I'm spending most my time lately studying for my finals as here in Norway your final accounts for 75% - 100% of your grade. Obviously I need to do well.

I had one last Friday. It was for this class that was an absolute joke. I got a B (Norwegian B) and I'm pretty satisfied, especially considering the effort I put in (virtually none...) I have another one tomorrow so we'll see how that goes.

I have been cooking a lot lately, but not taking many pictures. I've fallen in love with Vive le Vegan. I love pretty much every recipe I try. I especially like the french toast (which I don't have any pics of) because it tastes like the non-vegan one my mom made when I was a tiny tot.

Quinoa is my new favorite grain.
I love spinach and brussel sprouts
I've been craving grapefruit (in smoothies otherwise it is too bitter)
Dates filled with almond butter are my new treat. It tastes sinfull but is fairly healthy
Seitan is the best meat replacement ever. It works with everything and my cat eats it :)

Will post more after finals. Was supposed to go to Rolling Stones concert in Gothenburg but it has been postponed. To all those who are done with school, enjoy your summer. To the rest of us: Good luck

Finals are right around the corner and the weather is beautiful. I'm cooking. My boyfriend and I fired up the bbq this weekend when the weather started getting warm. I made some veggie kabobs. I don't have pics of them, but they were just different veggies. Made a quinoa salad to go with that. It was inspired by VLV's Quinoa Spring Salad, but I added more veggies. I like lots of fresh veggies in my salads. It was all really good. I love the flavor of bbq.

I also made thai curry. It's a recipe of my moms that I veganize. It's sooo good. I don't have a pic of that either, sorry. I can't remember the name of the book, but it's a very good curry. I put cubed eggplant in it and the eggplant turned all buttery and melted in your mouth. My favorite :)

I had squash left over from the kabobs so I decided to use them in a pasta sauce. Pasta is one of my favorite things because it's fast and easy and you can always add a little twist making it a brand new dish.
Here I've crumbled firm tofu. I sauteed the tofu with some onion, a little garlic and the rest of the squash (cubed). I also added "pasta spices" (oregano, thyme, marjoram, basil). Then I added a can of tomatoes and served it all over some penne. It was very good. I like pasta with a little crunch. I also think that the crumbled tofu gives the dish an interesting texture.





Yesterday I decided on Indian. I love indian food, but I find the sauces to be a pain to make so this weekend we got a jar of vegan sauce from the store. Naan is one of my favorite parts of an indian meal so I decided to make that too. Much to my surprise I discovered that naan is full of animal ingredients. There's yoghurt, eggs, milk, butter... the works. I felt stupid, but thankfully I haven't had it for months, only once after going vegan. I decided that I would make vegan naan that would be every bit as good as regular naan. So I used regular vegan yoghurt, soy milk and margarine and flax eggs instead of regular eggs. The naan was great. Even my boyfriend who was super skeptical when I told him I hadn't put eggs in the naan loved them.

You can see the flax (the black things). I also added some garlic to give the naan a little extra flavor. This pic is from before they were cooked, but they looked the same after, if only a little more golden (we ate them before I could take a pic...).

Today I decided I wanted to make Lemon-Herb tofu from VLV. Wow! It was amazing. It was so tender and nice, and the lemon flavor was so delicate.


The tofu before going in the oven. I also liked that the tofu didn't have to be marinated. You just make it and it turns out wonderful. I served the tofu with quinoa with walnut basil pesto, also from VLV. The pesto was good, but it didn't taste like pesto at all. I loved it as a sauce for the quinoa and it was wonderful with the tofu, however I wouldn't make it for when I crave pesto. It was just too different for my taste. I think it might be good as a salad dressing too, but I haven't tried that yet. The recipe made a fair bit, so I now have a jar of it in the fridge. I'll be having it for lunch tomorrow along with the left over quinoa. I intentionally made a lot so that I would have leftovers. I'm going to crumble the leftover tofu, mix it with avocado and tomato and put it in a pita (inspired by Dreena's website).

Walnut basil pesto.

