Friday, December 30, 2011

Pureed Potato Carrot Soup


I  hope everyone is enjoying the holidays. We are going to try a new vegan brunch in town tomorrow! I'll be sure to post about it and let you know how it goes.

After being sick, I wanted to add vegetables back into my diet slowly, so as not to upset my stomach. That's how I got this soup....I decided to puree some potatoes with carrots to make it easier to digest, so here it is!

It's probably pretty cold for a lot of you, so this is a good winter recipe. Right now, it's 78 degrees and sunny here, so I won't be cooking this one today:

Pureed Potato Carrot Soup 
(makes 2 large bowls)


2 white potatoes (feel free to try sweet potatoes!)
4 carrots
4 stalks celery, chopped
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2" piece fresh gingerchopped
1 1/2 cups vegetable broth


Steam the potatoes and carrots until very soft. In a soup pot, saute the onions, celery, and ginger in a little bit of water until  soft. Put the broth into your Vitamix (or other high-speed blender) and add the potatoes, carrots, and onion mixture. Puree until smooth. Add the soup back into your pot and add 1/2 cup broth as well as salt and pepper to taste. Stir and serve warm. You could try mixing in some vegan cheddar cheese at the end, if you'd like!


What are your plans for New Year's Eve?? What's your favorite winter soup?

Eat smart,
T.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Sick

Sorry I haven't been able to cook or post lately. It's funny....I don't really get colds or anything anymore, but I've had some weird stomach bug for the last 4 days or so....barely eating anything. Already lost almost 9 pounds. Keeping to mashed potatoes and applesauce mostly, and lots of water. I started taking some probiotics yesterday too. Hopefully it will go away soon.....maybe it's some sort of bacterial infection. Anyway, I hope you're all having a nice holiday season and I hope to be back to cooking and posting again soon!!

Eat smart,
T.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Raw Pad Thai


The other day I got my February 2012 issue of VegNews magazine and one of the many recipes caught my eye: Gena Hamshaw's Perfect Pad Thai (pg. 55). You can find a similar recipe on her website here (not exactly the same recipe).

I made it the other night when we had a friend over and the meat-eater liked it! I LOVED it. I doubled the sauce and I have some leftover to add to some vegetables/salad. I used two packages of kelp noodles...love those things! I only changed the recipe slightly: I left out the tamarind paste and sesame oil, I didn't have a red pepper, so I just shredded a bunch of veggies like white and red cabbage, carrots, and zucchini. It was so delicious. If you have this magazine (if you don't, go get it at your bookstore!), I highly recommend this dish!





SO GOOD! Go make it now!

You can find a recipe for my cooked Pad Thai here.

What awesome new recipes have you tried lately?

Eat smart,
T.

Friday, December 16, 2011

My new food processor!!


Yup, I did it. I finally got the big FP: The Cuisinart Elite 12-cup food processor. And it's big, but I love it! It's got 2 bowls in it, the 12 cup bowl and the 4 cup bowl. It also has an adjustable slicing disk, from 1mm to 6mm, as well as a fine/medium shredder and the chopping blades.

Carrots!

Carrots, zucchini, etc.

Cabbage for today's raw Pad Thai (I'll post about that later).

Do you have a food processor? I'm looking forward to using this to slice up cucumbers and tomatoes for salad too. You can do thin potatoes for chips as well!

Eat smart,
T.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Robert Cheeke stuff


I recently ordered a t-shirt from Robert Cheeke while he was doing his "Black Friday" discounts and look at all the other free goodies he threw in! Besides the shirt, I got a grocery bag, a tank top, some Vega samples, and some cool brochures and stickers. That's just the cover of his book on the left (though I do have the actual book...see my post about it here). 


I'm not a bodybuilder, but I have been using the p90x workout program, so that's about as close as I'm going to get! I started round 2 of p90x about a week ago. The Classic version this time and plyo is killing me. Anyone have suggestions for good shoes to get for that? Lots of cushioning is needed. Right now I'm just using really old sneakers for my indoor workouts and they're pretty worn down on the bottom.

Onto other things....have you seen these salad dressings (Sass)? I found them at Whole Foods...plant based, low calorie, low fat....and tasty! Though I do need to pour a lot on......I guess it's ok though, because it's mostly vegetables :)


And how about this soup (Pacific)? I liked it a lot!


