Doggie Treats for Xmas - and Cookbooklette Winners!

As promised, I bring you Snoopy in his Santa outfit! He doesn't like the hat at all, but he loves wearing his little Santa jacket. (Don't worry, I only make him wear the hat for pictures.) I'm not sure why, but he is oddly crazy about wearing jackets. My only guess is that whoever had him before we adopted him made him wear lots of jackets. Whenever he has his Santa outfit on, his name officially becomes "Santa," and it is against the law to call him Snoopy again until he takes off his outfit.

In fact, I got Snoopy a new raincoat from Lands End, because he really doesn't like getting wet. It doesn't quite cover his rear end, but I hope it's better than nothing.

It even says "Snoopy" on it! Squee! You know you are in trouble when you start buying doggie jackets with their names embroidered on them. God help me.

Speaking of doggies, we have three excellent doggies and everyone knows that doggies need christmas presents too. At least, that's what "Santa" told me! So, I decided to try my hand at homemade sweet potato chews. I looked around online and found some easy guidelines:

Cut a bunch of sweet potatoes into scant 1/4" slices (excellent time to use your mandoline!). Put them in the oven straight onto the racks (not on baking sheets), preheated to 250 F, and cook for 3 hours. Easy! They are crunchy and the doggies love them so much! Merry Holidays to all our Doggie Friends.

Lastly! Santa wants to send out Holiday Cookbooklettes to all the winners of my annual cookbooklette giveaway!

Congratulations to:

Celyn, Tahinitoo, Caitlin, Kirsten, Lauren Lowe, John P, Catherine Denis, Amber Shea, Kaycee, Nichole, Emily, Rebecca, Ela, Hannah, Fanny, Hannah, Kaite, Meg, Luciana, Molly G., Becca, Lizzie Bordello, Agati, Eat Me Delicious, Jared, Kirsten, MizzBzVegan, Jolca, and Bean!

Merry Holidays to You All!

I'll email you for your address, so go check your inbox!

Gingerbread Yoga People

Lotus Pose/Padmasana, Warrior III/Virabhadrasana III

Plough Pose/Halasana, Tree Pose/Vrksasana, Triangle Pose/Trikonasana

When I saw these cookie cutters online, about a month ago, I just *knew* I had to have them. Finally, a craft project that combines my love for yoga AND my love for baking.

Here is the counter full of little Gingerbread Yogis. SO CUTE. (and SO YUMZ)

I surfed around and actually found a couple of different yoga cookie cutter options. These ones looked pretty cute, but when I was shopping, they were all out. So, then I came over here... where there are two sets to choose from. After much deliberation, I chose Set #1 - but they were all out and I had to wait! Ahhh, the pain of waiting! They arrived this week, just in time for me to make a big batch for two of my classes. I love how cute and chubby they are!

ps. don't forget!

You have until noon on Monday the 19th to enter my giveaway for

this year's Vegan Eats & Treats cookzine!

Recent Advent Calendar Delights

Remember my post about the amazing advent calendar I won? This little treasure has been bringing me such joy! Every day I carefully hunt for the right little sock, carefully untie it, and discover a new treat. It's been so exciting!!! Seriously friends, if you need some more good karma in your life, make one of these for someone... because every time I open a little sock - heck every time I look at it or even think about it - I am filled with good thoughts for sweet Cara who sent this to me. I thought I'd share some of the very cool, and varied, German goodies I've gotten so far:

Special fun & fancy baggies of tea!

marzipan candies. LOVE!

SchokoLolly!! (chocolate lolly pop)

tea & speculoos cookies

(uhh... the cookie didn't quite last until the photo shoot!)

special German spices for potatoes!! YUMZ!

I can't wait to try these!

Adorable mini jar of Rose hip jam!

traditional Bavarian mustard! whoa!

I love mustard, so I really look forward to trying this.

a little marzipan log.

little Christmas chocolates!

SO MUCH FUN. Thank you, Thank You, a million times, Thank You, Cara!

ps. don't forget to win a prize of your own and enter my giveaway for a copy of my annual holiday cookbooklette!

