VeganMoFo comes to an end

whew! Thanks for indulging all this vegan food talk this month! Blogging every weekday (and about food at that) proved to be the challenge it was intended to be, but I'm glad we participated. It was really interesting to see the spectrum of vegan food blogs out there and I am in awe of people's imagination and cooking and photography skills. I've definitely gotten inspiration for how to broaden my horizons in the kitchen. As to how it relates to behind the scenes at LO, well food is the fuel! Here's a last food picture of these cool rainbow carrots we came across yesterday. The red ones were the color of blood oranges. So awesome we just had to buy them! They will be made into something good no doubt.



Ok, look forward to a Q&A with Dan Black next week! Happy Halloween!

from the best halloween house we've seen yet

VeganMoFo: oops, I almost forgot

Geez, only 2 days left to go with VeganMoFo and I almost forgot to post today. Well, it's late, so I'll make this a quickie. We went to People's today and since I forgot to take a picture of our previous kohlrabi, I'll make up for it with this green one which is almost the size of my head!



We also had some minestrone soup and cider from Sip, the vegan food cart out front. They just recently switched from summertime milkshakes to more autumn fare. It made for a comforting little afternoon snack and fell right in line with that fall feeling.

orange slices in the cider--what a nice idea!

VeganMoFo: feeling fall

It was a beautiful autumn day today and after going on a bike ride, eating a pumpkin danish, and depositing our ballots (I miss the ritual of going to a polling booth on election day and getting my "I Voted" sticker, but it's definitely less stressful to have mail-in voting), I felt inspired to make something fall-ish for dinner.

Let's face it, nothing says fall like winter squash (in spite of the name). I love all the different shapes and colors, but I'm still not terribly well versed in what to do with them. We used to get the occasional squash in our vegetable delivery box and I would like looking at them more than figuring out how to cook them. But luckily for me, I've gotten over the initial mental block by realizing how easy they are to work with. You can just cut them in half, take out the seeds (which make a nice snack when salted and roasted) and bake them for half an hour and then you've got squash at your disposal. Tonight I decided to add an apple and red bell pepper to the baking pan along with an acorn squash, and ended up with a tasty blended soup. I was never much of a blended soup girl either, but have found that our handy hand blender makes it a cinch and it adds textural variety. Sometimes it just really hits the spot.

VeganMoFo: interesting produce

I know it's obnoxious to take pictures everywhere, but we wandered into a market today and they had some produce I had never seen before--thai eggplant. I thought they were tomatoes and had to do a double take. It's cool to come across unknown produce.



For dinner we also ate something new for the first time (to my knowledge). Sometimes we'll pick up a vegetable we've never tried before and this one happened to be kohlrabi. I forgot to take a picture as we'd had it for a while before finally putting it to use, but it looks like a turnip with broken stems coming out of it. Turns out it's related to cabbage and cooks up to be like a tastier broccoli stem. We're still trying to find more recipes for it, but it's fun to try new things.

When we moved to Portland, we inherited a lot of interesting and new-to-us edibles in our yard. I think this first year was just getting to know them and figuring out how they grow and how they should be eaten. The previous occupants were pretty foodie with their plantings including quince, cardoon, sour cherry, muscat grapes, lovage, loganberries, green zebra tomatoes, artichokes, figs, and currants. We're still learning how to use everything in our cooking, but it's a pretty awesome challenge to have.

proofs and potatoes

We're one step closer to getting Jo and Martine's books printed! We looked over the physical proofs last week and they are on their way back to the printer. We are really looking forward to seeing the finished products, but in the meantime, we'll share a little peek at Jo's book, Quietly Sure-Like the Keeper of a Great Secret (LO80). Here's the proof of the cover...



We worked really hard to set the right tone with the cover and Jo came up with the great idea of using silhouettes of her characters. We don't want to give away too much of the book, but she was really able to capture a sense of and introduce the stories with this cover and deserves kudos for it. Like I said, we don't want to ruin the beauty of reading the book for the first time, but here are a few pages to whet your appetite (the pages will be printed in a favorite blue Pantone color).



