Sunday, November 1, 2015

2015--An Elf Odyssey



WELCOME NOVEMBER!!
The Elf doesn’t know about y’all BUT it seems like October just got started and HELLO—it’s November FIRST today!! Well, this week started off with an EPIC FAIL!! Seriously, The Elf tried to make the Cauliflower Biscuits that looked SO GOOD…well, the operative word is here is TRIED! What a complete mess. We veganized using EnerG egg substitution and Daiya cheddar cheese that we shredded ourowns-elfs. Other than that the recipe was the same as the one we copied from the Viance Blog page.http://blog.viance.com/news/recipe-cauliflower-biscuits/ 
Well, we obviously did something wrong because what came ‘out the oven’ was just that…WRONG. We even baked them an extra 10 minutes in hopes of them firming up, but all we got was MUSH, as you can see. ICK!


With Big Solid out of town, TE went to town making cookie dough galore to have on hand. We made four batches of jes plain ole vegan oatmeal cookies to prepare our ‘Little Kikies’ for ARF peeps and then got a tinted icing to make additional ‘LKs’ for Dr. Ley’s Tent at the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk that was held in the pouring rain yesterday! The rain did not dampen the enthusiasm of the walkers one IOTA and a good time was had by all. Here’s a picture of The Elf with Her Royal Highness Jill Conner Browne – THE Sweet Potato Queen.
Now, if y’all haven’t heard of her or of the Zippity-Do-Dah festivities that occur here in the spring, well rush right over to GOOGLE and type in her name. Her books (all of them NYTimes best sellers) are delightfully fun reading about life, love and all such things like that.

Anyway, the pink Little Kikies turned out pretty cool.


AND, you KNOW WHAT!! We found out that Duncan Hines Icing is VEGAN!! Now we don’t have to work around the humidity to make the cream cheese filling for the LKs; ‘cause sometimes it’s too soft and the cookies slide all over the place and that just doesn’t work well! By the way, there is a whole list of ‘unknown vegan’ foods that might surprise you! This link will take you to the PETA site, so just a heads up if you are not a PETA fan. However, even though these items are vegan, you still need to read labels to be sure these fit into your eating regimen.

Our ‘funnest’ meal of the week actually happened last night. We’ve said before that we LOVE LOVE LOVE the Cauliflower Fried Rice dish we had the other night and we found an even easier recipe than we used before although we STILL added the Chikun Shreds like we did before.http://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-recipe/cauliflower-fried-rice/ 
Here you see the shreds all sautéed

Followed by the finished product.

This stuff is so yummy!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Over the past few weeks, we’ve had several opportunities to share the vegan message with friends who are non-vegan. In my own little elf-mind, it would be wonderful if everyone would become vegan and the lives of animals improved. However, TE understands that won’t occur in her lifetime, most likely. People still have the notion that eating vegan means no protein, no taste, and boring as hell. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth as we have a blast cooking, learning new stuffs all the time and running into those epic fails like earlier in the week. But, awareness is growing and we’ve had more folks ask us about how to go about eating healthier. We are always happy to talk up the plant-based eating lifestyle and continue to work on our “Primer” for just that support. For example, we got a new iPhone 6s this week and the salesperson is a woman who has been trying to become vegan. We had more fun talking and sharing stories while waiting for our new phone to get backed up and all things transferred…she had some great questions and we hopefully shared some good answers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This past week has also brought MUCH needed rain to our area. We’ve had no significant rainfall since July 4 and a statewide burn ban had been in effect. So when Hurricane Patricia slammed into Mexico, her rainfall continued up through MS on Monday and Tuesday. Then we had a bit of a break but got hammered again yesterday with more rain. It has made it seem so much more like fall and when The Elf and Marley the Wayward Poodle went on a walk in the drizzle today, we just had the best time! This is our favorite walk because we can let Marley TWP off lead for a bit. You can hardly see him in this picture, but he’s waiting patiently for us to catch up.

 Today, we even saw a REALLY BIG OWL! WAY COOL! He flew by and lit in a tree just above us and gave us one of those 180°head turns. The picture isn’t great but you get the idea.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We at the Elfin Kitchen will commence our return to cooking once a week from the recipes of FatFree Vegan Kitchen.
 We had mentioned it last week BUT forgot that Big Solid would be gone AND we had said we’d start the first week of November. So the recipe remains the same (Pasta Fagioli with Cranberry Beans and Kale) and we’ll have it one night this week.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lastly, we wanted to ‘splain the most recent addition to our signoff—the phrase DO EPIC. It comes from a beautifully written book called Bright Side by Kim Holden. It’s about a young woman who faces a world of bad stuffs in her life with such a positive force and strength that she effects change on people just by being herself. In fact, her best friend, Gus, calls her ‘Bright Side’ and when you read the book, you’ll understand why. Her motto is “DO EPIC” which means to take whatever gifts you have and throw yourself into them with gusto, joy and affirmation. That’s how The Elf wants to be and even got inked to help remind her of that every day.

So, there you go.
Til then, breathe deep, laugh a lot, eat plants, love life and ‘DO EPIC’.
The Elf

No comments:

Post a Comment