vegan chai

last call for the ol' switcheroo

i posted a warning shot about a month ago, but i'm officially closing up shop here today, so i just wanted to send one more post through, just in case... time to update/edit your bookmarks, readers, blogrolls, etc. if you would like to keep reading my nonsense. 

i've moved to http://veganchai.wordpress.com/ and i believe all of my posts and comments came along with me... still a bit of tidying up to do, but it seems mostly intact! anyscoot... hope to see you over there!

update your bookmarks!

hi guys, long time no hear from, i know. i just wanted to post a quick update and let you know that i've moved the blog over to wordpress, and i'm going to give that a shot. the new link is:

http://veganchai.wordpress.com/

so you can update your bookmarks/readers/etc. if you'd like to stay subscribed. i promise to start posting more!

the v-dog verdict

so, when we originally ordered our first bag of v-dog, there was a shipping mistake (i guess they wrote our address down wrong), and the bag was never delivered. i got a bit stressed about it, because we were getting really low on food, and when i followed up with the company it took them a little while to figure out exactly what had gone wrong. when they did figure it out, however, they were really nice about the whole thing, and offered to not only resend it ASAP, but they gave us a second full-size bag for free to make up for it! so instead of trying it out with a 33-pound bag, we were about to become the proud owners of 66 pounds of v-dog. we were all, 'thanks, uh, i hope she likes it?' heh.

when it arrived, we gave it a shot and she actually took to it pretty much right away. she almost alays does this with new food, though, so we didn't get our hopes up. her usual MO is that she acts like the New Food is the Most Amazing Food Ever, for a couple of weeks, and then she gradually decides we're trying to feed her little pieces of cardboard. but! with v-dog this did not happen! at least not on the same schedule. she liked it for much longer than usual, which was a welcome change, but once we got into the second bag she started showing her old signs of boredom, and now that we are almost at the end of the second bag, she is back to her typical breakfast behavior of turning her face away and not bothering to eat her food until 6pm. sigh.

so, we're switching back to evolution for a bag, to see if we can jump-start her morning interest once again. i really wish we could hit on something that she would enjoy long-term, if only because it makes it easier to stock up, and it makes for less tummy-transition each time we switch foods.

anyhow, the v-dog was a success, at least at first. i was starting to get excited because it's much cheaper than evolution or ami, but oh well. in the negative column, v-dog made her poop a lot more often. not sure why that was (and it was never like she was sick... just a lot more productive, if you catch my drift), but just thought i'd mention it in case it's useful. 

chana masala needed!

okay y'all, i have a cupboard full of chickpeas and a serious craving for chana masala. i love it, but i've never made it myself, so i am at your mercy: what is your favorite go-to chana masala recipe?

hello?

wow, i kind of fell off the face of the earth again, didn't i? it's been over a month since i posted about v-dog, and since then we've had a major shipping snafu, a majorly awesome compensation package for that shipping snafu, maia's almost done with her first bag, and... we moved to a totally different house! heh. i buried the lead a little. anyway, things have been really hectic around here but i'm hoping/trying to settle down over the next couple of weeks. spring semester starts next week and i'm in the midst of prepping a brand new grad seminar, but once that feels under control i think i can start doing fun stuff again. more soon. 

trying a new dog food

anyone out there have vegan dogs who are also picky eaters? maia is soooo not about food, it's kind of ridiculous. we have two cats in the house who may as well be goats (i often joke that avery in particular would probably eat a tin can if you gave him half a chance), but the dog is extremely blase about pretty much everything. this is nice when it means that she doesn't try to steal things off the counter, but very frustrating when you try to make her delicious meals and she's all, 'eh.'

when we first adopted her she was being fed some kind of lamb atrocity, so we weaned her off the rest of that bag and switched her over to vegan without any problems. she was actually pretty excited about the new food we were giving her (at the time, we were transitioning with natural balance, because it's carried at our nearby pet supplies store), because she didn't much care for the lamb atrocity. well, we would soon learn that after several meals, she doesn't much care for anything. ha!

after awhile, she absolutely refused to eat natural balance, so we decided to gift it to a friend and try something new. we went with evolution, and that went over like gangbusters, until it didn't. she never outright refuses it, but you can tell she gets less excited as time goes on. at one point, we switched to ami, which she thought was like the greatest christmas morning ever, until she didn't. again, she won't refuse it, but she also is much less excited about it than she was at first. 

right now we're in a pattern of switching back and forth between the two, hoping that by the time she gets bored with one, it will be time to switch to the other... but to be honest, i'd rather just find something she likes consistently over time.

so, we're giving v-dog a shot. it isn't available locally so i have to mail order it, but even still it's cheaper than evolution and ami, so that's a plus if she ends up liking it. i placed an order on thursday so i'm hoping it will be here soon. keep your fingers crossed that it tickles maia's fancy!

gracias madre

okay, so i may have saved the best for last... gracias madre, in san francisco. after i ate there i tweeted that it was the jesus of food, and i am totally not kidding. 

