Post-Exam Brunch

One final down, two to go!

I always reward myself with a soy chai tea latte before/after an exam. 

Saxby's coffee has a vanilla almond milk option, my new favorite ☺️

UGH FINALS

Finals have been destroying me these past couple of days, and will continue to for the next week and a half. Haven't had much time to post, but now that I'm sitting in my linear algebra class bored as usual, I thought now would be a good time to write another one.  I haven't gotten nearly enough sleep to function properly so some things might sound a little dumb, but here it goes ---

One of the best and most underrated food combinations that I learned from my mom is avocado, soy sauce, and lemon juice, the latter split evenly half and half over the avocado.  It's seriously scrumptious. As always, I add a little bit of chili flakes to add a kick. It looks so beautiful in my flowery bowl 😙🌸

My meals recently require zero culinary skill to put together - instant noodles and bowls of rice, granola bars, apples, or stalks of celery with dressing.  A little sad, but considering that I've been living at the library, it's hard to put together anything else.

On the bright side, I have a dinner date tonight! As a vegan-vegetarian duo, there's really only one or two places to go to unfortunately... 

Hearty mid-day hangover food

Having only one last weekend before finals is a great excuse to go waaaay too hard on the weekend.  In preparation for the coming weeks of stress and lack of sleep, it's also important to stay heathly and keep your body at it's best..

So the morning after, I wanted to be really hydrated (tea and apple cider yum). Of course I need my fix of greasy and filling, so I reached for my polish flavored tofurkey wurst. And lastly, to wipe out the morning-after alcohol flavor in my mouth and replace it with something fresh - an orange.

I'm pretty sure I ate the same bruch for the next two days too, until I ran out of the sausage.. 

Awesome sauce pesto

On a whim at the grocery store I decided to invest in some pesto making ingredients. Warning: they were not cheap.

One package of fresh basil was about $3, and the bag of walnuts was about $5.  On the bright side, I was able to make about 3-4 servings worth of pesto, and still have most of a bag of walnuts left for banana bread muffins (will post pics later) and as toppings for my salads.

I tweaked the recipe below slightly, because I only had about 2 cups of basil, but stuck to it for the most part.

Once again, my trusty blender came in handy!

And the finished product:

Here's the recipe I used, which I found on this website:

http://hellyeahitsvegan.com/basil-walnut-pesto/

4.0 from 1 reviews

Print

Basil Walnut Pesto

Prep time:  5 mins

Total time:  5 mins

Serves: about 1 cup

 

Ingredients

• 5 cups loosely packed fresh 
• 
  
• basil leaves
• ½ c walnuts, toasted and cooled
• 3-4 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast, optional
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp salt

Instructions

1. Pulse walnuts in a blender or food processor for a couple of seconds.
2. Add remaining ingredients and blend until mostly smooth.
3. Adjust seasonings as desired.
4. Serve at room temperature, or refrigerate in an air-tight container until serving.

Notes

As is, this recipe makes a thicker pesto, best for spreading on warm, crusty bread.
Use more olive oil and salt if you’ll be using your pesto as a sauce on pasta — I recommend serving it over fettuccine with artichoke hearts and halved, roasted grape tomatoes.

WordPress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe

Kale, Spinach, Banana Smoothie

After I go on a run is one of the times when I'm feeling my best and healthiest. 

So why stuff my face with gnarly greasy food? I try to always reach for my trusty handheld blender (the purple thing in the background of the pictures) and whip up a smoothie.

It's incredibly easy to make any type of smoothie. Normally the ingredients I use are as follows:

1 banana

1/2 cup frozen fruit

Dab of honey

Just enough almond/soy/rice milk to cover everything

Sometimes half a scoop of women's protein powder, I use one called Aria from Trader Joe's. (I realize now that it's not vegan, and has some milk ingredients in it)

Then you blend it up for a great post-workout recharge!  These are also great first thing in the morning when I'm not really feeling eating solid food.

After my run on this particular day, my paleo roommate and I discovered that we each had a whole bag of frozen kale that we had forgotten about in the freezer.

Since I had run out of frozen fruit anyways, I just put in a bunch of kale and some spinach leaves out of my salad bag along with the banana, and blended that right up.  Turns out the almond milk and banana covered up any sort of bitterness from the leafy veg's. The outcome was this beautiful green jem, that tasted really good! 

Heaven is a place in Georgetown

Last week I went made a trip down to our beloved capital, Washigton D.C, to turn in my visa application to go back to India this summer. Unfortunately I missed the cherry blossoms!

But a random guy gave me a bouquet of flowers while I was eating lunch outside at Trader Joe's... 😋

I did get the chance to go to Georgetown Cupcakes, the store featured on the TLC show by the same name. This was my third time there (don't judge me), but my first time going as a vegan.

They have two awesome vegan flavors, Apple Cinnamon, pictured below, and Carrot Cake. Seriously, their cupcakes are amazing, I highly recommend waiting in line to get one. It's also really cool that they make vegan cupcakes. I'll def be going back to try the vegan carrot one some day!!

College-Style Vegan Hamburger

This is a meal I made that was extremely quick and easy. One thing I keep on hand for those quick meals are vegan Boca burgers and Tofurky sausages. They're both somewhat expensive when compared to regular meat ones, but for just over $1 a patty or sausage, that's maybe $2-3 a meal once you're done with all the preparations.

These are the Boca burgers I got from my friendly neighborhood Pathmark. I even think they were on sale, cuz really, who eats vegan burgers anyways.

