Spinach, betta fetta, olives, tomato, cucumber, bell pepper
I wasn't always a salad lover. Back in my "semi-homemade" phase of cooking, before I went vegan, I'd throw together some spinach and a carrot and a tomato or bell pepper with some store bought dressing and have it on the side of pasta with sauce from a jar. Then once I started cooking, it was all cooked veggies and no looking back. Why eat a salad when you could just sautee some chard instead?
Then I joined the my CSA and they started sending me lettuce. So, so much lettuce. Two to three big heads of lettuce a week. And arugula. And mizuna. So it was time to learn how to make a salad. And now I actually really like salad, enough that when my boyfriend isn't home for dinner, I get excited over the prospect of just eating a giant salad for dinner. (My boyfriend doesn't believe in "salad for dinner" although he does claim to enjoy a nice side salad.) I think the most important part of salad is variety. We've all experienced the sad side salad in a steak restaurant that's just iceberg lettuce, a couple of carrot shreds, and a lone slice of tomato, and it is no good. In a good salad, you get a variety of tastes in every bite, and what you get changes from bite to bite.
So, with no further ado, here is my salad tutorial:
The base - start with a variety of greens. Some of the regular green leafy lettuce, maybe some red leaf, whatever you've got. Throw in some spinach, arugula, mizuna, whatever you've got in the crisper, but mix it up a little bit.
The secondary veggies (raw) - What's in the fridge that would be good in a salad? I love cherry tomatoes (sliced in half so they don't explode when you bite them), carrots (shredded is awesome, but sliced is good), mushrooms, cucumber, bell pepper, radishes, shredded cabbage, alfalfa sprouts (be careful because all the dressing gets matted in these guys), basically anything that's tasty raw. Just cut it into bite sized pieces.
The secondary veggies (cooked) - Lately I'm really into some steamed green beans in my salads, it started because I had some leftover but now I'll steam some just for salad. Leftover cooked beets are good. I bet leftover roasted or boiled potatoes would be good. Basically any leftovers in the fridge that seem like they would work.
The secondary veggies (pickled) - I was throwing pickled beets and onions in my salad all last week, and it rocked. I bet pickled green beans would be awesome too, or any sort of pickled veg without a totally overpowering flavor. Marinated artichoke hearts sort of fall into this category as well.
The goodies - Baked or grilled tofu is awesome. Or marinated/brined tofu, like the Betta Fetta from the Uncheese Cookbook. Nuts are fantastic, lately I've been throwing in some sunflower seeds. Croutons, of course, it's super easy to make your own by just coating some bread in olive oil and sticking it in the oven for a while. Soy bacon bits. Beans, especially chickpeas. Basically, whatever you have lying around that looks awesome and possibly fattening. Olives, if you're not dating an olive hater like I am.
The dressing - Vinaigrettes are easy and great and classy or whatever, but I gotta admit that I love a nice creamy dressing. I am all about whiping up a batch of the Silken Mayo Dressing from Vcon at the beginning of the week, and it lasts me for three or four nights of salad. I like to throw in some garlic and whatever fresh herbs I have lying around. So tasty and garlicky and yum.
Basically, if you fill your salad with awesome stuff, it will be awesome.
See? Awesome.
Base recipe from Lindy loo's creamiest Mac n' Cheez EVER, with Kalamazoo Stout and Centennial IPA
My boyfriend is a beer freak. He rates beer online, and he has somewhere around 1800 ratings. It's this whole thing where he trades beer with people and we have an entire room full of beer and a separate beer fridge (because I insisted that we have somewhere to keep the food) and I get to drink super yummy beer all the time. So naturally it occurred to us to collaborate on some beer cooking experiments. I think that the idea of using beer in mac n' cheez was inspired by a time we were eating lunch at Stone Brewery and they had a mac n' cheese that used a cheddar cheese made with stout or some such business. And I thought that adding beer to vegan mac n' cheese would be pretty simple (just replace the other liquid) and would add some yummy, beery, fermenty goodness to the mac n' cheeze.
For both versions, I used the creamy mac n' cheez recipe. I made the white sauce without alteration, but when I made the cheez stuff, I replaced the water with an equal amount of beer. (I actually made two half batches of cheez sauce, one with the stout and one with the IPA.) For the stout, I also threw in a pesto cube, and for the IPA, I added a teaspoon of dill, a teaspoon of chili powder, and a quarter teaspoon of cayenne. I also added some kale to the pasta for the stout version, and cubed baked tofu to both versions. I also topped both of them with bread crumbs. In the picture, the stout version is on the left, and the IPA version is on the right.
The two mac n' cheezes were very different, but both delicious. The stout version was the one preferred by both the boyfriend and I - it was ultra creamy, and had a nice, rich, deep beer flavor from the stout that combined well with the pesto flavor. The IPA was much lighter, with a hint of bitterness from the hops. (I actually found the cheez sauce with the IPA much too bitter before I baked it, but fortunately it mellowed during baking.) The dill and chili both gave it a spicy, light and fresh taste. I would call both of these experiments successful, but in the future I'll probably stick with making the stout version.
For my next experiment, I want to try it with a rauch bier for an ultra smokey flavor.
