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.

NYTimes Article- The High Cost of Cheap Meat

Before I started eating a plant-based diet, and even before I stopped considering chips and ice cream to be a good meal (in my teens), it always bothered me to take medication. I always wanted to try riding out a headache, or drinking a glass of water and taking a nap before taking a Tylenol. I always wonder whether I really need it before accepting a prescription from my doctor.

You know what else bothers me? Things out of my control bother me. What if you had a meddlesome mother, who thought it necessary to mix some kind of protein powder into your meals because she thought you needed more protein, or one that was slipping you the newest diet pill and telling you it was a vitamin because she thought you needed to lose weight. For a vegetarian or a vegan parent, the person, whether family or friend, that gives your kid a bite of meat when you aren't looking because they think your child is missing something. People "slipping something past me" bothers me, even if they think it is insignificant.

Below is this article from the NYTimes this month. When reading this kind of thing, I can't believe how little I knew about the food that I was putting in my mouth, and how deceived I feel about all of the "extras" that I was getting that someone thought didn't make a difference. I can't believe that anyone who reads an article like this and sits a while to think about how sickly and diseased it makes the animals seem and takes some time to pull up some images in your head of what is being described, could ever eat meat again. Why would we put something like that in our mouths, let alone be nourished and expect to be healthy when that is what we are betting on?

EDITORIAL
The High Cost of Cheap Meat

The point of factory farming is cheap meat, made possible by confining large numbers of animals in small spaces. Perhaps the greatest hidden cost is its potential effect on human health.

Small doses of antibiotics — too small to kill bacteria — are fed to factory farm animals as part of their regular diet to promote growth and offset the risks of overcrowding. What factory farms are really raising is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which means that several classes of antibiotics no longer work the way they should in humans. We pay for cheap meat by sacrificing some of the most important drugs ever developed.

Last week, the Natural Resources Defense Council, joined by other advocacy groups, sued the Food and Drug Administration to compel it to end the nontherapeutic use of penicillin and tetracycline in farm animals. Veterinarians would still be able to treat sick animals with these drugs but could not routinely add the drugs to their diets.

For years, the F.D.A. has had the scientific studies and the authority to ban these drugs. But it has always bowed to pressure from the pharmaceutical and farm lobbies, despite the well-founded objections of groups like the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, which support an antibiotic ban.

It is time for the F.D.A. to stop corporate factory farms from squandering valuable drugs just to promote growth among animals confined in conditions that inherently create the risk of disease. According to recent estimates, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in this country end up in farm animals. The F.D.A. can change that by honoring its own scientific conclusions and its statutory obligation to end its approval of unsafe drug uses.

You Can Stuff Your Face on Oreos

...but I don't recommend it! (smile)


I am just excited because I found out that Oreos are vegan!


Maybe you already knew it, but I was oblivious.


I have never really been an Oreo eater (as an adult anyway), but it is certainly nice to know that if I am at my kid's piano recital and someone brings Oreos, I can actually have one!


...and maybe every once in a while, I might crush up some Oreos and put them in my So Delicious ice cream.

Vegan Nutritionista Website

Yesterday, I was doing a few google searches to try and find an interesting vegan blog to spend my time with for a few minutes to wind down at the end of the day. After about ten minutes, I was a little disappointed that I just kept coming across blogs that looked promising at first glance, but then had the reoccurring theme of "being a vegan means making my plate look just like a meat-eater's, by using fake meat substitutes and lots of processed food". I saw lots of pictures of "beef" stroganoff, and "bacon" sandwiches, and basically a lot of dishes with a lot of quotation marks. Sigh. Besides not being a healthy way to live, I don't understand how people who get sick at the thought of eating an animal can look at food that *looks* like it came from an animal and not get the same feeling.


I had a brainwave (very difficult after a long day, I tell you) and realized that I should search something like "healthy vegan" instead (not all vegans are created equal), and came up with more of what I was looking for. The first site I went to was called Vegan Nutritionista. I had already wasted my time elsewhere, so I didn't spend a lot of time looking at it last night, but signed up for their monthly newsletter and went to bed. This morning I sat down at my computer to find a nice email asking me to confirm my membership and giving me the chance to download a free e-book. It was a very nice start to my day. Of course, that led me to stray off the path of things I should be doing, and explore the sometimes rather mucky path of things that I might regret later when my work is not done. No worries this time. I found a very thorough and well thought out FAQ page, maybe the best I have ever seen.

