Winter Starts with Family

I had a marvellous three days off work before traveling to the five-day family extravaganza in Seattle with the in-laws. I got to take Mr. Man to his winter camp for three days. Going to school is usually my wife's privilege, but not last week. I spent the first day off downtown in the library and cafes finishing my paper. The quality of the paper is appallingly bad, which is similar to the quality of the educational standards of my particular university. Nonetheless, I'm done class for a while.

The next day I cleaned the house and baked amazing amounts of vegan cookies, bread and candy. I had not made vegan candy before, but I enjoyed making caramel and almond/walnut brittle. Both turned out very well. I also made two kinds of cookies - spicy oatmeal with raisins/chocolate chips and peanut butter. The oatmeal cookies are better; the peanut butter are extremely rich, almost like fudge. For lunch on Friday I made homemade corn dog muffins - cornbread muffins with sections of veggie dogs baked inside. They were super yummy and a great treat for the train ride to Seattle.

On Friday we packed and closed up the house for our trip. I hope you all did your part for world peace on Global Orgasm Day. We did.

The trip to Seattle was enjoyable. We got one of the cool seating areas on the train with a table. We were next to another two-mom family with 2 daughters. When we arrived there was debate about whether the whole family should go out to eat, but since it was Mr. Man's bedtime, I decided to stay home to put Mr. Man to bed. I enjoyed the quiet time alone to read for pleasure. I started reading Mad Cowboy, which ironically also intrigued my brother-in-law, who was born on a farm in northeast Texas with plenty of cows.

Saturday started with massive cleaning and organizing to help my brother and sister-in-law, who recently moved into their new house, after gutting it. I helped organize the kitchen, unpack and clean. I enjoyed helping. Each of required brief excursions out of the house in order to escape the insanity of the parents. Astoundingly, the entire family ate my vegan chuckwagon stew for dinner.

Sunday, being Christmas Eve, gave the pagans solace as the four Christians went to two different church services. My wife and I enjoyed the unique pleasure of flipping around cable stations.

Christmas Day greeted us with the general present opening, followed by a pancake breakfast. My sister and I planned out dinner preparations and started by baking pies. I made my first vegan pecan pie, with fresh pecans that we shelled ourselves (courtesy of the Texas family farm). Vegans sat at one end of the table with their tofurky, dumplings, gravy and veggies. The omnis sat at the other end with a big hunk of prime rib. My sister and I had an awesome time cooking together. The cranberry pecan stuffing and green beans with sauteed onions and pine nuts, both vegan, were enjoyed by all. An hour after dinner we had dessert and I'm proud to say my pecan pie was awesome and disappeared well before the non-vegan pumpkin pie. The rest of the day was spent playing.

By the time Tuesday rolled around we were ready to be home in our own little two-bedroom apartment. Our cat was in serious trauma over our absence, even though a friend came and fed and visited him. I anticipated the worst about this visit and it turned out to be quite nice, laced with a just-bearable amount of parental insanity.

We're in Shmooville Now!

My food prep fest continued tonight. I made carrot muffins with walnuts and raisins. They're yummy. The piece de resistance is the tofu apple spring rolls. It's a Vegan Lunch Box recipe. Jennifer Shmoo's husband says this one recipe alone was worth the cost of her cookbook. He's not kidding.

It took about 3 hours from marinade to rolling, but so worth it. The tofu is pressed and marinated in a fresh orange juice marinade. Then it's baked. It was hard not to eat all the tofu out of the pan. But we diced our tofu and shredded cabbage, apples, carrots and scallions. The fun part is rolling up the spring rolls. My wife and I did it together.

We each have a container of the most amazing spring rolls and awesome peanut sauce for our lunch tomorrow and two carrot muffins for breakfast.

I'm most proud of Mr. Man's lunch, pictured above. He has two spring rolls wrapped in a lettuce leaf, orange sections, a carrot muffin and a rice cake with hazelnut and almond butters. He has soy sauce for dipping, as peanuts are banned from his classroom.

I have to sleep for a few hours, but when I wake up exhausted I get to revel in the fact that I have amazing food waiting for me.

Oh, and our kababs were awesome. Even Mr. Man ate the veggies, seitan and tofu off the skewer like corn on the cob.

Mr. Man Grub

The extreme shopping run on Saturday that required us to haul our groceries back in the shopping cart has been bearing fruit.

On Sunday I made almond biscotti, which was earmarked for a coworker's birthday celebration. The leftovers came back tonight. Mr. Man gave them a thumbs up.

I also prepared a big pot of amazing chili and cornbread. This was by far the best chili I've ever made. I learned that the secret to a nice thick chili is to stir in a bit of refried beans at the end.

One of my new cookbooks is The Vegan Lunchbox. Shmoo's lunches are often the topic of conversation in our house. I finally got my ass around to making Mr. Man's lunches close to that caliber. We've always fed him healthy food and tried to vary it, but we got stuck in a rut.

Today I sent him to school with:

• tortilla wrap (whole wheat tortilla with cream cheese and refried beans rolled up)


• apple wedges


• yogurt


• crackers and hummus

I am certain that the fact he threw up in his lunchbox today for no apparent reason, claiming to feel fine both before and after the event is not related to the lunch contents.

Tonight I spent some time in the kitchen and prepped dinner and lunches for tomorrow. Granted, I didn't do the hours of homework I should have, but I am proud to say that I now have veggies, tofu and seitan marinating in my fridge so we can have kebabs for dinner tomorrow night.

