Tag: caribbean

Raw & Cooked at Healthful Essence

If Healthful Essence was more convenient, we’d definitely eat there more often. It’s kind of like a healthier version of Soul Vegetarian. Here’s what we got last trip.

Kevin had the raw lasagna. It was good but could have used some fresh basil and maybe garlic.

Lacking originality, I got rice & peas, collards and BBQ tofu. With a couple of bonus slices of plantain on top.

This time, they had patties, callaloo patties!

Is it wrong that I like mine better? I make the callaloo a little spicy. These are still good though and didn’t require any work on my part.

 

The $8.50 box from Healthful Essence

If you haven’t been to Healthful Essence yet, you should get on that. This is the $8.50 box. I’ve got rice and peas, BBQ tofu and greens with a few plantain slices on top. That fried thing on top is an unfish that Kevin ordered separately. The food here always feels like it’s pretty healthy, if you ignore that fried thing there. It’s always full of flavor without being oily or fatty. Again, don’t look at that fried thing.

Random consumption

The internet connection is slow here at the rental in Seattle. So I’m just going to clear out the last few bits off food I uploaded before we left Atlanta to one post so I can make way for the piles of noms had on the trip.

A quick dinner of May Wah chicken legs with buffalo sauce, baked potato and corn.

 

Thursday and Friday last week I had work meetings at the Grand Hyatt in Buckhead. Nothing on the lunch buffet was vegan, but the kitchen whipped this up for me: tofu on a bed of garlicky potatoes and vegetables. It was pretty good!

Thursday night, Kevin stopped by Healthful Essence on the way back into town from Alabama. My plate full of delicious, from two angles. Seriously, you should try this place.

 

 

West Indian Rundown

Some cookbooks are pretty straight forward and just give you the recipes with minimal commentary. And then some almost read like a memoir. Passionate Vegetarian is the latter. The whole book, 1000+ pages, is sprinkled with stories about food and the author’s life. It’s also a “joy of cooking” type of book where sections like “great grains” show you different things to do with quinoa, kamut, etc. I like these sorts of cookbooks for when you run across something a little unusual and want ideas on how to use it. While the book isn’t vegan, there are plenty of vegan or veganizable recipes. And the recipes are interesting, not the same old thing.

This past week, I pulled out this book and decided to make West Indian Rundown. Instead of using seitan, I substituted beef style TVP. I didn’t even bother to rehydrate it, just chucked it in the stew. We just ate it over brown rice. It made a ton and I ended up eating it all week for lunch. It was as good as I’ve had at a Caribbean restaurant, but it doesn’t photograph that well.

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….