Brunch.

Brunch.

Yesterday, we had Ollie's best friends Lucca and Sage over for brunch. Since none of the babies are really old enough to have pancakes or tofu scramble, we invited their parents too. It was such fun. None of us had met Lucca's dad yet, so that was nice. Especially since I only see Lucca's mom pretty much every day.

It was also my second brunch-hosting experience in recent weeks, and the first to involve a vegan scramble. In fact, it was the first time I've ever made one. I sort of used a recipe, but not really. It involved onions, potatoes, crumbled tofu, crumbled fauxsage (fake sausage/pronounced fossage in my world) cayenne, turmeric, pepper, Braggs, and some fresh cilantro from our favorite organic farm. It was impressive! I'm pretty sure most everyone else just tolerated it, because the only people who get excited about vegan breakfast items are the vegans who are usually so deprived of such breakfast items. Everyone else was all, "yeah, these aren't eggs."

I also made some Pear Cardamom muffins with poppy seeds. It felt very middle eastern, like I should have some delicate tea with them in a sweet little tea set in a little street cafe in a dusty town square. But maybe cardamom + poppy seeds isn't middle eastern at all; I'm really not sure where I got that vision. Blame the movies. Anyway, those were spectacular. Cardamom is a strange taste, though. Those are from a publisher's promotional copy of ExtraVeganZa (it took me weeks to figure out that title, FYI), which is a cookbook produced by an organic farm in Phoenix, originally intended to help their CSA customers use their weekly produce. It's been a really great cookbook, especially because it was given to me for free! I like free stuff.

And we rounded off the main food items with some Pumpkin Pie Pancakes from Vegan Planet. The cookbook isn't anything special, but it has so many solid, fool-proof staple recipes. We've had the pumpkin pie pancakes almost every weekend this whole fall.

I will never be one of those foodie bloggers, because I can never get around to taking pictures of my food. And if I do, they sit on the camera for weeks, and by the time I upload them, it's another week or two before they're on Flickr, and then I've forgotten what the food is. What are those food-colored circles? Are those pancakes? Maybe? Or that pourable, no-roll tortilla experiment? (Note: you just can't make pourable no-roll tortillas. Don't even bother, unless you like tortilla-flavored pancakes that fall apart).