Wheat Grass: A Shot at Love

I've always thought of Jamba Juice as kind of "the man" of smoothie shops. I think I saw an improv sketch once in which a Jamba Juice opened down the street from a small, family-owned smoothie shop and put it out of business. But in my new vegan life, Jamba Juice has become indispensable.

They have a new(ish) campaign in which they're pushing "fruit and veggie" smoothies. There are three options: Apples 'n greens, Berry upBEET, and Orange Carrot Karma. I've tried the Apples 'n greens, which is apple-strawberry juice, carrots, spinach, bell pepper, kale, spirulina (!), lettuce, mango, peach, and banana; and the Orange Carrot Karma, which is orange juice, carrot juice, mango, and banana (apparently, at Jamba Juice, mango + banana = karma).
The other day, I was flipping through TV channels trying to find House Hunters International, when I stumbled upon a rerun of Sex and the City. It was Episode 9 from Season 3, "Easy Come, Easy Go" (I had to look that up on Wikipedia - I love Sex and the City but it's not like I have all the episode names memorized), in which Samantha is dating a guy with, as she puts it, "funky spunk."

She tries to solve the problem with wheat grass shots:

I don't think her plan works. But it got me thinking about wheat grass. In addition to the, erm, benefits suggested in the above clip, wheat grass is rich in amino acids and it's rumored to reduce the risk of colon cancer, help blood flow, and generally "detoxify" the body. "Detoxify" has always struck me as a vague hippie word, but it's better than the alternative. I don't want to be toxic.

So I flounced over to Jamba Juice to give wheat grass a "shot," so to speak. Since I didn't know how disgusting it would taste on a scale from "funky" to "vomit worthy," I ordered the smaller sized shot. It came on a little platter with an orange wedge:

My first instinct was to think of it as a tequila shot with a lemon wedge. But to me, tequila is (often quite literally) vomit worthy. And just thinking about the word "tequila" brought to mind that godawful MTV reality show A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila (also vomit worthy). Things were not working in favor of this wheat grass.

But it was, surprisingly, fine. It wasn't delicious, nor do I feel compelled to make wheat grass shots especially prominent in my diet, but it certainly wasn't nasty.

I'd like to pitch a reality show idea in which, instead of tequila, people do shots of wheat grass. If Sex and the City is to be trusted - of course it is - then the contestants chugging wheat grass would probably have a much better shot at love.

Considerably Less Epic Meal Time

This horrifying video was brought to my attention a few days ago:

Epic Meal Time is, apparently, a group of quasi-bros who cook the nastiest, meatiest things they can think of, eat them in the most disgusting way possible, then edit the footage to make it look "epic." In this episode, they make "inside-out shepherd's pie," then fashion it into two cars (each with 1,119 grams of fat and 23,266 calories) and try to make the cars roll. That part is kind of funny.

The only thing I approve of in this video is the guy's shirt that says, "Drunk off pancakes." I can get behind that. But if you couldn't watch it all the way to the end, I don't blame you.
Watch this instead! It's the vegan parody of/response to the previous video, and it is way funnier. Probably because "vegan" and "epic" don't usually go together.

They're making a Christmas Tofurkey: Soy to the World! My favorite part is when they combine a bag of black beans and a bottle of iron pills using a mortar and pestle. Oh, and the peanut butter glaaaaaze after it comes out of the oven.

I was inspired. I wanted to have Epic Meal Time! I went into the kitchen and took out all the ingredients I had to work with. I would crush them all up and smother them in each other, then dump incongruous ingredients on top of them and stuff the whole mess in my mouth.

Then I realized that I didn't really want to ruin my dinner by smothering it in peanut butter and soy sauce. I also didn't want to waste food.

So I would have to settle for a considerably less epic meal time; the epicness would come from my excitement about it. Here's what I started with:

First I put the CARROTS! in my wok with some OLIVE OIL! Then I added the KALE! because it often takes a long time to get soft. I chopped up the RAINBOW CHARD! and threw that in with the mix, making it so colorful. I noticed that Emily had saved me some FAVA BEANS! so I added those, too, right after the GREEN ONIONS! I didn't even cry while chopping the onions!

Look at all those COLORS! Meanwhile, I was grilling up some EXTRA FIRM TOFU! in a pan with some POLENTA! that was lying around. Here they are, together! What a crazy combination.

I didn't even pay attention to the tofu, so it BROWNED all UNEVENLY!

But that's not all. I also had a whole lot of LEFTOVER MUSHROOM STUFFING! from when I made Stellar Stuffed 'Shrooms, so I spooned some of that out and put it on top. That stuffing includes SPINACH! BREAD! GARLIC! and MORE ONIONS! and it was cold so I also got a mind-blowing combination of temperatures!

