VegFest 2010!!!

So we went to the amazing and wonderful stuff-your-face-fest on April 11th at the Seattle Center and these are just a few of the highlights.....

Us nomming on one of the many ice cream samples....

Our first stop was Harbor Creek Farms which has a delicious mushroom strudel and a cranberry horserasdish relish/chutney/spread that we really liked. This was a brand we hadn't seen anywhere before, but hopefully becomes available soon!

The most epic of Vegfest booths, Field Roast. They used their meatloaf to make sloppy joes, tacos, and sliders depending on what time you stopped at the stand.

The lovely volunteers who dished us up our Field Roast. Field Roast is seriously amazing and our favorite store-bought "meat" product out there. Try the chipotle sausages if you haven't already!

Native Kjalli's sauces were amazing. We especially liked the Roasted Mole sauce. The Coconut Ginger and Peanut Sauces were good as well, but a little too similar to homemade versions we already make.

Two Leaves and a Bud Tea Company. Not only was this lady super friendly, but her tea was super delicious. We are both tea drinkers and were very impressed. Tea-rrific if you will.

Dave's Killer Bread. Becca finally got to try the SinDawg bread which is basically a giant cinnamon roll with seeds on the outside. Which means it's healthy. That's Dave there with his back to us with the flowing silver locks. Their bread is seriously the shit. And every kind is vegan!

The Sea Salt Superstore in Lynnwood was here with every flavor of salt you could think of and a bunch you would never think of.

Mighty O Donuts. The holy grail of VegFest. We missed this the first walk through and began to panic. Fortunately, we eventually found it because those sneaky donut devils were hiding right in the very front. Which we missed when we walked in because we may have still been a little drunk from the night before. Oops. Anyway, long story short we heart Mighty O mucho. Thanks for letting us take way more than our share of samples. By us I mean Becca.

Viana, a German company, is going to start popping up in the US.  We tried chicken nuggets, chicken filets, cowgirl steaks, and a few other things. It seemed like a really good product that you could season yourself and use in lots of different recipes.

Us getting excited about our awesome goody bags that we got by renewing our Vegetarians of Washington memberships. For only $20 you get a years subscription to Vegetarian times, a buttload of coupons, and this giant bag filled with nomnoms. I'm talking two loaves of bread, tofu, kombucha, tea, and a bunch of other snacks that were worth more than twenty bucks on their own. My bag had double of everything on accident so double win for me, suckers. We also got Lucy's cookies which neither of us had tried yet. We got the sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies and they were both delicious. Lucy's cookies are all vegan and I think gluten-free too and are available at Starbuck's!

So we tried this almond, rice, agave ice cream made by Heaven Sent and it was really good. BUT their logo and label is the biggest hippiefest pastel rainbow gay pride parade ridiculousness ever. I think it's also a christian brand or something too, which adds to the weirdness. SO. Good ice cream, but we had to make fun of it obviously. As you can see, the sunflowers had moustaches. Because I always associate my vegan desserts with sunflowers and moustaches.

So that was VegFest in a nutshell. I'll go ahead and list some of the other products we really liked that we didn't manage to get pictures of. This year I just brought a notebook to write down all of our favorites in so I didn't end up with a zillion little business cards and fliers.

Punjab Snacks

Caravel Gourmet-salts and spices (at Sea Salt Superstore)

Sheffa snack mixes

Marilyn's nut butters (the pistachio with fennel was especially good)

Alter Eco quinoa chocolate bars

Viovi blood orange juice

Truitt Brothers vegan chili

Moo Moo's vegetarian cuisine

So all in all, a super fun day. Although we were totally disappointed with the lack of vegan cheese. No Sheese, Cheezly, Daiya, or Teese. WTF. We were really hoping for the new Tofurky Daiya frozen pizza. There seemed to be overkill on drinks and snack mixes. So next year I propose VegancheeseFest unless VegFest decides to step up their game.

