Hey gang! Back again for the third installment of our vegan beer vlog posts, we sample New Planet’s Tread Lightly Ale. New Planet is another awesome company who found their niche in making gluten-free beers. Be sure to check them out.
As always, check to see if your booze is vegan at Barnivore, like the awesome vegan you are / want to be!
From Brent and Christie, peace out, my vegans!
There’s always something off-putting about the concept of a TV dinner: a pre-packaged tray of unrecognizable goo that you take out of the freezer and pop into the microwave before being distracted from what’s in it by the latest episode of Mad Men. This post is about that style of meal.
Amy’s tamale with roasted vegetables caught my attention as I looked for Amy’s vegan gluten-free burritos (a perennial favorite snack food for that man I love). I love Mexican food and found the picture on the package appealing. It also has the rest of the key words that lure consumers like myself in; it announces that the product contains organic ingredients and is dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free, nut-free and soy-free.
Taking this baby out of the package brought up some deeply repressed childhood memories. I also realized it might vaguely resemble the picture on the front once warmed and plopped onto a plate.
One of the reasons that I like Amy’s burritos is that there’s not a lot of packaging for the amount of food. This had a lot of packaging for the amount of food. I rationalized that I would be sating some water by eating it right out of the dish in which it was frozen.It wasn’t an unpleasant experience but the food did little more for me than sit quietly in the microwave safe plate. I added some fresh cilantro, powdered cumin, garlic salt and some Tapatio’s hot sauce and that definitely gave the meal some personality.
It was filling, contained unobjectionable ingredients and had some decent nutrition information. I’d probably buy it again but know I’d make something better myself at home. That isn’t the point though; this is a quick easy meal with good ingredients and nutritional details for something that comes from the frozen food section. Amy’s makes a lot of great gluten-free and vegan products (and their website has some great tools for figuring it out without condemning you to the tedium of reading every box)
What’s your favorite frozen dinner? I’d love to hear more and better options.
This is Christie, signing off!
Hey gang! We liked making the first video so much, we made a second. In this post, we review Green’t Dubbel Dark Ale. It’s freaking delicious.
Don’t forget to check if what you’re drinking is vegan at Barnivore!
From Brent and Christie, peace out, my vegans.
I’ll have to start in advance by thanking the ZenCat Bakery for the pizza crust but the rest was all about what we had in the refrigerator. There wasn’t any traditional pizza or pasta sauce but we did have some salsa so I knew what we had to do.
I started by sauteing a chopped onion with a diced jalapeño, chopped garlic and some flake red pepper. When the onion began to soften I added some soy curls that Brent prepared with some Brag’s amino acids and cayenne pepper.
I sauteed them until the extra liquid from the soy curls was absorbed. I seasoned it with a little additional onion powder, cumin, coriander, a touch of garlic salt and some garlic powder.
I topped the crust with some salsa and then my fajita mix and then some more salsa. We topped it with Daiya mozzarella (though pepper-jack might have been better) and then I baked it according to Zen Cat bakery’s instructions.
It’s good to have frozen pizza crusts around. It’s a great way for us to have whatever veggies in the fridge that need munching and it’s faster than making pasta. This pizza disappeared quickly and Brent’s face lit up at the possibility of doing it again. We will…
This is Brent and Christie, signing off.
I don’t worry much about Brent and I getting enough nutrients but I rarely skip and opportunity to make sure we’re getting enough iron and B vitamins. I learned about this product from a friend who had cervical cancer. When chemo destroyed her red blood cell count, she relied on FloraDix (or the gluten-free version, FloraVital) to improve her blood stats.
It did and in a hurry. Within 2 weeks she was considered healthy enough to continue her treatments and today (7 years later) she’s alive and well with no recurrences in sight. While this is merely anecdote, it’s good to know that an iron and vitamin B supplement can be gentle enough for someone who routinely suffers from nausea and effective.
So what does this have to do with Turning Veganese? Smoothies! I put a little something extra into every smoothie we drink and by ‘a little extra’ I mean anything from protein powder (from peas, of course), maca powder, carob powder, spirulina or just about anything to give it that nutrient and antioxidant kick. This is one of those nutrient and andioxidant kicks. I don’t like the idea of hiding vegetables and fortunately this doesn’t need to be hidden. It tastes fine all by itself!
Today I’m putting it into a blackberry raspberry banana orange smoothie. I know you want some. You won’t know the difference except the B vitamins make me feel like I was shot out of a cannon (in a good way).
This is Christie, signing off!
