Utopian Kitchen

Breakfast consisted of beet juice, multigrain cereal with raisins, an omelet, pancakes, and some type of patty that I don't know what it's called!

The following picture is the beautiful dining area.

Coconut soup for lunch!  We love the flavor of the broth, slightly spicy, and the cauliflower and tofu were delicious.

Seaweed with goji berries.

Ginger vegetarian chicken, always a pleasure to eat!

Dried tofu with cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, and a tasty sauce.

Breakfast was something new, a tofu scramble, which we both found to be quite tasty.  The cranberry-pineapple sauce was served again!  Yay!  And we had the greens and some hashed browns as well.  The meal began with our multigrain cereal with red beans and raisins, carrot juice, and ended on a light and sweet note with an Asian pear.

Our kind hosts packed a lunch to-go for us to have some good eats while at the state park.  We had sandwiches and fruit.

I loved the daikon radishes in the dinner soup.  It also was flavored with toasted sesame oil. 

This is vegetarian “fish.”  Sometimes people are confused by vegetarians eating mock meat products, but I think, if you are educated on reasons to be vegetarian, the answer is simple:  vegetarian products support peace as opposed to violence/killing, health benefits as opposed to illnesses and disease, and environmental sustainability as opposed to destruction.  I found the dish to be delicious, not too fish-like (as I don’t like the taste of sea life creatures), and the spices perfect.

I can only attest to the tastiness of the broccoli in the following dish.  The brown-colored items are mushroom stems and I do not eat fungus/fungi!

I would die a happy woman if I could eat the cranberry-pineapple topping on this date-nut bread every day.  I love it. 

Ricketts Glen is about a 40-minute drive from Ocean Lotus and a great place for hiking.

We got separated at one point, which was scary, but we found each other.  Imagine us missing our last dinner at Ocean Lotus!! 

See if you can find Rich in the photograph below. 

Today’s breakfast was quite a start to the day.  We had orange juice, millet cereal with pine nuts and cranberries, papaya, and a plate of hashed browns, snowpea leaves, tofu and cabbage, and steamed bread.  The steamed bread and greens were terrific. 

Lunch commenced with noodle and cabbage soup.  This was tasty.

Followed by one of our favorites so far:  tofu and broccoli with a light peanut sauce.

Also a mixed vegetable curry, which I did not take a photograph of.

Dessert was super-unique and special - Chinese sweet rice ball soup.  We loved it and it’s so cute, too!

Dinner’s soup was what I am calling “seaweed bowtie soup.”  With a slight hint of toasted sesame oil and the mild seaweed strips, nothing can beat the health benefits and flavor of this warming comfort food!

We loved the cauliflower with coconut sauce.  The chickpeas were very tender and the cauliflower, like broccoli, soaked up the flavor of the sauce very well.

Rich really liked the next one; it has a rare kind of mushroom that I don’t know how to spell or pronounce, also with carrots and cabbage.

Who wants carrot cake for dessert?  I do, if it’s made by Lotus.  While the cake may seem lonely without frosting, Rich and I concur that no extra sweetness is needed.  “Superiorly spiced and adorned with raisins and walnuts” is a good way to describe this treat!

Breakfast was good as usual, this time with delicious cranberry-pineapple topping for our French toast!  I liked that one even better than the blueberry.

Burdock root and vegetable soup.  Delicate and wholesome flavor.

I called one of our main courses “Mediterranean patties” due to their tomato and basil flavor.  They were really good.  In fact, I ate the whole plateful, which Rich ate the whole plate of the next dish.

Vegetarian sealife dish with cabbage and carrots.

This is the luncheon dessert - a date-nut cake, super moist and flavorful, with nice texture differences of chopped nuts and fruit, topped with the same wholesome cranberry mixture we had for breakfast. 

We sat by the fireplace for dinner tonight, which was very nice, but unfortunately, the pictures didn’t come out as well as others have.

For starters, we had a corn chowder soup.  Lotus’s soups are the best!

The next picture is some noodles with avocado, shredded lettuce, cranberry relish, wasabi, and soy sauce.  They were very tasty and I had been craving some type of pasta!

This is some greens with carrots and some type of topping that really soaked up the flavor of the sauce.  It had the texture of a soy product and was kind of peppery.  We love greens, so this dish was welcome and enjoyed as well.

The whole day, I was tricked into thinking that I would not have a birthday cake.  I was shocked to see it!  And in a heart shape, no less.  :)  The cake was delicious and really in-line with my superior health subtitle, as the cake was date and nut, with dates in the middle layer, and the frosting was made from mung beans.  I will be honest - I wanted some chocolate cake today or chocolate of some sort, but I can wait til I get home.  Clearly, this cake was made with love and care for using the best ingredients.  Thanks, Lotus & Rich.

Breakfast started out a little bit differently today, with millet and barley cereal with toasted pine nuts and raisins.  It was very creamy and delicious.  We had our fresh-squeezed juice and waited for what was next!  The main course was a tofu, cabbage, and tomato scramble similar to our lunch yesterday, which was a good thing!  Also very fluffy pancakes served with blueberry syrup and potatoes. 

Next we delighted in a steamed rice cake with a pineapple (I think?!) topping. 

Today a Tai Chi group came for lunch, so we received what was described as a “special” lunch.  “Huh,” we thought, “Isn’t all of this really special?!”

The first item was an avocado roll with a unique wrapper and peanut sauce drizzle.  In addition, we received seaweed and beets at the beginning of our meal.  The beets were the best I had ever tasted and seemed to have cilantro and another spice added.

Then came the soup, this time a coconut base, a tad spicy, with soy chicken pieces, chickpeas, cucumber, and carrot.  I called this “Better Than Tom Kha.”  Of course I love both [vegan] Tom Kha and Lotus’s coconut soup!

On to the main courses, this lunch we got brown rice sweetened with brown sugar and first a stuffed tofu dish.  The tofu has cucumber and banana inside and the sauce is very sweet!  It was a surprise of flavors!  I found myself wondering where Lotus received her recipe ideas.

Beautifully presented, you can see that these wraps are light yet still contain an array of ingredients, including vermicilli noodles, toasted pine nuts, tofu, cucumber, and carrots.

Rich and I were both delighted to find that our lunch dessert would be that pumpkin pie we had last night.  I did not take another photograph.  Rest assured, our stomachs were happy.

Dinner began with a seaweed and bean curd skin soup.  It also had some type of green but I don’t know which kind!  I do know that it tasted very good. 

Next in line was vegetarian ginger chicken with green bell pepper and carrots.  The sauce was so good and the veg chicken soaked up the ginger flavor very well.  We found half of a hot red pepper in our dish, too, which explained the slight spiciness.  I wouldn’t change a thing - it was perfect.

This next dish has pesto, one of our favorite garnishes!  It is stuffed bean curd skin with vegetables inside and topped with the pesto.  VERY tasty.

Regretably, our dinner plates emptied.  But light shines down and we have a dessert!  Another mung bean crepe, this time topped with blueberry sauce.  I’m thinking this blueberry sauce goes well with everything, except savory dishes, of course!