The Vegan Zombie's Neatloaf

As a flexitarian, I thrive to keep my diet plant-centric and so when I cook (which is not as often as I should ...) I only do vegan recipes. Over the months, I had some good and bad experiences with the recipes I have found on-line. The only on-line source that have been pretty consistently good, is The Vegan Zombie.

For Easter, I made the Neatloaf (a vegan meatloaf) which they posted this past week and it was pretty darn good. Even meat eaters that had some agreed!

Here's the video of the recipe:

I made a couple of change to the recipe though:

• Replaced the caraway seeds by the same amount of Provence herbs
• Added a teaspoon of Chipolte sauce for 3 tablespoon of Ketchup 

What does Rich Roll eats?

I just listened to an interview of vegan ultra-athlete Rich Roll by DocHeater on blogtalkradio and one of the question was related to what his every-day meals looked like (he appears to be training most days). Here are the notes I took from it (the sound quality was pretty bad so I may have missed or mistaken a few things ...):

• breakfast
• pre-workout
• smoothie (kale, chard, spinach, pineapple, chia seeds, macca powder, beets)
• almond butter toast (if really hungry)
• post-workout
• smoothie (almond milk, banana, macca powder, kale, avocado, walnuts)
• lunch (usually light)
• salad
• veggie burrito or rice&beans or rice with stir-fry vegetables (if really hungry)
• dinner (large)
• sweet potatoes, yams, potatoes
• brown rice
• stir-fry veggies
• kale chips
• pasta dishes
• snack(s)
• almonds
• almond butter sandwich

Recipe: Vegan Crêpes

Yep, you've read that right, this post is a recipe for Crêpes (thin french pancake); the vegan kind. It came about this morning as my wife made some non-vegan ones Saturday morning. Curious to how a vegan version of the recipe will taste like, I decided to try it for Sunday breakfast. And it was a resounding success, IMHO. Here's a few pictures of the crêpes in the making:

Making the recipe animal products free was pretty easy albeit a little worrisome as I kinda suck at cooking and substituting ingredients is a bit like dark art for me, still ... Anyhow, here's the ingredients list (which should yield about 4 standard size crêpes):

• 120g of Flour 
• 1/4 tsp Salt
• 2 tbsp Sugar
• 2 Flax Eggs (2 tbsp grounded flaxseed meal + 5 tbsp water)
• 1 cup of (unsweetened) Soy milk
• 4 tbsp Water
• 2 tbsp Orange Blossoms water (or Vanilla extract)
• 2 tbsp Vegan butter (e.g. Earth Balance)

The batter preparation is fairly easy:

• mix all dry ingredient in a bowl
• mix all wet ingredient in a separate bowl (you'll need to melt the vegan butter first, the flax eggs count as a wet ingredient)
• whisk the wet into the dry

It is custom to leave the batter to rest for a bit, I didn't and it turned out fine, YMMV. Grounding the flaxseed meal my not be necessary. I have the habit of doing so as I found the one I have to be not that well grounded. I think that for a crêpe you want it to be as fine as possible as they are not supposed to be "seedy".

I enjoyed mine with some Italian Figs jam and it was just as yummy as the non-vegan one! Enjoy!

...

Blackberries + Banana + Chia Seeds + Soy milk

Impromptu "Hawt Dawg"

For dinner we fired up the BBQ (since it's BC day and all) and cooked among, other things, one of the staple of the vegan diet: Portobello mushrooms. Since we had "hot dog" style buns, I thought I should try making a "hawt dawg" out of the mushroom ... and it was yummy! Here's what I put in it:

• 1 portobello mushroom (BBQed, sliced in two)
• 2 slices of Tofu (BBQed also)
• half of a small bell pepper (BBQed)
• mustard, relish, ketchup

Assemble and enjoy!

Banana Blueberry pancakes!!

Page 76 of the famous "Veganomicon" is the bet recipe of vegan pancake that I have fond so far. Even the kid likes it and he's kind of picky ... I used whole wheat flour and banana instead of white flour and just blueberries

Vancouver Veg Fest (report)

So the run went fine, I could easily have gone further but the wife was insisting we stopped at Granville since that's the street where the Veg Fest was. Here's the details of the run on Strava:

The Fest was a bit disapointing. While there was quite a few (vegan information) booths, there was only one vegan food vendor (e.g "chicken" burger and such). The other booths were occupied by various shops and eatery trying to raise awareness to their existence.

Maybe I was expecting too much, I dunno ... Anyway, here's a few pics from it:

Vancouver Veg Fest (pre)

Tomorrow, Saturday 4th, is the 2nd Vancouver Veg Fest downtown. We're running to it as part of our on-going Marathon training (we're doing the Victoria Marathon this coming October). It's about 17km or so to downtown from where we live. We already did that run (actually all the way to Stanley park) a couple of weeks ago pushing our kid in the running stroller. It should be fun (we'll have some "Larabar" to fuel outselves), althought it is supposed to be rather hot ... At least, there's be vegan treats at the end of it ;-)

Raw Vegan "Larabar"

Da wife made some "Larabar" ... I have been talking about making some for a few days, but she didn't want me to mess up the kitchen, so ... She kinda winged but here's the approximate recipe:

• 1 cup of dry figs
• 1/2 cup of dry cranberries
• 1/2 cup of blanched almonds
• 1 to 1.5 cup of walnuts
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup of almond butter

Soak the figs and cranberries for a bit in hot water (cover). Use a food processor to process all the nuts then add all the other ingredients until well mixed and crushed. Press in a pan then store in the fridge for a bit before cutting into bar.