June 18, 2008Gifts!My friend Kevin emailed me yesterday asking if I knew about any sites that made vegan gift baskets to send to a friend of his, so I compiled some of the cruelty-free items that I personally would love to get, and I thought I'd share it in case it helps anyone else out. If you want to get food for your friend, Pangea makes gift baskets. Or you could just assemble one yourself from these treats from Food Fight: Crumblz (they taste exactly like Butterfinger bars), Sjaaks Mini Chocolate Cups, Smooch Lions (vegan gummy treats), Alternative Baking Company Cookies (I love the Explosive Espresso Chip), and don't forget to toss in my favorite sticker. Even better? Getting awesome homemade baked goods in the mail from my friend Amanda. If you're shopping for a woman, I don't think you can go wrong with Lush. I'm not a very girly girl, and even I am a sucker for Lush products, particularly the massage bars. I love Wiccy Magic Muscles, but I also want to try Therapy, which claims to reduce stretch marks. Since it's summertime in most parts of the country, a skin-protecting moisturizer like Ultralight would also be nice. When shopping at Lush, looking for the green "V" symbol, which means that the product is vegan. This list doesn't even scratch the surface of great vegan gifts, and if I had more than a half hour to search and window shop, I could probably come up with a list twice as long, but this is a good jumping off point. For more vegan marketplaces, see: Cosmo's Vegan Shoppe, Pangea Vegan Store, and of course Herbivore for awesome clothing, stickers, and books.
posted by joanna @ 11:56 AM
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May 28, 2008Oprah and MeThis isn't a statement I have cause to make very often, but Oprah and I have something in common right now: we're both on a cleanse. Starting on May 15 and going until the end of June, I'm eating a gluten-free and primarily raw vegan diet. The timing couldn't be more ideal: my weekly organic produce box has been replete with salad greens, stone fruit, and citrus, and Food Fight has inexpensive, perfectly ripe organic avocados in their produce section every time I go there (some days, I buy every last one of them). In preparation of this cleanse, I added a few more raw uncookbooks to my collection, and I've really enjoyed just looking through them for inspiration, even if I don't end up making many of the dishes, or at least not as they're written. I know that there are a lot of people who can't conceive of how anyone could eat a vegan diet without getting bored. "I mean, what do you eat?" is something that I was asked a lot a few years ago (and is one of the reasons that I ended up writing a cookbook, partly just to prove that I eat whatever the hell I feel like eating). But a raw vegan diet is a completely different beast and is, in a word, challenging, especially with a full time job and a five month old baby. I'm not sure if I could do it in the fall and winter months, but I'm having a great time right now eating two avocadoes and at least a cup of nuts and seeds per day and still losing weight. Everyone in the vegan community is wondering if Oprah's cleanse will lead to her becoming a vegetarian. I'm not so sure. It would be wonderful if a decision that was almost certainly motivated by weight loss led to her choosing a more cruelty-free lifestyle, and from her blog entries, it does look like she might choose to reduce her meat intake on a more long-term basis. So will my diet be making a permanent change? Should you be expecting my next book to be called "Yellow Rose Stops Cooking?" Doubtful, dudes. Yes, I feel great and yes, it's much easier to lose weight and keep it off when your food is digested and metabolized immediately. But the thing about raw foods is, well, there is no cooking, just a lot of prep work, and prep work is what I hate about cooking! I don't really enjoy the peeling, chopping, processing, and blending. That is just what I have to do to get to the good part. I like standing over a pot or my cast iron skillet (my skillet! How I miss you!), stirring, tasting, reducing, deglazing, adding a pinch of this and that. Sure, I love a good salad, but I love throwing the salad together while the entree is in the oven, do you know what I mean? Having said that, I know that as the weather heats up here, I will be glad that this experience has added so many oven-free dishes to my arsenal. I would love to hear from you guys about how your diet changes in the summer, or if you like to go on cleanses from time to time to press your body's reset button.
