Visas and Veganry

Hello my lovlies!

Jex and I are wading through the wonderful world of "Visas for a foreign country". It's awful! (^_^) no really it's not very fun. Mostly because the agency we're working for has to go through another agency because of all the hullabaloo with the Thai government right now and it's making everything take that much longer. Time is something we're kind of running short on. Doesn't help that they send us the Visa package on a long American Holiday weekend so I can do NOTHING to start the process till Monday.

That being said I'll just skip to the reason I hopped on the blogger (other than trying to find my zen because of the above). I want to share with you the Awesomesauce I cooked up a couple Vegan Vendzdays ago. Why not wait till Wednesday? Because I have no idea if I'll be running around like a chicken with my head cut off or calling 400 different people and agencies and dancing around the house to horrid hold music for hours this coming Wednesday, that's why.

Ashes' Protein Stuffed Mushrooms

1/4 of a med onion chopped
1/4 cup or a little less shelled pecans
Six good sized Stuffing Mushrooms or One Sm Portobello mushroom
Fresh ground Sage, Rosemary, and Salt to taste.
Coconut oil for cooking the onions.
about 1/4-1/2 cup of water for steaming the mushrooms.

Chop the onions coarsely and throw them in a sm pan over med heat. Stir every now and again, cooking till they're almost golden brown. While the onions are cooking shell the pecans or if you bought shelled pecans throw them in a food processor with the spices and pull the stems from the mushrooms (I saved the stems for omurice the next day, but you can throw them in the pan with the onions if you like. Just add a little extra oil).
When the onions are the desired level of gold throw them in with the nuts and spices. Blend away!
Fill each mushroom with the mixture. It should be fairly moldable, not super crumbly. If it's too crumbly to work with add a touch more coconut oil.
Using the same pan you cooked the onion in place each mushroom stuffed side down, turn the heat up to med and brown the tops, about 2-4 minutes. Flip the mushrooms over and turn the heat up to med high. Add the water (I use less water for smaller or portobello mushrooms and more water for white mushrooms, also less water if you cover your pan, more if you can't or choose not to cover your pan).
Let the mushrooms hang out for 5-10 minutes, serve warm with your favorite sides.

I pared our mushrooms with some garlicy green beans and pan fried carrots.
I'm also thinking about trying to make a miso version of these mushrooms.

Till next time,
The light heart lives long~

Vegan Wednesday

Good evening! I thought I would share the experiments going on in my house today.

Breakfast is not very vegan friendly. It just isn't. Every culture I've been exposed to eats some kind of meat in the morning. The United States and the United Kingdom both have classic bacon and egg breakfasts, though rashers (UK) and streaky bacon (US) differ a bit, still the same concept. German breakfasts are equally not very vegan friendly. We eat breakfast sandwiches with butter, cheese, deli meats and some kind of crunchy green thing like lettuce or pickles, maybe an apple too. Japan has miso soup, the broth of which is made with tiny little dried fish. Some kind of leftover meat from the night before and rice with a raw egg yolk (My favorite!).

Vegans can have non of this. Out of the four above Japanese breakfasts come the closest to vegan. I've tweaked the broth for miso soup and it was palatable (but not awesome), rice, pickles, and grilled veggie slices (I like sweet potato and asparagus) are all great first thing in the morning. If that's all you eat though, it gets kind of old.

So, instead of a fruit smoothie, or some strange almond milk pancake (those never turn out well for me), I decided to try some stuff from one of my favorite vegan cooking sites Olives for Dinner. I love her because she typically doesn't use things like vegan sausage, earth balance (pretend butter), or vegan cheese slices (dear god, why?!), and the food still turns out pretty tasty.

This morning I fed Jex Coconut Crepes with Smokey Herbed Mushrooms.
I have never actually made crepes before. My sister and I made them together once (I think) but she was the baker in the family, still is, so she did most everything and I pulled out and put up all the ingredients. But I'm confident in the kitchen, this should be easy enough.
Oh no Batman!
Crepes are kind of hard to make. For me anyways. The first four were mangled beyond recognition before I was able to get the hang of it (then I promptly did a victory lap around the house). Even with all the mistake making I had enough batter to make enough crepes to hold all the mushroomy goodness.
Don't worry. As long as you spray/grease your pan between crepes, let them sit long enough on the pan, and have a goodly amount of time to make breakfast in the morning you should be able to pull it off.

It freaked Jex out a little when the crepes were savory instead of sweet. Which kind of made my day. *laughs*

The black bean soup I made for lunch wasn't the best ever, but I'm really not a big fan of the veggie broth I had in the fridge. 'Better than Bullion' how could you make something so nasty?

Then we have dinner. My crowning achievement for the day; General Tso's Cauliflower. Oh my goodness those little fried Cauliflowers were yummy! Even with the bad luck I have with battering things for frying they turned out perfectly crispy with a warm, soft, center. Mmmmmmm.
Rice flour is hard to find where I live (so is everything else I need/want) so I simply added equal parts starch and flour to make up for it.
I found the sauce entirely too gingery. Dear god, a 1/4 cup of ginger. Half of that was a touch too much in my tongue's opinion. With a little tweaking to one's own palette though it should turn out very nicely the second time around.

