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Posts Tagged ‘vegan’

About Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

The award-winning author of five books, including the bestselling The Joy of Vegan Baking, The Vegan Table, Color Me Vegan, Vegan’s Daily Companion, and The 30-Day Vegan Challenge, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau has guided people to becoming and staying vegan for over 12 years through sold-out cooking classes, bestselling books, inspiring lectures, engaging videos, and her immensely popular audio podcast, “Vegetarian Food for Thought.” Using her unique blend of passion, humor, and common sense, she empowers and inspires people to live according to their own values of compassion and wellness. She also contributes to National Public Radio and The Christian Science Monitor, and has appeared on The Food Network and PBS.

Visit colleenpatrickgoudreau.com for more.

The chill in the air and the turning of the leaves means it’s almost time to celebrate the autumn harvest à la Thanksgiving! However, when non-vegetarians think of the idea of eating vegan on Thanksgiving, they’re often aghast. They can’t imagine what vegans eat if they don’t eat turkey, as 45 million of these beautiful birds are killed in the U.S. each year for this holiday alone.

I’ve also heard the accusation that vegans are flying in the face of tradition – that it’s culturally blasphemous not to eat turkeys on this day. The truth is we’re ALL breaking tradition if we use the “First Thanksgiving” from 1621 as a barometer for what we should eat today. During that first meal between the puritans and Wampanoag Indians, there were no potatoes or biscuits or apple pie or yams or sweet cranberries. And there weren’t any forks either.

Does that mean we shouldn’t eat those things today? Does it mean we shouldn’t eat with forks. No, of course not. It means we shape our traditions out of our ideals. We all do it – vegans and non-vegans.

Our vegan feast can consist of mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, bread stuffing, cranberry relish, mashed rutabagas, butternut squash soup, sautéed green beans, roasted Brussels sprouts, cornbread or biscuits, and green salad. Dessert includes everything from apple pie, pumpkin bread, German apple cake to fruit cobblers, cranberry muffins, and other traditional, seasonal favorites. Over 150 recipes are in The Joy of Vegan Baking, including this one for Apple Cobbler.

Harvest-Stuffed Acorn Squash

For the main dish, which is really about creating a focal point on the plate, you can enjoy a beautiful stuffed acorn squash filled with a pilaf of wild rice, pecans, apples, celery, onions, and spices. You can also create a butternut squash timbale, stuffed Portobello mushrooms, or little mini-pumpkins stuffed with an array of grains and nuts. The options are endless, and over 200 are in The Vegan Table, including the Harvest-Stuffed Acorn Squash.

Of course there are other options such as Tofurky loaf or Field Roast’s grain-based loaf. And any customary Thanksgiving dessert recipe can be easily veganized with a few substitutions.

The point is we CAN celebrate tradition and honor our values at the same time. In fact, eating a vegan feast for Thanksgiving is more consistent with what this holiday is about at its heart: creating community, connection, gratitude, and compassion. I can’t think of a better way to do that than preparing food that causes as little harm as possible to animals, our health, and the Earth.

My only warning to you is to make more than you think you need, because undoubtedly everyone will covet your beautiful, colorful, compassionate recipes and, of course, you want leftovers!

World Go Vegan Week (Oct. 24 – 31) was a delicious success with dozens of pizza restaurants participating by offering a vegan pizza for the week featuring Daiya cheese, a vegan cheese that melts, stretches and tastes like traditional dairy-based cheese. IDA volunteers worked hard to get restaurants to participate in our campaign Vegan Pizza Takes Over the World! We had 73 volunteers reach out to 142 pizza restaurants in the U.S. and Canada asking them to participate in our week of celebration of the vegan lifestyle.

Offering motivation and to make things even more interesting, we had a contest!  Daiya generously offered a month’s supply of its delicious vegan cheese to a random participant who was successful in getting a pizza place to offer a vegan pizza. We are excited to announce that the winner of our contest is Gina Stuessy of Madison, Wisconsin. Gina got two restaurants in Madison to participate, The Glass Nickel and Ian’s Pizza. Let’s hope they will keep the vegan options on the menu beyond World Go Vegan Week.

Congratulations, Gina! We hope you enjoy your month’s supply of Daiya cheese!

Pizza wasn’t the only thing on our minds this World Go Vegan Week. Other volunteers participated in various creative ways beyond the vegan pizza project. At a church in Burnaby, British Columbia, eight families took on the challenge of eating vegan for the entire week of World Go Vegan Week and, in Sri Lanka, activists held an event with a film on veganism, speakers, and vegan food to sample. These are just a few examples of the wide reach of this important week of education. This was truly an international outreach experience!

