No Whey, José!

josh and i are getting ready to leave for disney world really early tomorrow morning, like 3 am kind of early, and we’re super excited. we went to disney in 2005 and then stayed at my aunt mar’s house in venice (which is where i’m from) for about a week, and it was great! so we’re going to recreate that vacation by doing it again this week.

we haven’t been cooking all that much lately. the intentions are there, as in we bought the makings for a few different meals, but sometimes it’s so much easier to just go out and have someone cook for you. we did however make these bangin’ drunken noodles a few days ago. we like to go to this thai place called “thai diner too” and every single time we go i get the drunken noodles because they’re soooo delicious. the noodles we made ended up tasting a lot like the dish i get there, so that’s always good.

there’s an asian food market near us so we went there to get the ingredients. we found this case of thai peppers and we just loved all the gorgeous colors. we also got a huge bag of thai basil, which is the kind of basil with purple stems and smallish green leaves. that’s pretty much the flavor that makes drunken noodles so delicious. the sauce consisted of tamari, vegetarian oyster sauce, brown sugar, lime juice, and a little canola and peanut oil. we sautéed up some red and green bell peppers, the thai peppers, and some onions and then added the sauce, the thai basil, and a few chopped roma tomatoes. the noodles we bought weren’t exactly the right kind, and they ended up sticking together and causing a big fuss..but regardless we added those into the pot once they were done cooking along with some tofu that josh had deep fried (yum) and stir fried everything all together for a few minutes. the flavor was to die for…

everything tasted really well together..and next time we make it we’ll use the right kind of noodles (i think rice noodles works best) and hopefully it will turn out even better. another thing that we always get when we go to the asian market is these canned soy milk drinks..

it’s totally different from any kind of soy milk i’ve had. it’s sweeter than regular soy milk, and if you drink it super cold or over ice it’s sooo yummy. it was perfect for combating the spiciness of the drunken noodles.

so now i’m spending the day getting ready for the trip. i just made up a batch of the most awesome delicious bakery style (hint hint) blueberry muffins i’ve ever tasted so those will be perfect for breakfast or for snacks on the ride down. oh and i also twisted my ankle the other day so i’ve got my foot in an ankle brace type ace bandage and i’m hoping that it will be better on sunday when we get go to the parks. i’m supposed to stay off my feet as much as possible, but there’s baking to be done!

we’ve also been doing a lot of research about disney world’s vegetarian/vegan food options, and while most of it seems to be glorified boca burgers and fruit salads (there was a website telling what is vegetarian at each of the restaurants at disney and one of them actually said “the fresh fruit is vegan”…a duhhhh), apparently if you call ahead to specific restaurants you can have a vegan meal made for you. there’s even a place that is said to be able to make you vegan pancakes! needless to say we’re gonna be making a call to those fine folks. so we’re probably going to be out of commission for about a week as far as posting goes.. but we’ll be back with lots of pictures of us reeking havoc at the most magical place in the world..sure to be quite amusing.

do you ever feel like you just want to eat something green? there are some days where josh and i don’t eat well at all. we’ve been working a lot lately so we’re lucky if we get to eat breakfast or lunch..and then making dinner is usually the last thing we want to do when we get home. it’s been like that a lot this past week and we’ve ended up eating a lot of crap..like papa johns breadsticks at 10pm and calling it dinner. yeah. so the other day i was starting to feel really gross and unhealthy and i really wanted to eat something green.

i grabbed a few cookbooks that i usually go to when i want a good recipe, couldn’t find anything in there, so i grabbed this tiny little vegetarian cookbook that i’ve had for a long time and started looking through the pages. luckily this cookbook has a photo of every recipe and that helps a lot when you’re creativity is a bit on the low side and your hunger is through the roof. i came across this recipe for “risotto verde,” and the picture looked absolutely delicious. it was green! just what i wanted.

it has leeks, garlic, and fresh spinach in it. i ended up changing the recipe a lot to make it more fresh and yummy. i added lemon zest to bring out the flavors a bit and josh added a lotttttt more white wine. it came out so delicious. it was just what i was craving. usually josh isn’t really wowed by risotto but he had like 3 servings and finished off the pot, saying “this is the best risotto i’ve ever had.” score.