What awesome foods have you tried lately??

Eat smart, 
T.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

More local goodies

There's been a lot of vegan happenings lately in New Orleans. Yesterday, I decided to go try out one of the new vegan restaurants. I mean...100% VEGAN!

The Wandering Buddha:

It's a 100% vegan Korean restaurant, located in a bar in the Marigny (or is it St Roch?) area of New Orleans. I'm not so familiar with that area. It seems a lot of the vegan food options are popping up in dive bars around town. We arrived at 5 pm, when the bar was supposed to open. The doors were chained closed, though we didn't have to wait forever out in the cold rain. They opened up about 10 minutes late. It IS New Orleans after all. We were the first ones in there and so there was no smoke lurking in the air (yay!). We brought a friend, who happens to be Korean-American. We sat down and the waiter, Christion, brought us out some menus. He was very friendly. He specified that everything was vegan on the menu, though I wonder why they opted to put "vegetarian and vegan" on the menu itself. It makes it seem as if only some of the items are vegan. <shrug>

I ordered the same thing as my friend, the bibimbap (rice and vegetables) with the brown rice option (for $1 more). S ordered the japchae (glass noodles with vegetables). His came out, and they brought out the bibimbap both with white rice instead of the brown. My friend mentioned that and the waiter quickly brought it back to exchange it for brown rice. S's food was getting cold, so he started and I liked his a lot (so did he!):


The waiter eventually brought out our orders with the brown rice. It was a bit on the cold-ish side. My friend says, traditionally, bibimbap should come out steaming hot. And it would have been nice, since it was freezing cold outside, and not that warm inside. It was fine for me...warm enough.


It looked so pretty! I haven't eaten much Korean food, I must admit. And after my dad always said how he couldn't stand kimchi or the smell of it in the air on the streets.....I was dreading it. And to be honest, it was too salty for me. But that's pretty traditionally Korean, I guess. My friend thought it was good, but she was used to kimchi that has fish in it, which is more authentic. Anyway, S liked the kimchi. I typically don't like really salty foods, so it wasn't the restaurant, it was me! The sauce that came on the side (luckily) was pretty darn spicy. Too spicy for me, though I did use some of it. The spicy cucumbers were also quite spicy, but I ate most of them. The rest was really good.....I only left the kimchi....for S :)

Outside of the salty kimchi for me and the spiciness, I thought it was really good! I might order what S had next time, or perhaps the cold buckwheat noodles. On another note, it was a lot of food! I'm glad we didn't order appetizers, although I'd like to try some of them...maybe next time. The bar is separate, so if you want alcohol, you have to go up to the bar and order/pay separately. (they had two Abita beers on tap, which is suprising for this type of bar!)

It was a good experience and I'm glad we went. I definitely want to go back and try perhaps some of the less spicy options :) And thanks for the great hospitality, Christion!

And these were really good too (not sure what they were), which were given to us at the end, on our check:

 (you can find them on Facebook too)

After dinner, we went over to the brand new New Orleans Food Co-Op, which was just a few blocks away. I wanted to check it out and see what kinds of cool stuff they had in there. It's in a really nice building and it's a pretty good sized store. Prices seemed to be on par with other smallish natural food stores. They had bulk seeds, grains, and flours, as well as coffee beans. They also had a pretty good selection of organic fruits and vegetables, priced perhaps a bit higher than normal. They did have the vegan staples: vegan mayo, vegan cheese (Daiya included-yes I found the pepperjack flavor there!), vegan cream cheese, nondairy milks, etc. There was a small selection of prepared foods like sushi and vegan chicken salad, but not a ton. And surprisingly, I didn't see any alcohol! Usually you can find good craft beers at these kinds of stores, but alas, not here. I would pay into the store and become a member if I lived closer. But I live out in the suburbs and it's not a very convenient place for me to shop.

Definitely check it out if you're in the area! This was the stash I got last night:

Daiya, Soy yogurt, pasta sauce, black apples, brown rice noodles, and organic swiss chard.

So if you're in NOLA, check these guys out! Next time I'm going to try the new vegan dinners at the St. Roch Tavern in the same area. Yay for vegan options in NOLA, finally. Anybody deliver out to the burbs yet?? ;)

Eat smart,
T.