Awesome day

Just got home from Seattle. I had a great fucking day!!

I got to interview Bitch at an awesome little coffee shop, Fremont Coffee. Fremont is so cute. There was some kind of weird pubcrawling event going on, so at two in the afternoon there was all sorts of drunk twentysomethings running around hootin' and hollerin'. It was crazy, but comical.

Bitch is completely awesome. And so is her album, Blasted. I highly recommend it--she plays the violin and it sounds like an electric guitar! It kicks ass. The interview will be up on Verbicide in the next couple of weeks, so make sure to check it out. We shot some great photos at Gas Works Park that'll be posted with the story. And she's on tour, so check out her website and head over to check out one of her gigs!









Here's the video for her first single off the album, "Kitchen"




After that, me and the mister tooled around Seattle a bit picking up some choice vegan omnoms. We stopped by Mighty O Donuts, which was just about to close...so the few remaining donuts they had in stock were half off!! Kick ass. We got a couple little "naked" donuts (plain), a chocolate cake donut, and a "cocoloco" which is a chocolate cake donut tossed in cinnamon and sugar. Can't wait to eat them later with a cup of cold soymilk!

Then, we had a delicious dinner at the Moonlight Cafe. Oh my god, it was so good! They have an entire vegan menu. It was difficult to decide what to get. We had these little "shredded tofu" spring rolls for an appetizer:

They were pretty good! Very different than any spring roll I've had. I don't really eat too much Vietnamese food, so perhaps it's common. It tasted really good with the sauce that it came with, but without the sauce, it wasn't as tasty. I liked the fresh mint that was in it. :)

For our entree, we had General Tso's "chicken" and Tofu and Black Mushrooms in a coconut sauce. Rice doesn't come with the meal, but it's only 95 cents per person to get a big old portion of rice, and we were able to select brown rice! Yum.

The General Tso's "chicken" looked kind of like Italian sausage and peppers, but with broccoli thrown in:

It was really good. The "meat" was crispy on the outside, and less firm on the inside. The sauce was savory, and the veggies were cooked perfectly.

The coconutty dish was fabulous. The sauce tasted great over the rice. The mushrooms were good, though I kind of wished there was more in there. Tons of yummy tofu. We had a lot of leftovers!

After this tasty meal, on the drive home, we saw almost ten separate rainbows between Seattle and Olympia! Also, the clouds were enormous and fluffy. The sky basically looked like a painting. I couldn't take any pictures...well...because I was driving, and I didn't want to die on the road. I assure you the sparkling, dewy world was beautiful.

Yay for good days!

Easter Brunch

We got Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz for Christmas, and I've been lazing around, not using it, which is a shame. So, since we aren't particularly big on Easter, we decided to make it special by trying out a couple of recipes. Omnomnomnom.



The book is awesome. SO awesome, in fact, it was extremely hard to decide what recipe to try out first. Go. Buy. It.

We nailed out a plan to have a lavish two course meal. For starters, we cooked up Tempeh Sausage Pastry Puffs, and served them with a delicious bannanaberrycocount smoothie.

The combination of the sweet smoothie and savory puffs was delicious! I used So Delicous Coconut Milk Kefir in the smoothie for the first time, and it turned out great.








BananaBerryCoconut Smoothie
1 cup of frozen mixed berries (my mixed bag came with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries in it)
3 large ice cubes
About half of the container of So Delicious Cocnut Milk Kefir
1 large banana 

Just whir it all up in a blender and pour it into glasses!

I'm not going to discuss exactly what Isa Chandra's recipe was for the Tempeh Puffs is here, because I think you should go buy her book (seriously, I'm not being a suck up, it's great and she should make money off of it) but I can say that instead of marinating the tempeh for an hour like it says to, I marinated it overnight. I omitted the fennel, because I don't like fennel. Despite the omittance, the tempeh had a great flavor due to the thyme, garlic and red pepper. I added a little bit of sage, too. I think next time I make it I'll use less olive oil. I followed the directions, and it came out a bit oily for my taste.

The next course was Banana Rabanada (Brazilian French Toast) and mimosas. I have not had anything this french-toasty since turning vegan, and let me tell you--these things were mouth watering. So craveable and delicious!

Again, I'm not going to fully disclose the recipe, but I'll share my experience. I used one of the "La Panette" baguettes from Top Foods. I sliced it into pieces and set them out on a wire rack the night before, so they would get nice and stale. I used a really, really ripe banana, the kind we normally make banana bread with, it was very sugary and ripe...at the point where the peel is quite brown, but the inside's still ok. Making the banana custard mixture that you soak the bread in (what makes it french bready) was stupid easy. I just mixed it all up, soaked the bread in there while we ate the first course, and then heated them up on the skillet afterwards! We served it up with some sliced strawberries, a dusting of cocoa powder and cinnamon, and a Jackson Pollack-y swirl of real maple syrup. Delish!

I had some inexpensive Spanish champagne that we used for the mimosas, and it was quite good.