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Asian Slaw and Potato Salad

A new vegetarian restaurant opened up today in downtown Asheville. Green Light Cafe, on Lexington near College (across from Tops Shoes) offers a new healthy option for dining out.

Everything on the menu is vegan or can be made vegan, with the exception of one of the dips. There are also several gluten-free options, although they do not have gluten-free bread for the sandwiches and wraps at this point. For the raw fooders, there are several salads and at least one raw dip.

The first thing they brought us was chlorophyll water, which they serve free of charge. It didn’t have a strong flavor but I did feel as though I was getting my meal off to an extra healthy start.

We then ordered the savory pocket appetizer which had a flakey spelt flour and coconut butter crust. It was magical. I will no doubt go back there many more times just to order that.

For entrees, we had sweet potato patties over rice with peanut sauce which was amazing, although a little more like breakfast than I’d expected. More sweet than savory. We also ordered the Jamaican Rice Mixup which was also a little sweeter than expected, but still a very filling, healthy, and tasty meal. The food was so filling actually, that we took half of it home with us.

But that didn’t stop me from ordering the Chunky Monkey cookie (I was won over by my server’s enthusiasm for it). It wasn’t the greatest cookie in the universe, but I did enjoy the blend of chocolate, banana, and walnut. They weren’t stingy with the good stuff.

High quality and generous portions and the whole thing cost us only $25 (before tip, after taxes).

More so than other restaurants, the staff seems so genuinely happy to serve their customers. It made me that much more happy about giving them my business. It’s a little unfortunate that their name is so similar to another healthy restaurant that is just a block away, The Green Sage, but on the other hand, Green Light Cafe has actually been around since 1998 as a catering and “mobile cafe” based out of Black Mountain. It is only their downtown Asheville location that is new.

So overall, I am genuinely excited about this new addition to Asheville. If you’re not a vegetarian or if you’re not into health food, you might be inclined to think “what do we need another healthy veg restaurant for?” But if you are into vegetarian health food, you’re probably just as tired as I am of eating the same things all the time. Green Light Cafe brings a whole new set of options to town. Check them out and give them your support!

[P.S. - like an idiot, I left my camera at home so I didn't get any pictures. I'll take some the next time I'm there. The picture currently on this post is from their website and is not what we ordered.]

Smashed up windows at the Grove Arcade

I remember being angry at how messed up the world is. I even remember thinking people who engaged in “civil disobedience” that involved stealing from and destroying property of big corporations were heroic.

Even at my angriest, I never would have even considered wrecking the storefronts of small, family-owned businesses in a little mountain city like Asheville. The only chain store in the effected area, which is a Subway restaurant, escaped unscathed.

From the Asheville Citizen-Times:

About 10:45 p.m. Saturday, a group of between 20-30 people wearing dark clothing, some wearing masks and carrying backpacks, threw items, including newspaper boxes, through windows of several businesses along O’Henry Avenue. A front window of the Asheville Citizen-Times was shattered, as were multiple storefronts at the Grove Arcade. An ATM was smashed at the RBC on O’Henry.

Multiple cars parked on Battery Park had their windows smashed.

The violence is likely linked to the observance of May Day, a day for marking worker solidarity that has been seized upon for anti-capitalism displays of violence, especially by self-proclaimed anarchist groups in Europe.

Several in the group yelled unintelligably as they vandalized. The group walked south on O’Henry Avenue and turned left on Battery Park Avenue. Some walked through the alley beside the Citizen-Times, where several employees of the paper had rushed to ensure the safety of their cars.

Talk about your random acts of senseless bullshit. For goodness sake, one of the vandalized shops, the Grove Arcade Copy Shop, has a big photo of the sweet-looking couple that owns the place right inside one of the smashed windows.

A comment on the article sums it up perfectly:

…this bunch of momma’s girls and boys who decided to get all radical in the most soft, liberal sympathizing, white-bred town they could find. LOL! Way to really show “the man” and take “the struggle” to the epicenter.

The Grove Arcade, where all this took place, is full of nothing but small locally-owned businesses, most of which take pride in supporting local artisans, farmers, and other local businesses. They are already struggling to survive in a down economy.

Since many of these “kids” were in their early- and mid-twenties, I am sure they came up with some amazing justifications for why they ran through downtown Asheville smashing stuff up. Wish I could hear what it was. I hope they all feel really stupid about this some day soon. Preferably from the inside of a jail cell.

The businesses that were vandalized include the Asheville Citizen-Times, RBC Bank, Grove Arcade, Grove Arcade Copy Shop, and The Eye Center.

