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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Recently I tried to make my own salad dressing–but ended adding too much lemon juice and apple cider vinegar. I don’t think what it was thinking—it was so gross!
My lastest kitchen disaster, was when I was trying to get sauce into a separate bowl from the stove and it splattered alll over the floor! Would love to try out this cookbook, hoping that has recipes that meat loving husband will like as well!
I was making spaghetti sauce and I accidentally left the stove on without stirring the sauce. Ten minutes later, I came back and the sauce evaporated and whatever was in the pot was burnt. It was horrible because it was all we had for dinner that night.
Oh man, I was cooking a filet mignon in my oven on a grillpan, and decided to broil it for the last minute or so. Little did I know that I would be eating flambeed steak…it set the meat on fire, literally!! I managed to put it out quickly but boy was that a crazy sight…
Leaving the lid off the blender while trying to make a green monster. My kitchen ended up looking like one!
I just got home from college for the summer and am staying at my mom’s house. She has two dogs and a cat, who all like to get into food left on the counter. I forgot about this, having been away, and left a half open can of tuna on the counter for TWO seconds today when I heard my phone ringing. I went to my room to get it and subsequently hear a loud crash and then a bunch of screeching and barking. Apparently the cat had jumped on the counter to get the tuna and knocked it over onto the floor, which then attracted the dogs. An all out, tuna-fight-to-the-death ensued, which I had to break up by spraying water on the animals. They all walked away perfectly fine (and rather smug), while I sustained two cat scratches. The worst part – after cleaning up the spilled tuna, I looked in the pantry and realized it had been the last can. FAIL. I settled for a PB and J while the animals watched and snickered to themselves.
Congratulations Gina! You deserve it 🙂 Now .. time to celebrate!
Congratulations!
I would love to win this book. A kitchen disaster for me – I was using sauce out of a glass jar and dropped it on the kitchen floor. Sauce & Glass everywhere. What a mess it was to clean up!
id have to say my biggest kitchen disaster was when i put parchment paper in the toaster oven and then almost set my friends mother’s kitchen on fire!
I was making myself a hot tea-like drink to ward off an icky cold-like bug coming on and combined in a pot on the stove some water, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, honey, ginger and cayenne pepper. I put in WAY too much ACV and cayenne but choked it down thinking it couldn’t hurt me. It was heinous.
I had my kitchen disaster around Easter. I was making a turkey for our family Easter dinner, since my brother had missed out on Thanksgiving with the fam. I was brining the turkey, and as I was pouring the last of the water into the brining bag, it completely collapsed! All the water and spices spilled all over the floor, cabinets and the countertop. I salvaged some of it, but it probably would have been a lot better if 3/4 of the brining mix didn’t end up everywhere but the turkey : )
I recently made homemade sweet potatoe fries and confused cayenne pepper with chili powder. I like a little spice so cayenne pepper-covered fries were a bit too hot for me! I keep hearing great things about this cookbook!
I made a cake from scratch that was vegan. It took a long time and I had all the right ingredients. I worked do hard -it was for a friends birthday. I went to take a shower after I finished my masterpiece as I let the cake cool. I came out to find nothing but crumbs in the cake pan and a guilty yellow lab cowering on the floor. I was livid !! Apparently the cake was so good it turned my dog vegan !
I made what I thought was going to be a yummy batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. When I pulled them out of the oven they lost balance and flipped over into the bottom of the oven. Needless to say we still made the best of it and ate the cookie pile on a plate with a spoon- kind of gross I know.
My last kitchen disaster was this past weekend. Was heading to a Cinco de Mayo party and told host I would make chicken taquitos as an appetizer. Made the filling and went to roll my taquitos and each and every corn tortillas cracked and broke in half. I had a mess and send my husband out to by brownies instead.
My latest kitchen disaster came courtesy of my kids. Unebeknownst to me one of them had put a rubber stress ball cars in the oven. As the oven was heating up I thought something smelled funny, but just brushed it off since I had to get dinner in the oven asap. I shoved the casserole in and set the timer. About 10 minutes later the weird smell was much stronger and my oven was smoking. I ran over and saw a small fire burning inside the oven.I gd the fire extinguisher and put it out and later found a charcoaled mess of said rubber cars. OUr house smelled liked burned rubber for days and it took me fooorever to clean that oven. hah 🙂
Added 2 tbsp of chili powder instead of 2 tsp to a sweet potato and pinto bean chili! My Mom and I had to keep eating greek yogurt to cool our mouths down!
We were making steak in our college apartment and the smoke set off the fire alarm so the entire building was evacuated and the firemen came to see what was going on….needless to say they wanted to eat the steak for their trouble of coming over. 🙂
my most recent kitchen disaster: i was making cheesecake for my family and we had a few black bananas…so i thought – hey! i will just throw those in and it will be BANANA butterscotch cheesecake – as it turns out, bananas are heavy and because i didn’t adjust the other ingredients, it didn’t set properly—–cheesepuddingcake…
(it didn’t taste half-bad, though 😉 )
A few weeks ago my brother was toasting a hot dog bun (at 11:45pm, of course) and forgot about it in the toaster oven. Eventually, the fire alarms went off (the bun was completely black by this point). Since our fire alarms are connected to the security system, a fire marshall was sent to our house to check on things. So, at midnight, a fire Marshall came knocking on the door! Hahaha! Leave it to teenagers to create some great stories!