Thank you for celebrating World Go Vegan Week with us. The animals, the environment, and your health thank you for your compassionate choices. Click here for more information on the vegan lifestyle.

New to veganism? Click here to order a free Vegan Starter Kit.

The IDA San Rafael office had some fun this Halloween teaming up with the San Francisco Vegetarian Society to hand out vegan Halloween sweet treats and our Reason for Vegan Brochures to passers-by on Haight St. in San Francisco! Volunteers made frightening yummy treats like maple cookies and cinnamon chocolate chip bars to show everyone how delicious vegan sweets can be. We also had lots of donated Halloween dark chocolate peanut and almond butter bites form Shjakk’s chocolate. Yum!

Dressed in costumes, we handed out the treats and leafleted vegan materials, asking San Franciscans to help end the horrors of factory farming and try a vegan treat for Halloween. The responses were wildly enthusiastic—in fact, people were shocked that vegan treats and chocolate were so scary delicious! It was a gratifying day of outreach with lots of people discovering just how satisfying vegan sweet treats really are.

I love Halloween. The coming darkness of autumn, the creepy, smiling jack-o-lanterns, and pumpkin-flavored everything. At what other time of the year do you get to dress up in wacky, sexy, or superhero costumes and eat yourself sick with candy? What a great holiday!

But Halloween can also be a nightmare for vegans—seems like non-vegan sweets are everywhere. Yet the true nightmare is what happens to animals on factory farms.

Vegan treats can be found at the witching hour, and you wouldn’t have guessed that some old favorites are actually vegan. Our friends at VegNews have compiled a deliciously comprehensive list of vegan candy. Can you imagine that Dots, Pez, and Dum-Dum Pops are vegan? You can also indulge in candies that are a bit healthier, support fair trade practices, and encourage sustainable agriculture like Sjaak’s Organic Chocolates  or Let’s Do Organic Gummy Bears.

So when the little monsters come to your door, you don’t necessarily have to contribute to the sugar fest. Stickers are a great surprise for the vampires, Freddy Kruegers, and Lady Gagas. Kids love stickers, and yours will be the coolest house on the block! Colored pencils or erasers can be fun, too.

Let’s make this a safe and compassionate holiday for everyone, including farmed animals.

New to veganism? Click here to order a Vegan Starter Kit.

Do you wear your veganism on your sleeve?   It’s great to lead by quiet example, but consider making an even stronger impact by speaking up about your reasons for going vegan.  Remember, the animals don’t have a voice, so now is the time to amp up your game to the next level.    

Okay, so you’re a 49ers fan?  Add a little dash of vegan to your red and gold.  You’ll be surprised at the impression you’ll make.  Be prepared by having a few of “The Reason For Vegan: Compassion In Action” flyers and “Vegan Starter Kits” with you.  Click here to order them.  While you’re at the game be sure to support the stadium’s vegan menu.  These days virtually all professional level ballparks have a vegan dog or a vegan burger.

If you’re going to a dinner party or pot luck, instead of bringing a bottle of wine, bring a vegan dish or dessert.

Other ways you can make a difference for animals, for the health of people and the environment:

• Wear a vegan t-shirt, hoody, necklace or pin (click here to order IDA vegan merchandise)
• Get a personalized license plate or license plate frame
• Put bumper stickers on your car, laptop and notebooks
• Use an animal rights quote in your email signature and include the link to our vegan campaign (http://www.idausa.org/campaigns/vegan/vegan.html)
• Use Facebook and Twitter to politely promote the benefits of a vegan diet
• Set a goal to speak to at least one person each day about veganism
• Feed your dogs a healthy vegan dog food
• Show someone a video about the horrors of factory farming or about the health and environmental benefits of living a vegan lifestyle
• Cook or buy a non-vegan a vegan meal

It’s up to us to try to enlighten others and do all we can to help animals.

So keep your eye on the tofu and take it one person at a time.  Let’s do this!  Go Team Vegan!

Click here to support IDA’s Vegan Campaign

Work every day of your life to right what is wrong.

On September 27, 2011, the Richmond, California City Council voted to end live bird sales at its farmers’ market, effective November 1, 2011. In Defense of Animals partnered with LGBT Compassion to organize weekly protests, petitions, action alerts and other pressures to convince the city to end the cruel practice of selling live chickens at the Richmond Farmers’ Market.

The Richmond mayor received over 1,000 e-mails from local IDA supporters, and she acknowledged these e-mails at the meeting. Nineteen passionate animal advocates spoke in support of the ban and only two people spoke in opposition. All our efforts paid off with a 4 – 2 vote, with the mayor voting for the ban. Supportive Council Member Jeff Ritterman did a celebratory chair spin and fist pump in the air as the room full of animal advocates gave a standing ovation!

