Curse you agar agar!!!

What We Had For Dinner Last Night

Well, I got a cookbook this weekend at this art gallery (cookbooks!, pottery! yarn! whee!). I got Vive le Vegan! by Dreena Burton. I've heard good things about this book, mainly that the recipes are pretty quick and easy and that appeals to me!

So I tried the Broccoli-Mushroom-Walnut Phyllo Pie! And it was quick and good!
I didn't have any onion (boo) so I used garlic, D. hates mushrooms, so I skipped that step, oh, I made the pasta version, no vinegar and I guess that's about it! D. said he usually likes his broccoli just by itself, not pureed into a sauce, so maybe next time I might try this as a sauce over the pasta and broccoli.

Notes;
Next time, boil the pasta water, and just before it's done, toss in the broccoli to cook!
Toast the walnuts in the bottom of the pot before sauteing the onion!

On to the weekend! Whee! It was apple picking weekend, a weekend each fall when a group of us get together and go up to Port Wing, WI to pick apples (wild apples! just there on the tree!) on our friends C. and D.s land!! Man, Port Wing is like a hidden treasure, I tell you! Right on Lake Superior and so much beauty! We stayed at the Stone Haus again this year and really enjoyed it!

Check out that view!!
And here are the apples. I spent a significant amount of time yesterday (read: hours) coring, peeling and cutting up all the apples into slices to go into my crockpot to make apple butter.
I'm trying out this recipe, using only 3 C sugar (we'll see). I plan on freezing most of it so we can enjoy the fruits (ha!) of our labor this winter. I kinda wish I could come up with some more awesome way to use these, but I'm always a procrastinator when it comes to apples and it just never seems to get done, so it was good to just plow through them all yesterday and git 'er done! I feel very happy that none will go to waste!

And I also have to share what I got here!

It's done by Melis Pottery and I think it's just perfect!

Oh, and for Veganmofo, I want to say that I now have the ability to recognize spices by sight. Unlabeled.

Vegans use lots of spices (vast generalization).

So anyway- I buy my spices at my coop, and they come in little clear bags (man, that bulk section used to intimidate me!) and I have all these little bags crammed into a big Ziploc. So today when I loaded up my crockpot, I grabbed for a brown bag of spice and !bingo! it was cinnamon! Woo!

Of course, there's always the agar agar. Curse you agar agar! How you mock me!! I shove you down to the bottom of the bag and there you malinger, waiting for me to grab you when I'm trying to find the onion powder...