vegansaurus!

CONTEST CLOSED. Vegansaurus Giveaway: VIP Tickets to VegNews Book Bash with Spork Foods! (HELLO, there’s a Cinnaholic cinnamon bun BAR)  »

Contest closed! The winners are Brandi and Rachel! We will contact you soon!! Yay!! If you didn’t win, never fear! There are options:

1) If you want to volunteer at the party, they’re in need of a handful of volunteers and you get:

1—A free tik

2—Free food and drinks

3—A free signed copy of Spork-Fed

4—A free VegNews tee

Email cholland AT vegnews DOT com if you’re interested!

2) You can still buy tickets here!

SO NO MATTER WHAT YOU BETTER COME!

xoxoxolaura

Great news! Vegansaurus has just secured four VIP tickets to the VegNews Book Bash with Spork Foods, despite the event’s being almost sold-out! We have connections, what can I say. I am going to be at the party (I’ll be under the Cinnaholic cinnamon bun bar), and I hope you will, too! We’re giving away two pairs of these coveted tickets, which include sumptuous vegan appetizers, all-you-can drink cocktails, a signed copy of the brand-new Spork-Fed cookbook, all the photobooth photos you can take, and, yes, the aforementioned cinnamon bun bar. And this all takes place on VegNews’ gorgeous rooftop deck in the Mission. Seriously, it’s the prettiest and most glamourous place in this filth-ball city!

We’re gonna give them out in sets of two. That’s two sets of two VIP tickets, if my math is correct! For a chance to win, just tell me what your current favorite vegan cookbook is (side note: did you see that Vegan Pie in the Sky is out?! So exciting! Buy a million copies! Plus, we’ve heard there are recipes for OLIVE OIL CRUST and MIND-BLOWING CHEESECAKES. Hello!), and I’ll draw two winners this Friday at 5 p.m.. That’s in TWO DAYS! So get to stepping! The same day we stop selling our t-shirts! And the Vegucated tickets giveaway ends! Friday is a big day!! Please only enter if you can definitely make the party (Friday, Oct. 21 at 6 p.m.). More details here! Now, enter!

Plus, we’ll get to hang out? How awesome will that be?? The answer is: VERY AWESOME because I am like, the cutest, coolest, sexiest, smartest, most down-to-earth lady you’ll ever have the pleasure of lying under a cinnamon bun bar with. Let’s do this!

Finally, let’s drool over the Cinnaholic cinnamon bun below and dream up our most favorite topping combo would be. Oh! If you don’t want to tell me your favorite vegan cookbook, let me know your favorite cinnamon roll topping combo OMG SO FUN.

Cookbook review: Color Me Vegan by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau  »

Earlier this year, Vegansaurus was asked if we’d like to review Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s new cookbook, Color Me Vegan. Being a total CPG fangirl—as in, every time I’m in her presence I’m awed to speechlessness—I said, YES WE WILL AND IT WILL BE ME WHO DOES IT GIVE ME THAT BOOK, and a little while later, I had it.

It’s gorgeous, as usual. The recipes are color-coded and include health information, like the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients in the main ingredient(s) in every dish. It’s designed, I guess, for people who are concerned with maximizing the nutritional content of their vegan diets, a group that usually doesn’t include me, except I found myself over the last year cooking for members of that group, and they really appreciated it.

The recipes are pretty all right! In the purple section, there’s one for my favorite Japanese eggplant dish, dengaku.

I’m not sure it turned out as well as it might’ve, but I tend toward heavy-handedness with the miso paste, and also I could have cut the eggplant more attractively.

Also in purple—or red? I can’t remember now—there’s a recipe for my absolute favorite way to eat cabbage, rotkohl!

This was good! Not as good the amazing and wonderful and perfect rotkohl I ate in Germany, but CPG adapted the traditional recipe, and anyway this was the first and only time I made it (compared to the countless times Dada in Germany made it for us, oh MAN that cabbage was THE BEST). It’s really good cold! Looks-wise, next time I’ll try slicing the cabbage with a mandoline.