The vendor, Raymond Young, has a history of well-documented and shocking mistreatment of the spent egg-laying hens he sells at market. In 2009, San Francisco’s Animal Care and Control cited Mr. Young for 795 cruelty violations, including overcrowding, injuries, and failure to provide water. This was after he ignored requests for corrections.

At the weekly protests, IDA activists repeatedly witnessed the disturbing procedure of two birds being forcefully yanked from their tiny cage and stuffed upside-down into one paper bag with little ventilation. Most of the birds go immediate into a silent shock, but others loudly squawk and scream in fear and struggle in vain to free themselves. We have video of customers putting the birds in their car trunks and then returning to shop at the market. We witnessed children kicking and violently picking up and dropping the bags on the concrete. If there was a dog or a cat in the bag, these customers could be arrested for animal cruelty – a chicken has the same capacity to suffer as a dog or a cat.

There is no regulation or supervision of what happens when these chickens reach the customer’s house. They could be starved, terrorized by pets or children, and a careless or just unknowledgeable slaughter could cause prolonged and immense suffering. Self-slaughter violates California’s humane poultry slaughter laws, which require poultry to be killed by specific methods at licensed facilities – and for good reasons.

Two years ago, live birds were being sold at four Bay Area farmers’ markets. As of this week, they are sold at none, Richmond was the last to finally ban this practice, thanks to the tireless efforts of many animal advocates.

For more ideas – check out the cookbook Vegan Lunch Box!

It’s back-to-school time and parents all over the country are looking over hot lunch menus and shaking their heads in disbelief. Today’s school lunches are notoriously unhealthy and if you are raising your children in a vegan home… well, all those hamburgers and “fish nuggets” will make you shudder. That means sending your littlest loved ones to school with lunches that they will actually want to eat and won’t trade away. Kids raised on a vegetarian diet have an amazing advantage: a lower risk of the obesity, cancer, heart disease, and other health problems that will plague their meat and dairy-eating peers as they grow older. These days it is easier than ever to raise kids who are healthy and care about animals.

With vegan alternatives to deli slices and cheese available in most grocery stores, it doesn’t take much to recreate the classic sandwiches. Let’s not forget that the most beloved of childhood sandwiches, Peanut Butter and Jelly, is already vegan. Here are just a few products to check out:

• Torfurky Deli Slices
• Lightlife Deli Slices
• Lightlife Smart Bacon and Smoked Tempeh (makes great BLTs)
• Baked Tofu
• Sheese (it’s a hard vegan cheese you can pack with crackers)
• Eco-Planet Non-Dairy Cheese Crackers (they’re like a vegan version of those cheddar goldfish crackers)
• Late July Organic Peanut Butter Bite Size Sandwich Crackers
• Granola or Snack Bars
• Tofutti Slices
• Pretzels (many of the brands out there are vegan – as always you might just need read a few labels)

Don’t forget all those fresh fruits and veggies that nature has already made sweet like apples and pineapple slices or ‘kid-sized’ like cherry tomatoes and baby carrots. Healthy and happy kids need those more than anything!

Of course, you can always get vegan options in your school cafeteria using these 4 easy steps!

Don’t forget World Go Vegan Week is right around the corner! This year IDA is helping Vegan Pizza Take Over the World! To find out more click here.

New to veganism? Click here to order a Vegan Starter Kit.

2 Words – Vegan Treats. vegantreats.com Photo Credit : MeetTheShannons.com

This is it folks, vegan is headed for the big-time! Just in the last five years, the vegan diet is being recognized more and more in the mainstream. Famous celebrities and politicians have gone vegan like Emily Deschanel, James Cromwell, Bill Clinton, and Ellen DeGeneres, who recently “veganised” an average American family on her show. Dr. Oz got an overweight, diabetic cowboy to adopt a vegan diet to save his life and Oparh and Martha Stewart have each dedicated an entire show to the vegan lifestyle.

Even millionaire moguls are embracing the plant-based diet like Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter (recently a guest on Martha Stewart’s vegan show), Steve Wynn, Las Vegas casino tycoon and Hip-Hop music producer Russell Simmons whose new book is titled Super Rich: A Guide to Having It All. We know that vegans are smart, but some vegans are geniuses. Like George Church, a molecular biologist who helped map the human genome at Harvard and Stanford Biochemist Patrick Brown, who transformed genetic research with his invention of micro-array DNA.

