vegansaurus!

We here at Vegansaurus pretty much love the hell out of any restaurant that buckles to vegan terrorism listens to their vegan customers and throw us a, uh, bone. Accordingly, we are happy to announce that San Francisco’s Saffron Grill has added a brand spanking new, all-vegan menu to their existing offerings.

Saffron Grill is North Indian cuisine, folks—that means flatbread, saag, and chickpeas galore! I grabbed the ol’ ball-and-chain and a couple friends and hit up SG on a Wednesday night, and the first thing I’d like to say is DO NOT TAKE THE 5 FULTON BUS. We attempted to do this, and it passed us right by, meaning we walked from Van Ness to Divisadero and were tired and hangry by the time we got there. Good thing, then, our friends were waiting, and our server kept the crispy papadums with chutney coming while we decided on food. Padpadums, in case you weren’t raised by a dad whose zest for Indian cuisine both informed and traumatized your formative years, are wafer-thin dry lentil pancake thingies that get kind of crispy and a little bit bubbly when heated up. They’re like Indian corn chips, but made out of lentils and served with chutney, not salsa. Anyway, they’re great, and they’re vegan, so eat them.

For food, husband and I split a plate of samosas (awesome) and pakoras (also awesome). The samosas were great and not of the too-spicy variety that I sometimes stumble upon and then curse vigorously. There is nothing worse than a too-spicy samosa whose samosa guts you have to scrape out and then eat the greasy, crispy shell alone. Thankfully, these samosas were not of that variety. The pakoras were flavorful and not too oily, which is nice in a pakora. The chutney they came with was also nice—flavorful and not too sweet. I think it was mango, but I was too overcome with white-girl shame to ask.

Entrees were saag aloo (for me) and some kind of chickpea dish (for him), accompanied by flatbread. Saffron Grill has whole-wheat flatbread, which is nice. It’s not huge and crazy like some of the naan I’m used to, but it’s good stuff, and I think my body likes the one-meal break from white flour. One other nice thing about the SG is that they’ll alter the spice levels for you, so if you’re a wimpy Canadian WASP, like me, they will make your food with baby spices, and it still tastes good. If you’re a spice-fiend, I have it on good authority they will do you up right as well.

Finally, the people who own/staff this place are fucking seriously nice. They decided to create the vegan menu after a few people asked them about it, which is awesome. They’re also really friendly, and I know I felt right at home, and I bet you would too.

The only downside to the Saffron Grill is that it’s a little pricey (as down as I am with the menu and the food, $3 for rice is still a bit rich for my blood). However, I’m still happy to support the businesses that support me and my stomach, so head over the the Saffron Grill; just don’t take the 5 Fulton, and if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

It’s your wildest piggy dreams come true. Oh hell yeah.

Here’s what the job entails: going to grocery stores in the SF Bay Area with a shit ton of the redonkulous Eat Pastry vegan cookie dough and demoing the shit out of it. It would be preferable if you had your own toaster oven, some baking know-how, and the ability to bake on site. It’s pre-made cookie dough so if you can’t do that, you should probably just jump off a building. If you’re interested, email the delightful ladies of Eat Pastry and they’ll fill you in on all the info. So basically, you are paid to demo an amazing vegan product and spread vegan food love and smell like cookies, which is natural aphrodisiac. Just ask that guy up there.

In return, all I ask of you is your first born, a gold bar, and a lifetime worth of foot rubs. Don’t worry, I’ll cover the bunions with band-aids!

