So long, Holidays! Phew...onto a great new year

Christmas Eve before the chaos

Glassy water, Severn River, Christmas morning

OK I am the biggest grinch ever, I really mean that. EVER.  You will never meet someone who hates holidays as much as I do...I mean why can't the gym be open, why can't life just simply go on...I love every day life, so this blip of holidays does me no good at all and always feels like it gets endlessly bogged down with hearing about material junk.  So, if you got your 9 year old an iPhone 5, yes, you know who you are, and that does not narrow it down...we sure do know a lot of folks with new iPhone 5s, well, if you spent your season shopping, I am sure Apple is psyched and a whole new generation of kids is relegated to electro magnetic radiation at unprecedented levels. Anyway, I bought all my kids' gifts the morning of Christmas eve from Barnes and Noble and Old Navy and that worked pretty well...except for a few cute knick knacks from the Union Square and Columbus Circle Christmas shops I gathered in NYC when I happened to be walking through.  So our kids had a few new games to play, the old fashioned kind, Boggle with pens and paper, magnetic chess, puzzles that entertain them for hours...and a few more possessions to fight over.

Salad Girl, earthiest greens

So well into recovery! remember last Christmas? uggh

But, as usual, our holidays pretty much revolved around food.  So we hosted Christmas Eve as usual which was a treat since last year we spent it with an extremely sick child who continues to be on the up and up...and we allowed sea food in our house (yes, animal products, I hate to give in but certain things are for the sake of family tradition.)  And I made a huge salad full of watercress, kale, dandelion, mustard greens and a few kinds of lettuce, and sauteed greens (chard and kale) and sauteed maitake mushroons....I was needing lots of greens and vitamins and micronutrients to outweigh my dessert consumption...speeding up metabolism, chugging green tea and hoping seasonal bad food choices will not hurt me in the long run. So, basically, Uncle French and I ate the vegetables, and everyone else ate so much lobster, shrimp, and clams they were all pretty stuffed.  Yet they all rallied to make a vegan ice cream sundae for dessert which was pretty spectacular if I do say so myself, I ate about four sundaes and felt a little too full...OK, a lot too full.

Christmas Eve Luke put together vegan quiche and we baked them Christmas morning...
spelt pie crusts (vegan) (yes, totally prefab, purchased frozen)
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions
1 leek
3-4 cups raw spinach
chives
1 container silken tofu
1/3 cup unsweetened organic soy milk
4-5 tablespoons nutritional yeast (note: if you are not used to nutritional yeast, it is the ingredient that gives vegan dishes an almost cheese like quality and tastes a little like parmesean)

Christmas Quiche

Saute onions and leeks in some of the olive oil.  After five minutes, add chopped spinach, saute one more minute.  Stir in chives.  Allow mixture to cool.

In a blender, blend tofu, soy milk, nutritional yeast and about 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil.

Thoroughly combine the tofu  mixture with the vegetable mixture.  Pour into a pre-made pie crust.  We used vegan spelt pie crusts and we had enough of the mixture to make two.  Bake 30 to 35 minutes at 400 degrees.  Yum!!!  These were totally amazing!!! We had a huge morning pig out (again, where is the gym when I need it?)

One more little tip:  when cooking with leeks, chop them first, then soak in a bowl of water and any dirt will sink to the bottom, pull floating leeks off top allowing any earth to stay in the bottom of the bowl...same works for sandy, gritty spinach but it seems everyone has switched to baby spinach pre-washed, triple washed, machine washed sold in sanitary plastic cubes.  I like mine in an old fashioned bunch, dark dark green, curly and leafy like the old kind.  And, I have extreme doubts this newer more delicate model has all the iron and nutrients of the old.  I used to beg my mother for spinach (I was very weird) but I am not sure people beg for this new dimple-less version we see so much of.

And just a tip about the sauteed vegetables.  We start with olive oil, garlic and ginger, let that cook a while, then add whatever vegetable or mushroom, etc, and sesame oil, very aged balsamic vinegar and wheat free organic tamari as a very basic recipe for Asian style vegetables, mushrooms and greens.  This is our easy fall back for week night dinners, we make kale and mushrooms this way fairly often.

We also on the day of Christmas Eve put together a big tray of roasted vegetables for Christmas...we had beets, fennel, cauliflower, broccoli, shitake mushrooms, red and green peppers and asparagus.  We brought that with Luke's special Nobu sauce (see link for roasted vegetables and sauce recipe)...

So, even though it truly was a very vegetably Christmas, I am still pretty glad to be done with holidays.

p.s. I refuse to fully disclose the number of Christmas desserts I consumed. I am SO done with Christmas.