i also made a batch of seitan cutlets from v’con and josh pan seared them with some margarine and lemon pepper to go with the risotto. i got a little fancy pantsy when i was taking the pictures using one of those circular metal rings to plate the risotto and josh was like you should do that on top of the seitan..so we did! i think it looks super fancy and fine dining-ish…

…or maybe we’ve just been watching too much top chef.

either way, i think this risotto is great for summer time because it uses fresh ingredients and bright flavors like lemon and thyme. so go make it..you’ll love it.

usually whenever we write a post it’s to tell about a delicious meal we had or about some new culinary creation that happened in our kitchen, but this is no such post. i need to rant a bit.

i was reading a few blogs yesterday (on my new macbook pro!! sweet!) and i stumbled across a website that was talking about vegans and the vegan diet. the author of the article mentioned that she used to be vegan for quite some time, but that it all ended when she was out to lunch with a friend who ordered a caesar salad and she found herself drooling over the cubes of feta cheese when finally her friend said “just eat it already!”..and she did. you could tell the article was geared towards a more skeptical audience…the author made it seem like vegans are starving martyrs who are constantly on the edge of giving into that bit of cheese and cutting their losses. 

we’ve all met the type. the “oh, i used to be vegan” or “i used to be vegetarian”..as if it’s this phase that we all end up going through. one of my friends from school chose to go vegetarian about a year ago and when he told his mom she said “yeah, i was vegetarian in college too”, as if to say, you’ll get over it soon. i never know what to say to those people, the ex-veg’s of the world. i always wonder why they aren’t vegan or vegetarian anymore, how they could choose such a compassionate and healthy lifestyle and then give it up after living that way for sometimes years. i guess i could possibly see a vegan going back to vegetarianism…possibly. but a vegetarian going back to eating meat? and i’m talking about the ethical vegetarians, the ones who chose to be vegetarian for the animals. how could you know what you know and then decide one day to eat that hamburger and never look back? 

it’s always boggled my mind. i mean we all have our cravings. we all have our achilles heel..usually the thing that took the longest to choose to stop eating. i think cheese pizza was my last non-vegan food to stop eating, and it also happens to be what i crave every once in a while. my mom’s biggest craving is scrambled eggs..but i think it’s more of what we associate with those foods and not really the food itself. for me cheese pizza reminds me of trips to new york or those weeknights when we would order pizza when we didn’t feel like cooking. scrambled eggs is my mom’s comfort food. it’s what she would always have my dad make her when she was sick, scrambled eggs and toast. it’s that comforting feeling you get from the food, not the fried chicken embryos and the knowledge of how those eggs were obtained. 

i guess i just don’t understand how there can be such a gap in understanding. how people can claim that they’re animal lovers, be vegetarian or vegan for however long, and then go back to eating meat as if nothing ever happened. as i’m writing this josh is watching one of those animal cop shows on animal planet, where these “animal cops” goes and saves dogs and cats who are being abused by their owners. they talk about “how could people treat these animals like this” as they hold a starving dog who’s been kept in a tiny cage for months on end. everytime i watch this show (which isn’t often because it’s hard to watch) i find myself yelling at the tv about how if they want to see some animal abuse and if they really want to protect animals from animal cruelty they should go down to their goddamn slaughter house. i guess the only animals they care about is the ones that we call pets. i bet after these “animal cops” go out every day and save these dogs and cats they come home and eat a steak (i told you i needed to rant.)

anyway..i guess i just have to take comfort in knowing that for as many ex-veg’s and “i’m an animal lover but i still eat meat”-ers our there, there’s just about as many truly ethical vegans out there, and it’ll take a lot more than a bit of cheese to bring us down. 

Another thing that I’ve been really into lately is caramelized onions. Slow cooking onions for about a half an hour releases their natural sugars and caramelizes them, making them sweet and even more delicious. When I told Josh that I wanted to make something with caramelized onions he went on to tell me how you really have to be patient and let them cook for 45 minutes to an hour to really achieve that dark, caramelly onions, and I could tell that he was gonna get on my case if I was impatient and said “Ok they’re done!” after 10 minutes of cooking. So I said yea yea and went about my caramelizing business. Well of course Josh was right and I learned after attempting to caramelize onions several times that the longer you wait and the longer it slowly cooks, the sweeter and more delicious they are.

