Good Food, Good Wine, Good Friends and A Give Away

 In my head I have reached the blogger holy land. Why you ask, because a few weeks ago I was contacted to do a cookbook give away! Nothing warmed my little vegan soul more than to know that my blog was read and considered worthy of having a contest. So of course when they asked would I do it I said yes, a million times yes! So tonight I will be sharing a review of Wheeler del Torro's newest book Fillet of Soul Afro Vegan.

Some of you may know Torro from his previous book The Vegan Scoop, now if you loved Vegan Scoop be prepared to fall in love with Afro Vegan. It is filled with beautiful color photos, stories of his international travels and recipes from each of the regions he traveled International cooking may seem a bit scary but Wheeler makes it a breeze to do. Along with the beautiful pictures he even includes directions on how to garnish the dish! When I received this book I fell in love with it, to the the point when I slept with it in the bed with me. I already have a few recipes bookmarked to try later.

Now the hardest task for me was to choice a recipe to cook. There are recipes from Paris, Jamaica, Senegalese, Ethiopia and even a chapter on Southern cooking. Being a Southern girl I know cooking from the Southern chapter would be "cheating" so I ventured outside my comfort zone and went for a recipe in the Senegalese chapter. I settled on the Avocado san Crevettes, sounds fancy huh. Don't freak out I was able to make this dish in less than 30 minutes and it used ingredients that are readily available. Reading the plating directions I knew that this would be a bit more food than Keithon and I could handle so I called over Aisha and Bianca to help me eat, give me feed back as well as have a little girl talk. This is dish is the best of the food world. It has a salad element, a protein base from the black eyed peas and the avocado adds a healthy fat. The most interesting part of this recipe was the prep for the avocado. It calls for avocado, non dairy yogurt and of course lemon. I have never thought to try avocado with yogurt but the two together made the avocado amazing and it also give the black eyed peas a totally different taste. I don't care for black eyed peas but tonight I almost went back for seconds. I love the bright colors of this dish.

Now of course you can't have dinner without dessert and with the World Wide Vegan Bake Sale coming up I need to test my cookie again before offering it to the world. The actual cookie I am making is from my cookbook that I am hoping will be published. I was out of almonds and coconut so I just used the chocolate chips I had in the pantry. The girls thought they were good just the way they were. I still may tweak the base of the cookie just a bit more. 

Now on the contest!!! Some of you may recall that I am heading to Japan in a month and the food over there is amazing. So for an entry leave me the name of your favorite international dish and come back on Friday when I announce the winner of a signed copy. But if you don`t win make sure you pick of a copy of Fillet of Soul Afro Vegan it won't disappoint.