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Guest product review: SooFoo grains blend!  »

Funny name, yummy blend. SooFoo, a San Francisco-based, U.S.-grown blend of grains and pulses, is the perfect mix of new-and-exciting with simple-and-nutritious. It’s a great substitute for bland white rice or, in my household, basic, tasteless brown rice. SooFoo is completely organic and it has nine ingredients. Seems like a lot for “rice” type of food until you read them: long grain brown rice, brown lentils, wheat berries, oats, barley, black lentils, rye berries, green lentils, and buckwheat. The folks at SooFoo must’ve been big proponents of Raffi’s “Oats and Beans and Barely.”

Certified organic, Kosher, and vegan, SooFoo is one of the most guiltless products on the market. Their packaging gives some super basic, alliteration-filled suggestions on what to do with the food, such as “sprinkle in a salad,” “stir into soups,” “chuck in chili,” and “toss with tofu” among others. My personal fave is “shower the bride and groom.” I’m totally going to do that next summer. “The vegan from California brought his own hippie rice”—I can hear the in-laws already.

I threw 3/4 cup of SooFoo, 2 cups of water, and 1 Tbsp. of extra virgin olive oil into my rice-cooker. Forty-five aromatic minutes later, I had four to six servings of SooFoo, piping hot. My ladyfriend and I decided to serve it with a stir-fry of red onion, purple bell pepper, green beans, and chickpeas with a gluttony of spices. In my attempt to rid the world of all gluten products by digesting them myself, I threw my portions in a whole wheat tortilla.

I gotta say, as a faux-meat and potatoes guy, I didn’t have the highest hopes for SooFoo. But I was blown away. Seriously. Add that to the fact it also has 6 grams of protein per serving (BUT WHERE DO VEGANS GET THEIR PROTEIN?!) and 3 grams of fiber per serving, you can easily justify the chocolate-covered pretzels you also bought. 

All in all, SooFoo is pretty freaking awesome. Before I throw the rest of the bag during friends and family nuptials, I think I’ll and “toss it with tofu” next. But I’m open to suggestions!

Andrew E. Irons is a blogger from Long Beach, Calif. He co-created and contributes to Rhode Island-based hip-hop website The Echo Chamber Blog under the pseudonym Verbal Spacey. You can track his daily diatribes by following him on Twitter.

Guest post: Let’s crawl together with L.A. Beer Hop!  »

Pub-crawling reeks of being 21 and not having to care about waking up on time and decisions you’ll regret early the next morning. But as real adulthood rears its ugly head, pub crawls are actually great ways to spend a night out with friends, if you pick the perfect “pubs” to “crawl” to. Well it seems LA Beer Hop was created with such nights in mind.

The places worth heading to in Los Angeles aren’t close enough together to warrant a good “crawl.” But now, for just a $5 ticket, you can be whisked away by shuttle to three of the L.A. area’s newest and best beer-and-bar-food joints. The Pub at Golden Road Brewing, Tony’s Darts Away, and Mohawk Bend make up the trifecta of destinations that LA Beer Hop will shuttle you to-and-fro every Wednesday in November. Take a peep at the tour schedule and reserve your tickets ASAP, because they’re sure to sell out.

Not only do each of these places have vast collections of tasty microbrews to sip on, they each have a cornucopia of vegan eats that’ll make your non-vegan friends say “I WANT THAT!” Tony’s Darts Away has gourmet vegan hot dogs, Mohawk Bend has vegan pizzas and buffalo cauliflower, and the Pub at Golden Road Brewing has ginormous vegan pretzels and fried avocado sammies, just to name a few!

Vegan-friendly bar-hopping, and no one has to worry about parking or driving for just $5? Oh L.A., sometimes you complete me. Who’s coming with me?!

Andrew E. Irons is a blogger from Long Beach, Calif. He co-created and contributes to Rhode Island-based hip-hop website The Echo Chamber Blog under the pseudonym Verbal Spacey. You can track his daily diatribes by following him on Twitter.

[photo by arvind grover via Flickr]

Guest post: when you hate on non-dairy milk, you just sound like an idiot.  »

Thanks to my obsessive personality combined with my penchant for evangelism, I am now lucky enough to have a vegan community that includes my mom, sister and three good friends. It’s really great to get to preach to the choir sometimes. Recently many of us have gathered to rant in perplexed fury about the anti non-dairy milk ads that are popping up on the netwaves recently.

