So many cookbooks!

By Monica on November 1st, 2007

I am literally being overrun with cookbooks.  I picked up Vegan Vittles and the Candle Cafe Cookbook at Farm Sanctuary.  I bought about 50 funny old cookbooks at a rummage sale last week for $2 total.  I finally bought the Chicago Diner cookbook.  I have not even cracked open Veganomicon. To boot, my fellow bloggers have been posting some of the most delicious recipes ever, and I am delightfully overwhelmed with foodie goodness!  Here’s just a little of what’s been going on in my kitchen this week, inspired by other blogs or my new cookbooks:

Up first is Fat Free Vegan’s tofu-spinach lasagna which has been making the rounds on vegan food blogs lately.   I made this the night we left for Farm Sanctuary and somewhere around Pennsylvania, a half asleep voice mumbled from the back seat of the car, “I wish we had more of that lasagna”.  It was so good, in fact, that it sparked a lively dinner conversation on “why vegan food tastes so good”!

Next we have a pudding cake from How it all Vegan.  I had never made a pudding cake before and I can assure you I read those directions at least 10 times.  “Sarah Kramer, you so crazy!  What do you mean, don’t mix?  Are you SURE?”

From the Chicago Diner Cookbook, we have Corn Chowder.  (Chowdah if you like.)  The recipe for this is online as well as in their cookbook, so check it out if you need to get your chowder on.

While I had that sucker cracked open, I also made their Chocolate Chipper cookies.  A little too cakey for my liking, but no chocolate chip cookie goes to waste in my house, no matter how bad it may be.

And finally, your standard “No Bull Beefaroni“, because sometimes you just have a taste for that weird orange sauce that covers canned pasta.  I add a couple spoonfuls of homemade sour cream into the sauce to make it a little creamier and more strangely orange.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to bake anything macabre for Halloween as we had a sick kitty at home, so Halloween was spent at the vet’s office.   Halloween is also my wedding anniversary so the timing was doubly bad.  But the kitty will be fine, and I did get to catch a few good Halloween movies.  Our local drive-in surprised us with a triple feature of The Day of the Triffids (bah!), Resident Evil 3, and the new Halloween.  The following night I was lucky enough to catch Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D which was a lot of fun; I adore that movie.  Hope everyone had a great Halloween!

How to gain 10lbs in 3 days

By Monica on October 23rd, 2007

We’re back from Farm Sanctuary!  While I haven’t had time to go through the 700 pictures we took on the farm, I can muster up pics from the amazing vegan vittles we found in the Finger Lakes region of NY.

Living where we do, a vegan-friendly establishment is really exciting to us. It’s hard to refrain from ordering every item on the menu in a gluttonous “OMG I can eat ALL of this” frenzy.  No side dishes or iceberg lettuce for us this weekend, baby!

Friday night we went to Jerlando’s in Watkins Glen.  Farm Sanctuary said they’d be happy to make us a vegan pizza, and indeed, they were.  Three of us ate the entire thing, after we cheekily decided that eating it all would be more environmentally friendly than using a take-out container.  Here’s their cheeseless veggie pizza, which was delicious:

Despite being stuffed, we waddled ourselves over to the Great Escape Ice Cream Parlor because one is never too full for vegan ice cream.  They had mocha and Oreo vegan flavors, both were fabulous, and their staff was well versed in which cones and toppings were vegan.

Saturday we went to the Crooked Rooster Pub & Wildflower Cafe for lunch.   I wish I could say it was as great as everything else we had this weekend, but it really paled in comparison to the other options in the tiny town of Watkins Glen.  I had the ‘Pasta with Beer & Good Stuff’, which was essentially fettuccine with canned artichokes, canned peppers, and beer poured over it.  Strangely sour, I abandoned it mid-meal to eat some left over chips on my niece’s platter.  She had the ‘Moonrose Ribs’ which turned out to be a plain Gardenburger Riblet thrown onto French bread.  Ray had an average portobella burger and the lunch meal for 3 of us, with two small beers, was $70.00.  Yeah….

Determined not to let that ruin our jolly times, we went back to the ice cream parlor and feasted upon some vegan sundaes which they topped with hot apple cinnamon sauce.

Sunday we ventured into Ithaca due to the rave reviews of Pizza Aroma, who has the only soy cheese pizza in the area.   I had an amazing calzone, aptly called “The Vegan” which was absolutely brimming with spinach, eggplant, garlic, FYH mozzarella, roasted red peppers, and other good stuffs.  $6.50 well spent!

Ray and Rachel split the “Veggie Pizza” complete with FYH soy cheese and it was equally delicious.  We took about half of it home and ate it all the way back to Illinois, the tantalizing smell of garlic wafting through the a/c vents for 700 miles.

Without exaggerating, there were about 30 vegan friendly restaurants to pick from between the tiny rural town of Watkins Glen and Ithaca.  Between all the great eats, the splendor of Upstate NY in the fall, and the haven that is Farm Sanctuary, I think this is about as close to vegan heaven as I’ve ever been.  More to come on the FS critters soon!

