Archive for what you *don't* have to give up

This week: Salad, Stuffed Shells, Sweet Potato Pie

My Dad and Dr. Mercola are on a tear about how dangerous it is to eat large amounts of unfermented soy products such as tofu. I agree and tend to cook from whole food and use rice milks and ice creams instead of soy, but sometimes tofu or other soy products are just such a fantastic shortcut you just can’t do without it.

This week, per my meat-eater husband’s request, I made homemade tomato pasta sauce with fresh herbs and poured it over shells filled with Vegan with a Vengeance Tofu-Basil Ricotta. Even my picky kids had seconds. Delish.

The good thing about Tofu-Basil Ricotta (besides being soooo tasty smothered in homemade tomato sauce) is the nutritional yeast. Let’s be honest– the vegan diet can be dangerously short on B12. Long term effects of B12 deficiency can be very scary. Nutritional yeast helps right that imbalance. And it is tasty, tasty, tasty, too.

To go with, I served a salad based on a Nicola Graimes recipe– slivered blanched almonds, golden raisins, oranges. I added a few perfect mint leaves, citrus champagne vinegar, a little sugar, a pinch of sea salt. I sneaked in a huge nutrition punch with Udo’s 3-6-9 Flax, Sesame and Sunflower oil. You couldn’t even taste it, or its odd flavor simply complimented the mixture, one or the other. I served it on spinach leaves– c in the oranges makes the iron in the spinach available to your body– and it was so delicious, like a dessert. The kids even ate it, always the hallmark of vegan food success.

Finally… my stepson loves Pie. Any Pie. He is too big for me to pick up and throw on the bed or throw myself on him and tickle him like I could do when he was small, so I do a lot of communicating through food.

He requested sweet potato pie. I once claimed to make the best sweet potato pie in Alabama and perhaps throughout the southland. It involved eggs, butter, sweetened condensed milk, and resembled butterscotch pie rather than sweet potato. So good!  What to do now that I am vegan? I hadn’t as yet found a good enough substitude.

But Albertson’s had organic yams, and I resolved to be brave and try.

I was dismayed to find that any recipe called for egg replacer or tofu. How could I thicken without those? Egg replacer often has a ‘taste’ and I honestly am trying to get away from the tofu.

So I decided to experiment. I mashed together 1 stick Earth Balance nonhydrogenated vegan margarine, 1 HUGE sweet potato baked in the microwave, a cup of organic sugar more or less, a half teaspoon of allspice, a half teaspoon of salt (go easy on the salt, it is WAY too easy to oversalt!) and a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice. I heated this to melt the margarine, and then mixed 1/2 cup of flour with water to make 1 cup to thicken, and continued adding rice milk  (1/2 cup or a bit more, maybe?) and cooking til it was pudding consistency.

You have to cook flour puddings to a boil, stirring constantly to avoid scorching, to get rid of the floury taste. Once it boiled and cooled a bit  I added a full big dessert spoon of bourbon vanilla from Trader Joe’s and poured it into a storebought shortbread crust and chilled. Nutrition + pie – tofu or egg replacer = …

My son had two slices for breakfast. Ahh… he knows the way to my heart.

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shampoo steal

 

PETA’s Proggy Awards are a resource to help me vote with my pocketbook and be more comfortable with my choices.

Today I was shopping on drugstore.com– that’s the only place I can find my Peaceful Patchouli shave cream and Liquid Rock deodorant (don’t bother with the enzyme deodorant, it’s worse than nothing!! I need my money back!).

I need more shampoo, and Beauty without Cruelty and Juice Organics are both pricey. I don’t have time to research other brands right now (but if I did I would use Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep cosmetic safety database, it RAWKS).  

I googled cruelty free vegan shampoo and lo and behold! White Rain uses no animal products, does no animal testing, and as I remember well from high school their products are about a buck a bottle.

Woo hoo!  That little gem alone will save me hundreds in hair care products!  See what information goodies you can harvest here!

http://www.peta.org/feat/proggy/2008/

 

 

 

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I’m buying all my makeup from here from now on…

pinkquartzminerals.com

Remember when I said you didn’t have to give up having fun looking pretty when you go vegan?

I found some beautiful colors and an owner/colormixologist who gave me awesome customer service at PinkQuartzMinerals.

Doree really set me up.

I found her on the Etsy site– pinkquartzminerals.etsy.com.

I wrote her a question via Etsy and she responded nearly instantaneously. She answered my many additional questions quickly and courteously.

She mixed me up something custom but did not raise her extremely reasonable price. Her prices are great, she shipped very promptly, she offers samples, and her colors are GORGEOUS.

And I was very, very satisfied with my little custom color. It was for a costume, and I felt as gorgeous as one can feel when one’s skin is, well, it’s not easy being green, but she made it easy, I felt so pretty and the makeup was so light I hated to take it off. And I was GREEN.

I am also very satisfied with the lovely colors of eyeshadow and the bronzer color I chose. She suggested some foundations and I can’t wait to try those out.

Doree, you are the best.

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Cosmetics can be vegan too

I have to pick on somebody besides Sarah Palin in my tag line now, don’t I. I can’t think of that right now, though.

I will say this much. Poor thing. I actually feel sorry for McCain and Palin… but I still ordered lots of post-win Obama stickers from Moveon.org. Heh.

Anyway. A friend of mine said the other day, but I would have thought you would have stopped shaving your legs.

WHAT? I shave them every day, in the shower. It’s faster that way, never a huge ordeal, over with, no worries. Why?

