Nov 20 2012
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Snacks

Potato Wedges with Aioli

Friends and family should be arriving soon so here’s a local and personal favorite for entertaining. We’ve got a lot of Spanish influence in Miami and something that they’ve created that’s right up my alley is Catalan Allioli or aioli. It’s a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, water and sometimes egg yolks. There won’t be anymore talk of eggs today.

I chopped some sweet potato (because it’s that time of year), yam and russet potato into wedges ranging from finger to thumb thickness and length. I tossed them in a mixture of the following:

2 tbsp corn oil (corn oil is important because it has a high flash point and won’t form carcinogenic substances as easily when baking at high temperatures)

1/2 tbsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

1 generous pinch of paprika

1 pinch of nutmeg

garlic salt to taste

I tossed the potatoes until they were coated with the spice and oil mix and them laid them out on a metal baking sheet lined with waxed paper. I baked them at 375F/190C for one hour.

While you’re waiting on your potatoes, it’s time to make some dipping sauce. I made 2 sauces.

One was my chipotle lime sauce and the other is the aioli. Combine the following:

1/2 cup of vegenaise

1/2 tsp Dijon mustard

3-4 cloves of garlic, finely minced

2 tbsp water

1 tbsp olive oil

It is possible to mix this in a food processor or blender but I don’t recommend it: it can be very thick and you’ll forever be scraping sauce off the walls of your blending device. Mix these well using a fork in a shallow dish, prepare for dipping satisfaction!

This is Christie, signing off!

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Nov 19 2012
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Recipes

Tahini-Soy Chickpea Salad

Life is thus that I am basically a Lazy Vegan 24/7 and haven’t had a chance to sit and plan and be creative with my cooking. I really want to turn things around, so I decided to make a different sort of chickpea salad to eat with my Boca Chik’n Patty sandwich.

Tahini-Soy Chickpea Salad

1 15 oz canned chickpeas (I would have used dry beans if I had planned ahead)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup olive oil
3 tbsp tahini
1 garlic clove, minced
juice of one lemon

I drained the chickpeas and set them aside. I then mixed all the other ingredients together in a bowl.

I mixed the beans with the dressing. Note: I only used about half of the dressing.

To make things a little more interesting, I added some grated carrot, sesame seeds, ground coriander, and dried parsley flakes. I’m sadly lacking fresh herbs at the moment and certainly would have added fresh cilantro or parsley instead.

I added some crushed red pepper after plating the salad. This ended up being a delightful and hearty meal! –Melissa

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Nov 18 2012
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Thoughts

Sunday Bunday!

More gratuitous bunny cuteness!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend. This is Christie, signing off!

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Nov 16 2012
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Thoughts

Sunshine Award!

We here at TurningVeganese are pleased to report that we were nominated for a Sunshine award by LiveBlissful. THANK YOU!

I can’t speak for Brent or Melissa on the answers to the questions or favorite blogs but you’re about to get a sampling of what I dig. I’m only nominating 4 bloggers because most of my other favorites have already been nominated and I don’t think these ones have been… yet.

Rules:

If you are nominated you must include the link in a blog, linking to the person/blog that nominated you. You must answer some questions and nominate 10 fellow bloggers and link their blogs in your post. Let the people you have nominated know that you have nominated them!

Here are the questions:

1. Who is your favorite philosopher? Richard Boyd

2.What is your favorite number? e

3. What is your favorite animal? Pretty much all of them. Nature blows my mind. I have a soft spot for octopus, rabbits, seahorses, pandas and a few others. Hippos are hilarious.

4. What are your Facebook and Twitter? Turning Veganese on FaceBook, Turning Veganese on Twitter

5. What is your favorite time of day? Noon, because it’s probably lunch time.

7. What is your favorite physical activity? hiking with Brent and swimming

8. What is your favorite non-alcoholic drink? coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee… also tea and vegetable juice.

9. What is your favorite flower? Delphinium, bee balm, bachelor buttons, wild poppies, fragrant lilies, columbine, Gerbera daisies and a few others. The sheer variety of flowers is staggering; nature just does the coolest things.

