Co-Opping

As Heather has mentioned in a previous post, we're broke. And while we'd like to say that we always shop organic, buy local, and avoid such evil establishments as Wal-Mart, the truth is, a savvy and financially challenged vegan must find ways to adapt.

We've scouted areas for the cheapest buys. We purchase cheap rice milk and soy milk at Wal-Mart, along with Boca and Amy products when necessary. We also keep an eye out for organic canned beans and whole wheat pasta, which sometimes makes an appearance. Our local Earth Fare and/or Whole Foods is where we get our novelty items. And veggies come from any of the farmer's markets we can find (one of which is open year round off of highway 40 between Greensboro and Kernersville). Harris Teeter, the local grocery market has great deals on many sauces, pastas, and fruits and vegetables. Costco is a good place for us to get baby spinach, frozen fruit, oranges, almond butter, and Cliff bars (my usual breakfast). And finally, we have our local Co-Op, Deep Roots.

Deep Roots has just about everything we like, from organic and local produce, to Sun Burgers, to Vegenaise, to Primal Strips and most other delicious vegan items. While it isn't huge, it has most of the things you look for when you're trying to cook for the week, and we shop there often. The one thing that makes it awesome, and the greatest thing on the planet is the spice section!

While I realize that most savvy shoppers have explored the bulk spice aisles in their favorite grocery stores, this has been a fairly new endeavor for us. For years now, we've spent big money on little jars of spices, thinking that spices were just expensive and we'd have to deal with it. However, Deep Roots has a wonderful bulk spices section that includes most anything I'm looking for, including beet powder, to my pleasant surprise the other day! And to top it off, the items in this section are cheap! I bring in a spice jar that I already have, the cashier is nice enough to pre-weigh it for me, and then I fill it up with my favorite spice. In the end, I wind up spending usually around 10-20% of the amount that I spend in the grocery store, and since I'm re-using the same jars over and over again, I'm reducing a little waste as well. I highly recommend it for anyone in the Greensboro area.

If you don't live in the Greensboro area, fear not! It's very likely that you too have a nearby Co-Op or some sort of natural market. Perhaps it'd be worthwhile to check it out. You might find spice bargains of your own!

Until tomorrow!

Delicious and Cheap Spaghetti Bolognese

We're pretty broke.

So, Brandon and I are always looking for delicious, cheap meals to help get us through the financially tight times without sparing flavor. Who says you need to eat bland, unseasoned bean soup every night just because you are a little low on funds?

I wanted to share with everyone one of our favorite "poor" dishes: Spaghetti Bolognese. It costs less than $10 and it will feed four people or, in our case, two people (one with a voracious appetite) for both dinner and lunch the next day.

Although the recipe looks deceptively simple and flavorless, it is not. Just make sure you use some really good veggie broth, plenty of Italian spice and oregano, and you are set. It's one of those recipes that you can totally mess with and make your own, although it is seriously fantastic just as it is. Enjoy!

Vegan Awesome Football Sunday

Every Sunday, I eagerly await 1:00 for the NFL games to start. While many may not appreciate the greatest sport on the planet as much as I do, the event of swearing at the T.V. coupled with the presence of junk food can be enticing for anyone. It was a conversation with my friend Dwayne about junk food that led to this question, "Hey Brandon, are onion rings vegan?" Dwayne is not a vegan, however his question peaked my interest and while I'd yet to find vegan onion rings in a restaurant or in the frozen section of my local food stores, I responded with a simple "they could be." From that point on I began speculating on ways to make vegan onion rings. Naturally, it's easy to simply deep fry some onions, smother them in sauce and be content. However, if I was really going to do this, I wanted that fried shell encasing the onion ring. You know, the kind that is sturdy enough that when you take a bite, sometimes you rip the entire onion out and you're left holding a greasy shell of a ring. This is the kind of junk food I was looking for, and I'm happy to say that the following picture was the result:

Pretty awesome huh? Tasted fantastic and was perfect for football Sunday! So the next time somebody wants some greasy sports-watching food, try this out. You need a deep fryer with lots of oil. You can use Crisco or vegetable shortening, but I used vegetable oil.

Ingredients:

Bread Crumbs (I used Panko Bread Crumbs)

Two Onions

About 6 Cups of Oil for the deep fryer

About 1/4 Cup of Flour

Batter:

I used a basic vegan pancake batter from the book "Vegan with a Vengeance" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, omitting all spices other than salt. You can use your favorite vegan pancake batter!

