Christmas dinner a day late...

We made Christmas aka winter solstice dinner a day late because we were busy messing around in the snow. Here are some of the things we had.

Garnet yams with maple cider glaze in puff pastry. This has a nice lemon flavor. Yum. I skipped the wash. I used Aussie brand puff pastry. I should have cooked the yams a bit more so they would be mushy.

Biscuits with a bunch of nutritional yeast added in.

Green Bean Casserole from Veg*ns are Friends not Food. It was nice and creamy and the croutons were really delicious. I made 1/2 a recipe and skipped the rosemary.

Basic Stuffing, nothing too exciting. I was going to make Guava's stuffing balls, but the stuffing was too stiff and unwieldy.

Mashed potatoes. Yeah, it's sort of obvious, but I wanted to make you hungry for them.

Squash Pie. I used Hubbard squash instead of pumpkin in the recipe from Voluptuous Vegan. Super dense and rich. This pie weighed a ton, but I like my pie really squashy. Hubbard is my all time favorite squash.

Is that enough food? Nope. There was also some cranberry sauce that wasn't cooperating w/ the camera. We made it instead of using the typical canned kind. To be honest, I like the canned kind. Next time I'm skipping the orange peel, other than that, I liked it a lot.

Partway through cooking we realized that we hadn't prepared seitan or something like that. We were way too burnt out at that point, so we skipped it.

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After 12 days, we escaped yesterday! The roads were plowed - that snow wasn't going anywhere on it's own. Here are some pics from my walk with Kobie today. There is a huge dirty pile of snow from the plow on the right.

Here is the first of 2 hills from hell that we have to go down. That strange white spot in the middle is the road winding down the hill.

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Peepa and the Judge are having some water together. They have their own water bowl, but they (like all of the cats) like to use Kobies bowl. Cats really freak me out when they synchronize their poses.

VeganSnowFo day 8,243 - or at least it feels that way

Yay, the snow is finally seeming to melt. It even rained later on today.

I'm super annoyed with it right now because of reasons that are pretty much my own fault. We tried to drive the subaru down the driveway today and surprise, surprise! After about 1/2 way down the driveway it got stuck. Now why would a car not like driving in 2 feet of snow? beats me. so we had the nasty task of shoveling the compacted snow from under the car. Then we shoveled a foot+ layer off the top of the snow on the driveway (believe me, I'm not shoveling an ounce more than necessary). We got to a point where the car isn't stuck, but didn't finish the driveway shoveling. We'll do that tomorrow. That took more than 2 hours. We gave up because it was cold and getting more tea and OJ didn't seem worth it. If we escape tomorrow, I'm thinking brunch at Cafe Flora.

Hey, this baby can deal with rain, but not 11 days of being trapped at home.

Here are some things that have to do w/ snow at my house:

1. Kobie can eat snow right at head level.
2. Kobie doesn't like the snow to be over his head. He makes an attempt once in a while to jump through it, but it's not fun for him. This rule of unfunness doesn't apply when in the cat cage, because Kobie loves going in there.

3. The roof of the cat cage got slammed with snow. It's made of net, so it stretches when it's weighted down. This was the worse yet. The part where it's touching the ground should be 7 feet off the ground. The only solution is to go out and smack at it with sticks which is what Andy is doing below. Don't worry, I have my own stick and umbrella. This type of fun needs to be shared.

4. Abominable snowvegans

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Andy made some pancakes from the Candle Cafe Cookbook and they were to die for. The texture was perfect.

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Chippy & co aren't about to go outside (even if the cat door wasn't locked). So what's a cat to do? Leech off the nearest heat source. In this case, it's Andy. No fear of him moving for hours because he's playing games (Andy, not Chippy).