My First MoFo Blog....a day late...

Yeah, it didn't happen yesterday. So sue me.

This first post will be about my veg story. Back in high school, my sister, who was 3 grades ahead of me, took a Food Prep class where she got interested in food and somehow (i never actually asked...) got interested in vegetarianism. She stopped eating red meat, which was a big deal in our family full of deer hunters. Me and sister didn't exactly get along until after she left for college, but she's always influenced me. I don't remember her telling me about why i shouldn't eat red meat, but it got in my brain. One day during summer school when i was on break at McDonald's having my usual cheeseburger (plain, as always) and i was eating it in the way i had since i was young. I eat about half of it and then i pull the bun off and just eat the meat and cheese. When i pulling the bread off i saw one of those weird slimy, brown "slugs" that gets on hamburgers and just got totally grossed out and vowed not to eat red meat anymore. This was big for me, it cut out a lot of favorite meals: Poor Man's Steak, Arby's roast beef sandwiches, deli roast beef sandwiches, this one casserole my mom makes.....and, of course, cheeseburgers. I believe i even started calling myself a vegetarian at this point, which now makes me wince and laugh at myself.

i continued to eat any other kind of meat for the next few years. My sister eventually became a pescatarian (vegetarian that eats fish), which she still is to this day. I worked Chick-Fil-A as a senior in high school and definitely got my fill of their chicken nuggets, which were my favorite growing up. I was never grossed out by white meat, which is why i continued eating it. i'm still not grossed out by white meat, cooked anyways.

I was in Germany for a year from Aug 2002-Aug 2003 and decided to be pescatarian (but mainly veg) while there so as to not worry about the meat situation, they eat some weird meat over there. I worked kitchens while there and i once had to cut up some bloodwurst, which was disgusting! Also, i prepped bread for the old people at a nursing home i worked at and one person, just one, wanted schmerwurst (known in america as braunschweiger, it's smearable meat), which made me gag every time.

I ate chicken once during that year, when i was out dining with an american friend of mine. when i came back home, i ate chicken once and decided to give it up altogether. well, except seafood, which i clung to. i'm one of those people that consider seafood differently than land animals. Some people don't get this, and i understand that.

I was living in Sarasota with my parents for over a year and working at a small health food store. I wanted to go vegan then but at the time i had access to free, recently-out-of-date yogurt and eggs. soon after moving here to Portland, i stopped eating seafood. i moved in with a vegan friend and that's when i became the vegan i am today. i'm not 100%, there are times where i will eat dairy and, honestly, i don't feel like explaining the various situations that i do.
oh, and i'll eat honey. i would kill a bee and you can't torture them, like cutting off their tails, debeaking them, etc. that's how i see it anyways....

Vegan MoFo

Last year Isa Chandra Moskowitz, of the Veganomicon, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and Vegan with a Vengeance cookbook trifecta, started the Vegan Month of Food blog challenge. It's not really a challenge per se....but for me it definitely will be. I have been a terrible blogger and have only been posting once a month. With Vegan MoFo the guidelines this year are for the blogger to post every weekday during October. I'll most likely do the weekend as part of that and take off 2 weekdays.

"Join us for VeganMofo - the Vegan Month Of Food. The idea is to write as much as you can for the month of October about vegan food. The blog entries can be about anything food related - your love of tongs, your top secret tofu pressing techniques, the first time your mom cooked vegan for you, vegan options in Timbuktu - you get the idea."

For more info and the list of participants: http://theppk.com/blog/2008/09/16/veganmofo-is-upon-us/

So make sure you check all the blogs out, it's going to be fun to see what everyone talks about and what ideas they come up with to talk about....Let me know if you have any splendid ideas or anything you wish for me to talk about.

Sauerkraut...not just for Bavarians anymore

Yeah, this is kind of a lame post. I haven't been eating very many new things lately. I've just been very blah when it comes to food. If y'all have any food suggestions, please let me know!