Then I remembered that I had forgotten to take my PILLS this morning! So I just balanced those on top of the leftover mushroom stuffing. CALCIUM! B-12! and a MULTI-VITAMIN full of who knows what!

Then I ate it all really quickly.

Now I feel ill.

So epic.

Stellar Stuffed 'Shrooms

A wise woman named Shirley Conran once said, "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom." I couldn't agree less.

Our friend Micah was coming to Tigh Vino for dinner, and I wanted to contribute to the meal. I decided to crack open The 30 Minute Vegan, a cookbook my friend Saloni had mailed me for my birthday (my birthday isn't until the 28th, but I have the self control of a Mexican jumping bean so I opened her present as soon as it arrived).

The 30 Minute Vegan is by Mark Reinfeld and Jennifer Murray, and it includes "over 175 quick, delicious, and healthy recipes for everyday cooking." I immediately liked it. I wanted to be a 30 minute vegan! So I got started.

Perusing the recipes in The 30 Minute Vegan made me excited, but it also made me kind of embarrassed. Most of the recipes require fancy things that I don't own, like spirulina, nutritional yeast, and something called mung spouts. I didn't really have any interest in finding out what mung spouts were (just saying "mung spouts" aloud makes me want to never eat food again), but things like cumin, basil leaves, and coconut oil seem like must-haves.

Saloni is one of those people who has a special sense about seasonings and spices when she cooks, like Ratatouille. I hope I can convince her to come out to Santa Barbara and teach me how to use The 30 Minute Vegan properly. By then, I'll have bought some fancy ingredients.

My eye landed on a recipe for Stellar Stuffed Mushrooms. Not only do I love the word "stellar," I also love stuffed mushrooms. Mark and Jennifer (the authors of the cookbook and, I assume, successful 30 minute vegans) suggest a pretty elaborate stuffing recipe. I decided to alter it to better fit my slacker lifestyle. For the stuffing, I used:

2 slices whole wheat bread
1 cup spinach
1/2 medium sized yellow onion
2 garlic cloves

First, I pre-heated the oven to 450 degrees. I put all the ingredients (and the stems from the mushrooms) in the food processor until they looked stuff-in-able. I had bought about a pound of cremini mushrooms at the Isla Vista Coop to stuff. I greased a cookie sheet with olive oil and laid them all out on it, then overstuffed them with the mixture.

After baking for 15 minutes, the mushrooms looked like this:

Everyone loved them. The best part about the 'shrooms (what makes them "stellar") is that they are so healthful. The only possible unhealthy part of the recipe is the olive oil with which I greased the pan, but that hardly counts.

I ate them with some carrots and parsnips that Emily had prepared. Please be advised that the photo below does not represent the amount of food I ate for dinner, by any means:

There were so many mushrooms that I ate some for lunch and dinner the next day as well. I had some leftover stuffing, too, so I refrigerated it to spread on crackers later as a snack. I severely altered the recipe from the cookbook, but once I purchase some fancy ingredients, I think I could be quite a successful 30 minute vegan.

An Irreverent Easter Story

It's hard to say whether or not Jesus would have included vegans on his To-Save List, since I really doubt vegans existed in the year 33 AD. Beggars can't be choosers, after all, and I think pretty much everyone was a beggar back then. Except for, you know, Herod et al.

But Easter, like Christmas, has become so much more than what, religiously speaking, it "should" be. And, unfortunately for me, the whole commercial aspect of this holiday is not too vegan-friendly.

When I was little, my family and I used to make hard-boiled eggs the night before Easter, then draw designs all over them with crayons and dip them in cheap dye. Sometimes my sister Katie would get really artsy and make her eggs striped with different colors, but mine usually ended up unevenly tinted and with fingerprints all over them. I never really looked forward to eating the eggs on Easter morning, because the dye had usually leaked through to the egg whites and made them look weird.

But no eggs for me this year. And no milk chocolate bunnies, either!

I spent most of the afternoon at my friend Erin's apartment, where I made delicious vegan pancakes with 100% pure maple syrup for everyone. I had to say no to Erin's homemade lavender ice cream, but I had a whole plate of her breakfast potatoes with peppers and onions. The reason I ate so much at Erin's is because I was starving. I had not planned well for the morning.

One of my jobs is to sing at the Lutheran church where my friend Adam is music director, and this morning I had signed on to perform at both the 8am and the 10:30am services. There were two reasons for that decision: I am desperate for money and I like making up harmonies to Christian rock songs.

Adam had told me that there would be a huge potluck brunch at the church all morning, and that I could help myself to any of it during the break between services. I heard the word "brunch" and stopped listening. I just love brunch.

So after the first service (during which - and I am not making this up - the pastor terrified the congregation with a synopsis of Hitchcock's "Final Escape" and then told us that we were all buried alive until Jesus came and dug us up), I skipped over to the church's multipurpose room to get my hands on some brunch.

