Sip, sup and siesta like a Spaniard for 7 days on the ultimate food adventure!

Share your best travel recipe to go on a culinary assignment to Spain.

Wouldn't this be an amazing adventure?!?! I came across this contest on Twitter today. All you foodies get on it and enter! I'm excited about anyone winning this contest, and you should be too, because the winners have to blog daily about their adventure, so everyone will be able to be part of the adventure.
Here are some details from the website:

We’re looking for three culinary explorers to embark on food-fuelled assignments to uncover the local recipes, techniques and attitudes that make Spain a seriously celebrated food destination.

This is your opportunity to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to learn from the producers, chefs and home cooks that are so passionately dedicated to Spanish cuisine. You could be scoffing churros and preparing patatas bravas in Madrid, cooking fideuàs and indulging in crema Catalana in Catalunya or perfecting a tortilla Espanola and gulping gazpacho in Andalucia - all right alongside the locals.

What the judges are looking for

We are looking for three culinary anthropologists to explore the history, traditions and social habits that define Spain's cuisine.
The three winning foodies will discover the techniques, the ingredients and the influences that make food from the Iberian Peninsula truly mouth-watering and unique - through visiting the sources and cooking alongside the local people.
Does this sound like your type of gig? Then it is up to you to convince our judging panel through your recipe, story and essay that you have the spirit of adventure and passion for food to be chosen for this opportunity. We will be looking for:

• a unique, drool-worthy, tried-and-tested recipe (with accompanying photos of the dish, cooked by you)
• a great story behind your recipe
• strong eye for detail
• a compelling reason why we should send you to Spain

What you'll be doing

Each food explorer will keep a daily blog on World Nomads documenting their culinary experiences in Spain featuring stories, photos and recipes from the road.
You could be preparing pisto in Madrid, trying the world famous jamon serrano in Andalucia or whipping up the perfect allioli to go with lunch under the shade of an olive tree in Catalunya.
While on assignment, all of the winners’ experiences will be filmed by an accompanying cameraman. That means if you win, you must be comfortable having every bite captured on film.

What are you waiting for? Go enter! Oh, you can do that here by the way.

A Vegan Feast

Last night, my husband and oldest daughter made dinner together. My sweet daughter did ask me if she should make her dish with vegan cheese so I could eat it (a cauliflower/broccoli bake- can you imagine? maybe it would work with Daiya Cheese (???), but certainly not the regular non-melty kind!). In the end, there was actually nothing in the meal that I could eat, but I didn't have to cook. I decided to take a run to Planet Organic, our local health/organic store for some selections from the deli. I was not really having the best day, so I decided to splurge and pick anything and everything that looked good. I ended up spending $32, but I have enough for probably 3 meals and I had a lot of fun doing it. I could have had just as much variety for a lot less money if I had just paid a little bit of attention to prices. I also should have taken a picture of my plate last night as it was insanely full of everything (and I ate it all). Hopefully, the picture of all my (slightly depleted) containers will do just as well.





Here is a list of what exactly I got for those who are interested (clockwise starting with top left):
Roasted Veggie Salad, Southwestern Basmati Rice, Tofu Sesame Snacks, Emerald Sesame Kale, Sweet Potato Salad, and finally Vegan Chocolate Cake.

I feel so lucky to even have some place I can go to get foods like these. Imagine how much work it would be to give myself the same experience at home? I am hoping when I finally get out to one of my local Vegetarian/Vegan group potlucks, it might be a somewhat similar experience (minus the work and the cost).

Home-made Individual Pizzas

These can be a little messy to eat, but they are one of my favorite yum-factor meals. This is also one of those things you can make at the end of the week when you have lots of odds and ends veggies. The pizza in the picture below was made without vegan cheese (and tasted just fine), but I think I enjoy it just a touch more with the vegan cheese on the top. The pizza below has a crazy assortment of veggies. Let's see if i can remember them all. There are pineapple, mushrooms, green onion, garlic, jalapeno peppers, red bell peppers, mushrooms, black olives,an assortment of beans, parsley, and kale. There might be a couple more.