Speaking of appetite (ah, what a corny transition to VeganMoFo--only 5 more posts to go!), we finally made it out to St. John's and the much ballyhooed Proper Eats. While we were slightly worried that it would be pretty hippie fare, and the seating behind the small grocery did not really allay those fears, the food was surprisingly tasty. I guess it was still hippie in the sense that it was healthy, but there was a lot more nuance to the shephard's pie special that I ordered than I expected. It had a delicious miso gravy and was well paired with kale and shredded veggies. I don't know that I would make a special trek to go out there just to eat, but if we were in the neighborhood, there are definitely more dishes that I'd like to try.

VeganMoFo: a nod to Grandpa B.

So while one of my grandfathers celebrated his birthday last weekend, another one passed away in August. We didn't always get along (he was a staunch Republican and told me back when I was in high school that my vegetarianism was a fad) and he wasn't my biological grandfather, but he was still the one grandpa I'd known ever since I was a baby. I actually thought he was Chinese most of my childhood because he spoke Chinese and I didn't know any differently. He was born and raised in Toledo, OH and lived quite an interesting life before he and my grandma moved from Taiwan to the South Bay in the 70's, most of the details of which I will never know. Even though neither of them had a cooking background, they opened an ice cream parlor/cafe and needless to say, I spent a lot of time there (although not so much that I could get fat off stuffing my face with ice cream). Besides ice cream, they served a mix of chinese and western food (I won't go into details as I don't think any of it was veg). I didn't appreciate it at the time, although it was a favorite of my brother's, but they served a signature chili with my grandpa's last name. It's my guess that the western foods came from his tastes, but I don't know if the chili was actually a family recipe. I do remember (as best as early memories can be trusted) that it had kidney beans, potatoes, and tomatoes. When I finally tried my hand at making chili a few years ago, I used my impression of their chili as my inspiration. Here's a version from last week that also had ginger, broccoli, red onion, chard, red cabbage, zucchini, green bell peppers, and mushrooms. Sometimes I add TVP for a more meaty texture (which would also more resemble the original).



My grandparents went on to open both chinese and italian restaurants when they moved to Southern California and my grandpa kept up his love of food (unhealthy choices as they might be) to the end. We disagreed about what we ate, but I like to think we shared a healthy appetite. I'm sad that there will be no future meals together, but we'll always have chili.

new store hours!

Ok, so with all this VeganMoFo food talk, you might be thinking, "do these people do anything besides think about, make, and eat food?" Well, we do try to get in some work between meals. One thing we've launched in October is new store hours! So through the end of the year, we're going to be open every day of the week from 11:30-7:30. We're accomplishing this with the help of our newest LO team member, Amara. You may have met her already helping Kirk out on the weekends. Now you can welcome her to Mondays and Tuesdays!

We're excited to be giving this schedule a try. We've been running the store for six years and it seemed about time to give this a go. Hopefully you'll find it more convenient for your shopping needs. We're always working on new LO projects as well as finding cool new books and zines and art and paper goods and look forward to the increased opportunity to share them with you.



And for once, I'm going to do my VeganMoFo writing earlier in the day. So the main reason I was down in the Bay Area this weekend was for my grandpa's 93rd birthday. After a luncheon in downtown Oakland (if you've ever been to a Chinese banquet, you'll know they're not exactly veg-friendly. I got a special tofu dish), we retired to my cousin's house in Alameda. My aunt bought me some handmade frozen dumplings from a northern chinese restaurant in Oakland that specializes in dumplings, buns, and noodles. I used to go there a lot in college and still have a fondness for their doughy dumplings, although my taste for vegetable filling has evolved beyond their somewhat uninspiring cabbage mix. It's still fun to get to eat some for old time's sake since I haven't found anything as good in SF or Portland.

VeganMoFo: seitan sandwich

oops, I missed posting before midnight, but I'm still up so it still counts as Wednesday! So instead of getting that 2nd trip to Cha-Ya since I couldn't wait for them to open at 5:30 without really rushing my meal (last trip's bowl of curry udon before heading for BART was enough of a lesson), I headed over a couple blocks in the other direction to Herbivore (did I mention how stoked I am to now have 3 veg restaurants within 2 blocks of the store! Funny how they're also all in Berkeley as well). My dad unexpectedly had time to hang out after flying in from Boston, so we got the rare opportunity to share a meal before going out to the airport.

