valentine cookies

happy early valentine's day!

i made shortbread chocolate-dipped cookies for Nate:

ingredients

cutting cookies

ready for the oven

double boiling chocolate

chilling on the porch

Mushroom Barley Soup

Today, I cooked up a huge batch of mushroom barley soup from a recipe in Student's Vegetarian Cookbook.  This is an old standard that is always delicious and can usually be made at the drop of a hat, because we usually have all the ingredients on hand.  I double all of the vegetables, but make sure to keep the barley to half a cup, because it expands so much.  

One Week Later

We're at the end of our one week break from our vegan/sugar-free diet and sadly Nate and I both had lousy weeks!  I fully believe the largest contributing factor to this was our change in diet.  We both felt weighed down, irritable, had 'plumbing issues' and my nasal passages were seriously messed up after eating dairy.  I also experienced headaches shortly after eating dairy and/or sugar; I would also wake up the next morning after eating these items the night before still feeling gross.  I never felt fully rested.  We both also intensely craved home-cooked food.  Now, we weren't bingeing on all the "other" food we could get our hands on, we still had plenty of home-cooked dishes.  But nearly anytime we were eating a more processed food, our bodies let us know, that they did not appreciate it.

More Lentils

Today, we had some more delicious lentils, this time with peas!  I can't say too much about how Nate cooked these, because I've never made them with him.  Next time, I'm definitely having a lesson!  This dish is a perfectly delicious go to dish, that always makes plenty of left-overs for lunches.  

Soup-er Pole-sole (aka Posole during the Superbowl)

Nate cooked us up a delicious batch of posole for our game-day long eat-a-thon.  We added garbanzo beans to this batch.  Next time, we're going to add more hominy and skip the g-beans.  Delicious!

I also made another batch of Alicia's 'My Favorite Cupcakes' from The Kind Life.  We adore these!  These are Nate's absolute favorite cupcakes (which he usually has no interest in at all).  We like the frosting better with maple syrup instead of agave nectar (although I still use agave nectar in the cake part).  The result is a delicious treat with a complex and mild sweetness.  

Nate's Pasta Sauce

Mmm.  Tonight we had our go-to quick and easy dinner.  Our supply of home-canned tomatoes is dwindling.  I kinda figure that once they're all gone, a lot of the appeal of this dish will be lost to me.  But for now, we're still enjoying this delicious sauce!

Lentils

After a long morning of shoveling out of our house, we settled into a delicious lunch of lentils and rice.  Lentils are terrific!  They are very light, but also very filling.  We cooked the brown lentils with onions and carrots and various seasonings.  

So...

We've decided to keep this thing going!  But first, we're going to take a week off.  I'm extremely curious to see how my body reacts to dairy and sugar.  I'm thrilled that we're keeping with this new lifestyle.      We'll report back in one week.