Hi guys! I’m very excited to announce that for the month of November I’ll be participating in Vegan MoFo!

What’s a Vegan MoFo, you may ask? It stands for Vegan Month of Food! If you thought it meant something else, go put a dollar in your swear jar and come back to me.

Everyone with me now? Ok!

For this month I, along with hundreds of others, will be trying to create and document as many vegan recipes as possible to help get the word out about healthy and satisfying vegan food, and we need your help! If you see a post you like, feel free to use any means you can to pass it on to others. Retweet my tweets, “like” a post with StumbleUpon, email it to a friend, anything you want.  And if you want to check out lots of other Vegan MoFo bloggers, just take a peek at the extensive blogroll for this years’ event. I’ll be doing my part to tweet every recipe, and if I get good enough pictures, I’ll submit my recipes to sites like Tastespotting and Foodgawker.

“But Alayna, you’re not even vegan!”

You are correct.  I do, however, consume a lot of vegan food and love it!

My diet is still evolving, and veganism is an ideal that I’m striving to get closer to as time goes by. I will probably never be 100% vegan, but I’d like my consumption of non-vegan foods to dwindle lower and lower to an almost negligible amount. I’m making positive changes in the way I eat every day!

I’m hoping that with this challenge I can eat a more-vegan diet for a month and show myself that it wasn’t that big of a change.  I’m also hoping to show people who may have never thought of a vegan diet as something they could incorporate into their own lives, that vegan food is no weirder than a fruit salad or roasted vegetables.

Ok! Enough chatter, on with the delicious vegan food!

EDIT: I changed the picture of the sauteed apple oatmeal to the berries and oats above because I realized the previous item had honey in it.  Oops!  This stuff matters!

I truly can’t believe that it’s only been 6 months since we were married.  So much has happened this year that it doesn’t seem like we could have possibly fit all of those experiences into such a short amount of time.

I never thought that I would agree to marry someone after only a year of dating, but with Jeff, I was already sure within just a few months that I would make him that promise some day.

:::Sniff:::

I’m ok, lemme just go grab a tissue…

Back! 😀

Anyway, we thought it might be fitting to try to relive some of our honeymoon by hitting up a Japanese restaurant for dinner.  I’ve heard a lot about Miso Izakaya; I’ve seen many of their dishes being reviewed here and there online and in local newspapers, so I already knew there were a few things on the menu that would be right up our alley.

What’s an izakaya, you ask? In Japan, an izakaya is a type of low-key bar where you can order easy drinks like beer or cheap liquor and order little snacks like yakitori. You can think of it like a Spanish tapas restaurant, lots of small plates and lots of drinking!  Miso Izakaya is a little unique in that they’ve taken this relaxed concept and tried to elevate it to the level of fine dining. You could still easily just come in and have a drink and a snack with friends before heading out for the evening, or you can do like we did and make a dinner out of all the delicious samplings!

We started by ordering from their extensive collection of shochu, a liquor that can be distilled from a variety of different products; most commonly rice, barley, or sweet potato.

I chose one distilled from buckwheat because I love soba. Jeff got one made from barley, his favorite.

The first thing we knew we had to try was the soft-boiled soy egg.

I gotta tell you, it was pretty damn sexy.

This was easily my favorite dish of the whole evening. The flavors of soy, miso, and toasted rice were so intense!  I’m definitely gonna recreate this at home in donburi form soon!

Next we had takoyaki, little chunks of octopus fried in a sweet and savory pancake-like batter topped with mayo, salty sauce, and shaved bonito flake.

This is classic Japanese street food.  I think we had these at least 3 times in Japan!

It tasted exactly as I remembered, and was just as mouth-meltingly hot as the fresh ones in Osaka too!

Recognize this?

Here I am recreating this image which I use as my online identity…

That’s my Gravatar that shows up in comment feeds, and yes, I’m popping a takoyaki in my mouth in it! (BTW, if you don’t have one, go grab yourself a Gravatar. It’s free to use and all you have to do is upload a picture of yourself. It really helps people to identify you and remember you when you comment, and because you can choose to have it automatically add your image to other services you use, like Twitter, it keeps your identity consistent across the internet.)