I make a lot of vegan lasagnas because it’s what happens when I’ve got too many vegetables in the fridge that aren’t suitable for juicing, like mushrooms, zucchini and eggplant. It’s something I suspect a lot of vegans do and just don’t talk about… correct me if I’m wrong. (this is the eggplant version after baking, below)
We slice the zucchini or eggplant thin to use instead of noodles and go from there. Usually we line the baking dish with zucchini or eggplant, cover that with a layer of spinach and cover it in soaked lentils flavored with tomato and garlic and other spices plus whatever veggies we’ve got mixed in. (pre-baking, below)
I usually sneak in another layer of spinach if I’ve got it.Then we make tofu ricotta (tofu blended with a little arrowroot starch, onion and garlic powder, Italian seasoning, etc), pour that over the lentil veggie layer and make another layer of ‘noodles’ cover with some more tomato sauce, sprinkle with nut parmesan, Daiya, and/or nutritional yeast and bake 45 minutes to 1 hour at 350F/180C until it’s bubbly and the ‘noodles’ are tender. It’ll depend on the size as to how long it’ll need to cook. Usually when it’s bubbling up the sides, you’re set! (zucchini version below, after baking)
I’m not writing a recipe for this because I don’t want to box anyone in with specifics. I’d also love to hear your favorite vegan lasagna recipes or little tips and tricks you’d offer to others.
What’s great about vegan lasagna is that it affords the opportunity to eat the nutrients vegans sometimes have trouble getting without a lot of effort. B vitamins, iron and omega-3 and -6 fatty acids are among the nutrients that vegans sometimes miss out on due to eating a compassionate diet. Spinach (for iron), nutritional yeast (B-vitamins) and nuts (omega fatty acids) are my favorite sources of these nutrients.
This is Christie and Brent, signing off!
These make great leftovers but don’t normally make it to that stage.
We decided it would be a good idea to do some videos to spice up the site. So, here’s the quick and dirty for Green’s Tripel Blonde Ale!
As discussed in the video, Barnivore is a great resource to check if what you’re drinking is vegan.
From Brent and Christie, peace out, my vegans.
I got these guys on impulse because they’ve got my dog whistle on them: gluten-free, vegan, organic. I can’t ignore those words. Five Star Foodies artichoke burgers are made primarily from rice, cashews and artichoke and have a great flavor all by themselves.
They keep indefinitely (barring the recommendation on the label) in the freezer and for weeks in the refrigerator. They cook quickly and easily and go well with fries or a tofu scramble. They cost me about $1.75 per burger and 4 come in a bag for a total of $7. Each burger contains 16 grams of fat, more sugar than fiber and 330 milligrams of sodium so those of you who are watching your weight or your salt might want to steer free of these babies in favor of something home-made. All in all it was one of the better gluten-free veggie burgers I’ve ever had. The texture was nice: they melted in my mouth without falling apart during cooking. Still, these haven’t converted me; I’ll probably stick to home-made burgers and trying new ones.
We served them up with a tofu scramble as though they were a breakfast sausage. This is probably not what these burgers were intended for but it allowed us to really taste the burger and not the bun and condiments. If you get to try them, let us know what you think!
This is Brent and Christie, signing off!
I made a spinach artichoke dip a while ago that’s based on soy which is my favorite source of creaminess. In this particular recipe I’m using white beans for the people that I love who cannot eat soy. The nutritional profile is similar: iron, fiber, no cholesterol, low fat, rich in protein, vitamins and minerals and the flavor is just as awesome. We started with the following:
1 tin of white beans, drained OR 1 cup of white beans, soaked and [pressure] cooked
1 tin or jar of artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
1 10 ounce package of frozen spinach
1 small onion, diced
6 cloves of garlic, minced (more if you love garlic as much as I do)
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp garlic powder
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
2 tbsp vegan parmesan (optional)
1 cube of veggie bouillon (we used Rapunzel)
1 tsp of flaked red pepper
1 dash of cayenne
1/2 tsp of paprika
juice from 1/4 of a lemon
2 tbsp vegan mayonnaise
1/4 cup of Daiya (optional)
Okay, so that seems like a lot of ingredients. It was really simple to make. Preheat your oven to 350F/175C… this won’t take long.
I put all of the ingredients into a bowl while my expert moosher went to work mooshing everything into oblivion. If you’re interested in something that’s creamier, I’d recommend putting the white beans into your blender or food processer first and blending until smooth but I like a little texture and Brent’s muscles are a sight to see mooshing those beans. We had to microwave it a few times to thaw the spinach.
Once it was all mixed I put everything into a loaf shaped baking tin and put it into my oven for 25 minutes. It came out smelling divine and tasting even better. I burned my mouth being so enthused about getting some of our creation into our mouths.
