Your Vegan Mom

Clean Slate: What I neglected to mention last year

I'm cleaning blog house this month.  Here's several odds and ends that I forgot to mention.  

Crockpot Tapioca and the Art of Cookbook Pairing

Are you done shopping?  I have one more present to make and one more to buy.  (I'm not whittling legos.)   

We've really been enjoying Kathy Hester's new cookbook, The Vegan Slow Cooker, lately, and I was thinking that a thrift store crockpot and this book would make such a nice little gift set.   That, of course, got me to thinking about all the other cookbooks I love and how to turn them into tidy little packages, like -  

• Hannah's beautiful new book, Vegan Desserts: Sumptuous Sweets for Every Season and silicone baking mats or a pastry bag or a classic cookie cutter or a madeleine pan, actually this one could be more a lavish baking basket than a humble pair, oh but packed into a baking pan or big ol' mixing bowl rather than a basket
• Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (or the whole grain version, but I haven't had a chance to check that one out) and a dough bucket
• Cook Food and a cast iron skillet (perfect for someone just figuring out how to feed themselves)
• Clean Food and a bottle of ume plum vinegar (for the healthy-inclined)
• Ratio and a kitchen scale (for the scientific-minded, or someone wanting to move beyond recipes)

What else?  What cookbook pairings would you suggest?

I seem to be on vacation.

Today we are recovering from a nine day weekend.  (And when I say today, I mean last Monday, but like I said, I seem to be on vacation.)  The movie that Paul is working on had a brief hiatus, so we just took the whole week off.  We visited with cousins.  And played on the beach.  We took a trip to the California Science Center and then ran around the Rose Garden.  We swam.  And played with friends.  And had a picnic dinner at the Huntington Gardens (one of my all time favorite summer things to do).  We rode the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier and went to the Kidspace Museum in Pasadena.   

And then crossed two things off my summer to do list when we went to Underwood Family Farms in Moorpark and came home to make pickles.  

A couple weeks ago Desmond insisted, insisted, that pickles grew on trees.  I, of course, immediately scheduled this field trip.

And this farm makes an excellent field trip.  Way more than just farm labor tourism (Oh!  But it's that too!  Do you see Paul and Felix up there working on their farm-labor-is-fun attitude adjustment?), small children dig and scoop in a giant sand pit while goats climb nimbly overhead on wooden planks.  Animatronic chickens sing totally inappropriate songs to your vegan children (Desmond comes home singing, "What do you do with a drunken chicken?  What do you do with a drunken chicken?"  Nothing vegan, it turns out.) Kids clamber up into the driver's seat of a real live (and completely stationary) combine or slide down the shoot in back.  We visit with real live chickens and cows and horses and a couple emus.  We have a picnic on the grass.  And then willingly pay eight dollars for Desmond to mine for gems, we're just so caught up in our surreal bucolic morning.    

It was a good week.  Here's the rest of our summer to do list.  What's on yours?

• Take the train to Little Tokyo.  Have lunch at Shojin and run around this secret garden.
• Join (and actually participate in) a summer reading club (I have mixed feelings about this, but Desmond is all into it this year.)  (Too late.  We've gone once.  It's already almost over.  Maybe next year.)
• California Science Center.  Picnic in Rose Garden.  (There's a Chipotle across the street if you haven't packed a picnic.  Maybe someone in your group will be as nice as Paul and run over to pick up lunch while you and the kids play in the Family Discovery Room at the Ecosystems Exhibit.)
• Natural History Museum (We can't wait to visit the new Dinosaur Hall!)
• LACMA and lunch at Real Food Daily
• La Brea Tar Pits and lunch at Veggie Grill
• visit the turtles and have a picnic at Caltech (the campus is pretty and fun to explore and not too far from our house - I wouldn't drive across town for this one)
• Swimming Lessons for Desmond (He's doing so, so great!)
• Leo Carillo Beach (lunch?)
• Manhattan Beach (We usually walk up and get lunch from Wahoo's, but I'm open to more interesting lunch suggestions.)  
• Laguna Beach (Zinc Cafe is pleasant and I've never been to Taco Loco, but I was just looking at their menu and it looks like the perfect place to have lunch with sandy feet.)
• Cabrillo Aquarium
• Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica
• Noah's Ark at the Skirball
• bike day at the big park near our house
• plant an avocado tree?
• Audobon Center at Debs Park

