Whiz Wit'

Work has been insane of late, so I have neglected my poor little blog too much.  It isn't that I didn't want to post, but I have been so busy that I've hardly been able to pull together a smoothie, much less anything post-worthy.

Hopefully, now that the state make-up testing is over, things will simmer down.  While state testing is always stressful, the site where I was proctor was only blocks away from Loving Hut, a vegan restaurant I have been wanting to try for a good while (and wanted to even more after this post at Peas and Thank You).

It was so good that I went twice and was bummed out that I wasn't able to go a third day in a row.  I kind of wish a location would open on my side of the Valley, but part of me doesn't, as I may frequent it a bit too much.  There are two local places on my side of town that I need to try.  I kind of just need to find a friend (or coughhusbandcough) who might be willing to try a vegan BLT with me.

Anyway, the one real meal I was able to make last week was a black bean and butternut squash burrito from Oh She Glows, which I modified a bit to work with what we had in the pantry.  I had been wanting to make it since I saw this post roll across my Twitter feed, but I always remembered too late to make the brown rice.

Fortunately, Pinch My Salt has a lovely post that gets your real brown rice in a jiffy, and I was good to go!

(Both blogs have much nicer pictures than I do; I apologize for the chop job here)

Anaheim peppers and red onion

Sweet potato ready to roast

Kind of looks like dirty rice!

The only real modifications I made were subbing the Anaheim peppers and sweet potato (although we did have a handful of leftover butternut squash that I also heated up), not using garlic (because, shockingly, we managed to run out without me noticing), and using real cheese instead of Diya.  I do want to try this vegan cheese, but since we still have about 15 tons of the real stuff from my husband's last Costco run, I need to work through that first.

It was delicious, and I love that I have plenty of leftover filling in the fridge so that I can actually make myself lunch this week.  We're definitely adding this to the rotation.

In other news, The Sun Devils won their Homecoming game against the Colorado Buffaloes this weekend.  It was a great game (and FABULOUS weather), and we had great seats!

The game started at 3:30, so after HRH was shipped off on her way to Nana's house, we drove to the park and ride, hopped on the Light Rail, and headed to Tempe for a new shirt for me and a new car decal for Ursula, our new Forester.  As always, we shopped at Cactus Sports, which is right next door to Rula Bula.  Even when we lived in Michigan, we purchased our ASU gear from Cactus Sports.  It's a fantastic local business, and they are extreme Sun Devil alumni/fans, so we love giving them our business (note to anyone needing to get me a present any time soon - the "May the Fork Be With You" tank top allows me to be a Sun Devil fan and Star Wars geek at the SAME TIME).

Then we had a cheesesteak at Corleone's, where I had my first Cheez Whiz experience (I'm not totally proud of that, but I was informed that this is the "proper" way to eat a cheesesteak).  After polishing off the fries (which I may or may not have dunked in both malt vinegar and Cheez Whiz), we headed out to meet our friends and enjoyed a great game.  Now we're looking forward to the blackout on November 19th - the Duel in the Desert (and yes, we need new black shirts; guess where we're going for that).