♥ Seriously Addictive Caramel Corn & A Lovely Surprise

I’ve only been blogging for a few months now, but I have lurked around the vegan blogging scene for years. I didn’t actually start leaving comments  on the blogs that I have followed, and enjoyed, until I created my blogger identity. Before I became “greyt”, making up an online identity along with my comment was too much trouble to show my appreciation of their hard work. Apparently.

I was pleasantly surprised (and outed!) when one of my favorite long-time lurking “targets” (Andrea at Andrea’s Easy Vegan Cooking) bestowed upon me a “lovely blog” award. By accepting this award, I agree to link back to the award-giver, share 7 things about myself and pass the award on to 15 newly discovered bloggers.

Okay, 7 things about me. Here goes (in random order):

1. I have a rescued racing greyhound (or rather, he has me) and he is partly to blame  for the name of this blog.
2. I eat peanut butter every day. For as long as I can remember.
3. I was born Jewish and raised Catholic. That in itself explains a lot. A  whole lot.
4. I am a 5-year cancer survivor. I credit my healthy lifestyle for my success at beating the odds. And I credit cancer for making me a compassionate vegan. And Erik Marcus, too.
5. I was a vegetarian when pregnant with my son 20 years ago.  I didn’t drink milk, either. All the “experts” (and other annoying types) warned me that I was starving my baby and that he would be malnourished from lack of protein (which was synonymous with meat, apparently). My baby boy weighed in at a scrawny 11 pounds. I am so ashamed.
6. My first “rescue” was an orange striped cat that found me playing in my yard. I named him “Tiger”. Not at all original but, hey, I was only 3! He was the first of many stray cats and dogs that found me over the years. I made up beds in our junk-filled garage for the cats that came and went and I fed them on the sly. I knew that if I told my parents what was going on, the dreaded “pound” truck would come take the cats away.  Apparently, my parents were none the wiser. The St. Bernard mix that followed me home one day, however, proved more of a challenge to hide!
7. It took me 10 years to finish my college education. My first declared major was nutrition, toward the goal of becoming a registered dietitian. Then it was  geography, until I figured out what I could do with a geography degree (teach). Then I became a city planner. And now I blog about vegan food and my love affair with a greyhound. Go figure!

There are so many great vegan blogs out there; but the blogs that I have been following (or lurking about!) are not new on the scene. I think those bloggers can rightfully be called “pioneers” in the movement. Since I joined the blogging community, however, I have discovered a handful of new (well, new to me) vegan (or vegan friendly) blogs that have captured my interest. In no particular order, other than the order in which they popped into my head, I present my  more recent finds (or they found me and I quickly grew attached):

♥ la vida vegga

♥ JL goes Vegan

♥ Play With My Food (sidenote: I now regret giving away those Rubbermaid totes full of my son’s discarded action figures!)

♥ Cadry’s Kitchen

♥ Virtually Vegan Mama

♥ The “V” Word

♥ Food Feud

♥ Mehitable Days

♥ The Witchy Kitchen

♥ The Vegan Mouse

♥ katshealthcorner

♥ lovinlivinvegan

♥ No Meat Athlete (not new, but he recently made the leap from vegetarian to vegan)

♥ Bren McClain

♥ And lastly, the source for my renewed caramel popcorn addiction: Recipe Rhapsody.

Veronica at Recipe Rhapsody adapted my version of white chocolate for her Vegan Cinnabon Caramel Corn recipe. Of course, I could not resist the temptation (sweet AND salty, heck yeah!) and I tried the recipe. Multiple times, actually. Using both white and dark chocolate.

I must admit, I actually prefer the dark chocolate on the caramel corn. When made with cashews, it totally reminds me of Moose Munch, which I haven’t had since I gave up dairy. And I once loved Moose Munch. I think I am in serious trouble here!

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Seriously Addictive Caramel Corn

Adapted from Recipe Rhapsody

Ingredients:

1/2 cup organic popcorn kernels (about 12 cups popped)

1 cup lightly salted peanuts or cashews (I like the sea salt varieties)

1/2 cup non-dairy butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup agave nectar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

6 ounces semi-sweet or dark chocolate

Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 250F. Spray a large rimmed baking sheet with non-stick cooking spray; set aside.

