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 would love a copy of Dreena’s book. I have recently become vegan and find I don’t need my oven that much any more. It’s a good thing because a few years ago my daughter and her friends begged me to make them a pizza for dinner. I preheated the oven to 450 and got to work on the pizza. After about 20 minutes I realized a funny smell was coming from my oven and opened to a huge plume of smoke and flames. I quickly realized I had “stored” my dirty dishes in the oven to get them out of the way when company came over a few days earlier.. I mean doesn’t everyone do that?!?! haha. Unfortunately in the dirty dishes was a plastic tray which my indoor grill fit in to and it had melted all over my oven racks and oven. My daughters friend quickly ran it outside and tried in vain to remove the melted plastic before it hardened. Lets just say I still have only 1 rack in my oven and can no longer use my warming drawer.
My mother was visiting so we decided to go out for a bit before supper. I instructed to my hubby: when the pot is boiling, turn off the stove. When you do that, turn up the oven to 400 degrees so that the food in the oven will be ready at the same time as food on the stove when we get back.
We came home and the house was SMOKING, fire alarm going loudly…. as we storm in, hubby is on the couch sleeping. He mixed up the 2 instructions I gave him. He turned off the oven and turned the stove top on HIGH! Needless to say I had to throw the pot out. He just proved that yes indeed, he is NOT a good cook.
🙂
Hmm, but there are so many to choose from! 😉 Most dramatic was probably the homemade pina colada blender explosion. Followed by round two. (I blame it on the crazy foamy coconut milk.) Right in front of our guests too.
I have a couple…I am a kitchen disaster if I don’t watch out! But the “best” one is when I was skyping my then girlfriend, whilst cooking pancakes. I was chatting away, plugged in the electric mixer, switched it on at the wall then at the same time put my hand on the bottom of the whisks to make sure they were clicked in properly and turned the on switch on. OM NOM NOM went the mixer, ‘mixed’ up my fingers, hand and wrist so it looked like I had tried to self harm or something! No blood drawn, just lots of bruises. Gave me a HELL of a fright and my girlfriend was like WHAT JUST HAPPENED and I was like I MIXED MY HAND.
Needless to say…I would love a cookbook! So I can practice not being such a derp in the kitchen more! 🙂
We have a few recent disasters in the kitchen. I’m super pregnant (due any day) and I would like to blame it on that; however, here are a couple fails… Going to grab the dill in the cupboard and knocking the ginger spice jar (and smashing it) with glass and ginger flying all over my meal, counter and floor. Cooking chicken (for husband) and potatoes at same heat and time and having overcooked chicken and still raw potatoes. Cooking chicken (for husband) and a vegan noodle dish for me at same time and having raw chicken and overcooked noodles. And finally baking brownies and realizing I didn’t even put in half the cocoa required until they came out very, very pale and unbrownke like.
Loooovvvee Dreena and would love her new cookbook!
A few weeks ago I heated up a frying pan and just sprayed the oil straight on without removing the pan from the gas flame… Kaboom! Giant fireball! Which narrowly missed my long hair!
I was bringing a pot of water to boil on the stove and I laid the lid to the pot half on the back burner, half on the counter. I came back when I started hearing little popping nioses and smelled something funny. Here I had turned the wrong burner on and the lid was heating up and burning the counter. Sigh. The lid was fine but the counter had a half moon scorch mark. Most unfortunate part? I live in an apartment so I can imagine I won’t get all my security deposit back. 🙂
Most recent disaster= my first attempt at vegan “cheese” made with almond meal. I took a few liberties with some ingredient substitutions and ended up with mealy, liquidy, goo. Needless to say it became a salad beast kinda night. I clearly need that cookbook….badly. 😉
I was recently preheating the oven for dinner and in the midst of prepping the food and putting away the clean dishes, I set some tupperware on the stovetop. I didn’t look back at it for a little while, and when I did, the tupperware containers were completely melted down at the bottom. Needless to stay, they stunk awfully and had to be thrown away. I’ve been meaning to buy some new glass ones anyway……
Our oven hadn’t been cleaned in forever and would smoke constantly. Meaning our smoke alarm went off almost every single day! Until I finally got on my hands and knees with some OVEN CLEANER!
