Let Them Eat Vegan! {giveaway} – ENDED 5/8/12
Goooooooood morning <3 Fun news 🙂 The blog was chosen as a reader’s choice winner for best personal training blog over at Fitness Magazine. Thank you SO much to those of you who took the time to vote – I’m honored to have been included in such wonderful company.
Last week’s little photo shoot was for an upcoming issue of Fitness Magazine- exciting stuff!
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Lots of food prep went down in our kitchen last night: the usual stuff for the week (chopped veggies, salsa, grains, a baby meal)
and a seriously amazing dinner.
(Sorry for the weird color. My camera died so I had to resort to the iPhone)
As you guys know, Dreena Burton is one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors. My copy of “Eat, Drink and Be Vegan” has tamari stains and chocolate smudges all over it- it’s been well-loved. Her Supercharge Me cookies are a dessert favorite and my hardcore carnivore husband loves her recipes, too. Even though they’re vegan, they never feel like they’re missing anything, because they’re satisfying and filled with bold flavors.
I also love that a majority of the recipes aren’t dependent on faux meat and soy: mostly whole foods with fresh fruits and veggies as the star of the show.
When Dreena offered to send me a copy of her new cookbook, “Let Them Eat Vegan!” I was so excited to try out some of her new recipes. While I’m still getting back in the swing of making dinners that aren’t prepped by myself and then grilled by the Pilot, I’ve only tried a few of the new recipes. I’ve made the kale slaw a couple of times, and it’s incredible.
When I realized we had all of the ingredients on-hand for her Almond Curry Chickpea recipe, it was an easy choice for dinner.
Creamy spiced almond butter sauce,
chickpeas and zucchini,
baked and served over brown rice.
It was absolutely perfect, and just as before, Mr. Pilot didn’t seem to mind the lack of animal protein at all.
Dreena kindly offered to giveaway a cookbook to a lucky reader, so if you’d like a copy of your own, all ya have to do is leave a comment with a recent kitchen disaster.
I’ll go first:
I set the smoke alarm off while making a salad beast. I was grilling chicken on the George Foreman to put atop the salad and before I knew it, the alarms started beeping. Livi was sound asleep and managed to stay sleeping upstairs while I opened doors and frantically fanned a pillow over the alarm. The Pilot just laughed.
I’ll pick a winner tonight at midnight EST and post it in tomorrow’s AM post.
Edited: This giveaway has ended as of 11:52 AM EST, 5/8/12. Please stay tuned for more giveaways in the future! Did you win? Find out here.
Have a great day and I’ll see ya tonight!
xoxo
Gina
Yesterday’s #smoothieaday:
PB & J
-1.5 C almond milk
-1/2 banana
-1 C frozen mixed berries
-1 scoop Sun Warrior
-1 T peanut butter
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I made ice cream with my new ice cream maker. Unfortunately, my freezer wasn’t cold enough, the bowl didn’t freeze, and it just ended up making chocolate soup. Sad. In good news, it worked the second try. 🙂
I’ve become 90% vegetarian. When I had some friends over the other week, we were grilling on the George Forman, and I forgot that real burgers, unlike veggie burgers, create quite the mess! It was all over my counter!
I tried to make a gluten free recipe that required at least 3 eggs, vegan, and it turned out mush!! It was supposed to be a chocolate coconut cake, but it was more like soft bars because of the flax meal. It tasted like a chocolate macaroon so I still ate it, but it wasn’t what I expected! Whoooops!
Somehow started garlic bread on fire inside the oven…ended up grabbing it with potholders and dumping it in the toilet…for some reason, the sink didn’t occur to me as a better place! :oP
Slicing my finger with a knife while cutting lemons and then spilling hot tea all over the place.
Started out the afternoon by taking a chunk out of my finger w/ a Cutco knife. Then decided to bake some muffins- got the batter completed & my 21 month old decided to pour his cup of orange juice in the batter. I decided to make my 21 month old son a smoothie so he could “help” (I give him a banana, blueberries, strawberries & spinach & he puts them in the blender). I put my Vitamix on its motor & something doesn’t sound right, then it dies…. There had been a spoon next to all the stuff to put in the blender & it had been included in our smoothie :-/. $500 Vitamix is broke :((
I recently spilled ~1/2 cup of chia seeds down a crack between my stove and counter. There was a little bit of moisture there and it was a hassle to clean up!
So this story didnt happen to me but to my brother in law, but it is too good not to share and I thought that it might be a winner. It was my husband to be’s bachelor party which was mustached themed. My brother in law made hot chicken wings with a little bit too much love on a cookie sheet which caused my whole kitchen to fill up with smoke. The entire fire department showed up to my house with a group of slightly inebreated (sp?) mustache men. Needless to say the fire fighters were quite amused with the scene.
