Monday, May 28, 2007

A memorial day feast of wonderful colors

Happy memorial day :)

Today is my sister's birthday so we had a party at my house with all the aunts and cousins and such. And lots of good food. I ate homemade pesto (with basil fresh from the garden), whole wheat spaghetti, an olive garden breadstick and some veggies.

We went to THREE different stores yesterday looking for basil and couldn't find any so finally we just bought some pots of basil from my neighbors and used it. Following the VWaV recipe for "Classic Pesto" I created the following beautiful, green, flavorful pesto.





I highly recomend this pesto as it is DELISH. It has quite a strong flavor, however, and so I suggest that you taste it before serving to see if you want to add more olive oil or adjust the amounts called for.





We had planned on using this for pasta, however, it was very good as a dip for the pita bread I made last night and I'm planning on spreading it on the oat bread which I also made last night. Last night I was in a bread mood, what can I say? :)


I ended up making the Pita Bread recipe from GoV and the Oat Bread recipe from How it All Vegan. I was very pleased with how EASY the pita bread was to whip up and it entertained my brothers to watch it puffing up in the oven. The oat bread recipe was very easy as well and tastes absolutely delish. It is a very soft bread. Not hard or dense just perfect:).








Here's the pesto flanked by the pita pockets on the left and the oat bread loaf and slices on the right. They look so happy together:)

And below is a close up of the oat bread. As I pulled it out of the oven I proclaimed "IT'S BEAUTIFUL!" Because really, I think it made quite a nice looking loaf.







This morning I knew I would be having a large lunch so I wanted something light and summery for breakfast and I opted to use up some stuff I had leftover from last week's baking endeavors to make a smoothie.
The deep purple of the smoothie paired with the green of the pesto was just absolutely gorgeous. The basic recipe follows but for smoothies it is so much more fun to just throw things in a blender and hope for the best:)






Raspberry-Coconut smoothie
-3 tbsp organic coconut milk
-3/4 cup frozen raspberries
-4-7 ice cubes
-1/2 cup pineapple juice (NOT cocktail)
-1/2 cup water (or more depending on how you like your smoothies)
Combine all ingredients in blender and mix until all ice cubes completely crushed and raspberries are mixed with everything else. Enjoy :)

Whew. Sorry for the long post today. It felt good to get some cooking in this weekend. Hope you all had a wonderful memorial day and took a moment to reflect on the sacrifices that so many have made, even if you might not agree with the rationale.




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