My first attempt was when I made this orzo pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted asparagus, and of course caramelized onions. I had never had orzo before. I categorize orzo with couscous and other small pasta that seems super tedious to eat. But I saw someone making an orzo pasta on tv and thought I should give it a try. We ended up getting this tri-color orzo, which was kind of cool because it had all the colors of the dish I wanted to make right in it.

I started out cooking the onions in some olive oil until they started to get translucent, then I cranked the heat all the way down to low and walked away..something that was very hard for me to do. I’m a stirrer. Ask Josh, ask my Dad..I love to stir the pot. It makes me feel like I’m doing something productive. But I actually walked away, peeking over my shoulder at the pan of delicious sliced onions, and really tried to wait the 45 minutes that Josh told me about. Of course I ended up waiting like 20 minutes instead and then added the sun-dried tomatoes..I thought it might infuse the oil with its rich, sweet flavor.

I cooked them for maybe 10 more minutes after that, and as you can see in the picture the onions were far from being caramelized but they were starting to goddamnit and that’s good enough for me. The orzo pasta turned out really well..I thought the combination of the roasted asparagus, the sun-dried tomatoes and the halfway-sort of caramelized onions went really well together. It wasn’t one of those holy-shit-this-is-our-new-favorite-dinner dishes but it was still very good.

My second attempt was when I was making one of our usual dinners, ziti with Tofurky Beer Brat sausages. It’s a quick pasta dish that we make once or twice a week and it hasn’t really gotten old yet. Since I was still in my caramelized onions kick, I was trying to incorporate it in any dish possible. So I thought how awesome would caramelized onions and beer brat sausages be together? Answer: super awesome.

Each time I make this I try to cook the onions a little bit longer to test my culinary patience, and I think the last time I made it up to the 30 minute mark. Not too shabby.. The onions are delicious. You could seriously eat them plain and call it a day. Instead I put them in my favorite diced tomato and fresh basil sauce with some beer brats and called it supper. Before I started using the onions in this sauce I used to put a couple garlic cloves…and since the onions give it a sweeter flavor it totally transforms the sauce. Especially since sausage and onions already go so great together.

Here’s a shot of my plate after I started eating. After our dinner is finally done cooking we’re both super hungry, and normally we wait for each other to get our plates and sit down at our coffee table (where we eat every night), but if it’s something that I want to take pictures of I give Josh the ‘ok’ to start without me. So usually I try to take a quick shot before I go and guff up the plate but sometimes a shot of the half eaten dish is just as good, right?

A few weeks ago I got the urge to start baking homemade bread. Josh and I go through bread really fast since we eat sandwiches for lunch every day and usually a loaf of crusty bread for dinners through the week. I thought it would be really nice to make the bread ourselves, that way we know exactly what’s going into it. I’d much rather have bread with 4 ingredients in it than the store bought bread with a list of 50 ingredients for a simple sandwich bread.

Some people (like my dad for example) get really intimidated by anything that has to do with yeast. Well actually my dad gets intimidated by baking in general. But I guess that’s one thing he didn’t pass along to me, because I happen to really like the whole kneading and rising and all that stuff that goes into making yeast bread. It’s almost like you’re tapping into this ancient ritual of making food that our ancestors have been doing since forever. It’s a long process but it gives you an excuse to be alone in your thoughts and know that you’re creating something so yummy out of flour, yeast, and water. Genius if you ask me.

I started by making a batch of country white bread from the new bread cookbook I bought. While it was rising I got a little bored waiting around for it so I started a batch of my Aunt Toni’s Oatmeal Bread, which I ended up giving my mom for Mother’s Day. I love that bread because it’s a hearty white-ish bread but it’s just slightly sweet and goes great with pretty much everything. After my grandma learned that we were so into baking bread, she was super nice and gave us her bread machine. Now while there’s not much connection with ancient artisan breadmakers of the past while you push a button and let the machine do it’s job, it’s great because you can still have fresh, homemade bread even if you don’t have a day to set aside to make it by hand. So we would put all the ingredients in the machine at night before bed and in the morning we would have fresh yummy homemade bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

My favorite bread in the whole world is sourdough bread, so the thing that actually sparked all of this bread making was me creating a sourdough starter. I fed and cared for that thing like a little jarred baby for over a week. I even took it to my parent’s house one weekend and everyone looked at me cross-eyed while I lovingly poured flour and water into a glass jar and placed it on the refrigerator every 24 hours. I did this for over a week until I left it in the oven and accidently baked it. But I don’t think it was working anyway so I guess I’ll just have to start again. Until then, I’ll just have to stick with boring old bread like this basil and garlic focaccia bread we made the other day. Life is tough.