Use an air popper to pop the corn into a large bowl. Pick out the un-popped kernels, then sprinkle the nuts over the top and set aside.

In a large saucepan, melt the non-dairy butter over medium heat. Stir in the brown sugar, agave nectar, cinnamon and salt. Bring to a boil while stirring constantly, then allow to boil for 4 minutes (reduce the time by half for higher altitudes) without stirring. Remove from the heat and stir in the baking soda and  the vanilla.

Pour the caramel over the popcorn/nuts and stir well to coat. Spread the mixture out on the baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the baking sheet from the oven and stir the caramel corn, then return the baking sheet to the oven and bake an additional 15 minutes. At the end of the baking time, transfer the caramel corn to waxed paper on the counter and spread evenly.

Place the chocolate pieces in a microwave safe bowl and heat for 45 seconds; stir. Heat in 30-second intervals, stirring in between, until smooth.

Using a spoon, drizzle the melted chocolate over the popcorn and allow it to cool completely before breaking apart.

Store in an airtight container or Ziploc bags.

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Okay, just one more look!

♥ So Long, Seattle

J and I spent our last week as Washington residents playing tourist and snapping photos of our favorite local vistas. Washington may call itself the “Evergreen State”; but the “evergreen” slogan doesn’t only pertain to Washington’s endless variety of coniferous trees. The unofficial state plant has to be moss – it grows on everything!

I heart Anacortes: I can see Canada from my house! Okay, not really.

As far as evergreens go, however, my personal favorite is the Madrona. This lovely tree resides in Washington Park, not far from our house. I miss it already!

Just another Fidalgo Island sunset. Ho hum.

La Conner is located practically in our backyard. The Skagit Tulip Festival every spring: nuff said!

J and I first met in Coupeville, said to be the oldest town in Washington (and the location of the movie Practical Magic, too). Life as J once knew it was forever changed that day. Oh yeah, he also went vegan!

Even when you drive across Deception Pass as often as we did, you cannot take it for granted: it requires a few extra moments to simply gaze and wonder. It was a frequent fly over for J, too.

Farewell, Whidbey Island.

We made one last trip to “the” tourist destination on the west side of the state: Pike Place Market! The construction project at the market got in the way of our photo-taking, so we borrowed a picture from the Market’s home page instead:

The very first Starbucks is across the street from the market and people were literally lined up out the door. After living in Washington for 14 years, J finally succumbed and ordered his first Starbucks. Ever.

Lastly, we stopped at Pizza Pi in Seattle’s University District for a couple of awesome vegan pies (and plenty of leftovers for road food, too).

Maximum Margherita

Ex-Meat Lovers

Two (plus) days in the car makes for a couple of very cranky girls!

At last, our first glimpse of Lake Tahoe:

We’re here, we’re here!!

And waiting for us at the end of our 900 mile journey is an all too familiar sight for us lately:

So, we are once again living in a “tunnel” house; the movers left us just enough  room between the furniture and the boxes for a pathway from the front door to the back door. I’m afraid to even look in the garage underneath the house!

Moving is hell on everyone.

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♥ Pizza Night!

In honor of Vegan Pizza Day, sponsored by Teese Vegan Cheese and Quarrygirl.com, I present family pizza night! Unfortunately for us, the closest retail outlet for Teese Cheese is 2 hours away, either by freeway or by ferry. So, while I am able to show the love and post our own shameless pizza lovin’ photos,  our pizza will not be featuring Teese Mozzarella Cheese, which is a pity because it looks really, really tasty!

Even though we gave up dairy cheese and mystery meat products like pepperoni and sausage, we still love our pizza (L♥VE). We celebrate pizza often around here: Friday night is our pizza night! We have discovered the ultimate (and insanely easy) pizza dough, quite possibly the best pizza dough that you can have that isn’t made by a natural-born Neapolitan and that doesn’t take all day to make, either. Bonus!