My dad was going to order an asian salad, but I advised him against it as, let's face it, anything asian that Herbivore is going to make is not going to satisfy someone who lives and travels in Asia, or even an Asian American for that matter. So he told me to pick for him. My safe bet is always a sandwich--even though I want to be adventurous, the food is too hit and miss and at least they can't mess that up too much--but I have a hard time deciding which one to get. I used to always get grilled vegetables, but thought I should go for the grilled seitan as I don't make that at home. My dad is a pretty big meat eater who I never think of as liking western food, although reflecting on it now, he did take us to McDonalds and Reuben's and Burger King when we were kids (though it was probably more for us than for him). He asked me what tempeh and seitan were and though I wasn't sure he'd like them, it seemed like a good chance to have him try them. It's not often you get to introduce two new foods to a worldly 64-year old. So we ordered the grilled sandwiches with garlic aioli to swap halves and I hoped my dad would at least eat some of his meal.

We tried the tempeh sandwich first and he didn't seem too impressed. I didn't blame him as the tempeh hadn't been seasoned much and it was kind of bland. The rest of the sandwich added taste, but the tempeh just mushed in the mix. I liked it, but it probably wasn't the best way to introduce him to it. We both tucked into our salads and seasoned potatoes in the meantime (both were in very good form) and tackled our seitan sandwich last. I was pretty full by that point, but kept eating as I didn't have room to take leftovers with me to the airport.



The seitan did not disappoint! It was well seasoned and tasty and my dad actually liked it. The seasoning helped, but he also liked the more substantial texture. We both ended up finishing our entire plate and my dad gave the whole meal a positive review. I was impressed with my dad for keeping an open mind about food and I look forward to the next time we can partake in a vegan meal together.

VeganMoFo: Cha-Ya

Just got in from a short trip to the Bay Area and need to hit the hay to make up for much lost sleep, but my food mention for the day is from our favorite restaurant, Cha-Ya. I only made it there for one quick dinner, but I did get in my favorite roll, the summer green roll. Seaweed, avocado, cucumber, edamame... mmmmmmmm.



I also had the miso soup special. It's a good deal and it's usually something interesting. This one didn't really knock my socks off, but it was solid. It had new onions, peas, asparagus, and enoki mushrooms.



I was looking forward to another trip to get the sushi special with corn and tofu, but alas, I ran out of time. Next time!

VeganMofo: "It's the pesto of cities."

I love how 90s pesto is. Once I made a penne pasta with pesto & sun-dried tomatoes and my head exploded from being so 1990s. But it was good! That's the thing, it might have been a trend but it's something that's easy and has tons of payoff taste-wise. At this point I'm not sure what recipe I'm using as I make it from memory and just kinda wing it, but here is basically what I put in it.

90s Pesto (aka "Everybody's moving to Seattle!")

• fresh basil leaves
  
• several garlic cloves
  
• a handful of nuts, preferably pine nuts but also walnuts or almonds or whatever
  
• salt and pepper
  
• olive oil
  
• white miso paste (I'm pretty sure this is from How It All Vegan but I'm too lazy to check, but let's just say it is)
  

So yeah, this isn't a recipe but basically I just throw all that crud in the food processor and add and subtract ingredients till it looks nice and fine...and green. This is not a food for a first date as your breath will smell like the 90s and that's no good at all. Did I mention the 90s? OH the 1990s, how I miss you....

VeganMoFo: apple mania

Our favorite nursery (well, the only one we've stumbled upon, but continue to revisit because it's like a botanical garden you can shop in), Portland Nursery, is hosting its annual apple tasting event. It was our first time and we had no idea what to expect. I read that there'd be lots of school groups in the afternoon, so we tried to go early, but there was no escaping the little ones. Really, the event seems very geared towards kids, except kids aren't going to be buying apples. We enjoyed it all the same. Here's a bucket of fresh cider (there's nothing quite like cider from a plastic pail).



We really shouldn't have had two cups of cider (mini cups at that), because we weren't ready for the onslaught of apples in the tasting area. It wasn't the most hygienic thing thanks to the aforementioned kids (we encountered a girl in line who literally had snot dripping out of her nose), but we pushed all germ-phobic thoughts aside and powered through. Our top-rated apples were Ambrosia, Cameo, Melrose, Natco #90, Newtown Pippin, Northern Spy, and Rubinette. We skipped the apples we were already familiar with (you can't go wrong with Fuji) and still managed to try 40 different kinds, plus some pears and apple pears. We bought a few of our tasting favorites (how can you not at 89 cents/lb!), but were feeling a little woozy afterward and I honestly don't know when I'll have the stomach to eat another apple. I guess there really can be too much of a good thing!