OMG this question couldn’t have come at a better time, lol. Yesterday my daughter and hubs wanted cupcakes so I decided to make the ones that you put in the ice cream cone as they are super cute. I was in a rush a and decided to make a box mix vs. homemade which was my 1st mistake. I also decided to finally try the old WW standby of adding diet soda to the cake mix w/ nothing else. I used a whole can of caffeine free diet coke and added it to the cake mixture — it bubbled up, fizzed, and spilled right out of the bowl. After cleaning up the mess I added the remaining mix to the cones and baked them in the oven. Well apparently you’re only supposed to fill the cones 1/2 way or something because that sloppy mixture cooked right over the cones and all into my oven. As if that wasn’t bad enough the cones ended up being droopy in the center and they tasted as gross as they look! Apparently there’s a reason why the recipe calls for oil and eggs — I’m done w/ funky “low fat” switch outs, lol. Oh and to top it all off I had to do the self clean option on the oven later on to clean out the mess and that made the kitchen smoke up which set off my smoke alarms and woke my daughter up from her much needed nap…. Total disaster from start to finish! Ha ha. 🙂
once, i found a tomato in my sock drawer. to this day, i have no idea how it got there. thank goodness i found it before it liquified.
YAY VEGAN! I was pan-frying tofu for dinner and I had the oil too hot. My entire house filled with smoke and I had to open all the windows, while waving my arms like an idiot in front of the smoke detector to keep it from going off. And even worse, I ended up burning most of my tofu!
This year my roommate set some oil in a pan on fire BRIEFLY on a gas stove. I wasn’t in the kitchen at the time, so I only heard his, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” commentary of the event.
Thanks for the giveaway!!
A while ago I was moving a heavy glass plate while cooking and it slipped out of my hands. It cracked my stove top! We had to buy a new one…
The day after I decided to start a healthy cleanse diet, which required daily fresh juices, while in a rush to clean my juicer, I dropped it a component, resulting in a significant crack. I didn’t think it was that bad, until I started juicing a cucumber, and the juice basically exploded all over the counter and almost short circuited the juicer. I ordered a replacement part the very next day.
I dropped a sweet potatoe in the oven, setting off both smoke detectors (one upstairs, one downstairs) sending my fiance (who currently has a strained knee) running up and down the stairs trying to stop them, with me trying to open windows and remove said spud.
I would love a copy… Just the other day we tried out a chile relleno casserole, the dish did not turn out as planned since I forgot to add the milk to the egg mixture. The dish was hard and not very appetizing 🙁
I attempted to make cake balls with my mom for Halloween last year. It was a disaster. She burned the dipping chocolate, then we couldn’t get it runny enough to dip in the cake balls. And for some reason the strawberry cake balls had a terrible artificial flavor. It was a sad cake loss.
I’ve had many kitchen disasters from burns to spills. Most recently while attempting to cook some chicken strips, I let the oil get way too hot. When I put the chicken in, the hot oil went everywhere (including burning my hand and wrist). That same week, I managed to cut my finger with the knife while cutting veggies for a salad. I should probably start paying more attention to what I’m doing 🙂
Um I guess this is a disaster… I found scary, moldy, liquid-y greens in my greens drawer! Oops! Yuck!
Hooray vegan cookbooks!
My latest was pulling a whole vegan vegetable casserole out of the oven and setting it down on top of the stove only to find that the burners on the stove weren’t seated properly – the entire bubbling hot casserole slid off the side and emptied into the tiny crevice between the stove/oven and the counter. It is impossible to clean inside that crevice and I have no clue what I am going to do – I had better figure it out before the ants realize there’s a lifetime supply for the whole colony down there.
This happens more than I care to admit…but I am missing half of my thumbnail today after moving too fast with my just-sharpened Chef’s knife last night…yowsah.
I was baking an apple pie for Christmas. The bottom crust was down, I had carefully laid out the apples, and put on the top crust. The pie was in the oven for a few minutes before I realized that I had completely forgotten to add in the brown sugar and butter filling! I had to perform emergency surgery on the apple pie to get it in there, and luckily it still tasted perfectly delicious after that disaster…
Many, many years ago, I tried to make a smoothie in my mom’s blender; it wasn’t a heavy duty one, and I think a piece of ice got stuck under a blade… anyway, the glass container EXPLODED. There was chocolate and shattered glass every, every, everywhere. I was home alone and young, and I was so worried my mom was going to kill me when she got home and I’d destroyed her blender and her kitchen. She wasn’t mad; actually, she seemed impressed that I got so much of it clean on my own. thank goodness, haha 🙂
Oh, I have so many kitchen disaster stories. I guess my most recent was a pancake mishap. I always have pancakes at least once on the weekend and I usually use a mix. Well, last weekend I didn’t have any mix, so I decided to go from scratch. I used the wrong flour the first time and they tasted just like the flour. Yuck! So I tried again. I burnt them on one side. FAIL
In the end, the hubs took me out for a pancake breakfast at IHOP. So, my story had a happy delicious ending!