My most recent kitchen disaster was with a new recipe for tempeh. The recipe called for a marinade with 5 teaspoons of grated ginger but I misread the recipe and instead added 5 tablespoons. The tempeh really soaked up the ginger flavor so that it almost tasted like straight ginger root. My husband was the first to “discover” my mistake. Oops. 🙂
I was making a batch of miso gravy, but the pot I decided to use was a *bit* to small. When I began to whisk the wet ingredients (which included oil) into the roux base, some liquid spilled over the side on the the burner and set the stove top on fire! I scrambed to get the fire out and was able to save-ish the gravy, so terrifying kitchen diaster semi-averted . . .
My kitchen disaster happened just this past weekend. I was making mini oreo cheescakes to take to a party, a recipe that I’ve made a bunch of times before. My husband commented that the batter looked really thin and it the recipe didn’t fill up as many muffin tins as it usually did. But I put them in the oven anyway and it was only then that I realized that I forgot the cream cheese, pretty much the most essential ingredient. Needless to say I went to the store and bought a cheesecake to bring!
I was trying to make broccoli soup in the blender, and i guess it was too hot, because HOT BROCCOLI mush kept blowing out the sides and splattering all over my kitchen. Of course, i refused to accept defeat, and kept blending – using a dishtowel as defense. It didn’t work. And I have since purchased a VitaMix. The end 🙂
I was making monkey bread for Christmas, the sugar leaked all over the bottom of the oven and smoked out the entire house. It was a lovely-smoky Christmas.
The other day I was trying to make dinner while on the phone and worrying about impending final exams. I had a box of quinoa in hand and was trying to juggle too many things (and my mind was off on some other planet) at once when all of a sudden the phone was on the ground and quinoa had flown everywhere. I’m STILL finding bits of it in nooks and crannies. The saddest part is that I lost about a third of a box of quinoa and that stuff isn’t cheap! Oh well, such is life!
I love Dreena Burton. Her Supercharge Me cookies are out.rageous.
Oh my gosh, those chickpeas look so good!
My most recent kitchen disaster involved veganizing a Cajun Chicken Pasta dish. I subbed tofu for the chicken, and managed to create a great spicy cream sauce using soy milk and soy cream cheese, loaded it with veggies, and could not wait to dig in. Unfortunately, I added fennel seed to the pan instead of just sprinkling it on the serving, and the flavor permeated the whole dish, much to hubby’s dismay. I ate it, but he couldn’t. Oh well – more leftovers for me. I want to make vegan dishes that wow him and convince him to eat vegan as well, and based on what I’ve seen about this book thus far, this would be a perfect tool toward that end.
This is pretty elementary, but I NEVER FAIL to burn popcorn when I make it. every single time the microwave starts smoking. I guess I should stick to making it on the stove!
I tried to do a tofu marinade that was made with a lot of honey the other day. I missed the part in the directions where you had to microwave the marinade to melt the honey a bit before tossing the tofu in it. So I was trying to coat the tofu in this marinade and was like, “huh…this is pretty thick”, so I ended up spreading it on top of the tofu on a sheet pan and stuck it in the oven. Well, 10 minutes later the marinade had melted in the oven, completely slid OFF of the tofu and had created a bubbling lagoon all over my pan. Fail.
Unfortunately my poor pup suffered from my last kitchen disaster – too much applesauce created more of an giant pan-sized cookie rather than any dog-sized ones, and it even overflowed a bit onto the bottom of my oven. Sorry, fido! I’ll measure next time!
