Shopping Vegan & Kitties! (again)

No real cooking today.  Granola was for breakfast with a glass of rice milk.  For lunch, the quesadillas (mushroom, onion, bean puree & quinoa) from yesterday's cooking session.  It turns out that I'm not a huge fan of quinoa, which is probably a good thing due to how expensive it is.  I will probably make myself eat the rest of them, but we'll see how it goes. 

Oh, the Spouse & I went to check out Veggie Paradise, a Vegan market of sorts.  The store is quite small, but there was a large selection of prepared foods and ready-to-cook convenience foods.  The shopkeeper was very informative and showed us lots of neat stuff.  She pulled out some frozen 'shrimp', and I swear they looked like the real deal!  They had some of the Tartex Pate (in three different flavors!), that I remembered seeing on Lady Vegan's Blog (she won the pate for submitting a recipe to vegweb.com).  I was tempted to buy the pate, but didn't.  Overall the items seemed a bit pricey, but convenient if I get in a pinch for dinner. 

On another note, it seems like I'm having more losses than wins in the kitchen lately, so I may be just doing some recipe testing from the cookbooks I have instead of doing my own thing.  Isn't that is what cookbooks are supposed to be for, to cook things?  :)  Hopefully I'll get my cooking groove back, because I am bit discouraged.  So when discouraged/sad/lonely/happy/cuddly where do I go for comfort?  To the kitties of course! 

Cat photos from this point onward, you may want to skip reading the rest if you aren't interested.  Starting from the oldest to the youngest (who made her Internet debut here):

Theo in all his furry glory.  Look at the fur on his paws!  It actually grows between his little kittie toes!  Despite appearances, he is quite skinny and sometimes borders on the anorexic side.  He had to have surgery about a year ago on his urinary tract and it almost bankrupted us.  I was seriously considering breaking into the animal hospital to steal him back after they completed the surgery.  But family loaned us some money and we got him back legit.  He is now 7 1/2 years old.

Here we have Theo again with a baby Nova, who is actually about 2 1/2 years old now.  Theo is the 'alpha' male of the group, but is very playful.  When we moved from the states, where he had free reign of about an acre and hunted avidly (much to my dismay), into an apartment in a high-rise condo in Ontario on the 8th floor, he became depressed. His personality changed from a VERY active & playful cat, to one who slept all day and ate very little.  We decided to adopt a playmate for him to hopefully bring him out of his depression without the need for medication.  It worked!  :)

Full grown and looking for trouble (please ignore my messy desk).  Nova is...well, different.  Imagine a cat with ADD who is super smart and has dependency issues with Yours Truly.  He can also be temperamental, stubborn and occasionally, melt-your-heart sweet.  He loves to sleep on the Spouse's chest at night. 

Ahh, and then there is baby cat, Mizea.  She melts my heart and turns me to a cooing, crazy cat lady at the blink of her little innocent eyes.  I would probably knit her little sweaters and booties if I could learn to knit.   :)

And one more of Mizea to show how tiny she is.  She was sleeping so soundly that I got to take a ton of pictures.  That is a 'AA' battery beside her.  She is 5 1/2 months old.