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

The conversations usually go something like this:

“Really? Really? The dairy industry is trying to convince me not to use almond milk because I have to shake the box?” 

“Seriously? The diary industry thinks that the Riboflavin in soy milk is more scary to me than the chemicals, pus, and hormones in cow’s milk?” 

Etc. You get the idea. The ads are doing little more than poking the beehive for my non-diary friends.

Which is the point.

You see, these ads are not actually for us as non-dairy milk drinkers. I realized this after another rant session with a vegan friend, when I came up a little stumped. These ad writers are professionals. I don’t think they are stupid enough to think that a convicted non-dairy drinker is actually going to flip on their decision suddenly because they realize they don’t like to shake a milk box. Also, we are a pretty small minority to target with wide-scale video ads. Yes, we’re growing, but the recent Gallup poll reminds us that vegans only make up about 2% of the population. These ads don’t seem to be targeting people who presumably can’t drink milk from lactose intolerance, but those who are choosing not to because of an anti-dairy bias. So who are the ads for?

These ads are not weak arguments aimed to bring non-dairy drinkers back into the fold. They’re actually aimed at dairy drinkers to prevent them from considering the switch to non-dairy alternatives. This tactic was used recently with the so-dubbed “anti-fanboy ads” that Samsung Galaxy III released earlier this year. These ads showed a crowd lined up at an obvious-imitation of an Apple store being drawn into the benefits of a Galaxy 3 and eventually abandoning their cult-like appreciation of their unnamed phone (clearly an iPhone 4s). A cacophony of internet righteousness ensued with much mockery and name-calling on either side. Many people argued that the internet skirmish was intentionally crafted, that the ads weren’t actually aimed to get Apple users to abandon their iPhone but to give a pat-on-the-back to those who hate “Apple fanboys” and say, “welcome to the team.”

These “non-dairy milk is stupid” ads are using the same tactic: they are intended to  reinforce to dairy drinkers that people who would think of drinking anything other than cow’s milk are ridiculous. So ridiculous, in fact, that we don’t even deserve rational logic to argue against. This serves to assuage any doubt that may be raised by the increasing number of people abandoning cow’s milk and affirms, “look at these crazy people who think cow’s milk isn’t God’s gift to the world. Good thing you’re not one of them.”

As for the indignation and fury from non-dairy drinkers as a result, that’s minor collateral damage. Or, one could say, just spilt milk.

Lucky for us, if youtube comments and votes indicate anything, no matter who these ads are actually aimed at, they don’t seem to be very successful. In fact, non-dairy are getting an opportunity handed to us to point out the flaws of dairy. Since the ads aren’t using any strong logical arguments against non-dairy milk, even dairy drinkers watch them with a little bit of “WTF?” This gives non-dairy drinkers the chance to make a case against dairy with dairy-drinkers on our side for once. So, show your friends, and make a day out of mocking how ridiculous these ads really are! It’s pretty fun.

Isaak Brown is a writer, youth worker, and highly enthusiastic and evangelistic vegan. Comments and thoughts are welcome at isaakbrown@gmail.com. 

Guest cookbook review: Veggies for Carnivores by Lora Krulak  »

Last I checked, Vegansaurus is a vegan lifestyle blog. It’s not called Pescetariansaurus or Vegetariansaurus or Omnivore Rex. I feel the need to point this out because this cookbook, Veggies for Carnivores, mentions many non-vegan things. Most notably is the use of honey in a handful of the recipes. None of the recipes call for meat, though some have little blurbs called “A Carnivore’s Choice” that list different types of meat that would “go” with that particular entry. So after reading the cookbook for the first time I was left a little confused. Why would someone take the time to market to a vegan blog?

Per the back cover, Veggies for Carnivores is supposed to introduce new flavors that “will make veggies irresistible—even to the most die-hard carnivore.” Of the seven chapters, only one is on entrees. The others, not including the introduction, are dressings, dips, soups, salads, and smoothies. If we’re moving vegetables to the center of the plate, shouldn’t we have more than one chapter on veggie-based entrees? Sides and starters are thoroughly covered, but if the basis of the book is to get “die-hard” carnivores to move their meat to the side, I would have assumed there would have been more of an emphasis on plant-central plates.

