vegansaurus!

Sunday: Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary Barn Bash! Help the Turlock hens!  »

We know how much you love the Turlock hens. That’s how we know you’ll be at Harvest Home on Sunday, June 3, for a barn dedication celebration! The Turlock hens got an entirely new barn to live in following their rescue this spring, where they cohabitate with other rescued birds.

Harvest Home wants to thank you for your support in the construction of the barn, as well as show it off, so they’re throwing a little party from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday. You’ll eat and drink (vegan-ly, of course), and meet the birds as well as the amazing Harvest Home workers. All ticket sales directly benefit Harvest Home, and this event marks the beginning of the organization’s fundraising campaign for the future “Sanctuary Avian Medical Barn.” Awesome, right? Right!

Buy tickets here, and go party with the birds in their new, wonderful home on Sunday!

[photo courtesy Harvest Home]

SF vegan drinks is tonight! See you there!   »

Let’s do this, peeps. I’m feeling really confident this week, so maybe I’ll talk to strangers! I think it’s called networking? But I probably won’t; I like people to come to me so I can act awkward and blush a lot, all the while being a little bit overexcited. Winning mix, right? Let’s hang.

SF Vegan Drinks happens tonight, Thursday, May 31, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, 2323 Mission St. at 19th.

Drink specials are strawberry basil caipirinhas, $3 bottled beer, $4 well drinks, and $5 vegan white Russians! Featured vegan food includes sweet potato tater tots, beer battered onion rings, veggie burgers, and vegan summer sliders. Try not to make the same mistake I did last time and eat all of it in one sitting. The only thing I was acquainted with that night was the toilet.

Confidential to VegLovr: I saw that comment in the last SF Vegan Drinks post, and I think you and I were made for each other, no joke.

Hello, friends! It’s WTF Wednesday with Mark!  »

Please don’t feed the raccoons.

You guys, the cruising life is not for me. I spent the last week on one of Carnival’s horrific floating frat houses, and between the exciting dinners with my family (not a dry eye or unflipped piece of furniture in the place), the delicious cafeteria food, and the loud people (not to mention children; children everywhere!!!) I feel about as relaxed as if I’d only worked an 80-hour week instead of my usual 60.

I am really glad to be back on dry land. Now that the shaking and rolling that is charmingly referred to as “sea legs” is behind me, and Allen is once again talking to me after being forced to spend a week on the high seas together, things are good again. I was even excited to get back to work and see my coworkers! It doesn’t hurt that there’s a potluck on the first day back and I just ate my body weight in delicious potato and cauliflower curry.

Let’s see what’s going on the internet these days. That’s something else I was excited about, getting back to my websites and catching up on everything Lindsay Lohan did this week (nothing).

Sloths are really in right now, did you know that? After Kristen Bell freaked the fuck out over being near one, people are going crazy for these adorable animals! (Quick question: Are sloths dangerous?) Even Animal Planet is getting in on the act, and running either a web series or a real series (I am not in the habit of watching animal shows, only ladies fighting in pretty houses) on sloths and how awesome they are. They’re even getting them at their most intimate and running clips of baby sloths getting potty-trained, which is awesome because baby animals peeing and pooping is adorable and I love it and they smile an make noises and when I do that I just have to spend a night in jail.

[Can’t see the video? Watch it on Vegansaurus.com!]

Raccoons are also adorable but I have a feeling i’m the only one that thinks so. And I bet I would also freak out if raccoons were coming into my neighborhood and eating all my Doritos.  Although, I’ve never really liked Doritos. When we first came to the U.S. my mom tried some and declared that they tasted like rat droppings (how she knows this I have no idea. She also claims root beer tastes like bee poison. Life in Russia was hard.). I’ve been off of them ever since. Also, when I was a kid, a raccoon climbed into my aunt’s window and killed her or something (that’s what my aunt tells me, but she is also still alive, so…), and it had little human hands (again, just repeating what I’m told), and I’ve been scared shitless of them since. But they’re cute from afar, right?

Here are some dogs chilling with fans and being all cute. Just the idea of laying on the floor with a fan makes me want to take a nap. Did I mention that everywhere we went in the cruise was super hot? I am surprised I do not get heat stroke. Or maybe I did, and that’s why I’m so excited to be at work. YOU DECIDE!

That’s it for this week! Please send me links for next week and have a Dorito-free Wednesday!

[Photo by Brad Woodard / KHOU 11 News]

Recipe: Wilted kale salad!   »

Are you sick of kale yet? I’m not! I just keep finding new ways to eat it that are better than the last. My new favorite is the wilted kale salad!

Call me late to the party, because I usually am, but my first experience with the mystical wilted kale salad happened on a trip to LA in January, at Mohawk Bend in Echo Park.

Very tasty! Spiced to perfection and topped with crisp jicama slices!

So, I’ve come up with my own version!