The Beehive Market is a new flea/farmers/food market that’s opening on Saturday, June 12 in the parking lot of the Berkeley Adult School. It’s the ultimate hippie mart (what? you love it, you composting, communal hot-tubbing, vegan psychopath!); it runs every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and there looks to be lots of vegan vendors, including some I haven’t heard of (yay! more vegan food! bring it!) and also, Scream Sorbet. I had the pleasure of trying this delicious shiz at the farmers market in Marin (I’m fancy) and it was good times. I’m not normally a big fan of sorbets (I WANT A REAL DESSERT DAMMIT) but this stuff knocked me out. It’s the whole package plus it does its taxes. I enjoyed the cashew caramel flavor—it was creamy and delicious like WHOA. The little dude running the booth was kind of a pill but I can imagine dealing with my fat ass requesting the 11th taste of the same flavor (what! Samples are free! That’s why they’re called free samples!), that even a man with the patience of the Buddha would start to get a little testy. Whaves, their product is quite superior and they’re gonna blow up so HOP ON BOARD THE SCREAM TRAIN OR GET LEFT BEHIND, SKINNY. 

Point is, get your ass to The Beehive Market on Saturday, June 12, and every Saturday after that. 

Ooh: also Sarah Smart from Millennium will be selling her Rocket Ship Ice Cream too so HEY NOW.  

To prove how amazing this chick is, here’s a picture of Shannon and Flori of Cinnaholic’s Ice Cream Wedding cake (that’s right, I said, ICE CREAM WEDDING CAKE) made by one Rocket Ship Ice Cream:

DAAAAAANG, Son. It tasted even better than it looked. Hate on, haters! Also, the wedding was amazing and they are the best!

LATE BREAKING BIT O’ BAD NEWS: They’re apparently roasting AN ENTIRE PIG at this sustainable, green, event where they encourage you to “leave with a rescued bunny.” Yes! Let’s save one animal and feast on another! Makes so much sense! I’m bummed; I thought it was gonna be an all-veg affair. I mean, if we can’t expect that from the Berkeley hippies, what can we expect? Oh that’s right, body odor and a superiority complex. Oh and jerking it to Alice Waters posing naked with only a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma covering her delicate bits.* I’m sorry, you can’t feel all high and mighty, Slow Food Nation, when you’re saving all of the dead pig for yourself. If these people really gave two shits about sustainability, they would eat vegan 95 percent of the time and donate the few animals that they can raise and murder “responsibly” to food deserts. Right? Isn’t that how we’re gonna feed the the country? Oh but you want all the “ethically” raised and “lovingly” murdered dead animals for yourselves, don’t you? You rich hippie wackadoos. ANYHOO, write the Beehive Market a polite email asking that they not do the pig roast because it’s going to alienate the people who actually give a shit about creating a sustainable future.

*WHAT! SEX SELLS!! 

There hasn’t been enough in the news lately about marine life being killed by the excesses of civilization, so what the hell, let’s talk about whaling. Food Fight Grocery alerts us to a FOX News report (via UPI) that Obama is set to “break his campaign pledge to end the slaughter of whales” by negotiating a compromise to lift the ban on commercial whaling. The International Whaling Commission next meets on June 20, when they will take up the proposal for a vote.

FOX News is trying to score cheap political points, but for once, they’re not wrong on the facts. Environmental groups are angry, and there’s a lot to not like here. The International Fund for Animals, along with Greenpeace and HSUS, released an open letter [PDF] condemning the compromise and has been urging action to flood the White House with calls.

So what’s this all about, anyway? The compromise would allow Iceland, Japan and Norway, the three remaining nations that hunt whales, to hunt whales legally for commercial purposes. In exchange, the nations would have to cap whaling below their current numbers and agree to tighter monitoring and regulation, including new efforts to help with conservation of whales and other marine life.

Iceland, Japan and Norway are going to keep hunting whales no matter what, and the number of slaughtered whales has been rising every year. Reducing this number would count a win, and by bringing outlaws under the watchful eyes of regulators, the worst abuses can be stopped—at least, that’s the logic behind the compromise. Environmentalists and other detractors say that passing the compromise would legitimize whale hunting, and that the compromise offers no long-term target to end whaling entirely.

