Vegan

Super Sweet Spinach Salad

September 30, 2013 by Erica

Super Sweet Spinach Salad from Coffee & Quinoa

My salad brings all the boys to the yard, and they’re like, it’s better than yours…

What? No?

Here is the thing about salad (and blogging about salad): It doesn’t exactly bring all the boys to the yard. You know what I mean? Now blogging about milkshakes, that’s another story.

Despite this unfortunate truth, I’m bringing you a salad today, because this is my blog, and on my blog I get to share the food I like to eat, boys in the yard or no.

Super Sweet Spinach Salad from Coffee & Quinoa

Well, like to eat is maybe a strong statement about salad.

To me, salads (and hard workouts, for that matter) are like classic works of literature: you want to have read them (or have eaten or have done them), but you do not want to read, eat or do them in the present tense. No, you want to look into your virtuous past and say “ah yes, I had a salad for lunch” with the same smug satisfaction you would say “ah yes, I’ve read Dostoyevsky.” Rarely could I say with any truthfulness, “I want to eat a salad right now.” (And I’m sorry, but the same goes for reading translations from the Russian.) In reality, I claim to want salad quite often, but it’s because I’m thinking of the present as the future past. And in the future, I will want to have eaten a salad.

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Whole Wheat Pumpkin Spice Mug Cake

September 27, 2013 by Erica

Fall weather is upon us, and that can only mean one thing: pumpkin!

Let’s talk about pumpkin. Although I’m not the biggest pumpkin spice latte fan – too sweet! – I do enjoy almost anything else pumpkin-flavored. Pumpkin beer and pumpkin puree stirred into my oatmeal are two fall favorites. I’m not planning on bombarding you with pumpkin recipes this fall, but I do think that a quick and easy pumpkin dessert is in order. Enter this whole wheat pumpkin spice mug cake!

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Quinoa-Stuffed Acorn Squash with Figs and Sage

September 25, 2013 by Erica

Quinoa-Stuffed Acorn Squash with Figs and Sage

Don’t you love the crossover seasons? When you can drive with your seat heater on and the windows down, wear boots with no jacket, and stuff winter squash with figs. It’s the best of both worlds!

Quinoa-Stuffed Acorn Squash with Figs and Sage

I didn’t really discover figs until this year. Previously, despite my childhood love of Fig Newtons, I thought that fresh figs had 1) a scary texture and 2) a scary price. I liked them only when caramelized to a juicy perfection on top of a pizza at the aptly named Figs, my favorite pizza place in Boston. Then, naturally, I discovered that the blogosphere goes crazy over figs just at the same time that Whole Foods had a giant gorgeous display of them… on sale. Whole Foods 1, Erica 0. More like Whole Foods 20,000, Erica 0 when you calculate the amount I’ve probably spent there this year. In any case, I bought them, was introduced to the glory of fresh figs, and have never looked back.

Quinoa-Stuffed Acorn Squash with Figs and Sage

A few of the ways I’ve been loving figs are:

– Just taking bites out of them! Usually right when I get home from the grocery store :)

– On my oatmeal with cinnamon and honey

– On pizza (although mine will never be as good as Figs’…)

– And finally, sauteed with onions and celery, mixed with quinoa and fresh sage, and stuffed into these adorable little squash bowls.

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Banana Almond Baked Oatmeal Cups (Vegan) + a GIVEAWAY!

September 23, 2013 by Erica

Banana Almond Baked Oatmeal Cups (Vegan) + a California Almonds GIVEAWAY!

Happy Monday! How do you feel about starting the day off with one of these?

Banana Almond Baked Oatmeal Cups (Vegan) + a California Almonds GIVEAWAY!

These may look like muffins, but they are actually little individual baked oatmeal cups. Chock full of oats, bananas, almond butter, and more almonds, they are the most delicious thing I’ve eaten for breakfast lately. And bonus: they are refined sugar-free and completely vegan. Now that is the way I want to start off my day!

If you’ve never made baked oatmeal before, it couldn’t be simpler. Just mix the handful of ingredients together, spoon into a muffin tin (or baking dish, if you’d rather do one big batch) and bake for about 20 minutes. The result is chewy on the outside, tender on the inside, and very portable – yum. I will take these over regular old oatmeal any day.

Also, assuming that you don’t have time to whip these up on a weekday morning, they reheat very well. A batch on the weekend will give you adorable little oatmeal cups all week!

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Vegan Thai Pizza

September 18, 2013 by Erica

Vegan Thai Pizza from Coffee & Quinoa

Today I come to you with a very important question: How do you eat your leftover pizza?

This is one of those conversations we’ve had about a million times in the lunchroom at work. The reason is that one co-worker, a New Yorker and self-proclaimed pizza snob, refuses to microwave his leftover pizza. He claims it makes the crust soggy and ruins the pizza. Another former co-worker was dead-set against eating cold any food that was supposed to be eaten hot, and found it completely unacceptable not to microwave leftovers. And soooo this same topic was hashed out and re-hashed whenever anyone brought pizza for lunch.

Vegan Thai Pizza from Coffee & Quinoa

Me, I’m not against microwaving pizza. If I’m at home, I’ll use the toaster oven instead to crisp up the crust, but at work (or at home now that our toaster doesn’t seem to have survived the move) I’ll stick it in the microwave. I’d usually rather do that than eat cold food – eating a cold lunch in our over-air-conditioned office makes me sad. But I discovered that what I really like to do (and this goes for all leftovers, not just pizza) is to take one bite cold and then heat up the rest. I’m not sure why… maybe I’m just impatient? Or I like to take the opportunity to see what the dish tastes like cold, which I obviously didn’t have the night before when it was fresh? It’s a mystery, and it might be quirky, but that’s just what I like to do.

People have strong feelings about their pizza, clearly. I’m not too picky, other than my preferred reheating method – it all sounds good to me, and that’s probably the reason that I love the idea of this vegan Thai pizza. With neither tomatoes nor cheese, this is clearly not your typical New York- or Italian-style pizza. Instead, it’s made with a peanut butter sauce and veggies that roast to a crunchy perfection as it cooks. It’s actually kind of like the pizza version of my favorite noodle dish! I think it’s clear that we can add a peanut sauce to anything and I’m in love.

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