a couple of different people mentioned the restaurant to me before we headed out west, and i actually forgot about it a couple of different times(!) but thankfully somewhere it stuck. we learned how to use BART as soon as we got off the plane, which was a total blessing because we definitely saved money not taking cabs all the time. anyhow, gracias madre would have been a long walk, but it was an easy BART ride, and over dinner at millennium on sunday night, we made plans to meet our friend for lunch at gracias madre the next day. we awesomely arrived before they opened, and sat around outside the fancy iron gate that borders their outdoor seating area. when our server came to open the door, i blurted out, "we're excited!" and lucky for me, i think she was charmed rather than frightened. heh.

as soon as we got our menus we knew we were in for a special kind of lunch. absolutely everything looked amazing, and we had a tough time narrowing down our selections. eventually we settled on splitting an appetizer (the quesadillas de calabaza, which our server said was a super-favorite), and then i ordered the tamal del dia (again with the tamales, i don't know what my deal was on that trip), e ordered the caesar salad and the tacos (he picked three different ones), and a ordered some exciting 'wet' version of the tamal del dia, which involved a sauce and some other business. i fully intended to order the soup of the day (a roasted cauliflower something that sounded amazing), but to my dismay, i forgot. anyhow, when the quesadillas arrived, they were a little surprising (because they don't look like regular quesadillas) but they were FANTASTIC. good night nurse. the perfect blend of spicy and creamy. we made yummy noises the entire time we ate them. our entrees were similarly fabulous--mine came with creamy refried black beans, which were great. aaaaand, we forgot to take pictures. curses!

we also decided to go for it, and order dessert. i have such a hard time not ordering dessert when vegan dessert is available, and we were on vacation, so... i ordered the pumpkin cake, which came with dulce de leche ice cream and vanilla sauce. it was to die for. a ordered the mexican wedding cookies (which also came with the ice cream) and e ordered the coconut key lime cheesecake. we left stuffed, and very very happy.

by dinnertime that night, i was already plotting our return for the next day.

on our second trip, i planned poorly and had a bit of a full tummy when we arrived (wah), although my husband did not have the same problem. anyhow, i was excited to have a second chance at the roasted cauliflower soup, and it was well worth the wait. deeeelicious. i also had to have my very own caesar salad, which was dressed a tiny bit heavily if i'm being honest, but i powered through anyway because there is nothing not to like on that sucker. remember how i said i wasn't very hungry when i got there? well i also ordered the quesadillas again anyway. AND forgot to take a picture of them again. sigh. during the attempt to shove those down my gullet, i finally had to get real and surrender. i was able to eat half of one, and i gave the other one-and-a-half to my husband. at least they didn't go to waste. for his part, he had ordered the fig salad, and another plate of tacos. yum!

after we tucked all of that away, he still had room for dessert (i, on the other hand, thought i was about to die from stomach explosion), and so he ordered the flan. i tried a tiny bite and it was really good--and he loved it, too. so, back to back awesome meals at gracias madre. it's a good thing we don't live there or we'd be broke in a month.

i seriously can't recommend this restaurant highly enough. i think it might be my favorite place to eat in all of eatingville.

loving hut

i've heard about loving hut before, and i read the recent article in VegNews, but i've never actually had a chance to try the infamous cult food. when i learned that there was a loving hut only a block or so away from our hotel, i was pretty psyched to check it out. before i even had a chance to find it, one of my grad students bumped into me in an elevator (i was at a conference for work stuff) and said, all excited, "did you know there's a vegan restaurant at the mall?!?" hee, so cute.

i have to say, just seeing something like this, smack in the middle of a mall, makes my heart go pitter-pat. i really love seeing things advertised as vegan all big and proud, like it's no big thing. i'm all for normalizing the scary V word, and stuff like this goes a long way, i think. i would give anything to have something like this in a food court around these parts. 

i visited the loving hut at westfield twice: once for a quick (shared) snack, and once for lunch. the first time we were saving our stomach-space for millennium later that night, so we just got one order of spring rolls and split them. they tasted really fresh and were super tasty--great peanut sauce, too. when i visited a couple of days later for lunch, i ordered their buffet combo special, which basically translates to two items plus your choice of rice (brown, white, or fried). i got brown rice with two different tofu dishes: lemongrass tofu stirfry, and an awesome creamy tofu curry. the portions were HUGE and it was deeee-licious. i would absolutely eat there again if i had the chance. 

millennium

all righty, i've gotten some pictures uploaded onto the ol' flickr, so i feel like i can start talking about more san francisco food now. whee!

way ahead of our actual trip, we decided to plan for a dinner at millennium, along with another vegan friend of ours from grad school. she'd been there before and assured us that we would definitely love it. we made reservations for sunday night, which (unbeknownst to us at the time) made us eligible for the 'frugal foodie' special--available sunday through wednesday--which includes three courses for $39. we decided to each go that route, so that we could try several things but still not break the bank. we also ordered one additional appetizer to split, because we all wanted it and it didn't fit into our orders. heh. 

i have pictures of the stuff i ordered, but the rest of it is still on my husband's phone so i'll have to stick those on flickr later. in the meantime, i can link you to some of them if you're interested.