At stake may also be the very existence of the IWC. If members can’t agree on a compromise, all signs point to the collapse of the 63-year-old organization. That would mean no standards, no monitoring, and nowhere to report illegal whaling.

No matter where you stand or which evil you feel is the lesser one, it’s clear that consensus on whale hunting will never happen without reaching the people who demand whale meat (and maybe smacking them upside the head). We’ve already gone after New Zealand for supporting this compromise, and if it passes, we’ll be really unhappy. But if it doesn’t pass? For the whales, it might be even worse.

The world is fucking ridiculous. First the Kardashians get their own television show. Then some of them get their own spin-off show. And now it has come to my attention that matches are not vegan. Yeah, that’s right. Whenever you want to light up a soy candle that you so painstakingly made sure was vegan, you best be rubbing some sticks over that shit: matches are the devil’s work.

I was watching a rerun of How It’s Made where, among other things, they discussed how matches are made. I was shocked to learn that gelatin is a part of the chemical cocktail on match heads, and was floored when the narrator introduced “animal protein” as an ingredient promoting oxidization. I had no fucking idea that something so commonplace as a match is teeming with “animal product.” Yucky yuck. It’s up on YouTube, see for yourself. A simple google search backed up How It’s Made’s claim, one source citing “animal glue” as both a combustor and adhesive, and isinglass as a “conditioner.” It makes me wonder what the fuck is in everything else I own that doesn’t have an ingredients list. Oh, the bittersweet aftertaste of truth. I think I’m going to go cry in a corner now.

Events! Or more precisely, event!
What are you doing this weekend? Maybe catch a baseball game at PETA’s “second-best veg-friendly major ballpark,” yes, home of y/our San Francisco Giants. Or you could check out the third annual Indie Mart at Thee Parkside? It’s on Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., entry is a mere $3, and Wonder Dog Rescue will be there! THEY HAVE PUPPIES!!

Serious news means serious business
Who hates horses and indigenous people? Australia hates horses and indigenous people! Seriously, the Australian government, instead of helping with humane population control efforts or doing anything sensible or kind or caring at all, is going to round up all the horses, kill them, and butcher them for tasty snacks. Not even kidding. Sign the petition against this insanity, please.

It’s about damn time: the Vermont attorney general finally issued animal-cruelty charges against two men in the Bushway Packing horror show. Remember that? From November? Too bad the penalties are so fucking tiny. UGH THE LAW IS SO FUCKED.

Pike Place Fish Market is quickly moving toward stocking exclusively sustainable dead fish. I know, but it’s not going anywhere, so it might as well be less ruinous of the planet. Hawaii has outlawed shark-finning, and if the article is accurate (read: not racist), shark fin soup was fairly popular in the state, so this might be a bigger deal than, say, California making it illegal. Dolphins, being demonstrable geniuses with whom we are all dying to communicate on a deeper level, are getting an iPad dolphin-to-human interface.

Moby’s New York Diet is, duh, vegan, and sounds pretty good. Seitan and grilled pineapple tacos, YES PLEASE. How about you delightful Vegansaurus readers? What would your Vegansaurus Diet look like? Record a week’s worth of meals, plus some interesting notes, and YOU COULD BE PUBLISHED ON VEGANSAURUS! All your dreams come true! Because eating interesting food is a weird competition/attention thing anyway, which we want to foster! Plus “our” Grub Street did, like, two San Francisco Diets and quit, and that is boring. BORING. So are you in? Come play!

Everyone gotten their no-duh inoculations? OK then: Paul Reidinger of SFoodie got such a shock at Golden Era this week: it’s really pretty inside, and the food is super-delicious. Good job recognizing the obvious, Paul! Oh and the new chefs at Ubuntu have actually not ruined everything—nope, still making tasty food (fava bean tempura WHAT?) out of fruit and vegetables, people are still paying too much attention to the fucking cheese—sounds like Ubuntu to us.

