Will I ever be not busy? It doesn’t seem like it, but I think my life should calm down in January, so hopefully then I’ll be back to posting more regularly, with my normal obnoxious photographing-every-little-step posts. In the meantime, here is a quick post featuring some soup I made for dinner tonight. It’s really just this Cream of Asparagus Soup recipe on AllRecipes, veganized, though it is also very similar to the Creamless Cream of Asparagus Soup I made earlier this year.

“Cream” of Asparagus Soup

3 Tbsp oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
4 cups vegan broth
1 bundle asparagus, chopped
1 large or 2 small potatoes, chopped
2 Tbsp soy sauce
freshly ground pepper, to taste

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven, then add the onion and celery and saute until soft and golden. Stir in the flour, stirring until completely smooth to avoid lumps. Add the vegan broth – I like to heat water to a boil in my electric kettle, then pour it into the pot and add the bouillon – and stir until smooth and thickened. Add the asparagus, potatoes, and soy sauce and bring to a boil …

… then reduce heat and simmer for half an hour or until potatoes and asparagus are soft. Season with as much freshly ground pepper as you’d like. Remove from heat and puree using an immersion blender, or let cool for a while and transfer to a blender in batches and blend …

… then return to pot and bring back up to temperature if necessary before serving.

It doesn’t look all that exciting, but looks can be deceiving – this is really tasty. Mark informed me this was “completely awesome” and had two huge servings…then later while doing the dishes lamented the fact that he ate too much. Mark added rice to his for some texture; I ate mine plain and spooned barbecued beans over my portion of rice. Either way it’s quick, easy, healthy, and delicious.

LA is beginning to seem like so long ago, but I promised you a Cats of LA photo essay, so here you go:

My gosh doesn’t this look like Brachtune?!

Oh wait, that last cat isn’t of LA….yet ..?

OH MY GOD I ate a lot of food in L.A.! By the last day I was starting to miss homecooked meals and swore I was going to eat nothing but salad for the next month to atone for my gluttony. Well, I could happily eat a salad every day for a month, but obviously I’m going to need more than that. I still want to keep things light this week though, so I decided to make soup and salad for dinner last night. Here is the soup I made:

Cabbage Barley Tomato Soup

1 small onion, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 large or 2 small carrots, chopped
5-6 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
4 cups veggie broth
1 14.5 oz can crushed tomatoes (I used fire roasted)
1 14.5 oz can Great Northern (or other similar) beans
1/3 cup pearled barley
several leaves cabbage (I used savoy), chiffonaded or chopped
lots of freshly ground pepper

Heat some oil in a Dutch oven, then add the onions, celery, and carrots, and saute until onions are starting to brown. Add the garlic and saute another minute or two. Deglaze the pot with some sherry, wine, or broth, then add the remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer until barley is cooked and soup is slightly thickened, about 45 minutes. Serve with crusty bread.

This was pretty good; hearty enough to fill me up (accompanied by a salad) but light enough to not make me feel fat. It tasted even better for lunch today.

I don’t have anything else food related to tell you about L.A., so if you’re here only for the food, that wraps up today’s post. Those interested in a few travel photos can stick around, although I’ll have to warn you I didn’t take any photos at all that I consider particularly great. I don’t usually go for particularly touristy things and I don’t like celebrities, so I didn’t go on any tours or anything and most of what I did was what any resident of the city would do: eat, read, and shop. Of course, my shopping was limited to book and thrift stores, which is all the shopping I can tolerate – no Rodeo Drive for me, thanks. I’ve mentioned some of the bookstores already, but if you didn’t know, L.A. is a great town for thrifting. I went home with 2 or 3 times as many clothes as I arrived with and I think I spent a total of $50 on clothes.

Anyway, on with a pictorial representation of my visit. Here is where you can legally graffiti on Venice Beach:

Obligatory shots of the ubiquitous Hollywood sign:

From Runyon Canyon

From the Observatory

Close up

Foucault pendulum in the Griffith Observatory:

(By the way, I read Foucault’s Pendulum this year and hated it, but I still think the device is neat.)

One of Fortinbras’ favorite places is the Getty Villa and he was anxious to share it with us. It’s a beautiful museum devoted to Greek and Roman antiquity. Half of the beauty of this place is its serene setting; just walking around the grounds is nearly as exciting as looking at the art and artifacts and the architecture of the place itself is in fact true artwork. Here are some random photos:

This is an herb garden. It also contains citrus trees, from which Fortinbras says you can pluck fruit for free in season, however I wouldn’t take Fort’s word for it because he’s a known liar.

When we were reviewing my pics later, Fort wanted to make this one his desktop.

This is papyrus.

Fort’s favorite sculpture; he likes to pretend he is this drunk guy slurring his words at a party.

He also likes this one:

Mark, however, apparently prefers this one:

(This is a reproduction statue visitors are encouraged to touch by the way; Mark doesn’t molest real art.)