Annual Holiday Cookbooklette Giveaway!

Friends! Romans! Veganmen!

It's that wonderful time of the year when I finally finish my annual Holiday Cookbooklette and offer a giveaway to my blog readers.

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately... Well, honestly, I also haven't been washing the dishes, folding the laundry, or responding to emails either - every spare moment I had was diverted to crafting up my annual cookbooklette. It's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of work! I finally finished - yesterday! This year I splurged and paid a little bit extra to have them all automatically folded and stapled for me - instead of spending hours watching the Colbert Report and stapling until my wrist is sore. Good decision! It was such a thill to open the big box and see them all sparkly and ready to go!

After the thrill wore off, I spent some serious time cleaning the house and washing the dishes (plus, the dishwasher broke, right after our big holiday potluck, and I had to empty it out and wash everything by hand. Rubbing salt in the wound!). Next up, I've got to tackle my email inbox!

This year I will randomly pick out 30 folks and send you a cookzine! Open to friendly readers All Around The World! Just leave a comment here, and please make sure I can contact you through your blogger ID or leave an email address... I'm not going to track people down! I'll pick the winners a week from today, on Dec 19th.

Bonus Picture of Adorable Snoopy Snoppy. I love this special little way that he has of sitting. You have to look closely at his back legs, and how he crosses them and then tucks them up against his front leg. MAN, I love this little guy! I'm about to bust out the holiday decor, so maybe next week you'll see him in his Santa outfit!

A Post-Thanksgiving Potluck Party!

I know most everyone has moved on to Christmahannukwanzakkuh, but I still had a little Thanksgiving left in my social calendar last weekend. After we'd all had our various holiday celebrations with our families, some of my PPK friends & I decided to have a Thanksgiving celebration amongst ourselves.

It was SO awesome! First of all, my friends are so wonderful and kind and smart and fun and interesting, and I am really stoked to know them. Secondly, how fun to be able to eat everything on the table! And thirdly, Two Kinds of Brussel Sprouts. Need I say more? It was super yums.

I only got close-ups of a few things... Carrie from Vegan For the Win made an amazing Butternut Squash Lasagna.

I made a Stuffed Seitan Roll, based on this recipe from the PPK... except I stuffed it with kabocha squash and leeks instead of mushrooms.

Here's my dinner plate, which gives a glimpse of all the deliciousness! It was such a huge and delicious feast ... even though it was a lunch party, I only ended up eating two apples for dinner, I was barely hungry at all!

Autumn's amazing brussel sprouts and hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are so delicious and everything is better with hazelnuts!

The Famous Emperor of Cold&Sleepy's blog was in attendance - and cute as ever. It turns out that little guy really loves cranberry sauce!

We had 3 dessert options... including a beautiful pie made by Kathy, which I somehow failed to photograph. Cold&Sleepy made this amazing quince+other stuff pie, based loosely on a recipe from Voluptous Vegan. She put the recipe on her blog, and I recommend it. Plus, her pie crust was outta this world. So flaky!

I made these Pecan Pie Truffles from a Hannah Kaminsky recipe. My friend Sophia had mentioned them to me weeks ago, and I couldn't get them off my mind. Friends, YOU MUST TRY THESE! Simple, easy, gluten-free, deeeeeelicious! Also, you may have noticed that this picture is awesome, and that's because I didn't take it... Vegan For The Win did! She has a whole post about our potluck, with really beautiful pictures!

Well, I hate to end on a low note, but it simply must be mentioned that Autumn also brought along a gorgeous Pumpkin Cheesecake - with homemade cashew cream cheese and homemade chocolate graham cracker crust & with pretty little leaf patterns on it - which then slid off the roof of her car as she was preparing to bring it in, shattering the glass baking dish into One Million Pieces, and completely decimating her beautiful creation. (You can see the original beauty and find her recipe here.) We had a moment of silence at the trash can for it. Rest in Peace, beautiful cheesecake.