VeganMoFo: Mock Meats and the Media

I am most definitely not an expert on food, let alone vegan food (let alone mock meats aka: faux meat, meat analog, fake meat), but I've eaten a good amount of meat substitutes--for better or for worse--so I want to talk a little about how and why you see so many mock meats in vegan restaurants.

Mostly you see them in forms familiar to all of us, the most familiar of all being the veggie burger. Ah, the veggie burger! I've had some great ones over the years and some pretty awful ones (I'm thinking of the ones they served at my high school in Virginia that were stuck to the buns and when you tried to take it apart to put in some ketchup the whole thing would fall apart).

Which brings me to how non-vegans deal with these fake meats. In yesterday's NY Times there was a review of Candle 79 by Frank Bruni where he mentions that, "...I'm convinced that many vegans are antsy about what they're missing." Referring of course to the many seemingly meat-based dishes that are on vegetarian menus. From the face of it, it seems like he's right. There is fake chicken on the menu so of course we all really want it to taste like chicken....right? The quick answer of course is no. (A hard NO!). We want good taste like everybody else and a multitude of textures and flavors from vegetables, grains and fake meats alike. Mock meats represent something different from a normal tofu stir-fry or whatever it is people are cooking.

The persistence of fake meat on the menus of vegan restaurants is more a product of the fact that vegan cuisine hasn't been around that long as it is named, and so a culture of dishes and menus and good-ole-standbys just has not come up yet (the word vegan was coined in 1944 and so for the purposes of this conversation and really for all intents and purposes, modern western veganism started then). We don't have a chicken piccata or pot roast or turkey dinner. Restaurants are still almost working backwards taking the chicken piccata and veganizing it, instead of starting with a list of vegetables and spices and grains and herbs and oils and going from there.

Obviously it's just much easier to make a version of something people already know than it is to make say, sauteed wheat gluten in lemon sauce. Mostly because that sounds kinda gross, even though I'm sure it could taste pretty good. (You will find wheat gluten named on the menus of Chinese restaurants and others, but I'm more specifically talking about American and/or western attitudes towards mock meats).

So what it boils down to is that we need new words to describe these things. Bruni said in his article (referring to a vegan reuben sandwich), "...sort of makes you wonder why it doesn't just take a different name, like an Irving or a Bernard." Now vegan or non-vegan alike, I don't think anybody wants to eat a Bernard (with no offense meant to anyone named Bernard). However it really is incorrect to say "mock" meat or faux or whatever as it is a real thing; it's wheat gluten. It's real seitan. We use these words because we just don't know what else to call it yet.

There are some fake meats that use that nomenclature just for practical reasons. The case in point is our old friend the veggie burger. Most veggie burgers taste nothing like a cow meat hamburger, but we use that name more for convenience sake so that we can describe the shape of what we're eating. It's a sandwich certainly, but burger is a good word to describe the shape made from taking an ingredient and making it in that specific form. It's almost a processed food (unlike ribs or legs which are literally ribs and legs) and so to make a burger out of beef or beans you still have to start with ingredients and process it in different ways to make a shape and so we end up with that word burger to describe it, which probably will not go away because it's just too damn convenient (and because most people don't want to eat something called a "bean patty").

But a chicken breast is a chicken breast and a fake version of that will pretty much never live up to the real thing when it comes to taste or texture (not to say it tastes better specifically, but the flavor and texture is different) and so we shouldn't even call it that. It's not the taste of meat and it shouldn't try to be a substitute; it's wheat gluten or soy that's boiled or baked and has a chewiness and texture that's quite good on it's own. There are bad fake meats much like there are bad animal meats, but mock meats haven't been around long enough in mainstream American culture to prove themselves as a fair substitute. We need more experimentation and more recipes to move forward vegan cuisine in a way that's uniquely our own, so sometime in the future we will no longer need the words mock, faux or fake. What I'm saying is we need ourselves some new words. It's going to take time as a vegan cuisine evolves and restaurants get better and recipes get better but sooner or later a seitan sandwich will be as normal as, well, a reuben.

VeganMoFo: carbfest '08

Well, looks like we've really fallen back on pasta dishes this week. Dinner ran late tonight as there was work, a long-distance call, and post-debate coverage. Jeremy decided to make a roasted bell pepper pasta. We usually just throw our peppers in with stir fry or grill them, so roasting was a novel thing. A little more work, but worth it. Here it is sprinkled with homemade parm along with some cheesy (FYH mozzarella) garlic bread.



