Gothic Granola

For those times when you don't want to spend $4.99 (and up) for vegan mac and cheeze from a box, DIY.

If you have some Italian in your heritage and you have two X chromosomes, you should know how to make sauce. And pizzelles...you should know how to make pizzelles , tiramisu , and cannoli.

Cooking with Gas | Penne alla Vodka Considering how I grew up on this dish, you might wonder why I needed a recipe. Rules are nice, sometimes. As my high school Honors Biology teacher said, "Rules were meant to be followed." 'Cept when veganising and deglutinising recipes. Then rules are meant to be broken and rebuilt from their component parts into new arrangements. Kind of like proteins/amino acids. Penne alla Vodka modified from  http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ree-drummond/penne-alla-vodka-recipe/index.html 1 pound GF penne pasta (I used brown rice rotelle and lasagne since I had kind of old boxes of each) 1 teaspoon olive oil 1 onion, diced 3 cloves garlic, grated dash sea salt 1 cup vodka (my mom used Stolichnaya; I used Luksusowa, a potato vodka, because I'm not taking chances with grain-based alcohol. 1 14- or 28-ounce can diced tomatoes (I went for the 14 but the 28 would be better) 1 16-ounce bag frozen peas, ...

Happy Halloween! Noodles look like brains. As I am Undead Q, brains it is for Halloween/my birthday. A chance stop at Whole Foods in Tenleytown yielded this Creamy Tahini and Broccoli Pasta recipe, which is eerily similar to pasta nests that I remade from my mother's recipe in 2011 . Like most Health Starts Here recipes, it is a blank slate. Add spice. I used a package of sweet potato noodles and two remaining skeins of millet noodles; they all clung to each other like the nests. Since I needed tahini for making hommos and had eaten the rest of a bag of broccoli-cauli mix last week, I substituted almond butter and indiscriminate frozen veggies for the eponymous ingredients.

Tofu shirataki noodles and I have a contentious relationship. At 20 calories per serving (40 calories in the entire bag), what's not to love, you ask? (If I may put words in your mouth...)

A presumption: you know how people ask you if you’re OK and you just say, without thinking, yes? For me, my relatives and other people to whom I report (willingly and unwillingly) ask me, “How’s [work] going?” and “How’s IIN going?” Sometimes my coworkers will ask me if I’m OK when I think I am OK. I really am OK. But it's a good question to ask sometimes to get below the surface. What am I missing about me? What do others see that I don’t see about me? </insecurity>

Post II of the Cheeze Series Something at work got us onto the topic of macaroni and cheese, and I made this version a few weeks ago to fill the freezer.  My vegan coworker made  a version this week .  My schoolmate  Avolara  forwarded me this Post Punk Kitchen version in 2011 that I printed and have been meaning to try for ages.

Final recipe: I attended a cooking class on Tuesday at the Whole Foods in Alexandria, and even if I hadn’t gone to the class, I would’ve had a successful WF trip.  I picked up this “Meals for Four under $15” flyer, and the Kale Pad Thai by Chrissy Bender made a perfect “this-is-my-real-work” supper after work on Friday.

As Julia Cameron wrote in The Artist’s Way, paraphrasing another artist, when you’re out of the studio for three days, by that third day, you’ll do anything to get back to your art and nobody better stand in your way. I came home from my first week of work on Friday (a yearlong fellowship) and made muffinz. Zucchini muffins.

For lack of a better term, I’m calling this next dish a seed butter.  Since I used mammoth zucchini and summer squash for the cake and pie, I scraped out the seeds because they would have added too much volume.  The internets didn’t have much in the way of a recipe for roasted  summer  squash seeds.  I sautéed the innards of a giant squash and a giant zucchini in the same pan as I used to saute the zukes for the Z-pie.  Then I Vitamixed them (“to Vitamix” has become a verb in my world, much like “to Google” something is a verb).

Got that Rob Zombie song stuck in my head, alternating with American Head Charge’s “Song for the Suspect.”  

My mom used to make these pasta nests for Christmas Eve dinner.  I made a tahini soup without garlic and onion earlier this summer, and its lemony flavour reminded me of pasta nests.  Seeing as how the original pasta nest recipe was glutinous, cheesy, and eggy, I took a stab at making it fit my nutritional and ethical specifications.  Since the lemon juice curdles the tofu, the cheezy sauce has an eggy texture.  I think my updated version tastes similar, if not better, than the original. Fighting words, I know.