A little over a month ago, Emma turned 5! I can’t believe she’s ready for kindergarten already. The theme was Tinker Bell and we had a Tinker Bell jumpy house, as well as a few Tinker Bell themed craft projects.

We had some tiny birdhouses (“fairy houses”) that the kids could paint and take home with them.


I bought some teeny tiny glass bottles with cork lids that the kids filled with different colored sand (that I had mixed with the same color of glitter). Both projects were big hits!

Here are some food highlights from her (mostly vegan) birthday party:

Drinks: bottled water, lemonade, iced tea, Sangria and beer. I used this Sangria recipe and should have doubled the recipe. It went fast (and was SO delicious!!). To keep it cold without watering it down, I froze some of it and also added some frozen apples and oranges that I cut in half before freezing. It did the trick!

Food: falafal (some wrapped in whole wheat lavash, some in GF brown rice tortillas), bagels and cream cheese, fruit, veggies with hummus, corn and black bean salsa, guacamole, edamame. Also, all of the cups, plates, napkins and utensils were compostable! We had very little trash from this party.

And the pièce de résistance… the cake! The top tier is GF vanilla, middle is vegan vanilla, bottom is vegan chocolate. There were only a few pieces of the GF left. All the rest got gobbled up!

This photo is so cute that I couldn’t resist sharing. Here is Emma “reading” to her sis… and the book she’s reading is Herb the Vegetarian Dragon. So cute!

AND before anyone even has the opportunity to ask: Yes, they are sitting in a leather chair. It is a hand-me-down from my parents from when they bought new furniture. You can tell by the style of it that is is quite old, at least 15 years. We will replace our furniture only after the kids have grown and stop drawing on it and when we do, we will choose something non-leather. Just had to state for the record.

This past week has been consumed with finishing this cake project, so I thought I’d share. It’s a 3-tier cake with a sculpted 3D dragon and phoenix (handmade from gum paste). The bottom two tiers are cake dummies, the top third tier is chocolate with chocolate buttercream (all vegan, of course). Here’s a video:

The cake was accompanied by 225(!) cupcakes, all vegan chocolate topped with handmade double happiness fondant rounds. This was a lot of work, but was also one of the most enjoyable cake projects I’ve had. I started making the dragon and phoenix a few weeks ago and they weren’t too difficult to make, but they did take a long time to get just right. For example, I spent over 5 hours just making the dragon head.

And here’s the phoenix:






Displayed next to the cake was 225 cupcakes, all chocolate.




Separating the tiers of the cupcake stand were glass vases filled with gold bamboo, dried flowers and sand.


The bamboo is actually plant stakes that I found in the garden section of the nursery. A $4 can of spray paint made them perfect for the display.

I recently signed up for an organic produce delivery service and I LOVE IT!! Farm Fresh To You delivers a box of fresh, organic, locally grown fruits and veggies for about the same price as what I could get at the grocery store or Farmer’s Market.

I’ve been receiving my box for 3 weeks now and it’s been a little different each time. There is always at least one head of lettuce and one bunch of greens (generally collard greens), but there has been quite a variety in the assortment of veggies. The first week, it was heavy with greens– kale, collards, spinach, chard– while the second and third weeks featured asparagus, broccoli, artichokes and potatoes. The quality of the greens and lettuces is awesome. The asparagus and broccoli are the best I’ve ever had (and I have to say that I’m not particularly fond of either, but find the ones from FFTY to be absolutely delicious). The artichokes were good, but they were on the small side and didn’t offer much edible portion. Being Emma’s favorite vegetable, though, she was beyond excited to get them last week.

Delivery from our first week: an assortment of greens and a bunch of green onions.

The fruit selection has been pretty much the same each week– apples and oranges mostly. We have gotten some strawberries, but with it being so wet and not quite strawberry season, we haven’t gotten more than Emma can eat in a day or two. I save those “special” fruits for her. This week I was surprised to get some meyer lemons, grapefruit, and avocados. I haven’t tried the citrus yet and the avocados are still not quite ripe, but I am loving the variety so far.

Making changes to your deliveries couldn’t be any easier either– just log into the account you set up when you start the deliveries and make all the changes there. This is also where you’d make any special requests for your deliveries– for example, I have requested never to receive English peas and thyme. I hate thyme and find fresh peas to be annoyingly time consuming when fresh tastes exactly the same as frozen. Aside from this, I’m happy to receive just about anything.

