Vegan Holiday Deliciousness (for non-vegans, too!)

For any vegan, the holidays can be stressful and result in eating lots of random side dishes. Most traditional holiday meals include meats, fish, and dairy products in sides, such as milk in mashed potatoes, a cheese filled pasta dish, or creamed vegetables. This can cause quite a dilemma when filling up one's plate.

Enter the Vegan Holiday Cooking from Candle Cafe cookbook. This book is filled with beautiful images that will make your mouth water and recipes that are easy to follow and exciting to make for your next get-together. More over, they cover all sorts of holidays. Upon seeing the title of the book, I assumed there would only be recipes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, and perhaps a Birthday celebration. Vegan Holiday Cooking from Candle Cafe covers every holiday from Super Bowl celebrations to Passover Sedar to Cinco de Mayo. The authors, and owners of the Candle Cafe restaurants, clearly put a lot of thought and time into creating the book and considering all varieties of vegans. For each holiday category, there's at least one beverage, appetizer, main dishes, and deserts.

The common belief about vegans is that we eat "rabbit food" like lettuce, carrots, and vegetables. It's simply not true! Vegans love everything that non-vegans like to eat, only we prefer ours with non-animal based ingredients. With all the options available to vegans, we can enjoy things like ice cream sandwiches and pizza and meatball subs, all without any ingredients that either don't work with our bodies, allergies, or moral opinions. Some of the recipes that really stood out to me in this yummy book are French Toast Coffee Cake, Pecan Pie with Cinnamon Ice Cream, Wheat Ball Heros, and Sweet Potato Latkes. Yum!

The only reason I gave this book 4.5 stars is because some of the recipes are a little tricky to make, and/or require equipment or products that I didn't have or couldn't find. However, I do feel with a little extra effort or a more stocked kitchen than an apartment of a 20-something year old, the recipes would be easy to make in all aspects.




As a New Yorker that loves to go to the Candle Cafe restaurants whenever possible, I can't wait to try every single recipe in this book! If you're a vegan, or love a vegan, definitely check it out! Happy Celebrating and get to cooking!

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Red, White & Blue Revisited

With the Fourth of July quickly approaching (you know, like, tomorrow), I'm taking a quick look back at last year's celebration and sharing the easiest, fastest holiday treat to make. Bring this bad boy to your barbecue, picnic, or pool party this year and you'll look super fancy while secretly knowing you are not. Don't worry, secret's safe with me.

Last year was a banner year for my 4th. Morning parade with my family, finally being grown up enough to bring something with me to a party, enjoying the afternoon with friends before taking a break to check in with my three favorite people whom I wasn't able to see that day (yes, two of those people have paws), back to the party and then fireworks to finish off the day. Classic July 4th.

Okay ready for the 'recipe'? It has 5 very important steps:
1. Get many cartons of blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries (bonus points if you can spell raspberries without spellcheck. Cause I couldn't. Both times.).
2. Rinse them off thoroughly.
3. Find some sort of circular serving dish and begin arranging the fruit, working your way from the outside in.
4. Make whatever fancypants pattern that suits you.
5. Win at 4th of July food. Done! Bam. Easy.

I'll have you know I did not see this on pinterest and copy it, but instead, combined my outstanding procrastination skills with whatever was left at the grocery store with my artistic talents (aka panic) and created this here beauty. Between this fruit platter and the fact that I wore a dress as a skirt, well, I was quite delighted with myself.

I hope whatever you're doing this year (or, maybe, not doing - hey there couch and marathons of tv, how are you?) brings you total joy. And delicious snacks.