I love olives. They are probably my most favorite food in the history of the world. When I was little I once had a dream that the Sears Tower in Chicago was made of olives. I also used to put an olive at the bottom of my ice cream cone for a salty finish. I still like to finish my meal with an “after dinner olive” and I make sure if I am running low to keep an “emergency olive” on hand in the jar until I replace my stash. This naturally led to a love of Italian and Greek food. Traveling in the Mediterranean I was so excited to be able to order a little plate of olives with every meal!

Living in Austin Texas I eat a lot of tacos. I often read on vegan food message boards “I don’t know what to put in my taco” and it makes me laugh because anything can be a taco! I had a bunch of red peppers in my fridge that I needed to use up and some black olives that I had already popped the can on as well so I decided to make and Italian-sausage-style seitan, a roasted red pepper creamy topping and add some olives. They were the best tacos ever. My partner had eaten three before I even took the picture!

Italian Style Seitan O’Greatness

Original Seitan Recipe

This turned out fantastic. The red wine and tomato paste made it very yummy. Next time I will replace the nutritional yeast with chickpea flour because I think that would make this the perfect Italian style seitan. You mix together the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another bowl. Then add them together and knead for a few minutes. Roll the seitan into a log and then roll it into foil making sure to keep the whole dough surrounded and to twist the ends. Bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 90 minutes. When I made the seitan I also roasted peppers, garlic, and potatoes in the oven and could have made cookies too since it takes so long!

1 and 1/2 cups Vital Wheat Gluten

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

1 tsp salt

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp fennel

1/2 tsp sugar

1 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp cayenne

3/4 tsp caraway

1/2 tsp corriander

1 Tbsp worchestire

1 and 1/2 Tbsps Red Wine

3 Tbsp tomato paste

1 Tbsp soy sauce

2 Tbsp olive oil

Roasted Red Pepper, Jalapeno, and Pine Nut Cream

First roast the peppers for 15 minutes in a 450 degree oven. Then let them steam in a paper bag for another 5 minutes to loosen the skin. Remove the skins if you want and add the peppers, jalapeno, pine nuts, and garlic into a food processor and mix well. Then add the water and salt, taste, and season again. Enjoy this cream with tacos, bagels, or maybe mix with some vegetable broth and some wine to make a pasta sauce!

4 red bell peppers

6 medium garlic cloves (you may want to use less)

1 jalapeno

1/2 cup pine nuts

1 tsp parsley or 1 Tbsp fresh parsley

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup water

For El Taco Italiano*

1/3 of Seitan roll, chopped

2 cloves garlic

1 Tbsp olive oil

5 cups of Spinach or 2 cups of other leafy green (Chard would be nice)

1 cup black olives

6 Tortillas

First wrap the tortillas in foil and warm up in the oven. Saute the sausage with a couple cloves of chopped garlic and some olive oil. After the sausage is browned add quite a bit of spinach or other dark leafy green. Cook until wilted. Assemble sausage mixture, red pepper cream, olives on tortillas and Enjoy!

*Note- you may want to cut WAY down on the garlic in this recipe. We love garlic but it was pretty intense! I think next time I would fry the sausage with red onion instead of more garlic.

Yum, yum! I still haven’t been cooking very much lately, we’ve been getting by on eating out (more than we should!) and Jim putting together simple meals like bruschetta on ciabatta and hummus with various dippers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just not that satisfying 4 nights a week.

From last week, a snacky-time treat:

Cashew cheese from Real Food Daily, Seitan O’Greatness, and crackers. I modified the seitan recipe again and used soy sauce for the Worcestershire, omitted the cinammon and paprika and added fennel and liquid smoke. I took the cheese and seitan in for lunch one day and actually got everyone there to try it.

Breakfast this morning:

Chocolate Chocolate Chip pancakes from Vegan with a Vengeance with warm, pureed strawberries on top and a tofu scramble consisting of onions, garlic, red potatoes, tofu, nutritional yeast, oregano, turmeric, kalamata olives, sundried tomatoes and spinach. So yummy! We ate at about 11 (okay, that’s not quite breakfast, but hey, it’s Sunday!) and weren’t hungry until 9p.m. tonight. That’s filling!

A quick dinner:

A whole wheat tortilla slathered with hummus, torn red romaine, a tomato and some slices of pickle with rosemary fries and organic ketchup on the side. So yummy and simple. Now I need to be a good girl and use up the rest of the tortillas instead of forgetting about them and letting them grow mold.

And dessert on the fly:

Vegan chocolate chip cookies from Trader Joe’s with a scoop of Vanilla Fudge Marble Soy Dream in the middle. These cookies (the bag in the background) are the bestest store bought chocolate chip cookies ever, IMO. Well, I do really love Alternative Baking Company, too… Maybe I’d be better not to judge and to just enjoy the goodness that is cookies I don’t have to bake.

