April leftovers + exciting news!

It’s show-and-tell time again! These are some of my amassed restaurant meals and other random eats from the previous month. Also, a very exciting event is about to happen in Almost-Vegan-land—more on that later in this post!

First up is a Vietnamese tofu fried rice at Saigon 39 in Midtown.



I tried out the carrot cake loaf with cream cheeze swirl from the Baking Bites cookbook. I should’ve photographed the making of this one, because it came out amazing!



I took Matt to Blue Bird Bistro, a restaurant serving all local and organic food, for his birthday. Along with a bottle of locally made wine, we shared the hummus appetizer. The pita bread was made from scratch!



Blue Bird Bistro used to be vegetarian, but added sustainable meat and seafood back to its menu a couple years ago. My rare taste for seafood struck again—I splurged on the catch of the day, cornmeal-crusted catfish with jasmine rice and ratatouille.



Our (free!) dessert was a slice of apple crostata with vanilla bean ice cream. All in all, this was a great meal.



At NARA, I ate a vegetable roll, and Matt and I shared a flight of crisp white wines.



My friend Henry and I attended Urban Picnic 2010, a yearly event held by the Kansas City Originals, a coalition of independently-owned, local area restaurants. It was a giant, sold-out affair, with over 40 restaurants (plus six wineries and a brewery) giving out unlimited (and massive) samples of mouthwatering, gourmet food for four hours, along with live music, auctions, and raffles. It was a madhouse in there, so picture-taking was all but impossible, but I did get this shot of our desserts: strawberry shortcake, Italian cream cake, and lemon pound cake with macerated berries. I got so full I nearly felt sick, but I can’t wait till next year!



Matt and I ate at Bo Ling’s one Friday. I had forgotten my camera, so these two shots were taken on Matt’s iPhone. I had a huge plate of steamed veggies and tofu with brown rice, and a side of "brown sauce" for dipping.



Matt opted, all on his own, for tofu fried rice. Aww.



One Sunday morning, I made us "sausage-and-egg" breakfast sandwiches. I toasted and buttered ("Earth Balanced," rather) slices of Ezekiel bread. I seasoned slabs of extra-firm tofu with cumin, turmeric, and garlic salt, then pan-fried them. I also mashed some fennel seed and garlic salt into LightLife ground "sausage," formed it into patties, and pan-fried those too. Stacked together, these made an awesome savory brunch.



This is just a particularly pretty smoothie I had one weekday morning—predominantly blackberries.



VEGAN LASAGNA! I promise I will make this again one day and post it, but man was it a lot of work! I made it with from-scratch marinara sauce, homemade tofu "ricotta," whole-grain lasagna noodles, and a fake ground beef-fake sausage-white bean mixture. I chopped and threw on my last couple slices of rice mozzarella before baking.



This was a WINNERRR. I’m hungry just thinking about it.



Ok, ok! I get it, you want to hear the news. Well, here it is: this Friday will see the advent of an Almost Vegan first—a GIVEAWAY! I love when other blogs hold giveaways (despite never having won one), and I’ve wanted to have one here since I first started this blog nearly two years ago. The opportunity has finally arisen! I’m not going to tell you what the prize is, but I’ll offer one hint—it’s a product that (I’m guessing) most of you don’t own, but it will allow you to make at home a recipe recently featured here, as well as the recipe I’ll post Friday. Check back then for the chance to win!

Let’s see how many readers I can pull out of the woodwork with this one, mwahaha ;]
See you Friday!

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Long-winded March leftovers
Belated February leftovers
December-January leftovers