I just cooked one of these babies up along with a side of green beans ($3 for a massive bag from Trader Joes), chopped up half a tomato and tore off some lettuce, and Voíla! A full burger meal that was very filling and delicious.

Oh I should also mention I don't have burger buns, so I just used that whole wheat bread I had in my cupboard (hence the 'college-style')

Altogether it took only about 5 minutes to whip up, cuz I didn't wanna miss the movie Bridesmaids showing on TV!!

An awesome vegan meal for one!

Power Snack - PB Cheerios bars

My new favorite snack that I discovered at the dining halls my freshman and sophomore years, and is actually really easy to make, is peanut butter & Cheerios bars.

My roommate, an elementary ed major, had a leftover box of Cheerios after using some for an activity with the kids she teaches. 

6 cups of Cheerios, 3/4 of a jar of PB, 1 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of corn syrup later, we had two jumbo tupperwares filled with this stuff.  Just melt all the sugary goodness first, then mix in the PB, and then the Cheerios last, until they're all covered.

Although I'm not the biggest fan of using so much corn syrup and sugar, this is a great snack to have just laying around, and a quick and easy pick-me-up early in the morning or after a long day of classes.

Another variation that I also like to make is even easier and can be made in small quantities. I just take about half a cup of Cheerios, a tablespoon of peanut butter, and a dash of honey (or sugar) and mix them all together.  

This is the end result - another great snack, or meal, if you're like me and make batch after batch in one sitting.  Enjoy!!

Veggies fah dayz --> Stir-fry

Another easy thing to make that you can always keep in bulk and on-hand in tupperwares, is stir fry!

I cut up a bunch of foods one day in my spare time (here you see green bell peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, and tofu) and kept the portion that I didn't use in a Tupperware.

  

The rest of it, along with some bean sprouts, I fried up in a pan for 6-7 mintutes. The only thing you gotta be aware of is the order you put things in the  pan, because some things cook through faster than others. I put in the bell peppers first, then zucchini and sprouts, and mushrooms and tofu last.

The only other ingredients I used besides these is oil for the pan, some salt and pepper, red chilli flakes, and some vegetarian stir-fry sauce. 

Some other ingredients you could include, just off the top of my head, are: onions, green onions, spinach, Chinese cabbage, tomatoes... anything really.

It's such an easy meal, with so many servings of vegetables and all the healthy things that are associated with veggies! 

Lettuce Wraps Galore

This is one of the first awesome vegan meals I made up myself, and is about one of the easiest things to make.  I made it for a quick lunch during the day.

The main ingredients you need are lettuce, substitute meat, some sort of flavoring, and some other veggies to go in the filling along with the fake meat.

Here I used sriracha sauce, salt, and pepper for flavor (and used some ketchup at the end too). I mixed some mushrooms, tomatoes, frozen corn, and a random piece of jalapeño I found in my fridge, with the Smart Ground substitute beef as filling.

It's as simple as frying everything together in a pan until it's cooked through, then wrapping it in lettuce and you're finished!  I used about a quarter of the Smart Ground package plus everything else you see below, and was so full I almost couldn't get myself up to go to class.

The great thing about all of these ingredients is that they are very versatile and can be used in many different meals. I'm planning on making chilli or burritos with the leftover Smart Ground, and of course some salad or more wraps with the lettuce.

I had about an hour of time to spare for lunch that day, and I was able to make this meal with time left over to watch some telly! Great success!

To New Beginnings

Hey All!  Classic intro post coming up --> I'm a third year college student at the University of Delaware, and I love to try new things and make changes to my life just to see how things go.  I feel strongly about the human need to reduce consumption and waste and how we should be more mindful about how our actions affect our environment, and how what we eat affects our health and body.

Over this last summer I was able to travel to and stay at several organic farms (see my other blog, urbanandnothing.blogspot.com, to see travel stories), where I ate all vegan or at least all vegetarian food, that was organic and grown right on the farm, and I felt great.  My body never felt sluggish, after meals I never felt the urge to crawl into bed and nap, and the best part is the food was absolutely delicious - some of the best I have ever eaten.

This blog is basically going to be my story of becoming a vegan, at least for the rest of the school year and as long as possible over the summer.  I say 'as long as possible' because I will be traveling back to India for an internship and am not certain about the vegan selection that will be available to me there.

Some background on my vegan-ness: I have been vegetarian for just over two years and will never go back to being an omnivore.  I just don't desire to eat meat anymore, its weird to me, borderline gross at this point.  For the vegan aspect, I am relatively new to it.   Last November, which happened to be national vegan month, I tried to be vegan for a whole month and it worked for the most part.  I made some rookie mistakes - taking coffee with cream instead of asking for soy milk, eating white chocolate, etc, and I gave up towards the end of the month for reasons I don't remember.  I also developed poor eating habits, basically eating pasta with sauce almost every night, sometimes twice or three times a day.  For a $1 pack of pasta and a $3 jar of sauce, I could feed myself for a week, possibly longer (this probably contributed to why I went back to my quesadillas and grilled cheeses eventually).

THIS time, I want things to be different.  Being the penny-pinching person I am, I will still be cooking on a budget, with typical ingredients found in a college girls kitchen, but I will make healthy meals, a variety of meals, and share what I make with others through this blog.  You heard it here first, this time my vegan-ness will last.

To conclude this post, a quote:

"Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies…that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself."
—T. Casey Brennan (1948–)

And a funny T-shirt with a broccoli tree: