I don’t have any food today, sorry! I know it’s been a while, but we’ve been out of town. I hope to have a real food post soon, but since I don’t know when that will be I thought I’d pop in and wish you a happy new year. We’ve been in Charleston visiting Mark’s family, so I also thought I’d share some of the pictures I took of various animals there to tide you over until I’m able to do some proper cooking.

The first ones are from Middleton Place, which has beautiful gardens.

Lots of water fowl, which I love. I think this is an ibis:

I grew up next to a farm that had peacocks and I’ve loved them ever since.

My first word was “duck”.

Mark has decided that I have “catdar” because I constantly spot kitties. I usually then chase them around attempting to both pet and photograph them. This one was very friendly. Success!

Water buffalo.

I love this and the other sheep pictures I took. The sheep had been driven off from their shady resting spot by a terrorizing toddler. After he left, they wished to return but in the toddler’s place was a much quieter but still untrustworthy Renae, who was trying to photograph the water buffalo. Unaware of this, I started heading back to my group and encountered all of the sheep lined up several yards away staring at me like they were going to eat my soul if I didn’t get out of their spot.

I was reading Folly Beach- and Charleston-themed novels while I was down there this time. I did some reading after returning home from a day of lugging my tripod and camera around Middleton Place and found the narrator of the book I was on at the time taking his camera and tripod to Middleton Place for a day of shooting. Weird, huh?

I recently got an infrared filter for my camera and spent most of the trip taking pictures through it, which then got converted into kinda-creepy B&W pictures that I’m really into right now. My poor mother-in-law had to drag me around town and wait patiently while I set up my tripod and took exposures anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes. It was suggested we go to Magnolia Cemetery for the types of pictures I was taking. It was a great location and I got some fun shots. I wasn’t expecting to run into much wildlife there, but I did. Apparently there are even alligators there, although I unfortunately didn’t see any. I DID see this goose practicing his ballet poses:

Wouldn’t it have been hilarious if after my parents had repeated the word “duck” to me a million times, trying to get me to say my first word, my first word had been “goose”?

Other than the fun infrared pictures I took, the blue heron was my favorite part of Magnolia, though. What a beautiful animal. He tolerated me for a while and let me get pretty close:

Eventually, though, he got tired of me and took off across the water …

… and landed on a tree on the opposite side:

I returned home from Magnolia Cemetery and picked up a different book I was reading, only to have the main character die and be buried in…Magnolia Cemetery. What was going on with the books I was reading mirroring my life?? Well, at least I wasn’t buried in Magnolia.

In more materialistic news, Mark gave me a Vitamix, which I’ve been very much coveting, for Christmas, so if anyone has any favorite things to make in one, please share! I feel I have a lot of blending to do this week.

For dinner tonight I got the idea to combine sweet potatoes and baby kale. It seemed very autumnal. I gave the internet a half-hearted search for ideas, but didn’t come up with much. Sweet potatoes and kale are not an unheard-of pairing, but a lot of the recipes I came across were soups or stews and I was worried about overwhelming my delicate baby kale. During the search, I did find an intriguing non-kale recipe, however: Smoked Chile Scalloped Sweet Potatoes.

The only problem? I think heavy cream is gross. It’s not even the vegan thing, although obviously it’s off limits because of that. Maybe it’s because I was raised on skim milk and I don’t recall ever even having cream of any sort, but I just think heavy cream – especially in a savory recipe – is disgusting. (I also tried whole milk once – before I was vegan, of course, – and almost threw up.) I don’t even want to substitute for it; I just think the idea of putting it or anything that is remotely like it in my food is abhorrent. And heavy cream is a pretty big component of that recipe. Fortunately, my vegan sub doesn’t just make the recipe safe for those who prefer not to eat animal products, it also makes it much healthier and a lot less…gross.

I cut this back to serve two as a side dish. If you’re serving more, feel free to double it.