I’m a vegan who turned Republican. Here’s an article from a Republican who turned vegan. OK, well, almost vegan. He’ll get there.

Read the article: Rise Up, Vegan Republicans!

Yes, I know what you’re thinking – you’re either vegan or you’re not. But he is going vegan the same way I initially went vegetarian. I said I would eat vegetarian unless my dad was making me dinner. It’s called a transition period. So give the guy a break, and the benefit of the doubt, and read the article for the interesting points that he raises.

Here’s an excerpt:

Cultural anecdote two: “You can be a Republican who eats a vegan diet, but you can’t be a vegan and a Republican. Vegans value the sanctity of life, which is in conflict with Republican values.” So said a poster named Bart on vegsource.com. Bart was adding to his thread called “vegan ideas and info are a threat to corporations, hence a threat to the GOP, hence Bush allows spying on vegans.”

I hadn’t noticed spy cams at my local Whole Foods in Los Altos, Calif., so I will be sure to glance up next time I’m inspecting the arugula. President Bush’s successor, we know, is both pro-arugula and pro-Patriot act. Surely that conflict is cleaving President Obama’s very soul. Bart could be right; the spy cams might still be up there.

Native Foods Cheeseburger

I just returned from a week-long vacation in Los Angeles, where the primary goal of my trip was to eat at as many vegan restaurants as possible. If only there had been more room in my stomach and more hours in a day, I would have tried more meals at more restaurants. But I did manage to check out quite a few. I tried, sort of, to stick with gluten-free and sugar-free foods, but there were just too many temptations. And it was a vacation so what the heck. I definitely need to stay on the straight-and-narrow for a while because my pants are now way too tight.

I took some photos of the food I ate but tragically left my camera at the beach on my 3rd day in town. But here is a great shot of the Native Foods cheeseburger, stolen from Vegan Food Blog.

Follow Your Heart, the company that makes the delicious vegan cheese that actually melts, has a restaurant (and full grocery store) in L.A! We stopped there for our first meal of the trip – Sunday brunch. I was able to try a vegan “om-lette” with mushrooms, onions, and vegan cheese. Delicious! I had a taste of their french toast which was just as I remember french toast to be. The tapioca pudding was good, but some of the other options for dessert might have been a better pick. The service was comically bad. We literally had to wave our arms around to get the attention of a server, and even that didn’t work sometimes. Luckily we were in good company so the 2-hour meal was still enjoyable.

Better Life Cuisine is a raw food restaurant in Santa Monica. Our first visit there for dinner was quite good. We tried the supreme tacos and the manicotti rolls, which were both excellent. Filling, without being too heavy. Their raw eggless salad was impressive. After that, it went downhill. Their desserts are tasty, but way way too sweet. We tried the cinnamon roll and the pumpkin pie. But what really disappointed us was breakfast. We grabbed a couple of smoothies on our way out of town for a day trip. We had been looking forward to their durian-coconut smoothie ever since we’d spotted it on the menu. It was unforgivably bad. It smelled vaguely of durian but tasted like watered down almond milk with some cinnamon thrown in. Not sure there was any coconut in it at all. We also tried a Gil’s green smoothie, which was equally bad. If we had not already been well on our way when we tried it, we would have demanded our $10 (each!) back. Truly awful.

Native Foods is an all-vegan comfort food type of place. Not a good choice if you want to eat healthy, but the food was great. The bacon cheeseburger was just like I remember from childhood, except without the greasy meat. We also ordered from the kids menu and got the quinoa macaroni and cheese and the chicken nuggets. Both were amazing.

Real Food Daily is similar to Native Foods in that it offers vegan versions of all your old favorites. I would say it’s slightly more upscale, with respect to both the food and atmosphere. We tried the gluten-free pizza and the club triple decker.  We meant to go back for breakfast but never had the chance. If I lived in L.A., I probably would eat here all the time. They also had some raw options.

Seed is a vegan, organic, macrobiotic restaurant a couple of blocks from Venice Beach. They had a big sign about their award-winning blackened tempeh burger. John had the good sense to order that – it was amazing. I got the Japanese vegetable curry bowl (supposedly with wild mushrooms and squash), which was disappointing. Too much carrot, almost no mushrooms at all. The $5 Madonna coconut mouse was good in that it wasn’t overly sweet, but it wasn’t very flavorful either. I’d eat here again, but I’d order differently next time.

