Lots of good shtuff

This morning, my boyfriend and I attended the Vegan Meetup. Meetup, for those of you who don't know, is a worldwide program where you can meet people in your area with your common interests. I belong to the Northern Virginia/DC Meetup and manage to attend most of their events. Today, we went to a new place called Busboys and Poets, a coffeehouse/restaurant/bookstore in an up-and-coming neighborhood. The management seems very willing to accommodate vegans and had the chef create a vegan french toast for the handful of patrons who wanted some. The food was very good--I had a tempeh sandwich with a side of chips and my boyfriend had a veggie burger with a salad. I tried his salad and have vowed to get that next time I go there. The portions of the breakfast items are a tad small for the price, but I was told the food is quite good.

Tonight, I made a recipe of tofu cubes from Carol J. Adams' Living Among Meat Eaters, which is a guide for veg*ans dealing with a very hostile world and how to graciously deal with people who have trouble wrapping their heads around the notion that some people don't eat meat. She includes some recipes in the middle of the book after a chapter where she talks about showing, not telling, omnivores just how delicious vegan food can be. She calls it magic in the kitchen. Along with the lovely tofu cubes, I made my lemon-rosemary carrots, a recipe I have almost perfected, and adapted a balsamic-glazed mushroom recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan With a Vengeance. Isa had (has?) a Brooklyn public access show called The Post Punk Kitchen, and the cookbook is based on the recipes she used, along with her kitchen wisdom, and ruminations on her life growing up in New York (lucky ducky!). Since I didn't have the portabello mushrooms the recipe called for, I made creminis instead, and while the cooking time for creminis is far shorter than for portabellos, it still turned out to be tasty. I capped it off, as you can see, with a nice potato and Earth Balance margarine.

I don't know what change she's undergone, but my cat has taken to staring up at me while I eat dinner. She assumes the posture I used to see only when I had soy ice cream. Now she seems to think that if she sits next to my chair and looks up at me sweetly without meowing, she'll get a taste of what I'm having. And the answer is maybe, but probably not. My boyfriend likes tell her that we don't annoy her when she's eating. She's showing a greater and greater curiosity about my food, and she never was this curious when I was an omnivore. Maybe I'm a better cook, or maybe she's like, are you still a vegan, Mom?

Yes, I am, Miss Kitty, and I don't intend to change.