Disasters? I made a green smoothie the other day and it just tasted like I blended up a salad. It wasn’t yummy at all. I tried to share it with my roommate and I think he was turned off from smoothies forever.
I tried to microwave a sweet potato at work (I help run blood drives at high schools) and since I do it all the time at home and they turn out fine, I entered the same time into the school’s microwave. Well apparently the school’s microwave was a lot more powerful and significantly older than my one at home because not only did my potato explode but it shorted the microwave whig in turn shorted the power to the whole school! Oops…
I was cooking some brown rice and forgot that it was still simmering. I went to take a shower and when I came back it was all dried out and burnt on the bottom! It was awful to clean up!
My most recent kitchen disaster happened last night actually! I decided I would be proactive and roast some veggies to have on hand throughout the week, and ended up leaving a wok in the oven while it was warming up. Needless to say, my boyfriend’s wok served us well while it lasted, but it’s no longer usable. At least we’ll get a new one now. Gotta find a silver lining right? 😉
Ugh, I am full of kitchen disasters lately. I bought these fresh vegan burgers from Costco a week ago, great buy, but with it just being me eating them, buying 12 wasn’t a good idea. Also, they tend not to cook very well at all, they kind of fall apart into a sludgy puddle now matter how I cook them. So, I cooked 4 of them at a time in the oven, with some butternut squash fries, and after 40 minutes the burgers were still gooey in the middle so I got angry and put the broiler on and proceeded to burn the squash fries, and charr the outside of the burgers, but THE MIDDLES WERE STILL GROSS AND SLIMY. I love those burgers’ taste, but they are dead to me because they won’t cook.
And my condo still smells like a charred carbon factory, 5 days later…
I set the fire alarm off and smoked out my roommates baking chickpeas. I thought I could jump in the shower while they baked, but I forgot about them once I was getting all squeaky-clean. Jumping out of the shower soaking wet to roommates yelling and smoke filling up the whole house was not fun! At least no one was hurt, but the chickpeas!
Lately I’ve been into trying new flours for baking/cooking. I had picked up some white whole wheat flour and dumped it into a canister. One day I was baking a coffee cake and had grabbed some of what I thought was all-purpose flour.. 30 min later and I had theeee most dense coffee cake I’ve ever had in my life. Didn’t rise a bit. Luckily it was delicious crumbled up in yogurt 🙂
I can’t think of a recent one so here is an old one. September 11th 2001 (enough said huh?!) toasting chick peas in the toaster. Sitting in the kitchen watching the news talking about the attacks. My aunt says that she smells something burning. They go into our pantry and flames are shooting out of the toaster. My mom grabs the fire extinguisher but doesn’t know how to use it so my dad comes in and, like an idiot, opens the toaster door. The fire came out and he was breathing in so much smoke. They called 911 and the fire department came along with an ambulance for my dad. So people are dying in new York and the country was under a terrorist attack and the fire fighters had to come put out a toaster fire. That was the craziest kitchen story I can remember!
Man oh man, I’ve had several kitchen disasters, but the worst, by far, was when I started an oil fire in the kitchen of my college dorm. I was trying to make french beignets, but I had way too much oil in the pan. The beignets burst into flames and the pan was smoking like crazy. My friend had to use a fire extinguisher to put out the fire, but not before the bottom of the microwave (which was above the stove) started to melt. Needless to say, alarms went off and everyone had to evacuate the building while we waited for the fire department to arrive. Everyone was extra pissed about the disruption because it was finals week and people were cramming for their exams. Worst part: I was the RA. Um, yeah.
I recently started making green juice in my blender and straining it in a nut milk bag rather than using my juicer (because the juicer is SUCH a pain to clean!) Well, I strained the juice into a bowl and when I tried to pour it into my mason jar, I dumped it ALL over the counter and floor, and into the bag of dog food. What a waste of time and money.
I’m a college student with a crazy schedule, so I was trying to be proactive and plan ahead for a healthy week. I set out to cook a huge batch on quinoa along with like 5 chicken breasts to divide out for the week. I set my chicken in the oven, set the alarm on my phone and then put the quinoa in a pot on the stove top. I of course, forgot to set a separate alarm for the quinoa, so when I came back into the kitchen 45 mins later, I had a crispy burnt pot of quinoa that was smoking like crazy! It took my a week to get the char off of that pot and I’ve been scared to cook quinoa since!
I set off the fire alarm cooking chicken on the stove top the other day and it scared the dogs so much that they won’t come into the kitchen anymore when I turn the fan on above the stove. The poor things give me the look of terror and run upstairs to the bedroom. Oops! 🙂
recent kitchen disaster: setting a rubber spatula on the stove while cooking… came back to check on the food and it has melted….oops
I am embarrassed to admit that more than once I set the popcorn pan on fire while waiting (um…forgetting!) for the oil to heat up! Now I just dump the kernels in right away…works just fine!