Cooking from VWAV

My family had dinner together last night after getting back from my sister's graduation. I would have liked to make something a little more extravagant, but I wanted to have something ready since we would be arriving home sort of late and very hungry. I followed the recipe for Orrechiete with Cherry Tomatoes and Kalamata Tapenade from Vegan With a Vengeance and served it as a cold pasta salad, substituting in whole wheat fusilli. The saltiness of the olives went really nicely with the sweetness of the grape tomatoes and sauteed red onion. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, especially Sam, who had seconds and thirds. I always like when people take seconds of my food. I also threw together a really simple salad of red leaf lettuce and shredded carrots, dressing it with a red wine vinaigrette to sort of echo the red wine vinegar used in the tapenade.



I made a batch of peanut butter oatmeal cookies, also from Vegan With a Vengeance. While the recipe was for giant cookies made from a 1/3 cup scoop of batter, I opted to make smaller cookies instead, and ended up with about a million of them. The cookies were delicious though, with the outside being crispy and the insides chewy and a little bit dense from the oatmeal. Remembering an episode of Good Eats, I believe the combination of crispness and chewiness came from using both granulated and brown sugar. If you have VWAV and haven't made these cookies, they, like most of the other recipes in the book, are certainly worth making.