Local: Tofu, salad fixins 
from Veganomicon
ZOMG this was so delicious. The seitan was great, the mashed potatoes were great, the green beans were the perfect texture, and the sauce was shallot-caper-olive-white wine heaven. (I left the olives out of the sauce and added them to mine separately, because the boyfriend is an olive hater. It was still delicious.) The boyfriend was actually like "I really like the seitan you've been making lately," and then I did a little dance because he used to be a seitan hater and I love seitan and now I can make it all the time. Plus how can you not love something that's served on mashed potatoes? Nom, potatoes. I used some of the leftover seitan broth instead of soy milk when I was making them, and it just made them extra delicious. There was also something about this meal that made it seem super fancy, even though it was actually quite easy to throw together. In summation, this gets an A+.
Local: green (actually purple) beans 
So I kind of did the whole vegan mofo iron chef thing, except that I'm totally posting this about a day and a half past the deadline. Yeah, I'm not so much with the, you know, "on time" kind of thing. Also I totally cheated, because I was planning on making a batch of roasted applesauce from Vegan with a Vengeance, and I was like "I'll make an experimental half batch and throw some ginger in."
And so I did, and it was delicious. The boyfriend totally freaked out about how delicious it was, too. I used four pounds of apples to make all of this applesauce, and we've eaten about three quarters of it in the two days since I made it. I think I may need to make some more soon. But the good news is I've figured out what to do with my CSA apples. (And I may throw some of the pears in there, too.) I'm not normally an applesauce person, but the roasted applesauce is almost like an apple pie filling, it's so delicious. Right after I took this photo, I ate that applesauce with some chocolate ice cream, and it was awesome. I've also used the applesauce in waffles and eaten it plain for lunch. Yummtastic. And other than peeling a bazillion apples, it's way easy to make.
Local: Apples 
Tofu by the boyfriend (!), tzimmes from Veganomicon
Salad: I'm not sure, actually, but I'm guessing it's lettuce, mizuna, sprouts, pickled beets & onions, cherry tomatoes and cucumber, with the Silken Mayo Dressing from Veganomicon. I've made the silken mayo dressing before and really liked it, but this time it tasted sort of chalky and overly soy to me. Last time I only added half the maple syrup, made the garlic aoili variation, and added a bunch of fresh herbs, and this time I wanted it to be more classic ranch-dressing like, so I added the full amount of syrup, used flax oil (for the omega 3s), and threw in some dried herbs. Maybe I just need to add garlic and olive oil to everything?
The boyfriend made the grilled tofu, he used some sort of spice rub on it and it was tasty. Plus, boy cooking for you = sexy. (I'm just sayin.)
The tzimmes were tasty, although I have no idea how you pronounce that word. (My boyfriend doesn't either, and he's Jewish. He fails.) I actually liked them better as leftovers, although the boyfriend liked them less as leftovers. (More for me!) This was another attempt to use up some of our pears. I'm generally not super down with sweetness in dinner food (dinner food should be savory, not sweet!), but I liked this anyway.
Local: Lettuce, mizuna, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, pears, tofu
Pasta: Whole wheat spaghetti, pesto, cherry tomatoes, spinach, tofu
Salad: Lettuce, arugula, mizuna, tomatoes, sprouts, betta fetta, pickled beets and onions, miso-tahini dressing, cucumber
This was a "throw something together quick cause I'm hungry" kind of meal. For the pasta, I just cooked the pasta and drained it, and then threw in some frozen pesto cubes, cut up cherry tomatoes, spinach, and baked tofu we had in the fridge. The heat from the pasta wilted the spinach, melted the pesto, and heated up the tomatoes and tofu. Score! Next time I'll probably throw in some extra nutritional yeast, but this was tasty and ridiculously easy.
The salad was another "what's in the fridge that can go into a salad?" adventure. And it turned out great. Hooray for yummy things lurking in the fridge and waiting to be eaten.
Local: cherry tomatoes, tofu, lettuce, arugula, mizuna, tomatoes, beets, cucumber 
green beans from Veganomicon
This was a super easy dinner. I had frozen some of the seitan sausage I made 
I mean, who can resist veganism when it looks like this?
tofu from Horizons: The Cookbook, salad from Veganomicon
Neither of these things was spectacular, but they were both pretty good. My boyfriend stole all of the candied pecans from the salad, because he claimed they tasted like pecan pie. This was despite the fact that my pecans never really set up properly and wanted to stick to each other in a giant toffee-like mass. (I think maybe it was too humid.) The salad as a whole had a nice flavor combo, and used up some of the many, many pears my CSA keeps giving me. (Seriously, if you know what to do with pears, let me know, I love them but I eat maybe one a day.)
The grill marks on the tofu came out nice, and the sauce was very tasty, but it was sort of difficult to create an ideal tofu-sauce-rice ratio in each bite. Maybe I'm just being overly picky. Horizons: The Cookbook has a tendency towards dishes that are either grilled or fried tofu with some sort of sauce, and usually they're very good, and this one was definitely tasty but not mind blowing or anything. There's apparently a new 
I'm planning on participating in VeganMoFo again this year, so hopefully in addition to my usual meal posts, I'll be putting up some posts about random vegan food topics during the next month. So if you have anything you really want me to post about, let me know!