Beignets and soup

Today's recipe test for the FS cookbook produced these tasty beignets - the French word for doughnuts, so says wikipedia. To me, they're reminiscent of the fried doughnut pastries my German great aunt would make - I wish I remembered the German name for them. This is happy food - deep-fried dough doused with powdered sugar, and I probably ate more of them in one sitting that I should have. My deep-fryer's basket suffered a serious injury a while back, so my deep-frying is now done in one of my soup-pots on the stove top. I went off script for the recipe, because it was an excuse to use my new dog bone cookie-cutters to make the beignets. I have big plans to start making my own dog biscuits, and picked up these great cookie-cutters at the local True Value, of all places. Even though these beignets are probably not ideal for dogs, my taste-testers were fired up to try a few bits and pieces.

I picked up a couple of new cookbooks, Donna Klein's The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, and Vegan Italiano. In both of these books, Klein focuses on dishes that are naturally vegan in their traditional context, rather than veganizing meat and dairy based recipes. That's a pretty cool approach, as much as I like tempeh meatballs and seitan burritos and stuff like that. The first thing I made was a gigantic pot of minestrone, with loads of fresh veggies and white beans.