10. What is your passion? Exploring, learning and growing.

Nominees for the Sunshine award

1. the Perky Poppy is a blog that caught my eye recently because secretly I’m lazy and want a personal chef who is also a compassionate and fascinating person like Christine to come to my house and cook for me.

2. The Cruelty-Free Review does reviews of vegan and cruelty-free products that are honest and a little funny. Also… easy to follow recipes for delicious food. Give it a try!

3. v1valavegan’s blog explores the trials and tribulations of going vegan with clever recipes, reviews and easy-to-relate-to anecdotes.

4. the Cameraphone Vegan’s blog is just about exactly what you’d expect; delicious adventures in food from the perspective of a camera embedded in a phone. I love that Ty is local because then I get to go try it. She’s also a New York transplant and has a dearth of scientific and medical knowledge so I like to pretend I know her. Is that creepy?

 

This is Christie, signing off!

Nov 15 2012
1 Comment
Reviews

The Other Lazy Vegans: TV Dinner 3

Amy’s has been doing well so far with their tamales so we’re branching out to try some of their Indian dishes.

This is their Mattar Tofu. It’s vegan and gluten-free.

It looked good right out of the box and went into the oven for a quick easy meal. So check this out: after heating it looked appetizing and smelled even better. We didn’t do much to it as we were eating.

This is an improvement on the tamales. I added some flake red pepper but no extra salt needed. The rice was a good texture (even if it hadn’t been previously frozen) and the veggies weren’t mooshy.

The ingredients and nutrition were pretty good. Like the other dishes in Amy’s vegan and gluten-free offerings, it contained a modest amount of oil and was salty but it was tasty, easy and not terribly expensive. I’ll probably make my own next time but I might buy this again.

This is Christie, signing off!

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Nov 14 2012
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Thoughts

Vegan Thoughts

I haven’t been experimenting much with vegan cooking these days, so I thought I would share a few random thoughts with you guys.

I’m really excited about having a 100% vegan Thanksgiving this year. I’ll be ordering my dinner and plan to make a delicious vegan dessert.

I get a real bad hankering for eggs about two or three times a month. Whereas my pizza cravings are more about taste and wanting something junky, my egg cravings seem physiological. I wake up on those days and I think, “I NEED SCRAMBLED EGGS TODAY OR I MIGHT DIE.” I don’t really get it, but I do give in to it and feel zero guilt because it makes me feel better physically. That’s weird, right?

I’m not comfortable calling myself vegan. That’s probably because I eat eggs and cheese sometimes. So, if it ever comes up, I most often will simply say, “I don’t eat meat.” That’s definitely a true statement.

I get really upset with vegetarian restaurants that aren’t vegan-friendly. I feel like they should be called creamy-and-cheesy restaurants.

We are approaching the one year anniversary of Turning Veganese! Can you believe it?? –Melissa

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Nov 13 2012
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Snacks

Pomegranate, Punk Rawk and Basil Sammiches!

Yeah, I’m still baking my own bread and each loaf is an experiment. Sometimes it doesn’t work out well but that’s cool; we’ve got the taste part down and now it’s about texture. Anyways… This post is about sammiches.

This sandwich didn’t quite make sense to Brent but he trusts me and tried it anyways. I slathered my bread with some Punk Rawk Labs plain cashew cheese, mooshed some pomegranate seeds into the cheese and topped it with basil from our garden. It was definitely a mouth adventure with savory cheese and spicy basil and then you get the tart fruit flavors and nutty bread as you start to chew it.

It was also as visually stunning as basil mozzarella and tomato salad with the bright red and verdant green against the sienna of the bread and creamy cheese. I won’t turn this combo down if it happens again but I’m also determined to find other great uses for my favorite fruit!

This is Christie, signing off!

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Nov 12 2012
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Dining Out

Adventures in Dining Out: Karyn’s Cooked

I dine out quite a bit. It’s not really healthy and I definitely should cook more and it can be really frustrating because vegan options are so limited. So it was really fresh and new and quite overwhelming when I had a late dinner at Karyn’s Cooked in River North.

