Mom made you eat your veggies for years, so return the love with vegetarian-friendly gifts this Mother's Day. Whether her diet is strictly vegetarian or just veggie-inclined, check out these lovely presents that will surely brighten her kitchen and her day!
Subscription to Vegetarian Times magazine -- Great recipes and fun eating ideas from a magazine that your mom will love all year long.
Mother's Day petit fours from Figis -- Who am I kidding? These are for any mom -- vegetarian, meat-loving, herbivorous, sweet-toothed... Olive and Rosemary Topiary Trees from Stonewall Kitchen -- A beautiful way to present a practical gift. These will look great anywhere, and come in handy when cooking with fresh herbs.
Bamboo steamer from WokShop -- Great for veggies, and anything else.
Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian from Amazon -- My favorite cookbook. Soon to be your mom's. Bittman offers easy recipes and plenty of suggestions for a well-balanced vegetarian diet.
Soy candles from Welcome-home Candles -- These yummy candles come in great scents, and since they aren't made from beeswax, they'll please even the most conscious vegan. Vegan baking mixes from Goodbaker -- Chocolate cake, oatmeal cookies, fudge frosting, multi-grain muffins...
Anyone have more ideas for the vegetarian Mom? Feel free to share!
So many of us are lactose intolerant these days, but there are so many milk substitutes that it's difficult to know where to turn! Find out where to go, and how to incorporate these substitutes into your cooking.
You know when you are eating your fourth tofu salad of the day for the eighteenth day in a row of this hell we call "diet before bikini season?" And on the salad there is a slab of stupidly healthy tofu that when you bite into it, you close your eyes and tell yourself it's actually a piece of chocolate cake?
These gorgeous cookies are Lolo's latest creation over at VeganYumYum. The delicate creations are definitely a labor of love - she baked them and then shaped them herself - but they look totally worth it.
I like Lolo's recipes because she takes chances with her food, swapping butter and whole milk for Earth Balance and soy milk and coming up with mouth-watering results. That's what she did with these cookies, substituting in Earth Balance and what she calls "flax egg," a mixture of ground flax seed and water, and then baking them and quickly shaping them when they came out of the oven.
Lolo filled her cookies with soy almond pudding and strawberries (and chocolate jimmies) but you could fill them with anything you wanted, or dip them in chocolate, or smother them in berries and cream...
What a fantastic idea: splitting waffles into individual squares and filling them with chutney! Genius.
The recipe comes to us from Vegalicious, and you'll find a recipe for the waffles as well as for the chutney.
Hmm - what if we can't find papayas? Perhaps mangoes would be a good substitute?
And just a reminder: this is most definitely a vegan recipe, so the recipe calls for "egg replacements" instead of eggs, as well as soy milk and soy margarine. And before you go changing the ingredients to real-milk products, try it vegan! You might just like it...
As it with most of my favorite cookbooks, I picked up my copy of The New Laurel's Kitchen at a thrift store about four years ago. I vividly remember buying it for a buck, because on that same trip I bought a 4 quart slow cooker that was priced at $3.99. I got something of a thrill that I didn't spend more than $5 that day.
Originally self-published in 1976, the revised edition was brought out ten years later by the Running Press. As cookbooks go, this one is an amazing resource. For those of us who are trying to get back to ways of cooking that include making our own yogurt, baking healthy loaves of bread that don't contain high fructose corn syrup and using lots of dried beans and legumes, this is a necessary book to have in your collection. I often turn to my copy when I need reminding as to the best way to cook barley or how to grow sprouts on my dining room window sill.
This book is far more than just a simple cookbook. It also contains sections about how to cook whole foods for children, the elderly, pregnant woman and people who are extremely active as well as offering advice on how to eat healthfully on a budget. It's not glossy, the only illustrations are two-color line drawings, but they are appealing in their simplicity. This is really a good book for those people out there who want to have more control over the foods that they and their families eat and lessen their dependence on pre-processed packaged foods.
