How about: Spaghetti with Italian Sausage and Garlic Toast. Better?

Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Tomato Basil Sauce, Field Roast Italian Sausage (vegan), and Twin Oaks Tofu

Let’s start Vegan MoFo Week 2, shall we?

Spaghetti is my comfort food. It reminds me of my dad, which is comforting. After last week’s sad news of the passing of Steve Jobs, I needed some comforting. Since my dad is now hanging out with Steve (asking how he ever managed to corrupt his daughter into drinking the Kool Aid), well, spaghetti it is.

I tried out two new products in this meal – both discovered via a couple of my favorite food bloggers. First up, Twin Oaks Tofu (which I discovered via Kath Eats). First of all, Twin Oaks is a cooperative, worker-owned farm. Second, they make local tofu – the farm is about 60 miles from where I live in Virginia. Third, it’s organic, non-GMO tofu, and it gets rave reviews from everybody I know that has tried it.

That makes plenty of reasons for me to take a stab at it! I grabbed a package of their Italian Herb tofu from the Friendly City Food Co-Op:

Twin Oaks Italian Herb Tofu

Now, word on the street was that this tofu didn’t have to be pressed. Now, it took me a LONG time to finally “figure out” tofu – and only now that I have a handy dandy Tofu XPress tofu press do I truly appreciate it as a meal option. So, a tofu that wouldn’t require a day sitting in a medieval torture device? Interesting.

I figured I would put it to the test of all tests, and try baking it, straight up – no pressing whatsoever. Sliced up, straight out of the package. (I did add a bit of garlic powder to get the garlic toast thing going on).

The other new product in this meal was Field Roast Italian Sausage – a “grain meat” that I discovered via Emily over at Daily Garnish. She had discovered Field Roast veggie dogs at her local market in Seattle, and they sounded better than most of the “fake” meats I’ve tried. I’m not much of a fan of fake meats – but I was never much of a meat fan even when I was eating meat, so it’s not surprising.

Grain or “wheat meats” are usually based on some form of a recipe for seitan, or wheat gluten. Seasoned properly, these “meats” – when prepared properly – can be nearly indistinguishable from “the real thing.” Texture is usually the hardest part to replicate, even if the flavors are spot-on.

I sliced up 2 links of the Italian sausage and sauteed it for just a few minutes until browned, then added a jar of organic tomato basil sauce and simmered for a bit.

I served the sauce and sausage over whole wheat noodles topped with a little ‘nooch Parmesan, and a few garlic tofu slabs on the side.

All I have to say is… look at this tofu!!

Look at this tofu!!

Seriously, people. Best tofu I’ve ever had. It baked up wonderfully chewy with a nice little crunch on the outside. So flavorful. So easy!

And with regard to the sausages, I have to agree with Emily. Field Roast is top notch in the vegan meats department. I even enjoyed a sausage plain on a giant roll the other day, and it had fantastic flavor and texture. I wish I could find more of their products locally here.

From my plate to yours, here’s to delicious food that makes you feel good!

Via KERF, I came across a new peanut butter option – Flying Squirrel Peanut Butter. As we’ve already established, I’m a sucker for a good nut butter. I’m also a sucker for a good story!

Flying Squirrel Peanut Butter was founded by two college students in Eugene, Oregon. They love peanut butter, and started making their own, mixing in all kinds of different flavors and add-in’s. There’s Spazzy Squirrel, with dark chocolate chunks, raisins, cinnamon, and coconut. Or Bright Eyed and Bushy Tailed, with coffee and dark chocolate. Nutty Buddy combines peanut butter with honey and sunflower seeds.

They had me at Squirrel. I had to try some of this peanut butter!

I ordered:

Sneaky Cinnamon – peanuts, cinnamon, raisins, agave nectar, salt

Pretzel Pizazz – peanuts, honey, pretzels, cinnamon, salt

Unfortunately for my taste buds, I ordered over spring break, and had to wait until the squirrels returned to campus to get my peanut butter – but their communication was great and I was informed up-front about the delay.

Shipping seemed expensive. It was $10 for one jar! However, it was still $10 even for 2 jars, and I later saw they use the medium sized flat rate Priority Mail box from the USPS ($10.95 flat rate). So my suggestion to anybody buying Flying Squirrel PB is to buy as many jars as you can for that $10 shipping! I bought two. I bet 4 could fit in that box.

The peanut butters are currently $4 for an 8 oz. jar. My initial impression was that the jars are small, but indeed they are 8 oz. I’m just used to seeing larger peanut butter jars. It took me a while to figure out that the lids twist off instead of pop off. (Maybe I’m just slow!)

But enough of the shipping and logistics. How is the peanut butter?

DELICIOUS!!