Quinoa with pesto, roasted pine nuts (love pine nuts) and lemon-herb tofu. Mmmm...

Some people don't do things if they feel pressured. I think I might be one of those people. It seems to me that it's been a long time since I've blogged (because it has), yet every time I think about doing it I decide to put it off. I think it's because I feel like I'm pressuring myself. And because I feel like a weirdo when I take pics of my food. But my boyfriend already thinks I'm a weirdo, so it shouldn't really matter... Anyways I decided that I should do some blogging today. I also decided that I can blog about whatever, even if it isn't about food, because I sometimes feel like just writing random thoughts.

First a few food pics I want to share


This is a cross between Peacefrog's artichoke pasta and Gerry's artichoke pasta, both from LDV. I only had some of the ingredients so I put the two together and changed it all a little and the result was Michelle's artichoke pasta. It was very tasty.


I was craving something sweet, but felt like I needed something healthy, so I made these muffins. I know I got the recipe from one of Sarah's books, but I think I might have changed it a bit. I think it might have been a blueberry muffin recipe and then I used whole wheat. I can't remember. These were really good too, although my boyfriend is of the opinion that muffins shouldn't be healthy (when I told him that yes, there was whole wheat in them). They tuned out really pretty too. I was a little worried for a while, because they looked green before they were done.



Another craving. This is peach blueberry cobler from LDV. What I did though was take Wolffies Peach cobler recipe and added some blueberries. It turned purple, but it tasted delicious.




Made the rosted cherry tomato pasta again. I really love this recipe. It's so easy and so good.



I made these yesterday. They are Dreena's chocolate p-nut butter squares. These are so good. You can see the chocolate and peanutbutter layers. The bottom is oatmeal, so the cookies are almost healthy :)

I've been wanting to make seitan (a meat alternative made from wheat gluten) for ages. Yesterday I decided I should make my favorite Tikka Masala recipe (from Jamie Oliver's book Jamie's dinners), veganize it and add homemade seitan chicken. So that's what I did today. It all tasted awesome, but seeing as how the seitan took almost an hour and a half and the Tikka Masala took almost an hour I realized that it might have been a good idea to make the chicken a different night. My boyfriend had the same as me, except with real chicken (yuck) instead of the seitan chicken. Of course it is an improvement because he had the veganized sauce but I still would have preferred that he had the seitan too.


Here is the seitan cooking. The gluten itself has no flavor, so to make it more like chicken it is cooking in the chicken flavoring from LDV. I was a little worried, because the Tikka Masala recipe calls for the chicken to be marinated for half an hour in an Indian yogurt sauce and I wasn't sure how the flavors would go together, but it ended up being really good. I was impressed. The recipe made more seitan than I thought though so I only used half of it in the Tikka Masala. The next time I make it I'm going to double or triple the recipe as it keeps for up to 6 months in the freezer. I love convenience foods.


Here's the "chicken" marinating.


The only thing I don't like about Indian food is that it always looks so boring. This dish was absolutely wonderful, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the boring brown stuff over rice... As for veganizing the recipe for the sauce that was very easy. I simply substituted soy cream for the yogurt and the cream in the recipe. I would have used soy yogurt, but the only kind we could find had strawberry flavor. I swear, I just saw the regular kind.

On a different note 'Becoming Vegan' and 'Vive Le Vegan' arrived today. I was excited (as always) my boyfriend however asked me if I didn't have enough books about veganism already. The answer is, of course, NO! Silly boys. Will probably be cooking some more tomorrow as it is Sunday and I'm off work, so I'll try to take more pics.

I was checking my e-mail today and found an e-mail about a comment that had been posted on this blog. It was from Sarah :) Yay! It said she loves me too (because I love her for making me a vegan kitchen goddess). I was so excited. Then I realized that I had checked a moderate comments setting, so then I tried to publish the comment but it wouldn't work... But I have the e-mail. Sorry Sarah.


