all hail seitan, our new dark lord

When I first started getting into cooking when I was around 14, I decided that I also wanted to write a cookbook. Not like some sell-out Emeril bullshit, but like a hand-made book with recipes that I could force my children to accept as an heirloom in lieu of money or property. I'd really wanted to have my dad do some illustrations in it, make it a family project. I got a blank book and hand transcribed a couple of my time-tested recipes. I made countless dishes, but now the bar was set so high, very few made it into the pristine pages of my slowly progressing cookbook. I started college and moved into a dorm where the extent of the cooking I could possibly do was craftily warming soups on my coffee maker hotplate. The book itself was misplaced somewhere in one of the moves. I'd moved into several apartments but between work and school, I seldom got to cook. When I moved into a place by myself, cooking for only myself, it was much less enjoyable. When Sam started weightwatchers, it gave me the perfect opportunity to flex my chef-muscles again, even better that her new diet syncs perfectly with my vegetarian one. Looking for recipes, making grocery lists, shopping for ingredients, and sharing meals together has been really fun for me. We've even resurected the cookbook idea and as a place to test recipes, I've made the herbivore recipe blog to cull recipes from weightwatchers, epicurious, vegweb, and vegetarian times as well as the cookbooks we have around the house. *love, r.