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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As a baby vegan (just finished my first week of switching to being vegan) I would love to score a copy of this cookbook!
Hmm, kitchen disasters – my most recent one was at work. We cook a LOT of bacon. Like 5-10 pounds a day sometimes.
Let’s just say I forgot about some of the bacon in the oven. All of a sudden, black smoke fills the cafe and I remember the bacon I put in at 325 almost 40 minutes ago. I forgot to set the timer. Fortunately, there were no customers in at the time, but it smelled like bacon all day – in the air, on my clothes, and in my hair – my husband was horrified/a little too into the smell!
I’m a raw chef for a reason! I’m a much better raw chef than a cooked chef but my family do still like to eat cooked foods too.
A recent disaster was trying to veganize buckwheat pancakes and having them fall apart in the pan, so I turned up the heat which led them to burning!
Ohh I put a dish towel too close to the stove that I had just turned off, and then smelled burning. BIG hole, but glad I caught it before I started a fire!
Mine is quite similar to yours actually! I was cooking up a turkey brat for a quiche in my apartment at college when the kitchen filled with smoke. My roomies and I scrambled around trying to fan the alarms and open the windows. I opened the front door (which I’ll never do again!), and it promptly set off the building’s fire alarm. The whole complex was evacuated, and the fire department came. It being finals week here, my neighbors were not pleased. Whoopsies! Needless to say, my quiche didn’t quite turn out 😉
Yum, that sounds amazing!
My most recent kitchen disaster was making muffins; only when everything was ready to be popped in the oven… I realised our muffin pan was too small for our new oven! 🙁
The job of transferring the batter OUT of the muffin tins was rather messy. But I baked the salvageable batter in a loaf tin which turned out okay!
I set off our fire alarm all the time… it’s directly in front of our toaster oven, location fail! Another kitchen fail was a blender incident… let’s just say it looked like someone was murdered in our kitchen! Berry smoothie eeeeeeeeverywhere!
Disaster : I was preparing a lasagna and started with using the stove top to cook some of the ingredients. Only, I forgot the stove top on after I was done. So, everything was ready and I was about to layer all of the ingredients : I put an (empty) Pyrex glass pan on the said stove, without noticing it was still on and very hot (my kitchen is very small, I always use the stove top as “countertop”). At the same time, my phone rang in the living room, so I only was in the living room for a minute when I heard : BANG!!! coming from the kitchen. My Pyrex container exploded on the stovetop, the glass was every-freaking-where! Good chance that I was not – nor anyone- in the kitchen when it exploded! Always be careful…
My most recent kitchen disaster is that my refrigerator broke this past weekend. I tried to look on the bright side of things by cooking an epic brunch with all of the tastiest, most expensive foods so they wouldn’t go to waste.
While recently trying to open a bottle of red wine (in the kitchen) I somehow managed to send the cork flying and get the wine everywhere.. but in my glass
Congratulations on that amazing news! So awesome. That chickpea dinner looks absolutely incredible.
You want kitchen disasters? I have two, from the same morning. LOL. It’s professional school finals week. So I was going to pack my fridge with healthy meals for the hellish week to come:
So I was making a vegan stew, and I went to open a bottle of red for the recipe. Try as I might, the cork wouldn’t pop. I fought for 5 minutes, and them *BAM* – the BOTTOM of the bottle pops off, an the wine is all over the floor. Glass everywhere, red wine everywhere. How does that even happen, when you are struggling with the *other* end???
Then, I finished the stew, and decide to throw together a veggie soup, too. Halfway through cooking, I noticed the pot stopped boiling… and I have apparently run out of propane. I live in a tropical place where all stoves are fueled by a propane tank. And its Sunday, and everything is closed on Sunday – so no more propane to be had for at least 24 hours.
hmmm I haven’t had a terrible one in a couple months, but a few weeks ago I forgot to add baking soda and powder to banana bread. That was some dense chewy bread 🙂
Everything has been a kitchen disaster since we moved and I am trying to get use to a new stove/oven! I want this cookbook so bad!
It’s recent enough — but I was terrified when I started a grease fire! I was heating a cast iron skillet … and then put the oil in. Insta fire. Luckily, I was cooking with a friend and he had the common sense to grab the lid and put it on instantly. No harm, no foul. A great argument for cooking with buddies!
I was just thinking about a funny kitchen disaster that happened a few Thanksgivings ago. I was pregnant and cooking Thanksgiving dinner for my family and my in-laws. About 15 people. I made the most beautiful homemade pumpkin and apple pies with leaf cut out crusts and an entire leaf cut out apple pie top. I put them on top of the washing machine to cool and rest overnight. I awoke early to get some things done and discovered my two beautiful pies were covered in ants! Millions of tiny black creatures were covering my pies! Pregnancy hormones running wild I ran upstairs and awoke my husband in tears. He and my mother somehow vaccumed the pies free of ants and we still served them! There was not one ant found during dessert! Gross but after all my hard work that went into them I was happy that they still made it to the dinner table 🙂 Needless to say we no longer put our food on the washing machine to cool!
My recent kitchen disaster was lighting a towel on fire when it got a bit too close to the stove-thankfully we put it out quickly!!