Baby Shower Cookies

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I went to a really special baby shower. I've known my friend Lorraine since we were really, really little. We met in kindergarten, and she came to my 5th birthday party, and we are still friends today. How cool is that? We wanted to offer a little take-home giftie for folks who came, but we didn't want to fill their lives up with more plastic crap. So I made these little baby bottle cookies and then we wrapped them in white wax paper bags, and sealed them with a really cute birdie clip. This was the first time I've ever done the fancy pipe-around-the-edges-and-fill-in-the-rest technique, and I thought they turned out super cute. I love icing cookies!

Filipino Grocery Store!

Recently my friend Jane and I went to a yoga workshop about an hour away, in a little town called Seaside. On our way to class I couldn't help but notice the "Filipino Indian Marketplace" sign on the other side of the road. I managed to keep my focus during class, but as soon as we got back to the car, I told Jane we needed to make a stop before heading home! Of course, she was totally up for it, and we had an awesome time inspecting just about every product in that entire store. I ended up with:

2 kindsof vegan spring roll/egg roll wrappers

Lumpia wrappers

Super enticing mixed root veggie chips

Urad dal (for more dosas and uttapams)

Chickpea flour (so Mr. VE&T can make me more french toast!)

Rice stick noodles

Some odd green rice krispy treats with pandan

and some cool looking frozen sweet rice & coconut milk thingees in banana leaves (yum!)

I already used some of my lumpia wrappers to make delicious batch of Baked Lumpia from Terry's recipe testers. I had never even heard of lumpia before, but they were really great, and I loved that I could bake them, instead of frying - which is not really my scene. Luckily, I've still got some wrappers left, so I can make these again sometime soon! Mmm!

Mr. Vegan Eats & Treats Make Me Breakfast

A couple of weeks ago, it was our anniversary, so we started the day off right! Truth be told, Mr. Vegan Eats and Treats had recently lost a bet with me and I told him that if he lost he had to learn how to make me vegan french toast (my favorite!). So, mwhahahaha, I redeemed my French Toast on Anniversary Morning.

You can see that this is not the natural habitat for Mr. VE&T. hee hee.

Here he is, soaking the breads in the bowl. Even though I offered to help, he insisted on doing the whole thing by himself. And guess what? It was awesome! I didn't take a picture of the final product, I was too busy snarfing it up. But now that Mr. VE&T knows how to make me French Toast, and *I Know that He Knows*... I hope I won't have to wait another 12 years!

World's Most Awesomest Vegan Advent Calendar

Ever since I was a little girl, my parents always got my brother & me an advent calendar before Christmas. We weren't a religious family, but somehow this became a really big part of our holiday tradition. To this day I always buy myself at least one advent calendar to help foster my festive spirits. I always look for designs with lots of glitter and lots of cute animals.

So, when I saw that Cara at think.vegan.act was giving away advent calendars during VeganMoFo, I jumped at the chance to enter. Did you see her MoFo theme? It was all about veganizing traditional German recipes, and it was really exceptional. In fact, now she has a whole new blog just on that subject called "The Vegan German Inn."

Then, lucky me, I was one of the winners!! I was expecting some cute little German advent calendar with doors that open to show pictures of pretzels or pointy-eared squirrels. And no one knows how to draw advent calendars like the Germans - little rosy-cheeked elves, snow-flocked trees, sparkly packages... they have the best drawings. So imagine my joy and delight when I opened a package to find this beautiful, heavy (!!), and handmade creation!! I've never seen anything like it! It's got little mismatched baby socks and baby gloves with ornaments and ribbons and all sorts of gifties tucked inside each one. And all the goodies are vegan!!! I've seen those advent calendars that have chocolates for each day, but of course the chocolates are always milk chocolate. I never dreamed *I* could have a goodies advent calendar! This is just the most coolest thing ever and I am totally stoked on it.

I could hardly wait for today, December 1st to open my first baby glove! I opened it to find a sparkly little bag with special chocolate covered candies in it... even a little boozy I think! Mmm.

I was feeling so generous, I even shared with Mr. Vegan Eats & Treats!

Thank you Cara, this is the coolest thing ever!