posted by joanna @ 7:24 PM
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March 16, 2008everyone loves a fat sausagearen't sundays the best? they've always been pretty great, but ever since sweet pea started offering an all-you-can-eat vegan brunch on sundays, they're even better. if you live in portland, i strongly recommend stopping by. i have been doing my daily eats again, if getting a glimpse into the food habits of a stranger rocks your boat. i'm going to try and do it for four months this time instead of just one month. but i know why you're really here. you want to know if i attempted beer brats again. i did, and this time, it was a stunning success! here are my ingredients, but you should head over to julie's site for directions. (better yet, watch the episode.) dry mix: 2 1/4 cups vital wheat gluten 1/2 cup nutritional yeast flakes 1/4 cup chickpea flour 2 tablespoons onion powder 1 tablespoon Spike (or your favorite salt-free seasoning) 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon sage 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard 1/4 teaspoon white pepper 1/4 teaspoon savory 1/4 teaspoon rosemary 1/4 teaspoon dill 1/4 teaspoon allspice 1/4 teaspoon thyme 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg wet mix: 12 oz stale beer* 1 cup vegetable broth 2 tbsp canola oil *the best method i've found for getting beer stale enough for this recipe is to pour it from the bottle into another container with a much larger surface area than the neck of the beer bottle (like a bowl or glass measuring cup) and then leave it on the counter for a few hours. you're going to want to make the brats a little "fatter" than you would the other sausages; i ended up with ten of them. here's the dry mix in a bowl:  so beautiful, right? and here is a brat, sliced up with some mustards for dipping:  hooray! these will definitely be a staple in our house from now on. thanks so much to julie for coming up with a quick way to make veggie sausages. don't you think she should write a sausage book? in other food nerd news, i finally got around to organizing my spices this week:  prior to this, i had a horrible combination of those magnetic spice containers that were popular for about a year and then completely disappeared and bags (some of which weren't labeled) in my drawer. it made it tricky to find what i was looking for when i was cooking, and since i hardly ever do a full prep before i start in on a recipe, i was frequently in my kitchen frantically throwing bags around because i knew i had cumin seeds somewhere, dammit! now i can open my spice drawer with zenlike calm. what a relief. testing has begun for the second yellow rose book and it's going really well so far. like any creative project, i can already feel this morphing a little from what i had originally expected and planned for it to be, but it's growing in a good direction, i think! of course, this is still happening all in my mind. if everything that was going on in my mind were actually occurring in real time, i'd be twice as busy as i already am.
posted by joanna @ 4:07 PM
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January 30, 2008beer brats!yesterday was my first attempt to make beer brats with seitan. it was a failure from my perspective because they didn't tasted like brats. they were good, and we're still eating them, but they need some serious tweaking. here's what i did: i started with julie hasson's spicy italian vegetarian sausage recipe, and i adjusted all the herbs and spices so they'd be more appropriate for beer brats. aren't they beautiful?  and then i swapped 1 1/2 cups of the water with a 12 oz bottle of beer. i chose deschutes brewery's jubelale, one of my very favorite local seasonal beers. next time, i will probably use a lighter beer, like a hefeweizen.  after mixing everything together, i rolled the mixture into foil logs and baked them for 90 minutes on 350, cooled them on the sheet, and then put them into the fridge until that evening. for the first tasting, i just cut the brats into slices and tasted them with mustard. it was obvious right away that the main problem was the texture; the brats were almost spongy. the flavor was great! but the texture was all wrong. i'm pretty sure that i should have let the beer go flat before combining it with the wheat gluten mixture. the foam obviously started a reaction that puffed up the dough and created air holes in the dough.  later, i ate the brats with sierra nevada porter mustard and sauerkraut on a toasted bun, and of course it tasted delicious! you could put my big toe in a hot dog bun with mustard and sauerkraut and it would be heavenly!  so, i will be trying this again eventually with a light beer and letting it go completely flat before i do the mixture, so i get all of flavor without affecting the texture of the seitan. onward!
