Vegan Month of Food 2016 Day 21 - Memories....

We're into the home stretch of Month of Food for 2016, so very hard to believe. Today's prompt is to recreate my favorite food memory. Sounds easy enough, but no....

I have virtually no special memories of food, or at least none I purposefully want to re live. Growing up, there were no food traditions in our house, beyond the fact that on our birthdays we got to pick our birthday dinner. I was always a taco girl, heavy on the tomatoes and salsa. Today if I do eat a taco, it's stuffed with kale, or chickpeas or some other luscious vegan option. But, I got nothing to call upon from the old days.

My memories of food are not good ones. I had a total disconnect of where my "food" came from, was not a very good cook, didn't get much teaching on cooking til I was in my 40s either. I survived my 20s on spinach salads and ramen noodles, barely remember even living my 30s, and then found myself finally learning to cook when I contracted the services of a professional chef to teach me so I could manage the kitchen here. I was so unskilled it wasn't even funny.... I remember when I was a teen, I loved boiled potatoes. One night, I over cooked them. I was absolutely astonished to see that they came out as mashed potatoes. I mean, mashed potatoes came from a box.... right? I am totally serious about this. I do remember thinking "why do we buy potatoes from a box, when I can just boil a potato and mash it...." but of course would never ask that because in my house one did not question authority. I don't think I was raised poorly, in fact my parents were great parents who worked hard to instill good values and ethics into me. It was my own choice to follow, or not, and yes they were good parents in my opinion. But the food thing.... it really was nothing worth remembering.

This week of prompts are going to be challenging for me, and today is one of the most difficult. I finally settled on waffles. About 100 years ago, when the other happy vegan and I had just gotten together, he showered me with Hello Kitty appliances. Nothing makes you realize someone loves you truly until they recognize a Hello Kitty addiction, and run with it. In due course, he presented me with a Hello Kitty coffee maker (totally hilarious because back then I would never even touch a cup of coffee), a Hello Kitty Toaster, a Hello Kitty Waffle iron, and other little things like a HK lamp, alarm clock, blah blah. He would make me waffles in that waffle iron and present them to me like it was an Iron Chef masterpiece (yes, vegan style.... I was vegan even back then). I had never personally used that waffle iron.... until today. It's something for him to make special for me, but it's Vegan MoFo, so I wanted to give you pretty much one of the only (or THE only) food memories I have. Mine didn't come out fancy like his always do, in fact you cannot even see their little faces,  but they're on there. I made my coconut waffle recipe, which is basically just a vegan waffle recipe done with unsweetened coconut milk, unsweetened dried coconut, coconut extract, and ground oats instead of flour. I didn't use measurements at all for this.... I included some baking powder, a dash of non-GM safflower oil, and that is everything. FYI, you should be able to adapt pretty much any waffle recipe to flourless using ground oats. I always omit the sugar, especially when I'm making things for myself. I sliced a banana, and called it dinner:

Aw, there she is.
Still going strong after all these years...
my beloved Hello Kitty waffle maker

I'm not sure how he does it, but when he makes me waffles
they come out perfect, you can see the tiny faces too
Somehow I am incapable of doing even that.

All the other Hello Kitty appliances are long gone. Planned obsolence I guess. Somehow the waffle iron survived, and still has a place of honor in my pantry. As this week progresses and other prompts come up, hopefully I'll have some type of epiphany and remember something every day. Hope springs eternal.

Vegan is love.

xo