Saturday

Coffee is brewing here. I'm downstairs at my cute neighbor's apartment. We're watching Planet Earth.

This morning, walking to Stony Creek, ate a banana to get breakfast started. Then wandering on the creek bank, had my favorite trail mix from Nuts to You ('Slightly Sweet,' $2.29 / lb.). Crunchy soy nuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, peanuts, raisins, carob chips.

After creeking, and after thrift store shopping for home decor (successfully: $8 = Ikea stool, body pillow with washable brown cover, aqua throw pillow, two big cream-colored plates, two small white plates with blue trim and the words Delta Airlines on the bottom, two petite coffee cups that look like miniatures of big chunky midnight blue coffee mugs, and a little box with a green fish on it), my pal and I went grocery shopping at the DeKalb Thriftway.

I am so stocked for food. This is great. Discovered a wonderful generic brand called White Rose that has delicious things with short ingredient lists for cheap money.

1 lb. box of whole wheat penne
?-oz. pasta sauce (like, enough for the pasta, Newman's own, tomato and basil, $2.99)
1 lb. jar of White Rose natural peanut butter, $2.79
gigantic box of "whole grain" saltines (whole grain saltines?), $2.50, to spread the peanut butter on
22 oz. box (yes, you heard correctly) of Mom's Best raisin bran for $3.29, also with a strikingly short ingredient list
a 12-pack box of White Rose instant oatmeal, $2.49
a jar of Vlasic baby dills, $don't-remember
1/2-dozen doughnuts, $1.50

I cannot remember what else I bought right now, but I spent $23. My companion bought some peapods and tomatoes and coffee and some other important things. At home were couscous, asparagus and broccoli.

Dinner was couscous and steamed peapods, asparagus, broccoli and tomatoes. Dessert is dark, muddy coffee and doughnuts.

Yes, you are seeing  Steamed Grape Tomatoes.  

They were... tomatoey, in the very best way.

Snack, on my mind for later: Saltine cracker, peanut butter, crunchy soy nuts, banana slice, drizzle with honey (or not). Repeat.

Other snack, on my mind for another time: Raw peapods and broccoli and cherry tomatoes dipped in Italian dressing.

Also begging to be put with peanut butter: 'Slightly Sweet' trail mix from Nuts to You ($2.29/lb.) and oat bran pretzels ($1.50/lb. at Nuts to You). Spread peanut butter on a pretzel and sprinkle with trail mix.

Pasta and steamed veggies for dinner a couple times this week. Maybe once with just olive oil, seasoning and steamed veggies, and nutritional yeast, and once or twice with the marinara sauce and veggies. Marinara and veggies is decadent. Doesn't happen often enough in here.

Breakfast will be raisin bran and 8th Continent soy milk. Oranges. Coffee. Improv breakfast cereals: banana/trail mix/soy milk or even orange/trail mix/soy milk.

The couscous turned out better tonight. I didn't make it. Hm.

Here's what's been happening in food.

Been living on snacks: figs, tomatoes, bean sprouts, carrots, sunflower seeds, dried red sea vegetable, nuts, grapes. What I can grab from my kitchen when I am not, by any reasonable definition, awake. I've actually taken for lunch what was left of a box of cherry tomatoes and what was left of a bag of mixed nuts from yesterday. I have a working lunch from 11:50 - 12:34.

And here's what else: Oversized baked sweets. Big, thick, pillowy chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cookies with fork-criss-crosses on top, brownies, cinnamon rolls with icing, brownies with peanut-butter-fudge and chocolate coating on top. I have to stop. You get these things at coffee shops. They add up. I have to stop. But I'm not gonna. Cause I have a working lunch from 11:50 - 12:34. And I like to have sweets during that time period.

Bagels from the coffee shop on weekends.

Tonight, we ordered Chinese food from China Inn at 44th & Locust. It wasn't that good. Ordered through Eat24Hours.com which is good because they also have service for Desi Village and Tandoor India, and I will order from those places in the future.

Farmers' Market tomorrow? We'll see. Sleep first.

Saturday: downed trees and paper bags of fruit

Saturday Shopping List

1 pint sweet cherries
1 pint blueberries
1 pint apricots
2 quarts green peas
2 quarts green beans (and yellow green beans)
1 pint shiitake mushrooms
1 portobello cap
2 giant orange carrots
1 bunch small multi-colored carrots with greens
1 bunch kale
2 heads buttercrunch lettuce
2 bunches broccoli
5 tomatoes
2 big white potatoes
3 red potatoes
and one 16-oz. iced coffee

Total: $38.85



Roasted some squash, green beans, and shiitakes with salt, pepper, and fennel seeds. It was very strong and savory. Kind of chewy.

I have a raw vegetable and fruit snack buffet on my refrigerator door right now. Been snacking all day on cherries, blueberries, apricots, green peas, green beans.


I found the park severely wind damaged this morning.

Saturday Market & North Port Fishington Cookie Factory

There are 30 vegan cookies in my kitchen, and I can't eat them until Monday.

