Orange food! Marigold, amber, sunset, mango, emberblush, citrus, tigerstripe, glow!

Oh, I am so procrastinating right now.  And isn't that *totally* the best time to blog, when it feels like a sneaky indulgent privilege to be able to write about all this stuff?  Hurray!  Southeast asian art, Foucault, and russian neoromantics be damned, all of them (at least for the time it takes me to write this, and then it's back to dandelion tea and the books.  which isn't so bad, nah....)

I didn't plan the colour scheme at all, but there it is.  Orange is a lovely colour to eat, cheery and usually sweet.  I may have mentioned the acquisition of my very first copy of Vegetarian Times in a past post - well, I made more than donuts.  The edamame and sweet potato collard wraps jumped WAY out at me when I saw them, basically 'cause I don't think I'd ever put those ingredients together in quite that way before.  There's even firm-soft tofu in here, and the only spice is cayenne.  In the end... they were good.  I enjoyed them a lot.  There was something odd about the texture I wondered about, but I think I was just getting used to edamame, which are way richer than frozen peas.  (I was an edamame virgin before this recipe you see - another reason to try them out!).  Ultimately I recommend it, although I liked the filling best of all over crunchy romaine leaves for added texture.  It froze really well, too.

Then I saw Smitten Kitchen's recent cornbread salad and deeply swooned over the concept of it all.  I think I saw it early in the afternoon and was eating it a few hours later for dinner, I was so jazzed about the thought.  So amazing this was!!  The tangy dressing soaks into some of the cornbread bites to make UbertasterBomsOfWow, and the rest stay crunchy and toasty and awesomely contrasty.  

Can we pause a moment to lament the atrocious photograph that I took of this salad?  

** moment of silence , snicker snicker **

delicious though.

I am a bit of urban harvester.  Just a bit, just here and there.  Kind of like Benjamin Bunny, and I spotted a green tomato peaking out from a trendy bar's front garden one Friday night while I was walking home and slightly drunk and I didn't figure it so bad to pop it off and dream of frying it up for dinner.  I see it as being a natural part of the city's ecology, you know.  And I plant things around.  Anyway, I fried it southern style and it was delicious!  Tangy and juicy and zestier than a red one.  Really good with egg salad beside it, too (ppk recipe, of course.  probably with extra mustard, if I was being myself that day).

Also from the Isa salad files, a very loose translation of the Prospect Park potato salad from the Vcon.  Loose, as in I had about 10 baby red potatoes and no desire to do any specific divisions of a recipe, so I just looked at the ingredients list and threw all of those things into the same bowl until it tasted good.  It tasted good!

These tasted okay.  I mean, the chocolate filling was the most intensely luscious sticky fudge sauce in the whole world and I was scraping it out of the pot like crazy to get the last smidge - THAT was amazing.  The cookies were only mehn, though.  Not so surprisingly, since they're just really fatty shortbreads that I didn't veganize well enough I guess, but anyway - Gale Gand's Orange Sandwich Cookies from Butter Sugar Flour Eggs if anyone's curious.  (Make that filling sauce, omg.).  And they sure are pretty looking.

And I tried to recreate one of the super hippy chunky crunchy veggie restaurant style cookie recipes.  You know the ones that are full of flax oil and/or spelt chunks and/or seeds and yet somehow are just incredible?  I kind of succeeded, kind of... okay, not really.  But I learned a lot about baking soda versus powder, and I have the beginnings of a fantastic sesame seed crust in my freezer right now... ha.   If anyone knows of a recipe that makes a big crunchy, browned around the edges cookie that tastes like a cross between a sesame snap and and oatmeal chocolate chip, do DO let me know.  I'll send Peppermint Ritter Sports, I promise.  :P