vegansaurus!

Do you ever say to yourself, “Megan Rascal! Where’s the food porn been?!” OMG me too, like all the time. So today, from Spabettie, carrot-ginger quinoa pepper jacks! What Halloween fun is this? Now I have to tell you a secret; well, it’s not much of a secret because I tell everybody, but I hates the sweet peppers! “Bleh!” I say to them! But I love carrot-ginger stuff and of course quinoa. I would totally eat these, someone would just have to eat the pepper for me when I’m done and my dog doesn’t like peppers. He does like ice cream cones, which I don’t, so ice cream cones are covered. But my peppers, still up for grabs. 

Last night’s dinner: penne with roasted-pepper and pumpkin seed pesto, and garlicky greens. SO GOOD.

I found the pesto at Simple Recipes, but for starters I didn’t have roasted red peppers: I had three raw bell peppers, two orange and one red. Oh how grateful we are for the internet! I found these instructions for roasting them, and it was pretty easy, not to mention fun, to turn these gorgeous vegetables all black over actual fire. Be bold in your kitchen!

I also didn’t have pine nuts, and though I had several other varieties of nuts I didn’t want their taste to overpower the flavor of the peppers in the pesto, so I substituted about 2/3 cup pumpkin seeds instead. Now, mine were “roasted, lightly salted” and unhulled—versus pepitas, which are naked—but removing the hulls seemed like a hellish process of doom, so I threw the seeds in whole, adding a little extra to compensate for their hulls.

I didn’t expect the pesto to be as sweet as it turned out, but of course the roasted bell peppers were super-rich and sugary. Dandelion greens, though, have a very earthy, bitter taste, and the contrast was SCRAMAZING. You guys, so good. And so easy, really. Yes, time-consuming, but I have so much fucking time on my hands, it’s obscene. So you should make this, it’s delicious and good for you and you will love it.