So, did you grow up eating sauerkraut? i did not. Or, at least, i don't remember eating it. Perhaps my mother tried feeding it to me and i recoiled in disgust. But the first time i remember eating it was when i was about 13 and i was in ohio at my aunt's house and my sister was just eating it out of a cup with a fork. i think i tasted it and was just not impressed.

A few years later, my sister, her husband, and i were living next door to my parents in their rental house. We had a New Years meal (which we now have every year) of kale with black eyed peas (a Nava Atlas recipe that is totally delicious), mashed potatoes and sauerkraut with vegan bratwursts. I became enamored with sauerkraut after that. When i lived in Germany for a year i became acquainted with red(rote) sauerkraut, which is sweeter, usually made with cloves, and is very delicious with mixed in with mashed taters. (isn't everything good with mashed potatoes?)

I moved in with my current roommate in February and that's when i found out we have a common love: sauerkraut. Although her love definitely surpasses mine, no question. We always keep some kraut in the fridge and when our friend Redhead Anna comes over we bond over our sauerkraut love.

We find that we like the nonraw kind. Like, there's this brand called Bubbies and we found that it's too crunchy for our liking. i don't know if it's usually cooked, but this kind keeps it's cabbage crunch. We normally get Eden's(above....obviously), but really any will do. This past weekend i made BeerBQ (from Let's Get Sconed....see links) sandwiches and i ate one with sauerkraut on it and it was delicious!

And, oh my goodness, i was looking through Flickr for sauerkraut picture and i came across Potato, Sauerkraut and Soy Cheese Casserole....that sounds so damn good! see it for yourself: http://www.vegalicious.org/2006/11/30/potato-sauerkraut-and-soy-cheese-casserole/

Spicy Hummus

ok, so i feel i kinda talk about the same things over and over again on here. ice cream and sausage and trader joe's all get mentioned pretty frequently....i just can't help it, i suppose.
i discovered TJ's Spicy Hummus a couple months ago when my roommate and i were doing some shopping and i was wanting something to snack on right away. i also picked up some of the multi-colored tortilla chips (that are great) to dip with. after about 3 chips, i was in love. it's got just enough kick to it and great texture. it's not one of those dense hummus's, like Emerald Valley. you know, the kind that breaks your chips when you dip them in? my only problem with it is that it comes in such a damn small container. it usually only lasts me 2 snacktimes....really more like 1 1/2 snack times. it seems wasteful to go through those little containers all the time. maybe we should all write TJ's and let them know how we/i feel about that...at least twice the size would be nice!
of course, because it's a TJ's product, there are no pictures to be found. i'll try to remember to take some and post an update.....

Cake, cake and more cake! and cupcakes!

So i haven't been eating much lately....well, new stuff anyways. I've been eating a shitload of Tofurkey Sausages (which, by the way, are currently buy one, get one at Fred Meyers here). But i've also been baking cakes. Three in the last 3 weeks. It's birthday season here, apparently....First, was my friend Corinn's:

swear cakes are all the rage right now, in case you didn't know. because they're funny. or at least, i think so...
This was my first cake ever. Like, from scratch and layered, nothing from a box. I had a lot of icing help from my wonderful friend Katie, who's Cake Bitch at Sweetpea Baking Co here in portland. She had me do some of the frosting, but i made her do the pretty stuff. I used the Super Moist Chocolate Cake recipe off of vegweb.com and the "buttercream" icing from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (VCTOTW)
The next week was my roommate Missy's birthday. I was dogsitting at Joshivore's (herbivoreclothing.com) house so i was working with unfamiliar space and mixers. It turned out pretty well though. Oh, except for the one layer, which i figured out wasn't at all done baking, and was put back into the oven after cooling a bit, so it was kinda dense....

the donut is from VooDoo and not a vegan kind...Same cake and frosting, just decorated with chocolate chips...
So next was my friend Jessica's birthday last weekend. This time I used the Basic Chocolate Cupcake recipe from VCTOTW (i didn't use it before because i wasn't sure what one recipe equaled, layerwise...I used the "buttercream" frosting again, because you can't go wrong with that stuff. It's delicious! I liked this chocolate cake recipe better than the first one i used. I used the leftover icing from the wording on corinn's cake for the middle and also put sliced strawberries in there. I then decorated with strawberries on the outside. I really disliked the red frosting's taste. Not sure if it was because it was a bit aged, but all i could taste was "food coloring" and that freaked me out...


