Cooking again!

Thanks for all your sweet comments! I took part of the CPA exam this morning, and I have never been more relieved that an exam was over. How did I do? Ehh... I'm not going to speculate, I will just wait and see. In the meantime, I am just thrilled that I have some time to cook again. So though I don't have a whole lot to show right now, I will be in the kitchen plenty in the next few days--you'll see.


I tried this tempeh recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen, and let me tell you, it was out of this world. Seriously. I found that the marinade was only enough to really coat half a block of tempeh, so I doubled the marinade recipe, adding about two teaspoons of siracha sauce to the marinade to give it a little something extra. It was a perfect addition. I also let the tempeh marinate overnight. This is one of my new favorite quick-cooking meals--definitely eat it on a wrap with sprouts and dijon mustard. Mmmm....

Bob and I have turned out some pretty awkward-looking loaves of bread in our day, but this one takes the cake:


It's good, though--we took one of our standard bread recipes and used 1/4 cup of vital wheat gluten, per a suggestion by Melody, in place of some of the flour. It made the dough a little more difficult to work with (hence the lopsidedness of the finished product), but with a bit of practice I think we can figure it out. Using the wheat gluten seemed to give the bread a nice, sturdy texture that we really like.

The following photos are from Bluebird Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant here in Athens that we have visited a few times. The menu is rather small and only about half the items are vegan, so we don't really go that often. But we ended up there for lunch yesterday--there is a story behind this--and there you go.


I ordered the hummus plate, which was actually quite delicious--though I thought they kind of skimped on the veggies. It came with pita wedges too, though.


Bob ordered a veggie plate with an Indian sweet potato curry over basmati rice, some tasty collard greens, and some sautéed tofu coated in nutritional yeast. Overall, it was a fair lunch but not exciting enough to tempt us back.

So how did we end up at Bluebird for lunch yesterday? Well... we heard over the weekend that our beloved Indian restaurant, Bombay Cafe, would be closing soon. We were so sad, but we decided we wanted to go one last time as a farewell. This was easily the most vegan-friendly restaurant in town, and we are both crazy over Indian food anyway. Well, when we showed up at their door yesterday for lunch, our hearts sank when we found out that Bombay is already closed--I guess "soon" meant much sooner than we had imagined. Sigh... we have had such good experiences there, and we will miss the place dearly. It seems that they were not able to compete with the other restaurants in town anymore.

Since we had gotten ourselves so worked up over Indian cuisine only to be let down, we decided to make up for it tonight by making aloo gobi matar. We referred to the recipe in LDV as well as to prior experience, and what resulted was near perfection (well, at least as far as food goes).


It's really not hard to make at all, and homemade roti is not too tricky either. I was scared for quite a while to try cooking Indian food on my own; now I'm very glad I got over that.

Dear friends, I promise to catch up with all your blogs soon! I had to stop looking at them because it was driving me crazy to look and not comment... so I have quite a pile of posts to go through! And I cannot wait!

Until next time...