There are a lot of good “faux meats” (J calls them “fox meats”) and dairy cheese alternatives on the market now for a more traditional American-style pizza. Occasionally we may add some chopped Field Roast Italian Sausages, but we typically do not put “meat” or “cheese” on our homemade pizzas. For us, it’s all about the dough and the sauce, even if the sauce is nothing more than a simple, well-seasoned olive oil. Granted, eating our pizza is a messier endeavor–without the melted cheese to hold it all together–but that is a “sacrifice” in the name of  great tasting pizza that we are willing to make!

Do you remember that part in the book Eat Pray Love? The author and her friend, Sofie, visit a pizzeria in Naples (the city that gave the world pizza and ice cream – what’s not to love?) that the locals claim makes the best pizza in Italy, if not the world.

So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered–one for each of us–are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with my pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie [she is from Stockholm] is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me “Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?”.

That is some serious pizza lovin’! Someday, I will visit Naples, if only to experience a ‘pizzagasm’ like that! But, until then, I have the following pizza dough recipe from my favorite bread baking book that, admittedly, did make me swoon just a little the first time that I bit into it. So as not to offend the masters at Pizzeria da Michele, I will concede that our homemade dough is not as pizzagasm-inducing as theirs, but it’s still really, really good!

 

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The Master Dough Recipe: Boule

From Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day

Ingredients:

6-1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached all-purpose flour

1 Tablespoon kosher or coarse sea salt

1-1/2 Tablespoons granulated yeast (2 packets)

3 cups lukewarm water (about 100 degrees F)

Directions:

Measure the flour into a large bowl or a food-grade storage container (my one exception to the ban on plastic containers in my kitchen) with the “scoop and sweep” method (“scoop and sweep” is just like it sounds!). Whisk in the salt.

Measure the warm water in a large measuring glass and whisk in the yeast. Add to the flour mixture all at once and mix well. It may be necessary to use your wet hands to finish mixing the dough until no dry pockets remain; kneading is not necessary. The dough will be wet and loose enough to conform to the shape of the container.

Place a clean towel over the top of the container* and allow the dough to rise at room temperature until the dough is roughly doubled in size–about 2 hours–and it collapses, or flattens a bit, on the top. At this point the dough may be used, but it is easier to work with if it is refrigerated for at least 3 hours.

*Alternatively, you could place the dough in a large food grade plastic bag and let it rise that way.

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Best Pizza Ever. Seriously.

Ingredients:

Refrigerated pizza dough (recipe above)

Flour for dusting

Organic cornmeal for the pizza peel

Three Olive Tapenade, an extra special treat for dipping the crust (may also be used as a topping)

Pizza toppings – I’ve listed our favorites:

• Extra-virgin olive oil  or pizza sauce**
• Fresh (preferably Roma) tomatoes, very thinly sliced
• Freshly ground Italian seasoning
• Dried crushed red chili peppers
• Fresh garlic, chopped
• Fresh mushrooms, very thinly sliced
• Fresh basil ribbons
• Sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil, drained and chopped (if necessary)
• Kalamata olives, sliced
• Black olives, sliced
• Red onions or green onions, very thinly sliced or diced

Directions:

Prepare the pizza toppings in advance and have them ready before it is time to make the pizzas.  The trick to a pizza that slides easily onto the hot pizza stone in the oven is 1) plenty of cornmeal between the pizza dough and the pizza peel, and 2) working quickly and not letting the pizza dough sit on the pizza peel any longer than necessary.

Place the oven rack at the lowest position in the oven so that it is almost sitting on the bottom of the oven (it’s easiest to remove the second rack from the oven, it won’t be needed). Place the pizza stone on the rack. Twenty minutes before baking, pre-heat the oven to 550 degrees F (that is the hottest that our oven gets).

Remove the prepared dough from the refrigerator and dust the dough in the container with flour and remove a ball of dough (roughly the size of a large orange).  Shape the dough into a ball and then a flat disc shape and place on a counter sprinkled with more flour. Using a rolling pin brushed with flour, roll the dough out to about 11 or 12 inches in diameter.  Forming a small “rim” or thicker edge of crust, as the Neapolitans do, helps to keep the toppings on the pizza. Carefully transfer the rolled-out dough to the pizza peel that is generously sprinkled with cornmeal.