101 Coffee Shop was recommended by a friend as the best vegan breakfast in town. 101 is a traditional diner, but it has one vegan breakfast item – “No Huevos” Rancheros. It was so good that it sent John into a tirade about how restaurants in Seattle and Asheville serve flavorless food. And it actually opened at breakfast time which puts it ahead of most of the other restaurants that serve vegan breakfasts. It was also quite a bit cheaper than everywhere else.

Interim Cafe (also known as Newsroom Cafe) was also recommended as having some of the best vegan food in town. Newsroom is not all vegetarian but they have a ton of vegan options. They also have quite a few gluten-free items. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had. I had the vegan spinach quesadillas – a meal I’ve been craving for years. It was everything I dreamed it would be. I was also able to try a bite of their superfood veggie burger, which was pretty good. The wild mushroom tamales were a letdown. I thought the vegan scone was pretty bad too. The chocolate soft-serve ice cream was impressive.

Babycakes NYC Bakery in downtown L.A. was so good we ordered 3 rounds of food. A great surprise was the fact that much of their items are gluten-free and sugar-free! We had a carrot cupcake, lemon poppy seed bread, corn bread, and banana bread, which were all amazing. The sugar-cinnamon doughnut was OK, but not nearly as good as other vegan doughnuts I’ve had.

On our way to Palm Springs for the day, we stopped in a charming little college town called Claremont for breakfast, and then again for dinner on our way back to L.A. We hadn’t planned ahead so there might have been other vegan places to eat there but we just stopped in at whatever looked promising.

Full of Life had some tofu dishes on the menu that looked pretty good so we decided to give it a try. I was about to order a scramble when I spotted the “Tofu Omlette” on the specials board. Assuming that meant it was an omlette made of tofu instead of eggs, I ordered it. Based on my questions, the woman taking my order must have realized I was a vegan because she asked if I could eat eggs. English was her second language and the conversation was a little confusing but I realize now that it was intended to be a typical omlette but with tofu and veggies inside. What arrived at my table was a pile of the omlette’s insides, very carefully arranged in the shape of an omlette. This wasn’t terribly filling but the spices made it very tasty and they definitely get an A for effort.

Ecoterra is a little hippie grocery store with a cafe inside. Their chef comes in each morning and makes the day’s food items which you can then pick out of a refrigerator. So it isn’t really a cafe in the way we expected it to be. We got some spanish rice and a turkey and cheese sandwich. Good food but nothing to write home about. The guy working there was exceptionally friendly and helpful, even willing to heat up our rice in a frying pan for us because we don’t like using microwaves.

Jed Gillen and Olivia

Jed Gillen, author of Obligate Carnivore and more recently co-creator of Liv Films, has never cared much about who he is offending or what idiots think of him. You’ll never catch him dogmatically adhering to a set of values just because “that’s what vegans do”. And if you try to debate him when you haven’t thought everything through, he will mop the floor with you.

These personal qualities allow him to accept interviews with websites such as “Let Them Eat Meat” without fear, and they also allow all such interviews to be fantastic.

I hope vegans everywhere read this article. I know from experience how easy it is to get wrapped up in being so “vegan” all the time that it becomes hard to relate to anyone who isn’t. And if we can’t relate to anyone who isn’t already living in our happy vegan bubble, then the we will forever limit the effects of our own efforts.

Based on just the intro to this article, we learn that it’s possible to earn the respect even of someone who intentionally set out to humiliate and discredit us.

I bought his book for two reasons: to help an entry I was writing about vegans with vegan pets, and to laugh at veganism at its most extreme. A vegan who argues that we should raise our miniature carnivorous felines as herbivores? Obligate Carnivore would surely represent the fringe of the fringe.

But I was wrong. On both counts. Rather than help my entry about vegan pets, it made me rethink it entirely until I decided not to write it at all. And yes, the book did make me laugh, but not by taking veganism to higher heights of absurdity. Obligate Carnivore uses vegan cats merely as a jetée to write hilariously about veganism and life in general; it is legitimately (and intentionally) amusing.

Read the full article entitled Interview With a Vegan: Jed Gillen

If I’d had the benefit of an article like this 5 years ago, I could have saved myself months of illness, frustration, and anxiety. The battery of tests that doctors performed on me failed to diagnose that it was my diet that was making me feel chronically fatigued and “under the weather”. Sore throat, headaches, muscle aches, and a general fatigue apparently do not fit into doctors’ narrow view of what gluten intolerance looks like.

This article, entitled “Gluten: What You Don’t Know Might Kill You” touches on a lot of different aspects of gluten intolerance, beyond just the immediate symptoms associated with it. If you have any issues with chronic illness, however slight, I highly recommend reading this article to see if gluten could be a part of it.

