Bad Kitties and Banana Bread

Good Morning All. I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. It's a beautiful day here in Mid-Missouri. They are calling for a high of 65 degrees! Yeah! And yes, this is in the same week that we had wind chills of -7, but hey, it's Missouri.

Anyways, Brett is a bit upset with one of our kitties, Gabby.

Here are a couple of pictures of Gabby:

This little punk right here has a thing for headphones, and not just any headphones, brand new ones. You see, she has now officially destroyed the FOURTH new pair of headphones Brett has gotten. And this is where I get confused: we have other headphones that she leaves alone, they are just plain old ear buds, and we leave them lying around all the time and she wants nothing to do with those. But every time Brett get the courage to go get another pair of new headphones, that he actually likes, Gabby usually gets to them in a day or less. Even a pair we got a while back that Brett was keeping in his book bag just to keep them away from her. We're still not sure how she got those......

Well, for fairness' sake, here is a picture of our other cat, Nermal.

So those are our cats.

Don't have much to report from yesterday in the way of food. My bananas finally got ripe so I made up two more batches of banana bread. This time I made Blueberry Banana Bread and another loaf of the vegan chocolate chip. The blueberry bread turned out excellent, I like it a lot. Blueberries and bananas go together quite well.

Other than that I made a tofu scramble with hash browns. The tofu scramble contained obviously tofu, and also sautéed red and yellow bell pepper, onion, garlic, kale, and Portobello mushrooms. It was seasoned with fresh lime juice, nutritional yeast, soy sauce (organic Shoyu), turmeric, salt, and pepper. It was alright, but I used way too much soy sauce so it was quite salty. The hash browns were simply organic russet potatoes, shredded in a food processor, fried in Earth Balance, seasoned with some salt. These were alright as well, but I used too much Earth Balance, so they came out a bit greasy even though I drained them on paper towels before serving. I would say there is potential in these dishes, but they weren't good enough this time to warrant a picture or recipe.

I always seem to be behind the curve with these things, but I think over the next couple of weeks I am going to try to get a couple of vegan cookbooks. I plan on checking at the University of Missouri bookstore (they sometimes have good stuff, I picked up Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power from there a couple of weeks ago) or the Peace Nook. The Peace Nook is a really awesome place that we are truly lucky to have in Columbia. It is an alternative store the non-profit Mid-Missouri Peaceworks runs (I am a member of Peaceworks). The Nook has all kinds of awesome books that you couldn't find many other places, especially not in Mid-Missouri. That was my plug, but it truly is a wonderful place, I love to support local business, especially one that holds my values and principles as well.

Anyways, I am thinking that I should start with Vegan with a Vengeance and Veganomicon, are these good books? I see Vegan with a Vengeance cited all over the veg*n food blogs. If there are any suggestions as to better vegan cookbooks or other essential vegan cookbooks to have in my collection, let me know.

I found some local, organic, whole wheat pasta which I plan on using part of to make a pasta salad for work lunches this week. Today, I'm also going to be experimenting with flatbread and black bean puree, so we'll see how that turns out.