I’ve been really getting into eating vegan lately because my 6 week old is having issues with my breastmilk, So no dairy or beef for me. Kitchen disaster- my husband and I tried to make popcorn from kernels using coconut oil and a big stainless bowl directly on the burners. it works with other kinds of oils, turns out the low smoke point of coconut oil combined with high gas stove heat turns your kitchen into a stinky smoky disaster area for about 24 hours.
My kitchen disaster is always lurking in a casserole dish that I forgot about for a couple weeks in the back of the frig!
I tried to make a vegan and gluten-free cookie cake last night that didn’t rise and turned out to be a crumbly mess, but it still tasted delicious, so I guess it wasn’t a total loss!
Recent kitchen disaster: I volunteered to bring vegan orange-cranberry muffins (from The Post-Punk Kitchen site – delicious!) to a brunch. However, I either overfilled the tins or tried to remove the muffins from the tin too soon (I had a brunch to get to!) and almost all of the muffin tops detached from the muffin bottoms. So sad!
My old blender broke while i was blending. And it split in two. IT SPLIT IN TWO! Now you imagine what a kitchen in green goo looks like. Such waste of a good smoothie 🙁
I love eating vegan these days! It certainly helps me to avoid my most repeated kitchen disaster: EVERY time I roast a chicken there is so much splattering going on in the oven that it sets off the smoke detectors. I never hear about anyone else having this problem… Probably something to do with me or my oven. 😉
I had been cooking a wonderful homemade pasta sauce, and was bringing it over to the dinner table to serve it. Unfortunately, the handle fell off of the pot, and the hot sauce burned my foot and was all over the floor! I had to squeegee it off of the floor which took forever!
Man i dont have a recent one, but when we were first married and i had no idea how to cook or bake anything! I actually put a bagel in the toaster oven on a paper plate! We never had toaster ovens growing up only toasters! Totally did not know you couldn’t put paper in there…i guess i thought it was like a microwave? I dont know! It started on fire, tho, and i frantically threw water in there…it was plugged in…i know…not smart! Panicked first time cook wifey here! Anyway it broke the whole oven, but at least it didn’t burn down our entire house! haha!
This happened just yesterday. I always keep a large tray of chopped veggies in the fridge so that we have quick access to healthy snacks. I had just finished filling the tray for the week ahead and putting it in the fridge when I realized that I needed to go back into the fridge for something. That something was underneath the veggie tray and I though I could get away with just sliding it out. Apparently not! The tray came flying out of the fridge, lid popping off as it hit the floor, and a weeks worth of veggies were scattered all over my not so clean kitchen floor. Ugh.
My most recent kitchen fail was putting cayenne on my oatmeal instead of cinnamon. Not a huge deal but no fun on a very sleepy, dreary morning. Such a disappointment!
I can’t WAIT (!!!!!) to see you in my issue of Fitness. I’m assuming I’ll have to wait a while on that one. Congrats! You definitely earned that one!
Kitchen disaster – I ALWAYS burn the bread. I stick it in the oven on broil and with little ones running around, I do close the oven all the way, where I used to leave it cracked open. And 90% of the time, it gets charred!
Congrats on your award, that is mighty awesomeness! I’ve been wanting this cookbook. Oh my, blowing up baked potatoes in the oven…never seen that before, but I did it!
I recently made the Pioneer Woman’s restaurant-style salsa (amazing!). I tried making it my food processor, but found out the hard way why there is a liquid limit – I had tomato juice and partial salsa leaking all over my countertops – about 20 minutes before our guests were coming over. Needless to say, I now use the blender to keep all liquids contained.
This looks like an AMAZING cookbook! I always get excited when you do a giveaway 😉
My kitchen disaster… I have a few! My flatbread caught on fire, my stovetop popcorn caught on fire, My toast caught on fire..I promise I’m not a pyromaniac 😉 The first meal I ever cooked, was age 13…Pasta and COOKED lettuce. I was so proud then, but now I look back on it as a total disaster! Learning how to open a thai coconut…I actually put it in a beach towel and smacked it on the ground. ;/ Forgetting to shut the lid of the vitamix while blending hot soup. I love it. The kitchen is a place for surprising adventures! =)
I would love to start eating vegan. I just feel super hungry every time I try. Any post you have about good meals are encouraging me to try again 🙂
I am a recovering chef. My husband and I owned and operated the “Dancing Crow Cafe'” a restaurant featuring Native American Cuisine. I turned to a vegan lifestyle to try and fix some health issues and am now learning to cook and “uncook” all over again. My first green smoothie was a disaster. Out of the vitamixer came this dark green slimy blob of goo that smelled like macerated kale mixed with soap (too much ginger). It kind of tasted like kale and soap too. I don’t know now how we choked that mess down but we did. My smoothies are much better now and I’ve tossed out all kinds of “cooking” equipment I no longer use, but the first few weeks of learning to go raw vegan was interesting.
I got my first set of stainless steel pans last year. It took me a couple tries to figure out that it’s impossible to cook pancakes or eggs in them. Not necessarily a disaster, but it required a lot of elbow grease and I certainly didn’t get an edible meal out of it!
