Written by Sunny Subramanian | Since I recently vlogged about how to stylishly rock vegan clothes and accessories, I figured it only made sense to post a video showing y’all how to veganize the inside of your handbag, too. It’s as easy as can be and there’s no excuse not to do it!
Get rid of those nasty leather wallets, those icky, cruel, animal-tested cosmetics, and pack your purse with all kinds of fun and useful vegan goodies.
About Sunny: I’m an über-girlie, compassionate beauty junkie. Cupcakes are my favorite fruit; I even wrote a song about them. I have a mating call that snagged me a husband. I speak Kittese … almost fluently. I love writing and blogging, and I’m beyond stoked to be a part of peta2′s blog posse.
Last day of cooking school. If I was rocking more sleep (4 hrs last night) these days I would be feeling a bit better but I have not been able to get my beauty sleep this past week. And I am not one to have trouble sleeping soundly. Normally I am out like a light within minutes from my head touching that pillow. But, unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case here. It must be a combination of the haunted B&B I am staying at, the fact that the air conditioning unit in my room is right above my bed so the condensation from the heat f-ing drips on my head when I finally do fall asleep waking my ass back up, the insane amount of mosquito bites all around my right angle, the espressos (yes that is plural!), eating late and drinking like a f-ing alky. Ha! I wouldn’t change a thing though. It’s been wonderfully imbalanced and oh so wonderfully perfect. It’s important to shake things up a bit.
And so today we, of course, are ending this glorious week with a….FISH LUNCH! Oh yeah. Bring back those ‘shit’ eaters. I’m ready…Huh.
We go to the fish market and get the fish. Sticky. Fish markets are very very very stinky! But Silverstro reassures me that the fish were just caught and killed within the hour. ‘Great’, I say with a smile, ‘I’m gonna wait outside’.
Sweet beets combine with creamy avocados for this alluring, satisfying, and not to mention stunningly-colored soup.
Serves 4
For the Soup
4 Medium beets
1 Avocado, chopped
1 Lime, juiced
2 Cups water
3 Tbsp hemp seeds
1 Tbsp ground coriander
¼ tsp sea salt
Fresh cilantro leaves & black pepper for garnish (optional)
Instructions:
1. Roast: Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Trim the beets and remove stems and end. Individually wrap each beet in tin foil. Roast for 1 hour and allow to cool completely. Using a paper towel, rub off the beet skins. Chop coarsely.
2. Blend: Place the beets, avocado, lime juice, water, hemp seeds, coriander and sea salt in a blender. Blend until completely smooth.
3. Chill: Place soup into refrigerator, and allow to chill for a minimum of 30 minutes.
Serve: Pour into serving bowls and sprinkle with cilantro and black pepper if desired.
Today’s GreenChef’s video features L.A. based GreenChef David Anderson. He joins us again to make a traditional French Apple Tart. David specializes in a traditional French Menu, with a vegan twist. He is the owner/ chef of Madeleine Bistro, which was voted as one of the best eats in L.A.
Chef David and Boise take us all along for this caramelized pie journey. Yes you will need to pull out your flame torch, but beyond that, this is a simple quick recipe which may just become your favorite pie for the holidays. (recipe and photos after the jump)
When it comes to healthy living, I’m all or nothing. I love raw food, because it keeps me on track and feeling in control. Right before I even knew what this lifestyle was all about, I was a super junk food eating vegan. Like full on dinners of potato chips because, well, they tasted good and they were fairly natural, meat & dairy free. But healthy? Let’s get real. Overnight I decided raw was the way for me and haven’t looked back. Most importantly, I pushed through the transition and pumped my body full of as many greens as I could handle until I craved them as I once craved chips.
My lifestyle is rooted in pleasure—but not the kind of fleeting pleasure a bag of chips used to give me. This is a flow of pleasure. I love to go to the farmer’s market and hand pick every veggie, sniff the herbs and taste the ripe fruits. I adore creating in my kitchen. A little of this and a little of that = magic. As a life long foodie, you know I love to eat and indulge in all of the pleasures of gourmet raw food. But the most pleasure for me? I feel amazing. I don’t get sick, like ever. I’m completely blissed out. It’s deeply empowering.
This is crazy, how come I have never seen this site/video before. The WindowFarms project is a non-profit organization out of NYC, collaborating and designing gardens you hang in your window. They have over 13,000 members all working together to create new improved systems. This is so awesome, I am thinking even a plant killing dark monkie like me could get this right. Look how cute the founder is too. Right?
The windowfarms project approaches environmental innovation through web 2.0 crowdsourcing and a method called R&D-I-Y (research and develop it yourself). Big Science’s R&D industry is not always free to take the most expedient environmental approach. It must assume that consumers will not make big changes. Its organizational structure tends toward infrastructure-heavy mass solutions. A distributed network of individuals sharing information can implement a wide variety of designs that accommodate specific local needs and implement them locally. Ordinary people can bring about innovative green ideas and popularize them quickly. Web theorists like Clay Shirky claim that this capacity to “organize without hierarchical organization” will be a fundamental shift in our society brought about by the web over the coming decades.
