Foodie Friday: I didn't like half of these recipes

It's Foodie Friday! Foodie Friday is my weekly feature that gives you a window into my kitchen. I love to cook, I love to eat, I love to read cookbooks, and I love to inspire people to give vegan food a chance. Thus, Foodie Friday was whipped up and baked to perfection.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, a dish doesn't turn out looking pretty. Such was the case with the Wild West pasta bake from 1,000 Vegan Recipes. See for yourself:


The cookbook is all text--no pictures--so I never know what the recipe is intended to look like. That is both good and bad. Good, because I don't have to try to live up to some impossible studio-taken, gussied up photographic presentation. Bad, because some recipes you really ought to see before you jump right into making them. In the case of the Wild West pasta bake, I don't think any food stylist could have made this look good, because it isn't good. Actually, it was kind of gross.

This one, on the other hand, came out looking lovely:

Fusilli with roasted asparagus, sun-dried tomatoes, and pine nuts from Vegan Planet
The rest of my noms are from 1,000 Vegan Recipes:

PB&J muffins. Yummmmm.
Thai kale with coconut milk
Roasted baby potatoes with spinach, olives, and grape tomatoes. This recipe was kind of a stretch. I guess it's hard to come up with 1,000 recipes, even if you do write cookbooks for a living. It ended up being good, but I still don't think the ingredients really go together.
Double-sesame tofu with tahini sauce. The tofu was fine, but the sauce was waaaay too salty. I put this on my colorful plate because it looked so boring.
Maybe I'll have better food luck next week.

P.S. Happy birthday to my brother-in-law to be!