Vegan Homeschooler's Potluck

The girls and I got together with some friends of mine (and their kids) last winter. All are homeschooling families and sort of crunchy--Birkenstock-shod, baby-wearin', school-at-home, natural-birthin' kind of crunchy. We discovered that everybody had some sort of food restriction, be it health-related, allergies, or religious. We met again today, this time at my house, and set out a challenge for ourselves: Make a dish that everybody in the group could eat (whether they wanted to or not didn't make a difference.)

Here was the list of restrictions:

* No meat
* No dairy
* No eggs
* No wheat/gluten
* No nuts/peanuts
* No mushrooms
* No coconut
* No strawberries
* No bananas
* No citrus
* No garbanzo beans

So it sort of turned into an ultra-vegan-allergy-friendly potluck. We embraced the challenge, and the food turned out to be delicious, and the company and chat was even better. We definitely ate a lot of veggies and whole grains, and tried new combinations of ingredients that we normally wouldn't have bothered with. It was also a way to walk in another person's Birkenstocks shoes for a while, because several people in our lives have to eat this way forever. The black bean brownies for dessert were absolutely amazing...I don't think I'll make "normal" brownies again for a long time.

Now on to make the Kraft mac 'n cheese and canned beans for dinner tonight. (Just kidding. Sort of.)

This is the roasted, peeled eggplant before I ground it in the food processor with the rest of the ingredients for baba ganoush. The eggplant looked disgusting, like a butchered eel--and I watch Top Chef, so I know what at butchered eel looks like! But the finished recipe tasted great.

Boys will be boys--and girls will follow suit. We have a terrific climbing tree in our backyard.

Baby Mattias, asleep on his mommy. Only 12 weeks old. Precious. Perfect.

I got to hold Mattias for a while and sniff his head. (Several of my fellow newborn-lovin' friends out there will understand the "sniff his head" thing. The rest of you will think I'm weird.)

Ava loves babies.

"Where is that smell coming from?!?!?"