Mega food retailers like 7-Eleven sell vegan options in six of their New York locations and Disney World kicked out McDonalds to make room for the all vegan bakery, Babycakes. Speaking of vegan baking, Animal Planet is rolling out a new reality TV show about Vegan Treats owner and founder, Danielle Konya delving into her animal activism.

Meatless Monday is taking hold across the nation with Baltimore and New York City schools adopting meat-free meals in their cafeterias on Mondays. Sodexo implemented Meatless Monday in its 900 hospital accounts and Oprah Winfrey’s company cafeterias are meat-free on Mondays. Celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali have gotten on board offering a Meatless Monday menu in their restaurants. And San Francisco and Washington DC have Meat-Free Monday Resolutions signed by their board of supervisors.

All this awesome news is incredibly inspirational and I hope makes it even easier for people to adopt a compassionate diet. I also hope that it inspires activists to work even harder to help reduce farm animal suffering. We are winning, but we have to keep the pressure on and the energy up in this critical time.

Do you know of a new way vegan is going mainstream? Add it to the comments!

All Vegan Cheesy Chik-n Fingers! Made with Match Vegan Meats, Daiya Cheddar & Eco-Planet Non-Dairy Cheddar Crackers.

World Go Vegan Week starts Sunday and if like many people you are trying out the vegan lifestyle for the first time, you might find yourself wondering : Do I have to give up everything I loved as kid to try this out? The answer : Nope!

I’ve been vegan a long time and even I – from time to time – get nostalgic for food I enjoyed in my childhood. I loved those little cheddar cheese goldfish crackers. One of my favorite memories was my grandfather putting them in my soup every Fall. I took them to school with me almost everyday in a sandwich bag and when I went vegan I admit I missed them. That’s why when I found these Eco-Planet Non-Dairy Cheddar Crackers I may have freaked out a little. They have filled that space in my heart that thought about those those little crackers from time to time. They also made it possible to veganize Betty Crocker’s cheesy crunchy chicken fingers (see recipe below) which would be a hit at any football or baseball playoff party this Fall… or just a Thursday night dinner.

Here’s a few other childhood favorites that some of you newly veganed folks might be interested in to help make that transition into cruelty free living :

• Marshmallows! There are several brands these days that make vegan marshmallows. Sweet & Sara are a favorite of mine and they even have special Halloween marshmallows shaped like bats & ghosts on sale right now. There is also Chicago Soy Dairies’ Dandies which are pretty perfect in Hot Cocoa.
• Which brings me to Instant Hot Cocoa! Ah!Laska’s Organic Instant Hot Cocoa is a pretty extraordinary treat for those nights when you just want to add water.
• Vegan Corn Dogs by Cedar Lake Foods. That pretty much says all I need to say about that.
• Memory can be kind to some old friends – like Cheetos and I actually think Tings are much better version of the cheesy snack puffs. I think Tings are actually better than most things. To quote Food Fight Grocery “Better than squirrels and kittens hugging.”
• Of course a lot of you are wondering what to do about Vegan Halloween candy. VegNews has a great list of Vegan Candy you can give away that night and of course snack on between trick-or-treaters.

OK back to our recipe…

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Vegan Sloppy Joes – Always a big hit! Recipe : MeetTheShannons.net

Now is the best time of year to make sure your school cafeteria has vegan options. Here’s how:

Step 1: Become Friends with Your School & Cafeteria

It is always easier to change a system from the inside. Just by stopping by and politely asking your Cafeteria’s food service coordinator for vegan options, you can make a personal statement on why these dishes are necessary and offer suggestions how they can make the changes. By building a relationship with your school’s food service coordinator you can help them locate the best recipes and resources so that these vegan changes can be successfully incorporated into the menu. If you’re too shy, send a kind e-mail or note to the head of your school’s cafeteria or dining hall requesting daily vegetarian and vegan options.

Of course, sometimes that doesn’t work. You can then move on to speaking to your school’s administration. Request a meeting with your school’s principal or, if you’re in college, your school’s Operations Director. Come to your meeting prepared to talk about why your school needs vegan options, what the benefits of a vegan diet are, suggestions for how they can veganize the cafeteria. Of course it doesn’t hurt to do a little research into how many of your classmates would want these options and if your school has had any issues with recalled meat or dairy products in the past (link to recent egg recall story) You can even contact other schools, such as Baltimore’s Public School System and Indiana University that have added vegan options to their cafeterias and get some statistics and suggestions to support your cause.

If you have any meetings, arrive on time, dressed nicely, and be polite. Don’t give them an excuse to ignore or disregard your request. Remember, you are there to advocate for the animals, so making a good impression is very important and, perhaps, this will be the beginning of a relationship with your school administration that could later help you also get dissection or circus field trips also removed from your school!

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