Remember, gluten intolerance can be a real blessing. It forces us to remove a lot of unhealthy foods from our diet, although not quite as much now that there are so many gluten-free junk food products on the market.

Mimi Kirk, 70 years old

Peta’s sexiest vegetarian woman over 50 is actually 70 years old! Mimi Kirk went vegetarian 40 years ago, was vegan for much of that time. About a year and a half ago her blood pressure was up and her doctor wanted to put her on medication. Rather than accept that fate, she turned to a raw vegan diet.

Check out a video of Mimi on a local news station here.

Check out SuperVegan’s interview here

Mimi looks amazing, even for 50. But she’s 70.

Check out Veggie Trader! A new website that allows you to search for fruits and veggies grown by your neighbors in local back yard gardens. Sign up and you can trade your excess garden vegetables with your neighbors. Yet another way of building a strong local community!

It doesn’t seem like there’s much going on for Asheville yet, but I did my part to help change that by signing up for a Veggie Trader account. If my garden ever manages to produce excess I will be sure to list what I’ve got and hopefully trade with a neighbor for some good stuff that I’m lacking.

Sign up! Eat well! Get to know your neighbors!

Male Chicks

Sometime around 1991 or so, I watched a video on factory farming that changed my life drastically and permanently. Among many horrific images of animal cruelty, was the sight of hundreds of unneeded male chicks being dumped into a grinder at a layer hen hatchery. Males have no value to the egg industry so they are disposed of as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Nearly 20 years later, I see this headline in my Yahoo News: Baby chicks ground alive by poultry producer: activists. My first thought, was “Yeah, no kidding. This is news?” And my next thought was, “Wow, this is finally news!”

This practice of grinding up male chicks is surely at least as old as factory farming. The “news” part is that Mercy For Animals recently caught it on tape. Of course, it was caught on tape 20 years ago or more as well. But hey, whatever gets the information out there is fine with me.

It’s really quite amazing that this made national headlines. Usually to get an animal issue even in the local paper, you have to take your clothes off, or set something on fire. What does it say for the animals and for our society that a common practice of factory farming has now made national headlines simply because a concerned person went inside with a camera?

Our land in Panama

Several years ago, in response to insane real estate prices and ever-decreasing civil liberties, my partner and I decided to do something drastic: leave the United States. I found an online resource called Escape from America magazine, which offered information on other countries across the globe to which Americans were relocating. We chose Boquete, a beautiful town in the mountains of Panama. Perhaps a bit impulsively, we bought some land there. 4 years later, we’re still here in the U.S., albeit in the mountain city of Asheville which suits us much better than Seattle.

I often hear friends talk about leaving the country “if the shit hits the fan”. And I admit, it is nice to know that I could escape to Panama and pitch a tent on my land if I really needed to. But when I really think it through, I have to conclude that if things did go crazy (and maybe they already have?) that the U.S. is exactly where I want to be.

If you read survivalist or self-sufficiency books and websites, most of them will tell you that the most important thing to get you through a long-term crisis is a community of trusted neighbors and friends. Who is the first to be targeted when times get tough? Foreigners, outsiders. That is not a unique feature of Americans. That is a common human trait throughout the world. Move to another country and when the chaos spreads there, you will then be the outsider.

And you can’t just show up in a new country, bags in hand, and expect to be allowed to stay. Panama, for instance, only allows you to stay for 90 days at a time. Most expats get around this by taking their passport to Costa Rica every 90 days, getting it stamped, and coming back into Panama. But unless you have a job skill that is rare, you had better have an income stream. Panama will not allow you to work without a work visa, in order to protect jobs for their own citizens.

There are plenty of great reasons to move abroad and plenty of places that welcome Americans, including Panama. It would be a wonderful place to live and we may still end up there one day. And I am sure that at this point, there are other countries which have far better economic opportunities than we now have here in the U.S. I am only suggesting that moving abroad because it is safer from an unknown future difficulty is not necessarily the smart move.

Instead, we changed our focus to where/how could we best enjoy a good quality of life here in the United States. Asheville has a mild climate in summer and winter, which means you can grow food just about all year long. It is protected by the mountains from most natural disasters. And the people here are absolutely wonderful. In 4 years of living in Seattle (13 years for John), we were not able to build the strong community of friends that we gained here in just our first year.

We’re building our little homestead in Asheville and building up an invaluable community of people. We have no intention of going anywhere any time soon.