The Chicken Post

By Monica on October 12th, 2007

Per request, here are some chicken photos of another kind! It rather fascinates me that whenever guests come over, they are either absolutely terrified of chickens, or think they are the coolest thing ever. And seemingly everyone has a chicken story of their own to share!

Chickens make excellent guardians. Here they are protecting the driveway from insects:

This is Burt the House Chicken; she is a Barred Rocks. Burt is technically a girl, despite her name. A few years back Burt injured her leg and was unable to walk so the others picked on her. So Burt came in the house and lived in the basement until she healed. She’s one of the friendliest hens and loves to sit on your lap and have her ears rubbed.

This is Henny Penny Pudding Pie; she is a Black Australorp. Henny enjoys stale bagels, grasshoppers, and long walks in the soybean fields. She’s very curious and one of the first to greet you when you enter the chicken run.

This is one of my rescued hens, we call her “the Muppet chicken” for obvious reasons. She is a Feather Footed Bantam White Silkie. Her ears are blue, she lays tiny little off-white eggs, and she loves to protectively sit on them. She would make a wonderful mother except that the rooster has no interest in her, so her eggs are not fertile and would never hatch. We don’t tell her that and let her sit on them as long as she wants anyway!

Presenting Seniorita Chicken Butt! She’s a White Orpington, not the friendliest in the flock, but a gorgeous girl.

Baby Peepers the first day I got them. (This is before I knew better and I actually bought chickens instead of rescuing them.)

Roo the rooster. Roo was supposed to be female, but it didn’t turn out that way and lucky for him he was mis-sexed and therefore avoided the woodchipper. Roo tries to kill my brother and barely tolerates Ray. He has chased the electric meter reader out of the yard, and two Jehovah’s Witness’ who were earnestly warned but would not listen to reason. He’s never tried to attack me, maybe because I am always threatening to turn him into Rooster Soup. (He doesn’t know rooster is not part of a vegan diet!) In any case, he’s cool as hell. He’s about 12 pounds and adores his hens. He cackles to them when he finds something good to eat instead of eating it himself. He watches over them while they forage and keeps the dogs on their side of the fence!

So those are them! The original chickens I bought from a hatchery must be about 6 years old now, most of them healthy and going strong! We have lost some along the way to predators, which is very sad, but unavoidable in the country despite elaborate efforts to erect predator proof housing. I’ve learned to accept it as part of the natural cycle, certainly much more natural than ending up in a KFC bucket at 6 weeks of age.

They have a 12×12′ insulated coop complete with windows, nesting boxes, and lots of wood shavings. This opens up to a 99% predator proof 25×25′ ‘chicken run’ layered with gravel that they need to digest their food. This opens up to another 30×30′ ‘chicken yard’ that is natural brush for them to forage through, and dirt for them to dig holes and dust bathe in. They only go out there under supervision right now because we have a nasty hawk on the prowl. Finally, they get free run of the front yard when I’m out there to keep a close eye on them.

As for their eggs, none of my hens (except the Muppet) have any desire to sit on eggs or hatch them, called being “broody”. This instinct has been bred out of them as they were designed only to be laying machines. They lay an egg, jump off it, and never look back. So we collect the eggs and feed them back to the hens, or to the dogs and cats.

Hope you enjoyed my chicken post! Please share your chicken stories or chicken questions; I know you have some!

Who Eats This?

By Monica on October 3rd, 2007

There is one particular episode of the Henry Rollins Show which echoes my daily life in rural America, where residents practically had a parade in honor of the new Super Walmart opening: In a “Drawing Conclusions” piece, Henry takes on Walmart and its expansive stock of Guns and Ammo magazines and Nascar tees. At one point a scene shows two elderly workers trying to hoist a “75 pound bag of Chips Ahoy” onto a shelf and he yells in that disgusted Henry Rollins tone, “Who eats this shit?!”

Thus, “Who eats this shit?!” has become a popular catch phrase in my household and when this dandy Walmart photo opportunity presented itself, I couldn’t resist.

Yes, that is a 25 pound bucket of lard. Seriously, if you are not Paula Dean, what do you do with 25 pounds of rendered pig fat? A little Googling taught me that the bucket Ray is holding contains 105,000 calories and 11,200 grams of saturated fat. Not only that, but as the bucket proudly proclaims, it is preserved with BHA and propyl gallate, everyone’s favorite carcinogenic preservatives! It’s like an old bucket of paint touting it’s extraordinarily high lead content. Brilliant, ConAgra Foods!

Alright, since Bazu and Mihl enjoyed the previous picture so much, I thought I’d add the second photo we took that day. Juvenile and immature? Absolutely! For some reason, Walmart has that effect on me. Here is my husband. Kissing. The bucket. Of lard.