Vegan Tomato Soup and Caesar Salad

The Chef: Elizabeth and Gracias Madre

The Menu: A fantastically delicious cream of tomato soup, topped with cashew cream, roasted pumpkin seeds, and chopped cilantro, accompanied by a perfectly pert Caesar salad of romaine, Caesar dressing, avocado, and more pumpkin seeds!

The Goods: You all know how we feel about Gracias Madre. When you go back to a single restaurant so frequently, it would seem easy to get sick of the offerings there. Does that ever happen at Gracias? Heck no. The daily soup special is my secret weapon against lunchtime repetition, as it's always rich, usually cashew-cream based, and switched up daily. The tomato is probably my favorite, which meant that I was a very lucky gal today. Little-known fact? I freaking love pumpkin seeds! And they were in both dishes! Huzzah! I also had the good fortune of dining with our High-Tech Chef columnist, Jesse Miner. There's definitely nothing better than delicious food paired with great company.

Fig and Walnut Pasta

The Chef: Elizabeth

The Menu: A hearty pasta doused in cashew cream, chopped walnuts and figs, salt, and a touch of nutmeg. To add to the carby goodness of the main course, Elizabeth prepared a panzanella-style salad of bread, avocado, and cherry tomatoes. Carbs on carbs? It appears we've answered the "to eat or not to eat" question from yesterday.

The Goods: The main course here was inspired by a meal Elizabeth made way back during cookbook week when we tried recipes from 1,000 Vegan Recipes by one of our fantastic columnists, Robin Robertson. This is the best kind of recipe: the kind that you make one time and can then improvise for years to come. And yes, we could totally eat this pasta every day. Remember, we'll be eating in LA this Friday and Saturday and reporting live from Expo West!

Cream of Tomato Soup

The Chef: Elizabeth

The Menu: As you might have guessed, another blended soup! Seriously, we are elbow deep in soup over here, and pretty freaking happy about it. This time, Elizabeth simply blended canned diced tomatoes with a sautéed onion and some cashew cream, and voila, we had soup. A marinated kale salad with avocado and freshly sliced baguette made perfect side dishes to our homey main.

The Goods: No, really, we are obsessed with making soup. Pretty much everything that can be blended is going to be blended. Soup is like the new Robitussin. Got a cough? Eat some soup. Trapped in your snowed-in home? Soup. Just about out of soup? Add some water and blend it up—more soup!

Cookbook Week: Fettuccine with Figs and Walnuts

The Chef: Elizabeth

The Menu: A highly delicious, very filling meal of whole-wheat fettuccine, doused in a cashew-cream sauce with figs and walnuts, topped with toasted breadcrumbs. A simple salad with tomato and red onion balanced out the extremely rich pasta.

The Goods: As we're sure you're aware by now, all the dishes this week are recipes in Robin Robertson's latest work, 1,000 Vegan Recipes. Robertson mentions that this recipe is one of her favorites, as it's adapted from a dish that her mother would serve every Christmas Eve. Which leads us to two points: one, congratulations to phrog from yesterday's comments! Send us an email, and we'll send your copy of the book right out. Two, for today's copy, tell us in the comments: What is your most delicious holiday tradition?

Lovely Potato Leek Soup

The Chef: Liz

The Menu: An utterly phenomenal potato-leek soup. Liz wowed us with this rich, homey main course that was definitely more of a meal than our typical miso. She added cashew cream (the recipe for which can be found in The Conscious Cook—we're slowly tapering off cooking from this book!), rosemary, and cherry tomatoes to the pot, and the savory results were nothing less than sensational. Liz also whipped up a lovely salad and roasted some Brussels sprouts with corn, which rounded out the hearty meal.

The Goods: It's another exciting week at the VNHQ! To carry over some of last week's giveaway fun, we are proud to announce that MacKenzie has won our last copy of The Conscious Cook! Congrats, MacKenzie! Please send us an email with your full name and mailing address, and we'll stick your winnings in the mail. Other than that, it's back to work for us! Happy Monday to all!