101 Cookbooks was one of the very first blogs I started reading, way back in the fall of 2004, when I was first discovering the wonderful world of the blogosphere. I was thrilled when Heidi released her gorgeously photographed and thoughtfully written book, Super Natural Cooking, in 2007.
If you're looking for a way to incorporate more whole grains into your diet (as all the studies say you should), this is a great book to turn to. Not only are there lots of recipes that include whole grains (as well as natural sweeteners, super foods and greens), Heidi is careful to tell include an exhaustive section that details the benefits, cooking times and flavor palates of the different grains that she uses.
If that bowl of soup on the cover of the book looks tasty to you, you're in luck, as the recipe for it appeared on Design*Sponge a couple of weeks ago. It's for Spring Minestrone (how appropriate!) and sounds delicious.
Who ever said Easter feasts required big, slow-roasted birds? The creative folks behind What the hell does a vegan eat, anyway? featured a gorgeous seitan roulade for their holiday entree.
Like good vegans, they made their own seitan, the old-fashioned way - no store-bought stuff for them! If you're feeling ambitious (and have some time on your hands), the seitan recipe is here.
After making and rolling out the seitan, it was filled with mushrooms and kale, rolled up, and baked for 25 minutes at 350 degrees F. The best part? Instead of twine, they used these cute reusable silicone ties to secure the roulade while it baked. They added some mushroom gravy at the end, which looked great, but I'm sure it tastes delicious plain, as well. Although if you're not gonna eat gravy with Easter dinner, when are you gonna eat gravy? Just sayin', is all.
My dream is that these lovely people will welcome me into their home and adopt me and offer to cook for me every night. But until that happens, I'll just keep featuring their awesome recipes.
I'd just gotten into my winter vegetable routine - roasting acorn squash halves with mustard and maple syrup, braising cabbage with caraway seeds and a dash of apple cider vinegar, grating endless bags of carrots for sweet-and-sour carrot and raisin salads. And now, here we are, spring again. Lamb's lettuce, tentative chives, delicate asparagus. So why not take advantage of the season with a simple, springtime vegetable recipe?
Here's a recipe for marinated early spring vegetables, adapted from chef Phil West of Range in San Francisco. Lightly cooked asparagus, turnips, artichokes, beets, and carrots are tumbled in a shallot, green garlic, and champagne vinegar vinaigrette. I'd have this for lunch with a hunk of bread and butter, or serve it before a main course of salmon or a simple lamb chop.
This photo on Apartment Therapy definitely called my name. "Elllllllen..." it whispered. "Bloooooggggg about meeeee...."
Making a mental note to lay off the hallucinogens, I decided to relay the recipe. Apartment Therapy offers it as a "low-fat, no cream" alternative to heavier, creamier pasta sauces, but I saw it as a great vegan option, and a welcome reprieve from pesto or marinara. AT uses butter and beef or chicken stock, but you could easily use Earth Balance or veggie/faux chicken stock, and omit the Parmesan, or use one of the many awesome soy or rice-based cheeses.
Mmm, French toast. It's one those perfect weekend breakfast (or brunch) foods. But what if you don't eat eggs? The test kitchen over at Bakers Banter has come up with a recipe for making the breakfast delight.
Someone asked the King Arthur Flour blog how to make French Toast for a person with egg allergies, and they jumped right on it. I haven't tried it, but everything looked good on the post. The recipe itself is based on some tapioca starch and half and half with flavorings.
Bakers Banter did say that this French toast doesn't taste egg-y (of course), but it does have a good look and texture for the breakfast food. If you have someone who doesn't eat eggs for some reason, this might be a great new breakfast tradition for you to start.
A NY-dwelling vegetarian friend of mine (shameless plug: he blogs for a few of our sister sites and you should go read his stuff here and here) mentioned that he visited a new veggie fast-food joint the other day.
Zenburger, a burgeoning healthy burger restaurant that currently exists in California and New York's Midtown Manhattan (and recently started taking online orders), definitely sounds intriguing. They carry all of your typical fast food fare, but with a twist: it's all vegetarian (though not all vegan). The store is a spin-off of Zen Palate, a NY-based Japanese veggie restaurant.