I have to apologize for being such a crappy blogger friend. I am long overdue, and greatly missing, checking in on your blogs. I have come to think of many of you as good friends and that’s just bad of me. I appreciate all of you for checking in with me and I apologize for not cooking much lately and food my sporadic posts. With releasing the book I’ve been busy, but I also need to set aside more time for it.

I’ve really been reflecting on a lot of things lately. Family, friends and the lines where those relationships cross. Food, health, mental health, disease and death and the lines where those things cross. And I’ve also been looking inward a lot lately, too.

Three weeks ago today my dad died. It was not expected, at least not in a traditional sense. He took his own life. I spent a week in Minnesota with my family and then came back and have been trying to busy myself for the past 2 weeks with the book. But I can’t distract myself and the more I’ve been trying to, the harder it’s been. I wondered whether or not to post anything about it, and I decided at this point I should. Maybe this is too personal for a blog like this, but I like to think that part of the beauty of the internet is being able to connect with other people. That’s what I need and maybe that’s just what some of you need, too. I’m not ashamed to admit the truth or talk about things, it’s not talking about things that keeps people from ever feeling free.

My father lived his life with untreated mental illness. He drank- heavily. But he taught me to throw a football, played Barbies with me in a falsetto voice, taught me to debate, instilled a strong work ethic in me, taught me to seek out knowledge, to be proud of myself and to stand by my convictions unapologetically. He loved his family more than himself, and treated himself in kind. Suicide aside, he only had so much time on Earth because he didn’t take care of himself. He smoked several packs of cigarettes every day, abused his liver daily with large amounts of alcohol, and ate horribly. Fast food and Ramen were his staples. He worked himself to the bone, pulling crazy shifts and at times in my life juggling up to 3 jobs at once to make ends meet. The lack of sleep, addictions and poor eating habits could only go on for so long.

In the past three weeks I’ve learned how common it is that people joke about suicide. I’ve learned how petty people can be, holding minor, pointless grudges against loved ones. And I’ve learned that so many people don’t care about taking care of themselves, even if not for themselves, for their family. A large portion of the people I work with smoke, the largest number of people I’ve ever worked with and an appalling number for health-conscious Oregon. The food they consume often consists of McDonald’s (where the heck is there a McDonald’s in inner SE Portland?), microwave meals and energy drinks. A heavy girl I work with, who claims to be trying to lose weight, was asked by another co-worker about the 2 heaping teaspoons of sugar she was putting in her water bottle. She replied that she couldn’t stand the “taste” of water and had to put sugar in it in order for it to be palatable.

Why don’t people care to take better care of themselves? I was asked recently if I ever miss eating things I used to, meat, cheese, etc. I’m sure these people can’t fathom that I’m telling them the truth when I say, no, not only do I not miss it, I find it repulsive. I eat significantly more healthily than the majority of these folks, and I’m by far not the most healthy vegan out there. But I care about my body, not only because I want to be healthy, but because I want to do everything I can preventatively to keep myself around to be there for my family, to have a healthy vessel to carry our future children in, to see my grandchildren.

My father wanted those things too, but he didn’t take care of his mental health, either. He would have been a proud grandfather. He would have continued to be a proud father, my brothers are only 14 and 16 and still have so many milestones to pass. He would have given his shirt off his back, literally, for any family member or friend in need. But he didn’t take care of himself as much as he took care of everyone else, and the only person who could have changed that was him.

I didn’t have it in me to get up and speak at my father’s funeral and I regret that. I don’t think I could have held it together, but I wish I would have tried. And I get to add that to the laundry list of regrets I have. I wish I would have called more, said ‘I love you’ more, made it clear how proud of him I am, let go of more of the baggage I held onto, the things that kept us from having a more open relationship. I wish I would have let Randy the man have a cleaner slate than Randy the dad and not held him to such a high standard. We all are, after all, just human. I wish I would have told him about how much it meant to me, the day we went to take my driver’s test, when we wandered around suburban Minneapolis, going from one garage sale to the next, seeking out treasures and enjoying our uncommon afternoon alone together. Or when I was 8 and we flew my kite off of the back deck of our house in the middle of the night and it went up so high it shimmered like a star. Or when I brought Jim over for the first time to meet him and he gave him his wide, thin-lipped smile and head-nod of approval, coupled with a firm handshake.

I have to deal with the things I never said, wish I did and would love to take back. We all do, in our own ways, with our own people. But things like this don’t have to happen in our lives, to the people we love. Please, take a minute to think of someone you might consider forgiving, reaching out to, letting come back into the fold. DO IT. You never know if the chance will come again. And if someone you know is wasting away, not taking care of themselves, setting themselves up for diabetes, cancer, has an untreated illness, let them know how much you love them and how much dimmer your life would be without them. Hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. But if we could just look a little further into the future, make a little change, better ourselves, how many fewer regrets would we have?

Thanks for reading.