Hello 2010!

Finally I'm making my first post of 2010! Hope everybody had a great time. I had an amazing Christmas and New Year with Matteo's family around! We had so much fun together that the only thing I missed was my family. But we can't have everything. 2010 is starting in a good way and I'm happy. 2009 was a better year too (I will write about it later).

As I told you last year, Christmas in Italy was always with a lot of food. Two days (25th and 26th) just to stay at home and eat! Well, this year we were in Dublin and I'd like to make things in my way too, so we had the first celebration in the night of the 24th, with a great dinner and the presents being opened. And we had the Christmas lunch and the St. Stephen lunch too.

December 24th: strogonoff

December 25th: snacks, risotto and frittata

December 26th: pasta al forno

December 26th: more frittata

Everyday: cupcakes

My sister-in-law ate my vegan cupcakes for the first time and she loved them! She stayed here until today and we had so much fun! Hope she can come back more times this year. And, of course, we kept cooking delicious vegan food all these days!

Special cupcakes for my sister-in-law, Elena. She loves blue!

Omelets (recipe from the Vegan Brunch book)

Savory and sweet pancakes

Happy 2010!
Go vegan!

Vegan Mofo III - Day 22 - Pasta

This post is about pasta, another food of my "Vegan Food Top 10". I always liked to eat pasta, even before being vegan. My family loves it, so it was always part of our menu. After becoming vegan it was the easiest option (some brandes in Brazil still have eggs on the pasta but they also have the semolina option), mainly for someone who didn't know how too cook too much stuff. And after having an Italian husband, you can imagine how much pasta we eat! But that's totally fine because it is good and gives you a endless options to cook. My favorite ones: with zucchini and soy cream, with sausages and soy cream, with olive oil and garlic, with mushrooms and soy cream.

But I will let some pictures "talk" for themselves!


Vegan Food Top 10 until now:
1. Cupcakes
2. Mushrooms
3. Pizza
4. Soup
5. Risotto
6. Pancakes
7. Pasta

Under your influence

I don't like to cook just for myself and I really forgot how is to do that. But for the next days it will be just me, so I need to do it. Today I decided to try a recipe that my amazing Brazilian friend, Flavia, posted at her blog (in Portuguese). She's not vegan or vegetarian but some of her recipes are naturally vegan/vegetarian and the other ones are easy to "veganize". So, I had a delicious penne (for my luck I can eat pasta again!), but I still have to work on the quantity because I cooked enough also for my dinner.


Recipe (1 person):

125g pasta (penne or other pasta that you prefer)

2 sliced Irish mushrooms (this was my "local" touch)

4 cherry tomatoes

1/2 small onion, cut into small cubes

1 garlic clove, minced (I confess that I used 2 and was too much!)

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 vegetable stock cube (Yes, I'm a stock cube addicted)

Black pepper and other herbs (I just used oregano in the end)

Salt

Dairy free parmezan


Cook the pasta in boiling and salty water. In a pan, put the olive oil. Let heat and add the garlic. When the garlic is "golden", place the onion. When the onion is transparent, add the mushrooms and the tomatoes and 50 ml of water. Let boil and cook until thicken. Stir from time to time until it becomes a succulent red sauce. Add the black pepper. Add the sauce on the cooked pasta and mix. Serve the plates and add the dairy free parmezan and oregano.

(Listening to Dag Nasty: Can I Say)

Cheesy weekend

In Brazil we don't have vegan cheese to buy. The only way to eat it is making a kind of cheese with nuts (recipe in Portuguese here). Everybody says that it's really good, but I never tried (must do it someday). So I stayed many years without considering the possibility of eating vegan cheese (I prefer don't think about things I can not have instead of staying suffering because I don't have them).

But here is different. We can find a lot of vegan cheese options and I just love them all! And last weekend we had a couple of cheesy days. On Saturday we had a delicious pizza night! Matteo is getting better and better on cooking pizzas (do you remember our first pizza? We never forget it!) and I'm enjoying to eat them at home. So we had two amazing vegan cheesy pizzas with cream cheese (Tofutti) and tons of cheddar (Redwood).


On Sunday we came back from the all ages gig starving and chose the faster option: pasta. But we still had some cheese left and Matteo improvised what would be one of the best pastas ever: vegan cheesy penne. I didn't take pictures because it wouldn't be fair with that great recipe(it looks like a normal pasta with white sauce but it's so better!). All you need is pasta, salt, oil, soy cream, cream cheese, diced cheddar, parsley and stock cube. Boil the water, add some salt and the pasta (let cook until the way you prefer it - “al dente” or well cooked). In a separated pan put the oil, the soy cream, the stock cube and the parsley. Mix everything and add the cream cheese and the diced cheddar. Let cook until the cheddar is softened. Put the sauce on the pasta and that's it, done! Easy, fast and superb!

Two other related posts:
Pasta: Fast and delicious
Pizza: Everything ends in pizza!