Yum, Yum, and YUM!

One family birthday/anniversary/welcome home party and three amazing new vegan goodies, all in one afternoon! I'd been absolutely dying to try Celine's cheezy crackers and knew that making them along with some sort of fresh dip would be a great compliment to our party spread (the fam always requests new vegan food to try at our gatherings). I was soooo right, these are incredible! they truly do have that cheezy zing we all know and love from the non-vegan goldfish crackers. I only had butterfly cookie cutters but the recipe made about fifty. I already can't wait to make these again. I love how becoming vegan spurs me to make things I'd never have made before. Crackers, all by myself? Who knew how easy and tasty they could be?! Now I do! They even went faster than the rice crackers or wheat thins I didn't make but also supplied.

The freshest, most appetizing sounding dip I could find was Vegan Vittles' Green Bean Pate. Don't let the beigeness of this picture fool you. Oh man, if you haven't had this before, you must try it! I doubled the recipe and am so glad i did. Fresh green beans, browned onions, toasted walnuts, a bit of silken tofu, salt, pepper, and nutmeg and wow 's all I can say. The combo was a huge hit. No one could keep themselves from diggin in til it was aaaaall gone.

But first, here's a lil butterfly takin a dip in the dip. ;) Last, but certainly not least was VWaV's Udon Noodles with Peanut Sauce. I skipped the seitan and used rice noodles (the Cap'n's sister has a severe wheat allergy so I always try to accommodate the both of us with great food) and added some carrots to the mix. This was cool, refreshing, so fresh and reeeeeally tasty. Everyone loved it. I only wish I'd doubled the peanut sauce because it was just so amazing and just barely enough for such a huge salad (that beautiful platter is more than a foot in diameter!)

Also to the celebratory table I offered up some grill roasted cauliflower (simply with some olive oil, tons of garlic, sea salt, and cracked black pepper) and the always wonderful seitan ribz, this time with Annie's Naturals BBQ Sauce. For some reason these were drier than usual so I opted not to toss them on the grill and they were just warm, not hot, but still tasty.

While everyone else dug into the Cap'n's family's traditional chocolate cake his sister and I enjoyed some wheat-free vegan chocolate chip cookies. Nope, no picture of those. Why? Well, because we deVOURED them, that's why! ;) but you can find that recipe here.