The Most Epic Week
My son came home Saturday afternoon- he goes to college in Texas, so we haven’t seen him since early August. As always, it was a jubilant homecoming, and when he went to bed that night he said “I’ll be up around 9:00 tomorrow to start the MOST EPIC THANKSGIVING WEEK EVER!” Can you see why I love having him home so much? Everything is so much fun when he’s here! We’ve started this epic week with lots of epic food. For Saturday night’s dinner, I made the Pumpkin Baked Ziti from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Veganomicon cookbook. I love this meal so much- you make a cashew ricotta, which is mixed with pumpkin puree, spices, caramelized onions and the cooked ziti. Then you bake it with breadcrumbs on top. SO. GOOD. For dessert I made these Salted Caramel Apple Bars from Nora Cooks. I didn’t actually eat these but they looked and smelled delicious. Sunday morning- I was up and out early for a 10 mile run, and when I came home I had the last pumpkin waffles of the season. A couple people asked about my “recipe.” I put 2 cups of rolled oats, two scoops of protein powder, two cups of water, a banana, salt and spices in the blender and blend it all up. That’s the recipe! I should really call these “pumpkin spice” waffles, because while I used pumpkin pie spices, there’s no actual pumpkin in them. I tried making them with pumpkin puree instead of the banana but they weren’t as good, so now I just stick to the banana. For the rest of the family, I made “normal” waffles- again, a recipe from Nora Cooks for “Best Ever Vegan Waffles.” Here’s my son’s plate: As he was eating breakfast he said “I can see why I always gain weight when I come home.” Luckily, that’s a good thing! He’s always trying to gain weight. For lunch, I had planned to make a charcuterie board with fancy-schmancy vegan cheese I ordered from SriMu, but my husband also had gotten really good bagels. So we ended up just spreading the cheese on bagels. So delicious. THEN, my daughter had a friend come over and I ended up making chocolate chip cookies. I wouldn’t have made them on this day, but the girls wanted to bake something and I also didn’t want them digging into the caramel apple bars. ONCE AGAIN, I used a recipe from Nora Cooks (where would we be without Nora?) Perfect Vegan Chocolate Chip cookies, and I think this is my new go-to recipe. They were easy, straightforward, didn’t require chilling the dough, and they came out great. Dinner was leftover baked ziti, and I have to say not having to cook dinner completely changed up my Sunday vibe. I was much more relaxed all afternoon, and I think this may be a new thing. Cook Saturday night instead of Sunday! I’m going to try it from now on. Now I feel like we’ve all carb-loaded and should be ready to run a marathon. I’ll be getting up tomorrow and heading to the gym and then work, but since my daughter doesn’t have school I can sleep an hour later. Yet another way this week is going to be epic! (If you think that’s a lot of food, just wait till you see what we have for Thanksgiving…) Whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving or not, I hope everyone has an epic week! Header photo by Kerstin Wrba on Unsplash