Directions:

Cut off the ends of the onions and peel the skin. Slice the onions whole so that rings are created. Dip each ring in flour, coating it. Then, dip the ring into the batter until completely covered, then dip into the bread crumbs coating each side until covered. Put on a plate, ready to be deep fried. Repeat this with all rings.

Deep fry the rings in batches according to your deep fryer's instructions and capacity.

Season how you like, using any dipping sauces you want and enjoy!

I didn't season them, I used Barbeque sauce, ketsup, and Cholula hot sauce. It was absolutely fantastic! Enjoy the food and enjoy the game!

A Vegan Saturday in Greensboro

We moved to Greensboro, NC from Maryland/D.C. area about a year ago. We knew that we would be losing many of the options that we had become accustomed to. Bracing ourselves for that fact, we moved. Greensboro definitely does not have many options for vegans, but there is actually more here than we anticipated. So, during MOFO, I wanted to share with everyone the cool stuff vegans can eat and do in Greensboro.

Meetup.com has been a great help to us in finding other like-minded individuals. In Greensboro, we have a vegan meetup group and an animal welfare meetup group. We have met such wonderful people in our area through this site and attended many an awesome potluck.

Anyway, today, we met with our animal welfare group to help out at a yard sale/bake sale to raise funds. We plan to use the money to start up an unchaining project, where we go to people's homes and offer to build fences for them if they will spay/neuter their dog and take them off of the chain. We hoped to raise enough money to complete our first project.

I baked Isa's delicious Coffee Chip Muffins for the event... and although I couldn't find coffee granules (or afford the $7 coffee extract), they were still delicious as plain, old Chocolate Chip Muffins.

It was a long day, but it was really successful and I believe we earned enough to start our first unchaining project!


Afterward, we went to a really fantastic local restaurant called Jack's Corner Mediterranean Deli. It isn't a vegan restaurant or even a vegetarian one, but it has many vegan options, all of which are notated on the menu with a cute little carrot. One of the most fantastic items on the menu at Jack's is the vegan falafel burger. Yeah, you heard that correctly... a falafel burger. It comes with these insanely good seasoned fries. This restaurant has all sorts of awesome options for vegans. If you happen to be in the area, you should totally stop by and have something from Jack's. You won't regret it.

Afterwards, we were exhausted and came home to relax and watch movies for the rest of the evening. It's been a long day, but also a very satisfying one.

Until tomorrow, happy MOFOing!

Comfort Road: Field Roast Love Part Two

In part two of our Field Roast love-fest, I wanted to bring back an old favorite. After all, that really is what comfort food is all about right? Nostalgic properties, hearty taste, and a love affair with your plate. With this in mind, imagine the excitement I had when at my local Earth Fare (essentially a Whole Foods equivalent) I found a Field Roast Meatloaf. This is a new product, but we fearlessly put our faith in Field Roast and concocted a typical comfort meal of champions: meatloaf, green beans, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Being a condiment person myself, I enjoyed a little ketsup mixed with some Cholula Hot Sauce (a current obsession).

I want to make sure no one thinks that all we consume is Field Roast. Left to my own devices and with unlimited finances, sure I'd be known to eat some sausage and peppers, meatloaf, and other items on a consistent basis, but we also enjoy some good old fashioned veggies. However, since this is comfort food at its finest, we'll worry about that later.

We decided that we couldn't really do much better for comfort food than to use this meatloaf, some green beans (plentiful even this time of year) and good old fashioned mashed potatoes and gravy. The result was a picture perfect resemblance of home, completed by the presence of duck-pond potatoes.

Awesome Deliciousness

This turned out to be a fantastic Friday night dinner. You can go through all the work of making an excellent Lentil Loaf if you want to, with home-made gravy and everything... or you can do the Friday night comfort food and use Field Roast and Road's End Gravy Packets. Either way, you'll end up with a delicious vegan feast fit for even the most difficult omnivores and the most finicky vegans. At roughly nine bucks, the meatloaf isn't cheap, but it fed two of us (three if you figure that I eat enough for two people) with enough left over for sandwiches the next day. The entire meal cost us about $15, not counting the ketsup and hot sauce and we very happy with the results. We highly recommend giving this meal at least one chance.

Vegan MOFO and Vegan Sausage & Peppers

This month we’re participating in Vegan Month of Food (MOFO). What’s that, you ask? Well, it’s similar to the month of writing done every year for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), except it’s about sustaining intensive food blogging for the whole month. The rules are that we can write about anything we want, as long as it’s about vegan food and it’s written often.