Oatmeal with Sneaky Cinnamon Peanut Butter

Here’s my morning oatmeal, starring Sneaky Cinnamon peanut butter. Perfect texture, perfect flavor – just as the name says. Just a touch of cinnamon that sneaks up on you!

Sneaky Cinnamon

Sneaky Cinnamon is a very spreadable peanut butter. My favorite texture.

But the flavor hit of the week, for me, has been Pretzel Pizazz. The combination of salty pretzel bits right in my peanut butter? Irresistible! I’ve been known to say out loud, after each bite while devouring PB&J sandwiches this week, “OMG, this is SO good!” Lots of crunchy chew. Oddly, I don’t really like “crunchy” style peanut butter, but it’s a whole different story when the crunch comes from pretzels!

Pretzel Pizazz

Pretzel Pizazz is a dry peanut butter. It’s not just chunky – it’s actually dry, as in, it doesn’t spread very well on bread. So I just lob a few blobs on there and smash ‘em down, then smother in jelly and nom. (As you can tell, I’ve already nom’d a good portion of this jar!)

These peanut butters are delicious. I love the story behind the company. I love the initiative that these girls have taken to share their peanut butter passion with the world. I love the creativity of the flavor combinations, and the logo is adorable. (Hey, I love squirrels too!)

Check out the Flying Squirrel Peanut Butter flavors and buy a few jars. They’re definitely a treat!

Flying Squirrel Peanut Butter

Enter: the Vacu Vin Pineapple Easy Slicer. Between it and its plastic siblings, this little gadget has nearly a gazillion positive reviews. Yet, my “gimmicky” radar was going off like Spidey Sense.

Aside from a vacation in Honolulu, I’ve never had fresh pineapple. It’s my favorite fruit, but being the clutz that I am, I deemed it much too dangerous to attempt chopping a pineapple myself. With visions of warm sea breezes and sweet, sweet pineapple nectar of the gods dancing in my head, I rolled the dice on this gadget. I went with the stainless steel version, hoping for some durability if in fact it worked. (Oh, who am I kidding? I just like how stainless stuff looks).

I ordered the slicer on Amazon, and then bought a pineapple in anticipation. An observation on pineapples: they are an angry fruit! Wow! I couldn’t figure out how to pick the thing up and carry it without drawing blood! I eventually wrapped my hands in my hoodie sleeves to pick the darn thing up.

Several reviews of the slicer mentioned that if the pineapple is too large, fruit will be left on the inside – so I tried to get one of the smaller pineapples of the bunch. I’ve since learned that this “medium” sized slicer is good for pineapples in the 3-5 pound range.

I took the pineapple slicer for a test drive this morning.

Vacu Vin Pineapple Slicer, and a Pineapple

The slicer did not come with instructions (gah!!) but thankfully the Amazon product page had a video demonstration, so I knew in a roundabout way what to do.

First, slice off the top of the pineapple.

Cut the top off the pineapple

Then, center the slicer on top of the pineapple and screw it in, clockwise. The teeth on the bottom of the slicer cut into the fruit with no problems.

Center the slicer on top of the pineapple and screw in

Continue to turn the slicer handle clockwise until it reaches the bottom of the pineapple. The only tricky part here is holding the pineapple in place, because – like I said – it’s an angry fruit! I ended up putting an oven mitt on my left hand while turning the slicer with my right, to prevent the pineapple skin from tearing my hand up. It was much easier to turn the slicer than I’d expected. I didn’t really have to use any force at all.

Twist the slicer into the pineapple until it hits bottom

Once you’ve hit bottom, pull the fruit out of the shell of the pineapple. It helped to twist it a bit while I pulled.

Pull the fruit out of the pineapple shell

Tada! A sliced and cored pineapple! I can see where a larger pineapple would leave more fruit in the shell.

Tada! A sliced and cored pineapple

Press the buttons on the side of the slicer handle to remove the handle, then slide the round pineapple slices off of the slicer. Serve as rings or cut into wedges. Yum!

Round pineapple slices

The way this slicer works, most of the juice is retained inside the pineapple shell. I poured the juice into a glass and got about 4 oz. from it. You could also use the remaining pineapple shell as a fruit bowl – nice party trick!

This little gadget, in my opinion, is genius. It’s brilliantly easy to use, and there’s very little risk of me losing any digits this way. If you’ve got a Bed Bath & Beyond store locally, the plastic version of this tool is on clearance for $6 (at least around the Chicago area), and it’s also available on Amazon ($8-ish for the plastic one, $16-ish for the stainless one).

Bravo! Fresh pineapple for everyone!

My mom used Peapod back in the mid-1990′s, when they operated out of our local Jewel grocery stores in the Chicago suburbs. I remember installing their software off of floppy disks onto the computer, and listening to the dial-up modem groan and wheeze as it connected to the internet. My, how far we’ve come!