Apple-blueberry Crisp

This was an afterthought.  We used frozen blueberries and pink-lady apples from our share!! Turned out amazing....again, loosely got this recipe from Vegan Baking, and followed it pretty closely but we were both too tired to really measure so everything was eyeballed.  it was bomb....I'll try to load the pictures from my camera later, because the crust was a thing of beauty, and the heap on my plate doesn't really do justice too, but the apples and blueberries were just tart enough to make the topping not too sweet.....perfect.  I'l.l actually eat this too, usually I can't get through the sweet stuff.
-bekks

CSA Soup

This was dinner tonight. We are picking up our CSA share tomorrow and realized we still had a shit ton of stuff from last week that we needed to use up. This soup is loosely based on the Potato-Leek soup from You Won't Believe It's Vegan.
We used :
- 4 leeks, halved and sliced thinly
- 2 small white onions, diced
- 2 medium anonymous local potatoes that we don't know the name of, medium chop
- a shit ton of minced garlic (it is possible that Taylor dropped the container in the pot)
- about a tablespoon dried dill (we gradually added it to taste)
- 2 tablespoons lemon juice
- 2 teaspoons red pepper flakes (we  like it spicy so use your judgement)
- 6 cups veggie broth (we used 4 cups low-sodium boxed and 2 cups water with Rapunzel  sea salt herb boullion cubes)
- salt and white pepper to taste
- 2 cups fresh spinach

1 tbsp olive oil and 2 leeks cooked til brown and set aside.  2 tbsp olive oil and the other two leeks, halved and sliced thinly, the two onions, and the shit ton of garlic sauteed until soft and browned.  Then we added the potatoes and the veggie broth, brought to boil, simmered for 15 minutes.  Seasoned w/ the dill, salt and pepper, and red pepper flakes.  Then we busted out the immersion blender, pureed everything, tasted, decided it needed some lemon juice, and thought we'd throw in some spinach for kicks.  Pureed again...and then.....topped w/ a scoop of tofutti cream cheese and the browned leeks from earlier. 

We ate the soup w/ some mixed greens from the farm share, that we threw some salad fixin's on and topped w/ some sourdough croutons we toasted up while the soup was cooking! Overall pretty healthy, I think, and super tasty!  The garlic actually wasn't overpowering, at least not now....Taylor's boyfriend is coming over pretty soon so he'll let us know either way then! We are now drinking wine and waiting for a apple blueberry crisp to finish cooking. If you bitches are lucky you will hear about it later.

Daiya Chz Pizza

Taylor's first Daiya chz experience happened this year! We're pretty excited about it. I tried it a couple times back in November, when I was in Phoenix, and wasn't horribly impressed, but Turnpike Pizza http://www.turnpikepizza.com in Seattle carries it now, so we gave it a try... Fucking BOMB!! Go Turnpike for having Daiya...pretty sure it's the only restaurant in Seattle right now to have it...? (taylor will correct me if I'm wrong) We got the Greenlake and the Mojave, but I think all these picts are the Greenlake...oh that's right, vegan pesto drizzled all over the top, baby!! artichoke hearts, sundried tomato, i took the liberty of covering it in red pepper flakes....amazing crust......heaven!! The picture below is what it looked like before I started gnawing on it and covering it in hotness!! Online, I don't think their menu says anything about daiya, but in the store, the menu tells which pizzas you can sub it on, and which ones can be made veg. The Mojave pizza we got was supposed to have chicken, garlic, bell pepper, spicy peppers, and an olive oil base. . .it was good. They had some marinated tofu to take the place of the chx, which I didn't really think was that necessary, and I think maybe they were out of the spicy peppers, cuz it didn't seem spicy at all, it was good. . .but the Greenlake rocked my world!

Heaven. . .

SMashWiches!!

So I know there's really nothing special about this, but we started this blog forever ago and haven't added anything, so I was thinking it's time to just get my feet wet and go with it!!

And that's why you get to hear about what I had for lunch....

I started w/ some Dave's Killer Bread and covered one side with some tofutti and the other side w/ the Wayfarer brand Hickory-smoked Cheddar spread. (in my personal opinion the only flavor of the four I've seen, worth trying-it tastes like bacon-ched cheese whiz:) I added some slices of baked tofu because I literally had nothing in my fridge for fillins', and then i threw some spinach and red onion in there. Taylor and I are part of a CSA this spring so it's greens up to our ears right now....pretty much everything I eat is on a bed of spinach or stuffed with spinach!

Anyway, then in the true style of a Smashwich, I buttered both sides and fried that shit!! and then i took 3 pictures and stuffed my face! It was good...I wish I had had something else to put in the middle, but it did slip me into a food coma and I took a 3 hour nap on my couch right after that.

So there you go....first official post, and like 3 paragraphs about a sammy!