I came across this interview with Sara Sohn on Veg News last night. She’s a rocking veg entrepreneur and her signature product is vegan marshmallows! I can’t speak for everyone, but rice crispy treats have always been a weakness for me and one I thought I gave up when becoming veg. My mouth is watering at the thought of a vegan friendly recipe already! It’ll be a while before I can get back to North America to get my hands on these babies but you can pick them up at Whole Foods in the US or the other retailers listed here on the Sweet & Sara website.
The June ‘Sex and the City’ issue of Marie Claire features a page dedicated to the fabulous vegan Emily Deschanel and some of her favourite vegan fashion, beauty, and living finds. Included in the mix are Olsen Haus, Cisco Brothers, Beyond Skin, and Vaute Couture among others. Check out the magazine or the online slideshow!
Ah, the Saturday mornings of my youth… Actually, we weren’t much of the traditional Saturday morning type, but when we did it, we did it with pancakes! So now to satisfy my still occasional Saturday morning cravings, I found this wonderful, flexible, whole wheat pancake recipe from One Frugal Foodie. True to simplicity and what I had on hand this time ’round, I used brown sugar and canola oil for my version. It’s the perfect Saturday morning treat!
When we first moved to the Middle East last year I was pregnant and contemplating the idea of returning to veganism. I must admit though that I was a little apprehensive about trying to maintain the lifestyle in a foreign country. Looking back I feel a little silly because the place where I’m living is one of the most affluent nations on the planet and has everything from Sbarro to soy milk, though it may not be the brand one is used to.
Since making the decision to go vegan again, I’ve enjoyed the challenges of finding and making my favourite foods and discovering new ones. Some things have been plentiful: no lack of faux meat here! Other staples, like seitan and ahem, vegan taquitos have been non-existent. Kind people have brought back things from Canada and the USA for me, like nutritional yeast, and I’ve been able to order my beloved VEGA in by air mail. I’ve also discovered a whole new host of products and brands that are fabulous: Linda McCartney frozen foods, Sanitarium soy ice cream, Baxter’s vegan soup, local falafel.
So while it may not necessarily be what I was used to when I first made the vegan jump, and though I still miss my beloved health food stores back in Montreal; vegan life in my part of the Middle East is pretty great thanks to brand flexibility, a great grocery store or two, occasional air packages, and an open mind. It’s really helped cement the understanding that being vegan is something I can (and want) to do everywhere.
I’m vegan.
It’s better.
Being vegan has helped me feel better physically and lose 30 lbs. But so did staying within an acceptable calorie range, making healthy food choices, and exercising regularly.
Being vegan has helped me better my environment My choice to be vegan isn’t going to stop all factory farming immediately, but it did make positive contribution to lowering the overall dependence on animal products and open markets for cruel free, creative, and/or sustainable alternatives.
Being vegan has helped me make conscious choices about what I eat. No, it’s not going to cure cancer, but it might help prevent it. And isn’t that better?
Being vegan has made me a better parent. It has helped me look at what I teach my children about life and the world we live in. Will I forbid them to eat meat? No, but I will tell them about why I don’t and hope that my example can help them make informed decisions about their lives.
Being vegan has made me a more compassionate individual. Can I help all those who suffer? No, but little efforts go a long way. Each individual life is sacred and by appreciating that, I can appreciate them all.
Being vegan has reconnected me with God. Does it make me more right than you? No, but it has let me realize a better purpose for my existence.
Is veganism perfect? No. Will it cure all the evils of the world? No. Will it make me disease free? No. Will it stop all of the pollution of our precious planet? No. Will it save every animal in suffering or pain? No. Are all vegans the same and vegan for the same reason? No.
Is it better?
Yes.
I have extremely sensitive skin. Prone to acne, rash, and just about any other nasty looking thing out there, finding something positive in the mirror has been difficult on more than one morning. More makeup leads to more breakouts and my vicious dermatological nightmare continues.
And then there was mineral makeup! Seeming sent from heaven, it promised breathable wear, clear skin!, and a beautiful finish. Like every other little lemming out there, I handed over my plastic card for a box of Bare Minerals from QVC. It was beautiful stuff. Swirl, tap, buff. Itch?! Oh MG, after about 2 hours of wearing the stuff, I felt like I wanted to rip my face off. I thought my minerals were contaminated and tried a friend’s jar with the same results. I washed my face and re-applied. Same results. Finally, in disgust, I threw out my little jars of “magic minerals” and went back to my liquid foundation with heavy heart.
This past summer, for some reason or other, I had an inkling to try mineral makeup again. This time though, I wanted to do my research. Why did my skin itch? The answer: bismuth oxychloride, an insidious little ingredient found in most mineral makeups. Commonly used as ‘pearling agent’ for a glossy finish, a not-so-fabulous side effect of this little bugger is terribly itchy skin and cystic acne for some users. Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Now I knew what NOT to include in my mineral makeup, I wanted to find a company that cared about beauty as well as quality, natural ingredients.
