Cooking with Ruchi

Ruchi and I cooked some pretty awesome Vegan and Vegetarian dishes last week. I didn't think I would be able to go 9 days without meat....but I did! Okay I cheated once and made Ruchi drive me to McDonalds. But I really didn't miss meat too much. Thanks to Ruchi, I learned about various vegan options such as Flax Seeds, Nutritional Yeast, and Soy Ice Cream (yum!). I also learned to cook vegetables I've been to scared to try out like Spaghetti Squash, Butternut Squash, some green leafy vegetable looking thingie (I forget the name). Squash is really not hard to prepare at all. I use a huge butcher knife now to cut through the squash and takes less than a minute. Then pop in the oven at 400 degrees for 30-40 mins, and you can literally eat it straight out of the oven on its own. The 3rd picture is Ruchi's butternut squash risotto.

The second picture is a random side dish I made with what I could find in the fridge. It's kinda like Eggplant Parmesan, except that I used Feta Cheese instead. I lightly cooked slices of eggplant in some olive oil, seasoned it with salt and pepper, then transfered it to a casserole dish. I layered some left over marinera sauce on top of the eggplant and topped it with chopped basil, panko bread crumbs, feta cheese and chili flakes. Baked it in the oven at 350 degrees. The feta/eggplant combination turned out really good!