This is winter white soup, from the white section. Because white produce is good for you, too! I have no idea why this didn’t turn out as white as the soup in the book’s photo, but it was still really good. I just love a thick puréed soup. And winter vegetables! So good for you!

I don’t think Color Me Vegan is as life-changing as The Joy of Vegan Baking—which is THE GREATEST—or as fancypants as The Vegan Table, but it is practical and good-looking, and Colleen Patrick-Goudreau can really write a recipe, you know? Maybe its ideal audience is the health-conscious non-vegan; you can’t argue with the health benefits of a vegan diet, and in this book CPG makes her case for veganism through delicious foods, which is, I maintain, the best way to get people to change their diets. And having not been able to cook since early February, I am eagerly anticipating making every recipe with spring/summer produce in Color Me Vegan when I get home. You want a cleanse? Eat your dang vegetables, CPG-style.

Vegansaurus loves reviewing stuff! If you want us to consider reviewing your product, person, or just cast judgements on your lifestyle, hit us up!

Product review: Mark Bittman Vegetarian Cooking app!  »

I got to test out a gratis copy of the new Mark Bittman How to Cook Everything Vegetarian iPhone application! Since my last mention of the app was less than informative, here is a thorough review, because I love you!

My official recommendation: it’s awesome! If you want to spend the $4.99, it’s worth your money and a lot cheaper than purchasing the actual cookbook. The recipe selection looks pretty amazing. I haven’t made anything yet but there are really a lot of things I already want to make! Or get someone else to make for me! You can make me food and I’ll give you fashion tips—fair trade!

I am told there are 950 vegan recipes and variations out of about 2,000 vegetarian recipes in total. The breakdown is 397 recipes and 553 variations to non-vegan recipes. There’s also a “top 100 vegan recipes” list under “Bittman’s picks” and several little “references” that like suggest vegan breakfasts for you, cheese substitutions, and one I’m really interested it: how to make any bread vegan. I love bread!

I don’t see any way to isolate the vegan options for the entire app but when you search for something, it’s super-easy to bring out the vegan options because of the vegan filter. You can search for key words if you want or you can use the filters they already have like “style.” So you can do a search by selecting “sweet” as the style and select just vegan options and it will pull up anything sweet and vegan (you saw where that was going). You could also search “cauliflower” or whatever word you want and select just vegan options. Oh and one of the style options is “raw” and there are 26 recipes and variations with that search. That’s for my raw friends! You know I’m always thinking of you.

When you are just browsing the recipes, the vegan ones are clearly marked but you can’t immediately see if a non-vegan recipe has a vegan variation. But when you use the search function, it lists all vegan recipes and all vegan variations for that search so that is prob the best way for us to look at variations. But just browsing for recipes is easy. There are no pictures so if you only like cookbooks with food pictures, this is not the app for you. I often like pictures but the names of these recipes are enticing enough that I don’t think I would miss them that much.

One thing to note: Reader Ryan K. says that some non-vegan recipes are marked vegan and vice versa. I haven’t run into this yet. I can send the creator a note about this and hopefully they can fix it in a future update.

Here are some screen grabs! First, a recipe; as you can see, it has the overview, ingredients, steps and variations:

Here’s a progression of how you can browse without the search. First you pick a general category and a more specific category:

Then you pick a recipe. You can easily see which recipes are vegan but if you select a non-vegan one, like the first veggie burger, it might have a vegan variation:

This is also cool: when you look at a recipe, you have all these options for what to do with it:

Another function is that you can generate shopping lists—kinda nice and useful. And as long as you have your phone, you will always have your grocery list.

Here’s my favorite part:

Under the style search option, you can search for hippie! It pulls up what you’d expect, tofu and whatnot.

