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.

Have You Heard of Bloglovin' ?

I am trying to streamline my life a little bit. This weekend I worked on getting my email inbox to a manageable size. I worked on it one day last weekend and quite a bit this past holiday weekend. I started with an unbelievable 5012 emails in my inbox, and managed to get it down to just over 1100 emails. It is obviously still a work in progress, but I'm super pleased with what I accomplished so far.

One thing that I did that will help my inbox from getting so bloated again, is to conglomerate all of my blog subscriptions into one email. I subscribed to all of my favourite blogs on Bloglovin' and now I get just one email with a list of all the new posts from my favourite blogs. Click Here if you would like to follow my blog with Bloglovin'. Bloglovin' is also very helpful in that, every time you follow a blog, it will send you an email with some suggestions of similar blogs you might want to follow.

Eyes Changing Colour Because of Diet?!?!?

A friend of mine started juicing a while back. She thought green drinks looked and tasted gross and was not excited about it at all. She was amazed at how her tastes started changing as she continued with her juicing challenge and she came to enjoy the juicing. That one juicing challenge led to her making quite a few permanent changes in her life. At one point she noticed that her eyes seemed to have changed colours. She was in disbelief and went searching for answers. It turns out eyes changing colour due to diet is "a thing". I will see if I can get her to share her complete story with you at one point, because there are actually some other interesting changes that happened to her because of her change in diet and lifestyle, but for now I will leave you with these videos I found of others who found that their eyes changed colour because of their diet.

Padmanadi- yummies in Edmonton, Alberta

I have so many pictures and adventures to blog over the past two years! Let's hope this post is the start of some wonderful back-tracking.


On Father's Day, my crazy wonderful hubby, was driving around and we were deciding where to go to eat. Remember this is Father's Day, so it should be somewhere special for him, right? You know the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat? Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean? If I just tweaked that slightly, I could make it describe my hubby and I.


How 'bout this?


The man-man could eat no plants,
his wife could eat no animals.


What? Not very catchy? I'll do better next time.


Anyway...I catch on a little before he gets there where he is going. There is a great little vegan/vegetarian restaurant called Padmanadi in our home-base that I had never been to. He chooses Father's Day to go there for brunch! Awww, yup that was pretty selfless and sweet of him.


I don't think he enjoyed the food very much, but I hope we were good company.





He ordered a side of fake meat to ease the pain. smile.





This was the meal of one of my girls.








The man and I both had a version of eggs benedict. The man had a kind of thai version and I had something that was close to original. I was very excited about this as eggs benedict was one of my favourite things before going vegan. Padmanadi's vegan version was yummy. The sauce was more tangy than creamy, but this substitution will do just fine in keeping my mind off of any cravings for non-plant based eggs benedict.
I don't get out much when at home, but I hope I won't wait too long before returning here. I would love to try their regular menu. I spied some pretty tempting stuff on there I would love to try.

On CNN Tonight

I have just heard word that Dr. Esselstyn is scheduled to be on CNN tonight in a segment entitled "The Last Heart Attack". The show is supposed to air at 9pm and 12pm ET, 6 and 9pm PT. I won't be able to watch as I have tickets to a concert with friends, but I hope some out there will be able to see it.

For those that have to miss it, here is a CNN Dr. Esselstyn preview. In the preview, Dr. Esselstyn actually goes as far as saying eating a plant-based diet (no eggs, dairy, or meat, as well as no added oils) will make you "heart attack proof"!

A great quote from the article accompanying the preview video: "We've eaten ourselves into a problem, and we can eat ourselves out of it." -Dr. Terry Mason.

Egg Replacers

I am about to head out to my in-laws' cabin for the next week. I have been terrible about doing much vegan cooking or baking as of late because of life just being on some wild ride that I am hoping will slow down eventually. I wanted something to be able to bake there to snack on, since there obviously will not be a Planet Organic anywhere nearby, and in fact the drive to the nearest any-kind-of grocery store is about an hour long.

I tried to google a vegan banana bread recipe and came up with lots of hits. However, I KNOW that banana bread can be made without an egg replacer, and it was a little harder to find that. In my search, I did come across a page on Isa Chandra Moskowitz's website ( Post Punk Kitchen) that gives quite a few options for replacing eggs in recipes without having to resort to an egg replacer (although that is listed too).

Now to finish looking for that perfect recipe...

Agave...not so Angelic?

Alicia Silverstone just posted a great guest blog all about agave nectar by Christina Pirello on her blog. A great piece including all the science information behind what she is talking about. I am trying to cut down on sugars and agave has been my sweetener of choice when I actually use a sweetener for something, but my bigger problem is still avoiding the regular old white sugar sweetened candies! I think maybe I will switch to brown rice syrup when my agave runs out, and send some good wishes my way to help me stay away from all the refined baddies that are a thousand times worse.

Check out the guest blog at The Kind Life here.