Carrie: Day 18,19,20 - Home Sweet Home!

Thursday and Friday were uneventful at best - I made it to a Chinese restaurant to try the Hunan tofu. Waaaaaaaay too much tofu, so I ended up just eating the veggies and rice. Sauce had a good spice, so it wasn't a total waste. Friday I had to travel home, so I grabbed vegetable sushi one last time and prepared for a long trip - a bag of lemon drop and peanut butter pretzels and I was good to go!

Which brings me to today… YAY! I'm HOME! Breakfast and lunch were nothing special, but to celebrate my return to the pots, pans, stove, and oven, I decided on a Kale and Mushroom Wellington for dinner. Never tried this recipe before, but given that I don't make the effort to make homemade pastry (pie crust I can do, but my puff pastry just doesn't puff) it was reasonably simple. A trip to both Trader Joe's and Ralph's and I was ready to go!

I started by cooking diced onions, garlic, crimini mushrooms, fresh thyme, dry marsala wine, sea salt, and black pepper in a butter substitute (Earth Balance). In a separate pan, I wilted the kale in a small amount of olive oil, then added thyme, wine, stone ground mustard, lemon juice, maple syrup, sea salt, and pepper and cooked another minute or so. I combined the two mixtures and let it cool - the filling was complete!

I rolled out a puff pastry sheet on flour until it was about 1/4 inch thick, then spread the kale and mushroom filling on top. I'm a decent enough cook, but I'm not so good at making the food LOOK tasty, so I didn't try for any of those fancy patterns you see some Wellingtons wrapped in to - it's all about the basic fold-over for me! Used maple syrup to seal up the side, then flipped it seams-down on to a baking sheet. More maple syrup went on top (apparently this is a pretty common vegan replacement for egg whites to give pastry that nice golden brown color), followed by a few slits, and in to the oven it went! As you can see, my oven isn't great at cooking things evenly… Oh well.

The recipe is for 4-6 servings, but I actually cut it in to 8 pieces and that was plenty for me.

Yummy yummy yummy! After this vegan experiment is over, I'm definitely going to incorporate something like turkey and use this recipe again. I will have to see what the leftovers taste like, but I'm expecting that it's much better fresh out of the oven. I have 7 pieces left and because of the pastry I don't see it holding up for an entire week, but we'll see. Also kale is generally hit-or-miss with people, so if you're one of those out there that doesn't care for kale, I bet spinach would just as good - although I would skip the stone ground mustard and maple syrup when cooking the kale, since those are used to cut the bitterness that it tends to have.

All-in-all, I was very happy with the way my first meal back turned out! I just wish I had a better oven… Now what to have tomorrow??? Ah, the joy of having endless options… Love it!

xoxo

Carrie