The garlic bread had fresh basil from the window box. Here's a view before the cheese and the oven just because it's pretty.

VeganMoFo: books and pasta and cats

Taking a breather from book work. I think we have just about wrapped up Jo's book (the cover just needs a tiny bit of tweaking before we're officially done) and Martine kicked ass and turned in an awesome mini-book of drawings that will be printed on the same sheets. It's titled "Water And Fall" just to give you a teaser. We're super stoked to be getting these turned in for release next month.

All this jamming to finish has kept me up late. I know I need to catch up on sleep when I've been up to hear the 3am broadcast of Morning Edition more than once this week. Needless to say, we've kept the cooking pretty simple. We don't get meatballs too often, but we just happened to and they were great crumbled up in this tomato pasta dish. I guess it was kind of like beef-a-roni (forgot about that stuff--used to have the real thing in grade school lunch).



On a food and cats note, there's a fundraiser dinner at Sweetpea Bakery next Saturday for House of Dreams, a non-profit no-kill shelter. There is a ridiculous amount of outdoor cats here in Portland, which is not good for them or for birds. All the same, they do make for cute pictures when you find one on your garage.

drowning in work, eating eggless egg salad

So much to do, but haven't missed a VeganMoFo post yet, so no time to start now (short as it may be). Jeremy made eggless egg salad with the leftover half of a big block of tofu. Had some in a sandwich and on some woven wheats. Tasty.

VeganMoFo: mac and cheese

Another cold weather comfort food is ye olde mac and cheese. The recipe we use is the one in The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook and we can't make it too often because it is so not good for you (seeing as how it involves almost a bag of pasta, a stick of margarine, and a 1/4 cup oil), but it really just hits the spot sometimes (and has even impressed a non-vegan or two). Last night was a mac and cheese kind of night, but we did make a side of dino kale and chard to try to counter the indulgence.

If you are in NY...

Hello all, if you are in New York this weekend, please check out this show I am in at Giant Robot! Will Scaff is also from Providence, RI. The opening is tomorrow night, October 11, at 6:30.

Thanks and Happy Fall, Jo Dery

Vol 3 Mini is here!

We just got our shipment of Volume 3 minis this afternoon and they turned out awesome! We're just about sold out of Vol 1 minis, so it's nice to have a new mini option. All the greatness of the bigger version packed in a smaller punch.



Keeping it short as I've got lots of bookkeeping to attend to, but my VeganMoFo thought for the day is soup. This week has really turned on the chill in the air, and as much as I like fall leaves and don't care much for heat, I've apparently been spoiled by summer and am not particularly pleased that I have to put on more than a t-shirt and hoody. It would help if I weren't sitting next to an old window which barely serves as a barrier between me and the outdoors. It's going to be a long winter...



Threw together a light broth soup last night with some tomatoes, beans, mushrooms, onions, carrots, broccoli, celery, chard, ginger, rice noodles, tamari, and brown rice vinegar. Was thinking of Vietnamese(?) sweet and sour soup with tomatoes and cilantro, but got nowhere near that. It was still pretty good.

VeganMoFo: Sweetpea Bakery

Lucky for Portland and people who love sugar, there is Sweetpea Baking Company at SE 12th and Stark Street. Sweetpea is an amazing all vegan bakery making the most fantastic donuts, cakes and danishes (among many other things). I love going there as they always have new things to try, it's a great space to sit & eat and the owner Lisa is super nice and cares a lot about making vegan baked goods taste as good as any other baked good in the world.


The chocolate petit fours with mocha and pumpkin cheesecake I picked up yesterday.

Saturday is donut day and Wednesday is danish day and on Sunday they have a vegan brunch. Go there and get a vegan Boston cream filled donut! I swear this isn't an ad, I just like the place. ...Seriously, it's good!


This is a chocolate tart and an apricot cream cheese danish! Yowza!

Jo and Mom

Been juggling work on Jo's book (it's awesome!) and a short visit from my mom. Spent the weekend formatting Jo's pages and it was so cool to re-read her stories page by page, coming all together as a whole, and seeing how they build and parallel and intersect. We're super excited about it! She sent us her mock-up yesterday (even better getting to flip physical pages), along with some really great little gifts (L, O, shell, and maybe it was just for wrapping, but loved her screen printed tissue paper). Thanks Jo! You can get a sneak preview of what the title page will be like.



