No new recipes but lots of food

Well, I've been cooking a lot lately, but since I've got two new cookbooks in my hands right now, I've been more interested in trying out new recipes than creating my own. I had said that I would post some more strawberry recipes, but I've had enough of the junk for a while. Last weekend I got the urge for sweets (which happens WAY too often) and decided to make this blueberry oatmeal breakfast cake from vegweb, subbing the blueberries with strawberries. It wasn't bad, but I ate too much and decided to take a break from sweets for a few days. Here's something healthier I did with the strawberries:

Strawberry-apricot oatmeal, cooked in half-soymilk/half-water for added creaminess...mmmmmm...

I've just discovered the greatness of baked tofu. I don't know why I took so long to try it, but it's awesome! So easy - just marinate the tofu in something tasty and then bake it in the marinade for 30 minutes, turning half-way through. One version I tried (although I forgot to take pictures) was the lemon-herb tofu from Dreena Burton's (author of the Everyday Vegan) cooking blog, and the other was the baked tofu from the ppk website.

Baked tofu over whole-wheat spaghetti with olive oil and garlic as part of my lunch on Monday

Then my friend Jeanna lent me The Self-Healing Cookbook by Kristina Turner. It's wonderful! The author advocates a macrobiotic diet, but she is very positive and encouraging. Rather than restricting lots of foods, she emphasizes whole grains, beans, certain vegetables, seeds and seaweeds. She suggests minimizing things like sugar, fats, tropical fruits and flour, but doesn't say you must cut them out forever to be healthy. There are a lot of nice, wholesome meals in the book, some of which I've tried but forgotten to photograph. I've been inspired to try to reduce my intake of sugars and tropical fruits and eat more whole grains, beans and vegetables. I'm not much interested in using the cooking methods in macrobiotics or cutting out eggplant, tomatoes and peppers, but there are a few things I would do well to eat more of.

Breakfast of brown rice with cinnamon, raisins and toasted sunflower seeds, from The Self-Healing Cookbook. The sunflower seeds were a really nice addition - I should use toasted seeds more often.

So this macrobiotic-ish thing lasted until today and then temporarily stopped for two reasons:
1) it was insanely hot weather and I couldn't imagine eating anything besides a smoothie, and it went downhill from there. That's ok though.

My boyfriend, Josh, made up a pasta salad (pretty tasty) which we ate accompanied by some steamed swiss chard, on the balcony. Nice hot-weather dinner. And yes, I'm aware of how many chips are in my bowls. They're well-loved.

The 2nd reason why I decided to break the macrobiotic-ish diet is because I bought Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I've seen this book mentioned many times on the internet but it's fairly hard to find here, so I had to special-order it, and it just came in. Yay! I had another craving for sweets (although I've been fairly good with that all week) so I made this:

Glazed Orange Scones from Vegan with a Vengeance

I tried to make them a bit healthier by substituting half of the white flour with spelt (I slightly increased the baking powder), using applesauce in place of the oil, and reducing the sugar. They still turned out pretty good, although I don't really want to know how much better they might've been if I'd followed the recipe exactly. I was happy with them.

Anyway, it's getting late now and I'm very tired, but I shall post again very soon!