I’d love this book! I totally burned my daughter’s toast the other day before school and set off the smoke alarm which woke up my toddler and husband. Arghh! It was just one of those mornings.
oh my gosh, what a great giveaway!! I am ALWAYS on the lookout for new healthy recipe ideas. I’m a busy student, so I usually have to do most of my cooking in big batches so I have leftovers for the rest of the week. It would be awesome if you could do a post on how you do your bulk cooking for the week and good recipes that taste good reheated!!
LOVE LOVE LOVE Dreena!!!!
Recently I was doctoring up jarred spaghetti sauce for a last minute dinner for unexpected guests. I put the jar upside down with the lid on to get all the sauce to the bottom. I lifted up the jar, unscrewed the lid and POOF! sauce exploded all over my outfit. I had globs of red sauce all the way down my legs and all over the kitchen. We’re still finding remnants of it and the outfit I had on was a goner. I had no idea the pressure would build up like that! Luckily, we all laughed about it but what a mess!!
You’re not considered a cook without at least one disaster right? 🙂 I had a fire scare when I tried to quickly bake a mini pizza in the toaster oven and walked away. Luckily I came back sooner rather than later and noticed it had turned black so I opened the toaster and surprise, surprise, the oxygen fed the flames and a small fire started! I started freaking out and tried hitting the flames with a towel? I don’t know why but thought I could fan it out I guess! It didn’t work so I ended up pouring my nalgene with water in it on the flames and put the fire out, somehow without damaging the toaster!
I was making a caramel pie for a birthday and was running short on time. I let the eagle bran milk can cool for 5 hrs before I had to make the pie. The second I put the can opener on the can and pressed, caramel shot everywhere. It was on the ceiling, floor and walls. Now I let them cool over night!
Once I made monkey bread, it expanded in the oven and dripping butter and sugar all over the place and it set off the smoke detector..the worst part was that all that burnt sugar was so hard to clean up! And it smelled bad :/
My latest kitchen fail was filling a cake pan too full and having it overflow and burn all over the oven. Woops!
Lately any attempt I make at protein pancakes is a kitchen disaster – I can’t seem to get them to stay together for the life of me. Great giveaway! 🙂
I am a vegetarian who is considering going vegan, so I would love this cookbook! As for kitchen disasters… well, recently I burned myself a bit on the oven door, and in the process dropped a casserole, which ended up in a disaster all over the oven and floor! It even leaked into the drawer UNDER the oven and got everything in THERE messy. It was such a mess to clean up, and I have a new battle wound!
My latest kitchen disaster was burning cookies. We recently got a new stove, and I should have checked on the cookies because it cooked them so fast. Love your blog!
Set the oven on fire by leaving a pizza box in there-burnt the whole pie. Oops!! So miz 🙁
I about chopped my finger off trying to get the avocado pit out! Clearly I am not bobby flay.
Recent kitchen fail: I often nuke my sponges to kill the germies. For some reason I put a completely dry sponge in the microwave. I went upstairs, and a few minutes later the smoke alarm was going crazy and all that remained of my sponge was ashes. WHOOPS!
I make chai every morning, which means boiling milk on the stove. The other morning I was distracted by my 4 week old baby 🙂 and the milk and tea leaves exploded all over the stove. Not a fun clean up job when you need some caffeine after a long night with baby! The cookbook looks great, would love to enter the drawing.
I messed up a huge batch of kale chips. I took my pup out for a quick walk and I accidentally set the oven to 425 instead of 400 and I came home to an oven full of smoke and burnt kale chips….yuck.
I bought brand new stainless steal pots and pans last week and was so excited to use them! I immediately went home to make some black bean and chicken burritos. I was TRYING to saute some garlic in olive oil and about 5 minutes in I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t cooking. I grabbed the handle and burned my entire hand. (I had the wrong burner on, and the handle to the pan was directly over the burner that was on..it was heating on high for about 5 minutes before I touched it). I ended up having to sleep with my hand in a bucket of water in order for the pain to stop. Luckily I kept it wrapped and with medicine on it all week and it had healed wonderfully. Needless to say I have purchased handle hot pads for all my pans.
