Happy (belated) birthday to me!

Last week was my birthday. I have already blogged about the yummy dinner my friends took me to, but I had another special dinner as well. Monday is family night in our house, so for the family night closest to my birthday my brother and my mother cooked a birthday dinner for me. It is quite the novelty to have yummy vegan food prepared for me while I am watching TV!

While I make dinner most nights I am home, whenever there is a birthday or special occasion I always make a special dinner. They get to pick out whatever vegan yummies they want, and then I make it. So this time was my time to choose. I picked something pretty easy (mum doesn't like lots of fiddly cooking, crazy woman). I picked out of Veganomicon, that greatest of tomes.

For the main I chose the Vodka Penne Pasta. I had made this before and it is outstanding. It gets my five star, two thumbs up rating. The tomato sauce is amazingly creamy and fresh. And it is so quick and easy to make, it is just fantastic!

For dessert they made the Berry Coconut Crisp. It is not something I have made before. And I frakked up by hallucinating a bottle of coconut essence in the cupboard and only found out at the crucial moment that there wasn't any. But it was great anyway.

It was a lovely dinner. Thanks to them both!

Tonight I am on call at the clinic. I have spent the last several hours on my computer, discovering insane amounts of new vegan blogs. I also updated my list of blogs, and now all the vegan ones are marked as such. Easy peasy! I am also right now watching a really bad movie on channel 10. But how can I say no a Hilary Duff movie? Followed up by some Season 3 Supernatural on DVD. Heck yeah!

I haven't posted much about what I've been cooking lately. A while ago I bought a book called Tofu 123, which is just chock full or recipes involving - you guessed it - tofu! It's quite a good little book. On Thursday night I was feeling like baking up some tofu, and so I cracked open this book and I made Ilyse's Cripsy Tofu Cutlets With Mustard Sauce. The tofu cutlets were quickly dunked in a sweet soy marinade before being coated in panko and nooch then baked. They were pretty tasty. Not too crispy though. The mustard sauce is a combination of vegan mayo (I used the Vcon recipe), dijon mustard and something called relish. Which, as far as I can tell, is something similar to sweet mustard pickle, so I used that. The sauce is really yummy! I also served it with some mashed potatoes and some roasted asparagus. The asparagus was a mix of regular green and yellow. The yellow had a more subtle taste, but something about it reminded me of tinned asparagus. So I like the green best!

In retrospect, it was kind of similar to a Vcon menu I made earlier this year:



Only the Vcon one was better, because it involved the Chickpea Cutlets of Vcon legend, and also one of the best mustard sauces ever known to man kind!

Got to go and check on some kitties. I hope everyone is having a wonderful Saturday night!