A Vegan Birthday Feast… 👍

A week ago I turned 19, and for my birthday we had invited a bunch of family over to celebrate. And given it was my birthday, me and my mom decided that it was appropriate that we served up some awesome vegan food to share with my family. I’m so grateful that my mother fully supports me being vegan, and even encourages me to make something vegan for our family-gathering. She is just the most wonderful person ever, and I love her so much. Okay, sidenote. The real point is that my meat-loving family LOVED everything we served them! (especially the dessert, which was gone in no time…) It was such a success, and therefore I’m going to share the dishes I made with you guys 🙂 Unfortunately I can’t give you any exact measurements as I didn’t measure anything (which I never really do when I cook), but I can give you the ingredients and tell you how I did it. I hope that is okay for now.

So what did I make?

I whipped up a huge quinoa based salad, marinated beets, and an avocado/orange dressing. Finally, the dessert was raw apple crumble.

 This salad had: cooked quinoa, diced cucumber, redbellpeppers, springonioin, parsley, avocado, edamame beans and lots of lemonjuice. So fresh and flavorful! Oh and I topped it with some vibrant beet-sprouts:

Then for the marinated beet salad I steamed some diced beets and once they’d cooled a bit I added the ‘dressing’ made of: applecidervinegar, coconutsugar, a little water, salt & pepper. Mixed that together with the beets, and topped it with some chopped fresh dill. This recipe was inspired by holistichabits on youtube, so definitely check her out! It was super delicious and I highly recommend it.

The dressing was creamy, delicious and with a subtle sweetness from the orange juice. It also paired really well with the other dishes. The ingredients were avocado, fresh squeezed orange juice, lime juice, green onions, cilantro & parsley all blended together.

The dessert (which was my favourite part) was inspired by one of 40belowfruity’s videos on her Youtube channel.

To make this deliciousness, I chopped up a lot of (peeled) apples into small pieces. Then I made a date-caramel sauce by blending soft pitted dates, hot water, vanillapowder, cinnamon and gingerbread spice. Mixed that with the apples and added it to a pie-dish. Then for the crumble I used mulberries, pecans, medjool dates, cinnamon and nutmeg. The result was like sweet, slightly crumbly, heavenly cookie-dough or something like that:

So yuuuuummy, seriously I wish I had this apple crumble in front of me right now! And as I said the hardcore meat-eaters of my family ate so much of it. It was such a joy for me to share a little part of my lifestyle with my family when they liked it so much. And for once I didn’t have to feel awkward around the table for not eating what they’re eating.

All in all I had a lovely day, spent with lovely people, presents and good food. I really couldn’t have asked for more.

On my Instagram I wrote the following on my birthday:

“On my birthday I just like to remind myself how grateful I am for all the years I have been on this beautiful earth. Life is such a gift and I aim to make the most of it while I can. I’m excited to see what the future has in store for me, and I’m excited to keep on learning, grow and explore. Here’s to nineteen years”

Much love

– Sophie