So, Brandon and I set up a few themes to help inspire us throughout the month ahead.

Sunday - he’ll write about football food, since that his favorite thing to do on Sunday is eat and watch football.

Mondays - we’ll discuss our favorite cheap dinners that have gotten us through our little financial rough spots.

Tuesdays – Grocery shopping tips in Greensboro, NC and beyond.

Wednesdays – Our favorite Asian foods.

Thursdays – I’ll discuss my favorite kitchen tools. It’ll be an Ode to a Kitchen Tool, of sorts.

Friday – Comfort food night!

Saturday – Vegan Night Out in Greensboro, NC.

Since today is our kickoff, I decided not to go with one of my favorite kitchen tools. Instead, I want to share with you one of my favorite vegan pre-made grocery store buys in an easy-peasy recipe that I make all the time: Vegan Sausage and Peppers.

Before my revelation, when I was still eating animal flesh, this was my specialty. Everyone loved it. I couldn’t even cook, and it was a hit. Mainly because the key is to the let the flavors stand alone, without a whole lot of hubbub, so it was easy, easy, easy. When I went vegan, I thought, there goes that. I tried unsuccessfully to replicate it. I used Tofurky sausages, seitan, and even vegan breakfast sausages in desperation. Nothing hit that perfect note I was looking for. I finally just gave up.

Then I discovered Field Roast Smoked Apple Sage sausages.

I thought, why not try it out?

It was absolutely perfect. It doesn’t exactly taste like sausage (thank God), but it is delicious and flavorful and hits all the right notes. So, without further ado, here is the simple recipe I use to make this easy meal.

Vegan Sausage and Peppers

Tbs of olive oil

One large onion, quartered and sliced thin

Two garlic cloves (or garlic flakes or powder, whatever you got!)

Three bell peppers of varying colors, sliced and cut into thin strips (or thick, whatever you like)

Field Roast Smoked Apple Sage sausages, cut into thin rounds (or thick, whatever you like)

Pepper

Pinch of red pepper flakes

A little soy sauce or Braggs

2 Tbs of water

Jasmine or Basmati rice (you can use other rice variations, but this is the best for this)

Put your rice in your rice maker (or pot) and get it going.

Meanwhile, chop up your veggies and sausage and have everything at the ready. Pour a tablespoon or so of olive oil in a big skillet, let it heat up. Throw in your onions and cook them till they brown a little. Throw in your garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Saute for a minute or two. Put your sausage in the pan and let it brown on the sides a little, or as much, as you want. Then throw in your lovely, colorful peppers. Sprinkle on some soy sauce or Braggs to add some salty flavor and loosen up any burnt stuff. Add your pepper (and salt, if you want) to taste. Throw in a couple tablespoons of water to help steam the veggies. Put the lid on for 5 – 10 minutes to let the peppers soften. It tastes the best if the peppers are a tinsy bit crisp. When it’s done, pile the sausage and peppers on top of a bed of jasmine rice and eat up. You can add some hot sauce or Braggs or soy sauce to the mix for some added flavor, if you’d like. Otherwise, enjoy!

This recipe is awesome because it’s delicious as is, but you can mess with it as much as you’d like… add spices, add veggies, change up the sausage or make your own sausage, etc. Feel free to make it your own.

Happy first MOFO day! See you tomorrow for Part 2 of our Field Roast love post.

Relaxin' in the Caribbean...

We've been MIA for a while. We got hitched, went on our honeymoon, and then bought a house. It's been busy, busy, busy. The blog got pushed to the wayside, but now we're back.

We may take a new approach to the blog and go for a less article-ish style and more for a personal day-to-day life thing. We'll probably put more a lot more pictures of our adventures in vegan food, maybe the occasional recipe, maybe a cookbook review or two, and definitely some pictures of stuff - like our honeymoon!

We honeymooned in Grenada at this fantastic vegan bed & breakfast in the Caribbean called The Lodge. Mark and Mary are the owners and they are wonderful hosts and great vegan chefs. The food and the scenery were great. We couldn't have asked for a better, more relaxing honeymoon. If you're planning on going on a real vacation anytime, look them up because, as you'll see in these lovely photos, they are great cooks and the scenery is just breathtaking. Plus, who doesn't want to spend a week in a 1920's era mansion on top of a hill called Morne Jealoux (Jealous Hill) eating crazy-good vegan food and watching the sun set?