Spinach Smoothie

I've read on multiple food blogs that you can put spinach into smoothies and you can't even taste it. So, I decided to try throwing a handful of baby spinach & greens mix into my regular smoothie recipe, which is just:

1 thing of yogurt (I think it's 6 oz)
1 yogurt-thing full of soy milk
1 handful of frozen berries
(In this case it's raspberry yogurt and frozen raspberries, but sometimes I mix it up.)

Blend until it looks, you know, smooth.

Anyway, I could taste the spinach, but not really in a bad way. Just like an extra bit of, uh, earthy flavor? Honestly it probably tastes slightly better without the spinach, but I'll keep adding it when I make smoothies, since it's such an easy way to eat more spinach!

(Sorry if this post is super obvious to everyone, but I only recently learned how easy it is to make smoothies at home. And only recently-er did I try adding greens.)

Dinner & a movie: The Birds

Another exciting dinner and a movie night! With The Birds. And what do birds eat? Human flesh? NO. Sunflower seeds.


So I made this awesome sunflower seed spread and pita chips!

I adapted it from this recipe which I found from a Google search for "sunflower seed recipes." It was SUPER DELICIOUS and the hardest part was cleaning out the blender afterward.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups sunflower seeds
• 1/2 cup tahini
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1/2 cup water

I made it with raw sunflower seeds from the local co-op, but some of the reviewers on AllRecipes said they used salted & roasted ones. Also, following the advice of the AllRecipes reviewers, I dropped the onion and celery from the originally posted recipe.

1) Toast the seeds in a frying pan on medium heat for 8-10 minutes, stirring constantly until the seeds turn they brown.
2) Mix the seeds with the tahini in a bowl. Then, spread the seeds out on a baking sheet and let them cool to room temperature.

3) Meanwhile mix the garlic and lemon juice and set it aside.
4) After the seeds are cooled, put everything in the blender or food processor and blend it!!

Seriously! So delicious! It's kind of like hummus, but nutty and savory-er.

Also by the way, last year I learned how easy it is to make pita chips! Did you know how easy it is to make pita chips? All you do is cut the pitas into triangles, spritz a baking sheet with olive oil and then spritz the tops of the pitas with olive oil, and bake at 400 for 10 minutes. Sometimes I put garlic salt on them, but I just did plain ones to go with the sunflower seed spread.

Potato Soup

Yo do any of youse guys have a good vegetarian creamy potato soup recipe? I made this one and it was gross. I ended up adding a packet of onion soup mix, some garlic, some dried chives, and some sour cream and that made it palatable, but there's got to be a better recipe out there. Right?

Dinner and a Movie!

My friends Ryan, Shilpa, and I decided to start having themed dinner and movie nights! We started off with Howl, the new biopic of Allen Ginsberg. (It was a good movie, by the way. James Franco deserves all his accolades.) We wanted a 50s-ish vibe for the food, so we had vegetarian shepherd's pie and blueberry pie! It was delightful!

My friend Ryan made this pie:

Doesn't it look pie-y?? It was delicious. But it's not Ryan's blog so I'm not going to tell you about the pie.
 
I made the shepherd's pie and it was also delicious. Shepherd's pie used to be a fave comfort food for me before I went vegetarian, and it never occurred to me to make a vegetarian version. My friends had never had shepherd's pie before in any form, and this recipe made them believers. It's a super easy, yummy, filling recipe. I adapted it from this recipe.

Ingredients:
2 bags of Morningstar Farms Mealstarter Crumbles (You could probably get by with 1 bag and some extra vegetables, but personally I liked having a pretty big layer of fake meat)
1 onion
8 small potatoes (or 4 big ones)
2 carrots
1 cup frozen corn
1 15 oz can of vegetable broth
Olive oil
Butter/margarine
S&P

First up, peel and quarter the potatoes and boil them for 20-30 minutes.

MEANWHILE cut the other vegetables and start browning the onion in oil, for about 10 minutes. Then add the fake meat crumbles and let them get warmed up. Then add the corn and carrots, and stir in about half the can of vegetable broth. Spread this mixture into the bottom layer of a casserole dish.

THEN mash the potatoes. Add a smidge of butter and the other half of the broth. Pat them lovingly over the top of the fake meat layer.

Bake it at 400 for about 30 minutes, until the potatoes form a golden brown crust.

Then eat it!!

This recipe serves like... 4 people who like to eat, or 6 skinny people.

PS for our next Dinner & Movie party, we're planning to watch The Birds. Let me know if you have any vegetarian bird-themed meal ideas!