The bakery fantasy is in full swing now. We’ve been looking at bakery cases online (those things are expensive..) and the other night we cozied up in bed with a notebook and wrote down a list of everything we want to have at the bakery. One of the things that we both are really excited about is…..donuts. We have been wanting to try and make our own donuts for the longest time now. Josh’s dad used to take those biscuit rolls from the grocery store, poke holes in them and fry them as donuts…and for anyone who has ever tried this knows that they taste realllly good. So Josh has been set on making a donut dough that will make donuts that tastes like those fried biscuit-donuts, and he tried once before using a recipe he found online but instead of donuts he got more of a fried, dense bread thing. It wasn’t good at all. So like most other things, we decided if we want them to taste the way we want them to taste, we’re going to have to make them ourselves.

Donuts had been on our minds for weeks when one night while watching TV there a show all about donuts in America. We watched it of course…in all its deep fried, sugar coated, glaze dripping glory. I’m pretty sure one of us yelled out “THAT’S IT!” and we grabbed the computer and started researching how to make donuts. We learned that there are two kinds of donuts; yeast donuts, and cake donuts. Cake donuts don’t have yeast, which make them more cakey and dense. Yeast donuts are more like the donuts we’re accustomed to, they’re more airy and I personally like the flavor better. So we decided to go with the yeast donuts.

We mixed all the ingredients, kneaded the dough, kneaded it some more, and let it rise for about an hour and a half. Then we realized we didn’t have any cookie cutters to make the donut shapes. So we grabbed Olly and walked down to our local kitchen supply store and bought a set of circle cookie cutters. It was kind of expensive but I figured we’ll have them forever and they sure will come in handy when we open our bakery (more dreaming..) Here’s Josh rolling out the dough

When Josh gets in baking mode there’s no stopping him..and I absolutely love it because he usually wants to be the one to do the rolling and kneading and all the hard work, leaving me to take pictures and dream about our bakery some more

By now it’s probably around 4pm and we had started baking around 1pm. I started to realize that for most people, if they get a donut craving they go to 7-11 or Krispy Kreme and get a donut or 2. But for those of us who are vegan, if we want a donut we have to find a recipe, veganize the recipe, spend hours making it, and hope to all things holy that it turns out tasting like those familiar donuts we were craving. I was thinking about all of this while I was kneading the dough for 10 minutes and realizing how much work goes into the things we make. I think it is a good value not only to have for ourselves but to instill in our children, that you have to work for the things you really want, instead of just walking across the street to 7-11 and buying it.

Anyway, back to the donuts. After we cut them into their shapes they had to rise for another 30-45 minutes. They rose really nicely and started to look like the delicious donuts they were about to become. So we got out our deep fryer (I knew we bought that thing for a reason) and began frying. I wanted to coat them in powdered sugar but we were all out, so we opted for a cinnamon and sugar topping. Josh took the first taste, and they were all we had ever imagined.

The texture was dead-on classic donuty. The cinnamon and sugar topping made it sweet but not rot your teeth out sweet. And now that we know we have a good base recipe, I’ve been fantasizing about jelly donuts, bear claws, donut holes, and every other yummy donut creation. These will definitely be going in the zine.

Oh and p.s., today is my 3 year vegan anniversary! I think I’ll go make some more donuts to celebrate

I was just about to publish this post when my internet closed the page unexpectadly and I lost the entire post. So here’s take two.

::shakes fist at WordPress::

Josh and I have been making seitan like nobody’s business lately. We use the seitan cutlets recipe from Veganomicon and then we cook it on the grill pan with some grill seasoning (tonight we used a garlic pepper grinder) and a little margarine. It makes it all moist and grilly and delicious.

