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Wednesday, August 4, 2010

There's an app for that.

So I did make homemade falafel the other night as said. It was quite easy. Just a can of chick peas, an onion, garlic and spices with a bit of flour then fry it in a pan. I don't feel like typing out the recipe so if you want it, you can find it here on Seeds for Meat.

Then I served it in a whole wheat pita with whatever type of dressing you like. The huz went for honey mustard. It was yum.

Further laziness: I only took a photo of the finished product. Here it is.



You could also choose to be healthy and add in some lettuce and other veggies. I choose to be lazy.

Last night I was very excited to make an Avocado Mango and Black Bean Salad that I found off of the Whole Foods App on my iPhone. The app is quite great for anyone with allergies and/or special diets as you can select what filters you want to sort the recipes by. I obviously chose vegan, and this popped up. They also have the option to search gluten free. I assume I'll use that one eventually. Now if you don't have an iPhone yet, I guess it's just sad being you and you can pretend you didn't read this last paragraph.

I also found my new favorite smoothie recipe on here (1 cup soy milk, 2 tablespoons almond butter, and a cup of frozen strawberries blended together= ecstacy). As a side note, I use a Magic Bullet for all of my smoothies as it's great for small servings and can go in the dishwasher. However, please don't confuse this with any sexual objects that may appear if you choose to Google it. I am definitely referring to the blender, not the vibrator.

But back to the point. Whole Foods and their app definitely let me down last night. My avocado mango salad was not a success. By far one of the nastiest things I've ever tried to eat. The huz wouldn't even try it, and that's saying something. I know the mango and the avocado were delicious as I ate half of each while preparing the salad, so it wasn't their fault. I think it was the nasty vinaigrette. I should have tasted it before dumping it all over my uber delicious produce. What a waste. I wish I had a compost. Then I would feel a bit better about all of this. Instead I wasted half of my lovely fruit bowl and threw it all into the trash. I think this experience wins a point for lazy. An hour cutting all my produce to throw it out. Not cool.

Here's a photo of my very appetizing salad.



And my sad fruit bowl now.



But luckily I had ingredients on hand to make old faithful: vegan happy pizza. If you'd like to see my recipe for that, click here.

Tonight I'm making this recipe for General Tso's Tofu. I'm excited. I'm hoping I can't eff this one up too badly especially since friends are coming over and I have more people to poisen besides the huz. I'll let you know if they're still my friends tomorrow.

Monday, August 2, 2010

I don't like labels, unless they're designer.

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!!!

Didn't you miss me? Don't lie. I know you did.

I'll be upfront and honest. I took a month and a half hiatus from veganism. It did not fare well. I realized I don't even really like meat, so why was I eating it? And every time I did I pictured all the horrible images from Food, Inc. and felt quite guilty about myself. However, this is not why I have re-veganized myself. Along with all the guilty feelings came my sicknesses. They came back in full force times 5,000 of whatever they used to be. It sucked. I'm not happy. And now I'm a vegan once again.

This is not to say, though, that I'm not going to have happy eggs every once in awhile. I think having the proper amount of protein consumption is essential and I have a tendency to not get enough when eating vegan. It was also the deal I struck with the madre to have her back aboard the vegan train. I think seeing how sick I got when I stopped with the veganness was enough to get her cheerleading for the campaign. However, she did now warn me not to go and carboload like all those other vegetarians and vegans and gain tons of weight. Thanks for the warning, madre.

And while some of you may now say that I'm not a true vegan if I'm occasionally eating happy eggs, that's fine. I don't really like to label myself a vegan anyway. The madre told me I would be considered and omnivore if I eat eggs (looks like somebody was doing some research). But I have yet to eat eggs since I reveganized and I don't think I'll really eat that much of them anyway, so I don't know that I'd call myself an omnivore either. Maybe I should change the title of my blog to "The tales of the sometimes vegan." We'll see. I really just dislike labels in general in all aspects of life, unless they happen to come on shoes or purses and bear some sort of fancy designer's name. In that case, I love labels.

My first week back to veganism was not without some drama. We had friends up to visit this weekend and we went to Restaurant Row for dinner. After wandering for a bit, the huz was annoyed and chaperoned us all into a Chilean restaurant. There was not one thing on the menu that was vegan happy. I was going to just sit and enjoy with everyone, but then it was discovered that there was nothing I could eat and a nice little hub-bub occurred and we created a little scene and left the restaurant. Luckily, I found out my friend was not impressed by the menu and also wanted to leave (and, by default, her huz therefore wanted to leave, isn't that the way marriage goes?) so I didn't feel as bad. We ended up at a Thai restaurant and ate like kings and everyone was happy. Gotta love Thai for all of the vegan happy options you can find there. Plus, a free appetizer with every cocktail? What other restaurant does that? Love.

My house had also unfortunately lost a lot of its vegan friendliness over the last month and half, so the huz and I did a major shopping trip to Fairway yesterday to stock up. Love that market. Look at my lovely kitchen table now! I've decided I must always have a fresh fruit bowl full to the brim in my house from now on. It just smells so good and looks so pretty!



I'm excited for all the fun recipes I'm making this week. Tonight is homemade falafel. For lunch today I made an almond butter, strawberry and soy milk smoothie. Delish.

All in all, I'm glad to have returned from the dark side. I even kinda missed this blog. :)