Tag: atlanta

Bake Sale Success!

It was nasty, rainy and a little icy but people still came out. Atlanta’s Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti this Saturday raised $1365 for Doctors Without Borders. Holy Crap! A special thanks to Kristin for organizing the whole thing and Criminal Records for not just agreeing to let us do it in front of their store, but letting us take over the back of the store when the weather turned nasty. Those guys rock!

Kristin has a great round-up of participants here. I’d like to also add thanks to Alicia Simpson, author of Vegan Comfort Food, Alison Brown, Lisa Bennett and a guy named David, I think, for bringing out goodies to sell. The hard work of everyone involved enabled us to turn a bit of labor and ingredients into a much larger donation for Haiti.

And now, for some of my crappy pictures!

Setting up in the back of Criminal Records
Setting up in the back of Criminal Records
Becky & Kristin load up Table 1
Becky & Kristin load up Table 1
Front of Table 2
Front of Table 2
side of table 2
side of table 2

Some of my contributions:

hearts and flowers sandwich cookies, mini marble bundt cakes, brownies, beard-friendly mini cupcakes on a stick
hearts and flowers cookies close-up
nekkid bundt cakes before they got their glaze

Fancy restaurant gets it right

Did we all survive another office holiday party season? For vegans, this usually sucks. If you’re lucky, you’ll get spaghetti with marinara or some sad steamed vegetables. Even at nice restaurants where you’d think the chef would have a little more pride. Just because we’re vegan doesn’t mean we lack taste buds.

My company doesn’t give a crap about the vegans that work here (no, I’m not the only one), so I don’t even bother going to work food events. Kevin’s company usually makes a pretty good effort. This year was really nice. The party was at The Mansion in Buckhead. Our entree was ravioli but the pasta part was celery root. The innards were tasty mushrooms. It came with various root veggies scattered around. Of course, I can’t remember what the sauce was, but it was good. See people, it’s not that freakin’ difficult!

Negril Caribbean Cafe

Tuesday I had to take an all day class and then an exam at the health department in downtown Atlanta. It sounds kind of terrible but it was actually pretty informative. And the test was pretty easy. Anyway, we were only going to have an hour break for lunch so I had to figure out ahead of time what to eat. Calabash looked to be a bit too far to walk, so after some googling around I found Negril Caribbean Cafe. Their menu showed some veggie options. Cool!

Naturally, it was raining all day. So I stomped through the rain the 3 or 4 blocks to the restaurant. I asked about vegan options and it was pretty much all the veggie options. Cool! So I got the blackened tofu, peas and rice and green beans. She said the blackened tofu came with sweet and sour sauce. I asked for it on the side. The blackened tofu wasn’t really spicy. At all. So that was kind of odd. But everything was pretty good. The sweet and sour sauce was kind of like asian sweet and sour sauce. It also had a strip each of raw onion, bell pepper and carrot in it. And two tomato chunks. I ended up dumping it on half the rice and half the tofu. I think the green beans were just canned, but they weren’t cooked to death so I was fine with that. They also had some veggie stir fries, a curry and other stuff on the menu I’d like to try.

I almost forgot that I picked up a callaloo patty for later that became part of dinner. The greens had a bit of a kick. Very nice.

Holy crap! That wraps up my 2nd VeganMofo! 31 posts in 31 days. I might be a little blogged out….

Sushi Sushi!

Look, we’re eating out again! I do miss cooking but there’s just been too much other stuff going on lately. That’ll get worse before it gets better. And then I’ll be doing more cooking than ever before. I’m sure I’ll bitch about that too.

Kevin and I hadn’t been to RuSan’s for sushi in a while. Sure, I know that if you’re a fish-eating sushi snob, RuSan’s isn’t all that great. But as a vegan, it’s fantastic! I love ordering lots of different small things and putting together a meal that fits your tastes and appetite.

I started off with potato yakitori.

And then had three different sushi rolls:

I don’t think I’d had the Kaiware Daikon (radish sprout)  Maki before. Tasted very cleansing. I can see getting it every once in a while.

Tempura Spinach Maki. See, you can justify eating something fried when it’s spinach, right? Right?

I get the Avocado Maki almost every time.

Others that are in my rotation: teriyaki zucchini maki, tempura tofu maki, tempura banana maki, inari nigiri, and some others I am forgetting. See, lots of vegan options!