So the book's just about done, but had to put off wrapping it up completely while Mom's in town. We tooled around, dropped by to see 2 Sarah's (Lart & Kramer), and ate. Today we were downtown and had lunch at Blossoming Lotus. We walked in and saw some very yummy looking food just served to someone's table and it looked so good, I had to try it. It being the live pasta marinara. I don't know what makes it live (how does that differ from raw?) and I'm usually a cooked food fan, but it was damn tasty. Zucchini ribbon pasta with cherry tomatoes, spinach, pine nuts, live marinara sauce, and basil cashew cheese. I'm really glad I went out on a limb. Beat my mom's hummus wrap by ten-fold.



We crossed the street afterward and treated ourselves to a little bit of chocolate. Don't think we'll be making that splurge again, but it was good. Black currants and strawberry. Some Sweetpea Bakery treats to follow tomorrow. So much for eating healthily.

VeganMoFo: tomatoes

With the onset of chill in the weather, it seems that our fresh garden tomatoes may be on their way out. But they don't know it yet and they keep making flowers and fruit, though not quite of the quality of last month. It's our first real season of tomatoes (besides soot-ridden yellow pears from the SF balcony) and while some were losers (so far we've only gotten one almost mealy orange oxheart and the yellow pear plants are looking in worse shape than the ones in SF), the black russian plums have been amazing. Here's something tasty we made by grilling bread with fresh herbs and Follow Your Heart mozzarella and throwing some fresh tomatoes on top.



Something else we did with them was add them to our favorite feeling lazy dish, vegetable roast. We chop up whatever veggies we've got around, sometimes throw in some tempeh, drizzle with olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs, and throw it in the oven. Tastes amazing on its own, or good over pasta, grains, salad. It does require some prep time, but basically cooks itself, and that's perfect when you can't think of what to make.



We finished this batch off over quinoa and the tomatoes were amazing.

6 Years Old Today!

We opened our store 6 years ago today, back on October 4, 2002. Those were the days! Thanks to all our old and new friends, especially Lart who shares a birthday with us today!

the return of the junco (and Lart)

It's been less than a year since we started backyard birdwatching (not really something you can do from three floors up in the comparatively treeless Mission) so we don't really know what the seasonal bird patterns are yet (nor do we actually keep track). At some point in the spring though, we noticed that the flock of juncos that would visit every day was no longer hanging around. They'd been pretty constant since we moved here so we kind of took them for granted. We quickly forgot about them as we were entertained by house finches, purple finches, goldfinches, hummingbirds, and other random visitors. So it was like seeing a long lost friend when we randomly looked out the window yesterday and saw a lone male junco pecking around on the wet ground. Today there were a few more so it seems like they're back for good. I don't know what they're a harbinger of, but I welcome them.

Also back this week, albeit only temporarily and from much further away, is Lart! She's touring with her band Coconut as they play some shows with Deerhoof. We haven't seen her since spring either, so it should be a happy reunion. Now here's the VeganMoFo food tie-in: this summer she sent us a box of goodies from Berlin, which included some tasty spreads. Why aren't vegan spreads a bigger thing here? I mean there's Tartex and hummus and whatnot, but we could use some more interesting options. The flavors of all these were not necessarily so distinct, but they tasted good and that's what matters. We also kind of dig the graphic design of the labels.



Last week we were in a sandwich mood and had run out of Vegenaise, so I took some inspiration from those spreads and decided to whip up our own. I used our hand blender and the little faux food processor cup it came with and blended up a bunch of random stuff (carrot, walnuts, ginger, miso, chard, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper). It turned out surprisingly good and we spread it on some homemade rolls with some Tofutti cheese, Tofurky Philly style slices (so much for my not really buying seitan), grilled onions and zucchini. Now that was a good lunch. So thanks Lart! Go see Coconut!

VeganMoFo: day two

Ok, so it's a bit hard to remember you need to blog every day when you're not used to it, but that's the point of the challenge. I think I just need to get into the groove (and hopefully some of our other bloggers can chime in too). I thought I'd expound on the seitan pepperoni I mentioned yesterday (because it's tasty and I have some pics of the process, like this close-up of the dry ingredients).



