National Yoga Month – Free Yoga!

Hi, hi, hi!

September is coming up and I’d like you all to know that it is National Yoga Month, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.  And I’ll bet that you’re all going to go buy a yoga membership at a local studio, yes? Well, you might not have to spend any money!

Click HERE and you can get one week’s worth of free Yoga.

My favourite dinner–Ever.

Why is this my favourite? Grilled vegetables is great because it’s delicious, completely guilt and cruelty free and it’s super easy. I like to see what vegetables are available for this time of the year, head over to my farmers market and pick some things up and get to grillin’.

The Gear:
Small dish with Olive Oil
Brush
Salt
Pepper
———–and that’s it. Seriously. That’s all I use, ever to grill veggies.
Directions:
Turn on your grill, put it on Medium and close the top. Brush each vegetable (You can cut them up if you need to!) with olive oil and then sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Usually, the hottest part of your grill is the middle, so there’s a bit of a strategy to grilling. Put potatoes, carrots or other really dense, starchy things on the back of the grill at the beginning of your grilling session. These will take the longest to cook, so you have to give them some time! Then you can work your way through the foods that are easier to cook.
First, if you’re planning on grilling Tofu, like I do, brush olive oil on the center of the grill and put your tofu there. You want to get it nice and charred. Then you can pick what order you want to do this in, but you can grill in the center, until grill marks are there, your asparagus, onions, mushrooms, pineapple, peaches, tomatoes or whatever you choose. If you’re going to grill corn, put it on last. It doesn’t take much time. Just grill it until the kernels turn bright yellow and you can even grill until there are small black spots, I like it that way, personally. Oh, and somewhere in there, you want to turn your dense, starchy item over to grill on the other side.
Turn the grill off. Enjoy. You’ll be surprised at how good this food tastes.
My husband it stingy and doesn’t really like to eat vegetables, but when they’re grilled, he gobbles them up. Try it with kids, try it with people who swear up and down that they don’t like tofu. This is my favourite way to eat tofu, grilled and tossed in BBQ Sauce.

Saturday Morning Pancakes: Chocolatey.

This week… Chocolate pancakes.

The Recipe–
1c Whole Wheat flour
2T Cocoa Powder
2 t Baking Powder
1/8 tsp Salt
1T Molasses
1 c Soymilk
2T Canola Oil
Enough water to make it pancake consistency.

Use an icecream scoop to make it easier to get consisten pancakes each time. Bake these on a sprayed pan, medium-low heat. Flip once the edges look dry and the bubbles on the top stay popped. Probably about 1 minute on each side.

These were really good. I had too many of them.  🙂

Tofu Dinner is Yum. And easy.

In the mood for some tofu but you’re REALLY LAZY? Try this method:

-Put some rice on. Use a rice cooker like me if you’re really tired or lazy or just really good at burning rice on the stove.
-Turn the oven to 375F, Cut up some tofu, toss it in enough tahini to coat, put it in a pan and throw it in the oven. Walk away.
-Come back when your rice is half done (20 minutes), put fresh or frozen veggies of your choice, along with 1Tbsp Olive Oil, 2Tbsp Soysauce in a pan and walk away again. 10 MINUTES LATER, turn your stove on med-high and heat up the veggies. Take the tofu out and let it cool slightly.

When your rice is done, so will your veggies be. Toss it all together, pile it on a plate or into a bowl and you’ve got an easy tofu dinner that doesn’t taste like spongy cubes on bland veg and rice… Enjoy!

What’s Cookin’ This Week?

Here are a bunch of the Vegan foodfinds that I saw up this week. Enjoy and try some of them if you dare!!

From the kitchen of Seasaltwithfood comes a beautiful Heirloom Tomato Salad that is sure to make anyone’s mouth water.

Looking at this makes me want one soo bad. Tofu Mocha Smoothie please, STAT! This comes from Kitchen Therapy.

Watermelon and Tomato play well together in this salad. And oh, god doesn’t it look delicious.. Head over to Stitchin n Bitchin in the Kitchen for the recipe.

Thanks to the Mighty Mango, we  get to gawk at this tiny Cherry Pies. They look really good… And cherries are in season, so I might have to make these this weekend.
(I know my husband is reading this and nodding in agreement.)

Alright, so admittedly, these look really weird… but they also look really interesting and good. I want to try! Dodol & Mochi has the recipe

Thoughts from a Buddhist Nun

I’m currently reading Cave In The Snow, a book recounting the life of Tenzin Palmo, a Kargyupa Nun. She’s a very devoted and kind nun of  Tibetan Buddhism, a confirmed reincarnation and a woman, which is an unusual recipe. I’m not really Buddhist, but her story really amazes and inspires me. At one point in her life, she was speaking to a man about non-violence. I love this story:

One time he swatted a mosquito. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ I went on through this whole thing, how mosquitoes have feelings and that just as our life is precious to us, for a mosquito the most precious thing it has is its own life, and as we don’t want anyone to squish us, so we shouldn’t take the life of another being because while we coult take it we could never give it back. By the end of it he was in tears. ‘Why has nobody ever said this to me before?’ he said. He had such a kind heart.

It’s a great way of describing just how important life is to every being. Although mosquitoes are annoying and make you itch all over, they still are alive. Sure, they annoy you, but does that give you the right to take it’s life engery away? Surely not. If annoyance was a good enough reason to take something’s life, our prison systems would be far smaller more vacant than they are currently. (Bug spray is soo much easier and less harmful than squishing.)

Feel Alive In Your Body!