Ingredients:
1 bunch kale
1 tsp. olive oil
dash of salt and pepper
juice of one lemon
1 sliced avocado

Instructions
Clean, de-stem and roughly chop the kale. Heat up your pan to about medium-high, with the oil drizzled in. Once it’s hot, put in the kale and keep it constantly moving, cooking between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. You are not sauteing it, but lightly wilting it. The point is, you don’t want it fully cooked, but just heated enough to take some of the bitterness out.

Transfer to a bowl and toss with avocado, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Easy enough, right?

I personally think this salad pairs beautifully with pasta doused in vodka cream sauce!

How do you make your wilted kale salad? Next time, I think I will use strawberries instead of avocado, and balsamic vinegar instead of lemon juice!

Product Review: Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics!  »

Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics is an absolutely awesome vegan makeup brand! They sent me some free stuff to try and now I will tell you all about it!

From their FAQ:

What’s with the ‘Vegan’ thing?
In a time when many cosmetic companies make the claim that their products are “Cruelty Free” simply because Animal Testing has become unfashionable and less cost-effective, OCC felt it was necessary to raise the bar on this issue. We pledge never to use animal-derived ingredients (including Lanolin, Beeswax, Carmine and more) in our products and accessories. Beyond any personal convictions, we simply believe that it’s unnecessary, especially when there are alternatives that are just as readily available, and equally effective in the formulation of our products. Further, you need not necessarily be aligned with animal rights issues to reap the benefits of a vegan cosmetic line: animal ingredients can be amongst the most allergenic and skin reactive, and prevent makeup from being considered Kosher, Halal or otherwise compliant with various dietary (and sanitary!) regulations.

So great, right? Love it. But besides being vegan, OCC is highly celebrated in the makeup world! My makeup fanatic sister was hella impressed when I told her OCC was sending me free stuff. She said people particularly rave about their lip tar. Here are the shades I tried:

My favorite are the Kava-Kava and the Queen, but I think I am square when it comes to lipstick so those are the most traditional colors I’d say. Well the Kava-Kava is kind of 60s pale, which is right up my 60s-enthusiast alley. It would look AWESOME with some seriously heavy black eye makeup. The Queen is so bright that I did a bare eye to complement. 

The lip tars are pretty amazing. They are renown for their staying power and straight-up heavy pigment and I’d have to agree with both those points. This stuff stays on for like ever. And the colors are BOLD and pretty much lovely. It’s a bit hard to get the color off but I prefer that to having to reapply all day. This stuff literally stays on like three hours longer than regular lipstick.

For the eye colors, here are the shades I tried:

These are great! Again, the colors are bold and lovely. I like the sheer colors but the matte Poison is pretty impressive in just how strong it is. These colors go on smooth and are easy to apply and blend. Love them!

As for nail polish, I hate my funny fingers so I didn’t want to model them for you, but my co-worker Leah was kind enough to volunteer her nails:

She said she liked the colors a lot! I tried the Copperhead on its own and it was very nice. The nail polish was a bit tricky to get off as well, but it certainly didn’t chip. And I don’t really wear nail polish but I’ve been under the impression that it’s hard to find vegan polish? Well, OCC has plenty.

The final product I tried was the tinted moisturizer. I liked this as well. Very moisturizing. It’s super-sheer so if you are looking for more coverage, this may not be for you. But if you want just a bit of coverage, you’ll like this.

So if you can’t tell, I love Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics! I even went to their launch party for their new Garden collection. The Ophelia and Belladonna and many of the colors I tried are in the new collection. The party was well-attended and had Babycakes cupcakes! Don’t you love it when a vegan biz supports a vegan biz? I certainly do. It’s just another reason to love OCC!

Cat-toure: buy kitty clothes from one badass cat  »

Guys, if you didn’t know, I got a new job. Yes, that’s why I haven’t been as prolific lately. But I still love you! So I find you great things like Cat-toure! There’s this funny guy Jeff at my work and my intern BFF was like, “you know he has a cat clothing line, right?” And I was like, “hell no I did not but I’m so ready to make him internet famous!” Which is the natural outcome of all Vegansaurus posts. 

Cat-toure is kind of like American Apparel for your kitty pals. It’s some cute-ass stuff. I love the hoodies like whoa. But my favorite part is the model! Look at this bruiser:

Holy crap, let’s cuddle already! I had to ask Jeff all about her. This tough guy is named Liley! Jeff and his wife rescued her when she was one year old. He says she weighed less than four pounds and “was pretty much bald and had mad shit wrong with her.” Now she’s happy and healthy! She’s a Devon Rex and purportedly “mad friendly and mad chill.” She sleeps on Jeff’s wife’s head every night and can do paw (that Devon Rex link says they hella great at tricks). So cute! My Mitsy can sit for treats but if I tried to teach her paw, she’d be like “LOLZ you are hilar. BRB I just saw some dust move!”