Here’s my second favorite part! For some of the basic recipes and techniques, there are these illustrated guides:

Love it! You KNOW I like pictures over actually reading instructions. And as you can see, these aren’t crazy Ikea-style stick figure pictures that I can never understand.

All in all, I’d say it’s worth at least $4.99. Even though all the recipes aren’t vegan, I’m still very pleased with it. If you are vegetarian, it’s DEFINITELY worth the money. It has more recipes than the Vegan with a Vengeance app and that one costs $9.99 (say what?). The recipes are a little lacking for vegan dessert options but I actually think the first thing I want to make is the vegan banana chocolate-chunk bread pudding. Banana and chocolate are my favorite and I love bread pudding! I’m going to eat the hell out of that.

CONTEST CLOSED Vegansaurus Giveaway: The Happy Herbivore cookbook!  »

When the cookbook giveaways rain, they POUR! We were lucky enough to get our hot little hands on a copy of Happy Herbivore’s brand-new intuitively named cookbook, The Happy Herbivore! How very exciting! Filled with simple, tasty, and ultra-healthy recipes like chana palak masala, tamale pie, and her famous black bean brownies (believe the hype!), this book is delicious. The beauty of these recipes is that they’re by and large very simple, but also tasty and not gonna kill you with Earth Balance and fry. Although that would be a wonderful way to go LADIES, AM I RIGHT?

So, as I was saying, the talented Lindsay Nixon (aka, Ms. Happy Herbivore) delighted us with a free copy (FREEBIES!!) and we’re passing this gem onto one of you awesome, awesome, sexy people.

For a chance to win, let me know what your spirit animal is. I choose this question because Lindsay has that cute little elephant logo and I love him/her. You can say anything but a tigerelephantrhinobunnypitbullandallkindsofdinosaurs, because that’s what I am. I will choose my second-favorite animal and that person shall be rewarded with some free shit (the cookbook, pay attention!). We’ll end this b early next week, I guess.

GAME ON!

Good Housekeeping’s vegan cookbook has ARRIVED!  »

Remember how excited we were? Well, NOTHING HAS CHANGED. Except that it’s here and you can order it! Now, go forward and get it for every grandma, grandaunt, great dame, great great grandma, and great grandcousin in your life TODAY. Point is, they should be old. Actually, I’m interested in cooking out of it because I’m dying to make a vegan Broiled Steak with Parsley Butter and serve it in a Jello mold. BAM!

CLOSED! This contest is CLOSED! Last day to enter to win a copy of The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions!  »

Thanks everyone for entering! We’ll announce the winner ASAP!

Are you in the running? All you have to do is leave a comment telling Laura about your favorite vegan food! Or, guess her favorite vegan food! Whichever, just get your name in there before it’s too late! The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions is pretty great and you know you love winning things.

Vegansaurus Giveaway: The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions! Haley is the winner with “kim chee”!  »

Those geniuses Joni Marie Newman and Celine Steen are at it again! They’ve written a new cookbook, The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions: Veganize It! Foolproof Methods for Transforming Any Dish into a Delicious New Vegan Favorite, and it’s a goodie. Packed with recipes from Beer-Battered Corn Dogs (HELLO!) to Frozen Pot de Crème (HELLO!), this cookbook is outta control. They also have tips for replacing any animal ingredient in pretty much any recipe you could dream up. It’s not only a cookbook, it’s a real resource. Plus, it’s hella cute, easy to follow along, and Joni and Celine are so much fun to read. It’s a keeper.

If you want to win a copy (and you do! because you are a winner!), let me know a food that you like in the comments! Whatever is closest to a my favorite food (don’t try to get it out of me, it’s a SECRET! Just like everything surrounding food should be! Secrets! And lies! What!) will win. Or, you know, I’ll use random.org. We’ll run this until Tuesday, Feb. 8. May the best vegan win! Yes, this giveaway includes a judgement on your character!