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first time cooking for my friends!
Dec. 30th, 2018 12:32 pmMe and some of my old school friends are having our eighth annual gift exchange--started when we were freshmen in high school up to now when we're seniors in college. My gift-giving and gift-wrapping skills, as always, aren't optimal. I'm wearing my ridiculous red bauble earrings, as usual. But the new thing for me is that I'm bringing actual food I made myself!
I hollowed out part of a winter squash (a cushaw, apparently, from my mom's boyfriend's mother's garden) and made some (vegan) couscous with the squash, onions and garlic, sundried tomatoes and some chopped heirloom tomatoes, olives, fire-roasted peppers, seasoned with zatar, sage, and red chili flakes, topped with some mint:
I also made vegan tempeh and white bean "meat"balls with lots of onion and garlic, dried basil and oregano, and topped with panko breadcrumbs and garlic salt, plus a sweet and accidentally overly spicy tomato sauce:
Overall, I'm happy and eager for my friends to try it! I think both came out pretty well. Not sure how enthused everyone will be about the couscous, and I anticipate leftovers, but that's okay. I'm usually only cooking for one person (myself), so figuring out how to cook for larger groups of people is really hard? Also, cooking vegan is an unexpected challenge for me, even though I've only ever cooked vegetarian?? I wanted to throw some honey in the sauce, and I really badly wanted some parm in the "meat"ball mix. I thought about adding nutritional yeast, actually, but I'm cooking for four carnivores in addition to me and my vegan friend, so I thought I should take it easy on the hippie stuff.
Also, uploading images on Dreamwidth is a pain in the ass! I see what everyone's been saying about the difficulty of artists moving over here.
All of us are sleeping over at my friend's house. The nostalgia is so real. Except everybody (but me because I don't drink) is gonna have alcohol, which actually didn't happen when we were fourteen. And despite that I still came out to everyone during some party game (Never Have I Ever or Truth or Dare, maybe?). I think it'll be fun, though! It'll be good to see everyone.
I hollowed out part of a winter squash (a cushaw, apparently, from my mom's boyfriend's mother's garden) and made some (vegan) couscous with the squash, onions and garlic, sundried tomatoes and some chopped heirloom tomatoes, olives, fire-roasted peppers, seasoned with zatar, sage, and red chili flakes, topped with some mint:
I also made vegan tempeh and white bean "meat"balls with lots of onion and garlic, dried basil and oregano, and topped with panko breadcrumbs and garlic salt, plus a sweet and accidentally overly spicy tomato sauce:
Overall, I'm happy and eager for my friends to try it! I think both came out pretty well. Not sure how enthused everyone will be about the couscous, and I anticipate leftovers, but that's okay. I'm usually only cooking for one person (myself), so figuring out how to cook for larger groups of people is really hard? Also, cooking vegan is an unexpected challenge for me, even though I've only ever cooked vegetarian?? I wanted to throw some honey in the sauce, and I really badly wanted some parm in the "meat"ball mix. I thought about adding nutritional yeast, actually, but I'm cooking for four carnivores in addition to me and my vegan friend, so I thought I should take it easy on the hippie stuff.
Also, uploading images on Dreamwidth is a pain in the ass! I see what everyone's been saying about the difficulty of artists moving over here.
All of us are sleeping over at my friend's house. The nostalgia is so real. Except everybody (but me because I don't drink) is gonna have alcohol, which actually didn't happen when we were fourteen. And despite that I still came out to everyone during some party game (Never Have I Ever or Truth or Dare, maybe?). I think it'll be fun, though! It'll be good to see everyone.