The Getty Villa apparently does this to me:

Stay tuned next time for The Cats of L.A., a photo essay by Renae.

It’s Saturday evening and Mark and I are preparing to head home tomorrow. I’m becoming extremely anxious to see the kittens, but I’ll be sorry to leave our friends – and all this delicious food – behind and am looking forward to returning soon. Unfortunately, Virgin America may end up charging me for two seats I’ve eaten so much!

Earlier in the week, Fortinbras and I went hiking in Runyon Canyon and afterward stopped at the first vegan restaurant we came to, California Vegan on Sunset Blvd, which had a very similar menu to Lotus Vegan, which I discussed in the previous post, although that just meant it was delicious. I had the baked soy “fish” with vegetables:

For dinner that evening, Fortinbras found and wanted to check out Veggie Grill, which Fort kept calling “vegan fast food”, but it was so much more than that. We started with the wings, which were incredibly tasty:

Fort ordered the Carne Asada on a bed of kale instead of a bun. He absolutely loved it.

I had the Bayou Chickin’, the char-grill taste of which was amazing, and the mac & cheese, which seemed to use Daiya (which impressed Fortinbras, although I’ve made very similar at home).

Veggie Grill also has beer and wine (a house red and white on tap; the red was really pretty good). Fort’s planning to go back often.

Last night Mark and I dragged V to Shin Barbecue, which I was dying to go to after reading Quarry Girl‘s post about it. Now, one of my all-time favorite meals is dolsot bibimbap and I have no problem going into a “normal” Korean restaurant and asking them to make it veggie for me even if it’s not on the menu. But I could absolutely not pass up the opportunity to check out a Korean restaurant offering vegan meals right on the menu, separately prepared from the meat in the kitchen. Boy am I glad we didn’t miss this! Our waiter was extremely helpful when I told him we were vegan; the service was really outstanding. And the food? Incredible! Really, really good.

We got six vegan banchan, including the kimchee, which was vegan! Yum, yum, yum. We ate it too quickly for me to get a picture, although we also later got refills.

Then, our appetizer, the tofu steak:

Next up the kimchee fried rice. I’m not always a huge fan of fried rice because it seems so greasy and heavy, but this was soooo good! It was not at all greasy and seemed almost light.

And the seitan bulgogi, which Mark in particular loved. We had intended to actually barbecue this at our table, but the kitchen forgot and sent it out already grilled. I wouldn’t have said anything in the first place, but the waiter brought it out with apologies, then brought us some beautifully sliced, marinated veggies for us to play with on the barbecue to make up for it! (As if we needed more food…)

We also got the kimchee soup, which they made vegan for us (it usually has beef broth). Oh, yumminess in a bowl!

This morning we went to the Getty Villa and afterward wanted lunch. Fortinbras found a vegan restaurant just a few miles from the museum, but either Mark entered the address into the GPS wrong or the GPS just hates us, because we ended up on I-10 nowhere near the alleged restaurant. So we decided to just head back to Fort’s ‘hood, but the GPS wasn’t done messing with us and delivered us to some heavy off-highway traffic. I was started to get cranky-hungry and was quite displeased, when I happened to look over to my left as I was driving and see “Ethiopian Vegan Restaurant” in big green letters. So I pulled into a very handy parking spot and we enjoyed an all-you-can-eat vegan buffet for $9.99 each. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE Ethiopian food? Well, I do, and this was all-vegan and all-amazing. A very happy detour indeed! The restaurant was Rahel Ethiopian and I wish it would relocate to Northern Virginia.

So, the question everyone is asking is: am I going to move out here or what? Well, quite frankly, I would actually consider moving here solely for the food. And the lack of snow. There is still a lot to explore and I’m eager to return; this city is very large. I didn’t take many great photos on this trip for various reasons, but here are a few sort of crappy ones that show some of the non-food-related things I did.

Jathan took us to Venice Beach, where Mark was interested in the graffiti artists.

(By the way, Jathan also showed us the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was really good. Watch it if you can.)

I didn’t know there were really canals in Venice until Jathan showed them to us and now Mark and I are both dying to live in one of the houses that line them. (I saw a lot of cats here, too.)

Mark and I accidentally found ourselves on Mulholland Drive one evening around sunset and very much enjoyed the views. This was taken with my phone and looks like a fake movie backdrop to me.

Fortinbras and I went hiking in Runyon Canyon, which gave me my first close glimpse of the Hollywood sign:

V and Mark and I went to the Griffith Observatory, which has fabulous views of the city, although it was so smoggy or hazy when we went that my pictures aren’t that great. The Hollywood sign is actually behind me in this picture, but you can’t see it.

Not a great picture, but from the Observatory, here’s the city at sunset.

All of tomorrow will be consumed by travel and time zone changes, but the reward will be two sweet, probably very confused kittens whom I miss very much!