Sheep's Wool in Your O.J.

One tidbit I forgot to mention about Christmas Day that was a bit shocking and quite odd... my mom offered me some orange juice when I woke up. I am not typically one to drink juice, but it sounded like a good way to sweeten the morning a bit while opening presents. I picked up the jug of juice, H.E.B. brand, fortified with calcium. Sounded fine, right. Well, I read further and saw that it was fortified with Vitamin D3. I remembered vaguely from reading Becoming Vegan back when I first went vegan that there were two sources of Vitamin D, one plant-derived and one animal-derived. I couldn't quite remember which was which so I did a quick google search and sure enough, Vitamin D3 is sourced from sheep's wool (bleh!). My mom was shocked, how can juice not be vegan? Crazier things have happened I suppose. So no O.J. for me....

Sorry for the random story. I go back to work tomorrow, which I am pretty sad about. So this morning after a run (trying to start my New Year's resolutions a bit early :-), I made myself my favorite Sunday breakfast; french toast. I have stuck to one recipe since going vegan, but figured in the spirit of the new year I should branch out a bit. Take a guess where I got this one from....

That's right! My copy of My Sweet Vegan, which I really can't put down, I'm having so much fun just drooling over the photos. This one uses nutritional yeast, and I thought it turned out delicious. I wish I'd had some thicker bread, but thankfully since I was instructed to toast the bread before dipping it in the batter, it didn't come out soggy. To make up for the lack of O.J. from Christmas, I had clementine wedges on the side.

Dinners the past few nights have focused on new recipes as well. On Friday night, my parents and sister came over and I decided to test out two new V-con recipes on them: the pumpkin baked ziti with caramelized onions and sage crumb topping that so many people have raved about and the roasted fennel and hazelnut salad with shallot dressing. Along with the leftovers, last night we also tried the mustard crusted seitan from Yellow Rose Recipes.

All three of these dishes got a thumbs up from everyone. One thing I would change about the ziti... next time I would use about half the breadcrumbs called for. Not sure if it was because I was lazy and used store-bought breadcrumbs, but there were just so many of them and they seemed to overwhelm the flavor of the pumpkin/cashew ricotta filling. The salad was a huge hit, my parents loved the fennel and hopefully now they will introduce a new veggie to their repertoire! The toasted hazelnuts and the dried cranberries along with the shallot dressing were a perfect compliment. And the seitan was a yummy new discovery as well (I also used her recipe for seitan, which was a bit moister than other recipes I've made). If you love mustard, you need to try this easy way to fix seitan cutlets.

So now I guess I need to go think about some resolutions for the New Year. Plus I need to make a grocery list so I can make a few goodies to bring along to the two New Year's parties we'll be attending....