Good Eats for Gamers: Fancy Pants Sam with Beauty and the Beast

These past few weeks, I've been stretching my gaming thumbs getting ready for the Gamers Northwest Disney marathon coming March 22. I've committed to playing a couple of different games I've been having some non-ironic and some ironic fun practicing. I signed up for Beauty and the Beast and Kingdom Hearts, both pretty different from what I'm used to.

I'll start with this: I didn't even know that there was a Beauty and the Beast game for the Super Nintendo! Belle was always one of my favorite Disney Princesses when I was little. It was between her and Ariel, because Belle has brown hair like me, and she really likes books like me. But Ariel is a mermaid, and damn that's cool! In Beauty and the Beast, you play as Beast, trying to persuade Belle to fall in love with you, while everything is trying to kill you... that's everything from wolves in the forest and some of the more malevolent enchanted household items in Beast's castle (which makes no sense to me, actually). It's a tough game (more on that later), and practicing it can work up a good appetite. For this game, being set in France, I felt a certain pressure to make a fancy version of my usual gamer fare: no veggie bologna sandwiches here. I came up with the poshest sammy I could: roasted tomatoes and grapes over caramelized onions, sautéed spinach and brie over toasted grain bread. I call it the Fancy Pants Sam.

It's delicious.

Days 14-17 (Thirty-Day Vegan): Vegan Grilled Cheese 2 Ways

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, fall/winter is coming on strong - the days are cooler and the nights seem a little bit longer. When it starts to get chilly like this, I start to thinking about soup, a lot...

And soup is great! Amy's Kitchen has a great selection of delicious soups, ranging from No Chicken Chicken Noodle to Thai Coconut Soup in the style of Tom Kha Phak (which is seriously, seriously good), and many of them are vegan (the vegan soups have a big bold VEGAN written at the start of the ingredients list).

But, sometimes I feel like soup needs to go with something in order to be a real meal, like something I would eat for dinner. And then my brain goes back to what I love: cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches, specifically. Which is unfortunate if you happen to be on a vegan diet...

Well, lucky for us, I worked up an easy vegan grilled cheese that rocked my dinner socks the other night.