It's Always A Good Time For Tofu Scramble

Back in September, I read a post on Midtown Lunch about a new vegetarian food cart in the city. It's Healthy Vegetarian Food and it's located on the northwest corner of 52nd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. For VeganMoFo, I decided to make the 15 minute trek from work in the pouring rain to check it out. The guys there were super nice and informed me that everything on the menu was vegan except for the oatmeal which comes with milk. However, the menu says soy milk or cow's milk.


You can choose any four items from the menu for $6.00. I got the tofu scramble, veggie burger, mashed sweet potatoes, and grilled veggies topped with a delicious lemon carrot ginger sauce and hot sauce. So totally worth the walk and a great deal for lunch.


More pictures.


Once I heard someone describe a tofu scramble as having an overwhelming amount of turmeric and it has forced me to start judging tofu scrambles based on a turmeric scale. This one was really good with a definite presence of turmeric, but nowhere near overwhelming.


Even more pictures.


One of the greatest veggie burgers I've ever eaten.

Pizzarama Teabonanza

Monica and I reserved a weekend this Veganmofo to whip up a bunch of delicious splurge food. To squash the suspense, I will say this now: Yes, boxed wine was involved.

Crispy pizza bagels with a liberal sprinkling of vegan Parmesan cheese. We were short on ingredients and made the cheese with only nutritional yeast, salt, and ground almonds. It was, to quote Steven Hawking, "totally yum". It will be interesting to see how the recipe works when followed to the letter.

Saucy magic....

The perfect beverage for a pizza night is a frosty root beer float with vanilla Tofutti ice cream. The use of Shop Rite brand root beer adds a gentle touch of class to the proceedings.

Saturday brunch was granny smith apple pancakes and Lightlife sausage patties. Kudos to Monica for upping this plate's sexiness quotient with a strawberry garnish.

No tea party is complete without finger sandwiches. We tried two kinds - BLT and cucumber. If you've ever wondered what Tofutti cream cheese and hummus taste like when used as a spread in the same cucumber sandwich, rest assured that they stay delicious. Next peanut butter and chocolate?? (The double question mark means that I'm screaming at you.)

Oh, the scones. I miss them so much. Monica came up with the idea to combine two recipes and create a frosted cinnamon bun variety of scone. To die for.

We've reached the point where food porn stops being entertainment and becomes a felony.

As this gluttonous, fabulous Veganmofo 2009 draws to a close, does anyone have any cool self-created recipes they'd like to share in our comments section? Perhaps you combined two recipes from your favorite cookbooks, veganized a recipe from a popular "domestic goddess magazine", or threw a bunch of stuff into a pot before it spoiled and ended up with Frankenstein's Deliciousness. Let's all share in the wealth of your creativity.

Dinner and a Bunny

(Random thought: Am I the only one who is offended that Timmy's love interest on The Fairly Oddparents is named Trixie Tang? I shouldn't watch the Nicktoons channel while I type.)

This week's spotlight of love is on the bunny, aka the family Laporidae's closest thing to a puppy.

Why not be a decent human being and invite a bunny or five into your home for a vegan meal? Here's a lepus-approved plate of tofu, green squash, and brown rice in a thin sweet chili sauce.

Sure, its appearance is a bit startling (i.e. pukelike) but that's due to the red food coloring I added to the sauce in a pitiful attempt to make the dish more aesthetically pleasing (i-ro-neee), as well as the fact that I pressed the tofu too aggressively and made it crumble.

For dessert, try this extremely simple agave cornbread muffin recipe. Of course, every supermarket within a 400-mile radius was fresh out of agave nectar, so I took the internet's advice and used maple syrup as a substitute. Syrup, applesauce, soymilk, and a bit of canola oil make these muffins super moist but not dense.

During this glorious Veganmofo, feel free to dig around like a badger in a trash can and assemble your own animal-free recipes to use for an infectious, repetitive, roughly-translated-from-German bunny party.

Snack Attack!

Ritz crackers with peanut butter and jelly and quite possibly my favorite snack food. I have fond memories of watching Duck Tales while I snacked on a similar plate of these after school. So, in an attempt to start a little conversation on this blog, what are your favorite snack foods?

Please leave us your responses in the comment section of our blog and/or send us pictures at: monicatara@gmail.com

If we get any pictures, I'll make sure to post them before the end of VeganMoFo III 2009.

Cocktails and Dinosaurs: VeganMoFo Edition for the Weekend of 10-9-09

Semi-weekly posts of the news you may have missed and some food-related VeganMoFo fun.

