Vegan party!

About a month ago, Dan and I hosted a party in DC for our JASC friends to come and eat/drink/be merry & "celebrate togetherness", i.e. our engagement. We had planned for a picnic outside and ordered food and cake in advance, so when it rained that weekend, we had to go to plan B -- which happened to be our favorite sports bar, Rocket Bar. Rocket Bar doesn't have its own food, so it allows you to bring in outside food. This was perfect for us, since we'd already arranged our vegan catering for pick-up!

We had five people staying over at our apartment that weekend, so I tried to start the morning off nice with some vegan cinnamon rolls - a nearly disastrous endeavor, since our oven started smoking, and not in a glamorous 60s kind of way (OK, smoking was never that glamorous.) There was some crud at the bottom of the oven making a terrible smoke, which miraculously didn't leave its mark on the cinnamon rolls. They came out fine - more undercooked than usual, because we were so eager to stop the smoke!

Luckily, the food only got better from that point on. Woodland's Vegan Bistro supplied us with fried "chicken" and macaroni & cheese to feed 15 (and then some), along with barbecue sauce and hot sauce. Dan made some pasta salad, and a friend brought chips and hummus. I LOVE Woodland's vegan chicken, and though it's always better fresh out of the frier, the leftovers kept Dan and I happy for days. And, the macaroni and "cheese" is one of the best dishes in DC, and I'm not the only one who says so.

Our friend Diane got a photo of the plated food -- I was too busy running around ordering champagne and trying to get the jukebox to play good music to remember to take a photo!

We also ordered a cake for the occasion, from Sweet Themez Bakery. They made us a "Cherry Blossom" cake, which was cherry-flavored cake and cherry jam in the middle - we loved it! Again, borrowing a photo from another friend, Yuri.

Sometimes it's not that exciting to have a lot of food and cake left over after a party, but we were grateful for it - with guests staying over the next day, it helped feed us all for lunch and sustained my lunches for a few days afterward. And I could eat that cake for days if I had to!

So, lesson learned - vegan parties in DC are a piece of cake, even when it rains. I won't pretend I wasn't nervous about the logistics of getting us all together & well fed, but it all came out perfectly, and we had a great time hanging out with our close friends.

Birthday food!

Last Saturday was my birthday, and I got to have some spectacular food...

Tiramisu cake

Baklava, baklove

Baklava is not the easiest or cheapest dessert to make. Especially if you shell out $12 for shelled pistachios (ha, see what I did there) and some more $$ for ground cardamom. I avoided the latter expense by buying only 2 tbs from the bulk section of Whole Foods, and later learned I could have avoided the former by using another kind of nut (or getting them from Trader Joe's)... not all baklava recipes use pistachios!

BUT, after all that, we came out with lovely baklava that tasted pretty much perfect (after cutting off burned edges... yeah, that nice golden color is not intentional)

Flaky, nutty, spicy, sweet...

Starting the summer off right with pie and ice cream

I grew up pretty spoiled, but my biggest privilege was probably my mom's pies. She is a master of the lattice crust, always cooking it to crispy golden perfection. She's also an outdoors(wo)man and would put in the work to pick delicious fresh berries. Since moving out for college, it's been hard to find anything close to the pies I grew up on. This weekend we came close.

Vegan fruit pies are not any more difficult than pies with dairy, eggs, or lard ingredients. Why should they be? The real star of a good pie is fresh fruit and a well made crust.

The fruit part of our pie was easy. During our weekly pilgrimage to the Columbia Heights Farmer's Market (blocks from our apartment) we picked up some rhubarb and some of the last strawberries of the season. The strawberries were a deep red, ripe and juicy. Good fruit is essential for a good pie.

For the recipe we consulted our cookbook library and chose a recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky. You can't really go wrong with this handy little cookbook that has recipes for 75 pies, tarts, cobblers and more. We followed the strawberry rhubarb crumb pie on page 67 and it turned out very nicely.

To top off our pie, we made a batch of ice cream. A future post will delve more into our ice cream churning, but we received an underutilized ice cream maker from a parent and have been putting it to good use. We follow the cookbook Vegan Scoop. This cookbook has also served us well. We tend to follow their recipes almost exactly, but we add a quarter teaspoon of xantham gum to keep ours creamy. Since our pie was heavy on flavor, we chose a plain vanilla ice cream recipe.

Vegan pie and ice cream, what could be better?

For the full recipes, checkout the two cookbooks we used.