Do I just have to pick one? haha. I guess one of my recent acts of not-so-genius was when I put eggs in a pot to boil….and forgot to add the water. There was the pot on the stoves with the eggs slowly burning away rather than boiling. Thank goodness the smell drew me to my mistake before some kind of awful egg-splosion happened! 🙂 And needless to say, the pot is no longer usable :/
Oh jeez I have a kitchen disaster AT LEAST once a week. Often much more than that. Most recently, I tried to make a bunch of substitutions to a cookie recipe, de-glutenizing and whatnot. They were NASTY.
The latest disaster was trying to open my bag of chia seeds and having chia seeds all over the kitchen. It was a huge hassle to clean up!
My latest kitchen disaster was dropping an open container of rolled oats on the floor this morning! They went everywhere! 😛
This is not my own kitchen disaster per se…but Paul Millsap, the NBA basketball player, was a previous owner of my house and set the kitchen on fire whilst cooking breakfast one morning. Now I have poopy cabinets and a weird ceiling that doesn’t match the rest of my house. 🙁
I made the mistake of leaving a GINOURMOUS bulk bag of Nutritional Yeast on the counter overnight. What’s the problem, you ask? We have cats and cats LOVE nutritional yeast. There was a torn bag on the floor the next morning with it’s contents strewn across the whole house. I could even see little yeasty paw prints. Needless to say, we new the culprit. Velvet had yellow powdery whiskers! At least it is good for them!!! 😉
When just a bit of turmeric turned into ALOT when the cap came off the spice bottle! But after roasting and pulling a whole chicken, I wasn’t about to waste it!
Looove Dreena, this newest cookbook looks perfect!
I reached to move my tray of kale chips that I had just recently taken out of the oven. Well I reached with my bare hand. Dumb!
I decided on eggs for dinner several nights ago. I prepared the wrap, warmed it, spread some dijon, goat cheese, went to scooch the eggs from pan to wrap – totally missed the wrap and onto the floor they went. Dogs were there in .2 seconds.
The wrap itself was not wasted though 😉
Congratulations on being voted best personal training blog!! That is awesome and such a great accomplishment!!
This was a while ago, but when I lived in my sorority house we had fire alarms hooked up to the fire department (AKA when the smoke detector went off, the fire trucks came!). Someone burned brownies once, and the trucks all came. Another time, something fell to the bottom of the oven and caught on fire when someone turned it on to preheat it and again – the whole fire crew showed up. SO embarrassing! We made them cookies every time because they were all false alarms – I bet they loved us!
I am in the Army and I was TDY for training for 3 months in an extended stay hotel. They had a little kitchen with a tiny stove and I tried to make myself dinner in an effort to stay healthy by avoiding quick processed dinners. Anyway, I managed to set the fire alarm off…no big deal right? it happens all the time. WRONG! The fire alarm in the entire hotel went off and the fire department had to come clear my room – SO EMBARRASSING!! I felt better the next day when it happened again to someone else – it turned out that it happened all the time during the 3 months I was there.
I have a kitchen disaster daily. If anyone was ever a fan of the show Gilmore Girls, my husband calls me Suekie (sp?) because I’m always injuring myself, setting something on fire or causing some disaster in the kitchen. But I have fun and usually all disasters end up in something yummy to eat. My last funny disaster was I made a s’mores cake for my brother in laws bday and I put the cake under the broiler to toast the marshmallo top and set the whole cake and oven on fire. It was funny! The cake tasted good once we scraped the burnt part off. 🙂
I have so many kitchen disaster stories! Most recently, these have involved several arm burns from reaching into ovens (and toaster ovens) far too quickly. It was all the excitement over the deliciousness in the oven!
Just tonight actually…I was making some flower shaped cookies with hard candy melted for the centers. I was taking them to my daughter’s school tomorrow for her birthday. Well, the dough was all wrong and I couldn’t even get the flower shape cut. So, daughter gets plain old round cookies for her birthday.
Using salt instead of sugar in kettle corn…yowza! Big mistake!!!!
When I was making bread last weekend, I unwittingly poured my salt on top of my yeast. For those of you who aren’t yeast bakers, salt kills yeast. I inadvertently made flatbread. 🙁
My kitchen disasters frequently involve letting things cook a little too long and ending up with a smokey kitchen.
