Color Me Vegan Part 2

I've made even more recipes from Color Me Vegan! Since I'm an organized, planner-in-advance type person, I'm really enjoying my cookbook project. I know what I'm going to make for dinner when I get home in the evening and I have all of the ingredients waiting in my fridge. These recipes all make several servings, and I've been putting the leftovers in containers right away so that Dennis and I can just grab lunch to take to work in the morning. Some recipes even made enough leftovers that I didn't have to cook dinner every night. (I'm talking about you, Manicotti!) I've also been making sure our breakfasts have been taken care of in advance too. A little bit of planning means less work for me in the long run, and I love it! We're saving money too, since we haven't had to get take out for lunch.

I made Raspberry Lemon Muffins so we would have breakfast for a few days. My friend Jen made these for our brunch potluck a few weeks ago and they were really good. I used gluten-free flour instead of wheat flour, and the muffins came out a little weird, but they were still pretty tasty.

 I made Hot Tamale Pie because it was cold and the name called to me. This was really easy and really good!

 I really loved the cornbread topping on this. I added extra nutritional yeast to make it cheesy.

 I love garlic and I also love greens, so Garlickly Greens with Pasta seemed like a natural choice for me. I actually used more garlic than the recipe called for. I also added cannellini beans for flavor and for some extra protein.

 I wasn't sure if I would like Sweet Potato Tacos but I was intrigued, so I made them. And I'm glad I did because I loved them! Since color is the theme of the week, I used blue corn taco shells. I served this dish with spicy rice and beans. 

When we ran out of muffins, I made blackberry breakfast bars. And to make it interesting, I used both blackberries and blueberries. This photo looks a little boring, since it's pretty much just a brownish, squarish blob, but these bars were really good! Next time I make these I'm doubling the recipe! There seemed to be an error in the recipe though. The instructions say to bake the bottom layer until the berries are bubbly and then it tells you to add the berries and top layer and bake for 20 more minutes. Hmmm... the berries are supposed to get bubbly before they're cooked? I went with my instincts and didn't cook the berries with the bottom layer, which is what I think you're supposed to do.

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Cookbook Project Week 4: Color Me Vegan

This week's cookbook is Color Me Vegan by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. I think the color theme is a really great idea since a vegetable's color comes from it's nutrients. The recipes in the book are divided by color and there's a multicolor chapter in the back. I like the clean page layout and the interesting facts that are sprinkled throughout the book.  I've made so many dishes from Color Me Vegan that I've decided to split the blog post up into two parts.

I started out with Cashew Cheese. I don't think I let it cook long enough to thicken, because it was pretty thin. It was still really tasty.

I made the Cashew Cheese, because I wanted to make Swiss Chard Pie, and the recipe called for it. This pie is actually more of a frittata, and it was really really good. This would be a perfect dish for a brunch.

 And since the theme of the week is color, I made roasted butternut squash to serve with the Swiss Chard Pie. Look at that gorgeous orange!

There was a lot of leftover cheese sauce, so I poured it over some roasted broccoli. This was really good and reminded me of the broccoli in cheese sauce I loved when I was little.  That was a powdered cheese sauce mix poured over frozen broccoli, while this is fresh broccoli with cashew cheese, so this is much, much healthier!

 I wanted to make stuffed shells, but I couldn't find large pasta shells anywhere. I could find manicotti, however, and since stuffed shells and manicotti are basically the same thing, I bought them instead. This recipe makes enough filling to feed a small village manicotti and/or stuffed shells for a week. I spent what felt like hours standing in the kitchen stuffing those little pasta tubes. The next time I make this I'm definitely cutting the recipe in half. 

I sprinkled the manicotti with Daiya Cheese and served it with the broccoli. It was amazing! Since I had enough leftovers to last several days, the prep work was worth it.

There will be more Color Me Vegan food photos coming soon!

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Update on the Update

So I had given myself the deadline of the end of January to have Veggiegirl.com updated, but since that's just a week away, I don't think it's going to happen. The update is still in the works, it's just moving slower than I would have liked. Things like cooking dinner, doing laundry and obsessively watching Mad Men dvds from Netflix have gotten in the way. Plus Dennis and I are doing all of the work ourselves and we don't know quite what we're doing. I'm now hoping the website will be done by the middle of February. Should I give myself Valentine's Day as my goal date?

And on the cookbook front, Color Me Vegan will be this week's book of choice! I may have ordered a couple new cookbooks too. Believe it not, they were added to my Amazon cart for the free shipping. See, I was ordering the new Decemberists CD, and and I needed to buy something else to get free shipping, so I decided to get Appetite for Reduction, since I've been hearing so many good things about it. And that still didn't bring me up to the requisite $25! After looking around, I decided to also get Vegan on the Cheap. So I blame the Decemberists for stuffing my already full bookcase with even more cookbooks. It all made sense at the time. And if you're wondering why I still buy CDs instead of downloading from iTunes, there are two reasons: I like having something physical after spending money - $10 for files on my computer doesn't do it for me; and that "buy album" button on iTunes can be dangerous - I've been over zealous with it in the past, resulting in minor freakouts when the receipt lands in my inbox days later.

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