your goose is probably only half-baked at this point

Funny story for you. Thursday, we ran out of fresh salad greens, so we popped by the grocery and picked up two big tubs of greens.  Saturday, our farm share portion arrived, containing a smaller-but-still-substantial tub of fresh greens, and a smaller-but-spicier tub of microgreens. Sunday, I drove my partner to the airport so he could go see his grandfather, who had had a stroke and was in need of family to keep him distracted from hating his physical therapist. Which meant that I was facing a week alone with what measured out to approximately one (1) metric fuck-tonne of fresh greens.  Like, enough that it would be PLENTY for two people. I am one people.  You may see where this would cause concern. Except not for me!  I've totally  got this.  "I'll just eat salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the whole week you're gone!" I announced to my partner, who looked at me like that was the worst thing he could imagine.  "Either I'll be the healt...

Once upon a time, I was going to do this whole British-themed meal:  fish 'n chips, English beer, sticky toffee pudding, black tea with milk ... But then I made this pudding and it was so good that I kind of ... ate it without giving a hoot about the rest of the theme meal?  I'll care later. For now, I'm making this whenever possible because holy hell is it delicious .  Just as smooth and lovely and sweet and delightful as Leia in her Bespin costume.  Between it and her Hoth costume, I managed to fall completely in love with her.  Han and Lando'll have to fight me. Hello What Have We Here Sticky Toffee Pudding Ingredients 1 tsp baking soda 1 3/4 cup dried chopped dates 3/4 cup boiling water 1/3 cup butter (vegan buttery works here) 3/4 cup white sugar 1/2 cup pumpkin puree 1 cup flour 1 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp salt Caramel : make half a batch and you'll have more than you need, so maybe a quarter batch?  Or make the full batch a...

I do love a good challenge, and making things that are a) vegan, b) gluten-free, and c) still delicious is one of my favorite  challenges out there.  I originally started adapting this recipe  so I could bake for a vegan colleague, but then I found out that he's allergic to both peanuts and chickpeas, so that's me back to the drawing board for him, but as a nice side-effect, I now have a recipe for AMAZING chocolate chip cookies that are approximately 200% less a pain in my ass than regular chocolate chip cookies. And they're full of chickpeas and peanut butter, so they're ... actually sort of good for you?  Will wonders never cease. The only real difference between these and the usual chocolate chip cookies of the world is that they're not at all improved by dipping them in milk (I personally like them better with a cup of unsweetened green tea than I do with a cup of milk) and they're better cooled than warm straight from the oven.  They're also irresi...

2018 was just a really good year for me, bringing with it innumerable blessings, one of which being some nice holiday traditions that helped ease down the blues I normally feel toward the year's end.  Our most recent new tradition is that of making a  cheesecake  on New Year's Eve that isn't done and ready to eat until New Year's Day, making it a nice treat that spans the two years.  I don't actually know if you can call it a tradition until you've done it more than once, now that I'm typing it all out, but whatever, it was so awesome to have cheesecake for breakfast on the first day of the new year that it's going to happen again next December, see if it doesn't. Anyway!  I wanted to make a special topping for our cheesecake and, while trolling through all the recipes I've saved over the course of the year, discovered that I had a recipe saved for  candied pecans  that claimed to be easy and quick -- 5 minutes, start-to finish.  After all the ...

... and it's vegan, no less! (Shamelessly ganked from  this recipe for chocolate silk pie , which was shamelessly adapted from  this young lady's recipe , but I've never had much shame about anything, so it's fine.  Sets me up great to shamelessly make this frosting, smear it all over some  vegan wedding cake , and eat it with my bare hands.) ... and I'm not even vegan, wtf. Come to the Dark Side We Have Dark Chocolate Frosting Ingredients 16-20 oz silk tofu 2 tsp cocoa powder 2 Tbsp coffee liqueur OR vanilla extract Pinch salt 1 Tbsp sugar 12 oz vegan dark chocolate* (if you can get your mitts on some  Taza chocolate , you'll have a REAL treat) Instructions In a food processor, combine tofu, cocoa powder, liqueur/vanilla, salt, and sugar. Process until smooth. In a double-boiler (or SUPER carefully in the microwave?  I've heard this works for people, but it has never worked reliably for me) melt your dark chocolate. Pour the melted c...

