Mexican Cooking Class: Fajitas, Avocado Salad, Quinoa with Leeks, Cornbread, Potato Soup (and Dilip's Orangey Rice Pudding, Mango)

In tonight's cooking class, my students made delicious fajitas out of seitan (wheat gluten), bell peppers, and onions, and enjoyed them with either new hemp tortillas that I found a few days ago (nice but they didn't hold together) or sprouted grain ones. We were to make guacamole, but the only avocadoes that I could find were fairly firm, so they made a tasty avocado salad. Their quinoa with leeks came out nicely, and everybody loved the cornbread - I bought hempmilk as an ingredient (usually I use rice milk), and it was a winner, as it was in the delicious "perfect" potato soup! Their orangey rice pudding was very tasty, and we also had champagne mango pieces.

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I'm preparing for pasta tomorrow - I'm overdue for using my slow cooker again! I saw some heirloom yellow tomato sauce in the store and decided to try making my own; the sauce that I saw was quite liquidy and really not that expensive (around $7 or $8 for a large jar - heirlooms are expensive and the tomatoes would cost that much alone to make that much sauce), so I may still buy it in the future to mix in with a chunkier base that I'd make with my cooker.

I thought I would do three things differently from my previous pasta sauces. Instead of using roma tomatoes, I used yellow-red heirloom ones; the taste is fabulous, so the sauce should be great. Instead of sauteeing the other ingredients, I put them all in raw - a few cloves of elephant garlic, finely diced; end pieces, diced, from Field Roast's handmade stuffed vegan (with apples, squash, and mushrooms) Celebration Roast (I was slicing it for making sandwiches for a lunch meeting my wife is attending for work tomorrow); and olive chunks, a few tablespoons of olive oil, fresh oregano, and 2 frozen teaspoons of basil, all of which, of course, I don't cook anyway, as well as a little salt. I can't remember what the third difference is, so it is probably not significant. I wonder if the sauce will be too garlicky, but somehow I think it will be quite good - this slow cooker seems to be able to do no harm :-) !