When the moon hits your eye...

Just a quickie today.

Sometimes a girl just needs some junk food.

What's a better junk food than the good old stand- by pizza?

Some of my non-vegan friends argue that a pizza isn't a pizza without cheese. But I argue that that with the right combination of ingredients you don't need the fattiness of the unnecessary product.

Sure with a pizza, I could pick up the phone and argue with the person on the other end about how or why I don't want cheese on my pie and how I want extra sauce and some olive oil drizzled on it, but why put myself out?

I'll make it myself.

Now i could have been all Martha Stewart- like and made the dough myself ( and one of thee days I will post the awesome recipe i have for the GREATEST homemade dough in the world) but screw that. I want junk food and I want it NOW.

At more grocery stores you can by pre-baked , whole wheat pizza crusts with a package of sauce on the side. Perfect.

This is my combo for the BEST salty sweet pizza combo ever!

Green pepper

Green Olives

Lots of Minced Garlic

Onion

Pineapple

Extra Sauce.

Olive Oil.

Drizzle the oil on the pizza after it's cooked through. It should take about 10 minutes in the oven.

The sweetness of the pineapple is offset by the salty flavour of the olives.

Give it a try and you wont even remember the pizza didn't have cheese.

Off to a slow boil

My adventures this week involve a broken refrigerator and a slow cooker.

When I moved last week my landlord warned me the fridge may be on the fritz and, yes, he was correct.

Although, I am having a new one delivered on tuesday I deemed it necessary to use up all of the fresh vegetables I had while still having food to eat for the coming days.

What to do?

This led me to my vegan creation: Metta's Slow Cooker Chili

I had originally found a recipe online for a stovetop chili but it seemed rather watery and time consuming so i adapted it for the lazy person in me.

For this post I added mushrooms to the recipe. I don't like them at all so I left them out and doubled up on the peppers and broccoli. You can use whatever veggies you like for this.

3 cloves of garlic — crushed

1 tsp of garlic — minced

1 red onion 

1 green pepper

1 stalk of broccoli

4 stalks of celery

1 cup chopped mushrooms

1 cup of red kidney beans — drained

1 can diced tomatoes — drained

1 can of tomato paste

2 tbsp vinegar

2 tbsp lemon juice

olive oil

1 package of Yves "Italian" veggies ground round or whole wheat rotini

chili powder

cajun powder

cayenne powder

salt

pepper

Saute the onion and garlic with half of the spices you intend to use in a pan for a few minutes. Add the tomato paste before adding the onion, garlic and paste to cooker.

Add the diced tomatoes.

Mix in the rest of your veggies and add a bit more spices ( just a bit. You can add more later if you like. Take it slow — You're going to simmer this shit, so don't go overboard.)

NOTE* — Don't go crazy with the salt. There should be enough sodium with the tomatoes but you can add more later if you want. Makes sure all of the veggies are covered with the tomatoes.

Add vinegar, lemon juice and kidney beans and a dash more of  all of the spices. Set the cooker on low and let it simmer for as long as possible.

I like to let it simmer for at least an hour before adding the ground round.

Add the "meat". Stir. If you find it's too think you can add up to a 1/3 cup of water — NO MORE ( you're no making a fucking stew.) You may want to consider adding a bit of olive oil at this point too to replace the fat that will be missing from the chili as the "meat" will be missing that gross run off from regular ground round.

Add the rest of the spices to taste.

Let it simmer for as long as you want.

Serve with your favourite bread and enjoy!

recipes serves 4

Note: If you are going to use pasta: I would under cook it slightly before adding it to the chili as w/w pasta takes a bit loner to cook. You can probably bypass this step if you are going to let this chili simmer for hours. In that case add the pasta at the beginning.

Old MacDonald had a farm and all his daughters were vegan.

I'm in the mood to talk about food.

With my recent change into Veganism, I thought it best to share one of the websites I have found that have made this transition relatively easy and painless.

 VegWeb.

This site is looks clumsy at first glance but when one starts to navigate it you come to realize it is made for users by users.