So many disasters around here with a 6-year-old and 2-year-old around! Not to mention my clumsy self. This morning, I spilled some smoothie on the floor and, as I was going to get a towel, my 2-year-old came running in and slipped on the mess and hit his sweet head. Luckily, the smoothie was ready and it made him feel better. His mama, not so much.
My latest disaster in the kitchen was about 2 weeks ago when I was making my healthy ricotta French toast! I have alot of my seasonings in the same kinds if containers so I was going to sprinkle chia seeds in the middle if my French toast and make like a sandwich French toast and before I knew it I had ricotta black pepper French toast !! Hehe I had to start fresh!!
I don’t know if this counts as a kitchen disaster, but it was certainly painful. I have the same breakfast most mornings: an egg, cheddar, and kale bagel sandwich. Literally, I’ve made this dozens of times. Then comes last Monday, when I somehow manage to over-pour the oil, lose track of what I was doing so it got crazy hot, and then proceed to give myself a nasty little oil burn on my hand when I was stirring the egg. Truly one of my more graceful moments.
There’s also the time I accidentally left the heat on under some tomato sauce I was making for a dinner party while I got ready, and burnt the heck out of the pan. Or perhaps the time my sister, brother in law, and I tried to make falafel with a faulty kitchen thermometer and almost started an oil fire because the temperature was a couple hundred degrees off. … Apparently I should not be allowed around heat.
I tried to make a crock pot recipe “from scratch” using cream of mushroom soup and chicken….SO NASTYYYY….my boyfriend was so polite and tried to say it “smelled great”, but I threw it out. Haha
I made TERRIBLE lemon bars that my husband wouldn’t even touch. I ended up bringing them to work because everyone knows coworkers will eat anything, right? Yeah, the coworkers weren’t too pleased about it either. One said, “These taste one part lemon bar, one part fruit cake, and 50 parts butt hole” hahaha oops.
My latest disaster was attempting to make homemade oat milk, and blending it before letting it cool completely. Needlesss to say, oat milk got everywhere!
i was so lazy boiling millet on its own that i incorporated into the stir fry dish i was making…i just added more veggie broth and put the millet in…i ended up cooking like 2 cups of millet which required probably like 8 million cups of broth…so it would keep drying out then i would have to add more veggie broth, ended up sorta risotto kinda millet…weird looking and tasting…did not like it at all.
I was making garlic roasted carrots and forgot to press start on the timer, an hour and a half later the kitchen was smokey and I was left with black carrots 🙁
Before I left for work I had to put some chicken in marinade for dinner that night. The marinade was called “Chaka’s MMmmmm sauce” (yes that is the actual name and it’s delicious.) Anyways I couldn’t get the top off so I’m twisting it and its jiggling around. I finally call my husband in and as he takes it from me the top explodes of the bottle- and its like the jumbo family size bottle. Chaka’s mmm sauce goes everywhere- its all over the kitchen, in my hair, all down my back. Like I’m literally covered in the sauce. I had to call my boss and tell him I was going to be late because I was covered in Chaka’s mmmm sauce. He was like “ok, I don’t want to know what you and your husband are into.” I had to explain why I was covered in marinade and that it wasn’t some freaky love thing, lol. It was pretty funny!
My oven coil is in need of repairs.. and I often forget that. It hangs low – rather than being permanently attached to the ceiling of the oven.. Which has caused a few burns. Sadly, I can’t think of a good food one right now!
Last summer, we lost power in our house for a couple days. Most of the freezer food seemed okay, but then we tried to cook some of the frozen fish (that had thawed and then refrozen…). I almost gagged the texture was so disgusting!!
A recent kitchen disaster of mine involved my cat. I was making peach praline muffins, and when I took them out of the oven they were actually rounded and uniformly shaped, a rarity for me since my oven has a tendency to produce lopsided baked goods. I was very excited about this, and left them to cool like usual. Then somehow, my cat snuck into the kitchen and proceeded to step in every. single. muffin. The previously uniform muffins now each had a uniform catprint. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. My cat, however, was very pleased with artwork.
I want the cook book!!!! 🙂 My latest kitchen disaster…hmmm which one to choose from… the most painful kitchen disaster to clean up would have to be when we ran out of egg so I ran to our basement fridge to grab another flat ( 30 eggs ) but I was in a real rush because I had to get ready for work. As I ran up the stairs holding onto the flat of eggs I tripped and landed boobs and belly onto the flat of eggs and the stairs. Eggs went a flying and landed everywhere, including on my poor puppy, the walls, the stairs and yours truly. I said some bad words, wiped up as much as I could and ran downstairs to collect the last flat of eggs that were in the fridge. But some of the eggs didn’t make it much further then the fridge because I was moving to fast and the flat was quite flimsy and I dropped another 6 eggs, but at least 24 eggs made it up stairs!!! When I called home on my lunch break my husband said I forgot to wipe the egg off our doggy and some of it had crusted on- parts of the shell and all….oh my I was glad when that day was over!!! All of which to make a yummy goat cheese and spinach frittata- which in the end turned out great!
