Happy holidays!

It's Christmas eve and I'm on break from school! Life is good. I realize that I haven't posted anything in over a month, and I didn't even tell you guys about our wonderful vegan thanksgiving. It was probably the best thanksgiving meal I'd had. When I tell anyone that I'm vegan around thanksgiving they invariably ask me if I'm making a Tofurky. And no, I'm not. I've never had one, and I don't plan on it. The truth is, they might be delicious but they kind of scare me and there's so much delicious food to be had on thanksgiving that there's really no need for a meat substitute.

Not all of the food was vegan, but I'd say most of it was. We had a delicious spinach salad with pomegranate and persimmon that our friend Meredith makes every year. I managed to figure out the ingredients to her top secret dressing that I figure out every year, but I've forgotten it. Oh well, I'll try again next year. Then there was a delicious coconut-milk curry with three types of winter squash, mushrooms, tofu, and broccoli that our friend Tammy made; she also made some swiss chard leaves stuffed with rice and vegetables and topped with tomato sauce. Yum! Now for the more traditional foods. We always have two kinds of cranberry sauce, a raw relish-like one with nuts and lemon zest and the traditional cooked one. My dad made a yam puree with butter and brandy, and he made a little one for me minus the animal products. I made the vegan kabocha squash cornbread stuffing from ExtraVeganZa, one of our favorite vegan cookbooks (Try their lavender chocolate-chunk cookies. Oh My God!). The Kabocha squash was sweet and cooked to perfection. I could eat like that every day.

On to dessert! We had about six desserts but I'll only mention the vegan ones. I make SusanV's persimmon break from fatfreevegan.com every year and it's always a big hit with everyone, including my father and sister, who are pretty skeptical of vegan desserts (a tip: if you use white flower instead of whole wheat and use more persimmon puree than she says to use it'll be more moist and less "vegan" tasting). I also tried a new recipe. Double layer pumpkin cheesecake, also by SusanV. You have to try this. It's light (though definitely not fat free) and creamy with a lemon-flavored layer and a pumpkin layer. Thanksgiving was more than a month ago and writing this blog is making me want to get back in the kitchen and make some more desserts! Fatfreevegan.com is a kickass blog with some really good recipes. A lot of them aren't fat free, so the title is a bit misleading, but I don't think I've had a bad experience with one of her recipes yet (Except maybe the brownies. They ended up tasting like Cliff Bars).

The goats are getting bigger. My father made them a stanchion (milking stand) and he's trained them to run there from their enclosure by giving them treats like apple cores and sunflower seeds. Since Eve's a bit of a bully and eats all of her food and Kiah's, we usually feed Kiah at the stanchion and let Eve battle it out with the chickens in the pen for her food. Hoping to be able to say for sure whether they're pregnant, we ordered some pregnancy tests from BioPRYN (Pregnant Ruminant Yes No. LOL!) The problem is that you have to draw blood from their jugular vein; you can't just have them pee on a stick. My parents tried to do it, but just shaving them was hard enough. They tried using my dad's electric razor but goat hair is a lot thicker than human hair and my mom accidentally cut Eve's neck. The goats wouldn't keep still long enough for us to find the jugular vein, and we gave up. One of them is probably pregnant, and we'll find out in March.

On my adventures to find cheese that I will eat (I have to know for sure that they weren't factory farmed and I like to see pictures of the animals, just to be sure) I've been doing some research and we found this farm that only has a few goats and makes cheese that they sell at Whole Foods and Farmer Joe's! I was really excited to learn about them because our friend at the farmer's market who we usually buy cheese from hasn't been there for the past couple of weeks (If you go to the Grand Lake Farmer's Market in Oakland, check out Pug's Leap). Anyway, this cheese is from Redwood Hill Creamery. They make a fresh chevre and one that's more like a camembert. I wasn't too hot about the camembert, but the fresh one was so good that we went back to get more. My favorite is the three pepper, but they also make plain and garlic and chive flavored cheese. We ate it with a roasted butternut squash, lentil, and arugula salad. Major Yum!

Because we try to stay out of the cycle of consumption as much as possible, we've been doing a lot of crafting. We were in Provence, France at my grandmother's house this summer and that's the lavender capital of the world. We brought some back with us and we've been mixing it with rice to make eye pillows with silk from the Depot for Creative Reuse. My sister made some soap with food coloring and a tub of glycerin that we bought last year, and later on today I'm going to make some body scrub with cheap sugar, olive oil, and essential oils. We've been wrapping all of our solstice gifts in silk so that we can reuse them. Wrapping paper is pretty but it just gets thrown away. Santa's gone sustainable this year.

I wish all of you a restful new year!