Good bar food: it's not any oxymoron

One of my favorite bars here in Portland is Bonfire, SE Stark and 28th. I've gone there for twice as part of my birthday celebrations. In my most humble opinion, they have the best fries in Portland. And i don't think that only because they're the cheapest! It's $3.50 for a motherload of well seasoned fries. McMenamin's charges $5 for tater tots! But i won't get started on my love/hate relationship with the McMenamin's company, maybe a different post...

French fries is what i look for at a bar as my primary way of judging their food selections, but in Portland you'll find a lot of substantial food and there's usually some good vegan options. I think it's the law here to serve some kind of food as long as you're serving alcohol. I really should know this since i took a mandatory 6 hour long alcohol class so that i could work at Hot Lips Pizza....

Anyways, at bars around here you can almost always count on a hummus plate and french fries (though there's a few bars that don't have that have, if you can just imagine that! i'm looking at you, Beulahland, Roadside Attraction, Tube and Hedge House! man...there's quite a few....), but you can also count on something more filling, such as the tofu or tvp tacos at Bonfire, which is what my friend Matthew above is about to devour. They also have a curry burrito, which i've never had. My friend Corinn loves the portobello gyro, which can be made vegan. Side note about the waitstaff: they can be a bit more-hipster-than-thou, but there's at least one awesomely nice server there named Sean.

The Tube downtown has the yummiest $2 Ham & Cheese english muffin sammies during their Happy Hour (which last i checked ended at 10pm). The Bye & Bye, our town's only all-vegan bar, has quite a few options including a delicious, but messy meatball sub and several different bowls, which are nutritious and delicious. Oh, they are also fry-less.....sad face....

As you can tell, i'm not looking for good-as-in-healthy bar food, though it's possible. I just know that when i visit home in Sarasota, Florida i don't even think about trying to get anything vegan that tastes good when i'm out and about.

What's your favorite bar food?

My Story, Part Zwei

My long story didn't really include why i am vegetarian, so i thought i would explain a little. Explaining things is not a strong suit of mine, i tend to babble and i don't have the ability to make it clear and ideas are a little disjointed. So bear with me.

I started becoming veg because i became grossed out by red meat and also just because my older sister was doing it. I also figured out that I am unable to actually kill an animal myself and i think that if you can't do it yourself, then you don't deserve to have someone doing it for you. Growing up in a "city" and not a farm, you don't really put the 2 together that what comes in a nice clean package first went though a disgusting slaughterhouse. It's just a nonmoving lump of "meat." The German word for meat is "fleisch" (pronounced "flysh"), literally "flesh." I think if i grew up calling meat "flesh" i would've been a little weirded out that i was eating it.

While i still lived in Florida with my parents, i started learning more and more about the dairy and egg industry and i didn't like what i found out. They are connected with the meat industry. Dairy cows produce male calves that are good for nothing, so they get sent to veal farms. (I have family friends that run a veal farm and i remember visiting the air conditioned barn when i was young. i didn't think much of it, just that it was dark and coo inside. the husband has mentioned that he thinks veal calves have an excellent life. i guess he just feels like just sitting without being able to barely move is a great life. i do believe he is nice to them, but the not being able to move is what gets me, and also that they are separated from their mothers...) Since male chickens aren't needed for egg producing they get disposed of or sent to farms that grow chickens for meat. Some of them get disposed of by being thrown into garbage bags and die by suffocation.

The way most of the dairy cows and chickens live just sucks. Like, for real, it's not what God intended. The standard American diet uses too much of these products. Years ago, before factory farming, people ate meat once a day and butter was used sparingly and you got whatever eggs your own chickens laid or whatever you could afford to buy from the local farmer. Chickens weren't "shocked" (put in darkness and not given food) so that their bodies would produce more eggs for awhile long before being killed.

Slaughterhouses are gross. Stun guns don't always work and animals are sliced open still alive. People that work in slaughterhouses get injured and die from falling into dangerous equipment. The speed they must work at to keep up with their quotas is mostly to blame.

And then there's the shit. Literally, shit. Animals produce a lot of it and it produces a lot of greenhouse gas. It gets into our water and even into the meat you eat. One of my favorite quotes from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser is "The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms : coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.

Some people aren't fazed by killing an animal. I don't, personally, understand that, but i realize it's why the motto "meat is murder" and the like are not going to change someone's mind to stop eating meat. I am not like a lot of Portland vegans and vegans worldwide in that i'm not eating vegan for animal liberation. I don't mind people owning animals and i don't think animals are just like us humans. I don't put them on the same "level" as humans. But I do have compassion for them and animal cruelty is something i find despicable. It's a living creature and if you're a christian or whatever and believe that God put you on this earth and you have dominion over all the animals, it doesn't mean you can treat animals like shit. Shooting squirrels for the hell of it with your bee-bee gun is something i'll never understand. Putting a lizard in an emptied tennis ball and lighting it on fire....these are things boys, like my cousin benji, did. I don't know where they get this from....

I always find it humorous when people find out your veg and they get all worried about your protein intake or whatever. It's like, hello, my diet even if low in protein (which it's not) would be 10 times better than what you eat. i eat plenty of grains, legimes, veggies, fruit, nuts, etc. You, with your white bread devoid of any nutrition, your 40 oz of soda a day, your processed cheese and your red meat full of saturated fat is not healthy and you're not getting all the nutrition you should be getting......We don't need as much protein as some might think and i eat tofu and beans, i'm just fine. So just lay the fuck off. Thanks!

Waffles and Me

I've posted about waffles before on here. It's not my favorite breakfast food, but when it comes to quick and easy, frozen waffles are just the manwhores of breakfast foods. Especially when someone else is making them for you....and adding maple "butter" and vegan sausage. Then it's just flippin' golden! Look how happy Katie is!



Yesterday Katie (of Sweetpea Baking Co) and i went to the Flavour Spot cart at N. Fremont and Mississippi (the other location is somewhere on Lombard, google if you want specifics, i'm unable to do links...). We met up with our friends Kevin (www.tofuligans.com), Jeff, and Susie. Kevin is currently visiting from the great north (aka Canadia.....yeah, Canadia) to do photography for Isa Chandra Moskowitz's new brunch book (yay!). Jeff is a recent transplant from....Iowa? This here is Susie, a recent transplant from Vancouver...Washington. Heh....She's into science and molecules and how to make vegan whip cream.(http://parsnipparsimony.wordpress.com/)


Anyways, back to food....

I had been hearing about this food cart for a very long time, but it's quite far for me to go just to get a waffle, no matter how good that waffle is. I finally went a few months ago when i was house/dogsitting for the Hooten's, who live out near the Lombard location (and also the Fremont/Mississippi location wasn't open just yet). I fell pretty hard for this delightful mix of flavors and textures. I had to go again the next day. And then again a few days later....The wait can be a little long at times. The cost is $4.50, which isn't bad.

Bellies full of goodness:

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.....