ATL Vegan Drinks – February

We don’t make it out to enough of these. ATL Vegan Drinks is a vegan dinner once a month with drinks and usually a special menu. The Wrecking Bar was already offering some vegan items and featuring vegetarian specials every Tuesday night so it was a good choice to try out.

We started off munching on some fries. They were excellent, but be aware that the special sauces that normally come with them aren’t vegan.

And a pretzel. It was really salty, but it advertises that right up front. You can just pull off some of the salt chunks. Looks like I got to that pic a little late…

The turnip parsnip soup was delicious. The two roots really worked together to mellow each others favor.

I ordered the Braised kale, mustard greens & apple strudel with chipotle-hop BBQ. It was not too heavy on the pastry and packed full of greens. So good. The BBQ sauce wasn’t as smokey as I was expecting but still good.

Kevin had the Sweet potato pancakes with vegetable goulash. It was tasty, but I was into my greens more.

I also got to taste the Falafel and the Vegetable pappardelle with pesto with seitan. Both good. Apparently they make their own pasta in house. Their seitan had a really nice texture as well.

Since The Wrecking Bar is a brewpub I had some, uh, beer. The first one was the Jemmy Dean Stout which was okay. It lacked a certain fullness I expect with a stout. The Victor Imperial IPA was excellent though and a bit of an ass-kicker. Go slow on that one.

Thanks again to Brett for organizing these. It’s a real asset to Atlanta’s vegan community.

Christmas Day/Birthday dinner

Christmas Day we celebrated not working and Nick’s birthday with a chill traditional dinner. Vegan of course. Nick was surprised that Danielle made him a cookie cake that he’d mentioned wanting months ago.

And here it is! Cute and delicious.

We found Christmas Vacation moose mugs, so those had to be busted out.

We brought the green bean casserole, a vat of gravy and sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping.

Crescent rolls.

My starter plate. I guess I was easing into it. There’s some tofurky under that gravy.

Chipotle-kissed Red Beans and Sweet Potato Chili

No, I’m not done with the bowls but I did save some other posts to break them up a bit so it wasn’t bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl….

Slow cookers are awesome if you don’t know that already. You can turn dried beans into a big pile of mouth-watering bits to eat as is or freeze in batches to use in recipes. All without pot watching. Nothing better than getting home from work to find your kitchen already smells delicious.

This one is Chipotle-kissed Red Beans and Sweet Potato Chili from Robin Robertson’s Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. Look at that color! If you follow the recipe it’s pretty mild, so punch up the hot stuff if you like to feel the burn. And there’s only a little bit of oil in the whole pot so it’s pretty much just a bowl of goodness. Not pictured: unhealthy bread or corn bread slathered with Earth Balance.

 

 

Sweet & Sour Chipotle Tempeh with Sweet Potatoes

It’s been nice cooking lately instead of going out. While we’re lucky enough to have quite a few vegan options here in Atlanta, there is a ceiling. And sometimes you get tired of eating the same stuff all the time. At least I do.

But when you cook at home, your possibilities are almost endless. The Sweet & Sour Chipotle Tempeh with Sweet Potatoes from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan were another excuse to turn on the oven for an hour. Plus, I don’t cook nearly enough tempeh. I forgot to get pineapple and toyed with the idea of using mandarin orange segments but then just left out the ingredient entirely. The dish did not suffer for it. There was plenty of sauce and plenty of sweet and sour goodness.

Bourbon black-eyed peas

One of the fun things about VeganMoFo is how it inspires you to try different things. This week, I only made a minimal soy milk and cereal run so dinners had to come from ingredients on hand. Of course, I could probably live for 6 months on my hoarded ingredients, but still. One meal’s inspiration came from Jessy’s bourbon baked beans post. I had sweet potatoes and collards on hand. And a bag of frozen black-eyed peas. Sure, those will work. And work they did! Kevin thought they were a tad sweet. I can see possibly cutting back the sweetness and/or adding something sharp like a bit of cider vinegar. But all in all this was a perfect fall meal.