My Nanna always likes to make “1-2-3″ dinners, which is “meat,” a starch like pasta or potatoes, and a vegetable. Josh and I have been making 1-2-3 dinners more than ever lately, now that we’ve been finding new ways to cook up seitan. Josh bought some steak sauce, which for me was a very different flavor then anything I’ve ever had, but as soon as he tasted it with the seitan he said it was almost scary how much it tasted like, well, you know. It almost looks like the real thing too, which is kind of eery.

We also ate brussel sprouts for the first time a few days ago. Brussel sprouts have such a bad reputation but I personally believe it’s all in the way you cook things. I bet the people who say they hate brussel sprouts probably steam them and throw some salt and pepper on them, if that. We opted to grill them with some olive oil and some grill seasoning, and we think brussel sprouts are absolutely delicious.

The parts that are really grilled taste a lot like cashews, and for us anything that tastes like cashews is going to be a new favorite food. So for anyone who thinks they don’t like brussel sprouts, try cooking them like this and you may decide you like them!

So another thing that my Nanna is famous for is her baked macaroni and cheese. She used to cut up veggie dogs into coins and bake them in with the macaroni, and it was always one of my family’s favorite recipes. That was actually the last non-vegan meal I ate. I thought I’d go out with a bang.
Josh and I have had a few different vegan macaroni and cheese dishes, and as so many of you know, it never really leaves you saying holy crap this is exactly what I’ve been missing. So we decided we’d take a crack at recreating Nanna’s baked macaroni and veggie dogs.

Now I haven’t had macaroni and cheese in almost 3 years (May 20th will be my 3 year vegan anniversary!), but this baked macaroni dish satisfied my cheesy cravings and Josh’s too (that says a lot right there). The veggie dogs gives it a little smokey flavor, and the bread crumbs on top get all golden brown and delicious…it’s just awesome.

This recipe will be in our recipe zine which is still in the works (no we haven’t forgotten about it!) so as soon as we finish that it’ll be for sale for like 5 bucks and then you can make this amazing macaroni every night like we do (well, almost every night).

Josh and I went to go pick our own strawberries the other day..actually it was like last week sometime but it’s taken for-ev-er to get on here and post about it. Anyway, it was realllly fun. This little farm outside of Richmond has pick your own strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and in the fall they have pumpkins and gourds too. I think we must have gone at the right time because pretty much every strawberry in the field was perfectly ripe and perfectly shaped. Here’s Josh the FIRST time he found “THE PERFECT STRAWBERRY!”

Of course there were like 20 other occasions just like this, where one or both of us found the absolute perfect strawberry. We went there planning on just getting a few strawberries, but then we thought while we’re here we might as well pick a bunch of them and then freeze them so we’ll always have strawberries in the house. We ended up with this

..a humongous pile of beautiful strawberries. So we went home and Josh and I hulled them, ate a few (make that a bunch) and then freezed the rest. I’m not sure if anyone else knew this, but once you freeze strawberries and then defrost them, they’re pretty much mush. So that’s pretty disappointing, but we’re still gonna try to use them in this strawberry rhubarb crisp that we want to make tonight so we’ll see how that goes. Otherwise we’ll be making a bunch of strawberry smoothies, which isn’t bad at all.

So while reading a post on Kamutflake Girl about Cinco de Mayo, I realized that we had totally missed it. BUT, and you can call it fate, Josh and I just so happened to make burritos with guacamole and cheesy sauce on Cinco de Mayo. Worked out pretty good if you ask me. The burritos were super good this time for some reason..I think it was the guacamole.

I served it in these little avocado boats, which Josh said is good because it’s like a single serving of guac for you to eat out of and not worry about sharing

Here’s a shot of Josh’s burritos

Ok I probably shouldn’t have posted this around dinner time when I haven’t eaten yet because now I’m super hungry.. damn.

I just made the blueberry coffeecake form vegan with a vengeance for lunch and it was delicious.

Happy Earth Day everyone! I’ve noticed that this year on Earth Day there has been a lot more buzz about living “green” and saving the planet and all of that. It’s gotten to be a really big trend, and although it sometimes bugs me to see people buying into it just because it’s somewhat a fad now, at least they’re buying into it at all. I think its really great, all day on HGTV they’ve been playing shows that have to do with green living and things like “20 ways to be green.” I’m an interior design student and the program is really focused on green architecture and design. Almost all of our projects have to be eco-concious, ranging from using recycled materials for finishes to utilizing solar lighting designs. It’s really awesome because green living and design is so important to almost every student and faculty member in the program, but one thing that has always frustrated me is that people don’t realize that what they eat has almost more to do with being green then driving a hybrid car or recycling their bottles and cans.

