Vegetarian birthday dinner

My birthday is today, but we started celebrating this weekend with a special trip to Millennium, arguably San Francisco's best vegetarian restaurant.

Millennium is acknowledging the economic crisis with a special Frugal Foodie Menu. For $39 dollars, you select an appetizer, main dish, and dessert from a subset of the regular menu.

I started with a refreshing nectarine salad. It was a very delicate dish with butter lettuce, sesame seeds, and a fresh creamy lemongrass & ginger vinaigrette. Aaron's sweet chili-glazed tempeh was popular, too, seeming to show up on every table.

Both entrees were showstoppers. Recently, we discovered a delicious vegan Vietnamese-style crepe at Merit vegetarian restaurant in Sunnyvale, so when we saw it on Millennium's menu, we had to try it. With mung sprouts, sunchokes, cubes of firm seared tofu wrapped in an amazingly eggy-flavored crep

e, it's definitely something new (to me, at least).

I opted for the French fingerling potato roulade, which is something like potato strudel, in a beautiful orange puddle of carrot puree. Haute comfort food!

In my book, the appetizer and entree are nothing more than an excuse to kill time while waiting for dessert. We shared two desserts, rice pudding and dark chocolate vegan cheesecake.

The rice pudding had just the teeniest hint of hot pepper that I could only taste at the very end of each bite -- something like a culinary peck on the cheek. Almost every dessert came with a little scoop of a sorbet or ice cream, which I really liked because it didn't force me to choose between a cakey dish or ice cream. A sherbet of pluot and Pu-erh came with the rice pudding. Pu-erh is a kind of tea, but it was wasted on me; I really couldn't identify its taste. Really, the plum and apricot stood out more.

My own dish, dark chocolate cheese cake, was delicious, but a far cry from cheesecake. It tasted like a very dense chocolate cake with a melted chocolate bar on top. The winning taste in this dish was the blackberry coulis. Very seductive taste with the dark chocolate!

To mark the occasion today, I'm planning a little trip to Sugar, Butter, Flour, a really fun bakery in Sunnyvale that has a big selection of individual-sized desserts. Watch out!

Goodbye PB&J, hello PB&More!

Going from carnivore to herbivore has its moments. Even now, I am tempted by the fragrance of rotisserie chicken at the deli counter and sometimes day dream about chopped liver. Just because I've gone veg doesn't mean I don't like the taste of meat! Though my values and my taste buds clash, my values generally prevail.

Here's a baby step you might consider on your way to a meatless diet: Instead of eliminating the meat, try increasing the number of vegetables you consume at every meal. Go for five a day -- and really give it the old college try. It's not as easy as it sounds. Eventually, the vegetables will displace the meat and you'll wonder why you ever felt that a meal wasn't a meal without a slab of flesh on the plate.

I'm also a fan of sneaking the veggies into unlikely places. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) recently released a new cookbook, PETA's Vegan College Cookbook, and their Bunny Butter Spread does exactly that. You make it by grating a carrot into a bowl containing enough peanut butter for one sandwich, along with a few raisins and a little orange juice. Slap it between two slices of bread and you're done.

Peanut butter has an assortment of strange bedfellows. As a kid, my grandpa sometimes fed me peanut butter sandwiches on crispy Italian bread between whose slices he slid concentric circles of sweet Spanish onion. And though I've never tried it, I imagine that peanut butter and chile peppers is probably a nice combination, too.

The PETA cookbook has an entire chapter (20 recipes) devoted to peanut butter. While I enjoyed the Bunny Butter Spread and I'm eager to try the Super Quickie Peanut Sauce -- which combines PB with lemon juice, soy sauce, and chili-garlic sauce for slathering over steamed veggies and tofu -- I'm a lot less interested in The Nut Job Salad, which pairs our hero with Italian dressing. Yechhh!!

Experienced cooks may find PETA's new book to be frustratingly simplistic, but if you're brand spanking new to cooking or just don't like to cook, but want to move in the direction of a healthier diet, its 275 recipes are worth investigating.