What I love about it:

• I love that we’ve been eating more variety.  When I shop, I tend to buy the same things week after week.  I feel like we are eating much more variety now.
• I love that I’m “forced” to eat more vegetables.  I like to saute up a bunch of different veggies now for breakfast and love that I’m eating a veggie with every meal.
• I’m not going to the grocery store as often now and thus don’t have many snack foods on hand.  Instead, I’m snacking on the apples and oranges from our box.
• What can be more convenient than someone picking out your produce for you and bringing it to your house?  Love that!
• It’s a great deal!  I get the “monster mixed” box, which is normally $55 weekly but I found a coupon code on yelp and have only been charged $45.  If you decide to join, use promo number 482 for the discount.  Be sure to let them know that I referred you (it gets me a free box): Meredyth Hite.
• I love that there’s something for everyone in our box.  Matt and I enjoy the vegetables, Emma enjoys some of the vegetables and all of the fruits, and there’s even stuff I can make for Amanda.  Just this week, I steamed and pureed some beets for her (she likes them, but what a mess!!).  I’ve also cooked the broccoli for her.

We love it and if you dislike grocery shopping as much as I do, give them a try!  There’s no long term obligation– just cancel if you find it doesn’t work for you.

You must make this recipe ASAP. It’s delicious! I followed the recipe exactly, except that I didn’t add any veggies because I didn’t have any appropriate for this dish. The sauce is served over some quinoa spaghetti noodles (that’s why they look a little yellow in the pic). I also did not bake it and opted instead to cook the pasta and sauce together for a few minutes after the pasta was done boiling. The sauce definitely tastes better after cooking (it must give the garlic time to mellow out a little), so I would definitely recommend cooking it a little if you can. Baking would be ideal and I will plan ahead next time to allow time to do that– I was just too hungry to wait this time. Enjoy!

Have I blogged about these before? Probably. Here it is again because they are just so delicious (gluten-free too if you use a GF flour in place of the a-p)! It’s my falafel recipe made into a burger instead of little falafel balls. I used chickpea flour to keep them gluten free.

If I owned a cafe, this salad is definitely something I would have on my menu. My dream is to one day open up a bakery and cafe that caters to people with allergies and those who choose to eat non-mainstream diets. People can go to pretty much any restaurant and find an entree suitable for Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach, Take-Your-Pick-Of-The-Next-Fad-Diet, but finding something vegan, gluten-free, etc. is really difficult sometimes. My cafe would be vegan and would feature a good selection of gluten and soy free options. I would also specialize in custom vegan cakes. One day…

This is a vegan nicoise-esque type salad. I served it on a large platter with the salad greens piled up in the center, with tomatoes, cannellini beans, blanched green beans, olives and dilly potato salad on the side. The greens and tomatoes were dressed with this dressing, except I only used about 1/4 the amount of oil and used a little water and agave to cut the harshness of the lemon juice. The dressing recipe made way more dressing than I needed for this salad (it was only enough to serve 2), but I enjoyed the leftovers on salads throughout the week.

I’ve made the dilly potato salad several different ways and I always wing-it with whatever I’ve got in the fridge. For the dressing, I sometimes use Vegenaise, other times I use Tofutti cream cheese, Tofutti sour cream, plain So Delicious coconut milk yogurt, or a combination of all of the above. Add a squeeze of lemon, a few tablespoons of chopped fresh dill, chopped red onion and celery, S&P and you’re good to go. The “recipe” (I suppose it’s more of a method than a proper recipe) is very versatile and foolproof; serve it warm or cold, both ways taste great.

Here’s another easy lunch that I made for Emma one school day last week. I took some leftover beans, mashed them up in a tortilla, then pan fried as if I were making a cheesy quesadilla. This no-queso-dilla is a big hit in our family, and I sometimes make it as a really quick dinner when I don’t have a lot of time to throw something together. I added some popcorn on the side, some apple slices and some chocolate beans for a treat. Aren’t those chocolate beans so cute? Like M&M’s but vegan and without weird artificial colors.