Want to see some baby eagles? Check out the EagleCam from Duke Farms in Hillsborough, N.J.! Seriously I am watching two 10-week-old eaglets stretch their wings right now and it is pretty amazing.

What would I rather do than go anywhere near this “steak smell”-emitting billboard? I suggest everyone in its immediate vicinity take up the niqab. Bonus: you’d anger a lot of crazy Christians, and Christopher Hitchens!

Did you know that your Vegansaurus also hates fat-hate? Everyone is great, everyone’s body is great, and we believe that the most important diet choices are made empathetically, meaning: NO ANIMAL PRODUCTS. So this study that found that “between the ages of 25 and 70 there is little different in the health of normal compared with overweight people”—we love this study. Oh, what’s that, study? You “also examined the relationship between body mass index and illness and found those defined as obese, with a BMI of 30 or above, had no more health problems than those who were a ‘healthy’ weight if they were under 40”? We should shut the fuck up about THIS GENERATION OF CHILDREN WILL DIE BEFORE THEIR PARENTS BECAUSE FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT and focus more on THIS GENERATION OF CHILDREN WON’T HAVE ANY EARTH TO INHERIT BECAUSE ANIMAL AGRICULTURE, maybe? The vegans are in.

Raising all those animals for you to eat is unsustainable and absolutely ruinous to the planet. Don’t hate me for saying it—the U.N. did! And of course the comments, even in the good old smarty-trousers Guardian, quickly devolve into meat-eaters demanding that people leave them alone because it’s not their fault the Earth is going to burn up in a toxic flameball by the end of the century; blame those (foreign) people having all those kids! It’s overpopulation of humans, plain and simple!

Never mind that meat and dairy agriculture uses 70 percent of worldwide fresh water and 38 percent of all the land, ever. It’s all those people having all those kids!

Man is it so hard to change your diet? Maybe instead of being subtly racist, overtly selfish dicks, you could stop eating all those animal products. Just a suggestion! Because I’m vegan and I plan on contributing to the human population someday, and I would appreciate it if you fuckers would try a little bit harder than “usually putting the plastic water bottle in the recycling bin instead of the trash” because THAT ISN’T GONNA CUT IT ANYMORE. And my future vegan children deserve oceans that are less than 50 percent trash-island/petroleum products/fish carcasses. Also: breathable air. Are you going to deny my babies BREATHABLE AIR, you FUCKING MONSTERS?

You could at least try Meatless goddamn Mondays without pitching a fit.

Man, we have it so lucky in the bay area. In other parts of the country, they have to literally climb mountains, cross rivers, and pass tests of endurance, skill, and wit to get to a quality vegan cupcake. For a decent vegan pizza, they must whittle a squirrel while riding an elliptical. For vegans in Middle Earth America, grocery shopping is basically like living in Saw, but worse*. WHICH LEADS ME TO MY NEXT POINT: God Bless San Francisco and God Bless Rainbow Grocery. Now, let’s get down to business!

First, we have VEGAN COOKIE DOUGH. That’s right, we can eat cookie dough straight out of the tub with the fattest of ‘em! And guess what, we ain’t getting Salmonella! HELL YEAH. Check out the ridiculously amazing Eat Pastry in the frozen section!

AAAAAAND… let’s give it up for Tofurky Pizzas! It’s a melty, delicious, Daiya-topped, vegan pizza and it’s ALL YOURS. It’s like $8 so my cheap ass will be saving it for special occasions like weddings and graduations and days ending in y. The actual pizza doesn’t look exactly like the box but SEX SELLS.

Also, vegan fertilizer for vegans who want to get DIR-TAY. Sorry, listening to too much Christina Aguillera.

Don’t know much about this but thought it might be of note for all you outdoorsy types. Cheers!

*I kid! It’s pretty easy to be vegan just about anywhere in America and so all you whiners better shut the hell up and GO VEG! Also, MOVE TO A COAST. I kid again, GO MIDWEST!