My frequent disasters include spilling and making a huge mess! I’m just not smooth in the kitchen 🙂
I have a bad habit of leaving pans on the stove that I used to only cook veggies for a couple days and typically reuse the same one… And always tend to forget that sometimes my roommate uses the pans left on the stove too. I think she was trying to be proactive in cleaning the pan that she think I overuse and added a bit of soap to it to get the cleaning action started. Later, I was starving and seriously needed to go grocery shopping, but I managed to save a bit of kale to steam up. Turns out garlicy steamed kale with siracha and soap is not the business. But I ate it anyways. The joys of college budgeting.
I was trying my hand at my first vegan protein pancake using oat flour and decided to use our smaller frying pan. Well, I hadn’t made pancakes since moving to our apartment with a gas stove and the smaller pan is also our old pan that is worn and scratched up. I ended up having the stove-top too high and ended up burning the outside of the pancake while it kept sticking to the pan and on top of that it still had a gooey mushy uncooked center. It was still delicious and edible since there weren’t eggs in it or anything unsafe but not even close to a pancake. It could have maybe passed for burnt oatmeal with syrup though.
I put some oil in a pan and then went into the other room because my baby cried. I started playing with him and forgot that I had started cooking dinner. By the time I remembered the pan was black and there was smoke in the kitchen!
My most recent kitchen disaster was actually over Christmas, when I had finished making the sweet potato pie casserole and was bringing it to the table. I slipped (word to the wise, don’t go barefoot in tights in a tiled kitchen), and dropped the whole casserole, but not before trying to save it. I would up sending it into some sort of forward spin sending half the thing flying onto the kitchen walls. My mom called me in March saying she had found another glob of the casserole hiding behind the cookbook shelf. The gift that keeps on giving?
My food processor EXPLODED! The blade went flying EVERYWHERE! And so did my banana ice-cream! Sad, sad! 🙁 I called the company though! And they should be sending a new processor my way ASAP! (:
Oh, my worst kitchen disaster has to be when I decided on a whim to make cookies…and forgot to add all of the flour. I spooned them onto a sheet, put them in the oven, REMEMBERED halfway through that I forgot to add all of the flour, and tried to pull them out and add flour in. Needless to say, there were no cookies that day 🙁
My most recent kitchen disaster was pancakes that were burned on the outside and raw in the middle. Grrr. I LOVE Eat Drink and Be Vegan as well!
Im working my way to 100% vegan, this would really help me with new ideas! 🙂
I love giveaways!
Recent kitchen disaster: making a huge smoothie in the Vitamix and forgetting to put the lid on before turning it on. Oh, and forgetting to turn the variable speed down instead of up when I realized said lid was not on. What a mess!
I set off my fire alarm this morning making OATMEAL! Seriously how do you do that! Waking up my poor husband and probably my neighbors too!
Even though I know better, I went to puree hot liquid in my blender without letting it cool or opening the vent hole and it exploded everywhere! Gahh!!
I am very interested in expanding my vegan horizon! Would love a copy of the book!
First a tip I use, when I am using a cookbook I cut open a clear page protector and it lays perfectly over the pages and keeps the actual pages from smudging. That’s just 1 gem I learned in culinary school and it’s a good one. =)
Secondly, my kitchen disaster. I was making alfredo sauce, turned around and when I did it boiled over. NBD, I just cleaned up the burner and the oven where it dripped in and kept prepping. When I was preheating the oven though, I started smelling smoke and the alarm went off. I couldn’t deal with that then because I had a fire in the oven! I grabbed a huge measuring cup, filled it with water and threw it in the oven. Once that was contained I grabbed a chair and took down the fire alarm. Apparently I didn’t clean all of the sauce like I thought I had… The house was already smoky and then I decided to run the self cleaning cycle. Here is where bad=disaster. Now the house was REALLY full of smoke. My poor husband came home to me sitting on the porch swing with smoke billowing out of our house almost in tears. Needless to say, we went out to eat that night.
My most recent kitchen disaster was filling my whole house with smoke while trying to make some garlic bread. I bought one of the premade garlic breads at the supermarket, threw it in the oven and parked my butt on the couch to watch some tv while it heated up. The butter on the garlic bread melted and spilled out onto the bottom of my oven and when I heard the smoke alarm the whole kitchen and my bedroom was filled with smoke.
there the no less than five hundred instances of setting of the smoke detector trying to get the food network ‘crust’ on various meats. then theres the infamous pea “paste.” i want to make luscious pea soup…i managed to create pea concrete. it was horrible. great flavor though i guess… (thats like saying ‘she had a great personality.’)
Well recently my husband put the parchment paper in the oven at 500 and it is only supposed to go up to 400. It smelled chemically but luckily we removed it and it didn’t seem to ruin anything. Cool giveaway, I love Dreena!
Recent kitchen disaster: Simmering rice on the stove top, used my kitchen towel to lift the the lid and check the progress. Then I left the kitchen towel on top- I guess I thought I had turned off the flame. Soon, kitchen towel was in flames, melting the front of my range. So, now I have a permanent reminder of that stupid mistake.