You know that vegan cooking has arrived when a pair of non-vegans do a cake taste-test for their wedding cake and decide that the vegan cake option is, hands-down, the BEST cake out of all the options.  Like, nobody cares that it's vegan, so much as they care that it's just plain delicious.  Which it is, really -- dense and not too sweet, but very vanilla-y, a perfect offset to the sweetness of  the best-ever cream cheese vanilla buttercream frosting  I smeared all over it.  Oh, and because it's so dense, we had no problems at all with the wedding cake trying to tip over, despite being three layers tall, made taller by the amount of frosting I shoved between the layers. Yup. The groom's cake , on the other hand, was completely, unnecessarily vegan, frosted with a vegan tofu chocolate frosting that defies description, it's so tasty.  One batch of the stuff was enough to frost 6 cupcakes and thickly frost the moustache cake and still have probably half ...

I don't have much to say about this dish, mostly because I just ate a big bowl of it alongside a genuinely delightful  Badass Biker Chick(pea) Burger  and a cup of strawberries in applesauce -- pretty much the perfect meal to eat after slogging home on a bike in 98* weather.  I'm sure there's a long-winded story in my brain somewhere about how I had pumpkin soup for the first time while studying abroad to Japan fifteen years ago, and an observation that I've been meaning to learn to make pumpkin soup for fifteen-odd years, but that's honestly not all that interesting and the soup's so easy and quick that you can make it faster than I can bore you with my stories. Credit where credit is due:  It's almost exactly copied from  The Minimalist Baker's site , but she a) makes her pumpkin puree from scratch, which is way more effort than I'm going to put into a side-dish and b) goes on and on and ON forever about this soup with picture after picture after...

Five or six years ago, I hated cornbread.  Now, I'll shank a b*tch over it. This recipe gets all the credit. (And it's vegan, but don't tell anybody.  It's delicious and that's all they need to know.) Everybody Loves Cornbread Ingredients 1 cup flour (whole wheat, white, rye, knock yourself out here) 1 cup cornmeal (yellow, accept no substitutes) 1 Tbsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt (DON'T leave this out) Scant 1/2 cup white sugar* 1 Tbsp molasses* 1/2 cup pack pumpkin 1 cup milk (of the soy, almond, cashew, or rice variety if you're going for vegan cornbread) 1/4 cup natural, unsweetened applesauce * Or use 1/4 cup white sugar and 1/4 cup brown sugar, if you can be bothered to keep brown sugar around the house (I can't). Instructions - Preheat the oven to 400*F. - In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients and molasses. - Make a well in the middle and dump in the wet ingredients. - Whisk the wet ingredients, ...

This coming November will be my third Thanksgiving as a vegetarian, but because we celebrate two Thanksgivings every year, one for just us and one with extended family, this year will technically be my fifth and sixth vegetarian Thanksgivings, and where the joke here should be "not that I'm counting," don't be confused, I am totally  counting, because it's been a long road getting here.  The trouble is always finding a suitable main dish to go with all of the tasty sides, something that's the perfect balance of bland and flavorful you get with a turkey or a roasted chicken.  I hadn't until today, but now I've got it and it's July and I'm actually looking forward to Thanksgiving now, will wonders never cease. We had this for lunch today with sides of roasted okra and a mix of cranberries and mandarin oranges, and it was delightful.  For Thanksgiving proper, it'll be served with Thanksgiving Dumplings , some Mos Eisley Roasted Vegetables , ...

Sand People are easily startled, but they'll be back soon enough if you make them some nice hummus, and they might not even beat you with sticks if you use this hummus to make them a sandwich. Also, good stars Ben, you can't just call them Sand People. Way to be a super old racist dude. This recipe was inspired by  Alton Brown's "Hummus for Real" recipe  on the Food Network, but recipes on the Food Network always have too many adjectives in them, so here's my version, which is tons easier and shorter and just better all around. It's also my go-to when I don't have the energy to cook something more substantial, and it makes a damn good centerpiece to a handful of good meals. More on that below. For now, go give this recipe a try. It's really very tasty. Sand(wich) People Hummus Ingredients 15 - 16 oz tinned chickpeas, drained but keep the liquid 2 cloves' garlic 2 tbsp lemon juice 1/4 cup chickpea liquid 1/3 cup tahini (peanut butt...