My biggest cooking disaster was my first time cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Luckily, it all tasted good, but I didn’t realize how long the turkey took to cook and we ended up eating dinner at 9:30. Oh well!
Oh man I’m glad I’m not too late! I just got off duty!! 🙁 recent kitchen disaster: I overfilled the cupcake pans and caught my oven on fire when the batter dripped onto the heating element 🙁 no harm no foul! I still haven’t tried to make cupcakes again.
What a great giveaway!
Our smoke alarm goes off ALL the time – like even if we turn the oven on. It’s crazy. My most recent kitchen disaster was when I made zucchini lasagna a couple weeks ago. I meant to slightly cook the zucchini first to get some of the water out, but I totally forgot. It was a watery mess and I pronounced it “zucchini lasagna soup” haha. It still tasted great!
placing very large pieces of kale in the oven and forgetting about them until they started to burn and stink up the house just before our dinner guests arrived
The first time I attempted my Grandma’s homemade jam recipe, it too me an hour just to blend the berries (I don’t have a food processor so I had to figure out how to “process” the frozen berries in a blender). Then I didn’t give myself enough time to accurately measure the sugar and ended up putting in the wrong amount. I ended up with jam that was too grainy and a purple kitchen that took me another 2 hours to clean. I have since learned how to make “Granny jam” correctly.
So, one of my guy friends junior year of college asked me for cooking lessons when I was bragging about an amazing peanut sauce/stir fry thing I’d made the other day. Me thinking this would be so great, invited him over, made a sweet playlist for background music while we cooked, and taught him how to finely chop an onion and to slice bell peppers/zucchini. All was going great when I put a wok on the stove top and turned the heat up to get the surface warm a little. I THOUGHT I turned the heat back down but actually turned the knob for a different burner, so when I went to add the oil to the wok the oil IMMEDIATELY caught fire!! I screamed and we had to grab the wok off the stove and try to cover it with a large plate to put the fire out. Then BOTH smoke alarms in my apartment started blaring and we had to rip the battery out of one and frantically fan the other with a pillow and open all the windows!
The stir fry ended up being really tasty on round two, but needless to say I will never get cocky in the kitchen about my skills (which apparently are non-existent) EVER again! And maybe stop offering cooking lessons. Or maybe I should have my own show on food network. I think I’d make a lot of people feel better about themselves! =)
A couple nights ago I decided to add a can of tomatoes to the mac and cheese I was making. As I was mixing everything, I found something unidentifiable (sort of looked like either mold or part of a tomato core), decided I didn’t want to risk it because I didn’t know what it was and it was potentially gross, and threw away the whole thing. I ended up making pasta instead and while that wasn’t especially good, there wasn’t anything gross and unidentifiable in it.
Mine was this weekend…I was making a large batch of whole wheat pasta for freezer dishes and as I was draining the liquid the strainer lid on my pasta pot managed to come unscrewed (don’t ask my graceful self how that happened) so there went all my pasta down the garbage disposal hole 🙁
I has just moved into a new house with my husband & was new to cooking. I dumped a large, leftover batch of beef stew down the garbage disposal & completely clogged it! We had to pat $$ to have it unclogged. Oops!
Recently I thought it might be fun to try out a low carb cheesecake recipe. I don’t have much experience cooking with sugar substitute, so I just grabbed a random bag off the shelf at the supermarket. I baked the cheesecake and it came out looking surprisingly yummy (despite the fact that I didn’t have a springform pan and had to use a casserole dish 🙂 ). I let it chill for some time and when I couldn’t resist anymore I dug in and took a huge bite. Well the first part of that bite was amazing….but then the aftertaste of the sugar substitute hit and it was awful!!! The cheesecake ended up in the trash and I learned a valuable lesson…that sugar substitue can be good, but definitely only in moderation!
My first time baking cookies, was a monumental disaster. I would say I was about 13 or 14…. I was using one of those packaged betty crocker sugar cookie mixes. I had placed a batch in the oven and I’m not certain what I pushed incorrectly; the temperature or the time. Because the next thing I know my mom was yelling at me for the extinguisher becuase they were on fire …..luckily we put the fire out and no one was hurt…. but the cookies were char. I cringe thinking about that.