Cookbook love

I was never really that into cookbooks before I went vegan, but now I adore them. Seriously, I want every vegan cookbook that exists.

After geeking out for about an hour on the floor in front of the vegan cookbook section of Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge recently, I finally settled on this one:


The guy who wrote it seems so awesome...if only he were single ;)

So far I've made two things: Candied Walnuts (fast and yummy dessert when I was having a sugar craving the other night) and Chocolate Pecan Pudding Pie. For some reason I struggled with his pie crust recipe, though. After two tries, I really could not get something that behaved at all like a pie crust. The recipe calls for solidified coconut oil, and mine kept melting quite quickly, so that may have been the issue. The A/C in my apartment doesn't make it into the kitchen, which is roughly the size of a shoebox, AND I had the oven on. Still, I think a "soul food" recipe should be compatible with a hot Southern kitchen!

Eventually I gave up and went to Whole Foods and bought a frozen crust. And the pie turned out to be just as awesome as it sounds.

However, none of it was consumed last night, because my dinner guest and I proceeded to stuff ourselves with Seitan and Herb Stuffed Mushrooms and Maple-Mustard-Glazed Potatoes and String Beans, two recipes I hadn't tried yet from one of my favorite cookbooks, Vegan With A Vengeance. I ended up with WAY more stuffing than I could fit in the mushrooms, so I'll probably buy some more mushrooms and stuff them later.



Then the pie became breakfast this morning.

The World Series of Solitaire

World Series of Solitaire - watch more funny videos

This is the short film my team made for the 48 hour film project last month :)

Recipe: RAW corn salad stuffed tomatoes

This is what I ended up making for the Raw Food Potluck last week. I'd never eaten raw corn before...it's delicious!

Ingredients:

10 medium-sized tomatoes
2 ears of corn
1 red bell pepper (mine was big, I think we used about 3/4 of it, and my sister Becca ate the rest while chopping)
2 green onions
1 handful fresh cilantro
1 avocado
2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 limes
approx. 1/4 cup olive oil (um...I didn't measure and sort of just dumped it in. Oops)

Preparation:

1. Slice tomatoes in half *vertically* and scoop out the insides with a spoon (I saved the inside goop and threw it in some chili a few days later.)

2. To prepare the dressing, juice the limes and add the avocado, garlic, and olive oil. Pulse in the food processor until creamy. Add more olive oil if it's too thick.

3. In a large bowl, slice the corn off the ears with a big fun knife. Dice the red pepper, green onions and cilantro. Add the avocado dressing and mix it all up. Fill the tomato halves with the corn salad.

Current food obsessions

I have a crockpot of red beans simmering in my kitchen. It smells amazing, but it's not ready yet, so I've been eating everything else in my house while I wait, because the smell makes me so hungry!

A crucial ingredient is this stuff, which according to the internet is vegan, but which I find completely perplexing:

I mean...what? And...how? Regardless, it's quite helpful in making vegetarian food taste...not quite so vegetarian.

Another magical food which I ate a lot of while waiting for my red beans is this stuff:

This is the best vegan "ice cream" I've ever tasted. My guy showed up on my doorstep with Coconut Bliss on Saturday night (yeah...I think he's a keeper). It has very few ingredients (especially compared to Soy Dream and Rice Dream and stuff) and the texture is perfect. I think the reason it works so well is that coconut milk has so much saturated fat. But I don't really want to think about that right now, since I ate half a pint in one sitting.

Tomorrow I'm headed to a raw food potluck. Red beans and rice is obviously a no-go, so I'll have to create something else. More on that soon.

Still up to no good

I painted my design today. Painting is so calming and therapeutic...even when you're painting Sarah Palin.

Up to no good

Today I worked on an idea for the poster design for my Fringe Fest play, To Moscow, You Betcha! If you hadn't figured it out, it's a Sarah Palin Russian nesting doll. Just a rough sketch, I'm going to paint it later. Visual art isn't really my strong point, but it's a pretty simple idea so hopefully I'll be able to pull it off.

The play is a theatrical mash-up of Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Sarah Palin.

The basics.

A group of NTI alums in New York recently formed a collective, and they offer acting classes taught by NTI teachers. I'm on their email list, and reading about these classes makes me wish I lived in NYC. Except, you know, that it's cold, expensive, and eats little starry-eyed artsy types like me for dinner...

Anyway, in his description of an upcoming class, Michael Cadman said something that resonated with me:

I am most concerned to make opportunities for the students to overcome what seems to be a major obstacle in much of their acting: themselves. Without ridding ourselves of the need to be constantly monitoring our work, constantly worrying about what others might be thinking of us, we cannot hope to stay in the moment and be truly and freely reactive. I think we all recognize this, both from what we've read about acting and from frustration in our own experience. Until we have felt the power of simply listening and responding and realized the beautiful simplicity of it; until we have let go and trusted ourselves in the hands of our creative partners, be it writers, directors or most importantly our fellow actors; until we have sort of discovered it for ourselves, it is difficult maybe to believe this power even exists.

The pressure to come up with a clever way of delivering a line can be so distracting. It's easy to see when an actor is doing this, and it usually falls flat. Truly listening to the other actor(s), and responding to their offerings, is more powerful. I've seen actors come up with something funny in one rehearsal or performance, and then refuse to let go of that choice even as it continually fails to work as well as it did the first time. The thing is, theater is live. A play is a living thing. It's never exactly the same show twice. That's why the great choice you made last night may not be the right choice tonight.

The concepts Cadman describes are so simple, but so easy to overlook, especially in the high-pressure settings of audition and performance. Since I can't travel to NYC every week to take this class, I've been trying to apply these concepts to my own work here at home.

(Another cool thing about NYC is that I hear there's a ton of vegan food options there. Like, say, if a vegan found herself craving donuts, I bet she could find them in NYC. If said vegan lives in New Orleans, she has to make her own vegan donuts.)