Happy B-day to Me!

This past Tuesday was my b-day (thanks for all of the b-day wishes!), but I didn't get to spend it how I always do - having a yummy dinner with the fam. Instead, I was off to Regina, to face weather that we have not yet been accustomed to so far this year in Ottawa - temperatures in the -40 and -50 degree zone (with the wind chill). It was awful!

One good thing about Regina - Earl's Restaurant. Who would have known that a chain restaurant in the prairies would have steamed edamame as an appetizer? I haven't even found that in Ottawa! I also had an awesome salad with an apple-sherry vinaigrette. My god, it was so good. After heading back to the hotel to work out, I couldn't stop thinking about the salad and how I could re-create it. Sure enough, when I got back into town, I found a recipe here, and instead modified it by halving the recipe, and using apple juice concentrate instead of waiting for juice to boil down to a syrup.

With pumpkin seeds and dried cranberries, it tasted just like what I had in the restaurant! I loved it.


Despite being up at 3:30am that day to catch my flight back to Ottawa, I also made a lentil soup from Vegan Italiano. As with most lentil soups that I've tried, I didn't find it had all that much flavour and was a little pasty. It didn't help that I am still being stubborn and not giving in to myself in allowing myself to salt my food.

So the family b-day celebration was last night, and we celebrated mine and my mom's b-day. As always, I made the cake! After eating Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Cupcakes from VCTOTW back in October, my mom and I were craving Boston Cream Pie as our cake. I had made one from Veggie Life a few years back, so I decided to go that route. I managed to find my issue (it's also on the web here), and only made a couple of subs: I doubled the cake part of the recipe to make two layers (I found the cake too short when only making one layer and cutting it in half), and I used Isa's recipe for chocolate ganache from VCTOTW instead of the one in the recipe. It turned out great! I had forgotten to take a pic of the cake before, because I just wanted to dig in, so here is a shot of what was left when I finally remembered to take a picture (of course it's the side where I dripped some ganache by accident). Fortunately, the link to the recipe also has a picture of an uneaten cake.