Like I always say when we discuss cat clothes, if your kitty don’t like clothes, don’t make her wear clothes. If she don’t care, no harm no foul. Though I think anybody might want to get Cat-toure’s super cute kitty robe for the post-bath routine. I don’t bathe Mitsy too often but sometimes you just gotta. I’m talking pee. Shit just got real.

Totally nasty: Eating pork could give you brain tapeworms!  »

This is your brain on pork! Specifically, this is “A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs.” How do pig-muscle parasites get into human brains? Carl Zimmer at Discover breaks it down: When humans eat undercooked meat from a pig that was infected with the tapeworms, those  tapeworm eggs will hatch in a human’s body, and the bloodstream will whisk the new little tapeworms around and up into the brain, where they thrive, forming cysts and giving the human a grody disease called neurocysticercosis.

Because the symptoms of neurocysticercosis are similar to lots of other diseases—it can cause epilepsy, for one thing—doctors like Theodore Nash of the National Institutes of Health say they can only estimate how many people are suffering from brain tapeworms. Dr. Nash tells Discover that he estimates between 1,500 and 2,000 people in the U.S. have them. And even grosser: “Nash and colleagues published a review of the scientific literature and concluded that somewhere between 11 million and 29 million people have neurocysticercosis in Latin America alone.”

Get over to Discover and read the whole article right now. It’s a totally treatable disease, though of course it’d be much easier not to accidentally become infected with parasites if you weren’t eating the animals that carry them. I really wanted to say this to my dining companions last night, who were eating copious amounts of pig, but not being a complete jerk, I refrained. Still, once you see that brain, it’s hard not to see it every time someone mentions the word “bacon.”

[photo by Theodore E. Nash, M.D., via Discover]

Recipe: Hawaiian pasta salad!   »

Living in California is the best, because you can theoretically BBQ during all of the seasons, and BBQs are my favorite! Just put on a sweatshirt, it gets chilly at night. Once it starts warming up, nothing beats inviting all your pals over to drink some brewskies and grill some food. What’s not to love?

Actually, if I can be honest with you, I’m not having quite as much fun as I should, grilling my food these days. Tell me what you grill—I’m bored of veggies and faux meat.* My favorite part of BBQs has turned into making (and chowing down on) the side dishes! (There has to be more. Tell me there is more than this.)

Here’s my version of a Hawaiian pasta salad. People love this salad. It’s refreshing and creamy. I use penne in it, but I have a feeling most people prefer macaroni. I like to think penne adds an elegance to traditional macaroni dishes! Plus, wikipedia says the shape and design makes for more sauce absorption. See, I’m not completely out of my mind!

Ingredients
1 lb. macaroni noodles (or elegant penne!)**
2 cups cashew cream (I’m assuming you can sub unsweetened soy creamer, cup for cup. It’s very rich and creamy!)
2 cups vegan mayo
1 Tbsp. agave nectar
1/2 cup mild vinegar (I use white rice)
4 green onions, thinly sliced
1 large carrot, grated or chopped. I usually chop.
1 celery rib, thinly sliced
1/4 red onion, diced small
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
If you are making your cashew cream and mayo from scratch, do that ahead of time, to cut down prep. I never do, but it really is a great idea in theory!

Boil your pasta. Now, I love over-boiled, puffy pasta and everyone turns their nose up at it, but I’ve finally found a recipe that recommends you overcook the pasta, because it’s better able to absorb the dressing. Take that, haters!

Boil until super fat and puffy. Also, throw in some salt, because it flavors the pasta. My friend told me you want to salt it enough that the water tastes like the ocean. I usually toss in a small palmful.

Over-boiled pasta, a.k.a. DOING ME.

While your pasta is boiling, make your dressing. Whisk together 1 1/2 cup cashew cream, 1 cup mayo, 1 TBS agave nectar, 1 tsp salt and 2 tsp pepper in a bowl.

Whiskin’ up some dressing.

Once the pasta is boiled, turn off the heat and drain it. Then put it back in the pot. Add the vinegar and toss until completely absorbed. Now let it cool for about 10 minutes, then add the dressing. Transfer to a bowl and try to let cool completely. Since I am impatient, I wait about a half hour.

Ever so creamy, vegan style!

Add the rest of your cream, mayo, the veggies and mix together. Salt and pepper to taste. Cover and place in fridge for at least an hour. Overnight is best, this is the kind of salad that gets more terrific as the flavors meld! I like to garnish it with some sliced green onions, but I bet a hodgepodge of green onions, thinly sliced celery, and red onion, plus slivered or grated carrot, would look really pretty!


Everyone’s favorite pasta salad, no joke!

*OK, kind of an exaggeration. I am having fun grilling homemade seitan. But even that is getting a little old. I need new ideas, and so I’m turning to you for help!
**You can make this salad gluten-free so easily! Just sub gluten-free pasta!