we just made it back from our weeklong birding trip to texas last night.  i was really hoping to regale you with tales of nights i conjured up some really special camp meals while owls hooted in nearby trees, and how we stumbled upon a surprise vegan-options taqueria in the lower rio grande valley.  but i can’t.  though the grocery stores were a bit more accomodating than my fears had led me to believe, the restaurants barely had vegetarian food.  beans were cooked in lard, or had bacon/meat in them.  we got some relatively delicious indian food in mcallen one night, but mostly, if eating out, we were extremely limited and very disappointed.  to top this off – and we had intended eating out to be a rare occasion due to exhaustion or timing – the valley has had no significant rainfall since last august, meaning there was a burn ban in the region.  this means no hot food.  no boil-in-a-bag vegan indian meals we had carefully selected and brought with us as a backup on the plane from minnesota.  during most days it reached nearly 90F.  we had no way to keep anything cool.  that means a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, apples, bananas, and dry cereal.  i wish it could be a better story than that, but in terms of food, i couldn’t wait to get back home to the chilly weather, my own kitchen, the vegetarian cooperative cafes, the jasmine deli, and pizza luce:

pizza athena with vegan rinotta from pizza luce (leftovers from a late saturday night indulgence with a vegan peanut butter bar, unfortunately not pictured

i meant to take care of this before i left, but dj over at the skint vegan tagged me … and when i got home to my email, kittee tagged me too!  in the interest of not driving myself overly crazy, i’m just going to combine this as one, so i hope i do this right:

1) tell you 5 things about myself

2) tag 5 other bloggers via my blog and theirs

1. i was born in sweden, but grew up learning english and swedish in the u.s. my dad’s family still lives there.

2. i have a really hard time eating oranges like a “normal person.” i really hate the pith and skin that covers each segment, and will often spend time peeling that off of each piece of orange before devouring what i like to call the “inner jewels.” it’s really weird, and generally if given a choice, i would pick an apple or any other kind of fruit over eating an orange in front of someone. oddly enough, i love pulpy-style orange juice, and don’t mind blending whole pieces into a syrup.

3. i’m an amateur birdwatcher. my trip to texas next week is was specifically for the purpose of birdwatching. my favorite bird is the black-crowned night-heron, and i have a tattoo of one on my left forearm. 3a., i am a huge dork.

4. i work at a coop, and can tell you we make a lot of unhealthy food. beyond gross things like meat and mayonnaise-based salads, we make a hot dish called parmesan creamed corn. using 30 eggs, a gallon of milk-cream, a pound of butter, about 2 or 3 pounds of cheese, and a few bags of frozen corn, we make a grand total of 4 9×12 pans about 2 inches deep. most people think that coop=health food store, and thus they can erase the guilt of whatever it is they’re buying. not true. very not true.

5. i have a cat named franki, whom i named after my friend franki aka frances whom i met in glasgow. when i told her about this, she told me she was “really chuffed” about it.

i’m tagging: ricki of diet, dessert and dogs, liz of kamutflake girl, nicole of vegheadcooking, shayna of a damzylfly in london, and ruby red vegan!

and as for more pre-departure food… i made ani phyo’s brazil-broccoli mash with miso gravy:

this was really awesome, and had so few ingredients! besides soaking the brazil nuts, the prep time was a breeze for the mash – sort of a raw version of mashed potatoes (although no potatoes were involved). some interesting ingredients like an orange and dates were part of the gravy, which was sweet and savory at once, and went really well with the mash. i also topped it with some raw sunflower parm, and enjoyed the 4 portion yield over the next couple of days.

quinoa with broiled lemon-garlic asparagus and ed&bv’s tamari-roasted chickpeas

this was a perfect dinner for a temperate spring evening after a 51 degree day (which quickly devolved into heavy snowfall by monday morning). light, lemony, and easy to shovel in by the forkful!

before i left on my trip, while it seemed to be snowing small snowballs, i decided to break out the can of jackfruit i’ve had for a few months, and make something using up tomatoes, cilantro, and salsa we had in the fridge. mexican food, naturally. looking at pictures of the cooked jackfruit, i thought about my childhood pre-veg days when we’d go to bahia and i’d order a machaca burrito: shredded beef and eggs with green peppers and onions rolled inside a flour tortilla. for lack of wanting to get too many ingredients, and not wanting to have to make too much, i kind of winged this one. it’s nothing like a machaca, but still ended up being pretty tasty. here it is before getting cooked up in the crockpot all day:

and then, inside a very crumbly sprouted wheat tortilla:

when i get rooted again, i hope to start cranking out some homemade deliciousness again.  you can only imagine the dreams i was having about food, when i would be awoken in the middle of the night in the middle of bentsen-rio grande state park by the call of the mexican subspecies of the eastern screech owl.*  oh, minneapolis kitchen of mine, we’ll be good friends again soon.

* being awoken by owls was awesome.  in fact, the birding part of my trip was amazing.  it’s just the food part that left a lot to be desired.