quick hit: Whole Foods carrying Daiya starting tomorrow!

BIG NEWS, vegans! Starting April 1st (that's tomorrow!), Whole Foods stores nationwide will carry Daiya. Daiya is the best vegan cheese I have ever eaten, hands down. It tastes delicious, melts, and even strings the way dairy cheese does. If you haven't had the chance to try it, you are in for a treat. I am so excited to be able to get it when I'm home this summer! Look at the fancy new packaging, too!

ingenuity in cheese and chips

Food science, especially when something vegan is involved, will never cease to amaze me. They can make mock snails from wheat (seitan) and ice cream from hemp and that's all well and good, but now they can make cheese out of oatmeal! OATMEAL. WTF. It's made of oatmeal and it's really good and tastes cheesy! My parents didn't raise a liar.

I heard about We Can't Say It's Cheese a few months ago, but, honestly, there are so many brands of vegan cheese out there, a name like that just doesn't cause one to drop the Daiya/Cheezly/etc. The other night I was at the grocery, planning to make quesadillas and not being able to find vegan sour cream (boo Market of Choice, boo). Near the regular sour cream was this fine product. Oh! Recognition! Intrigue! "Mexi-Cheddar"! Sounded like it would go equally well with quesadillas, so that was that. 

This stuff is really good! It is a little thicker and milder than non-vegan jarred queso dip, but overall it's very similar and has a good flavor. It reminded me of a queso-style dip someone made at a vegan potluck a few years ago from Jo Stepaniak's Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, if that means anything to you. Overall I can't think of any way to improve it without veering too far into territory of "This tastes so much like what it's a vegan version of, it's kinda gross" (e.g. ricemilk tastes too much like cow's milk to me, so I hate the taste). Hooray oatmeal cheese!

WCSIC (oh, name it something else) in the bowl, being tasty

yum! A segway into the other part of this post.....make your own tortilla chips! You don't need a deep fryer or anything fancy (other than yourself). Cut a tortilla into eighths, spray a cookie sheet with baking spray, and put it in a 350F oven for ten minutes or so. So much healthier than fried, probably cheaper than buying bagged tortilla chips, and they have better flavor. DO IT. 

a few of my favorite things

Lately, I've been enjoying:

1) Clif Kids fruit twist things

I had never seen these before first semester, but my roommate loves them and always has them around. She loves them because the three-year-old she babysits back home loves them, but this is a case of all paths to enlightenment being valid. They are like beef jerky, if beef jerky tasted like fruit instead of dead animal, if it had a texture between fresh and candy instead of greasy, if it were associated with the children of food-conscious parents and not fourteen-year-old boys.
It's shaped like beef jerky. Anyway, they are really good and come in flavors from Strawberry to Tropical and apparently one is a full serving of fruit. These have been tossed into my backpack many a time this semester.

2) Tao of Tea Moroccan Mint

Tao of Tea is a tea house here in Portland, and my school's dining hall has two of their teas. This is my go-to beverage when the soymilk machine is broken. It is a green tea with a full body and a very mellow, refreshing, not overwhelming mint flavor. I've not yet made it out to the tea house itself, but I want to. Now I am thirsty.

3) the banjo
So this isn't vegan-related, but being vegan makes me happy, as does the banjo. Connection made. More and more people who play the banjo have been coming into my life lately. I love the instrument! I have been realizing over the past year or so how much I really do like music with twang. More from the folk end (e.g. early Dar Williams) than country, but twang nonetheless. Last night I was hanging out with my friend Leah, who is teaching herself the banjo, and she taught me a few cords. 1) Playing the open strings is a chord on the banjo. 2) It's so much smaller than the guitar and you don't feel like you have this massive block of wood demanding that beautiful noises be produced from it immediately when you play it. 3) It's so much fun just to pick. I love music but my brain is just formatted to be literary. I am amazed at people who can jam, who can just flow into things that they make up and that sound good. But it's fun just to mess around and to sing. When I had a car in high school I would sing all the time, but now that I don't I've been realizing how little I do and how I wish I did more. An old friend had a bumper sticker on his car that said 'The more I sing, the better I feel' - very true. I think this summer when I have more time to learn I'm going to try to find a used banjo on craigslist and see what comes of it.

4) Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar


I've blogged before about the pumpkin brownies from this book, but last night I used the sugar cookie recipe in it to make cookies for the Vagina Monologues here on campus. Finally! A vegan sugar cutout cookie recipe that works! One Christmas my mom was making holiday cookies and I just gave her the first sugar cookie recipe I found from VegWeb. Now, I adore VegWeb and some of my favorite recipes are there, but for some reason these were just - weird. But Isa&Terry's were, as everything from their cookbooks, reliably delicious.

What have you been eating/drinking/using/reading/enjoying lately?

vegan coat patrol

The vegan winter coat is one of the most elusive things in the world. Oh, you can find coats that are vegan, sure. But ones that will actually keep you warm while being at last somewhat fashionable? Oy, not so much. It's that time of year again. It seems like every vegan I know, regardless of how long they've been vegan, goes into "Shit I need a good coat!" mode as soon as the first leaf falls. There's very little effort to make or market coats specifically to vegans, and looking through tag after tag for the absence of wool and down can be a neverending chore. Why can we buy vegan haggis (and Tofurky soda), but no decent coats? Having just moved to a much colder, wetter climate, I needed a new coat in so many ways. When I first went vegan I got this one from the Vegan Store. A vegan peacoat you say? Peacoats are warm and cute, yes? Um, no. I would recommend this one if you are a man living in a relatively warm climate. It says they have unisex sizing, but by that they mean "Hi females. Here is a fleece rectangle." It's cut like a refrigerator box, not flattering at all for us ladyfolk. And as for warmth: it's not bad, but not terribly good. Meh. If it ever dances towards freezing where you live, look elsewhere. And the Polartec fleece would not hack it at all if you live, like me, somewhere with a wet winter. When it gets wet, it gets wet and kind of...filmy. If you're a man who doesn't see much snow, you'd probably be very happy with this, if not, not.

This year, however, I have this one from Columbia and I love it!



Don't I look happy and warm? (That's not me.) It does keep me happy and warm though. It has a nice thick Polartec layer on the inside that can zip in and out, making it work as both a winter coat and something of a heavy-duty windbreaker. It hasn't gotten too cold here yet, but so far I've been nothing but toasty. I have it in a light/dark blue & white combo that isn't on the website, and it's cute. The outer layer is waterproof and it has a detachable hood, musts for the Pacific NW. There are also stealth pockets on the inside for being sneaky. I am really happy with this coat and think that I'm finally out of the endless vegan coat search. It is a little pricey, but I think it's worth it to have a high quality coat, and I'm sure it will last me several years at least. Columbia also has a lot of outlet stores, so if you can find one near you, do it, I got this for about half the price.

As for other vegan coats, sportswear brands like Columbia, North Face, etc. are, though pricey, promising. While a lot of their coats do have wool and down, they are designed for being X-TREEM in the winter and thus aren't 100% wool like peacoats, because that doesn't protect you from the spray you get as you schoop down a black diamond ski slope. Or so I would imagine. My home state of Kansas is not notorious for its skiing. Anyway, they like to use manmade materials with names like Opti-Warm and Microtemp to show they are approved by Science.
Here are a few other vegan ones I've found:
the Zurich Parka from Columbia

the High Jump Parka from Columbia

the Bugaboo from Columbia

Boulevard Jacket from North Face

Ava Insulated from Merrell

Amber Road Coat from ModCloth - a friend just got this one and describes it as "not that warm, lighter than I expected", but it's so cute!

The interwebs are your friends. All of them. Stay warm, vegans!