The only odd-seeming part about the place is that the fact the offerings are all veggie isn't immediately apparent from their menus or the store itself. (Apparently, one is supposed to devise that "zen" actually means "faux," which would make dishes like "ZenBeef Burger" and "ZenChicken Sandwich" more obvious).
Brad ordered the ZenHarvest Burger (a veggie burger with homemade hummus, lettuce and tomato on a whole-grain hoagie) with a side of fries, and said he was pleased, but not overly impressed with the food - it was the clean, uncrowded restaurant with plenty of seating that really appealed to him. The place also offers dairy-free "milk"shakes, and Vegenaise alongside its faux tuna sandwich.
And did it produce a zen-like state? According to Brad, not a bit. "It felt like Burger King, except I could eat everything on the menu," he said.
Nope, not cupcakes - sausages. Over the past week or so, I've noticed a preponderance of vegan sausage recipes, of all things, flooding the blogs I frequent. I'm not sure how or why the sensation arose, but I'm glad it did - vegan sausage should indeed be celebrated.
A lot of my carnivore friends have tried the Morningstar and Boca brand veggie sausage links (and patties), and raved about them, saying that the spices are just perfect and even the consistency is spot on. So, not only are vegan sausages a tasty protein source for veggies, but you could potentially sneak them into a meat-lover's chile and they would be none the wiser...
I decided to compile all of the latest vegan sausage recipes I could find, so that you could taste the spicy, indulgent treats for yourself. They might look a little strange, but don't worry, they won't take away any of your carnivorous cred.
I wasn't always a breakfast person. That's changed in the last few years as I've discovered how much better I feel after having a substantial breakfast. Unfortunately, there are some tough choices to make. Most traditional breakfast foods are either all carbs or high in fat, or so it seems. I know there are good choices too, but the bad ones seem easier.
A researcher at the University of Illinois is working on changing that. She is on the tail end of creating a cereal made with as much soy protein as can be packed into it without having off flavors or textures. Apparently those are common problems when working with soy. The cereal also passes the FDA test to claim high fiber and high protein. The developer also worked to make the cereal low in fat.
Sounds great to me, if it tastes good. The researcher says that while it does need to be tweaked, the cereal has compared well with other healthy cereals already on the market in taste tests.
Well, I don't even know if this cereal will ever happen or if it's real in the first place. I do think it sounds promising, though. So what do you think? The perfect breakfast or ...something else?
Kashi, a company once known for its hippy-dippy, fiber-rich cereals with cheesy names (Heart-to-Heart and Good Friends immediately come to mind), has ditched its nerdy image and now boasts everything from cookies to crackers to frozen pizza.
The company's website even highlights a few recipes that (obviously) prominently feature its products. And like the store bought stuff, the recipes are deceptively healthy. (They even offer full nutrition info, if you're into that sort of thing).
The recipes range from stuffing to smoothies, but one that caught my eye was the Blueberry Almond bars, the stars of the recipe being the Heart-to-Heart Wild Blueberry and Oat Flakes and the GOLEAN Crunch! Honey Almond Flax cereals. Simple recipe tweaks, like adding tofu and soy milk and replacing white flour with wheat, make it the perfect guilt-free breakfast, snack or dessert.
It sits alone and untouched at the end of a long buffet table -- a bowl full of apples and bananas, maybe a seedy orange tossed in as an afterthought. Don't let your fruit salad meet this awful fate, spruce it up instead!
I'd just gotten into my winter vegetable routine - roasting acorn squash halves with mustard and maple syrup, braising cabbage with caraway seeds and a dash of apple cider vinegar, grating endless bags of carrots for sweet-and-sour carrot and raisin salads. And now, here we are, spring again. Lamb's lettuce, tentative chives, delicate asparagus. So why not take advantage of the season with a simple, springtime vegetable recipe?
Creating the ultimate Mother's Day gift for the carnivorous mom
Create less clutter with your Mother's Day gifts
Gifts for the vegetarian (or vegetable-loving) mom
