I cooked three different dishes from three different sources for my contribution to Christmas this year.
Here's recipe #1: Vegan Fudge
Source: An email from the nice folks at VegNews
Background: I confess, I'm not a fudge person. I've never made it, and I don't even actually eat it...vegan or pre-vegan days. I like chocolate in small doses, generally speaking. Fudge is just so...fudgey. However. The recipe showed up in my Inbox just when I was starting to agonize about what to bring, and it looked damn easy. Four ingredients, and a little processing...piece of cake.
I made it. It was easy. It is incredibly rich, so one piece is about all I can take. And ti went over well with the fams, none of who are vegan, and none of whom seemed to realize or care that this fudge is.
Enjoy:
Vegan Fudge
Serves 24
What You Need:
8 ounces soy cream cheese4 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup vegan chocolate chips
What You Do:
1. Line an 8-inch square pan with wax paper. In a food processor, blend soy cream cheese until smooth. Add powdered sugar and vanilla, processing until smooth.2. In microwave or double boiler, melt chocolate chips. Pour melted chocolate into cream cheese mixture and process until smooth.
3. Pour mixture into prepared pan and refrigerate until firm. Pull wax paper out of pan. Cut fudge into bite-size pieces. Store in refrigerator in an airtight container.
I'm always looking for good resources to figure out what to eat and what to drink that's vegan. Especially since this year I wanted to give some wine, and wanted to make sure it was vegan wine. (Here's a wikipedia entry on wine and veg*nism, in case you're unfamiliar with the issues.)
The Vegan Wine Guide hasn't got the best interface. The wines aren't listed alphabetically, so you either have to browse a very long list in pretty short chunks of links, or you have to search for a specific brand.
I found it a little easier to navigate Veggie Wines and Barnivore. barnivore is definitely the best-organized, and therefore the most usable.
I'm going to head to BevMo today and look out for either Hahn Estates, Fetzer Merlot, Rabbit Ridge or Yellowtail reds.
Vegan Soapbox provided some good links to restaurant resources, including Happy Cow and Veg Guide. Prompted me to write this post in fact.
Something else that has come in handy lately are veg*n aps for the iPhone, such as:
1. Lock down the "vegetarian" restaurant type on UrbanSpoon, and you can find the closes veg restaurants wherever you are.
2. Download VegCookbook or Vegetarian Recipes for recipe ideas.
3. The VegOut app is a veg restaurant search tool, powered by HappyCow. A little surprised by the $2.99 price tag, but I just downloaded it anyway!
What do you use to point you in the right veg direction?
Apparently there is a movement afoot to provide arguments to meat-eaters who encounter those pesky logical arguments in favor of Veg*nism.
SuperVegan has some good arguments to counter this Moral Outrage Against NOT Killing.
I'm glad other sites have the energy to publish posts like these...I confess it's hard for me to avoid snark and sarcasm after all these years.
But I'm happy to point you to others who can manage to stick (basically) to the facts and logic!
Namely...Serve delicious vegan offerings, and don't invite people who wouldn't appreciate your efforts.
This via the "Dear Prudence" column on Slate.com.
OK, she doesn't state it just like that, she says it more like this:
As for telling you you're rude and selfish to open your home and offer to feed them, or that you will have an unacceptable wedding because you won't serve meat -- hmmm, I wonder who's being rude and selfish?
That's only part of her logical advice, you can check out the whole thing. Nice to get that mainstream support :)
Here are a few things to check out over the weekend, the good, bad and ugly:
Hat tip to Vegan.com for pointing me to a very positive article in the News Observer: If a Vegan Comes to Dinner. The author actually suggests accommodating the vegan in your regular cooking, and that it (gasp!) won't kill the non-vegans to eat mashed potatoes with soy milk or stuffing made with vegetable broth. Of course, if you want to be left with the same warm glow the article leaves, don't read the comments. Some of your usual "Oh, you're a veg*n, let me tell you how tasty meat is" types are in there blowharding away.
JWeekly features a columnist who is aspiring to be vegan after being inspired by Alicia Silverstone and her new book.
I promised you ugly, and that would be the USDA declaring PETA to be a terrorist organization. Seriously appalling.
I'm definitely intending to write more about this, but here's a link to a section of Martha Stewart's site devoted to her awesome vegetarian Thanksgiving episode.
I'm also planning to write more about Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals, but until I do, here are two links I've been holding on to for way too long now, intending to share:
Finally, speaking of Erik Marcus, here is a little online interview with me, wherein I name Marcus's book "Meat Market" to be the most-life-chnging book I've read.
Enjoy, or at least appreciate, all the links and have a great weekend!
As always, Stephanie Ernst, Change.org's Animal Rights blogger, is a font of useful information. This time it's a holiday gift (and charitable) giving guide that all vegan, all the time.
Check it out here.
I really need to get myself over to Vegan Etsy and do some shopping around!
Recently the NY Times published an Op-ed by Gary Steiner from a truly vegan point of view, not the sort of half-assery usually published by folks like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman.
Then they published some letters to the editor about the Op-ed, most of which made the usual excuses. I read them and moved on, not having the wherewithal to push back on these most common excuses.
Luckily, Eccentric Vegan, from Vegan Soapbox, has the wherewithal I did not! She responds to many of the comments in this great post: Backlash.
Check out my personal blog where I did a very comprehensive review of Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet and a mini-review of Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook.
Now, bear in mind: I didn't actually cook from either book yet. With Silverstone's book, that's not so much of a big deal, since half the book is about the what, why and how, not the actual cooking.
Ronnen's book is a more traditional cookbook.
But as i say in my reviews: I own 20 vegan cookbooks already. I have no time. My reviews are really about whether a cookbook inspires me to want to take the next step, buy the unusual ingredients and spend an hour int he kitchen experimenting.
So, with that in mind: Read my reviews.
Sigh.
While I'm glad that the LA Times is featuring vegan beauty products, and that it's becoming more mainstream to talk about things like carmine (the crushed up beetles that provide the red color to many beauty products) and collagen (comes from cows), I do wish that when they say it's going to be a feature on vegan beauty products they wouldn't include a brand that is self-described as "mostly vegan." Or feature Origins which, again, is mostly vegan except their use of (self-described) "cruelty-free beeswax and honey".
I mean, there are lots of brands that say they're vegan and are vegan, not just mostly vegan. Alternative Outfitters is one source.
It reminds me when they had a feature on awesome vegan accessories/clothes, but one of the items was cashmere, I think.
I just think that sometimes "vegan" should just mean "vegan". Is that so wrong?
No, not yesterday's Thanksgiving meal, but some great vegan meals I've had lately, sometimes in unexpected places.
Like in the bar of some random hotel in NYC. We had stepped in for a drink. (I honestly don't even remember what street we were on or what hotel it was.) Eventually, getting hungry, we looked at the menu. Typical hotel steakhouse fare. But I asked the waiter if the chef could whip up something fabulous and vegan, using my favorite vegetables on the menu: Brussels Sprouts, Mushrooms, Spinach. This is what I got:
A couple of weeks later we took a good friend to dinner at Amber India in Santana Row. Upscale Indian Food, and yes, veggie choices are always abundant at Indian restaurants. But most places don't present a salad quite this lovely:
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I try to remember to take pictures of the creative, tasty vegan food restaurants come up with for me. (Or have on their menu already.)
Enjoy :)
