Its Yum Yum

Vegan Yum Yum, that is. If you don't have Lauren Ulm's new book, you are missing out! Not only do the recipes all sound delicious, the full color photography is beautiful. Don't lie, you love when your cookbooks show awesome pictures of the food. I do.

Admittedly, life has been busy lately. While I have a lot of free time in the morning now, I pretty much come home and go to bed, which = no dinner. Don't worry, I'm eating, just not anything at all fancy.

But the Golden Chickpea and Artichoke Salad from Vegan Yum Yum was so quick and easy to throw together that it was able to make an appearance!

Browning the chickpeas gave them a warm golden color, and the artichokes gave a distinct flavor that was of course delicious. I really thought that the toasted ground nuts made it pretty, distinct, and yummy all at the same time. We actually threw this together with some whole wheat pasta to make a pasta salad.

Now on Sundays, I bake. Forgive me for taking a few days to get this up (I so badly wanted to talk about my Vegan Brunch that it had to wait!), but I made some of Veggie Girl's Peanut Butter Banana Bread.

Sans bananas on top...I had already used 3 of Nick's bananas (he eats about 10 a week).

This is yummy, although I found that mine was very crumbly. It also took way longer to bake than hers did. I don't know if I didn't add enough milk (vague recipes and me don't go together well when it comes to baking), but it was delicious just the same. Especially heated up the next day with some Earth Balance and a glass of soymilk...which coincidentally is what I just had for breakfast!

*Sidenote: Does anyone else have a cat who LOVES Earth Balance? Zoe will try to lick some of it up whenever I have it on something.*

So while the new job doesn't exactly provide a ton of time for cooking, there is still plenty of opportunity to squeeze in some good food. Today I am hoping to try a curry in my slow cooker. How do you balance food, work, and blogging about food? If I wasn't blogging, I wouldn't have an issue, I'd just have Trader Joe's soy nuggets for dinner every night. But no one wants to hear about that. Its good though, this keeps me on my toes and out of vegan convenience food mode, but its hard to make it all fit.

Other than finding that balance, everything is good, and the new job is going very well so far! There are lots of cute puppies that I get to play with every day. I hope everyone is having a great week, Happy Wednesday!