The Daiya and parmesan do make this richer but it wasn’t missing anything when we made it with one or the other or neither. It was still creamy, rich, delightful spinach artichoke dip, perfect for parties or snacking.
This is Brent and Christie, signing off.
Here at Turning Veganese, Brent, Melissa and I can agree that cheese is the hardest habit to kick when transitioning from a carnist to vegan lifestyle. We’ve made 3 previous posts about cheeses we’ve tried and whether or not we liked them, were useful, thought the ingredients and nutritional profile were an improvement and if we thought they were a good value. We’ve managed to track down a few more vegan cheeses and wanted to share them with you.
Better than Ricotta by Tofutti was stunningly similar to ricotta. The ingredients include soy but it’s free of nuts, dairy and gluten so it’s suitable for people with those sensitivities. It’s pretty high in calories, equal to that of regular cheeses so I’ll probably stick with home-made tofu ricotta which is also considerably cheaper compared to the $5.49 or about 30 cents per ounce.
Better than Sour Cream, also by Tofutti is another product that we liked the flavor but found the nutrition lacking and the ingredients highly processed. It also contains soy but is free of nuts and gluten making it suitable for some common food allergies but not others. Making you own at home is probably more budget friendly but this makes a great taco topping in a pinch. Making your own will be a better bet in terms of nutrition and price. It’s priced at $3.49 for 12 ounces.
We Can’t Say it’s Sour Cream by Wayfare Foods had a great calorie profile at 35 calories per ounce and is free from soy, gluten or nuts (except for coconut). The taste and texture were a little confusing. It tasted kind of like sour cream but more like Tofutti’s Better than Cream cheese. The texture was also more like cream cheese than sour cream, even after we mixed the top layer of liquid into the bulk of the product. It cost us $3.99 for 16 ounces making it a better value than Tofutti but I suspect that a lot of people wouldn’t be convinced by the flavor and texture to really enjoy it.
Free & Easy Cheese Sauce mix is more of a flavoring than a cheese substitute but can help make things that are supposed to be cheesy taste like something approaching white cheddar. The ingredients are pretty processed but mostly inoffensive and are suitable for someone with nut, soy or wheat allergies. The container says there are 12 servings in the can but I don’t think you need as much as they say to get the flavor they’re advertising. You can add this to sauces, nut or lentil pate, soy-curl “chicken” salad and anything else that you’d want to have a cheesy kick. With this product, a little goes a long way so it’s a pretty good deal at $6.95 for a 130 gram container.
Nacheez This particular cheese was low in calories (20 per ounce) and the ingredients were relatively unprocessed and inoffensive, though it does contain nuts. It’s a great source of B vitamins, iron and Vitamin C. The flavor is pretty good, though we had to add cayenne to make the ‘spicy’ version spicy enough for our taste. It microwaved well in its glass container turning into a molten pot of awesomesauce that’s great for dip at a party or pouring over your favorite taco recipe. It was a little pricey at $6.99 or 82 cents per ounce.
Mozzarisella is something I’ve been excited about because I’ve been seeing rave reviews. It comes packaged like Teese and has a softer texture. The ingredients are not particularly objectionable but the cheese has no particular nutritional value. When we actually got to tasting it, I found it had an oddly chemical flavor and Brent’s remark was that it was “like sucking on a garden hose”. We might have gotten a bad batch but I don’t think I’ll be buying it again. Even at a sale price of $7.95 ($2 less than retail) it wasn’t worth it for 7 ounces.
Parmela has a standout list of ingredients and a nutritional profile and flavor to match. I think the packaging is a great addition because it’ll look nice on your table at a fancy party when you’re serving pasta but I think it’s a little pricey at $3.99 or $1.60 per ounce. I’ll probably stick to Parma by Eat in the Raw. Parma also contains nuts so neither is suitable for those with nut allergies.
Vegan Queso by Food for Lovers does not contain nuts like Nacheez but does contain gluten so this is suitable for people with nut allergies but not for those who are sensitive to gluten. It’s very close in flavor, ingredients and nutrition to Nacheez and is similarly great for use as a dip or a topping for enchiladas or your favorite TexMex cuisine. A little cayenne and a microwave is all it needs! It’s sold at $5.99 or 50 cents per ounce which is a better deal as long as you’re not sensitive to gluten.
So we’ve shown you some more of the cheeses we’ve managed to get our hands on and hope you’ll get to try and decide for yourself. Also let us know your favorites and if we haven’t tried them, we’ll give it a spin.
This is Brent and Christie, signing off!
Turning Veganese 