The book does a great job of promoting healthy eating; it’s ideal for all of our stubborn relations who could use an overhaul in their diets. Krulak does an excellent job of spelling out the benefits of vegetables in her recipes and overall as a staple in our diets. She uses her history of world travel with cute anecdotes and infuses her knowledge of many cultures into most of her recipes. I have never thought to use maple syrup in lieu of olive oil in cooking until I read this book. I tried it while sauteing onions, peppers, and Tofurkey sausage, and I was really impressed.

Beautiful avocado dressing on my frou-frou salad.

The first recipe to really jump out at me was one for Sweet Avocado Dressing. It was super small, ingredients wise, and extremely easy to make. I’ve never made my own dressing before, but have seen my partner make them on numerous occasions. It called for avocado, lime, soy sauce, maple syrup, and olive oil. I cut the amount of olive in half; I use a ton of dressing on my salads so I didn’t want to overload myself on EVOO. The dressing came out pretty awesome, even if my blender doesn’t allow me to blend slowly while drizzling in the olive oil, as the recipe states, without making my kitchen look like a crime scene.

Veggie for Carnivores is a good, short cookbook. It may not be aimed at a vegan household, unless you don’t mind having to make some easy substitutions. (You may need some stickers or white-out to cover up the salmon or tuna suggestions.) And as I stated previously, if you have a relative who is notoriously omnivorous and wouldn’t in a million years give up his meat (like my own dad), and who could stand to eat more vegetables, then yes, this cookbook would be perfect for him. But as a vegan looking for new and exciting dishes? Not so much. Maybe the fine folks at Notreallyveganorvegetariansaurus.com would like to give it a try. 

Andrew E. Irons is a blogger from Long Beach, Calif. He co-created and contributes to Rhode Island-based hip-hop website The Echo Chamber Blog under the pseudonym Verbal Spacey. You can track his daily diatribes by following him on Twitter.

Guest Post: Meatless Monday Murderers? Chico State students not stoked for Meatless Monday!   »

A few weeks back, someone in the USDA sent out a newsletter that seemed to favor the latest push to wean Americans off of their meat addiction, Meatless Mondays. But as soon as the proverbial ink dried on this newsletter, the clowns in the meat industry cried louder than the millions of livestock they brutally slaughter everyday, claiming this new fangled Meatless Monday was a detriment to the farmers of our fine country. The idea behind USDA’s Meatless Monday was part of a “green” initiative, not so much a diet. Their endorsement of Meatless Mondays was meant as a push to lower the ecological footprint. Well…how dare they.

The outcry from the middle states, the ones with right-angle-borders and no indoor plumbing, makes some sense. But here, in my supposedly progressive state of California, we’re having a similar issue. California State University, Chico, may be the latest school to participate in Meatless Monday. However, the school’s agricultural department, both students and instructors it seems, are taking to the school’s Facebook page to voice their displeasure over the decision to being part of a Meatless Monday campaign. 

Seems not-so-shocking, right? An agricultural department not wanting to be part of an event that caters to consumption of…agriculture. But it gets worse. Chico is like many Cal State schools that has multiple areas where students can find food. This Meatless Monday event is only going to take place in ONE dining hall, Sutter Hall, where only ONE of the five food stations would be serving meat-free dishes on ONE of five days of the school week. Whole lotta ones.

This Tuesday, October 9th, there will be a Meatless Monday meeting held on Chico’s campus at 5:30 PM in BMU 209. The Humane Society of the United States will be on hand talking about the Farm-Animal Rights Movement as well as the Meatless Monday campaign. If you or anyone you know lives or works near Chico, I encourage you to voice your support. Both in terms of a greener planet and healthier diets, we have to crawl before we can cartwheel off the pommel horse. Bullies like the Ag Department at Chico and the meat industry on the national level will do anything to stop us from crawling. And are proud to do so. Just take a look at these comments:

And now I’m off to grab a hamburger. 

Courtesy of Jennifer Ryder Fox, Dean of CSUC School of Agricultural. This is how she signed off on an e-mail to all the agricultural students where she stated she was appalled by the school’s decision to include Meatless Mondays. She also went on to say:

…which was clearly influenced by the Humane Society of the United States, who uses its cover of a caring, moderate animal welfare organization to advance its true mission of ending animal agriculture.