Chipotle Scalloped Sweet Potatoes
Adapted from The Food Network

1 medium to large sweet potato, sliced thinly
1 cup unsweetened non-dairy milk (I used hemp, and not only that, I only had 3/4 a cup left so I thinned it out with 1/4 cup water, which was even better for making this dish as little like heavy cream as possible)
1 – 2 tsp chipotle powder, depending on your heat preference
1 tsp vegan vegetarian or “chicken” bouillon
2 Tbsp Dragonfly’s Bulk, Dry Uncheese Mix (you really want to have some of this stuff lying around at all times)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Peel and slice the sweet potato about 1/8″ thick. A mandolin is a huge help here as uniform slices will look best and also cook evenly.

See? Nice and uniform:

Whisk together the rest of the ingredients in a small bowl.

In a small baking dish, layer a row of slightly overlapping sweet potato slices.

Add additional layers until all slices are used up.

Pour the “milk” mixture over the sweet potato slices.

Cover and bake for 45 minutes or until sweet potatoes are soft.

Since I wasn’t putting them together in a single dish, I just simply sauteed the baby kale in a little olive oil with garlic and seasoned with salt and pepper. This was my first time trying baby kale. It’s gorgeous.

Baby kale is every bit as awesome as I expected it to be.

I didn’t cook the sweet potatoes and baby kale together, but you can be sure I ATE them together. I’m one of those people that happily mushes everything on their plate together – I don’t understand people who have “food touching” issues – but the sweet potatoes and kale were particularly awesome together. Also served with barley pilaf from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Mark said the sweet potatoes were great; “surprisingly great”. The surprising part wasn’t that I made something great (I don’t think), it was that the sweet potatoes were spicy. And smoky. Chipotle-y! This was a really good meal.

Halloween was a couple of weeks ago, but my friend Dave just sent me this lovely photograph, which he snapped Saturday night. It’s Renae, The Happiest Zombie Ever.

Creepy? Okay, to make up for it, here’s a nice, non-creepy squirrel on our patio:

And here is a skunk who wants to come in. AND I WANT TO LET HIM IN BECAUSE HE’S AWESOME. But I’m not going to. No, I’m not. I swear. It’s wrong to invite skunks into your home. No matter how awesome they are.

Maybe he could just come in for 5 minutes?

Mark’s been sick this week and wasn’t up for dinner tonight. Long-time readers may know that when Mark doesn’t eat dinner, dinner is Indian! I’d been planning a nice autumn meal of seitan, kale, and delicata squash before he announced he wasn’t hungry, so I decided to save it for tomorrow instead of eating it alone. But then I eyed up the kale and considered how much I’d been looking forward to eating it…so I didn’t put it away.

Like a lot of my Indian meals, because they are generally impromptu affairs born of Mark’s refusal of dinner, this recipe was made up on the fly using ingredients I had on hand and needed to use up. I’d done a really smart thing Sunday afternoon after returning home from LA: I cooked up a pound of dried chickpeas, reserving some for salads, and freezing the rest. I also cooked up a large batch of rice and portioned it into single serving sizes, which were also frozen, ready for me to grab for a quick meal down the road. Tonight that quick meal was realized.

Chole Saag

1/2 large or 1 small onion, small dice
about 1″ of ginger, grated
3-4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/8 tsp red pepper flakes
1 bunch kale, chopped into fairly small pieces
8 oz spinach, also chopped into fairly small pieces
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup vegetable broth or water, plus additional (I start with 1/2 cup broth and add plain water)
salt to taste (I used Indian black salt, but regular old salt is fine)
asafoetida to taste (optional; I love the stuff)
lemon wedges, for serving

In a large pan, pot, or wok, heat some oil over medium high heat, then add the onions, garlic, ginger, red pepper flakes, turmeric, garam masala, and asafoetida if desired. Cook until soft, then add the kale. Stir and cook down slightly, then add the spinach. Stir and cook down again, then reduce heat to medium and add about 1/2 cup broth or water and the chickpeas. Cook for about 20 minutes, adding 1/4 cup of water or broth periodically if it looks dry. Salt to taste. Serve over basmati rice with lemon wedges.

Since I didn’t take prep photos (I didn’t know it would be blog-worthy!), this post seems uncharacteristically short. To make up for it, here are some pictures I took shortly before our vacation, when I spotted a cardinal outside the window taking a bath in an overturned planter. Not the greatest pictures since I was taking them through both a screen and dirty glass, but the subject is pretty.

I wasn’t the only one charmed!