His lunch for tomorrow is packed and contains:

• deli rolls (vegan lunch meat layered with cream cheese, rolled and speared with a toothpick)


• tofu veggie pasta salad


• hazelnuts and raisins


• half a piece of almond biscotti


• a banana

This one could be photographed a la Jennifershmoo. I am quite proud.

Time Stamp

If you had asked me at 8am this morning, I would have told you that today was going to be a horrible, no good, very bad day. At almost 9pm, I'm here to tell you it rocked.

• 6:45 am: Mr. Man wakes up in our bed [We've instituted Friday family bed night.] and asks if he can go play. The answer is always a definitive yes because he occupies himself while his lame ass mommies get a few more minutes of sleep.



• 7:30 am: Mr. Man comes back from his room and announces he wants breakfast. I get up and make him oatmeal. I eat leftover mushroom stroganoff from last night's dinner.



• 7:45 am: Mr. Man decides he wants to watch the rest of the Heffalump Movie which came yesterday from Netflix. (Sue us - he finally succumbed to the damn ads that precede the one and only video he owns - Mary Poppins.)



• 8:00 am: If the Heffalump Movie isn't bad enough, the cat decides to take the mother of all dumps. The stench wafts through the apartment. Some of you who know our cat may remember that he neither remembers to fully cover his shit or to take a shit gracefully. You might also remember that he has very long hair. Chalk this up to a cat smearing shit around the kitchen floor at 8am in the morning. I am tired. I have cramps. I am hormonal. I run to the sleeping wife and insist she must come help me. I clean the cat shit off the kitchen floor only to find that he'll continue smearing it around until we get the gobs off of his tail. The wife and I trap him in a tub full of water. This is the only positive use I have found for sliding shower doors. Yes, it sounds cruel, but we leave him in there until he's sloshed around enough to get the shit off his tail. We've covered the bathroom floor with towels to soak up the shit water that is likely to come off of him when he emerges. (Trust me - we've done this before.) Fortunately he comes out clean. Let's just say I was a tad bitchy to the wife during this process. Mr. Man is all the while watching the Heffalump Movie.



• 8:30 am: The three of us snuggling on the couch conclude the viewing of the Heffalump Movie. We go to the bonus features on the DVD and find a recipe for the type of cookie the Heffalump likes. Pumplerumkins or something stupid like that. Mr. Man decides we should make them.



• 9:00 am: The baking commences, followed closely by a coffee and cookie breakfast.



• 9:30 am: I scrub the kitchen floor. My wife goes back to bed.



• 10:00 am: Mr. Man and I begin making salt dough for holiday ornaments. We rolled out the dough, used cookie cutters and Mr. Man put all the holes in each one so we could insert a string when they're finished. The first two dozen ornaments are baking and we make braided candy cane ornaments with metal hangers with the rest of the dough.



• 12:30 pm: I begin making a menu and a grocery list for the week. I hear the gate open and there's a knock at the door. The woman from NWVeg has come to deliver the basket of goodies we won at the Vegan Holiday Festival two weekends ago. It was like Christmas. In the basket was 2 books about food, a cookbook I really wanted, a bar of soap, a gift certificate to a vegan grocer, 3 boxes of Fantastic food mixes, 2 cans of Amy's lentil soup, a head of garlic, an acorn squash, 3 gravy mixes, 2 Peanut Better peanut butter spreads and 2 Bumble Bars. I might even be forgetting something. It was awesome. My wife rouses herself to come see and we sit down to a bit of lunch.



• 2:00 pm: I get input from everyone and finally finish my weekly menu plan and grocery list. The list is massive. I slowly entice Mr. Man to come to the store with me. We have no idea how we will carry everything back home the 3 blocks from the store.



• 3:30 pm: Mr. Man and I finally finish shopping. He got tired of pushing the cart and eventually climbed in the cart. I piled everything on top of him. Our cart was overflowing. We checked out and I asked the clerk to pack as compactly as possible since we were on foot. By the fifth full bag he said, just take the cart home. I said, okay, we'll bring it back. "No, don't bother bringing it back, he advised. We give the homeless $1 for every cart they return." There was a dilemma I wasn't expecting. Mr. Man loved pushing the cart three blocks home. As it was I carried one bag and the cart was still full of bags. We had to work tag team to get the cart up the hill to our house. We wheeled the grocery cart right up to our door and unloaded it. What fun.



• 4:00 pm: I proceed to reorganize the fridge and pantry to make room for all the food I bought.



• 5:00 pm: I begin making vegetable chowder for dinner. Mr. Man decides he wants to eat the pomegranate we bought at the store. None of us has ever had a fresh pomegranate. My wife conducts internet research so we know what to do with it.



• 5:30 pm: The pomegranate has been scored and is soaking so we can easily peel of the husk to reveal the juicy kernels. We have agreed to sprinkle the seeds over ice cream for desert. In the meantime we eat dinner. The vegetable chowder was okay, but not the best recipe to come out of the Uncheese Cookbook.



• 6:00 pm: We all strip the pomegranate seeds from inside the fruit and have dessert. I loved the seeds. Mr. Man was 75/25 in favor and I think my wife was the opposite. Nonetheless we had a great time with a new fruit.



• 6:30 pm: We attempt a family game of Parcheesi, but Mr. Man tires and we suspend play.



• 7:00 pm: Mr. Man goes to bed. I venture out into the blustery, cold night with a shopping cart. I return it to the store and pick up the tea we forgot to get.



• 7:30 pm: I watch the tail end of the Veronica Mars episodes my wife is watching.



• 9:00 pm: My wife is in the tub. I'm in bed under blankets. I might go make almond biscotti. I might curl up with my sparkly clean wife in bed.