Right. Now let’s mirror that to the comments made on Twitter by Iowa Senator Charles Grassley after USDA pulled their newsletter:

I will eat more meat on Monday to compensate for stupid USDA recommendation abt (sic) a meatless Monday.

Perhaps the Dean and the Senator should hook up on LinkedIn.

Visit Chico for Animal Rights FB page to learn more about AR efforts on campus. 

Andrew E. Irons is a blogger from Long Beach, Calif. He co-created and contributes to Rhode Island-based hip-hop website The Echo Chamber Blog under the pseudonym Verbal Spacey. You can track his daily diatribes by following him on Twitter.

Guest post: Eating vegan in Barcelona!  »

At first glance, Barcelona doesn’t seem like the vegan-friendliest city. This is bull-fighting country, after all. You see butcher shops everywhere, tempting though completely NOT vegan pastries in bakery windows, and smell not-so-pleasant wafts of seafood in the air. But frankly, I was surprised with how many vegan choices I’ve stumbled upon during my various visits to this city. Barcelona is not only full of amazing buildings, museums, and churches—it is quite progressive when it comes to food. I’ve been lucky enough to travel here three times (for work, mind you, but yeah, I know) and I always discover new vegan or vegan-friendly restaurants.

I found the awesomely named Cat Bar on my last trip to Barcelona. An all-vegan bar named after my favorite animal!? Oh my, I think this could work. Owned by U.K. ex-pats, Cat Bar is a cozy little joint in El Born (the best neighborhood!). Weirdly, it is located right next to a cycling shop that sells San Francisco’s Chrome Bags, so I felt very much at home. I was super-hungry from a morning trip to Park Güell, so I ordered a veggie burger and a pint of BrewDog, a vegan beer brewed in Scotland. They have an eclectic, ever-changing menu with options like quiche, sushi, hummus plates, goulash, and gluten-free chocolate balls, as well as local beers from Barcelona and the Catalunya region. Cat Bar’s website is terrible, so just check out their Facebook for more information. They also have this handy map to navigating Barcelona’s vegan scene.    

Guest Post: Rosie O’Donnell Announces She’s Vegan On Twitter!  »

For those of you living in the middle of nowhere Arizona eating raw vegan food, meditating and not checking Twitter on your phone every ten minutes, I feel you: I lived that way for a couple years! I assume your main source of information is Vegansaurus, so we’ll just break it down for you: the awe-inspiring Rosie O’Donnell recently suffered a heart attack and has since gone vegan! 

Yesterday Rosie O’Donnell tweeted:  ”nine days later - nine pounds lost - eating a plant based diet #likebillclintonhttp://pic.twitter.com/8ItILfpl.

Some debate ensued as to whether she really was outing herself as vegan. I tweeted the news that she was vegan and a few people chirped that she’s not. I apologized for the misinformation, and, lo and behold, @Rosie tweeted me:

@Rosie: @QueerVeganFood - yes i am

The vegan-lesbian tribe is getting so full these days! Yay! Since coming out as vegan, Rosie has received a barrage of vegan-positive tweets, Facebook posts, and messages across the far reaches of the Internets. Let’s keep spreading the veggie love and supporting her heart-healthy journey to an ethical, plant-based diet!

This is Vegansaurus raw correspondent Sarah E. Brown’s latest post! Read more by Sarah on Vegansaurus, and visit her personal blog, Queer Vegan Food.

Guest Product Review: Good Greens: Superfood Nutrition Bars That Taste Like Candy!  »

Good Greens low-glycemic gluten-free vegan bars, which boast 40 antioxidants, 10g protein, Omega 3’s, are low-glycemic, and are free from animal products, could taste like chalk and still get a nod of favor in my direction, because I love supplements so hard. These bars boast some of the fanciest and hyped ingredients in the natural health/vegan world, including mesquite, nori, mangosteen, probiotics, flax, aloe vera, chia seed, mulberry, bilberry, broccoli sprout powder, Nova Scotia Dulse (can we please make this the trendy new lox substitute? Yay Jewish vegan pride!), golden berries, alfalfa sprout powder, beet juice powder, wheat sprout powder, cha de Bugre, Siberian Eleuthero Root Extract, DHA, green tea extract, camu powder, pine bark extract, macs, lucuma, chlorella, and spirulina all grace each label of these superfood-packed bars.