 

Things I am Currently Obsessing Over

Bunk Beds.  Two weeks ago Felix hurled himself out of his crib.  And not in the dexterous fashion that Desmond perfected when he was about this age.  Felix pushed his sizable baby girth up with brute strength and then flung himself to the floor below.  We ditched the crib.  And I have thought of little besides big kid beds now for the last two weeks.  This obsession has not only completely consumed me, but also, in true black hole fashion, sucks the light and cheer and joy from any mass in my vicinity.  We will speak of nothing else.  I need to find, right now please, stylish, safe, well-made, preferably second hand, definitely affordable bunk beds that separate into two twins.  Ideally in a dark wood finish.  A trundle for sleep-overs would be nice.  The top rail is essential as it will make one the toddler bed until the boys are old enough for the beds to get stacked up into truly terrifying flinging heights.   

(This was a month before.  But look at him.  He's gonna go for it.)

I am also occasionally thinking about:

•  A pie iron.
• The carrot cookies on 101 cookbooks.  Lightly sweet and softly coconut-ty.  A perfect afternoon snack and maybe even an acceptable breakfast cookie.  (Thank you, Dorka.)
• These cute little raw carrot cakes.  (I haven't tried the recipe yet, have you?)
• This veggie burger recipe.  (Also on my to try list.)
• Working my way through this list of the top 10 ethnic markets in the San Gabriel Valley.  We went to Hawaii Supermarket last Sunday.  Great.
• Korean Food.  We ate at Cham Korean Bistro.  Pleasant, tasty.  Missed the banchan and kimchi.  Want to eat seitan bulgogi here.  And was momentarily consumed by something non-bunk-bed related while I read Mark Bittman's article in last Sunday's New York Times magazine.
• Oh, and Moroccan Food.  I recently received a tagine, and have since been reading myself bed time stories from Paula Wolfert's Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco.
• Richard Scarry.   

Now, I'm back to scouring Craigslist, unless you have any words of bunk bed wisdom?

Things I Like, and Also, the Winner from Last Week's Contest

I loved reading about all of your barbecuing and picnicking plans for this weekend.  I drew Allison Blakeley's comment.  Here's what she said, 

Would love to get some groceries over at the new seasons by me (http://www.localpages.com/or/portland/new-seasons) i want to try making some homemade veg-burgers, bbq corn, and some sort of veggie salad. I'm also going to try making those chocolate mint cookies you posted over the holidays!

If you weren't here for the contest, you should really go read the comments for weekend cookout inspiration.  So, so great.  I feel so honored that all you smart, creative, good eaters read this blog.  Thanks. 

In addition to you, here's some more things I like:

• The Bolani and Sauce stand at the South Pasadena Farmers Market.  But apparently they're everywhere.  Chow Vegan just wrote about sampling their wares at Costco.  (Is there a way to get around paying to shop there?  I just can't get over that.)  But this Afghani snack is amazing.  It introduced me to a whole new array of flavors.  We took the spinach and pumpkin flat breads to the park and slathered them with alternating smears of the sundried tomato and cilantro pestos.  Everything was dolloped with the sweet chile jam.  If you haven't tried it, you need to go get the sweet chile jam.  It's like everything you hope jalapeno jelly will be and never is - sweet and spicy and richly flavorful.     
• The looks of this laksa recipe from Robin Robertson.
• These baby socks made from a big old sock.  Such a clever idea.
• The fact that my kid is building an apartment building out of a cardboard box for the stuffed echidna right now.  "It had to end!  The echidna had to go home."  He says to someone in his most forlorn dramatic play voice.   
• My new "window treatment" made from 5 pieces of white origami paper and a large doily.  
• Which reminds me of this poem.
• And makes me wonder, of course, where the word, doily, comes from.  ("Named after a London draper of the late 17th century," says Random House Webster.)

 What are you really liking at this moment?