Eat, Read and Be Merry

Midweek Munchies: What Danielle D is contributing this week I've been in a major food (and everything else) rut lately and I have not felt like getting groceries or cooking. After living on practically nothing for the past couple of weeks, I finally broke down and picked up a few things at the store:

• Green Beans
• Bok Choy
• Romaine Lettuce
• Bean Sprouts
• Zucchini
• Tomato
• Bananas
• Butternut Squash
• Diced Tomatoes
• Canned Chickpeas
• Canned Kidney Beans
  
• Red Lentils
• Crispy Rice Cereal
• Taco Kit
• Microwave Popcorn
• Blackberry Jam
• Frozen Edamame
• Frozen Berries
• Ground "Beef"
• Brown Rice Tortillas

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PURPOSE of Midweek Munchies: Put together by a small group of Veg Women, we hope to spread the word about healthy vegetarianism while obtaining idea starters for meals, recipes, learn about new products, and meet other female veg*n bloggers. Visiting and commenting on other participants lists are encouraged but not required.
Have fun and Go Veg!

In my opinion, there is nothing better on a cold, rainy night than a nice, hearty bowl of chili. Luckily, like soup, chili is one of my favourite things to make, as it is as easy as simply throwing a few ingredients into a pot and letting it do its thing. While I can make chili without a recipe, I sometimes like to follow one. Last night, I decided to follow a recipe and make the Three Bean Chili from 125 Best Vegan Recipes (which I borrowed from the public library a while back).

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While I was not too impressed with this cookbook (as it uses too many prepackaged products), I really like this chili recipe. Though it's not an especially spicy chili, it has a nice, deep flavour that really hits the spot.

In this new t-shirt that I got from Walmart:

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Isn't it cute? It made me giggle, so I had to buy it.

I have to admit that I am not really a big fan of tomato soup. I always liked the Campbell's variety (which I can no longer eat on account of the gluten), but I find that "real" tomato soup is just too tomato-y for my tastes. Nevertheless, I still crave tomato soup at least once a month (weird, huh?). This month's craving came a few days ago when I saw MadeinAlaska's blog post about creamy tomato soup and veganrella quesadillas. Unfortunately, I didn't have the necessary ingredients to make MadeinAlaska's recipe (I didn't have any tomato sauce or cornstarch), so I had to go digging through my cookbooks to find another one.

I ended up finding the Spicy Creamy Tomato Soup (p. 55) recipe in How it all Vegan. Though I didn't really want spicy tomato soup, this recipe looked just about perfect: it had few ingredients, lots of garlic and some soy milk (to make it creamy). I decided to make the soup and to simply minimize the spiciness (I only used 1/4 tsp. of pepper and a pinch of cayenne). The results were fantastic! The soup was creamy and had a nice deep, warm taste to it (likely from all of the garlic).

Here's a picture of the finished soup in the pot:

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And here's a close-up of it (still in the pot):

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And here it is all ready for lunch:

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I will definitely be making this soup again. I think that next time, though, I will use a little less garlic - as much as I love garlic, six cloves was a little too much for three small servings of soup (which is what this recipe makes).

From Bookmole:

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book. *
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions
   

* 'nearest' means you can't rummage around for a 'cool' or 'intellectual' book.  Really, whatever your hand falls on first.  Let's hope it's not porn.  (Or should we hope it is?)

Okay, so I dug under my coffee table and the first book that I found was (the yet unread) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Slaughterhouse-Five

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On page 123, the fifth, sixth and seventh sentences read:

"Did he say anything?"
"No."
"Was he scared?

Earlier today, Nava Atlas posed the following question to her blog readers: "What's Your Favorite Food Movie?" Though I had never considered this question before, the answer came to me almost immediately. My favourite food movie (broadly defined as a movie that has something to do with a type of food) would have to be the Peanut Butter Solution (1985).

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Did anyone else watch this as a kid? No?! Are you sure? Maybe this summary will jog your memory:

Peanut butter is the secret ingredient for magic potions made by two 'friendly' ghosts. Eleven-year-old Michael looses all of his hair when he gets a 'fright' and uses the potion to get his hair back, but too much peanut butter causes things to get a bit 'hairy'.

I'll be the first to admit that I have boring dreams. Like my life, my dreams are often filled with mundane tasks and ordinary occurrences. Last night's dreams were no exception. For the most part, they focused on work and what had happened throughout the day. There was one dream, however, that stuck out from the rest - not because it was interesting but because it was completely uninteresting and seemingly unnecessary. In this dream, I put on my eyeglasses and realised that they were broken (the pin was missing out of one of the arms). So, I took the glasses off. After examining them for a few minutes, the dream was over. Sounds exciting, huh?

According to this dream dictionary,

To see broken eyeglasses in your dream, indicates that your vision and perception is impaired. You are not seeing the facts correctly.

While these might not be new "words", they were definitely new to me. Note: I put words in quotations because I can't for the life of me figure out why either of these terms needs to exist.

• Dick Lit (or Lad Lit)
  
• Manorexia (or Manorexic)
  

What's your favorite thing to shop for? 
Submitted by JadedButterfly.

Not surprisingly, my favourite things to shop for are food and books. While I really, really dislike shopping for clothes, I can spend hours browsing grocery and book stores. This is especially true for overstocked, seemingly chaotic used book stores, which are my absolute favourite stores to visit.