The room was filled with all kinds of dishes that the members of the church had brought to share. There were all different varieties of muffins and moist-looking breads, quiches, sausages, pudding, and bacon.  But I couldn't eat any of it. The one dish that I could have eaten, roasted potatoes, had been covered with scrambled eggs. It was as if the parishioner who made it had prepared the potatoes and, just before heading out the door, thought to himself, "Oh wait - a vegan might eat some of this!" then promptly dumped a pan of scrambled eggs on top of it.

Certainly not for the first time in a church, I felt ostracized. But I didn't want to bring it up to anyone else because - again, not for the first time in a church - I felt guilty. These people were really enjoying their Easter brunch, and I didn't want to complain. I found a sad-looking bucket of fruit and put some in my mouth so I could at least avoid keeling over during the second service. The worst part was that the guy who plays the drums in the band asked me to bring him back a plate of food. So I heaped everything I wanted to be eating onto a plate and delivered it to him, trying not to look down at it.

So does Jesus love vegans? Who knows, probably. Should I have brought my own vegan dish to the parish potluck instead of trying to be such a mooch? Yes, definitely. Because I am not a beggar, I'm a chooser. And choosers can't be complainers.

Restaurant Review: Crushcakes & Cafe

Crushcakes & Cafe (website)

1315 Anacapa St. Santa Barbara, CA

805-963-9353

Cafe hours: 8am-5pm every day

Crushcakes hours: 9-6pm every day

Vegan-Easy or Meat-and-Cheesy?

.   .   .

VEGAN-EASY

I discovered Crushcakes soon after moving to the Santa Barbara area, and every time I go back I love it more and more. The people who work there are friendly and helpful, there are indoor and outdoor seating areas, they use compostable to-go boxes, and there is a little sign above the stack of napkins in the coffee area that says, "We come from trees!" I think it's cute to imagine the napkins shouting that in their little napkin voices.

Crushcakes also has a vast selection of hot sauce options (and I am not one of those people who overuse the word "vast"). That doesn't matter much to me because I have zero tolerance for spicy things, but it's the cafe's best selling point for some people.

Imagine my delight when my Yelp search for "vegan brunch" in Santa Barbara brought up Crushcakes as one of the first listings! There aren't very many vegan breakfast options, other than oatmeal with fruit, but they're pretty flexible about making any lunch option vegan. Some of their menu items are even labeled with the word "vegan" in parentheses.

I went with the crushed tomato basil soup and the "tree hugger" panino (roasted portobello, zucchini, red and green peppers, caramelized onions, tomatoes, goat cheese, and house aioli) on wheat toast. Obviously, I asked them to hold the goat cheese. Here's what I got:

I was quite pleased with the little heart shape drawn on top of my tomato soup - until I realized that it was probably made out of cheese. Luckily, it was just kind of resting on top of the soup and hadn't permeated through it. 

Andrew had brought a few different hot sauce bottles over to our table and was, apparently, alternating hot sauces for each bite of his breakfast burrito. I interrupted his ritual to ask him to eat the cheese-heart off the top of my soup, and of course he obliged. After that, the soup and panino were both tasty.

We finished our meal in the "& Cafe" section of Crushcakes & Cafe. But there's a whole other section: the cupcakery! That's where they give away free bumper stickers that say, "Make cupcakes not war." I have one stuck to my refrigerator with a magnet. I wistfully stared at the cupcake case as we walked past it:

Then my eye landed on the plate of chocolate cupcakes in the front right corner, and my heart skipped a beat (not actually - that would only happen after I had ingested the entire plate of cupcakes). Look what the sign said:

These were vegan cupcakes! With little chocolate hearts on top! I bought one (of course) for $3 and ate it up quickly. It tasted just like a regular cupcake except a bit moister. And "moist" is one of those words that is only acceptable when used to describe a cupcake.

Laughing Alone with a Salad

Sometimes I just feeling like laughing alone with a salad.

Photo credit: Mike Vitalino

It’s been a month now since I decided to be a veghan, and I thought I’d use this post to reflect on how it’s been going so far. I was about to refer to it as my “progress,” but that implies some kind of end point, and I don’t really have a goal to progress toward.

The coolest (and most surprising) thing has been the support I’ve gotten from my friends, who have gone out of their way to send me vegan recipes and websites about veganism, and in some cases have even cooked me vegan food. My whole family has made a point of learning about veganism and calling me to share what they’ve learned. My roommates have come up with ideas and participated in my vegan cooking endeavors. Andrew has been totally flexible about trying vegan-friendly restaurants with me, and he's even done a good job of hiding his jealousy as I mourn my polyamorous breakup with bacon and cheese.

