Veggie Goes Vegan

A Vegan Cooking Show on the Cooking Channel

Even if they won't call it that!

Here's the scoop on VegNews.

The show is called How to Live to 100, and debuts tomorrow. It's in my DVR, ready to go. 

Will you watch?

 

 

Video: Vegan Style

Yes, I can hop on a trend just like the next gal. So, this is the video making the vegan rounds this week.

Enjoy. (PS-You might enjoy more, or at least get the references, if you watch the actual Gangnam Style video, but I'm not going to inflict that on you in this post too!)

 

Vegan MoFo Day 31: Well, I did it!

That's right. We are at the end of the road. Cue Boyz II Men because I survived Vegan MoFo. I posted 23 out of 31 days in October. Of course if you look a little more closely, I clearly had trouble sstaining the effort. I blogged 14 out of the first 15 days in the month. And 9 out of the next 16. 

I cooked some new recipes. I share my most reliable go-to ingredients and meals. I went out to several restaurants. I brought the variety, I will give me that.

My pictures are not really very good, and I don't feel comfortable reprinting entire recipes from other folks, so I'm probably an annoying blogger.

But I did it!

Today being Halloween, we had a potluck at work, and I stopped and picked up a dozen vegan donuts at Whole Foods. These are moist and, to my mind, indistinguishable from regular donuts. They were so good I forgot, once again, to take picturesof them before they were gone. 

Because oh, yeah, that's the other thing I do. I forget to shoot the food I'm eating, sometimes at all, but often only when it's half-eaten and not nearly as attractive.

I could be a better blogger. I could probably be a better vegan too. But with both veganism and blogging: I just keep trying!

How was Vegan MoFo for you/

 

Vegan MoFo Day 11: The promised vegan interview

Ack, OK. trying to recover from missing a day yesterday :( I could have done a quick and dirty link to something, *anything*, but I figured that wasn't really the point.

As I mentioned hearlier in the week, I interviewed Leesa Rowland and Lisa Gaye from Two City Girls this week. The full interview is published on BlogHer. 

Let me just tease to the post by sharing the final question I asked each of the L's (and myself) and all of our answers:

BlogHer: If you had to articulate why you're a vegan (and others should be) in one sentence, what would it be?

Leesa: My go-to argument is this: The lives of animals are more important than my appetite.

There's plenty to eat without eating animals. Plenty to wear without wearing animals. It's the compassionate choice.

Lisa: It leads to a sweeter life.

Elisa (couldn't resist adding mine, especially given that my name fits right in!): I (and all humans) do not *need* to eat animal products to thrive, and if it is more kind, more eco-friendly, and more healthy to not do so, why on Earth would I?

Thanks to the Two City Girls, Leesa and Lisa, for the fun chat and their words of vegan wisdom. Read the whole interview here:

Happy World Vegetarian Month!

 

Vegan MoFo Day 5: Let's address expense

I have a Google alert for "vegan", and every day that alert is full of two kinds of hits: Awesome recipes and food writing from vegan blogs and snarky, even hostile put-downs of veganism and vegans from mainstream media outlets.

It's both appetizing and disheartening...which is emotionally confusing :)

One of the common dismissals of veganism is that it's an elitist affect of the privileged. Never mind that the common diet of many world cultures is essentially vegan. Never mind that people talk about subsisting through hard times on things like peanut butter & jelly, rice & beans, and  ramen noodles...all of which are easily vegan.

So, to take it one step further, check out this post on I Eat Grass from a vegan who, for five months, was happily a food stamp vegan.

He subsisted on a monthly budget for food that is about my weekly one (granted, for two people...one a big eater). And he was able to shop both at the supermarket, and at some farmer's markets.

Greens, beans, rice, noodles, nuts. These are absolutely my staples too. Many bought in bulk. Everything else is bonus, and could be lived without. 

No, vegans are not the privileged or the elite. No, you don't need a lot of money to be a vegan.

You just have to care enough about either your health, the planet's health, or the animals' health to take this very effective action about it.