We'll come back to that. It's a cold, sunny day at Clark Park, maple-syrup weather, and chilly yellow daffodils are in bloom. White sunshine glances off the mud or is absorbed by bare branches. Food is plentiful, sweet and variable. Even the bean-and-spice lady is here, and I think she may be back for the season. She has chickpeas today.

Saturday Shopping List

1 lb of chickpeas
1 bunch of kale
baby spinach
2 heads of green leaf lettuce
a carton of micro-greens
a paper bag of small white potatoes
2 parsnips
1 quart of white mushrooms
1 portobello cap
a 23-oz jar of homemade apple sauce
1 oz. of "chicken seasoning"
a really big butternut squash
a loaf of multi-grain bread

total: about $35


Hadn't gotten a butternut squash in a long time. I'm going to bake it, of course. Going to try to make hummus - that's what the chickpeas are for. I also have a recipe for falafel I want to try. Still did not use the leek from last week, so I think I'll start off the week with a potato-leek soup for lunch.

I also purchased today 30 vegan cookies from a local bakery for my students. Milk & Honey Market special-ordered them for me and they came in today. I would tell you the name of the bakery but I'm afraid to open and look at the cookies. I have to keep them until Monday. Since two days were lopped off of spring break due to snow days, I wanted to bring my kids something for having to come to school those days. And I want my kids to know I like them, and what better way to show someone you like them than by giving them cookies. And I wanted cookies.

UPDATE: I braved a look at the cookies. They look so good! There are ten chocolate chip, ten snickerdoodle, and ten oatmeal-cranberry. They were baked at Philly Kitchen Share on South Street by North Port Fishington Cookie Factory (the name is an amalgam of several northeast philly neighborhoods: Northern Liberties, Port Richmond, Fishtown and Kensington). The baker apparently also makes donuts! And the donuts look good!

Papa John's

Everyone wants junk food once in a while. I recently had a depressing experience in which the facilitators of a group I was part of ordered pizza for everyone as kind of a surprise treat, as we were all exhausted and had been working long hours. Of course, it was all cheese, even though it's fairly easy to get vegan pizza in Philly (or anyplace there's a Papa John's). I know my group did not intend to exclude me, or the other two vegans in the group, or our lactose-intolerant colleague. It's just that people don't typically think of pizza as a vegan food. But pizza is actually one of my favorite foods.

Shortly after the above-mentioned incident, our group had pizza again, but this time it wasn't a surprise, and I was able to put in a request for no-cheese pizza, which was no problem. The local place we ordered from didn't really know how to do it, and there wasn't much flavor, as they apparently relied on the cheese and meat for flavor and didn't bother with the sauce or crust, but at least we all had something to eat. Papa John's, on the other hand, makes a delicious and flavorful cruelty-free pizza. Counterintuitively, even their "butter" garlic sauce that comes with the pizza... is vegan.

So, for your informational delight, here is a suggestion for a cruelty-free pizza you might order. This is a screen-shot of my actual online shopping cart on the Papa John's website.

It's as easy as that. No animal cruelty anywhere in there. Papa John's online menu allows you to select "No Cheese" from a drop-down menu. We've ordered this several times (except we don't usually get pineapple, because I'm the only one in the house who likes pineapple on pizza), and it has never once turned up with cheese on it. Interestingly, the one time we ordered from Papa John's face-to-face, they did screw it up and put cheese on it. But every time we've ordered online, it's gone well. And during football season, you can often find specials where you get extra toppings depending on how many touchdowns your home team scores. Fun, huh? And not a bad deal.

Two Sandwiches

A couple of sandwich meals I've been having.

Here's a favorite:

White mushrooms soaked in balsamic vinegar, mixed greens, alfalfa sprouts, onions, and Vegenaise. (If you don't have Vegenaise, use olive oil mixed with your favorite spices - that's what I often do.) In this picture, it's on country white bread, because they were out of multi-grain, but multi-grain is my personal favorite for this sandwich. This sandwich keeps well, if you want to make it in the morning and wrap it up for lunch. Because the mushrooms soak up the vinegar, you can have a lot of flavor without the ingredients being too wet.

On the side: green beans lightly sauteed in olive oil with salt and pepper. Don't cook them long - leave them crunchy, and then coat them with crunchy sea salt. These are also a great movie snack. And of course, if you have a sour pickle to add on the side, all the better.


I don't think this next one photographed as well, but it's a good hoagie.

That's Tofurkey kielbasa cut into strips and heated in a skillet on the stovetop. Top that with raw onions, alfalfa sprouts, and a little bit of the sauerkraut you're going to have for your side dish. The roll is a standard hoagie roll from any Philadelphia corner store. (Or your favorite steak roll from wherever you live.)

Side dish: seared brussels sprouts and sauerkraut. Use a small amount of olive oil, salt and pepper for the brussels sprouts. Cook them over high heat. You want to leave them crunchy but blacken parts of them. Some of the outer leaves will fall off and those will get nice and crispy. Don't use too much oil because when you add the kraut, there will be a lot of moisture. Keep the heat high and add the kraut - this will blacken a little, too, and get smoky. Sprinkle the whole mess with pepper.