Photo credit: Mike Vitalino

Since I post my blog updates on Facebook, people I haven't talked to since college have been confronted with my veganhood on their newsfeeds. I'm sure most of them see my newest post and think, "Isn't that the chick who tried to take 21 shots on her 21st birthday? Nice to see she's still craving attention!" But I've received a bunch of messages from people just wanting to say that they enjoy reading about my hapless adventures as a vegan. In some cases it's turned into a little catch-up session with people I haven't seen in years.

I'm getting more comfortable identifying myself as a vegan. I'm still tempted to preface my special requests at restaurants with, "I know this is probably an annoying question, but..." because I feel guilty for being one of those customers with insane dietary restrictions. I've made a point of only asking questions when necessary. I always carefully investigate the menu to find out as much information as I can before asking for details.

But sometimes I still catch myself being obnoxious. For instance, at my friend Sasha's birthday dinner at Hollister Brewing Company the other night, I ordered a Market Salad with no cheese. It was served with some moist-looking bread, which I really wanted to eat. I asked the server, "Excuse me, what is in this bread?" She scrunched up her nose and said she'd ask in the kitchen. When she returned, she very politely explained that it was sourdough bread that the restaurant ordered from a bakery downtown, and she had no idea what was in it. Of course she didn't. Did I expect her to have baked it from scratch, so she could report its animal-product content to any obnoxiously inquisitive vegan who might ask?

Photo credit: Mike Vitalino

My anxiety about interacting with servers at restaurants has resulted in my avoiding eating out whenever possible. That's good because I can put the money I would have spent at restaurants toward vegan ingredients for cooking meals at home.

I've done a really good job of sticking to eating vegan food. My only slip-up was when I got macarooned (!) at a party a few weeks ago. Most of the time, I don't feel like I'm depriving myself of anything. I feel quite healthy and content.

Being a vegan has been isolating in some ways. Eating is often a social activity, and now I'm a little bit excluded from that experience. It might seem like those women laughing alone with salads are about to burst into tears and cry, "I'm so lonely!" as soon as the camera turns off.

But they might just be really happy about their salads.

Cookie Doughn't You Wish There Were Eggs in This?

The title of this post is a reference to Coldstone Creamery's signature creation called "Cookie Doughn't You Want Some?". It's a delicious concoction of french vanilla ice cream, caramel, fudge, chocolate chips, and chunks of cookie dough. I'm not that bummed about missing out on Coldstone Creamery - their ice cream was always a bit too rich for me and I could never even make it though a "Like It" size - but cookie dough is another story.

In my pre-vegan days, whenever I was feeling particularly indulgent, I'd purchase a tube of cookie dough with my groceries. It might last a week... but that was only if it got hidden behind something else in the refrigerator and I forgot it was there.

I once babysat for a family that always had a 36 oz. tub of Toll House cookie dough in their refrigerator. Anyone who has ever babysat knows that the biggest perk is digging through the family's kitchen after the kids are asleep and finding new, strange snacks to nom on while you watch TV. This tub of cookie dough always haunted me. I wanted to eat a lot of it, but I felt embarrassed that the family might notice how much of it was gone each time they got home after I had been babysitting. I would try to scoop spoonfuls from places that had already been attacked, so the mound of cookie dough still in the tub didn't look markedly different.

After three heaping spoonfuls, I always felt kind of sick and had to stop eating it. It was the raw eggs. Those raw eggs! They'll also kill you with E. coli and salmonella. But cookie dough is worth the risk.

When I was shopping at the Isla Vista Coop yesterday, I spied with my little eye a tub of vegan cookie dough. It's made by the company Eat Pastry, whose website looks like a mix between Willy Wonka's most terrifying dream and a particularly colorful interpretation of the Book of Revelation. But their cookie dough looks pretty unremarkable.

I wanted to give the vegan cookie dough a fair shot, so I waited until last night when I had changed into my pajamas and was about to watch an episode of House Hunters International while pretending to do school work. The time was right for a heaping spoonful (or three) of cookie dough.

Unfortunately, it seems that in addition to E. coli and salmonella, raw eggs also contribute most of cookie dough's great taste. The vegan cookie dough wasn't disgusting tasting, it just wasn't satisfying. I guess I'll have to become one of those people who thinks of cookie dough as just a means to an end: cookies. So I baked some:

They were incredible. So yummy. And better even than the ones I baked from scratch a couple of weeks ago. I guess the moral of the story (the way the cookie crumbles, if you will) is that even though you don't have to be afraid of E. coli or salmonella when snacking on raw vegan cookie dough, it just doesn't measure up to the real stuff in taste. The Eat Pastry cookies themselves, though, are definitely something to write home about.

Luckily, I don't have to bother writing home because my mom and dad read this blog.