Happy New Year!

Wow - can't believe 2008 is already here! It's nice to have the new year come after the Christmas holidays when you spend time with family and friends and realize how much you appreciate your family. A great way to start the new year is spending time with family - we went to our Grandparents and "the whole gang" was there celebrating 2008.

K, L, and our Dad

Lots of Christmas gatherings for us this holiday season. We attended 4 celebrations, and of course we made lots of food for the occasions.

As mentioned in the previous post, we made spiced nuts (a mixture of pecans and almonds with cayenne, chili pepper, maple syrup, and cinnamon), yeasty cornbread sticks, carrot hummus (was fabulous!, especially with pita bread), garbanzo green bean salad with pumpkin vinaigrette, double chocolate cookies, ginger cinnamon wafers, almond-oat cookies with mixed berry jam in the center, German red cabbage (a family recipe with red wine), and broccoli wild rice stuffing.

stuffing, cornbread sticks, salad, & red cabbage

cookies

garbanzo green bean salad

For today's New Year gathering, we made spinach dip (from Soy of Cooking by Marie Oser) served with pita bread, cucumber, and cauliflower; black-eyed pea salad with tomatoes and jalapeño; and oatmeal pistachio cookies with Pearl Green Tea soy milk!

When we weren't out at family gatherings, we enjoyed homemade pizza with broccoli, tomatoes, mushrooms, and tofu ricotta (tofu ricotta taken from Broccoli Lasagna Rolls in Soy of Cooking cookbook) and we loved the Indian Sweet Potato Wraps (with peas, onion, cinnamon, cayenne, garlic, sweet potatoes, and pumpernickel wrap - absolutely easy and delicious from Student Vegan Cookbook).

For Christmas we got the Soy of Cooking cookbook and Veganomicon! We are looking foward to making lots of tasty meals out of our new cookbooks. This past week we also made our own aprons, which we can now use when we are in the kitchen! We just bought stencils, plain aprons, and fabric paint, and painted "Life is like a bag of carrots" and "Cruelty free Baking". We love carrots, and life is very much fresh and sweet like carrots :)


We wish you all a blessed year full of joys and new opportunities.

Peace, LK