Back to dinner!

Next we had the duck buns…

Delicious marshmallow-soft steamed buns filled with cucumbers, crispy duck, and an anise-infused sauce. These were incredible, the pillowy texture was so comforting and soft.

Next up was hamachi kama, or yellowtail collar.

A huge piece of lightly fried collar (the area between the head and the fins) with ponzu for dipping. This was so rich and fatty, it melts in your mouth like butter and the crispy skin was excellent too.

Then we ordered ja jiang dofu, crispy tofu in a spicy-sweet black bean sauce. Jeff was not really excited about ordering tofu, but this turned out to be one of the stand-out flavors of the evening. The thick sauce was so good we were mopping it up off our plates!

Lastly, we ordered a dragon roll.  It had tempura shrimp and cucumber inside and was topped with avocado, flying fish roe, and grilled eel.

It was good, but we were getting so full that we were having a hard time finishing this heavy selection.

We ordered two more drinks so we could sit around and chat. Jeff got a different barley shochu and I got a cocktail made from sweet potato shochu, peach bitters, honey, and white tea liqueur.

It was so full I had to drink it like a kitten at a milk bowl!

Jeff thought that was hilarious and was laughing at my plight.

Though we were beyond full we ordered dessert, green tea creme brulee!

Creme brulee is easily my favorite dessert, so this was perfect to me.

It was glorious. Perfect way to end a fabulous night of authentic Japanese food and booze!

I think we’ll be back to Miso Izakaya, it’s hard to find authentic Japanese food that isn’t sushi or hibachi (you know, where you sit at a table right next to a flaming grill and have food thrown at you, not authentic!)

Cheers to 6 months of wedded bliss and to many more months (and years!) of happiness to come!

It’s hard for me to believe that yesterday was Halloween.  I don’t know why, but the holiday just completely escaped me this year. We didn’t even get one single trick-or-treater either! And now I have a bowl full of Halloween candy sitting in my living room mocking me.

I felt an intense urge to make something today that would celebrate the holiday somehow, but what? I don’t have any more pumpkins, but wait…I do have pumpkin seeds! I’ve been saving the guts from the pumpkin that I recently used to make pumpkin butter with.

For many, Halloween means carving pumpkins, and for me that’s always meant that roasted pumpkin seeds were in my immediate future. I really wanted something out of the ordinary, so I turned to Mama Peas’ recipe for salt and vinegar pumpkin seeds.

If you’re not already familiar with her blog, Peas and Thank You, you have got to check it out.  Make sure you’re wearing water-proof mascara, cuz you’re gonna laugh your butt off til you cry.

Anyway, I got started by picking all the seeds out of the flesh and giving them a good rinse.

Rather than laying them out on a towel to dry, I rubbed them with a few paper towels to speed up the process.

Next I tossed them with the vinegar and poured them out onto a non-stick sheet pan.

Sprinkled on the salt…

And after about 20 minutes I had this…

They’re not burnt, that’s just all the sugars in the vinegar that have caramelized and glazed the seeds. I did have my oven at 350 degrees rather than 300 as the recipe calls for, which is why mine took less time but got darker.

They are really tasty, although I expected them to taste more like salt and vinegar potato chips.  I think the balsamic is what makes them so different, they are mostly salty but with just a hint of figgy sweetness on the end.

I couldn’t keep my hands out of them so I just decided to add them to the salad I was making for lunch.

This salad was a total mish-mash anyway. It has carrot-miso dressing, avocado, toasted buckwheat, chia seeds, dulse and seaweed flakes, and of course the seeds.

Weird but good.

At this rate I’ll have polished them off before the husband even gets home from work! No matter though, tonight marks our 6th month of being married and we’re going out to dinner to celebrate!

I’ll make sure to document our evening well, ta ta for now!