Some Vegan Superheroes!

I was so excited yesterday to read about the diets of the two trainers on the popular TV show The Biggest Loser. Bob Harper is a vegan and was the 2010 spokesperson for Farm Sanctuary. It looks like he has been vegan for about 3 years according to my rough calculations. Check out an interview with him below. I love the part where he says that every product you buy in a grocery store is a vote - a vote for the kind of food you want to see, and a vote *against* the food you are choosing not to buy.





Jillian Michaels is the other trainer on the show. She does not eat a complete plant-based diet, but beef, chicken, and dairy are all excluded from her diet. A tidbit: Jillian will be leaving the show at the end of this season (to focus on motherhood). I think it is a real testament to a plant-based diet to have these two role-models, who are seen as two of the healthiest people in America, eliminating all or most animal products from their diet.

Ready for a Challenge? Vegetarian Times

Vegetarian Times is hosting a 28-Day Boot Camp for those who want to try out being a vegetarian and need some help and guidance, for those "sometimes vegetarians" who want some motivation to go all the way, or for all the time vegetarians who just want to refresh their plan. They are already on day 11, but you can get the full meal plan here. You can also sign up for daily emailshere.

It doesn't really work that well if you are vegan however. Many of the recipes have dairy or eggs in them. Guess we are on our own. Maybe at some point I will have to make a Vegan Boot Camp for the rest of us.

An Old Interview with Alicia Silverstone

This interview with Alicia Silverstone is obviously done before her book came out, and that was quite a while ago now, but it still said some interesting things and kept me reading until the end. I also think it was accompanied by a great picture of her, don't you think?

Did you know she is pregnant right now? She gave the news to all her TheKindLife.com followers a while back. Congratulations to Alicia!

Bloggin' Good Times

Okay, busy season is over. I'm back.

I just finished putting through an order for a Vitamix Blender! I am very excited. I have been waiting to get one for a long time. Most of my friends have them and are so happy with them. I watched some demos on-line and saw them make hot soup. When I told my mom that a blender could make hot soup she was skeptical and thought that they did it by warming it up first. Then of course I started to doubt. We happened upon a demo in our local Costco recently and one of the things they showed was making hot soup! Apparently the blender works with friction and if you leave the blender on for about 5 minutes, whatever is inside will get hot. The lady doing the demo also made a smoothie and a fruit ice cream.

My new blender should be here in about 2 weeks and then I am ready to start blending, processing, heating, mixing, grinding, and whatever else I can think of.

Yay!

Forks Over Knives Movie Trailer

Check out this link for the movie trailer and more information about the exciting documentary entitled Forks Over Knives. It says it is to be released in theatres in May.

Genetically Modified Foods Scare Me

Why does our food have to be so horror movie like?
I just read this article on GMOs at PlanetGreen. Enviropigs? Are you kidding me? Soon there won't be anything left to eat that is not some kind of science project.
I'll take my apples nicely and naturally browned, thank-you very much.

Here is a page with downloadable guides with tips for avoiding GMOs and lists of brands that are GMO-free.

Vegetarian Chili Takes Top Prize in Contest

Now, this is isn't exactly breaking news or anything. The chili contest happened way back in the summer. I had heard some rumours about it, but hadn't actually seen an article or anything until now, and even better, there is a link to the winning recipe in the article! The only non-vegan ingredient is 1/2 cup of cheese. I am going to try it with some Daiya vegan cheese and a little nutritional yeast instead and see how it turns out. It looks like a really yummy recipe - Indian style vegetarian chili.

Website with (Healthy!) Holiday Recipes

The blog is called Keeper of the Home. I am impressed enough with it that I am considering ordering both of her books.

The post that was passed along to me today is titled Real Food Recipe Roundup: 398 Wholesome Recipes. This is not a vegan blogger or post, but there is definitely some vegan recipes involved and some great information on healthy and natural eating. I have only scratched the surface of this blog post. Immediately I found the link to How to Make Your Own (Unrefined) Powdered Sugar and cannot believe how easy it is. Whoo-hoo!

