my cooking revival

Cooking is something that I forget I love.  When I first became vegetarian, I began trying out all of these new recipes out of necessity.  Not being able to eat fast food was one of the strongest excuses I had to go vegetarian.  However, when I moved to Portland, I found that numerous restaurants carried a variety of things I could eat so cooking became less of a necessity.

I have dabbled here and there but usually using some box mixes or pre-packaged veggie meat.  Tonight was all from scratch with no veggie meat required.  I found a recipe for vegan chicken salad but chickpeas are used as the substitute for chicken so it's really just a vegan chickpea salad.  Still, it gave me an excuse to use this masher thing that my sister got me for my birthday and the slap-chop that my mom got me for Christmas, both for the 1st time.

And it was good.  I wouldn't say that it tasted like chicken but it definitely tasted like home-cooking!

What else?
I pulled a big win out the my work hat today.  One of the clients in a different program in our company was banned from working in a store environment after he offended the wrong customer, a wife of a lawyer.  A lawsuit was threatened but later that threat was revoked.  The higher-ups at my work basically indicated that this client would never be returning to a store which would be holding him back quite a bit.  Litigation is a threat that's not taken lightly at work.  Anyway, it was killing me that we sort of failed this guy by setting him up in a situation that he wasn't ready for without the training.  I decided to appeal it to my boss's boss today even though nobody else was concerned about him staying where he was.  She agreed that we could give him a trial in a training store.  Yay!  I feel so good about this!