vegangirl.com

Wingbean meal delivery

From Wingbean’s website:

Wingbean makes tasty vegan cuisine and delivers it right to your door. We know you’re busy, that’s why we do the cooking for you.

I’m busy, and I like tasty vegan cuisine, so I figured why not check it out. They even have a non-gluten option, which I ordered. The menu for this week was:

• Senorita Pasta – Delicious pasta dish with a creamy cheesy sauce, mixed with black beans and other veggies. Possibly the best meal of the week.
• Mini BBQ with Coleslaw. Surprisingly good. Much more interesting and satisfying than I thought it would be.
• Portobello Tapenade – Kind of weird. I ate it, but I’m not sure I liked it.
• Chickpea of the Sea – A chickpea “tuna” salad, similar to what Earthfare sells but a little better. Very good.
• Green Man Lasagna (with rice lasagna noodles) – Super delicious and fun. I don’t get to eat lasagna often.
• Summer Kale Saute with Shitake Bacon – LOVED the bacon. The kale was OK.
• Steamed Baby Carrots with Herbed “Cream” Sauce – Very good, but no one could be expected to eat that many carrots in a week.
• Minestrone Soup – I haven’t tried this yet, there’s just so much food.
• Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies – Delicious, of course. They’re cookies. But they all stuck together so it was more like a bag of cookie pieces.

The service is $70+tax. For this, you easily get enough food for 10 good-sized lunches. The food quality is on par with eating left-overs from a really good restaurant. It’s certainly far better than I would make for myself.

There are a couple things I would change, if it were up to me:

1. I’d eliminate the cookies, or make the “tasty treat” something that is sugar-free. As it is, I will probably ask to leave out the cookies next time. It’s hard enough to avoid sugary desserts, without having them delivered to my doorstep.
2. It sure would be nice if the food was delivered on Sunday so that I could have it for my lunches Monday-Friday. It comes on Monday, so I don’t get to use it until Tuesday, and now I still have food going into the weekend, which isn’t quite as useful.

I probably won’t sign up to order meals every week, but I will certainly order again soon. It’s a high quality service, and a good price for what you get. Check out Wingbean here.

Lasagna (photo from Wingbean's website)

Pillow that I made

I prefer quality stuff made in America rather than cheap crap made in China. Unfortunately, the good stuff is less likely to be vegan: a throw pillow filled with down, or a nice jacket or blanket made from wool, or some accessory with leather pieces on it. It’s also getting harder to find clothes that fit thin, petite women. It seems like “small” just isn’t small anymore. Needless to say, shopping is usually a very frustrating experience for me.

Robe and PJs

I haven’t solved all of my problems yet but now that I’m learning to sew, I can see so many possibilities. It all started with a pillow that I fell in love with. Not only could I not really afford it, but it also used down, which I won’t buy. But I HAD to have it.  Once I started sewing that pillow, I just could not stop myself making all kinds of other things. (Pillow made from a kit from paint-by-threads.com)

I’ve made a robe, pajamas, a pin cushion, and am working on a quilt with bamboo batting. As my skills improve, I will work on more complex clothing items like blouses and jackets.

Aside from the practicality of it, I’ve found making real things myself is extremely satisfying. I almost cannot stand to be at home not making something now.

Smart Mouse Trap by Seabright

I like mice. They are adorable. But not so much when they are eating the dog’s food and leaving poop all over the kitchen. You crossed the line, mice! And my cat Simon, once a proud hunter, hasn’t done a thing to dissuade them. In fact, I recently saw a mouse scamper across the kitchen floor, right past the cat, who didn’t move a muscle.

We finally bought one of those humane mouse traps. I thought we had a mouse, as in one mouse. Instead, we caught a mouse almost every night, for 2 weeks. We’ve relocated about a dozen.

Some tips, if you are trying to use these traps. They’ve worked amazingly well, but not until we figured a couple of things out.

• Use peanut butter. Or if you’re fancy, like us, use those little packets of Justin’s classic almond butter.
• Make sure the door is just barely latched open. If you’re not catching any mice, check to see if the peanut butter is already gone. If so, you’ve got the door latched open to securely.
• Get rid of whatever the mice were coming in for in the first place, or move it to the fridge or a higher cabinet.
• Find a nice grassy area to release the mouse that is far away from your house and far away from any neighbors’ houses.

At this point, we actually stopped setting the trap for a while because it seemed like the only reason the mice had left for coming into the house at all was to get the peanut butter in the trap. We haven’t seen any disgusting mouse droppings anywhere else in the kitchen since we moved everything out of their reach.