An argument could be made that Mark Bittman taught me how to cook. First there's his cookbook How to Cook Everything,  which doesn't just have recipes in it, it has methods in it. For like, normal stuff -- the first thing I learnt to cook using this book was French toast. "Who would need a recipe for making French toast?" you might say, and the answer would be me. ME. I didn't know how to do it, Mark Bittman taught me how to do it, and everyone was a little bit happier because of it. Then there was his Youtube series "The Minimalist." In it, he taught me how to make really fancy-tasting meals without fancy ingredients or methods that could go awry in the blink of an eye, and that  played a large part in my confidence in my cooking skills increasing and my knowledge of cooking methods and flavor pairings increasing. I was sad when he retired until I found out that he was retiring to work in his garden, grill out, and play with his grandkids full-time....

When looking for a cookie recipe, most folks aren't going to be looking for words like "gluten free," "vegan," or "cholesterol free." Most folks are going to be looking for "delicious," "chewy," and "addictive," because these are the things all good cookies should be. These are both. The name comes from the fact that they taste (to me) like Thailand, thanks to the mix of coconut and lemon, and they're bite-size, so they were originally going to be Thai Bites, but then that came out of my mouth as "Thai biters," and that  sounded like TIE Fighters, and because there is something wrong with me , I became overly enthusiastic and the name stuck. (Also TIE fighters are way, way  cooler than X-wings forever and always and they shouldn't be because they are bad guy ships  so have a contradiction as striking as these stupid cookies.) OH and don't expect these cookies to last very long. They wo...

My partner and I went to a restaurant a few weeks back and for dessert, we got a slice of something called the "Imposible." It was advertised as "chocolate cake with custard drizzled with caramel." As it turns out, that's like telling someone about Niagara Falls by saying "It's some rocks with water falling off it." This thing was ACTUALLY chocolate cake made with cinnamon and cayenne pepper, topped with a thick vanilla custard, dusted over with cinnamon, and drizzled in rich warm caramel sauce. We each took a bite and melted a little because holy heavens it was good. "I know how to make this," I told my partner. "Really?" he said. "This is a thing?" "No," I said (around a mouthful of cake, I wasn't about to let conversation rob me of my fair half of the slice), "but I can make this." (Side-note: my other superpowers include being able to nap anywhere, diving way too deep way too fast in...

Thanksgiving can be a tricky time for vegetarians. All the side-dishes we traditionally prepare at Thanksgiving complement the turkey, so if you're not eating any turkey, you usually get the sense that you're missing out. Well no more! These mushrooms are so good, oh my goodness. They're buttery, for all that there's no butter involved, have just the right amount of heat in them from the garlic, and if they were any easier, they'd probably be a Skywalker. I like them because I can roast them along with my  Mos Eisley Roasted Vegetables and the chicken breast I make for my partner, which means that the entire Thanksgiving dinner, aside from the dumplings and dessert, is in the oven roasting along merrily together all at once while I drink wine make the dumplings and set the table. And drink wine, because dear god is wine nice with a meal celebrating the good things in life. Kiss Me Anyway Garlic Roasted Mushrooms Ingredients - 1/4 lb sliced portobello ...

It's all fun and games until someone gets their arm chopped off. Mos Eisley Roasted Vegetables Ingredients 1/2 lb (15, yes I counted) frozen Brussels sprouts 1 large carrot 1 large or 2 small parsnips 2 tsp olive oil 1/4 tsp coarse salt Gratuitous black pepper Instructions - Preheat oven to 425*F. - In a small mixing bowl, microwave the Brussels sprouts for a minute or two. - Cut the carrot into 1" pieces, halving the pieces where the carrot's thick (so you only have cylinders that are no bigger around than a marker, maybe). - Do the same for the parsnip. - Halve each of the Brussels sprouts, once they're out of the microwave. - Dump all of the veggies into the mixing bowl with the oil, salt, and pepper. - Toss with a rubber spatula until everything's all even-coated 'n stuff. - Arrange on a silpat on a baking sheet, turning the Brussels sprouts so that they're cut-side up. - Bake 40-50 minutes or until the Brussels sprouts are ro...

