VeganMoFo IV: Momo's First Tea Party

Confession time.  I, Madame A. Monique Martin Esq. III, have never had a tea party before.  Meep!  I know.  So I decided to gather my bestest of friends today and have one kickass cool tea party in the back garden.  So throw on your vegan pearls!  And if you're wearing gloves, make sure they're fingerless because this ain't a party fit for the queen.

Meet the gang:

Smackers, Dino, Rocky, and Rose get a little testy that I'm taking pictures

Smackers wants everybody to know he's drinking organic tropical mate

Tea Party of Awesome Menu

Mini Reubens

Mini Tofu Salad Sandwiches

Cucumber with Devilish Spread

Scones

Cranberry Sauce

Clotted Cream

Assorted Teas

The food was a bit labor intensive because I was feeling lazy yesterday and didn't prep anything at all.  So...  I woke up and baked pumpernickel from scratch for the mini reubens.  All I did for those was marinate some Yves turkey (all I had) in a bit of tamari, crushed garlic, and liquid smoke.  Then I cooked that with drained sauerkraut until the moisture was gone.  Added a little bit of tofutti cheese and some homemade thousand island.

Then I made the tofu egg salad and devilish spread.  The tofu egg salad was tofu, Vegenaise, mustard, onion, celery, salt and pepper.  The devilish spread was the bean mixture from my Deviled Tofu recipe.  I originally came up with this in '07 and always come back to it.  It's something I like to play around with so it's gonna be on my next show with mix-in ideas and such.

Rocky and Rose say "Hi!"  Also..."Check out these sammiches."

zoom in on the tofu egg salad and cranberry sauce

The last things I made were the desserts.  Originally, there was supposed to be lemon curd tarts, but I burned the damn crusts.  Grrr.  So now, I'm just gonna make some lemon curd with the gazillion lemons I have from our tree.  I decided on regular scones, but will most definitely be making these pumpkin ones tomorrow.  By the way, the scones I made today are AMAZING!  I left out the raisins because Era hates them, but they are so super delicious and fluffy.  Mmm.  I served them with this clotted cream.  Just double the recipe because it's delicious and, as is, it's hard to blend until smooth.

Dino wants you to see the scones and is not at all bitter you can't see his face in the other pics

For a first tea party, we had plenty of fun.  We shared lots of laughs and discussed, in depth, our love of Sheldon Cooper.  Mostly, we just ate sandwiches.  Who knows what tomorrow may bring?  Hopefully, more scones.

goodbye, everybody!

VeganMoFo IV: Behold the Power of Kale

Truth be told, I wanted to present a video today.  Unfortunately, my body needed sleep yesterday so we didn't finish editing.  We are hoping to do that tonight after we get back from voting.  So I thought I'd skip ahead, show some love, and make something for the first time!  First comes the love...

If you've never heard of Kittee, you need to get in the know.  I absolutely adore her for several reasons.  First, she lovingly calls people "titty babies" when they whine for no reason.  Second, she thinks xantham gum is the devil.  Third, she has the most colorful wardrobe I've ever seen.  She's also a really great cook.  I use her cake recipes religiously and Papa Tofu straight up introduced me to Ethiopian.  Why all this love?  Today, for the first time ever, I made kale chips!

You don't understand.  For years I've been oohing and ahhing over other people's kale chips (You down with OPKC?  Yeah, you know me!).  I was starting to get kale chip envy!  I just never had kale in the house or would forget to make those damn chips until I had used up all the kale.  It was a shame and made my heart hurt.  I made a promise, nay, A PLEDGE to make a bunch of things I've been pining for this year for VeganMoFo.  And so, I did...

nothing goes with kale chips like a nice, frothy beer smoothie

I used the recipe that Kittee posted back in June.  It was a fantastic experience.  I used the oven method and it took around an hour and a half.  I had to leave my oven door almost all the way open because the lowest temp is set at 200, but my oven thermometer said it was closer to 300.

These chips are a salty, crunchy, spicy, noochy good time.  I'd  call them noochilicious!  Era will be lucky if they last until he gets home.  And in the spirit of kale, I made myself a delicious green smoothie!  It was kale, cilantro, bartlett pear, banana, water, and a tiny splash of apple juice.  It was so good that when I yanked my blender from the unit, the bottom unscrewed and smoothie dripped all over the floor.  From my swearing, the dogs knew something was on the floor and ran in to have some smoothie.  Good times!  Haha.  Here's the obligatory smoothie shot.

green smoothie goodness

Well, that's all for now!  I've got some kale chips to eat and a whole mess of blogs to read.  Hopefully, tomorrow I'll have a video for you!  Happy MoFoing!