I still need to make non-vegan meals for my non-vegan family, so I am sure I will also find a few things to make for my family that I will not partake in myself.

Update: What I Brought for Thanksgiving Dinner

Do you remember way back in this post, when I told you what I was thinking of making to bring a long to my in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner? I ended up making the Pumpkin Pie Brownies.



They were good enough, but I had to substitute some items to make it gluten free as my mil has celiac disease, and I think it could have been much tastier made as it was meant to be made.

I also took along Quinoa Salad with Avocado and Grapefuit (125 Best Vegan Recipes). The first time I made this I wasn't sure I liked the taste combo, but after a couple bites, I was hooked and it is one of my favorites to make now.

In order to make this, you need to start by making a batch of Pickled Pink Onion Relish (125 Best Vegan Recipes). It is super simple to make and I add the leftovers to salads, veggie dogs and wraps for about a week afterwards.




Pickled Pink Onion Relish (125 Best Vegan Recipes)

makes about 1 1/2 cups

Ingredients
6 c water
1 tsp salt
1 red onion, cut in half from stem to root then crosswise and thinly sliced
1/2 c seasoned rice vinegar

Directions
1. In a pot over high heat, bring water and salt to a boil. Add onion and return to a boil. Drain and immediately transfer to a nonreactive container. Add vinegar and toss to coat evenly.

Let cool to room temperature. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours or until chilled and deep pink.



Quinoa Salad with Avocado and Grapefruit (125 Best Vegan Recipes)

Makes 4-6 servings

Ingredients

2 c water
1 tsp salt
1 c quinoa, washed, rinsed and drained
2 tbsp chopped fresh mint leaves
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
2 tbsp granulated natural cane sugar or other dry sweetener
1/2 tsp salt
pinch freshly ground black pepper
1/3 c vegetable oil
1 red grapefruit, peeled, sectioned and each section cut into thirds
1 avocado, peeled, pitted and cut into 3/4 inch cubes
1/3 c Pickled Pink Onion Relish (see recipe above)

Directions

1. In a pot, bring water and salt to a boil over high heat. Add quinoa, stirring to prevent lumps from forming, and return to a boil. Cover, reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes or until tender and liquid is absorbed. Remove from heat and let stand, uncovered, for 5 minutes or until it reaches room temperature. Transfer to a serving bowl.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together mint, lime juice, sugar, salt and pepper. Whisk in oil. Add grapefruit pieces, avocado and onion relish and toss lightly to coat. Spoon over quinoa, letting dressing drizzle down through the salad. Serve immediately.

The Old Farm Market outside Duncan, B.C., Canada

I know we've already had Halloween and Thanksgiving, but I don't want to miss sharing these things. I'm sorry I am late.

Back in October, hubby and I attended a conference in Victoria, B.C., Canada. In grade 9, I went to a boarding school in Duncan, B.C., which is about an hour north of Victoria. I had been hoping to get back and see my old stompin' grounds someday and we were so close, so before we headed home, hubby made sure we had time to go up and see my old school. We couldn't get a hold of someone to officially set up a visit, so we just showed up and hoped we could walk around a little. Well, goodness me, we happened to pull in on Sunday afternoon about 10 minutes before they started an open house event! We were the first ones there so we were honored to receive a full tour of the facilities from the current head girl. It was pretty awesome to not only re-visit my past, but also to be able to share a piece of such a memorable part of my life with my husband.



After we left, I was hoping to find a vegetarian style place to eat, but considering almost everything seemed to be closed on a Sunday out there, I think we were lucky to find anything to explore at all. We did end up finding this great market just outside Duncan right off the highway. It was just so quaint and full of country charm. I would love to be a "regular" at a place like this. I hope that those Duncan shoppers don't take The Old Farm Market for granted. We picked up some snacks for the ride back to Victoria to hold us off until we found a restaurant to eat at.






There was an absolutely huge pile of pumpkins outside. I found it funny that there was a sign saying, "No Climbing Pumpkin Pile. Thanks, Management".






I thought, "Who would climb on a pumpkin pile?!?" Well, I guess I must be totally naive, maybe because I am the mother of only girls, but 1 minute later we hopped into our rental car and what did I see as we were pulling out? Two boys climbing up the pumpkin pile!