I have personally found my answer in Afterglow Cosmetics. I’m not gonna lie, I’m a bit vain. if I’m going to be bothered to put on makeup, it better be damn good stuff from a damn good company. I want to see and experience a product from people who look, talk, and sell something well and I want that product to look and be as good as it is sold. Especially in the cosmetic industry, cosmetics count, no? Afterglow delivers on all of these counts. Transparent company dedicated to truly natural ingredients and beautiful products, vegan brushes, and an image that wears as well on my face as it does on the webpage. These guys are Leaping Bunny approved, proud signers of the Compact for Safe Cosmetics and bismuth free! My skin still isn’t perfect. I still have some acne here and there, usually on a monthly basis, but when I wear makeup, it stays put, looks good, and doesn’t itch!
Carmen is my godmother Teresa’s daughter. She is three and a bit years older than I am and the closest thing I’ve ever had to a big-sister-idol figure. She is smart, beautiful, and sporty, and fun; basically everything I wanted to be as an overweight, spectacled thirteen year old adolescent. Carmen lived three states away, but in the summer and every other Christmas or so we would see each other and I would marvel at the something new she’d learned or done since we’d last met. One year it was surfing. One year it was vegetarianism.
I still distinctly remember being in her kitchen as she rhapsodized about eggplant lasagna and the benefits of not eating meat. At that point, I could barely identify an eggplant, but dammit, if Carmen was going to be a vegetarian, I was going to be one too!
I’m pretty sure I lived on cheese quesadillas and peanut butter sandwiches the first time around…and still could barely identify an eggplant…but dammit, I was a vegetarian.
I’ve had an eye cast towards Odette New York’s amazing nature inspired jewelry for over two years now. I originally discovered the line on Etsy and since then, I’m happy to say, the products have been picked up by mainstream style mags and celebrities.
For men and women alike, the jewelry features a touch of the wild, hammered and hewn into delicate and simple shapes and figures. One of my favourites is her bullet hole collection. Though not an explicitly veg’n company, all of Odette NY jewelry is hand crafted from precious metals and celebrates an “organic aesthetic.” To all of this, I say “huzzah!” as the jewelry speaks for itself.
One of the foods high on my vegan wish list has been a recreation of classic Kraft Dinner mac and cheese. Not only is it a terrible, but nostalgic food from my childhood and penniless days in college but the kid friendly potential of a vegan alternative is priceless. My efforts however, have been hampered by a lack of nutritional yeast, which until now has been unavailable in Doha. Mr. Omni’s return from the USA, where he was in town to go to a conference and do my bidding at Whole Foods, brought the storied item back to Doha in an economy size can on Friday night. Mac and cheez baby, here I come!
We decided to try the lovely looking recipe on Fat Free Vegan for two reasons: 1) because she uses dry mustard in her recipe which is much less yucky to me than wet mustard (can you tell I’m not a fan?) and 2) because she describes her daughter’s very particular taste in mac and cheez with great gusto and we can definitely relate to having taste-decisive children in the house!
Her mac and cheez recipe is AWESOME. I kid you not.
We decided to add a few of her alternative suggestions:
We added 2 extra generous pinches of tumeric and 3 tbsp of vegan margarine to make it more creamy and fatty, LOL! We put a bit of extra salt and some generous ground pepper on our individual bowls and licked the spoon clean! Baby Clover and I had it for lunch this afternoon and I used 2-3 tbsp of soy milk to re-cream the sauce in an approximately 2 cup size portion in the microwave. It’s an instant favourite around here and a definite vegan comfort food!
Ok. Let’s get real honest here. I’m vegan. But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy or that I don’t miss things from the omni world. I lived there for a long time. For me, the two hardest things about going vegan were leather shoes and cheese. I love shoes. And cheese. But cheese will come in a later post. This one’s about shoes. Many leather shoes out there are for me, aesthetically pleasing from a design perspective. They are not however, worth the price of a life. At the end of the day, no matter how pretty, I don’t want to wear something that used to be the skin of another living animal and I’ve reached a point of maturity in my own life to follow through on that belief. But I often find myself looking at a pair of leather shoes, thinking, “Damn! I wish they made a vegan alternative to those!”
And until recently, I’ve personally had a bit of a rough time finding nice vegan shoes. I don’t think it’s because they’re not out there, I just think I’ve been looking in the wrong places. I want something quality, not just stuff made out of PVC which will fall apart by the end of the season. Part of the reason I started this blog was to gather vegan resources out there and write them down in one place so that myself and others could take advantage of all the wonderful stuff out there that is vegan! So when I discovered Novacas and Moo Shoes, I thought I died and went to Veg Heaven!
Novacas is one of the most beautiful lines of vegan shoes I’ve ever stumbled across. Even the website is a work of art! You can instantly tell that these people care equally about ethical footwear and design. WOO HOO! They are available at a variety of fine retailers, one of them being Moo Shoes.
Based in the USA, Moo Shoes has anything you can wear on your body, though they specialize in shoes. I actually let out an audible squeal of delight when I saw the brand list with so many names I didn’t recognize and a few on the fabulous names I did know! So much to explore! So much to buy, lol!