Yes, friends, this is almost it. The Awaiting Table is coming to an end. It’s been so lovely but, I gotta tell ya, I am f-ing filled to the brim with food and wine. I need to stop f-ing eating and drinking! Ahhhhh… 1 dinner and 1 lunch to go…I think I can…I think I can…I think I can…okay…twist my arm…. :)
The temperature keeps rising here so we wanted to create the least amount of heat in the kitchen while making dinner. That was the plan anyway. But as you know, plans don’t always go as planned. Somehow I volunteered to make the eggplant over the hot stove. The dish shoulda been called eggplant with essence of Aria from all the sweat I dripped making them. And right next to me, Ted was sweating a big pan of yellow bell peppers and next to him Giuseppe was sautéing a pot of string beans…I mean…come on guys! This was probably the MOST heat we made in the kitchen!
The only thing that wasn’t creating any heat was a classic Leccese dish. It’s basically a bread salad with fresh vegetables. The difference is that they use a local dense hard bread to do it called, Frise Integrali. It’s cooked like a biscotti so it’s very hard and the only way they eat it is by soaking it in water to rehydrate it and then eat/use in recipes when soft. Am I the only one who finds that strange? I mean, why not just keep it soft in the first place? Well, I asked of course, and Silverstro informed me that this particular type of bread has been around for years and originally was eaten by field workers and those who travelled long distances because it doesn’t spoil. So they would pack the hard bread in their bag and when they got hungry travelling along the countryside, or working in the fields, they would forage some wild onions and tomatoes, what ever they could find and soak the hard bread in the fresh stream until soft and managia (that’s eat in Italian)! Well, I’ve tried it both ways and personally, I like it better crunchy. But then again, I’m American, so what do I know… :)
Last week we discovered GreenChef Chloe on VegNews and we posted her 4th of July dessert video. This week, we bring you her Vegan Avocado Pesto Pasta video (recipe link). This is a pretty simple and quick recipe, even I could imagine whipping this one up for dinner or lunch. Which means, I will be making this for sure in the next few days. If the recipes are too complicated, I tend to wait for a visiting greenchef to make them for me. I know, I am a very spoiled dark monkie.
Enjoy the video… and go checkout VegNews Magazine, they gave us an award a few years back. Best site to read at night, or something like that. No, I don’t know what that means either. Maybe we are too dark to be read during the day. Also, take a few minutes to see more recipes by Chef Chloe on her site, chefchloeblog.weebly.com
The brownie universe isn’t exactly full of surprises. The combination of sugar, butter, flour, chocolate, eggs, a few extraneous ingredients, plus a little oven time, inevitably leads to some form of brownie action. Of course, the resulting degree of deliciousness is all in the details — just talk to the adamant nut-adders, the chocolate chip enthusiasts, or the “fudgy” versus “cakey” people that can seemingly never agree. Yet, by and large, the language of brownies is pretty much the same: delicious chocolate squares that just about everyone loves. Including me.
But I have a secret. With the exception of chocolate (which can be profoundly beneficial in its unprocessed form), I don’t use any of the “conventional” ingredients in my homemade brownies. In fact, I don’t even bake them. (I know — what a rebel.) Instead, by using exclusively natural, whole foods, the inherently gorgeous flavor of each healthy ingredient does all the sweet singing — without needing the crutch of sugar or butter. Undercover health benefits like antioxidants, good omega fats, potassium, magnesium (and more) nutritionally rank this dessert as more of an energy bar than an “extra 20 minutes on the treadmill indulgence.” Best of all, five ingredients plus five minutes is all it takes to go from zero to brownie.
G / Food Fix Me Pumpkinseed Salad by GreenChef Sarma Melngailis
G / Design Boeing’s Phantom Eye, zero emissions liquid Hydrogen powered unmanned spy plane.
G / Travel Ten Best Foods for the Raw Food Traveler by GreenChef Omid
G / News GreenChef Sarma The Tweeting Addict Melngailis has got some Answers For All You Flesh Monkies
G / Design The worst idea ever! BrewDog bottles their exclusive expensive beer in side of the body of DEAD ANIMALS. What the F@ck. What’s next stuffed Baby Kegs?
G / Architecture The future city maybe be a floater! 50,000 inhabitants seeking refuge from rising waters due to global warming, are now calling the sea home!
G / Architecture Jetson Green has the scoop on the Expanded Toyota pre-fab home program. Yes, Toyota is making factory homes now. And they look awesome.
G / Architecture If you had $10 Million, would you buy this Modern Architecture Eye Candy in Toronto? I would have to really thinking about it, because oh my… juicy!
G / Food Mint Veggie Touiller Recipe on HLife, a health focused site, with some G Living inspire (maybe) layout, founded by two very hot smart woman.
G / Video Anna-Louise, Young Funny Brit living in New York City area takes on a 100 Juice Feast and makes a video journal about the experience. A must watch.
G / Biking Puma Bikes? Really I thought they made shoes or something. Well, turns out they make pretty awesome urbanist get your ass to work bike too. So sexy you just want to hang it on a wall.
G / Design Crude Awakening
G / Design Spock LED Lighting will blow you away. Think SyFi lighting, something designed for blade runner or Star Trek. I think the product video alone will make your day. I want some :(
G / Design Stylish Electric Vehicle Charging Stations by GE, TThe WattStation. The collaboration between GE Ecomagination and fuseproject has led to the GE WattStation.
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