I realized that I'm not very good at posting pictures. It really is too bad, because I make a lot of good food. I took a picture of my dinner today, pasta with spinach, mushrooms, lemon, garlic and soy milk. Oh, and pine nuts on top. It was really good.


This past weekend and through this week I've made tofu scramble which I adapted from the post punk kitchen. It was really good, and it looked like scrambled eggs. My boyfriend saw me cooking something, so he decided to have some too. He liked it. I made some fried potatoes for breakfast, seeing as how we had been out on Friday night. That was nice. I had refried beans with mine.

I made Daniyell's peanut butter cookies and Wollfie's peanut butter cookies, both from LDV (La dolce Vegan). I added chocolate chip cookies to both. I loved them and my boyfriend has started calling me the cookie monster. We had a friend over for dinner on Friday. I was going to make the stuffed eggplant from GOV, because they are awesome, but all the eggplants at the store were looking sad, so I ended up making mashed potatoes, dijon brusselsprouts, spinach and mighty miso gravy. The boys, being omnivores, also had chicken. I intended to make some tofu for myself to go with the veggies, but time ran out so I ended up having everything but the chicken. I asked my friend how everything was and he said awesome. Then I told him there was soy milk in the mashed potatoes and he had to taste it again. He still liked them :) Then he told me how I was the opposite of this guy he know because I eat only veggies and his friend won't touch them. Stupid boys. Veggies are awesome.

Yesterday for dinner I had potato wedges that had been baked in the oven with garlic, terragon, lemon and olive oil and asparagus on the side with chopped cherry tomatoes that had been marinated in garlic, terragon, olive oil and red wine vinegar. I did kind of miss the hollandaise with my asparagus until I started thinking about how disgusting the eggy smell is and how it gets on everything, yuck. Then I was over it. I also made soy dogs for dinner one day. That is to say I bought soy dogs, boiled them, bought buns and made french fries.... It was good though. I came across the long wiener type ones as opposed to the fat bratwurst kind so I bought them.

I'll try to be better about taking pictures. I just got an e-mail from amazon and 'Vive Le Vegan' is on it's way. I'm excited. I love cooking.

I'm bad with breakfast. I don't like eating early in the mornings, so I usually go to school on an empty stomach. Because I'm disorganized and always running late I often forget to bring lunch too, and therefore end up starving and having to buy a vegan chocolate or something at school. Therefore I decided that I was going to make a rice & bean salad from 'How it all Vegan' by Sarah Kramer and Tanya Barnard.


As you can see the salad looks awesome. It also tasted great. I ended up eating it for dinner and none of it ever made it to school.... I'll have to make some more.

I also feel very proud for having taken a picture of something I made. I just want to emphasize that this bowl is my second one, because the first was gone before I remembered that I was supposed to take a picture.





My cat, Rex. He has devil eyes in this picture, but it looked even worse after I tried putting it through photoshop... oh well. He doesn't really have anything to do with this post. He's just a cutie. He liked the corn in my rice salad, and he can never pass on avocado... cats.

A very productive weekend. I've been cooking up a storm, and all of it from Sarah Kramer's books. On Friday I made Roasted cherry tomato pasta which was heavenly. On Saturday I made two loaves of Zucchini bread, then yesterday I made mashed potatoes, baked portobello mushrooms and dijon brusselsprouts and peanut butter cookies with choc chips for dessert. Who knew vegan food could be this decadent...? Well I did. And Sarah did because she wrote the book on it. And anyone who has made anything from her books knows.

I didn't take any pics, so I will have to cook some more tomorrow... however there is a pic of the roasted cherry tomato pasta here:sudzgirl's blog and if that doesn't make you hungry nothing will. If you wanna check out Sarah's website it's here. I love Sarah. She makes me a vegan kitchen goddess.

Other than making food I'm "studying" for a test tomorrow. I hate midterms with a passion. Stupid midterms. They aren't made better by the fact that it's anywhere from -5 to -15 degrees outside (celcius) and there's tons of snow and one of my friends is studying on Malta and another friend is moving to southern Spain. Stupid friends.