With such a crazy A-list of superfoods, there’s very high risk for flavor failure. It’s like those star-studded ensemble cast movies which have such glorious talent but as a whole miss the mark: Paris Je T’aime, New York, I Love You, New Year’s Eve, etc. (Note: These films certainly had redeeming qualities, so if you love them please excuse this analogy!)
 
Taste may not be the primary concern for vegan health freaks (myself included!) but Good Greens bars unabashedly shoot for mass appeal. They even have a code to scan with your smartphone to learn more about the products! Can you just imagine a bunch of people scanning these on BART? I (s)can!

While a lot of so-called nutrition bars fail badly when they try to cram so many insanely powerful nutriceuticals (or else are seriously effing unethical and won’t disclose whether they source their cacao from places that use child slavery—F you, CLIF!), Good Greens decided to rise above and make bars that are completely ethical and INSANELY DELICIOUS. I shit you not, these are like CANDY! So how do Good Bars orchestrate a symphony of superfoods without creating sheer mouth cococphany?

Actually, it’s pretty simple: chocolate! Nearly every flavor of these bars includes dairy free dark chocolate as the first ingredient. It turns out, dark chocolate is the great equalizer when it comes to flavor-balancing. These bars are sweetened with healthful ingredients but you’d swear otherwise. The chocolate peanut butter, chocolate raspberry, and chocolate coconut flavors will inspire you to break dance in your “Pigs are Friends Not Food” underwear until you hit your target heart rate!

Good Greens, which sent me free samples of each flavor, are available in health food stores and online.

This is Vegansaurus raw correspondent Sarah E. Brown’s latest post! Read more by Sarah on Vegansaurus, and visit her personal blog, Queer Vegan Food.

Guest post: Vegan exploration in the Eternal City of Rome!  »

Organic plate at Cavour 313.

Cheese-laden pizzas and an emphasis on meat-based pasta sauces, with plenty of veal and offal thrown in too? On initial impressions, Rome is any vegan’s nightmare.

When I trundled off on a solo trip to the Eternal City in spring this year, it was my first time as vegan. And lo and behold, it wasn’t nearly as difficult to eat well here as I anticipated.

Let’s start with the bad, and go on to the good.

The bad bit was breakfast. I love my breakfast, I really do. But wherever I stayed, usually the most I was able to eat was some packeted dry toasts, and jam, with maybe a banana or an apple. There were, however, always plenty of cheese, eggs, croissants and other non-vegan things to choose from at breakfast. 

There were two mornings that I relished, though. This was when I was staying at vegetarian eco-hotel The Beehive for a couple of nights. What a gem this place is. One morning I enjoyed apple cinnamon oatmeal made with soy milk, and another morning I was delighted to be cooked a tofu scramble.

Yes—tofu scramble! In Rome! The Beehive was also the only place that was able to provide me with soy milk to take in my tea (I am English, after all), and the owner said they were due to hire two vegan chefs this year. So they may be able to offer even more to vegans from their cute café now.

Eating at other meal times was mostly fine, as long as I studied menus well and hunted around. It is good to be prepared and have an idea of some places to go to and what to eat or not – but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?

As a rule, you’re fairly safe with the vegetable contorni dishes: eggplants, artichokes, bell peppers, and so forth. They will be cooked in olive oil and you can order several and make a meal from them, with some delicious fresh bread and olives.

You will often see potato croquettes, chickpea salads, hummus, and other vegan-friendly items on menus, too. Gnocchi in tomato sauce is another possibility, as well as the ubiquitous pizza marinara, which is simply pizza base with tomato sauce. Order some vegetables and top it yourself.

Rome does have a few vegetarian and vegan restaurants, and if you’re here for a week, theoretically you could go to one each night (I think).

The best experience for me was Il Margutta. Gourmet vegan cuisine at its finest, where my meat-eating companion also claimed it was the best food she’d eaten during her trip to Italy. It’s not a budget option, by any means, but if you’ve come all the way here on holiday, then treat yourself.

