Snow Day Cooking

Okay, I'll be honest. The hinted upon snow day was really a week ago, but I felt obligated to blog about it (since I've been meaning to do so) before I blog about my dinner and bread baking tonight.  It was actually a very fun meal that involved me and two other roommates each making a dish to contribute. (Please excuse the messy kitchen in the background below.)

In the front are some frozen vegetables which were sauteed with balsamic vinegar among other things.  To the right are latkes, or "those Jewish pancakes" as my roommate likes to call them.  I always top them with apple sauce and never ketchup, because I want to do it the German way, plus I think ketchup just overpowers the potato taste.  The recipe that she used was from Veganomicon.

And last but not least, is my contribution on the left. I had a bunch of swiss chard, a great vegetable love of mine, and I somehow got the idea to make a pesto with it. I had seen recipes were spinach had been used for some of the basil, and, since I didn't have any basil, I figured that I should give it a try with chard.

It may be a bit difficult to see, but this pesto was absolutely lovely.  I followed the pesto recipe in VwaV except that I used three rather large chard leaves.  I think one of my favorite parts of this pesto was how the red stems give it these gorgeous red flakes amongst all the green.  Even though I served it on top of a lemony brown rice with white beans and tomatoes, I have plans on making this again for pizza along with the vodka tomato sauce. Such a combination could only turn out absolutely amazing and may cause me to forget to put any other vegetables on the pizza!

Coming soon: another variation on red cabbage salad with lazy quinoa and carrot cake!