In Alabama we wear open toed shoes about 9 months out of the year, even to work. It is actually stated in my employer’s dress code that open toes are okay. It took me a while to get used to it– but I finally caved.

And hose, even though they are recommended in my employer’s dress code, are a BIG, BIG, NO, NO with open toed shoes. And they age you. My mama told me so. And they’re made with petrochemicals/fossil fuel byproducts, too. Aren’t they? Yuck.

So back to what going vegan does not have to mean.

So this isn’t about food. But it is about what you DON’T have to give up just because you go vegan. Therefore it does fit under our title Vegan Without Cruelty.

Just because you’re vegan doesn’t mean you give up being sucked into other sorts of consumer and marketing scams like beauty products.

I don’t dye my hair any more– I do kind of draw the line at that kind of alteration of my natural looks. I miss it, I miss it bad. I look at the photos from my baby’s first Christmas and my hair just looks so darn good. I can’t stand it. I am so much prettier a dark, almost-black ash brunette.

But… well… it just seems wrong.  Maybe later if i can find some good cruelty free plant based dye and get the guts to try it at home and be ready to live with the consequences if it turns out green – either walking around with green hair or paying the wonderful lady who cuts my hair a BUNCH O MONEY to fix it. After she recovers from laughing her butt off at me.

In our last town I had the best stylist in the whole wide world… she cost a pretty penny for the insanely cool, edgy dyejob and cuts she gave me… but her prices were quite good considering her amazing ability and my extreme satisfaction. But when I moved here I just stopped going to her. When you have someone great you just can’t bring yourself to try something new sometimes. I love the lady who cuts my hair– she is AWESOME too. But I haven’t ventured into color since I ‘lost’ her.  

I want a tattoo real bad too. The only reason I don’t do that is because I am just plain chicken.

So breathe a sigh of relief. You don’t have to give up your shitty self-image and stop altering yourself or stop expensive slathering product all over yourself to go vegan. I haven’t. In fact, I just started, and I am loving it.

Although as I’ve noted before, I dropped 30 lb going vegan– a huge self image boost. But I’m also pushing forty and getting anxious about beauty– skinny don’t stop aging (okay so vegan might actually slow it, honestly!) and it certainly can’t fix ugly (sorry, Tater Salad).

So from my other blog, devoted to bargain hunting and saving time and money…

“I can’t believe I just did this. I just spent 45 bucks on Ecco Bella’s anti aging day cream and eye nutrients cream. But if I’d paid full price it would have been sixty four bucks– plus shipping.

Vitacost.com had a deal where you could get both for around forty dollars, their standard shipping is only $4.99.

I have Ecco Bella Eyeliner and Mascara, and I shit you not, their mascara is the BEST EVER. Plus it comes with a little mirror right on the tube, how AWESOME is that?

I’ve been needing an eye cream BAD. Concealer settles into the tiny wrinkles around my eyes– which would probably be invisible if I didn’t use concealer, but if I don’t use concealer I look like death. I actually scared myself the other day, caught unawares as I peered into the mirror to begin my morning primp.

The beautiful boy at The Body Shop in Atlanta told me the solution was a good eye cream, and my mom told me the solution is a concealer brush. So now I’ll have both.

The daily moisturizer I use– Beauty Without Cruelty with Alpha Hydroxy– well I ADORE it and I’ll probably buy some more of it but BWC AHA does not have SPF in it at all. It’s better, actually, for places that get scaly– not eczema, just trouble spots, you don’t need me to share with you which spots I’m talking about, believe me. It also seems to reduce the appearance of cellulite (okay that’s a hint, right?)  

And LORD, I thought BWC was expensive!

But there’s an AWESOME sale on BWC on drugstore.com and you can get free shipping if you order enough stuff.

I usually buy my skincare stuff with joint account funds– that is, money  my husband and I both contribute for shared bills. But the Ecco Bella, even with the huge savings, I just felt too guilty, and I bought it out of my own little nest egg.

On to drugstore.com… free shipping if you order enough, though their Peaceful Patchouli deodorant is 1/3 more expensive (6.29 or something) than on amazon.com (4.15 or something), I think the shipping savings makes up for it.

And one last frivolous purchase– in a strange twist since my extremely redneck and intolerant 20’s and early 30’s, I now love anything patchouli or sandalwood. But my little girl hates Kiss My Face Peaceful Patchouli Moisture Soap. 

One day she came to me just after washing her hands and I said you smell good. She said, I used the soap in the green bottle you had on your sink. That was the remnants of a bottle of Lush’s Tramp, watered down to stretch out what was left for hand washing.

My little’un has complained so many times– do I HAVE to use Kiss My Face?– that I determined to buy her some more Tramp. (I’ll defer telling her what Tramp means).

It is vegan, although the last time I looked it does contain SLS  unfortunately. But how often do we use it, and just on our hands… I went ahead and got her some, with my own funds from my own little nest egg as well. The shipping for it was slightly cheaper on Amazon… Lush has free shipping for orders over $100 but I don’t see myself spending $100 on anything at all any time soon.

I have on my wish list on amazon a book about make-at-home organic skin care. I may grab that some time soon. Wonder if what I make out of there will be cheaper or have results as nice as the stupidly expensive stuff I buy now?

Also I feel bad about adding to landfill problems. Those products are sold in teeny tiny little containers, so you run out quick, and have to toss the container, which may or may not be recyclable… I need to get that book. I will.

After I enjoy my Ecco Bella, BWC and Lush…

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