To make the pizza, you just cut up an assortment of veggies, grab a pita and spread some tomato sauce on it. Layer up your pizza with whatever you want. With this pizza, I drizzled a little more tomato sauce on the top because I didn't have the vegan cheese, but normally I would sprinkle some vegan cheese on the top. This is a very casual meal for me, so I don't really bother to remember a set temperature on the oven or cooking time, but this time I put it in at about 285 degrees and left it in for about 20 minutes.

Fresh Fruit Salsa

Here is a picture of my fresh fruit salsa. It is one of my favorite things to make because it is easy to remember what goes in it and quantities are not really that important. You take one mango, about 1/4 of a pineapple, juice of half a lime, about a quarter of a red onion and either some parsley or cilantro (probably about a quarter cup), and you have got yourself a salsa.

Thrive (with a plant-based diet)

Planet Organic is our local organic food store. I was shopping there a couple weeks ago and they had samples available of Vega Shake and Go Smoothie, created by Brendan Brazier. One serving is supposed to be 2 tbsp, and all you need to do is add some water, shake, and drink. That little serving has 3g of dietary fibre, 11g protein, 4% of your daily calcium, 30% of your daily iron, 2500 mg of omega 3-6-9 and 1 billion probiotic cultures. Nice.

I have been adding it to my blender smoothies instead of mixing it with water. it takes some of the pressure off to come up with foods to eat that will give me all that this smoothie does.

Brendan Brazier is a heavy-duty marathon runner and developed his vega drinks over a period of about 15 years while trying to reach peak body performance as an athlete, while maintaining a plant-based diet.

I am currently reading his book, Thrive, which I first heard about in Alicia Silverstone's book, The Kind Diet. I am really intrigued by the fact that Brendan began eating a plant based diet at the age of 15. My main thoughts at age 15 involved boys, more boys, a few more boys, maybe some alcohol, and scattered with thoughts of music. I long to have been a deep and mature teen who knew where they were going and had their priorities straight. I cannot even imagine being in that frame of mind back then, and so I am always interested in stories of people who accomplish things at young ages.

I am only about a third of the way through Thrive, but I loved this analogy of coffee drinkers so much that I must share it here.

I view coffee drinking as a form of credit, similar to shopping with a credit card. You get energy now that you don't actually have, then you pay for it later. When the 'bill' comes it might keep you down for a few days (unless you drink more coffee to put off the inevitable - kind of like paying off one credit card with another). You'll most likely pay a high interest rate as well, needing more time to recover than if energy were not 'borrowed'.(Thrive, Brendan Brazier, page 29)

Food, Inc.

I just finished watching this DVD. It was pretty powerful. I am a visual person, which is probably why an hour after finishing this DVD, I still feel nauseous. Funnily enough, I don't believe that the disturbing images that pop up throughout the documentary are what made me feel so sick. I think that the thought that big companies can get so powerful that they can control government, laws, and people is what really make me sick. The thought that "Mr.Average-Joe" can be doing what he does to make a living, possibly doing what his father did and his father before him, and that some big corporation can come along and squash him, put him out of business, ruin his life, destroy him, and there is basically nothing he can do about it. He can fight until his money runs out and then roll over, or he can choose to roll over sooner and escape with something to rebuild his life with. The absolute helplessness portrayed by some of these farmers (the ones that were actually brave enough to talk on camera) was so heartwrenching.

The main message of this documentary was that each one of us has the power to change these kinds of things. With every dollar we spend on food and every bite we put in our mouths, we are voting for the kind of food we want to see. I have been making some big changes in my life, but this video has inspired me to take a weekly trip to the farmer's market and learn about foods in season and try to put as much of my "vote" as I can in these types of foods.