My most recent kitchen disaster was dropping a delicious looking vegan pizza, cooked on my pizza stone. I dropped it on the oven door which chipped it in a few places and bent a rack 🙁
I got a measuring spoon caught in my garbage disposal. I’m *SO SURE* I can get it out so I won’t give in and call a plumber yet. I’m reeaaalllyyyclose!!!
My latest fail was attempting to make caramel. The water kept evaporating out of the sugar and yeaaaaah, the pot had to soak for a day afterwards.
We just got a juicer! All excited to try out some healthy juice recipes, the husband decided to add ginger … half of an entire root. Not all the stevia in the world can stench the burn of ginger in my mouth. Who says moderation is key?
Latest kitchen disaster= trying to make red frosting…I ended up staining my counter tops and teeth a shade of electric pink…and the frosting tasted TERRIBLE!!!
My most recent kitchen disaster involved the microwave, which makes me feel even more pathetic about it. I was making oatmeal and decided to go with the quick zap instead of cooking on the stove (lessons learned). I reached in to grab the bowl when it was done and it was SO HOT that I dropped it on the floor. The bowl shattered and the oatmeal flew out in one of those cartoon-looking splats. Since my kitchen is a tiny apartment sized one, I think the oatmeal reached about every corner of it. After staring at my mess for about a full minute I finally crawled down on the floor to clean up 😛
My wife recently burned her hand while getting cookie sheet out of the oven luckily a have aloe Vera growing by front door. she’s fine note, no scars
TONS of kitchen disasters!! It usually involves the overuse of soy sauce, salt, cayenne, or chili powder!!
I would love this book to add to my vegan cookbook collection! My latest kitchen disaster involved trying to pop pocorn in the microwave. I accidentally used a brown paper bag that was too big, and it caught on fire! Luckily I had a pair of kitchen tongs nearby so I grabbed the bag with the tongs, ran outside, and put the fire out in a puddle. I’m glad it was raining that day! 🙂
I luckily haven’t had any recent major kitchen disasters but everytime I try to flip eggs, they break apart on me and end up scrambled whether that is how I wanted them or not!
Ha!! Well mine doesn’t have to do with food but it was done in a kitchen using a microwave at work! I put one of those little neck warmer things in the microwave to heat up because my neck was hurting. I always do the “lazy” thing and pressed start because the timer said 6:20 on it. I let it do it’s thing, got distracted and meant to stop it after 30 seconds but I let it go for 5 minutes!!! I smelled something funny and noticed smoke creeping through the hallways. We had to evacuate our entire 2 story building!!!! This was at a gym by the way… People had to stop mid workout and leave because they were getting sick from the nasty smell and smoke. It smelled like that for a week. My coworkers were so mad at me. I’ll never live that one down…
My latest kitchen disaster happened when I was making popcorn the other day. We have an air Popper so I like to dress my popcorn up with salt, nutritional yeast, and cayenne. As I was shaking the salt on I realized too late That the lid on my trader Joe’s sea salt was not on at all! About a cup of salt went into That popcorn
This is embarrassing as well as a disaster. I sauteed some brussel sprouts last week and they were done before the rest of the meal. I moved them off the burner (think older electric burners) to another one and proceeded to clean around the stove. Well without thinking, I grabbed the burner (to clean under it) and completely burned my thumb. Like immediate blister and throbbing pain all night kind of burn. I eased the pain with some delicious white wine and the sprouts were delicious. My fiance thinks I did it to get out of doing dishes but a week later and my thumb still isn’t back to normal!
The first time I ever cooked for my husband I made him a ham sandwich on wheat bread with nothing else, pretzel twists and easy mac (in the microwave) unfortunately I didn’t quite master the art of easy mac and I ended up exploding it all over the microwave and then burning myself… badly. Needless to say my sweet husband said he’d be in charge of cooking for the rest of our lives. 🙂 Luckily, I have started and am actually decent now… but we still laugh about my first attempt!