Thanksgiving meant chicken and dumplings in my family every single year when I was growing up, and it was just the BEST part of the year, lemme tell you. Granted, I was that picky little kid who wouldn't eat dumplings until I was 7 or 8, but that doesn't mean much -- I refused to eat ANYTHING for the first near-decade of my life. I was surprised and pleased to learn when I was in my teens that the dumplings I had loved so much were my grandmother's own recipe, and delighted when I learned as an adult, living too far away to come home for Thanksgiving, that I could make dumplings myself. These are the ultimate comfort-food, and one of my favorite things about the autumn holidays. Thanksgiving Dumplings Ingredients 4 cups all-purpose flour (1 cup) 4 tsp salt (1 tsp) 4 tsp baking powder (1 tsp) 1/2 cup vegetable shortening (2 tbsp) 1 1/2 cup milk (3 oz) Extra flour for rolling 12 cups water (3 cups) 1 tbsp bouillon of your choosing (I use vegetable and it's...

I've been accidentally making quite a lot of vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, low-fat, low/no-cholesterol dishes lately, which is interesting because a) I'm not a vegan, b) I'm not even trying  to make dishes that fit any of the above categories, and c) all of these dishes are wicked  tasty, which is not something one generally associates with vegan-gluten-free-soy-free-low-fat-nice-to-your-cholesterol cooking. I mean, I guess there wouldn't be any vegans if vegan food tasted bad or boring or whatever, but still, considering how devastatingly deep my love of cheese and eggs goes, I've been pleasantly surprised to learn that my twin vices aren't actually needed in every dish I eat. That said, whenever I take this soup to work for lunch, I find that I heat it up and expect it to be boring. Like, every single day. Even though I ate it the day before and loved it. I still  expect to dislike it the following day. I suspect this means that I am a) biased, b) indoctri...

Back when the Star Wars  prequels were coming out, my father -- who is not a Star Wars  fan, by the way -- got ALL excited because KFC had a drink-cup shaped like R2D2, and dragged the entire family out for dinner at KFC just so he could get the drink-cup. I didn't get the appeal at the time, and strongly disliked that cup, because one night, when I was wandering around in the dark, scared, with a flashlight, its shadow projected onto the rocking chair in the living room and gave the illusion of a man sitting in the rocking chair, only there wasn't a man and it terrified me and oh by the way I was a complete and utter chicken  when I was younger. Except I still am now, never mind. *cough* So I've now seen the orig-trig and have a deeper understanding of why my dad wanted that R2D2 cup. Artoo is just a little bucket of sass, he's legitimately the only  reason Luke survives half the stuff he survives, and (unlike me) he isn't afraid of anything . He's easily m...

Fun facts about Chewbacca: 1) He's 200 years old when we first meet him in A New Hope ; 2) He'll live to be 400 years old, so he knew he was going to out-live Han Solo when he adopted the guy; 3) I'm pretty sure he'd adopt Leia and keep her as his cub if he had half a chance; 4) He's awesome and his actor, Peter Mayhew, is one of the most understated and loveable celebrities on the planet. This dish has literally nothing to do with him, otherwise, save that ... um. Yeah, nope, nothing to do with him. Doesn't matter. It's a great recipe, and you're a laser-brain if you don't give it a go. #nailedit Laugh It Up Fuzzball Sweet Potato Chili   Ingredients 1 tbsp olive oil 2 medium yellow onions, diced 2 tbsp chili powder 2 tsp cumin 1 tsp black pepper (I never measure, honestly) 4-10 shakes cayenne pepper (I don't measure this, either) 2 cups frozen diced green peppers (use fresh if you have that much free time on your hands) 4 1/2 ...

"You a fan of the 'Fett?" "Nah, I was always more into Star Wars. " ( Live Free or Die Hard ) I always assumed Boba Fett was like ... cool or something. I mean, there's that line in Die Hard , there was the whole thing about his dad in those godawful prequels, people dress as him for Halloween. And then I got around to watching the orig-trig and he didn't really do  anything. Except die. Like a bitch . These badass brussels sprouts aren't at all in his honor. Boba Fett Died Like a B*tch Brussels Sprouts Ingredients 1 lb frozen brussels sprouts 1 tbsp olive oil 1/4 tsp sea salt (use less if you're using regular table salt) 1/4 tsp ground black pepper Instructions - Preheat your oven to 420*F (I use my toaster oven at 400* - it needs 420* for a regular-size oven) - In a small mixing bowl, microwave your brussels sprouts for 3-4 minutes, or until they're kinda thawed. - Drain off any excess water - Slice them in h...