I made too much frosting every time so I made cupcakes to use up the extra. I made the Basic Golden Vanilla cupcakes from VCTOTW and they freakin' rocked my world. I never realized that i liked vanilla cake. They were perfectly moist and delicious. I made them for my neighbor's game night and they were loved whole-heartedly. i made another batch last night but i ran out of unbleached all purpose flour and had to use my roommate's whole wheat flour. They were still good, but they tasted healthy, or "bran-y" as my friend matthew mentioned. Cupcakes aren't supposed to be healthy, kids, make sure you're using unbleached!

sausages....get in my mouth!

Now, y'all, don't let your minds go in the gutter. Too late, right?
Well, fine....I went to VegFest a couple weekends ago and sampled quite a bit of stuff, but my favorite item is always the fake meat stuff. Tofurkey and Field Roast are always there, which fills my heart (and stomach) and makes me happy. My birthday was the following Monday and my friends and i got together and made pizza. Well, what goes better on pizza then faux sausage, right? Right! We had Tofurkey Sweet Italian with Tomato and Basil and we cut them up and sauteed them a bit before putting it on our pizzas and cooking them.
This is what my pizza looked like:

Good, right? It looks like it's missing cheese, but it was still killer, i swear. I put some tomato sauce, sauteed mushrooms, onions, and spinach, a few blanched broccoli florets, and the tofurkey sausage. After it was baked i put some pepper rings on it. With added nooch, it was just some of the best pizza ever! I just wish Hot Lips would carry some of the Tofurkey sausages to put on their vegan pies. I think i would go there a lot more. They don't really cater to the vegan crowd though. I used to work there and i would mention and hint to them to get some kind of protein topping for their vegan slices, but they would just say "yeah, we're working on it. we tried something with tofu but it didn't work, blah, blah, blah..." If you hadn't had their crust before, you should try it. They sell the dough so you can make your own pies at home.

Also, I would like to note that the girls of StumptownVegans invited me to be a guest on their podcasts that they do and i did it and it's now up to listen. It's all about the VegFest, so check it out. www.stumptownveganspodcast.com.

such a slacker...

Apologies to the onlookers of my blog. I could try to make up some good excuse for my absence, but i don't have one and i don't like lying. I have been thinking about posting and it's the thought that counts, right? oh! i just did have my birthday, that's a good excuse, yeah?
I did go to the VegFest last weekend and got to do a little sampling. Not a lot of new things though. I got to try some tasty chocolates, the much talked about Temptation Ice Cream from Chicago, hazelnut hemp butter, hemp crackers, Wildwood burgers, and some other various things.
ProBar was there. They have some new ProBar flavors that i'll be trying out soon. They've got a new line of flavors called Sweet & Savory and so far i've had Kettle Corn and the Cherry Pretzel. So far, so good. I'm a fan of kettle corn in general so i was excited to try that one. (by the way, for those don't know kettle corn is just popcorn that has been sweetened. it's what you get over in Germany at movie theaters. They apparently don't like salty popcorn...)
The lovely girls of StumptownVegans.com invited me to do a podcast with them discussing VegFest and that should be up on their site soon. The podcast was fun to do but it's like i got all verklempt as soon Jess's Tommy started recording us. I mainly let Webly and Jess do the talking. Good times, good coffee (made by Tommy, lover of coffee).

Hopefully, i'll be posting something real soon...until then enjoy this picture of the cake my friends made me. carrot cake with vanilla "pudding", and carob chips.