Sesame “Chiken”, Chocolate Cupcakes, Gorgeous Sky

First, I want to start this post off with a picture of the gorgeous sky I saw on my way home Monday. Isn’t it beautiful? It was deep shades of dark blue and pink.

We didn’t have much of a color changing fall this year. It seems the trees changed colors and then all the leaves fell off in a blink of the eye. We did have a beautiful tree in our condo complex though. Notice the tree on the left already lost all of it’s leaves. Speaking of the condo complex, we are renting for another year while we wait for our home in Michigan to sell. So now I have to wait another year to bring out all of my vintage kitchenware. Phooey!

I’m finally getting around to posting about this: My co-worker’s birthday is on Halloween so I made some chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting (colored orange) and chocolate sprinkles. They were really yummy. The chocolate cupcake recipe is from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and the frosting recipe I used is from How It All Vegan.

I recently veganized a recipe from a Rachael Ray cookbook – Best Eats in Town on $40 A Day. I veganized “Sesame Chicken with Spicy Dipping Sauce” using some mock chiken. The recipe did call for some booze, dark rum to be exact, (I’m not surprised though as Rachael Ray seems to be quite a lush) but I omitted that. The sesame chiken is marinated and then coated in a flour/toasted sesame seed mixture and lightly fried. It’s served over a sesame noodle salad and mesclun greens along with spicy apricot sauce on the side (not pictured). It was so tasty and actually made a great lunch the next day as well. Whole Foods has been selling these large plastic containers of organic mesclun salad greens from Canada lately that I love. Be sure to keep and eye out for it.

Hope you all have a wonderful day. I’m so happy to be back to blogging

Happy Holidays!

Hi Everyone!

Thank you all for your kind comments and emails. We’re doing good (and yes, I’ve finally kicked that pesky sinus infection!) but we’ve been super duper busy. Last month, my parents and grandma came out for a visit. My grandma hasn’t been to Chicago since the 1930’s! Earlier this month, Rob and I celebrated our Anniversary-Birthday-Palooza. We also built a brand new computer that can easily handle all the Sims 2 expansion packs. I must admit, most of my limited time on my pc has been spent playing The Sims 2

We just got back from a short trip to that bastard state of Michigan (can you detect my bitterness towards that state? Yes, our place is STILL for sale there) . We spent Thanksgiving with my family and also celebrated my mom’s birthday. We had a lovely Middle Eastern feast on Thanksgiving and I got to eat all the foods I’ve missed. We also celebrated Christmas and I got to open all my presents from my family. Yay!

I have a tremendous backlog of pictures to post. Hopefully I can get them up ASAP! Take care!!!