Good times.

The best dollar-fifty I ever spent: A pint of tomatillos

Imagine the taste of a raw green pepper mixed with a strawberry. That's how a raw tomatillo tastes.

I removed the skins of these three (save the skins for your soup stock), cut them in quarters and threw them into the skillet for the last two minutes to heat with my curried blue and white potatoes. Start by cooking the potatoes thoroughly with olive oil, onion, and salt. At the end, add the curry powder (don't be shy about it), and I added a little rosemary as well.

Then add the tomatillos. They taste so good raw, it nearly breaks your heart to cook them, so only add them at the end, give them a little heat and toss them around to coat them with the other flavors, but they've got plenty of flavor inside, so don't lose that.

We're going to have these with a breakfast sandwich. Most of the time, we don't have things like soy sausage (or any fake "meats") or tofu in the house. We do eat tofu hoagies from Fu-Wah probably at least once a week, but as a general rule, the kitchen is stocked with vegetables, grains, beans, and fruit, not manufactured nonsense. However. I've been craving these soy sausage on English muffin sandwiches like crazy lately.

We bought fennel seeds at the market today, so I embedded some of those into the Gimme Lean soy sausage patty. I also cooked some thin, thin slivers of portabella mushroom. This is all cooked in the olive oil with the leftover tastes from the curry potatoes and tomatillos.

We're going to slice a tomato to top this with and put it on a toasted white-wheat English muffin. As these are cooking, you've got the potatoes setting aside. When you take the soy sausage and mushrooms off the heat, throw the potatoes back on for a minute or two to reheat while you put the sandwich together.


I have to be someplace tomorrow at 9 am and I have to be there all day. So I'm going to bring some raw tomatillos for snacks (remember, they're high in Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, so they're nice and filling), along with some raw carrots, maroon, orange, and white.

Right now, I've got a butternut squash and three apples baking in the oven with olive oil, cinnamon, and brown sugar. They're not for tonight. I'm going to make fried apples pies in the morning to take with me, and wrap the squash (stuffed with apple) in foil and bring that as well. I'm moving up in the world, I now have big, re-usable aluminum pans to bake in, rather than folded aluminum foil. One day, I'll own a casserole dish. I will.

Woody Harrelson loves Twinkies and, apparently, animals

I guess I have to see this movie now, since it stars both a vegan and Vegan Twinkies.

This is news to me. Woody Harrelson is vegan (yay!) and was in need of some Vegan Twinkies while filming Zombieland.

The fake Twinkie they made of cornmeal to shoot the scene doesn't sound all that appetizing to me. Thank goodness for the folks at Vegan Lunch Box for coming to the rescue.

I don't see me actually attempting to make Vegan Twinkies, but I love the exposure, nonetheless.

I knew I liked Woody Harrelson.

Molasses, quinoa, calcium, outer space

Just had a bedtime snack, an English muffin, toasted, with molasses, and some grapes (only fruit in the house, it's almost shopping day). The label says molasses has 20% of your recommended daily value, whatever that means, of iron. Twenty percent of your recommended daily vitamin A, and 20% of your calcium. Hmm.

Made a rare trip to the grocery store after work. Bought something expensive I'd been thinking about all day. Quinoa is $3.99 for a 16 oz. package. We searched it online, it only goes up from there. Does anyone know where to get this cheaper? (She said, as though people were already hanging out here reading.) But I want to try it. You prepare it like white rice, but it's heartier than rice. Got cheap balsamic, $2.29 for a glass bottle that will last us a couple of months. The English muffins, splurged on some soy sausage, got soap for the shower, flax seed meal, I feel like I'm forgetting something. Spent around $15 altogether. I usually go to the grocery store about once a month for oat bran, flax seed, and tea. Coffee comes in cans from Fu-Wah. Yesterday at Fu-Wah we picked up a package of pastry wraps and that's why we couldn't resist the soy sausage. Oh, we're gonna stuff something and cook it.

Quinoa is a wonderful food:

Quinoa was of great nutritional importance in pre-Columbian Andean civilizations, being secondary only to the potato, and was followed in importance by maize. In contemporary times, this crop has become highly appreciated for its nutritional value, as its protein content is very high (12%–18%), making it a healthful choice for vegetarians and vegans. Unlike wheat or rice (which are low in lysine), quinoa contains a balanced set of essential amino acids for humans, making it an unusually complete protein source.[4] It is a good source of dietary fiber and phosphorus and is high in magnesium and iron. Quinoa is gluten-free and considered easy to digest. Because of all these characteristics, quinoa is being considered a possible crop in NASA's Controlled Ecological Life Support System for long-duration manned spaceflights.[4]

I would like for it to be cheaper. But I can already eat on $80/month if need be. Depending on the outcome of this weekend's festivities, quinoa might get its own line item. We have a birthday in the family this weekend, and a cat adoptiversary, and a new Michael Moore movie (Capitalism: A Love Story). Cool weather and cooking. And blogging.