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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.

Book Signing poster

Nathalie VanBalen, author of kids’ book Garlic-Onion-Beet-Spinach-Mango-Carrot-Grapefruit Juice, will be at Firestorm on Saturday, June 18, 10am for story time and book signing.

Firestorm Cafe & Books is located at 48 Commerce St. Just off of Coxe Ave in downtown Asheville. Also accessible from Patton Ave.

For more info about Garlic-Onion-Beet-Spinach-Mango-Carrot-Grapefruit Juice, please visit ThoraThinks.com and read what others are saying about the book here: Your Vegan Mom;  Bonzai Aphrodite;  Eat, Drink & Be Vegan;  VegBooks;  Our Hen House

Asheville will finally have its own 100% vegan restaurant. Not bad for a tiny little city in the mountains. Plant, opening this summer at 165 Merrimon Ave. will feature flavorful vegan dishes by former Laughing Seed chef, Jason Sellers.

From the Mountain Xpress (click here for the full story):

“We will serve flavor-sophisticated, multiculturally influenced food, using techniques that we like the best to intensify flavors based on what’s available to us at the best time,” he says.

….

Plant’s menu will be kept small enough to enable great attention to detail, he says, with fresh vegetables in the spotlight.

The restaurant also will have a char-grill. “Smoke and flame is something that’s really important to me, especially with vegan food,” says Sellers, who expects to include menu items like smoked potatoes and other dishes with “over-the-top” flavors. The chef will nod to his Italian heritage with seitan marsala and polenta dishes. He will also make his coconut-milk ice cream and other desserts, as well as pizzas and baked goods.

“I think we’ll just really surprise people with increasing the level of vegan food and offering what they may not have expected,” says Armstrong, who admits to a healthy addiction to Sellers’ ice cream.

“The menu is a hit list of all of our favorite flavors,” adds Sellers. “Our goal is lots of grilled and sautéed and cook-to-order vegan food.”

Weekend brunches will feature pancakes and yeasted Belgian waffles. “We want to take vegan brunch to a whole new level,” Sellers says.

Sounds great to me. If the food is good, I will eat at Plant all the time. I can’t wait to try their weekend brunch. Laughing Seed brunch just hasn’t been the same since they took the vegan omelet off the menu. * hint hint, Plant *

In the meantime, you can still support Asheville’s only *almost* vegan restaurant, Firestorm Cafe & Books. Their entire food menu is 100% vegan, but they do sell milk-based coffee drinks.

Update: The chef from Plant tells me that they already have some gluten-free options planned and he is working on ways to expand the gluten-free selection even further. Sounds like there may be some raw options as well, and….possibly….maybe….a vegan omelet in my future!

George Burns as God

I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God. By that I mean I don’t believe there is any intelligent force guiding events. Sure, I recognize that I could be wrong about that, but I find the idea of God (or whatever you want to call it) pretty far-fetched.

In the last several years, though, I’ve taken great interest in various spriritual books. Here are my favorites:
The Mastery of Love, by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
Loving What Is, by Byron Katie

These books truly changed my life and allowed me to be happy; to let go of so much disdain I constantly felt toward my fellow humans. I got so much out of them, but they all centered around some concept of God. In order to fully take them in, I had to come to terms with “God”. I had to understand why the ideas in the book still resonated with me even though I have a fundamentally different view of reality than their authors.

All that which is beyond my control

For me, at least for the types of books and philosophies that resonate with me, I found that “God” could pretty seemlessly be replaced with this one phrase, “all that which is beyond my control,” and the concepts made total sense to me.

Here’s just one example: Byron Katie writes that there are three kinds of business: my business, your business, and God’s business. You need to stay in your own business. So much of my energy was being spent in “God’s business” or in what I now realize is all that which is completely out of my hands. What a waste of time and energy.

There are a lot of worthy ideas out there. There are great spiritual books, great philosophers, and even great preachers. It is a shame to dismiss everything they say simply because they have God at the center of their lives and speak in those terms. As an atheist, I would do myself a disservice to close myself off to what so many others have to share.

Vegan scramble at Rancho's

It is not easy to find a decent vegan breakfast in San Diego. It seems that all the good restaurants open after 11am. Luckily, there’s a very vegan-friendly (and carnivore-friendly) restaurant that opens at 8am and has some of the best vegan scramble I’ve ever had, not to mention some other amazing vegan options. Rancho’s Mexican & Vegetarian Cuisine a strange combination of traditional Mexican and super healthy vegan food. We were told that it came to be that way because the owner’s wife was vegan. See also my previous post about the most delicious vegan quesadillas I’ve ever had.

