Between finishing up my dissertation and applying on a bajillion jobs, I haven't had much time to cook anything overly exciting (nor the time to post about it if I did). With a move looming somewhere in the future (not sure where yet...depends on the outcome of the bajillion job applications) it is my mission to use up the abundance of items I have in my pantry. My cupboards are full of miscellaneous beans, grains, pastas, and other assorted goodies. Sometimes I use recipes, sometimes I throw a bunch of random things together and hope it turns out.
Like this stew. I had a tiny bit of red lentils and a tiny bit of split yellow peas so I combined them. I added some diced tomato, vegetable broth, onion, garlic, spices, and kale, and voila, a nice lentil-split pea soup (not the prettiest thing in the world I realize).

A few weeks ago my husband was in the Bay Area for a work trip. On the way home he picked me up a loaf of sourdough they were selling in the San Francisco airport. Imagine my surprise when I go to pick him up at the airport and he gets off of the plane with a bag of sourdough.

I had a sweet potato in my fridge that needed to be used, plus some butternut squash in my freezer, so I made a sweet potato-butternut soup to go with the bread.


Finally, I also had a handful of couscous left in a jar. Not enough couscous to really do anything with, so I combined it with some chickpeas and topped it with roasted butternut squash, zucchini, eggplant, and onion. This was inspired by a dish from The Kind Diet which I finally got from the library...I've been on the waiting list since it first came out months ago.

I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day and/or Chinese New Year. This year for Valentine's Day we decided to stay in and save some money. I received a pizza stone for Christmas (thanks Grandma!) but so far hadn't had a chance to try it out yet - perfect reason to have Valentine's pizza.

We use the crust recipe from Reinhart's Break Baker's Apprentice which calls for refrigerating the dough at least overnight. This makes the dough so unbelievably soft and tender. Here is my pizza on the peel waiting to be put in the oven.

I was sure that I would mess up trying to slide the pizza from the peel to the pizza stone, so I made my husband do it. It seemed to work just fine. Here he is snacking on pizza toppings (even though he is wearing shorts I assure you it still freezing here...he just likes to wear shorts when indoors):

He's probably kill me if he knew I had put that picture on the internet...but whatever.

Here is my pizza out of the oven, waiting to be devoured. Toppings included pizza sauce, portobello, roasted eggplant, spinach, and cashew ricotta (Veganomicon).

Now that I've had pizza stone pizza I think I am spoiled for life! I love the crispiness and chewiness that it imparts. I can't wait to bake a loaf of bread on the stone!

So by now most people must think that I dropped off the face of the earth. Not quite...just really trying to finish up the dissertation this year, applying on jobs, all of that fun stuff. Oh, and then throw in triathlon training into the mix. It doesn't leave me with a whole lot of spare time.

I have been cooking though...I just haven't been photographing my food and blogging it. For shame. Anyway, I would like to get back into that. So to start things off with a bang, here are some Valentine goodies I made for a local animal shelter that is having a bake sale.

First up, I made these sandwich cookies. I subbed no-sugar added strawberry jam for the raspberry jam originally called for, and used Earth Balance in place of the butter. This dough was pretty rough to work with when rolling out...It would either be too warm (and stick) or too cold (and crack when rolled out). The happy medium was pretty difficult to obtain. I think next time I will just use my standard sugar cookie recipe.

I was a bit worried, as the dough didn't taste very good (always have to have a nibble at the dough!), but the finished product was actually quite tasty.

Here they are packaged up for the bake sale:

I also made heart sugar cookies, using NoWhey's recipe. This is my go-to recipe...not too sweet and the perfect combination of crunchy and chewy.


I also made vanilla cupcakes with pink icing. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture before I packaged them up.

I wasn't sure how to package cupcakes without ruining the icing. A quick Google search gave me an answer: buy plastic cocktail glasses (pretty cheap) to put the cupcake in and then wrap with cellophane. Genius!

Okay so I handed in that crazy comprehensive examination I was talking about. Whew. I still have to have an oral defense, but at least the written part is done.

Moving on to more delicious matters...I realized I had a giant backlog of photos on my camera. Some of which are from Halloween which seems like eons ago. Anyhoo, check out these Mummy Dogs we made for Halloween...they're veggie dogs wrapped in crescent dough with little mustard eyes:

I also made cupcakes with different designs...the only picture I have is of this cute vampire...the design came from the Wilton website:

Here's a brunch I made one day...scrambled tofu, roast potatoes, and tempeh bacon. Nothing too special, I just like the picture.

I have some updates from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar which I will post later on this week...everything I've made out of there so far has been very, very yummy!