bewaaare! vegan desserrrrts! (scary moaning sounds!)

I'm on a mission that has to do with Raphael's levels of HDL vs LDL, one of which has to do with olive oil and one of which has to do with hot dogs. You see, we're getting older around here, and suddenly the things we worry about and discuss over drinks with our aging friends and that keep us awake after we've gone to bed (at 8:00 pm) are the things I swore I'd never let bother me. "Why waste my life" (I thought) "wearing pantyhose or avoiding shortcuts through dark alleys or worrying about saturated fats? Those things can't hurt me. I'm invincible!"

I'm still convinced that pantyhose were dreamed up by Satan during a bad break-up and that I don't have to wear them because I am, in fact, invincible. But these days I do avoid shortcuts through dark alleys, and I've cut my saturated fat consumption, and my mission is now to find desserts that I can make for Raphael that will do whatever it is to his HDL that he needs and vice versa with the LDL.

Desserts. That are good for his cholesterol.

To that end, I've been hunting the internets for delicious vegan desserts. Delicious! Vegan! Desserts! Desserts without butter or cream! Or butter! Or butter! Honestly, it makes me tear up just thinking about it.

But despite my trepidation and my conviction that such a thing could only possibly exist in some other strange dimension where Raphael has a buzz cut and I'm a dude, I found just such a dessert on my new favorite vegan blog. My only favorite vegan blog, I guess, since I've only been on my mission for about three days. Anyway, so I made the "Vanilla Bean 'Honey' Ice Cream with Black Tea Graham Crackers" sandwiches this evening, and--

I love them.

And not only do I love them, but Raphael also loves them. And Lila loves them, I guess, although she seems wary of soy products in general and looked at us kind of sideways when Raphael gave her a spoonful of the ice cream. But she didn't spit it out the way she does carrots. So it wasn't worse than carrots.

The verdict, then, is I get to continue to play around in the eerie and wondrous world of vegan desserts as long as I continue to let us eat hot dogs now and again. Because vegan is still vegan, and hot dogs are still hot dogs, and there's a moral somewhere in there that I can't quite pull out.