As good as their food is, I really didn’t want to eat there 2 mornings in a row, but I literally could not find another restaurant open for breakfast. For my 3rd morning, I had luckily discovered the Ocean Beach People’s Co-op which has a pretty good hot bar and bakery upstairs and lots of great food downstairs.

In general, it is very easy to find good vegan food in San Diego. Here are the places I had a chance to check out:

• Evolution Fast Food
  2949 5th Ave.
  San Diego, CA
  (619) 550-1818
  

  Mushroom swiss burger from Evolution

  Drive through or order take-out at the counter inside. They have a few chairs inside. The menu is reminiscent of traditional fast food – burgers, fries, shakes, and sandwiches, but way way healthier. They have several gluten-free options as well as a nice selection of raw food. The gluten-free version of the mushroom swiss burger was very flavorful and satisfying. I also grabbed a banana bread cookie to eat the next morning for breakfast, which was delicious. I came back another night for a smoothie, since they seem to have some of the more interesting smoothies in San Diego. I’m afraid I can’t remember what I got but it definitely hit the spot.

• The Greenery Raw Food Cafe
  133 Daphne St.
  Encinitas, CA
  (760)479-0996
  Not quite as good as Peace Pies (see below) but similar concept. I think I caught them at a time when they were out of most of their options, which is why it didn’t seem as good. Greenery does have a made-to-order menu for dinner, but I ate there during lunch, which is pre-made raw food items. I had a pretty good pizza and one of the best seaweed salad’s I’ve ever had.
• Peace Pies
  4230 Voltaire St.
  San Diego, CA
  (619)223-2880
  

  Raw cinnamon rolls from Peace Pies

  “I’ll have one of everything!” OK, it wasn’t exactly like that but pretty close. This 100% raw cafe didn’t look too promising when I first walked in. Most of the lunch options were pre-made in a fridge, not made-to-order. But When I looked up close, everything looked like something I had to try. I had some spaghetti with pesto, a slice of pizza, veggie sandwich, vanilla ice cream, and a slice of coconut cream pie with chocolate on top. I also got some cinnamon rolls to take for breakfast the next day. Everything I tried was outstanding. Truly delicious.

• Stephanie’s Bakery
  4879 Voltaire St.
  San Diego, CA
  Their website proclaims that they have the “best vegan pizza ever!” so that definitely seemed worth trying. Unfortunately, they were out of the gluten-free crust, but I decided to suffer through the gluten in order to get to try out their pizza. I don’t know if it lived up to the hype, but it was pretty good pizza. Definitely no complaints. I had the “Supreme” pizza which includes vegan pepperoni and several vegetables. They also use Follow Your Heart cheese. I also grabbed a gluten-free brownie, which was very tasty. Their other cakes looked absolutely incredible, but I didn’t want to eat any more gluten than I already had.
• All Vegan
  4669 Park Blvd.
  San Diego, CA
  

  S'mores from All Vegan

  Not a restaurant at all, but they had some really awesome vegan treats. The s’mores was particularly amazing. Truly amazing. They also had a nice selection of chocolates. Most of the store is non-edible things like shoes, belts, wallets, and other hard-to-find vegan items.

Overall San Diego is far more vegan-friendly than your average city, but not so awesome as Los Angeles or NYC. There are pockets of the area where good vegan food is very hard to find (ie Coronado Island, where I was staying). If you show up with a good list of restaurants and a GPS, you’ll have no problem finding enough food to eat.

As an aside, an interesting peculiarity about San Diego is that many many restaurants seem to offer young coconut water as a beverage, straight from the shell.

Daiya vegan cheese

Any time I see vegan quesadillas on a menu, I have to order them. They were my breakfast this morning at Rancho’s Mexican & Vegetarian Restaurant in San Diego. I became instantly suspicious when my cheese was not only delicious, but also chewy and stretchy. Everyone knows that vegan cheese does not taste and feel like that. Not possible.

I called the waiter over to ask if they had made a mistake with my order, but he said no – it was Daiya cheese. This may be old news to a lot of people, but I’d never heard of Daiya so I figured it was some “lactose-free” cheese with casein in it. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, ate my quesadillas, and hoped that I wouldn’t be puking sick later from eating cow’s milk (which I was not).

