Thursday, January 06, 2011

new year means no more baking for a while.

I promised myself I would stop with all the dessert baking for a while after the holidays are over. Six days into the new year, and I'm going strong. Ha. Here is the last batch of cookies from 2010.

cookie cookies

These are Cookie Cookies, another recipe from The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions. They are basically chocolate chip cookies with chunks of sandwich cookies inside. I used double chocolate Jo Jo's, which explains the yummy mess of chocolate swirls. These were good cookies (I mean, how could they be bad), though a little bit cakey for my taste. I think they really need that heavier cake texture in order to hold up under the weight of big sandwich cookie chunks, so it works out. I brought these for family on New Year's Day and my brother in-law exclaimed, "A cookie made out of cookies?!"

For my regular, non sweets meals I've been struggling to find a balance between a nice variety of veggies and meeting my doubled protein demands while pregnant. It's too easy to just fall back on a double stack of soy chick patties on a toasted bagel for breakfast (32 grams of protein, yo!) but then I'm stuffed until lunch with no produce in sight. So I've been doing more salads for lunch at work. I still have to throw some kind of protein into the mix in order to meet my 70 grams daily, so I will use quinoa, tofu, walnuts, beans, etc to top salads. my favorite lunch salad so far has been this one I tossed together with whatever we had on hand. It's spinach, blueberries, tomatoes, a quinoa and brown rice mix, and lemon vinaigrette.

lunch salad

I love the chewy quinoa on salads. Must do more of that.

7 comments:

dreaminitvegan said...

What a pretty salad. I feel the same way about baking but my son turns 13 this weekend so one last hurrah for a while.

Jes said...

I don't think I'd have the strength to not make dessert--I'm just not that good. Rock it on for those of us with less willpower!

And that salad looks delish!

Sarah S. said...

Saw a comment you left on someone's blog, including your little Tori Amos avatar, and had to stop by! Any vegan Tori Amos fan is an instant friend in my book ;) I love the name of your blog. I had a website back in the 90's raspberry-swirl.com, it was a weekly Tori Amos game. It got to be too popular and I couldn't handle managing it and going to school so I shut it down. Brings back fun memories :)

Anyway, your cookies look lovely! I'm following the same no baking rule as you, though I did have a good excuse to make some carrot cake cupcakes for a friends birthday. That sort of thing totally doesn't count! ;)

nomnomnomblog.com said...

That looks so delicious. I love the quinoa/lemon/blueberry combo.

HayMarket8 said...

I had another cookie failure today. /sigh

I will get better someday!

dreaminitvegan said...

I love quinoa salad.
I've cut down on baking as well. I 've made my son's b-day cake and then a gf cookie that is low in sugar.

Hannah said...

For a final batch, you certainly picked a winning recipe! Those look amazing, and a cookie within a cookie, no less. Way to go out with a bang.