Quinoa Salad, Lime Tart, and Pot Pie!

Sunday my friend Jocelyn and I put on an "Intro to Vegetarianism" workshop together, something we have done 3-4 times before. It was really fun and we were able to provide people with a lot of resources and good solid information. We always provide some food too, so that people will see how yummy vegan food can be. Jocelyn made some delicious walnut-lentil pate from Angelica's, and I made a delicious "Quinoa Salad with Pine Nuts and Dried Fruits (With Lime-Cumin Vinaigrette)" from "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison. This is one of our favorite meals, so I made a double batch so that Musty and I could have some for dinner too. We had more for lunch, and even still have a bunch left over. I guess I really did make a big batch! It's such a great recipe, I really encourage you to check it out. It's got raisins, dried apricots, cilantro, yellow bell pepper, cilantro, quinoa, onion... yum yum. And, it's so pretty.

For the workshop, I also decided to test out some of my pie experimentation on them! I made the same lemon tart that I made recently, but I also tried the same pie with LIME - which was super delicious!! I think I liked it even better. The only other change that I made in the lime version was to add a bit more soy yogurt, to make it a little creamier. I liked that. Here are the lemon and lime, next to each other. The lime is on the right, which you can barely tell because it's a little less yellow & the zesty zests are green, rather than yellow.

Then, for the final touch, I melted some vegan chocolate chips and piped on a pretty decorative design onto the lime tart. I think this may be the pie that I enter in the contest! I am going to try one or two more recipes just to make sure though. Hopefully my yoga students are ready to eat some pie! :)
For dinner last night, I made Veggie Pot Pie. Yum Yum. I looked at the recipe in the recent issue of "Vegetarian Times" and at the recipe in the "Joy of Cooking"... and then roughly did something in between the two. I cooked up some onions, celery, garlic, mushrooms, sweet potato, butternut squash, potato, zucchini, purple beans, frozen corn, frozen peas, and seitan! Phew! That's a lot of veggies! I also threw in a little veggie broth, some thyme, and splash of white whine. Then I cooked it at 400, while I made some "basic biscuits" from Joy of Cooking, which I used as the topping. I made a few extra biscuits with the leftovers. I used 1/2 Earth balance and half canola oil for the fat in the crust, and also used whole wheat pastry flour. It turned out very savory and very delicious!
Here is the butternut squash (from my very own garden!) and the cool purple beans (from the farmers market) that went into the pie. I only used part of the squash, so I'm sure you'll be seeing more where that came from soon! In fact, this summer I planted one butternut squash plant and got 14 butternut squashes off of it! and they are not small... so you can expect to see plenty of butternuts in the upcoming months.