I made scalloped potatoes for dinner tonight. nothing else. I just needed a starch fix & it hit the spot. But as I was laying about lethargically contemplating the merits of going to bed early, I thought, “Why not make cookies?”
I found this recipe for chocolate chip cookies that looked pretty simple. And after making the cookies I realized that maybe simple isn’t better. The resulting cookies were lacking in flavor substance and didn’t spread during baking. My first batch of cookies are perfectly round like the balls of dough that I placed on the baking sheet. Successive trips to the oven were made with the dough smooshed down for final shapes resembling cookies.
I’m thinking with my next batch of chocolate chip cookies, I’ll just take an omni recipe and veganize it. Not that I think I’ll be making more cookies anytime soon. For as obsessed as I seem with sweets (chocolate, cakes, brownies, cookies, etc) I don’t really feel the urge to eat them. The first vegan chocolate bar I bought is still sitting here unfinished.
I’m also officially broke. All my money is gone. So any and all new food is coming out of the family pantry. This means in order to continue to eat vegan (and justify someone else’s expenditure on my food) I am going to need to start making meals that appeal to my omni family.
OK, So Now You’re a Vegetarian – I bought this book when it came out in 2000, shortly after I became vegetarian not because I thought it would be an invaluable tool, but because it was written by a local girl and they mentioned it on the news. So I thought, “why not“.
I don’t even know where Practical Vegetarian came from. I didn’t buy it. Maybe someone dropped it off at my mother’s house in an effort to recommend some healthy meals for my father who is a diabetic and eats crap. There are other cookbooks out there by the same name. So don’t be confused. This is a tiny book that looks like it came bundled with other things, not something you would buy individually.
the Betty Crocker’s Cookbook might have some baking recipes that can be converted, but for the most part this is a junkfood cookbook for an era in american cooking when junk food was starting to make it big at home and in the market.
Easy Sushi was a birthday gift from my amazon wishlist. I never really intended on making sushi I just wanted ot look at the pictures because sushi is so pretty to look at. It has no veg redemption. If you want to make vegetarian sushi it is one google search away.
Now here is the great surprise to me. Harumi’s Japanese Cooking was my favorite cookbook purchase in my omni days. I am a HUGE otaku and love making bentos, so in the effort to make more authentic inclusions to my bentos I bought a cookbook from this renowned and awesome author. Every dish (even the ones I would never eat) look amazing and there are lots of notations on what ingredients can be omitted or substituted if you can’t get the ingredients that she lists.
As many budget conscious bakers know, a “pizza” stone is expensive and easily replaced by a cheap unglazed quarry tile (or several) from your local home improvement store. Except that my local home improvement store doesn’t carry them in house. Smart move on their part. In order to get my hands on a $2 tile I had to order an entire box of tiles. 16 tiles in total. Now, if you are playing along at home then you know that I probably could have bought a “pizza stone” online for the price I paid for these quarry tiles. But I refuse to admit defeat. I refuse to pay inflated prices for a baking stone. Besides, after I subtract what I need from my box of tiles I can give away the other tiles to friends and family and thus keep them from spending way too much money on a “luxury” item. I know it must seem silly, but it’s just the way I work.
