Last Monday I hosted a vegan dinner party to commemorate two things: the midpoint of my six weeks of veganism and my 28th birthday. The date worked out well because my old friends Chris and Soren were in town to watch their New Orleans Saints play the Seahawks. Since my place was too small for the number of people I had coming, we decided to have the party at Brezza, which is the condo complex in Kirkland where my friends Greg and Raazi live. Brezza has a nice commons area complete with kitchen.
The party was excellent - 15 of my friends, great food, kitchen hijinx, and low-grade alcohol - pretty much all of my favorite things. Chris, who stayed with me over the weekend, was instrumental in helping me plan and shop for the meal, which is fortunate since I would have undoubtedly screwed it up if I had to do it by myself.
The shopping began Saturday when Chris, Raazi and I went to a vegan restaurant in Seattle's U-District. Before dinner we tracked down a Brazilian grocery store where we bought three pounds of manioc flour. Chris and I had spent six months in South America a few years back, and we were craving farofa, which I thought was synonymous with manioc. Turns out that farofa is actually toasted manioc with some seasonings thrown in, so our plan of having Brazilian beans and rice as our primary side dish didn't work out so well.
Luckily we scored home runs on our other two prepared dishes. The main course was a vegan "corn chowder" recipe that I pulled out of my vegan cookbook. It wasn't very chowdery, although we put flour in it per the recipe, it was really more of a stew. It was delicious though. Our other prepared dish was spinach and mushroom "quesadillas", which lacked cheese of course but were held together with refried beans.
We rounded the meal out with some prepared foods from Whole Foods including tabouleh, cous cous, and my favorite, the dolmas. Chris made some of his proprietary guacamole recipe, which turned out pretty well despite all of our avocado's being either rotten or unripe.
Dessert was excellent as well - Lara Brown made cooked apples stuffed with berries and cinnamon. Chris Bradbury and his girlfriend brought a vegan carrot cake, complete with birthday candle.
In addition to copious amounts of beer, we had a box of Franzia sangria, simply because I felt like getting drunk on the most ridiculous thing I could find, and the store didn't have any Bartles and James.
I thought the party went very well, but it was a lot of work, especially in regards to the transportation of goods to and from Brezza. A tabouleh spill has given my car a distinctive Middle Eastern odor. I would not have been successful without a lot of help from my guests - thank you to everyone who helped cook, clean up, and brought beer and food.
Here's more pictures, although they're all terrible. Unfortunately our staff photographer had band practice that night.