It’s been a while since I posted photos of Emma’s lunch. She goes to school Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the afternoon and takes a lunch to school every school day. Today’s lunch was packed in under 5 minutes and I thought it would be perfect to show how quickly a healthy, vegan lunch can come together (p.s. it’s gluten-free too!):

Today, she’ll enjoy some organic cucumber and orange slices, kidney beans, 1/2 a rice cake, and a piece of homemade, gluten-free banana bread. She likes this banana bread more than she’s ever liked any baked good I’ve ever made her, cupcakes excepted. And while I’m on the subject of that delicious, easy banana bread recipe, I made another slight change to the recipe again this time: I subbed coconut flour 1:1 for the oats and followed the same substitutions that I made the last time I made it. Turned out fabulous!

What are some of your kids’ favorite lunchtime foods?

I made pizza dough tonight from scratch and I pronounce it to be a semi-success.  It would have been a total successful had I not skipped one very important step, but I’ll get to that in a minute.  Even having skipped this important step, it still turned out really good.  In fact, it tasted pretty much exactly like regular pizza dough– actually, I think I might like this recipe even better than wheat dough.  Since this was my first time, I relied on this recipe here.  I wasn’t able to find all the ingredients and, of course, had to swap some stuff to make it vegan, so here’s my adaptation of that recipe.

Gluten-Free Vegan Pizza Dough
adapted from this recipe

Step 1

Place pizza stone in oven at 170 degrees.

Step 2

Ingredients:

2 1/2 TB olive oil
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 TB agave or maple syrup

Combine in a small bowl and set aside.

Step 3

Ingredients:

1/4 cup amaranth flour
3/4 cup white rice flour
1/4 cup sweet rice flour (you can find this at Asian markets)
3/4 cup tapioca starch
2 TB quinoa flour
2 tsp xantham gum
3/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 TB sugar

Combine all of the above ingredients in the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.

Step 4

Ingredients:

3/4 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar
2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast

Warm water to 115-120 degrees (this feels warmish-hot to the touch in case you don’t have an instant thermometer). In a small bowl, combine 1/4 cup of the warm water with the sugar and yeast. Set aside for a few minutes to allow the yeast to proof.

Step 5

Ingredients:

3 tsp Ener-G egg replacer (equivalent to 2 eggs)
1/4 cup water (omit if you use eggs)

Whisk the Ener-G powder with the water and add to the bowl of dry ingredients along with the yeast and olive oil, vinegar and agave mixture. Turn on the mixer and slowly add the remaining 1/2 cup warm water (from step 4). Add more warm water as necessary until the dough looks like cake frosting (to get to this consistency, I used about 1 1/2 cups total).

It should look like this:

Step 6

Remove pizza stone from oven and turn the oven off. Place a sheet of parchment paper on top of the warm pizza stone and brush lightly with olive oil. Put the dough on top of the oiled parchment paper and spread into a 12″ or 13″ circle. I found that my hands worked best for this step (I put some olive oil on them first). Place pizza stone back into the warm oven and let the dough rise for 40 minutes.

Step 7

After the dough has risen for 40 minutes, turn the oven on to 350 degrees and pre-bake your crust for 10 minutes. This was the step I missed in the instructions and even though mine turned out okay, I wouldn’t recommend skipping this step.

Step 8

After 10 minutes, remove pizza crust from oven and add your toppings. Increase the oven temperature to 425 degrees and once you’ve got what you want on top of your pizza, put back into the oven and bake until the crust is golden and cheese is bubbly. My tips for making the perfect vegan pizza can be found here, but one tip that I will reiterate here is that you really need to bake the cheese (I used a combo of Daiya mozz and cheddar) before adding any vegetables or other watery ingredients. Once the veggies start cooking, they make the cheese too watery and it gets a little gross. This time, I topped my pizza with jarred marinara, the Daiya, mushrooms, zucchini, spinach and jalapenos.

The verdict: Yes, it was labor intensive, but so worth it. This is better than any GF pizza crust you can get in the store. I think what I might do is on days when I have free time (uh… what’s that?!) is make a batch and pre-bake, then freeze for use later. Or if I knew that I was planning pizza for dinner that week, I might make this one or two days ahead to save some time. So, there are ways to do it so that it doesn’t take so long to make. If you’re GF, or even if you aren’t and want to try something new, give this recipe a try.