I will be the first to admit that I'm not much of a blog surfer and just looking at the list of all the bloggers participating in VeganMoFo is overwhelming for all the food ideas that are out there. When I cook, it's pretty improvisational or we use a tried and true recipe (like the mac and cheese from the New Farm Cookbook). I really haven't explored the wealth of options in our many cookbooks. So it goes without saying that I never thought about making seitan (although I think my housemates in college made it once--my memory's a bit fuzzy. I know we made veggie burgers and soy milk. good times!). To be honest, my favorite protein is tempeh (which I need to look into making myself too), then tofu, and then I enjoy seitan the now and then that we have it (Herbivore's grilled seitan sandwich, holiday Tofurkey). We also usually don't buy it because it seems pretty expensive for the amount you get. So it was a revelation when our friend Adam suggested we get together to make some seitan. It was such a novel idea. Little did we know that it was so so easy. Now, it's not particularly cheap (vital gluten flour is a lot more expensive than your all-purpose white flour), but the fun of making and flavoring it yourself and then enjoying the fruits of your (very small amount of) labor far outweighs the expense, and if you broke it down, it would probably still come out less than buying it from the store, and you can save on some of that packaging.



This was from our 2nd attempt and we decided to throw in some fresh herbs from the yard. It would be better to chop the herbs up a little more than we did here so that they stay in the mix better, but it was a nice little addition. It does make you appreciate the flavors of Field Roast sausages though (we think apple sage is the tastiest). I think next time I'll try to be a little more experimental, but I was just getting the hang of this recipe and enjoying it. Here's a pic of what it looks like getting mixed up.



I won't include any more pics in its shaping process, because to be honest, it looks rather turd-like. But once it's cooked up, it's yummy and you forget all about that. We've yet to try it on pizza because we just end up eating it straight, although I did manage to forgo enough to include it in a Teese bake. All this talk of food is making me hungry. I might need to go whip up another batch of pepperoni. And then we can all go play Palin Bingo as we watch the debate. Sadly, I think we're all going to win.

VeganMoFo (aka Martine's visit)

So I was going to write about our nice weekend visit from Martine when I came across VeganMoFo (Vegan Month of Food). The idea is to post every weekday for a month about vegan food and it happens to start today! It's funny because it seems to be inspired by my friend Chris' NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which I participated in its 2nd year (yep, I did write a novel. No, I have never read it again). We've been wanting to blog more regularly so this seems about the pace of writing challenge we need/can handle. And we love us some vegan food! So we're latecomers, but not too late to start today.

It works out because I was going to talk about the food we had with Martine anyhow. She drove down from Seattle on Friday night and we shared some vegetable soup and a random melon we picked up from the store. It tasted like honeydew, but we just can't remember what kind of melon it was (something we had never heard of), but it was tasty. We stayed up late talking about books and projects. She brought us some really cool things: a crazy Japanese street scene cut-out book she found at a bookstore in Paris when she was there painting a mural for a clothing store (with help from Lart!), a Louvre magnet, and a vintage fold-out postcard mailer of Portland.



The next morning Jeremy prepared a tofu scramble from the Candle Cafe cookbook (with some improvised elements thrown in), made coffee with Cellar Door beans, and we toasted some Ken's Artisan bread and spread with whipped Earth Balance. In the meantime, I started making some seitan pepperoni, which is super easy to put together, but takes some baking time.



The weather was simply awesome (warm, but not hot, sunny with clear skies) so we headed out to Laurelhurst Park. We were greeted with a sad semblance of a Disney Radio event, which may explain why the park wasn't packed. We did get to see some dance moves done to that Jonas Brothers song. Scary... Here's a postcard of the park from the set Martine gave us. In reality (and many years later), there were no swans, the water was green, and the pond was fenced because of an algal bloom, and it certainly smelled like you wouldn't want to get near it.



It was too noisy to sit and talk, so we had a stroll and then headed over to Food Fight! and Sweetpea. We picked up some tasty apple, boston cream, and glazed donuts (and a mini pumpkin pie tart) and signed up for the Josh Harper fundraiser dinner at Cellar Door this Friday. We are excited that a vegan italian restaurant is going to be opening in the space after cafe hours. We'll let you know how this first test meal goes.



Martine had to get to her friend's house so we went home and scarfed our donuts and sampled some pepperoni and then bid her adieu. We love hanging out with Martine and we came up with a new project which we'll keep hush on for now, but we're excited!