Vegan MoFo--Vegan Month of Food!

After tossing some ideas around for the last couple of days, I signed up for nanowrimo--National Novel Writing Month today. It starts tomorrow. 50,000 words in 30 days. I actually have a story plot in my head and I think I could go somewhere with this one, so we shall see. Hopefully it will get me better trained to be writing everyday.

Well, today I saw some posts on Twitter for VeganMoFo and had to look it up. It's Vegan Month of Food and it was started by some vegans who were also doing Nano from what I can see. Anyway, I figured, you know, since I'm already going to be writing 50,000 words, what is a blog post or 20 about vegan food? Yeah, I know. I'm really just crazy. I signed up for VeganMoFo too.

So, what can you expect from me this month? Hopefully a daily post about vegan food. It will probably just be about what I've made each day. I'm still fairly new to vegan eating, so I'll share my recipe sources with you and hopefully you'll enjoy what I've found.

We'll start with this weekend. Friday, I made a great vegan banana bread. I used a recipe called Mel's Vegan Banana Bread from vegweb.com. It turned out really well. I usually find that banana breads come out pretty dry, but this one was nice and moist and my kids loved it. They had no idea it was vegan.

Today I made a vegetable stew. I used some mixed canned beans, a can of mushrooms and a can of sliced water chestnuts (the whole ones are too big), some vegetable stock, lots of water, half an eggplant, some potatoes, a sweet potato, a couple of carrots, and I think that was about it. Basically, I used all the veggies I had on hand and threw in some spices--garlic salt, some pepper, some parsley. Pretty standard stuff. Then I made some vegan dumplings. I found a recipe on a blog and it worked out really well! The recipe is Vegan Dumplings for Stew. My youngest wouldn't eat them (she is leery of new foods), but my oldest did and asked me what was in them. If you could have seen her face when she heard I used soy milk! "I can't believe I ate soy and liked it!"

Then this evening, I made some carob chip cookies using a recipe from vegweb.com again. Happy Vegan Cookies were pretty easy to make. I liked that the recipe said to use as much carob or chocolate chips as you wanted too. The cookies did not spread out like traditional chocolate chip cookies and they taste a little strongly of the brown sugar (I didn't have any raw sugar, so I used what was on hand). And, let's face it, carob is not chocolate, but they are still pretty tasty. I might even make them again.

So, that was my weekend in vegan food. I've got two big pumpkins I'm looking forward to cooking up and making into pumpkin bread this week!