Leaving a one-inch margin of crust without toppings, quickly layer the toppings on the dough. Begin with drizzled olive oil, spread with the back of a tablespoon, or pizza sauce if that’s your preference. Placing the sliced tomatoes directly on the olive oil followed by the chopped garlic, Italian seasoning and crushed red chilies makes an unbelievably good pizza! Follow that base layer with the remaining toppings of your choice.

**Although the end result isn’t picture-perfect “pretty”, adding the pizza sauce last, on top of the other ingredients, results in one fantastic-tasting pizza. Seriously, try it sometime!

Turn the oven vent fan on (the cornmeal may burn and smoke) and carefully slide the pizza directly onto the hot pizza stone in the oven.  It may be necessary  to gently shake the pizza peel in a back and forth motion to loosen the pizza so that it will slide off the peel. Bake 5 to 7 minutes  total, but be sure to check at 5 minutes.

At the end of the baking time, remove the pizza to a large cutting board and let it sit a few minutes before slicing. I’m still using my 15-year-old Papa Murphy’s rotary pizza cutter, but someday I will trade up for something like this!

It helps to brush the loose cornmeal off of the pizza stone into the garbage can between pizzas; it reduces or eliminates the smoke from the burned cornmeal.

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♥ The Celebratory Cacao Smoothie

I haven’t run since early September. Why? Back-to-back surgeries. Lack of motivation. The thrill was gone. But, honestly, I haven’t been a “runner” for a couple of years now. And I miss it! I miss the rhythmic pounding of my sneakers on the shoulder of the road. I miss the intoxicating aroma of the wet pines in the winter and the flowering trees in the spring. I miss the sights and the sounds that you never experience while sitting within the confines of a car. I miss the first gulp of cold, cold water after a hot, sweaty run. And I miss the self-satisfaction and inner peace that comes from being a runner: “when your feet are in the right place, your mind will follow.”

I had that on my mind when I rose this morning. I allowed myself some gentle yoga while I thought about the limits that I used to push my body to (and beyond) just a few short years ago. I sat at the laptop with my morning cup of coffee and began to read through my e-mail inbox. A blog post about running caught my eye.  I read it. I clicked her links, and then a few more links. And then a miracle happened: I put on my long-neglected running shoes and my ratty old “Just Do It” t-shirt and I stepped on the treadmill. I fixed my determined gaze upon my motivational focal point: an old Bloomsday poster with a refrigerator magnet affixed to the metal frame. And I began to run!

I promised myself that I would only run 1 mile [Sidenote: technically, I am not medically cleared to run until my post-op appointment next week]. And, truthfully, I was more than happy to step off the treadmill after only 1 mile. But I did it! And while it was difficult, it was also an exhilarating victory (albeit a small one) for me. I can’t wait to climb back on and do it all over again. But for now, it is (celebratory) smoothie time.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Cacao Bliss Smoothie at Free Bird in South Lake Tahoe. Since that trip, I have been on a mission to replicate it. While my version is not identical, it’s still pretty dang good. I added a banana to my version of the smoothie and I used the organic (but not raw) cacao powder that I already have on hand. I also added cacao nibs for an extra bit of yumminess. And, because it is a celebration of sorts, I enjoyed my cacao smoothie in a choc-tini glass.

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Cacao Smoothie

Makes 2 servings

Ingredients:

1 cup coconut milk (or canned lite coconut milk)

1 ripe banana (fresh or frozen)

2 heaping Tablespoons cacao powder

4 Tablespoons almond butter

1 Tablespoon agave nectar

1/2 teaspoon sea salt (The Free Bird uses Celtic sea salt in their smoothie but I like Fleur de Sel because I think it pairs wonderfully with chocolate)

1 large pinch of cacao nibs (about 1/2 Tablespoon), optional

15 to 20 ice cubes (depending on cube size and the desired thickness of the smoothie)

Instructions:

Place the ingredients into a high-speed blender and blend until smooth. Serve immediately. Garnish with extra cacao nibs if desired.

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