Home-Cooked Birthday Dinner

I’ve gotten a few email inquiries about what delectable treats I ate for my birthday. On Saturday, we had brunch at cafe flora with all the usual suspects (cinnamon roll, strawberry creme scone, caesar salad and roasted potatoes) and we also tried the vegan version of their reuben, which was quite delicious and unpictured because I was taking the morning off. We shared everything and were quite satiated for our trip to Pigs Peace Sanctuary . It was late by the time we got back from Pigs Peace and we were tired, so we just grabbed some burritoes from the local taco bus and brought them home. On Sunday, we had Eric’s mother and step-father over for a celebratory dinner.

My birthday is at the end of summer, and so when I was little, we always celebrated with a cookout and a homemade birthday cake. My mom used to ask us what kind of cake we wanted and she would decorate it with flowers, mint leaves and berries from our garden. One of the most memorable ones was a chocolate cake covered in lavender and mint colored icing in the design of a yin-yang symbol (my special request!). Anyway, I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic and wanted to do a vegan version of this kind of meal for my birthday. My mom and Eric and I spent Sunday around the house, doing little cooking projects for dinner and doing some yardwork and cleaning as well. We made black bean burgers from scratch (I’ll post the recipe when I perfect it-it still needs tweaking…the flavor is there, just not the consistency) on whole-wheat buns with some delicious fixin’s (roasted green chile, avocado, onions, lettuce, and tomato):

Eric’s mom made a quinoa salad with red peppers, onions, basil, mint, kalamata olives, etc., which is always great:

I made a kale salad (I will post this recipe shortly), which is one of my favorite salads. And as a special touch, we used a cabbage from the garden! This is the first year we’ve actually planted cabbage AND had them produce cabbages AND harvested one in time to eat it before the bugs and other critters got to it. Here it is growing in the garden–so pretty:

I peeled off all of the outer leaves and gave them to the chickens:

And all cleaned up:

Check out the inside. The color is amazing!

Back to the meal.

The outcome was a delicious and well-balanced plate of food with plenty of protein, plenty of vegetables, vitamins and nutrients and, of course, plenty of ‘yum’ factor.

Of course, I wouldn’t dare forget dessert. For dessert, we made the Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s and Terry Hope Romero’s Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Usually I triple their recipe and make a 2-layer cake, but in this case I felt like making a single-batch of cupcakes (though I think we could have eaten more!). This cupcake recipe is outrageously good–if you haven’t tried it, you should. Their series of dessert books, including Cupcakes and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar (and coming out soon with Vegan Pie in the Sky), make the transition to veganism SO much easier.