• Sad news this week: Gourmet Magazine folds after 68 years of publishing.
  
  
• Another Japanese cafe with an interesting concept, you get what the person before you ordered. (via Marginal Revolution)
  
  
• OLED technology explained with a pickle. (via Eat Me Daily)
  
  
• Alicia Silverstone's new book, The Kind Diet, will be released next week. She will also be doing a culinary demonstration at Comix for the New York City Food & Wine Festival on October 10th, this Saturday.
  
  
• In other vegan celebrity news, frontman of the Cro-Mags, John Joseph will also be releasing a new book, Meat Is For Pussies.
  
  
• Sometimes cupcakes are just too small, which leads people to invent things like the Big Top Cupcake and the Cupcake Car. (In both cases, I suggest you watch the video.)
  
  
• Martha Stewart shares some spooky Halloween cocktail ideas. Black vodka? I didn't even know that existed.
  

Libation of the Week: Dark and Stormy

A delicious combination of dark rum, ginger beer, and lime served on ice. My personal preference is to make it using Stewart's Ginger Beer because it's super gingery. It's like getting punched in the face with ginger. It sounds unpleasant, but it's quite refreshing. Remember those old Hawaiian Punch commercials, kind of like that.

Send any news tidbits and cocktails ideas to: monicatara@gmail.com

Amusement Avec Les Pommes! (French Makes Me Smart!!)

My parents bought roughly 23 pounds of apples at the Paterson Farmer's Market this weekend and, since I was coming over to mooch, thought they could use some of them in vegan recipe experiments. The result was two lovely dishes, one sweet and one savory-sweet; I stole leftovers to use in a three-course meal back at home:

One can never go wrong with a starter salad. This is your standard mix of greens, radicchio, orange bell pepper, and tomato with a toss of nutritional yeast, a splash of Italian dressing, and a few Wasabi & Soy Sauce Blue Diamond Almonds.

My parents' first experiment was this crunchy, tangy dish made of red cabbage, apples, onion, garlic, margarine, and red wine. The potency of the garlic blended fabulously with the fruity notes of the wine and the sweet-tart flavor of the apples.

When one thinks "fruit", one automatically thinks "pungent cloves of garlic", so this dish made perfect sense from the start.

The second dish, a dessert, was a slight variation on the apple crisp my mother was accustomed to baking. She was out of flour, so she combined the margarine with Bisquick. Same yummy outcome.

As you can see, I threw a scoop of vanilla ice cream in there to liven things up; I finally managed to track down the Tofutti pints at Shop Rite.

Thank you, parents, for providing awesome comfort food, especially because I needed tremendous comfort after reading this very anti-Veganmofo development in the fast food screwnivurse. You have to love that this country continues to piss millions into marketing schemes for entities representing animal torture, racism, and obesity while cancer research societies scramble for donations.

Ok, enough Michael Moore-ing for one night - the Tofutti is waiting....

Cocktails and Dinosaurs: VeganMoFo Edition for the Weekend of 10-2-09

Semi-weekly posts of random things I find on the internet and all the food-related news you can handle for the month of October.

• Charlie on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is introduced to pears.
  
  
• Has the excitement of somen noodle night fallen flat lately? Maybe what you need is a Home Somen Shop from Bandai. (via eatmedaily.com)
  
  
• Alton Brown from the show Good Eats in a segment I'd like to call Food Network Secrets.
  
  
• Archeologists find what they believe to be the fabled rotating dining room of the Roman Emperor Nero.
  
  
• Barbara Walters takes Paula Deen to task on her new cookbook for kids and its potential to contribute to childhood obesity... and then she's distracted by a table full of baked goods and sandwiches.
  
  
  
  
• Pizza Hummus? Could it be true? The VegNews blog, This Just In, had a post last week about Tribe's new pizza hummus. However, the website for Tribe doesn't have it listed yet. I have tried a couple stores and haven't found it. Blog 'scuse me? will get to the bottom of this pizza hummus scandal. Stay tuned for updates.
  
  
• On Robin Robertson's blog, Vegan Planet, a new recipe was posted last week for Mac and Chard.

Libation of the Week: Margarita

On the rocks or frozen, margaritas are a great way to cool down on a hot summer day or in my case, imagine it's a hot summer day as I shiver from the crisp early autumn weather.


Send any news tidbits and cocktails ideas to: monicatara@gmail.com