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My favorite way to celebrate my birthday is by eating delicious food with close friends and family. The past few years I’ve gone out to get vegan food with friends in Austin and then had cookie cake from Zucchini Kill, but since we couldn’t do that this year, Luke and I cooked lots of tasty food at home instead. (Here’s a video I made of my birthday last year if you missed it.)
I wanted to have cookies with coffee for breakfast, so the night before my birthday Luke and I made chocolate chip cookies. We used this recipe from Nora Cooks, and they came out seriously amazing. They taste just like cookies I had growing up, before going vegan. I’ve tried a lot of good vegan cookies, but I think these were the best and highly recommend them!
Breakfast/brunch is my favorite meal of the day, so we had to go all out for my birthday!
Recently I made 10 minute pickled jalapenos using this recipe from Gimme Delicious, and Luke used them to make tofu migas.
To make them, he crumbled up super firm tofu in a pan with oil over medium/high heat and added black salt (which has an eggy taste so it’s perfect for creating vegan “eggs”), onion powder, black pepper, and nutritional yeast. He then added in the jalapenos and some crumbled tortilla chips. He also added some vegan butter towards the end.
We didn’t have any shredded vegan cheese, so I chopped up some Chao tomato cayenne cheese slices we had.
For the home fries, he chopped up potatoes and tossed them in canola oil, salt, onion, garlic, and paprika, and air fried them for about 25-30 minutes. We also had a side of field roast breakfast sausages and Angelic Bake House toast with Miyoko’s cultured vegan butter. (The potatoes, sausages, and bread all came in an Imperfect delivery.)
The migas came out SO tasty, just as good as any migas we’d get at a restaurant! (Luke said the key is plenty of salt and butter.)
For dinner I asked Luke to make one of my favorite recipes–baked ziti!
We had to make a few modifications–usually we use extra firm tofu for the tofu ricotta, but we only had super firm high protein tofu (which is drier), so we added some soy milk to the ricotta mixture. We had also used our last lemon to make my cake, so we used some crystallized True lemon from Amazon that I’d ordered in case we ran out of lemons. (The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, so Luke mixed 1 lemon packet with 1 tablespoon of water to make the “juice.”) We were also out of oregano, so Luke subbed Italian seasoning instead. It still came out just as good as usual!
Luckily, I was also able to order a take and bake baguette through Imperfect, so we got to make some garlic bread to go with it too!
I’d planned on making a vegan funfetti cake for my birthday, and I ordered ingredients to make it from Thrive Market a few weeks ago, but with everything going on, they didn’t make it on time. So I decided to have lemon cake instead after seeing The Vegan 8 post this simple recipe since it required only a few ingredients that we already had (plus I love lemon cake too.)
It came out soft, fluffy, and delicious. The center did cave in, and I’m not sure why (anyone out there know why that could’ve happened?), but it didn’t affect the taste at all.
We spent a lot of the day cooking (or rather, Luke cooking and me watching haha) and eating, and we also sat outside for a while, watched my favorite show, The Office, and played The Office Board Game, which we hadn’t played in years–it was a lot of fun!
@pennysportalChill ##Birthday. Ate lots of yummy ##vegan food & watched my favorite show. Like this if you love ##theoffice too! ##veganfood ##pasta ##brunch ##cake♬ The Office (Main Theme) – TV Sounds Unlimited
If we weren’t in quarantine, I would’ve liked to go to Possum Pizza for my birthday (they’re closed for now), but Luke said we can celebrate for three days when this is all over, so I’m gonna hold him to that, and we’ll go get pizza and other vegan food we’ve been missing.
I’m thankful that I got to spend the day with Luke and Sookie and that we’re all safe and healthy.
Anyone else out there celebrating a birthday during quarantine? Made any good vegan meals or baked any vegan treats lately? Let me know in the comments.