Fresh imaginative flavors abound; my vegan antipasti was a delicate combination of tofu-stuffed zuchini flowers deep-fried in a tempura batter, an Asian wok salad topped with pickled ginger, a wild berry salad drizzled with balsamic dressing, and a home-made ketchup, tasting of tomato, and not sugar. Oh vegan heaven.

My other great vegan discovery was Bibliothè, not far from Piazza Venezia. Here, they do a different set lunch menu each day that you can have, and they will take out any vegetarian elements that may be involved. They also have several vegan stand-alone choices, as well as vegan cakes.

And then there was also the originally named Taverna Vegetariana, close to Vatican City. It wasn’t the most inspiring food that I have ever had, but it is cheap, cheerful, and you know what you’re getting. They have color-codes on the dishes to denote whether they are vegan or vegetarian; very handy when you don’t speak Italian.

Though not exclusively veggie, another place I ate at a couple of times was a bar in the cobbled streets of Trastevere. At Art Two, you can buy a drink, and for only 2€, help yourself to the aperitivo buffet, which has several vegan options (eggplant, potato croquettes, salad, etc).

I also had a scrummy vegan meal at an Ethiopian restaurant called Africa (Via Gaeta 26), just north of the main railway station. There were not many vegan options, but this one meal of a selection of foods was filling and delicious, and made all the better by the fact I had to eat with my hands.

There were a number of other eateries that I sadly didn’t manage to experience on this visit, including a vegan restaurant called ReWild Cruelty-Free Club—funny little name, but it does what it says on the tin, which is offer cruelty-free dining as well focus on animal rights events in Rome.

If you’re going to Rome anytime soon, I hope this article has given you some vegan food for thought. One other tip: Watch out for risotto. It may appear vegan, but it almost always contains parmesan, which isn’t even vegetarian.

Andrea Wren is a U.K.-based freelance journalist and has a passion for vegan baking and food blogging. She ditched dieting years ago and loves to create interesting and imaginative dishes that tempt non-vegans as well as vegans. On her blog, you will also find her free ebook, Wot, No Eggs?! The Beginner’s Guide to Becoming an Expert Vegan Baker, packed with tips and advice. You can also reach Andrea on Twitter.

Guest recipe: Vegan Taiwanese tomato egg, featuring the Vegg!  »

This recipe involves the Vegg. For my review of the Vegg, please read here.

As a child, my mother used to make a stir-fried tomato egg dish that tastes sweet and juicy at the same time. It is a common Taiwanese home dish. I generally dislike tomatoes in stir-fried dishes, except this one. After getting my hands on the Vegg, I decided to veganized my mother’s Taiwanese tomato egg. Thanks, Mama, but I’m gonna eat that vegan from now on and save the BABY CHICKS!

Silly me, my mama and baba in Toronto, Canada.

Ingredients
2 tomatoes, chopped in medium-size pieces or wedges (I prefer pieces, but wedges are better)
3/4 cup warm water (only for Vegg mix)
1 1/2 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. white pepper
1 1/2 tsp. organic ketchup
1 Tbsp. vegan sugar
8 oz. extra-firm tofu, pressed and drained
4 tsp. Vegg
Sunflower oil
2 green onions, chopped for garnish

Instructions
1. Create your Vegg mix. Mix water, Vegg, and tofu in a high-speed blender for 30 seconds.

2. Heat up a lot of sunflower oil in a saucepan, at high heat. Crumble in the Vegg mix, as you would scrambled eggs.

3. As your Vegg mix starts to brown and dry a bit, add tomatoes. Make sure there’s no visible liquid in the pan. It took about 8 to 10 minutes to get that cooked and firm.

4. In a small bowl, mix salt, pepper, ketchup, and sugar. Pour the sauce over the vegan scrambled egg and cook for 2 to 3 minutes.

5. Garnish with fresh chopped green onions.

This comes with stir-fried oyster mushrooms (leftovers) from the Taiwanese oyster omelette I made earlier that day with some vegetarian oyster mushroom sauce, white pepper and salt.

Based both in Oregon and worldwide, Taiwanese vegan Rika has run an international and travel vegan blog since July 2011. She also spends her time abroad caring for and feeding feral cats and dogs. Find her on Twitter and Pinterest. Check out all her posts for Vegansaurus!