posted by joanna @ 1:04 PM
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January 29, 2008blogs!i know that this really shouldn't warrant a post, but suck it! it's my blog! i finally got around to making a list in the sidebar of the food blogs that i read. and of course it didn't take as long as i thought it would take, once i got rolling. why did i build it up to be this sisyphean task that i could never accomplish? why did blogger just underline sisyphean as if i misspelled it? don't make me question myself, blogger! can you tell that i've had a half-caf soy latte today? please let me know in the comments if you have a food blog and it's missing from my list. i would love to read it.
posted by joanna @ 10:30 AM
25 Comments
January 28, 2008because i just don't have enough going oni just wanted to pop in here and let everyone know that i've begun writing recipes for the second cookbook, tentatively titled yellow rose family, to be released by herbivore in spring 2009. the only reason that the title is tentative is that i really don't want to exclude my single and childfree audience, because the real target demographic of the book is the person who doesn't feel like he has enough time to cook healthy vegetarian meals in addition to everything else he has going on. it saddens me most americans consider a home cooked meal to be a luxury rather than a priority, even though i completely sympathize with feeling like there just isn't enough time in the day. the goal of this book will be to provide some healthy, quick, and mega-tasty recipes for everyday life.
posted by joanna @ 2:27 PM
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January 02, 2008yellow rose recipes table of contentsmany people have been asking for a list of the recipes in the book, so here it is: Tofu Scramble Perfect Oatmeal Buckwheat Pancakes Jalapeño Corn Cakes Buttermilk Biscuits Rosemary Home Fries Cherry Almond Granola Zucchini Muffins Raisin Bran Muffins Very Berry Muffins Roasted Red Pepper Hummus Roasted Eggplant and Garlic Hummus Spinach Chickpea Dip Lettuce Wraps Polenta and Eggplant Napoleons Veggie Wontons with Ginger Miso Dipping Sauce Baked Samosas with Cilantro Mint Chutney Potato Corn Chowdah Tortilla Soup Black Bean Soup Miso Soup with Edamame Black Eyed Pea Soup Curried Carrot Ginger Soup Mom's Lentil Soup Daily Green Salads Antipasto Salad Taco Salad Minty Summer Fruit Salad Barley and Avocado Salad Texas Caviar Goddess Pasta Salad Couscous Chickpea Salad Quinoa Tabouli Carrot Salad with Herb Lime Dressing Wild Rice Salad Sundried Tomato Cream Sauce Ratatouille Pasta Sauce Marinara Béchamel Sauce Pesto Mexican Pesto Lemon Artichoke Pesto Mushroom Gravy Almond Milk Gravy Lemon Tahini Dressing Creamy Pepita Dressing Tangy Sour Cream Nacho Sauce Guacamole Mango Salsa Raw Corn Salsa Birthday Salsa Chipotle Ranch Sandwich Spread Tapenade Sunflower Feta Vegan Parmesan Simply Sweet Potatoes Braised Cauliflower Lemon Pepper Chard Collard Greens Sesame Green Beans Pickled Onions Creamy Herbed Polenta Spiced Applesauce Lemon Rice Green-wa Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes Stuffed Twice-Baked Potatoes Roasted Roots Refried Black Beans Dirrrty Rice and Beans Simple Chicken-Style Seitan Mustard Crusted Seitan Crispy Beer-Battered Seitan Tofu Marsala Baked Mac and Cheese Spinach Lasagna Butternut Squash Lasagna Penne Alfredo Pasta E Fagioli Kasha Varnishkes Grilled Portabellos Asparagus with Spinach and Artichoke Cream Sauce Thai Bowl Sloppy Joannas Chana Masala Cajun Spiced Tofu White Beans and Kale Black Bean and Sweet Potato Flautas Tamale Pie Better-than-Basic Veggie Chili Northwest Meets Southwest Chili Aloha Bread Cherry Compote Soft Oatmeal Cookies Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Bars Mojito Pie Lemon Almond Cake Spice Cake
posted by joanna @ 2:10 PM
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