It turns out that Rancho’s knows what it’s doing. I stopped off at a little hippie food coop to see if I could find it. There it was, Daiya vegan cheese. Holy crap, it’s good. You must eat it. It’s been a super long time for me, but I’m pretty sure this is just what eating cheese used to be like. Close, at least.

Even better, it’s allergen-free for most people. From their website:

Daiya products do not contain many of the common allergens including; soy, dairy (casein or lactose), gluten, egg, peanuts, and tree nuts (excluding coconut)

sanctuary eggs

If you’re vegan or an ethical vegetarian, you probably know that the “cage-free” or “free range” labels on eggs don’t mean much. They are marginally better than battery cage raised eggs at best, but still involve keeping laying hens in overcrowded conditions where they live in their own feces, rarely (if ever) see the sun, and may still even peck and trample each other to death.

A little better would be a local organic farm (depending on the farm) where the chickens run about a large natural area, living a good chicken life. For vegans, who oppose exploitative practices or who consider killing (even in a “humane” way) to be cruelty in and of itself, this also is not an acceptable source of eggs. Most farms who rely on animals for their profits aren’t going to keep a chicken around who isn’t laying anymore. Chickens can live many years longer than they can lay eggs.

And then even better than the local farm is the neighbor with back yard chickens (depending on the neighbor) who treat their hens as well as they treat their beloved dog or cat. These hens may experience a great environment with human kindness and might even live out their lives as members of the family, even when they can no longer produce eggs. Even in this case, I am not comfortable with this as a source of eggs because in order to get those chickens in the first place, those caring neighbors most likely had to purchase their chicks from a chicken breeder who engages in exploitative practices, raising chicks as a commodity for human use. In most cases, the chicks are shipped in boxes across the country. (If they happened to find a young chicken up for adoption at the humane society, that would be a different story.)

sanctuary chicken

But consider a sanctuary, whose mission is to take in animals in need and give them a safe haven for the rest of their natural lives. That sanctuary may have taken in hens who might otherwise have been killed, who then lay more eggs than can possibly be used at the sanctuary. In this case, what harm is done to any chicken, or other living creature, by eating those eggs?

That is exactly the situation I came across today when I visited a sanctuary outside of Asheville, NC. The caretakers themselves are vegans and are active in the community with other vegan organizations and events. They allow friends of the sanctuary to come and take their spare eggs. I took a dozen and I don’t feel any less vegan for doing so.

Click to view the flyer

There is no shortage of festivals in Asheville, celebrating music, art, health, the environment, and/or just the wonderfully freaky nature of Asheville. Now, for the first time, we’ll be having our very own VegFest, celebrating all things vegan and animal-friendly.

Putting something this big together takes a lot of work and of course some money. Here’s the email (slightly abridged) that went out through The Asheville Vegetarians about this event:

As you know, The Asheville Vegetarians and Goat Mountain Ranch Sanctuary are planning the first ever Asheville VegFest (Sunday, August 7th).  WE NEED YOUR HELP!! We’ll be sending out a volunteer form soon but in the meantime, please note that our current estimates indicate that the festival is going to cost us nearly 7K (permits, insurance, porta potties, security, marketing materials, advertising and on and on…..). We are hopeful that rental fees from vendors and donations from sponsors will cover much of this but we do expect a shortfall. To that end we have applied for a www.vegfund.org  grant and are in contact with other organizations to whom we will apply for grant money. WE do need YOUR donations though! ….

For any donation above $20, you will receive a vegdiscount card which is good for a year of many discounts around town at various restaurants, service providers, retailers et cetera.

Asheville Vegfest  is a great opportunity to “vegucate” and “vegutain” folks near and wide  so please consider participating in any way you can but .. if you have some extra funds, they’ll go a long way in helping us pull this off!

All donations are tax deductible., checks should be written out to Goat Mountain Ranch Sanctuary and sent to:

Goat Mountain Ranch Sanctuary
1601 Newfound Rd
Leicester 28748

Alternatively, you can donate via paypal via the Goat Mountain website:  http://www.goatmountainsanctuary.org/about.html Please specify that donations are for Vegfest (donors to VegFest will receive a vegdiscount card but not a Tshirt from Goat Mountain– separate donations earmarked for Goat Mountain of $17 or more will  get you one of their cool T-Shirts).