Eat well my friends!
~the Light Heart Lives Long~

I can't believe it's not butter!!!

On any regular day I'm about as far away from 'vegan' as one can come. No I don't binge on Velveeta Mac n Cheese or eat TV dinners on the regular. But I do, or did rather, eat a lot of meat.
Every meal typically had a flesh element to it. Or did before I decided to run my little experiment. Most, if not all my recipes are centered around meat in one form or another. Chicken pies, beef and broccoli, pork chops with apple stuffing and sweet buttered carrots; you get the idea.
Relearning how to cook has been the single hardest part of being vegan for me. But even more difficult than finding new recipes and not so mainstream veggies (one can only eat carrots potatoes and onions for so long) has been what to use instead of butter. I cook everything in butter; everything. Pan frying things with butter has been my go to when I don't know what to do with a new menu item.
I love butter. Buttered toast is one of my favorite snacks. I miss butter.

Coconut oil is a silly fad. Or at least that's what I've thought. Before my foray into veganry I even bought a jar of it to see what the big deal was. You know the white louanna jar one can find in just about every grocery store. I wasn't impressed. It smelled kind of nice, but that was about it. I think the jar is still over half full and I've had it fore more than 6 months.
While shopping I realized something: I don't buy cheap butter. I spend a little extra on the challenge butter. The only butter in my area that says on the package "No rbgh." So, why was I buying the cheap coconut oil?
I bit the bullet and bought the organic, virgin, unrefined coconut oil. Truth be told I was prepared to be let down. You can imagine my surprise when it was actually really good.
Not only is it smooth and creamy you can spread it over toast with a little salt and it tastes just about the same as butter. I kid you not. Jex tested it for me. He had a piece of toast with the salted coconut oil and one with butter, both melted so he couldn't see a difference, and he couldn't tell which was which.

I'm so excited!!!!! I'm still forever hungry, but at least I discovered a few new tricks to make my life a little better.

The light heart lives long~

How Time Doth FLY

I've been in the U.K for a week. A WEEK!
What the crap? I feel like I just staggered off the plane yesterday.

Not so.

Today was dress fitting day. *Le~GASP!*
Since the whole moving back to Jex's home state adventure I haven't kept up with my physical conditioning. Somehow over the course of a month and a half I gained back the inch I fought so hard to lose; and I had given my sister my measurements for the bride's maid dress when my exercise plan was in full swing. I was afraid the dress wouldn't fit.
Thank God for weird size differences.
I fit! I fit i fit ifit I FIT! *happy swirly princess twirl*
The top had to be adjusted a little to fit over the top of my boobage properly and the skirt had to be hemmed a little because I guessed the height of the shoes I was going to wear when I gave the measurements.
I'm so happy I fit into it!

Even though I'm happy I fit into the purple princess dress that is my sister's choice for her bride's maids I still want to re-lose that stupid inch. Not to mention I want to be smoking hot for when Jex get's back from his mini-deployment. Thus some things have got to happen.
V is over on her blog beating my pants off at being healthy already (good job by the way). That's ok though she got an early start. I was that girl who ate 6 doughnuts and 4 slices of pizza before polishing off a 2 ltr of some fizzy soda drink that has enough dye to kill a tank of goldfish (cheerwine anyone?). While this pattern of (delicious) eating isn't something I do (often) anymore I find that my body is changing. (O.o)!
What? You think I'm a 13 year old girl?! Nope, I just have the LONGEST PUBERTY EVER.
No really, after I got married (and after 21 years of virginity, not a lie. YOU read the S.T.D portion of a pathophysiology text book and tell me that sex is still worth the risk. *shudders*) I grew hips and stuff. I also now (so depressingly) have to exercise or I put on a little pudge.
I'm a gamer. I have the tan of a vampire and the most imposing muscles on me surround my thumbs. Till my body decided to transform I was also in the category of "I will never be any bigger than the middle finger you wave in my direction as I eat that super fattening, and magically delicious, food you just can't bring yourself to enjoy" metabolisms.
Damnit.

The plan is: Do the power 90 thing with my mom every day she does it. Every day but busy wedding planning/fixing/burning days that doesn't have a work out I run for 20-30 minutes. Which, since I'm in the wettest place on EARTH, means I get drenched at least twice a week.
So far I've stuck to eating fruit every morning, and I really don't like fruit.
Naturally I have a Paleo type diet. I eat meat and veggies... with gravy and sometimes really good cheeses. That's about it. Jex teases that if left to my own devices I would live off of meat, meat, and more meat, with a dash of broccoli. So cutting out the soda, sugar, and generally not so good for the waistline foods probably won't be a daunting as it looks right now.

For the record I will count the 4 hours I spent walking around Norwich (pronounced Norrich) in heels today (I don't wear heels!) as my work out.

Hopefully I can get some of the pictures I took over the week on here come Monday. Unless some one else wants to take me to some place whose name I can't pronounce. I swear British people swallow the majority of their consonants. Swallow them alive!