vegansaurus!

Quick-Ass San Francisco Bay Area Thanksgiving Guide!  »

You guys! We’ll add to this but for real right now, here’s what you can do if you have no family because of distance or fighting or deaths or what have you. HERE GOES:

Restaurants serving vegan Thanksgiving!
Millennium is having an amazing Thanksgiving meal, as always. It’s $60 ($30 for kids under 12!), and the menu looks unsane. Go on, get fancy!

Souley Vegan is doing a special Thanksgiving menu (info is further down the post). I’m hoping for a veganized deep-fried turkey leg. I wanna get Medieval on your asses! 

Café Gratitude returns with their FREE VEGAN THANKSGIVING! No matter that it’s raw, it’s free! I mean, you’re already vegan, might as well become a full-on holiday meal weirdo. Oh, and it looks like you might have to work? But, er, FREE FOOD!

If you want to get a meal at a supermarket and bring it home, check out:
Whole Foods varies what it offers store-to-store. Our pals in Los Angeles, quarrygirl, got the Whole Foods dinner last year and looooooved it. Search by store location on their site, or give your closest store a call and find out what they’re offering!

Andronico’s has a pretty rad deal at their eight Bay Area locations! They’re introducing a vegan meal this year and it sounds delicious:
Field Roast: Wild rice, cranberry, fig and grain roast en croûte (1 pound)
Roasted root vegetables (1 pound)
Vegan yukon gold mashed potatoes (1 pound)
Vegan mushroom gravy (½ pint)
Cranberry orange chutney (½ pint)
Vegan pumpkin pie (6 inches)

It’s only $30 for all that awesome food! GET ON IT! 

AND NOW: it’s DESSERT TIME! That means PIE!!
You can get vegan options at Mission Pie (order ahead!), Bike Basket Pies (OUR FAVORITES! Best pie in the Bay Area! Order ahead!), or pick one up at Rainbow Grocery or Whole Foods. Also, check out all our our local vegan bakeries and see if they might make you up something special? Bet they will! A cake from Sugar Beat Sweets? Cupcakes from Fat Bottom Bakery? A giant cinnamon roll from Cinnaholic? A toffee treat from Wholesome Bakery? Nabolom Bakery has lots of good vegan options! There are pies and Weekend Ruiner cinnamon rolls from A Fire Inside. Idle Hands Baking Company makes cupcakes and cakes if you aren’t a pie person. Or get a pumpkin pie ice cream cake from Maggie Mudd—that flavor’s coconut milk-based, it’s intense. The options are endless, but you better call now!

Also, if you don’t want others to do the dirty work, you could totally make your own fabulous Thanksgiving, lazy!

Now, let’s get fat, American-style! Happy Thanksgiving!

[photo credits: top, QuintanaRoo; middle, digiyesica; bottom, sweetbeatandgreenbean]

Cinnaholic needs our help!  »

Vegans! And friends of vegans! And lovers of all things delicious! AN ANNOUNCEMENT: Our most favorites, Cinnaholic, is in a tight spot with cash and needs a little extra to pull through this month. You can help, and here’s how: buy a gift certificate for deeeeeeeelicious cinnamon rolls now, and you redeem it, plus 15 percent of its original value, in December. You’re giving them a micro-loan because they’re fucking rad and their cinnamon rolls are magic, and then you reap the rewards after just nine weeks! DO IT! And buy one for your friends! And your mom! (And ME GIVE TO ME!)

Party at Cinnaholic tonight SAY HEEEEEY!  »

Head down to Cinnaholic tonight from 3 to 7 for some free music, good mind-blowing eats, and perhaps one of their adorable, limited-edition t-shirts, featuring a snail loving on a cinnamon roll. Because what’s cuter than a snail who can throw down when it comes to food? NOTHING. Okay, maybe baby sloths! BUT THAT’S IT. And maybe this baby hippo.

More party details here. Save us a cinnamon roll topped with rootbeer frosting and marshmallows and chocolate sauce WHAT IT’S A ROOT BEER FLOAT DUMMY. Oh man! Just had a brainstorm! Cinnaholic should TOTALLY have a Vegansaurus cinnamon roll, right?? Something with pink frosting that’s fat and awesome. Let’s rap, what are your ideas?

The world is bleak: fighting little dogs for half a cracker with this week’s link-o-rama!  »

Pamela Anderson loves animals! She paid all the expenses for the transport of 50 homeless dogs from New Orleans to a pet adoption program in Virginia, less the two she adopted herself. That is a good thing that a person with money can do. [photo credit: AP]

Get busy with these events!
Tonight eat snacks from Vegansaurus pals Fat Bottom Bakery at the Oakland Art Murmur! Also, there’s art, and wandering around Oakland, where it may be warmer than the city! Double-also, art shows very frequently serve free liquor. Go expand your cultural horizons, starting around 5 p.m. and continuing until it’s not entirely clear, but not very late (8ish?).

Tomorrow, Saturday Aug. 7, Oakland gets to be awesome again (!) and host this month’s SF Underground Market. Which is technically a “Bay Area” underground market, but, all right. It’s at 24th Street and Broadway, runs from 5 to 11 p.m., and has a $2 entry fee. There’ll be live music, drinks for purchase, and all kinds of food vendors. The location, incidentally, is three (big) blocks from the 19th Street BART station.

If you didn’t find what you wanted in Oakland, or were unable (TOO LAZY) to get there, probably you should get over to Hayes Valley Farm on Sunday, Aug. 8 for the Fresh Produce Free-For-All. It is exactly what it sounds like, apparently, and it sounds like AWESOME. Hayes Valley Farm is on Laguna Street between Oak and Fell Streets, and the Fresh Produce party is scheduled from 12:30 to 6 p.m.

Alternatively, you could participate in the protest honoring the 40th anniversary of Lolita the orca’s capture. It will be held at “Six Flags Discovery Kingdom” (formerly known as Marine World Africa USA, the saddest not-SeaWorld your Vegansaurus ever visited) in Vallejo from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

More protests next week! On Wednesday, Aug. 11 protest the opening night of the Ringling Bros. circus in Oakland (everything is happening in Oakland now! And HBIC Laura just moved there. This is not a coincidence). The protest will be at the Oracle Arena (7000 Coliseum Way) from 6 to 7:30 p.m., and our pals at Cinnaholic are offering 20 percent off to every protester who brings in a flyer from the event! More details about this and other circus protests here.

Educate yourself with these thrilling news items!
This week in Meat news, British people found themselves accidentally drinking milk and eating meat from cloned cows. Whoopsie daisy! Esquire wouldn’t mind cloned meat, but thinks in vitro a much better (and safer) idea. England is exporting miniature cows to the U.S., which SFoodie considered “might save the planet,” what with their being extra-small and needing so little food and water and space (the better to pack you on the feedlot, my tiny ones!) Good made a super-disgusting chart of the “average American” annual diet, which include 110 pounds of “red meat,” and 600.5 pounds of non-cheese, non-egg dairy products. So that’s all milk and yogurt and cream? Ew. Christina Pirello reminded the omnivores that their hamburgers are totally disgusting, though she didn’t “[go] all vegan on [them],” just suggested, like, the Dan Barber way, Dan Barber’s so great! (no he’s not.) Erik Marcus pointed out that it wasn’t so much the “meat” component in the “cooking meat led to human intellectual development” theory as the “cooking” part. Shut Up, Foodies! wondered how owners of an emu farm could slaughter and eat the birds who literally hug them.

What Fucked-up Things have people been doing to animals recently? Germany’s wild boar population has rapidly increased, and the number of whom are radioactive due to the lasting effects of the Chernobyl disaster has quadrupled. HA HA HA AWESOME. Scientists at the Emory University School of Medicine published research that may explain “the molecular biology of fear”; they studied this by giving “mild” electric shocks to mice. Kerry Ressler, the researcher interviewed for the LiveScience article, really loves his wife and three children. On the subject of fear, military veterinarians are diagnosing dogs with PTSD now. Specifically Gina, a bomb-sniffing German Shepherd, who has been in recovery for a year after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. She’s well enough to work on domestic bases, and maybe she’ll get redeployed to on of our Middle East quagmires, just like our human troops! It’s nice that dogs get treated equally to (straight) people in the U.S. military, isn’t it.

Awwww, isn’t it cuuuuuuute? Anthropomorphic cows selling dairy products! It’s not at all reminiscent of Suicide Food! And Mouila, the oldest gorilla in England, turned 50 on Monday, and her keepers threw her a birthday party, complete with “presents wrapped with [sic] special gorilla-friendly paper.” I’m sure it was always her dream to live in freezing-ass, foggy fucking England and be a baby machine for Howletts Wild Animal Park.

One item of non-terribleness: the guidelines for the first complete replacement for the Draize skin test was adopted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in July, which will, according to PCRM, replace “the rabbit method for most chemicals and products.” Fewer bunnies being tortured really is wonderful.

In our Bay Area, people on the Supplemental Nutrition Program (a type of food stamps) can now use their funds at farmers markets in Healdsburg and Petaluma. That is a really great idea! But considering that the federal government made a big fat cut to funding for food stamps this week, who will have the funds to buy fresh, local produce? Our jerkface governor doesn’t care about who will pick any of the produce from anywhere, vetoing a bill this week that would have guaranteed farmworkers ONE DAY OFF in every seven worked, and overtime pay for over eight hours worked in a day or 40 in a week. You know, like you’d get in an office for making after-hours copies and drinking soda, or sitting around waiting for deadline DOING NOTHING. As opposed to, maybe, picking fucking strawberries in the hot sun all day, every single day. New York City won’t commit to preserving all of its existing community gardens, despite protests—why have a garden when you can have condos?

A pitbull saved a chihuahua from being devoured by a coyote! Stop hating pitbulls already, they are as good a dog as any other. Turns out that the earliest known domesticated animal was, indeed, a dog, and that the act of domestication and bonding with animals may have taught us humans to “learn about and care for fellow creatures.” Speaking of which, Ethical Pizza rescued a baby pigeon at the Daly City BART station yesterday! A tiny baby pigeon only three weeks old! YOU GUYS.

The New York Daily News had a little spotlight on Latin American vegan food in NYC, which our crack team of Megan Rascal and sometimes Figaro will get right on reviewing for you! And Team VeganMania won the Sixth Annual Brown Cow Ice Cream Trough Eating Contest, with a separate trough of Chicago SoyDairy’s Temptation vegan ice cream! Obviously, vegans and our delicious dairy alternatives are the fucking best, HOORAY.

SF Vegan Drinks is tomorrow night!  »

It’s already the end of July, and you live in San Francisco, so bundle up in your best summer hats and scarves (and snow fog pants) because it’s time yet again for SF Vegan Drinks, sponsored as always by your Vegansaurus. (Are we really making small talk about the weather? Yes in fact we are. Because IT’S FUCKING FREEZING. AND IT’S JULY. FUCK YOU SAN FRANCISCO. I STILL LOVE YOU BUT YOUR FOG-SNUGGIE OF MISERY AND DAMP CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF.) Still confused? Here’s Lyndsay’s fashionable press release to smooth it all over:

Just a heads up that the July installment of Vegan Drinks is Thursday, July 29 at Martuni’s (Valencia @ Market). Not only is this a fantastic chance to mingle with other interesting vegans while enjoying drink specials (this month: $5 Ketel One-Orange vegan creamsicle martini), a host of non-alcoholic beverage options, and all-you-can-eat vegan hot dogs and popcorn, you can support a local non-profit as well!

This month, we’re raffling off a dozen cinnamon rolls from Cinnaholic, and all money goes to Toni’s Kitty Rescue. Don’t miss your chance to win these sweet treats! Raffle tickets are $1 each.

What the—hot dogs, cinnamon rolls, and kittens? I’m almost certain that’s what heaven looks like. You’ll also get a chance to meet the whole Vegansaurus crew, or maybe some of us, or, let’s be realistic, probably none of us. Life is all one big gamble, and you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like playing Monte Carlo around here. Or, a bit more like Artichoke Joe’s. We at least won’t make off with your Social Security check. Vegan Drinks goes from 6 to 8 p.m. so if you find a tux rental with hourly rates, you’ll have plenty leftover from that check for cat food. Not for you, for all the new kittens you’re going to adopt from Toni! We’re already so helpful, getting you started early on the senior gambling debts/crazy-cat-lady aesthetic.