Recipes are added daily, with a vegetarian/vegan option for pretty much anything you can think of. Mock Fried Chicken? No problem. A hearty chili for a cold winter's day? Type it into the search and you'll be serving up bowls in no time.  Chocolate loving vegans get their fix with many items on deck, such as the five Star Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie ( shown above).     

All of the recipes are rated by users and have comments by other vegetarians on additions or substitutions to the recipes. 

In addition, a forum is offered for those who need to know just where the heck to get nutritional yeast as well as many other helpful topics.

My standby recipe from that sight is one for Easy Pancakes submitted by user Sarah Hoff:

2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

2 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons baking powder

1 tablespoon salt

2 1/2 cups of soy milk or water

(optional: dash of cinnamon)

               

My little addition that I like to add is when I am feeling like a dessert is to add some cocoa powder and about a 1/4 cup of sugar and and another 1/2 cup of water ( or to consistency). This makes a delicious chocolate pancake. I discovered it one a whim when I had to use up some old baking ingredients. I have been making them ever since.

So head on over and start cooking or baking or just browse. Be warned though: Once you start making these easy recipes it's hard to stop.

Fill it up with petroleum distillate, post haste!

Ahoy hoy!

My name is Jennifer, but for readership sake and the sake of my internet anonymity, lets call me Metta.

I hate writing about myself but I certainly like to ramble about either the odd day to day things that make up my life or the blow off the steam that fills this volatile head of mine sometimes.

I shall start with that wonderful day of gluttony we call Thanksgiving or , as we in my family like to call it, "Turkey day."

Now I could go on about the history about the day but I will go on about my favourite part – the food.

Food – my secret lover. For years our relationship has been on a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, diets and binges, weeks of salads over breadsticks  and days of poptart breakfasts followed by neat and tidy popcorn dinners.

Let me frame the situation by saying I, in no means, am ever going to be a size zero, but when I stepped on the scale again a month ago I almost hit the floor. I am not going to say the exact weight right now, but let me tell you if I continued the way I was going I was swiftly on my way to becoming one of those people you see that need the wall of their house torn down when they die just to bury them in a piano box.

So I immediately set up an appointment with a dietician. I knew that If i was going to loose weight I couldn't crash diet. I needed to go slowly and make small changes. I explained my situation to her and she understood.

She told me I wasn't eating enough. Go figure.

I took the small of advice she gave me and made the small changes. Soon the weight started to come off and I quickly dropped 10 pounds.

Then came "Turkey Day."

I figure one cheat day wouldn't hurt.

I don't eat meat so I forwent the actual turkey itself and helped myself to all the trimmings: Vegetables, potatoes, stuffing, and pie – Oh my! The Pie.

I knew I was full when I reached for that first piece but it was my mother's apple pie, so I needed two full helpings.

Now I felt gross.

I relinquished myself to my room to relax and settle my stomach, only to soon to hear the inner workings of my digestive system soon going into overdrive. "This can't be good," I thought.

I drank some water and fell asleep.

Big meals, I find, give you some odd dreams. I can't remember exactly what I was dreaming about but It involved a fishing boat and an easy bake oven. Enough said.

All of a sudden I was woken up with a feeling of nausea. The room was spinning and I felt like I had been drugged.

I pushed my dog ,who was nestled comfortably in the crook of my legs, off my bed in a hurried attempt at getting to the lavatory in time. In an instant my glorious Thanksgiving dinner revisited my senses in a wafting blaze of glory. This is punishment. This is evil. This is overeating.

My point is that I used to eat like that a lot. The portions I ate at Thanksgiving meal wasn't so grotesque looking that people would stare. It was what most people would consume.

I think my body has just gotten used to eating less amounts and less fat– and that's a good thing. 

I guess it goes to show that just because something tastes good going down doesn't necessarily mean your body is going to like it. I was shown exactly that the other night.

Oh and for the record: No matter how good the pie is, it doesn't taste nearly as good the second time around.