pumpkin puffs

Have you ever met up with another blogger or an online friend? Did you get excited and nervous or did you feel as is if you were meeting up with an old friend because you know a lot about them through their blog? I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up with quite a few food bloggers. Some live here in Richmond and others live much further away, but each time I’ve had a blast chatting it up with the person I’ve met. We tend to find we have a lot in common- go figure!

Yesterday was no different when I met up with the gorgeous Stephanie from CookinFanatic. Every weekend I end up going to her side of the city to do some shopping and we kept thinking that it’s odd we hadn’t run into one another yet. This weekend I proposed we meet up at the foodie haven, Whole Foods. Steph (is okay if I call you that?) was down (obvi).

steph&brit.jpg

We both got some goods from the bar for lunch and sat down to chat about life, our boys and current living situations, and our fav places to eat or drink around Richmond.

Stephanie was super sweet and it was fun getting to know her outside of the internet. Confirms my belief that meet ups are awesome. I have met some amazing people through blogging- some of which I am still waiting to meet in person!!!

I know you’ve already seen lunch but Isaac made me a veggie omelet for breakfast yesterday morning and it was definitely blog worthy so here she is.

Spinach, green peppers, sprouts, and tomato wrapped in 1 egg and 1 egg white. He came up with the inside ingredients himself and as you can probably tell, the omelet turned out eggcellent.

In other news I tried (key word) to veganize the Frosted Pumpkin Puff recipe that I posted about a few days ago. The end result turned out okay as the puffs still taste great, but they’re definitely not puffy.

The regular puff that my friend’s mom made.

My pancake like version.

I’m not exactly sure what I did wrong. Maybe the flax and water combo (1 tablespoon of ground flax seeds and 3 tablespoons of water) that I used as an egg replacer wasn’t good for this sort of recipe. But that would be odd, because I’ve used it before in baking and it worked just dandy. Oh well, the vegan cream cheese frosting turned out to be awesome so I’ll post that and I do have the recipe for both the non-vegan pumpkin puffs and the vegan pancake cookies if anyone is interested I would be happy to post it. Just let me know.

Vegan Cream Cheese Icing

1/2 of a container Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese
1/4 cup soy margarine (I used Earth Balance)
1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon juice

Combine the cream cheese and margarine and mix well. Slowly add the powdered sugar to the mixture and then add the vanilla and lemon juice.

**I’d probably double/triple the recipe if I were making icing to frost a cake.

Happy Monday. Stay warm if your area of the world is freezing, as it is here in VA today. It’s suppose to warm up the 70′s later in the week so we haven’t turned on our heat on yet. Let’s just say that my hands are ice cold right now as I type. I gotta go find my snuggie and then head to work.

- Brittany

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Whew. The work week is over and it’s time for some relaxing. Am I right?

So let’s start with the special treat from my last post. No one guessed it but the fall dessert I had the privilege of taste testing was Frosted Pumpkin Puffs. My friend’s mom makes these cookies and I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about them. Of course I wanted to try them for myself so my friend and his gf brought over four cookies for Isaac and I to try. Some had a cream cheese-like icing and others were topped with vanilla. I was suppose to taste both and let them know which I preferred.

I had no problem consuming two of these little puffs because they were delightful. The cookie itself had a lovely pumpkin flavor and was moist and airy, less like a cookie and more like cake. I let them know that I liked the cream cheese icing more, but that both were ridiculously tasty. My friend’s mom was also kind enough to share her recipe with me so I’ll be making some Frosted Pumpkin Puffs of my own – hopefully with a little twist!

Although, come to think of it, I may not be doing much cooking this weekend because our kitchen sink is currently out of commission. Our landlord called last night to let us know that we can’t use our sink. Every time we run water it’s causing the sink in the apartment below us to overflow. Doing dishes in the bathtub isn’t my idea of fun so we’ve been trying to refrain from using a ton of dishes. This, in turn, means less cooking. Dangit! I really really really hope it’s fixed soon.

In other not so good, but turned out okay news, this little booger got sick on us Wednesday night.

She was up all night vomiting and having diarrhea. We didn’t know why she was sick so I started searching online to find out what might be the reason. Turns out that when I was cooking the Mellow Lentil Soup on Tuesday evening I dropped a few small pieces of garlic and onion. Before I could pick them up the mini vacuum aka Olive had ran by and got them. I didn’t think anything of it until I found this list and realized that both onion and garlic can be harmful if consumed by dogs. The only human foods I knew not to give dogs (before reading this list) were chocolate, grapes, and raisins. If you have a dog I highly recommend looking over the list because there were many things on it that I wasn’t aware of (avocado, nutmeg, macadamia nuts…).

After a trip to the vet, a shot, and some pills she is doing fine and is back to her playful self. Thank goodness. Apparently, the amount was small enough that it just really upset her stomach because her blood work came back normal.

So besides all the drama and the cold and wet weather, things have been a-okay and I’ve been enjoying some delicious food.

Oats topped with flax granola with a little spoonful of TJ’s pumpkin butter.

There were the standard oatmeal/oatbran combo.

In an effort to limit the amount of dirty dishes created at the house I went to our local organic market for lunch. I got the mock chicken salad made with tempeh.

While there I also sampled a vegan chicken nugget that I could have swore came from Chic-fil-a. Back in high school Chic-fil-a was literally my favorite restaurant so you can rest assured that I do know what their nuggets taste like. And, this vegan nugget my friends was pretty darn close – in looks, texture, and taste!! The nice lady at the counter had to burst my bubble and tell me they are fried, but oh well they are definitely still tasty.

I paired a steamy bowl of butternut squash soup with the tempeh salad.

The soup was creamy, warm, sweet, and absolutely fabulous. I definitely need to make my own version sometime very soon.

For dinner I boiled ww noodles so that we could test out some homemade spaghetti sauce that the kids at Isaac’s school prepared using items of the school garden. (tomatoes, garlic, basil, and oregano)

I added some cooked onions and red bell pepper and some fresh spinach. It turned out to be a nice little meal and it’s cool to think that kids made it. I found out later that kids age 3-6 were the cooks. This made me wince a little but Isaac assured me they all washed their hands and they weren’t allowed to pick their noses during kitchen duty.

I hope everyone is having a lovely start to the weekend. Isaac and I borrowed his parents amazing vacuum (a Dyson) for the weekend so we’ve been running around vacuuming everything in sight. We were fascinated (and disgusted) by how much dirt came up from areas that I vacuum every week. Twas a fun Friday night!

- Brittany