This morning I’ll start my first session of Kundalini Yoga practice. I’m excited. Americans, to me, feel sluggish. They are unaware quite often of the energy that lies dormant inside of them. We are all filled with energy and power and most of us don’t even know it and certainly don’t access it. I’m ready to start to embrace and release that energy that’s inside of me.

We all have soo much potential for greatness, if we all were just able to concentrate on it, we’d all be happier people. The sad part is, most of us don’t really have the time to get to know the energy that lies inside. Most of us are too caught up in the life of Starbucks and CNN to realize that the biggest part we can play in this world is to better ourselves. If we could all improve as much as possible on our own and stop concentrating on changing everyone else, we would be much better off. That’s my rant on utopia for today.

Namaste
Robin B.

Are soy products just second-rate guilt-free meats, or something more?

So we can use soy beans to make just about anything that you might be missing from your pre-veg diet: milk, cheese, yogurt, meat, butter and ice cream. However these are its primary uses, and this (I think) is a limitation.

Some soy bi-product is found in just about everything nowadays, be it veggie or not – it has a remarkable texture, contains a good source of Omega-3 fatty and Amino acids and a high protein content – which make it very popular in its variety of applications. But as I mentioned almost all of them are in substitution of some non-veg substance.

I once had a teacher in art school who hated comics that stuck to using long (widescreen panels) to give a film-like experience, because it didn’t take advantage of the specific qualities of it being a comic, it turned it into a second rate movie. It’s an odd comparison but similarly, I think we can use veggi products such as soy, which have their own unique set of flavors and textures to create new dishes, instead of trying to imitate and emulate what it isn’t. I mean if we can season it to get almost the same flavor as exactly what it isn’t (meat), why can’t we season it to be something totally unique and original.

Now the problem is most people do not grow up vegetarian/vegan, we grow up on meat (in America). Food filled with animal fats, and in a society where the menu is organized based on what type of meat you would like your dish to be centered around.

Americans generally eat more than the recommended amount of protein per day, usually through meat but also especially for athletes, through supplements and protein powders. The effects of which could lead to things like stress on your liver, osteoporosis and even cancer according to a recent article.

Anyway, because of the change in diet most of us partake in to become vegi, we immediately look to where we can alternately acquire the same tastes (I did at least) and try to fool ourselves into thinking were eating as we used to, without the guilt.

Now, if you’ve ever tried tofu, TVP or seitain, without seasoning it like meat, you’ll notice it’s quite bland and plain (Which can be good in some cases like sticking tofu straight into a smoothie mix) but I think there is a whole world of flavors we are not even striving to find because we are confined by the flavor palette of our preexisting diet.

This may change, should the current eco-friendly and heath-conscious consumer and producer turn out to be more than a trend in America. If it can hold to see another generation come up in a world without animal products, they may be open minded enough to create and accept new-school dishes more quickly than we could, since a large part of what we like as adults is comfort-food we have had all our lives, which is one of the only reasons why (I think) we as Americans are so hooked on meat in the first place.

Saturday Morning Pancakes – Blueberry & Lemon

As a tradition in our house, every Saturday or Sunday morning is a pancake celebration. We enjoy pancakes with a warm fruit topping–whichever kind of fruit I happen to have. A few weeks ago I made a sweet sticky apple topping to pour over our cinnamon pancakes. This week: I made blueberry topping over lemonny pancakes. It was wonderful. I’ll never use maple syrup again.

Lemony Pancakes
1 c. Whole Wheat Flour
1 c. Soymilk
2T Canola Oil
1T Brown Sugar
Zest of one Lemon
2t Baking Powder
Pinch of Salt
½ c. Water
Mix this all together. If it’s not runny enough, add more water to the mixture. Scoop onto a non-stick pan and cook at medium heat. Flip once the edges look dry and there are bubbles that are very slowly popping in the batter. Should take about 1 ½ minutes per side. Stack them on a plate that’s reserved in a 200F oven if you’re not serving them directly. (I typically find myself flipping them directly onto Zach’s plate. He eats them faster than I can cook ‘em.)

Blueberry Topping
7 oz Frozen Blueberries
1 oz Sugar
Juice of one Lemon
3 oz Water
Bring this to a boil over medium/high heat and then turn down your flame. Allow this to simmer and bubble and cook down until the blueberries are popped and the sauce is thick and delicious. Pour it over your pancakes and enjoy.

Veg Stickers

Okay, am I the only one who follows cars with vegan bumper stickers, hoping that they’ll lead me to a place where I can conveniently park near them, ambush them when they get out and say “HI, Want to be my friend?!”

Yes, it sounds creepy and stalkeresque. I know this… but I also know that Zach and I are the only people in Elgin, TX (Home of Meyer Sausage) that don’t think that pork links are golden God-given deliciousness. I live in Texas. People here put meat in everything (as well as copper colored longhorn stickers ON everything… including their meat, sometimes.) So you can understand the desperation that I feel when I find myself on a lonely highway where the only other car on the road is sporting bumperstickers for Veganism. It feels like a miracle. I don’t want to lose them cause I’ll never find them again. Sure, I’ll see that car with the crazy Christian preachy bumper sticker EVERY NIGHT on the way home, but I’ll never see my vegan car driver buddy ever again. Because Texas hates me. But that’s okay, cause I don’ t like Texas much either.

Here are some neat stickers that I’m thinking about investing in. I don’t like sticking something permanent on my car, but I want to be a beacon to other vegans on the lonely long stretches of Texan highway.