Are you a cheap vegan or a luxury vegan?

 

 

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Explains Why He’s Not Vegan | One Green Planet

Cory Booker, part-time superhero and full-time mayor of Newark opened up for questions from Reddit users by participating in “Ask Me Anything” session. He answered questions on drug policy, what he thought when he charged into the flaming building, what he would name a Newark NBA team. Booker, who is a vegetarian also answered a question on why he chooses to be vegetarian.

via www.onegreenplanet.org

I did not know Cory Booker was also a vegetarian. Is there anything the man can't do to pull at my heart strings...saving someone from a burning house, driving downtown to check out kids making a ruckus instead of calling the police because "they're our kids", not eating the animals...what next?

OK, well, to be honest, if he wanted to truly become flawless he could give up the Ben & Jerry's...it's not that hard, jeez. And he could stop thinking that examining Romney's life as a "vulture capitalist" isn't relevant to the presidential campaign (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/et-tu-cory-booker.html).

Cory, dude, those things both sound pretty easy, don't they?

Starbucks ends use of cochineal extract in response to furor

 As I first shared on March 29, we’ve learned that we fell short of your expectations by using natural cochineal extract as a colorant in four food and two beverage offerings in the United States. Our commitment to you, our customers, is to serve the highest quality products available. As our customers you expect and deserve better – and we promise to do better.

via blogs.starbucks.com

Online activation and agitation works.

End of story.

A vegan barista forwarded a picture of the changed ingredient formulation of Starbucks's strawberry frappucino mixture to a vegan bloggers. Firestorm ensued. Starbucks reviewed and is changing their change.

if you ever wonder if it's worth it to raise your voice, wonder no more.

SOPA
Komen-Planned Parenthood
JC Penney-Million Moms

Just these last few months real online outrage has spurred real offline change.

This is, IMO, inarguably awesome.

Martha Stewart on Factory Farms

Marths Stewart is not a vegan, but her daughter is, and she has incerasingly found ways to spotlight vegan and vegetarian food and issues. Last year she had an entire vegan episode, which I've saved on my TiVo.

Now she has recorded a video message on behalf of Farm Sanctuary, deploring the conditions for millions of factory farmed animals.

It's a simple powerful message: We should say "no" to cruelty, no matter what we eat.

Sure, I could be a purist and say that any animal you eat eventually experienced some cruelty. That being vegan is the only way to eschew cruelty, but I would rather every meat eater *care* about the conditions the animals they eat are raised in, and that they'd change their purchasing habits based on caring. 

Some change is better than no change. 'Cause the animals in this Martha Stewart video need a lot of change.

Today at the Farmer's Market: Beautiful Radichio

I didn't buy any produce this weekend at the market, because I'm traveling this coming week, and I still have some beautiful greens to try to use up tonight and tomorrow before I leave.

But Icouldn't resist taking this shot of beautiful radichio. It seemed darker than typical, and I think Project Runway should do a challenge to make me a dress out of this gorgeous stuff:

Did you buy any beautiful food this weekend?

QuarryGirl is now Twitter-only :(

Just found out via SuperVegan that QuarryGirl, an L.A.-based vegan blog, has stopped posting. Now this isn't like Erik Marcus over at Vegan.com, who merely stopped posting daily on his blog, but still posts regularly (far more regularly than I, I should point out). No, QuarryGirl is now only Twittering.

QuarryGirl is probably most famous for doing the in-depth analysis of local vegan restaurant food and revealing that many items that were prupotedly "vegan" were anything but. That was called Operation Pancake. I think QuarryGirl also broke the story about VegNews using stockphotography of real meat dishes to accompany vegan recipes.

But mostly she created the ultimte guide to being a Los Angeles vegan, and traveled quite a bit too.

Hers was a strong, determined blogging voice that definitely went above and beyond the usual vegan blogger's approach.

Twitter is not, in my opinion, the same kind of venue, and her move to Twitter indicates she won't be doing the same kind of substantive original content she was doing. And that's a shame.

Thanks for all your work, QuarryGirl, you'll be missed.