We recently had a project where we had to design a cafe space for the first floor of our building at school. This one girl in my class (who recently decided to go vegetarian) chose to make her cafe a vegetarian restaurant. While doing her presentation she had a slide where she talked about her research into the vegetarian diet and how eco-friendly it is. She mentioned how a vegetarian diet uses less water than a meat centered diet, and how it uses less land, etc. My teacher, who is always talking about how we need to be “green” and how important it is to be “green,” interrupted her and said in a very skeptical and I’ve-been-a-meat-eater-all-of-my-life kind of way, “Wait a minute..how does eating meat use a lot of water?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe that a man of such a high level of knowledge about the green movement and the impact that we as humans have on the environment could really not know that. Could he really have not ever read about a plant-based diet being one of the most ecologically smart things we as humans could do? The girl who was presenting her project kind of looked at me for help with some facts to back her up, so I told our teacher all about how raising cattle for meat is a leading cause of deforestation,and how we could be using the land for growing crops to feed people instead of growing crops to feed the cattle and cutting down trees to raise the cattle who eat the food and then we eat the cows to get the “nourishment.” It sounds just about as stupid as it really is, right? Didn’t he see that?

But then I realized, what we choose to eat is not one of those “top 20 ways to be green” that’s being broadcasted on my television. You don’t see big signs in the grocery stores with facts about meat consumption and the environment like you see on TV about how driving a hybrid car will save the planet. So many people have no idea that not eating meat actually does MORE for the environment then driving a hybrid car. My dad would call this “the politics of meat.” People don’t want to give up “their meat.” It’s ingrained in us through the media, by making meat a sign of masculinity..you know, the “Amurrican” way. The media tells us that tofu is gross and veggie dogs are tasteless. People most times than not get defensive when they learn that you are vegan or vegetarian, and usually find ways to make you feel less of an equal.

It’s much easier for people to screw in a compact flourescent then it is to feed their child a veggie burger. It’s much less complicated, and it’s so much more socially accepted. For Earth Day my dad got both my sister and I a book called “The Environmental Equation, 100 factors that you can add or subtract from your total carbon footprint.” It’s a really good book with lots of ways to make a positive impact on the environment, and we were even surprised to see two whole pages devoted to eating “less meat.” It had some facts like these:

The average meat diet results in an extra 1.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases a year compared to a vegetarian diet.
Annual global meat production is projected to double from 229 million metric tons at the start of the decade to 465 million metric tons by 2050.
Livestock commands 30% of the planet’s land surface and 70% of the planet’s entire agricultural land.

But of course it closes with saying how if we cut our meat consumption by a third we can have a cleaner, greener Earth. Why not all together?!
But then this is the best part. I was somewhat happy with those 2 fun-filled pages about eating “less meat,” but as I flipped through more I found a page on green weddings. Now being with Josh for almost 6 years now, I’ve looked into the topic of green weddings more than once But this guy, Alex Shimo-Barry, who wrote this lovely book couldn’t just type a page about green weddings. Oh no, he had to throw in a nice shot to the heart for all of us vegans out there. Allow me to indluge you:

Stories about green weddings usually focus on a couple who choose a vegan menu and go hiking for the pre-wedding date…. Not everyone who cares about the planet wants to eat bean curd on one of the most important days of his or her life; nor should they have to.

Oh the horror! Eating bean curd on your wedding day?! How god-fucking awful! But this is the mentality of the world that we live in. If running their laundry with cold water is going green, they can manage that. But cutting down on the milk and burgers? No way, Jose (I had to say it..).

I know I’m not alone in my frustration. But I also know how much one person can really do for a cause, and how much one person can effect all of those around them. It’s nice to look back and think of how many lives I have changed just by people learning that I’m vegan. If I open one person’s mind about veganism that to me is worth all of the frustration about the world around me, because I know that person will go on to open other peoples minds, and so on and so forth.

So happy Earth Day everyone..and thank you to all of you who are or who are on their way to becoming vegan.