It’s a pesto fiesta in my pants, and… everything green is invited? (I might want to rephrase…)

I was feeling super pesto-y a couple of weekends ago, but I didn’t really want to have a pesto baby two days in a row, so I went for Isa’s inaugural Yet To Be Named Lower Fat Cookbook recipe of Spinach Fettucine with Edamame Pesto.

This is a bullshit picture, but you’ll live.

For being so much lower in fat than I’m used to, this is a pretty good recipe. The sauce is extremely thick and creamy, but yet light and full of basil goodness. I can definitely handle a main course of this if the next night’s dinner is…

Isa Pizza

As seen with whole wheat crust, homemade pizza sauce, pesto sauce, tofu basil ricotta, mushrooms and capers (because olives are the deeeeevilllll.) I don’t think that it’s  my most favoritist homemade pizza ever, but the Green Goddess Garlic is extremely hard to top. Also, I’m slightly sad that my whole wheat dough didn’t rise as much as my AP version, but that’s hardly the recipe’s fault.

Recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance

Now with marinated mushrooms and peas.

Funny, it was pretty good, but it didn’t bowl me over like the first time I had made it.

The anti-vegan roommate liked it, so maybe I’m just getting pickier in my old age.

Rather than keep whining about being a fatty (I’ve gained back roughly half of the 50 pounds I lost a few years ago, boo), I’ve decided to join up with a bunch of PPKers and start the 6 week induction to the Eat To Live diet. Now, time restrictions with working full time and going to school at night, doing the whole “let’s make massive salads all day” thing is going to be difficult, so for the first couple of days, I’ve been more or less winging it, trying to follow the general guidelines, and where I’m not, keeping the calorie and fat intake low. As you can tell from the blog, everything I eat is sweet, whether or not it’s desserty – I have a major sugar addiction. I need something like Eat To Live to completely get me off of the refined sugar and get me into some decent food. So, naturally, here’s a dessert post.

That’s sum delicious copypasta; leftovers again?

On the left is a Sexy Low-Fat Vanilla Cupcake with Chocolate Mousse, on the right is a Margarita Cupcake. This is here mostly because a) I just decorated them this morning (on the second day of my diet, I was asked to make cupcakes for a coworker’s birthday. Not fair.)  and b) the Margarita Cupcakes look a fuckton better than the last time I made them for the same co-worker’s birthday last year. I toyed with doing something really espresso-y like Tiramisu so that there wouldn’t be a chance in hell of me wanting to even taste them, but I barely had the energy to make these last night. Not to mention that I don’t keep any sort of coffee in my house, and didn’t want to run out and buy any.  Side note: I haven’t eaten any of the cupcakes yet, and I don’t think I’ll succumb to their siren song (I usually have a test cupcake right out of the oven of both batches, and then at least one at work the next day. Ugh.)… but I did let myself have a few leftover swirls of the mousse. But, it’s silken tofu based, so other than the bag of melted chocolate chips in it, it’s not that bad of a slip up.

Last week I had my final wisdom tooth pulled, resulting in a weekend spend alone and not going to this month’s PPK potluck – again. So, I made Green Tea freezer pops from My Sweet Vegan and pretty much just ate those and watched a marathon of The Girls Next Door. Odd choice, I know.

My mold makes 10 of these, which turned out to be 2.5 batches of the recipe. In the future, unless entertaining, just stick with one batch.

The recipe is pretty much a cooked pudding, which solves my non-chocolate pudding quandry – use powdered sugar. Yay pudding pops! Fuck you, Bill Cosby!

The upcoming food porn probably isn’t going to be gourmet, blow-your-ass-off impressive, but it will be healthy and I won’t care because I’ll be wasting away to nothing. Yes, Virginia, there are Fatty Von Fattenstein vegans.

Lachesis, a PPK idol, has invented quite a few famous veganville recipes, including the Seitan O’Greatness (which I have yet to attempt.) When she gets her cookbook out, I think she’ll get a million pre-orders from her legion of seitan fans.

She posted food porn on the PPK with this recipe (I omitted the marinated mushrooms and the peas, mostly because I felt lazy tonight), and the whole world persuaded to share the details. The whole world is pleased that she did. It’s easier to make than the Vegan with a Vengeance recipe, which was my mainstay until tonight. However, unlike Isa’s recipe, it’s chock full of soy and there’s not a particle of nooch in sight. When I blended up everything, I opened the blender and smelled… garlic alfredo HOLYCRAPWHAAAT?! As a vegan, when you make ‘cheese’ type dishes, you get a certain tolerance for things not exactly 1000% smelling or tasting like the original version. Cheesecake is the one, rare, exception simply because vegan cheesecake is pretty much impossible not to make to perfection.

If it smells like alfredo, does it taste like alfredo?

You bet your ass.

For future reference, I think I’d at least halve the amount of margarine in the recipe, and maybe add some roasted garlic before pureeing.  This would be great on a white pizza. Mmm.. it is really so very good. I’d feed this to omnis without a second thought.