AusNZVeganMoFo: If you build it...

Then you too can have pretty looking dinners! I made these two recipes for dinner one night because they seemed both a bit fun and cute. Both recipes come from Vegan Planet.


The first course was Eggplant Salad Towers. A bed of green leaves topped with a giant crouton (read fancy word for a piece of toast, essentially... hee) and then layers of eggplant, tomato and a delicious marinated mixture of roasted red capsicum, peas, red onion, garlic, balsamic vinegar and lemon juice. Nom! It was delicious! I found that the nice bready crouton really anchored the flavour, but you could easily omit this to make it GF.


The second course was Ravioli Without Borders, which is an open ravioli using wonton wrappers. The recipe instructs you to boil the wrappers for three minutes, but when I did this they were way overcooked, stretchy, tearing and unmanageable! Maybe we have different wonton wrappers here? The ones I used were from the fridge section at the supermarket, and I found the best thing to do was grab them in tongs and just very briefly run them through a pot of boiling water. Also, be careful when buying wonton wrappers - most of them have eggs in them! The filling is made from crumbled tofu, shiitake mushrooms, garlic, onion and roasted capsicum and there is also a layer of baby spinach leaves inside. The toppings on them are salsa, tapenade and pesto (all made from recipes from the book). The verdict was delicious! And kind of pretty to boot!

Cute Cat Photo of the Post


I thought I would feature Gizmo today, because she has been keeping me company this morning while her sisters have been enjoying some fresh air. Gizmo loves to sleep. My friend Jessie loves to sleep. Here is Gizmo, sleeping with her arms wrapped around Jessie's arm. Is it love? Or a clever way to not fall off the edge of the sofa? Either way, it is a gorgeous snuggling snorgling snooze! Sleeping (along with eating and getting pats... and shedding fur) is something Gizmo excels at!

I've had the last two days out of the blog world. My holiday is over, my head cold is cleared (though the massive dust storm of yesterday has made me all snuffly again!) and I am back to work. I started work at 7am Tuesday and finished at 7pm on Wednesday, and was just a bit too tired to blog! I shall do me best to keep up with it now that I am back at the clinic. Also, I have signed up for VeganMoFo 2009, so October will bring another month of frequent posting!