It’s hard to believe that this is the first time I’ve visited one of Karyn’s restaurants. Karyn Calabrese is a very popular Chicago vegetarian and it was a really big deal when she opened a raw foods restaurant. Her empire has expanded: she has a raw cafe, a raw bistro, an inner beauty center, and her cooked foods restaurant. I’ve heard a lot about her and she seems like an amazingly positive and inspirational person.

Karyn’s Cooked is vegan, though they are quick to mention that they use honey in some of their desserts. One look at the menu and I think you will understand why I was overwhelmed. There is so much to choose from, it all sounds really good, and it’s all vegan. There’s no guessing, there’s no having to ask questions about ingredients or request that they hold the cheese. It was really refreshing!

I wasn’t super hungry but needed to nosh on something. I decided to go with the vegan pizza, mainly because I’ve been craving deep dish pizza lately. I was amused when the pizza arrived since the description basically said “vegan cheese, seitan, and veggies.” It was topped with a lot of goodies – peppers, broccoli, kalamata olives, and a ton of onions. The cheese and seitan were deceptively good, in my opinion. I would have liked to have a little more cheese on it. The crust was thin and crispy and the sauce was tasty. This is a great deal at $10, especially after I consider how much a frozen vegan pizza costs. It’s under Appetizers so it’s clearly meant for sharing. Two slices and I was stuffed!

My friend Chris, a non-vegan, ordered the jerk tofu sandwich. I’ll take his word for it when he says it was good. It looked delicious and non-intimidating and was served with potato wedges and cole slaw. The cole slaw looked really good and I couldn’t wait to try it myself. Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed and so was Chris. My response when I tried it was, “Hmmm… it tastes like… cabbage.” Now, I realize how crazy of a response that is, but it was really the most cabbage-y cole slaw I’ve ever had. Let me take a sec here and thank Chris for taking me to a vegan place. I didn’t even realize how considerate he had been until well after dinner was over. I’m grateful for thoughtful friends!

I absolutely want to visit Karyn’s Cooked again. The vibe is really laid back, the space isn’t big but it’s roomy with pleasant contemporary decor, and there were lots of tasty-looking sweets on display. There are so many things on the menu that I want to try: lasagna, enchiladas, meatball sandwich, chili, ribs… and they have beer, wine, and cocktails!

Cheers! –Melissa

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Nov 11 2012
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Thoughts

Sunday Bunday!

Brent and I adopted some bunnies a few weeks ago and we’re just sharing bunny cuteness.

This is not an unusual pose: they do this kind of thing ALL the time. Rabbits bond for life and these two are inseparable. They’re napping together, eating together or grooming one another or doing SOMETHING adorable. I kind of wish I could love as unconditionally as they do.

With that, I’ll give a friendly reminder to get your pets spayed or neutered and adopt instead of buying an animal. Now comes the quandary: our neighborhood has a feral cat problem. There are at least 12 that hang around our house, skulk on sidewalks and in driveways and have crazy loud cat fights/mating sessions in the middle of the night. We’ve been considering renting a trap from the city to catch the animals (which one of our neighbors feeds, unwittingly perpetuating the problem) and have them impounded. It’s likely many of them will be euthanized if they’re too wild for adoption. The alternative is to hire a service to catch, spay or neuter the animals and then re-release them into our neighborhood. We could also leave them be, but I was never one to sit back and watch a disaster unfold. What would you do?

This is Brent, Christie and the bunnies, signing off!

Nov 10 2012
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Lazy Vegan, Snacks

An Apple a Day…

I realized today that I haven’t been eating much fruit lately. I forced down some oranges earlier in the week but have otherwise had no appetite for fruit… or really, any food. I wanted to be good today, so I snagged an apple from my sister’s kitchen and sliced it up into wedges.

To make things more fun and interesting (and inspired after rummaging through my nieces’ Halloween candy), I took a heaping tablespoon of peanut butter and softened it by heating it in the microwave for 10 seconds, stirring it, and then heating it for another 10 seconds. I took the melty peanut butter and drizzled it on the apple slices.

Voila! One of the easiest snacks ever!

Don’t forget to eat fruit, you guys. –Melissa

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