From Joan's Kitchen: Healthier Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

In our kitchen, the ultimate goal is to make everything taste delicious, while using healthy ingredients. I switched to a vegan lifestyle back in July 2010 (you can read about that here), and while eating out can be a pain at times, dining in has been a wonderful adventure.

Part of the transition to becoming vegetarian or vegan (these days I'm about 95 percent vegan, and Jonathan is about 85 percent vegan) is adapting your palate. These cookies are a good example of that. To the average person, they might not taste very sweet, but in our house, they are the perfect treat.

If you're considering a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I highly recommend reading The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone and watching several food documentaries (there are a ton of great ones out there -- check out this list). It's important to note that any steps toward vegetarianism and/or veganism are positive ones. You don't have to give up meat and/or dairy entirely to make a big difference in a whole lot of ways! :)

Enjoy!

From the recipe box: Margherita Pizza

Continuing the Italian theme we have going this week, today we're sharing one of our favorite pizza recipes. This is one of our go-to recipes year-round, but it's especially good this time of year because we love using homegrown tomatoes and basil. We dream about pizza ovens and gardens filled with basil and tomato plants, but doesn't everyone? Until we build our dream pizza oven, we cook our pizza on this Mario Batali pizza pan (a wedding gift). It's really heavy and stays hot long after it comes out of the oven, but it cooks a perfect crust.

Enjoy!

Memorial Day Grilling with the Big Boy Barbecue Book

Happy Memorial Day! I don't know about you, but every Memorial Day weekend we spend quite a bit of time at the old grill. In honor of that tradition, I wanted to share this vintage cookbook that I found at Joan's house a few years ago. It was published in 1960, and the illustrations and verbiage are just so kitschy and fun. For example, the book is attributed to "the Barbecue Experts of the Tested Recipe Institute, Inc. at the Kitchen in the Clouds and with the Cooperation of Barbecue Experts of Big Boy Mfg. Co." The book is filled with recipes for meat-eaters and veggie-lovers, and they do look pretty yummy for the most part....perfect for a Memorial Day cookout. Enjoy a little peek inside!

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In the Kitchen with Gerald & Joan: Vegetarian BBQ Nachos

Since becoming vegan/vegetarian almost three years ago, I haven't missed BBQ. That is almost sacrilegious to admit when you live in Memphis, Tennessee, but it's the truth. When you don't eat foods for a long time, you don't really crave them anymore. Well, at least not until BBQ Fest...

Last weekend was the World Championship BBQ Cooking Contest. It's a really big deal in Memphis, and for an entire week, everyone is talking about BBQ. When your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds are constantly blowing up with photos of BBQ for a straight week, you start to crave BBQ just a little bit.

Which brings us to this week's in the kitchen recipe...It was Thursday night, our healthy dinner was already prepared, but I was craving BBQ. It's not every day that I have a craving as well as the ingredients to satisfy that craving, but I just happened to have chips, tofu, cheese dip, shredded cheese and jalapeños (note: we don't usually have cheese products in our home, but we were expecting company over the weekend). It was far too tempting, so we saved dinner for another day and made these nachos. In a former life, I lived for Central BBQ nachos. These tasted just like them to me. Yummy.

If you are vegan, you can substitute the cheese for Daiya. Cheese dip is a little more tricky to recreate, but there are several decent recipes on the Internet. Here's a good one that we've made before. Note: Daiya is pretty expensive (around $4.50 a bag), but in my opinion, it is the best vegan cheese product on the market.

Enjoy!