Dr. Praeger's California Veggie Burger, Potatoes O'Brien, Grilled 'Artihearts'

It has been a while since I've cooked! I photographed a wedding this weekend and had the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner on Friday; I came home around 11p and had my wife heat up some leftovers from Thanksgiving. I had yet more Thanksgiving leftovers on Saturday; I was involved with setting my lighting gear up at the reception hall starting around 3p and returned from the wedding around 11p again.

Thankfully, I love the vegan dishes that chef Robert Adams and pastry chef Lou Mincey at Café Parizäde put together, because it was their food again last night! I hosted a photography competition for my students there last night; the meal was great! The menu that I had designed with them included grilled flat breads with roasted red pepper and eggplant spreads; lentil-brown/wild rice cakes with lemon tahini; and celery and carrot sticks with hummus as starters. For main courses, we were to have had lime-marinated seared seitan with peppercorns and fig glaze; kale rollups with polenta, artichoke hearts, and seitan (but they didn't include this - which is okay, as I trust the Chef's work); a tangy Moroccan Sweet Potato Tagine; hearty exotic mushroom filo pie with fennel and spring onion confit; basil-roasted garlic whipped potatoes & mushroom-onion gravy (gravy was missing); and a hearty vegetable-barley stew. For dessert, I suggested to the pastry chef that we have plates of fruit and either my recipe for biscotti (double chocolate-cherry and lemon-currant) or one of her coconut-based cakes or chocolate pastries - she provided succulent pears and a great platter of pastries.

Strangely, we were also distributing raffle prizes which hadn't yet been picked up from Thanksgiving and couldn't find a case of products from Field Roast which makes the vegan wheat-based sausages and roasts that we so love. It turns out that for some reason the restaurant cooked a neat holiday roast with cranberries and surrounded by a thin layer of filo dough that they had sent us - it isn't locally available. It tasted great! But I wonder why they used our raffle prize?! The fortunate thing is that the winner of that prize is out-of-town and told us to give it to somebody else. We don't know what happened with the rest of the case of their products, alas. Next year I think we'll require that winners of refrigerated/frozen products be present for the raffle, rather than storing the products. Anyway, it was a yummy banquet and we had a lot of fun with the pictures.

Tonight, I was on my own for dinner and made a simple meal. I heated Dr. Praeger's California Veggie Burger and served it with potatoes O'Brien that I had purchased frozen and simply had to cook. I also had a few of those delicious Monterey Farms' "Buffalo" variety of "Artiheart" grilled artichoke hearts that the manufacturer sent me to try.