the appetizer that we split was the black bean torte (whole wheat tortilla, caramelized plantains, smoky black bean puree, pumpkin-habanero papazul, cashew sour cream, strawberry salsa), which they actually forgot to bring us until we were nearly done with our entrees, but that's okay. it was amazingly delicious--all three of us loved it. for my personal first course, i ordered the soup of the day, which isn't on their online menu so i have to go from memory: it was pumpkin and butternut squash, i believe, and it was garnished with apples (my new favorite thing, i swear to god), and it had a bit of cream on top and lots of tasty warm spices involved. LOVED that soup. our friend ordered the butternut squash rawvioli, and my husband ordered the fall sweet & bitter greens salad. they both were very happy with their selections.

for the entrees, our friend and my husband both ordered the same thing--some type of pistachio-crusted tempeh something or other. i don't think it's the same thing that's listed on their online menu right now, so that's the best description i can give. they both loved it, and i had a bite of the tempeh and it was really tasty. i ordered a blue corn tamale that was filled with squash and other delights... again, not on the online menu so you have my crappy memory to deal with. sorry. i have never considered myself a tamale person, but the description made it sound so good, i had to give it a go. i'm really glad i did, because it was awesome. the greens (broccolini, i think?) were not too bad--i'm not a fan of greens but these were edible and i ate them all. i'm a good girl.

for the dessert round, a and e chose MUCH more wisely than i did. sniff. they got these amazing cakey desserts--a ordered the chocolate almond midnight and e ordered some kind of amazing pumpkin cheesecake-type deal with a chocolate base and a creamy topping... basically they got a giant pile of dessert pr0n, and i got three of the tiniest scoops of sorbet imaginable. when i saw that chai was one of the three flavors (the others were pear lemon, and dulce de leche), i pretty much couldn't resist, but i wish i had. i felt super duper sad when i saw my miniature scoops. lame move, millennium.

overall, we really enjoyed our meals, and for $39/person and super fancy-pants food, you really can't go wrong. i would definitely go back and give them another try (and get a different dessert, ha!).

family vegan thanksgiving a success!

sorry for the large gap in mofo-posting... we've been on a bit of a roller-coaster during a spur-of-the-moment decision to put our house on the market and buy a different one. more on that later. anyhow, that ramped up as soon as we were on the plane home from san francisco, and that means i got lazy about finishing all of those SF posts i had promised. i'll do those next...

but first, in a more timely fashion, i wanted to gush a little about our family vegan thanksgiving. if you've been reading my blog for awhile, you may recall that every year i try to figure out a graceful way to skip thanksgiving, and every year i feel guilty and go anyway, but i totally dread it. we have two thanksgivings every year: one on thursday with my mom's side of the family, and one on saturday with my dad & stepmom's side of the family (the saturday celebration doubles as my stepmom's birthday party). my saturday thanksgiving has traditionally been the much more vegan-friendly one, so while i still haaaaaate seeing the giant dead bird, i do have the benefit of sitting in a mostly veg-thanksgiving room, since the crowd is big and a bunch of us are veg*ns.

the thursday dinner, however, has traditionally been very meat-centered; the kind of dinner where i have to prepare my own stuff in the kitchen in tiny portions (here, have a few potatoes to sully with your weird science butter and your fake milk), or bring an entire vegan feast that we'd prepared ahead of time. my husband is a wonderful cook and a generous person, and he's taken to doing the latter. my sister, her husband, and her two daughters are also vegetarian, so it's become quite a production to feed six veg*ns at a non-veg*n-friendly dinner. two years ago, due to some health complications my gram was having (our usual host), we hosted thanksgiving as a last-ditch appeal and it was wonderful. we had lasagna and everything was vegan and i didn't have a stomach ache all day and i LOVED it. last year, however, due to some health complications my grandpa was having, my mom reverted back to plan A and she hosted the regular meal at his house. i understood, but wasn't happy about it, and once again we took our entire meal along with us.

we have, extremely unfortunately, had a lot of deaths in our family over the past 2 years, and what that boils down to is that we now only have 2 meat-eaters at thanksgiving, and the rest of us (6 of us) are veg*ns. and not to be petty, but i'm in a kind of majority rules sort of mind-frame at this point. so we decided to offer to host again, but in a really upsetting twist, that conversation devolved very quickly into a nasty drawn-out fight with my mother (in public, no less) all about how my going vegan has ruined everyone else's life. awesome.

in the end, things got smoothed over (sort of) and our offer to host was accepted. we decided this time around to do a more traditional thanksgiving, so that we'd be eating 'all the usual stuff' except, of course, the turkey. a couple of my family members are not-so-adventurous, and vegan thanksgiving is an adventure in itself, so rather than doing any of the fancier roasts that are out there, we decided to give the field roast classic meatloaf a spin. with that we served mashed potatoes (yukon gold, yum), stuffing, gravy, oven-roasted sweet potatoes, peas, corn, and brussels sprouts with toasted almonds & lemon. for dessert i made pumpkin chocolate chip cupcakes (of course!) and chocolate chip cookies (special request from husband). everything--including the meatloaf--went over extremely well! people had seconds, everyone said it was delicious, and my mom even joked with my husband that the trouble with doing such a good job is that you get saddled with the job again next year(!!). hooray!