In my quest to find organic products at grocery stores that are at least somewhat convenient to me, I stumbled upon Peapod. Why, yes! Peapod! I was shocked, quite honestly, at their selection of organics. I could order everything from organic meats to produce to prepared foods, all for home delivery.

So, I tried them out. I spent a week or so filling up my Peapod shopping cart. You can save your grocery list and come back later, and I did that quite a few times. When you’re ready to check out, you input your payment information and select a delivery time slot. Longer time slots offer a $1.00 discount on your order, and paying with your checking account offers another $1.00 off. With reasonable delivery fees ($6.95 for orders over $100), these two discounts make the delivery cost less than the equivalent cost of gas for me to drive to one of the local (within 20 miles) organic-carrying grocers. (Maybe if I drove a hybrid vehicle, this logic would be moot – but even at 20-23mpg, my Jeep is a bit of a gas guzzler).

You can edit your shopping cart up until the evening before your delivery – which is dangerous, if you’re me, because you’ll find yourself thinking of oddball things to add right up till the last minute. After the cutoff time, you can opt to receive an email or text message with the final delivery time window (if you selected one of the longer time frames when you placed your order).

Finally, the cutoff time arrived, and my wallet breathed a sigh of relief. My order would be delivered today, Wednesday, between 9am and 11am. At 8:57am this morning, the big white Peapod truck pulled up in front of my house, and at 9:01am, my doorbell rang. It was the friendly Peapod Guy! He had a hand truck stacked with Peapod boxes, and in those boxes were bags of food, glorious food. Some boxes had insulated coolers inside.

Mr. Peapod propped the door open and brought all of my goodies into the kitchen. He offered an invoice for me to sign, and I tipped him $5. The Peapod web site makes it very clear that tipping is optional, but hey – it’s Chicago and it’s freezing cold outside, and I did order a heck of a lot of food. And, the guy was smiling – at 9am. That to me is a miracle in and of itself (as I was still half unconscious, having sleepwalked out of bed at 8:51am when the alarm went off for this little adventure).

The whole process took about 10 minutes. That sure beats spending an hour and a half or more in the grocery store!

All in all, I’m happy as can be. Peapod delivered everything on my list. No items were damaged, and the produce looks freshly picked. Frozen items were frozen solid, and fresh items were fresh. All groceries were bagged “properly,” which seems to be a lost art in the modern grocery store. (You know… colds with colds, non-foods with non-foods, etc).

With the various discounts, I feel that 5 bucks for delivery and 5 bucks for a tip is a phenomenal deal for the convenience of not having to leave home to shop for my organics. (And of course, the tip is my choice – I could have had all of this for just $5!) Future orders will be even quicker, because I can shop from my previous list instead of searching all over again for each item, and I can create custom lists and save them on Peapod’s web site.

This Peapod grocery delivery service is a steal! I feel like I just got away with something! I highly recommend it.

EpicOrganic.net

The solution that allows me to both sleep in and have a nutritious breakfast: smoothies.

Throw some stuff in the blender, cover my ears for a few seconds, and voila. Morning goodness.

I’ve been making smoothies for years. It’s the one healthy thing I’ve managed to continue doing for myself, even when other habits haven’t been so healthy.

Today’s smoothie is based on the Nature’s Way Alive! Soy Protein shake mix, vanilla flavor. I got this mix at Whole Foods Market for around $18. It contains non-GMO soy and is more than just a soy protein shake, but a whole foods shake, including nutrients from 24 different fruits and vegetables.

I like this mix. I’m not sure its flavor is exactly vanilla – it almost has a fruity tang to it – but it tastes good. It doesn’t taste “green,” even though its coloring is such (a big surprise to me the first time I mixed it!)

The Alive! shake mix blends easily – no clumps – though I do use a blender instead of a spoon to mix it up.

My basic smoothie recipe is to mix 8 oz. of organic soy milk (usually vanilla flavored) with a scoop of whatever mix I’m using that day. Then, I throw in some fresh or frozen fruit. If I’m using fresh fruit, I also throw in 2 or 3 ice cubes – otherwise, the shake comes out too thick. Mix in the blender for 30 seconds or so, and enjoy!

Today, I used frozen pineapple. I typically throw in 3-5 chunks of whatever frozen fruit I’m using (pineapples, strawberries, blueberries, mixed fruit, etc).

Smoothies are a great way to start the day, and help to get me out the door quickly!

I’m hoping to add a Vita-Mix machine to my kitchen arsenal with this year’s income tax refund. My plan is to start incorporating more fresh fruits and vegetables into my smoothies. My current blender (the classic beehive Osterizer) is powerful, but can’t fully liquify leafy greens and some of the tougher vegetables like carrots.

Until then, it’s mix-based smoothies for me!