This recipe for vegetarian beef stew was wonderful!!  Next time I will brown the morningstar farm beef strips longer.  After simmering it for a long time the beef strips broke down a lot and lost the texture.  For the part that says

2 cups vegetable broth
2 cups reconstituted vegetarian ‘beef’ bullion

I used Better than Bouillon no beef base for the whole amount instead.

It flavor was just like my Mom’s stew I grew up on!  It was wonderful!

Just a fun little fact before I start; I never thought I’d use eBay as a source of information in regards to a products’ ingredients, but there it was. I can vouch for their accuracy too. I just had another box of these recently and looked at the ingredients but didn’t think to write them down before tossing the package.

Anyways, not only are they attractively colored and shaped like Chinese takeout boxes, the food cooks right inside. Minimal packaging and simple instructions mean you tear open the noodle and sauce packets, dump them back into the takeout box, close it up, and nuke it for two minutes. Then, eat.

Several flavors are available including Peanut Satay, Pad Thai, Kung Pao, and new Green Curry and Tom Yum. I’ve only had the Satay and Pad Thai so far, both of which fall somewhere between just edible and stupendous. There’s plenty of flavor but neither seemed especially delectable. It’s far and away better than a pack of chemical-filled ramen noodles and for $1.99 there’s precious little else you’re going to find that’s as easy to fix and still Vegan.

The ingredients are mostly wholesome but somehow they’ve managed to pack in an insane amount of calories. I don’t have the box with me and can’t find much info online but each box will plump you up an extra 400 - 600 calories. Filling, affordable, and healthy hardly ever coincide and in the case of these noodle boxes you’ll get plenty of filling food at a decent price. They’re definitely worth trying but if the middling flavor and the calories are a bigger factor in your food equation you may want to look elsewhere.

I like scones, or rather, I like Panera’s orange scones and I’ve always wanted to make some at home. Flipping through the musty pages of Rose Elliot’s Complete Vegetarian Cookbook I came upon a recipe for Easy Whole-Wheat Scones that calls for few ingredients and offers a Vegan alternative. Perfect! When my mother forced a bowl of blueberries on me, it cemented the deal. It was time to bake!

1 1/2 cups 100% whole-wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
6 tablespoons vegan margarine
2 tablespoons evaporated cane sugar sugar
1/2 cup soy milk
1/2 to 1 cup blueberries (or whatever you wanna put inside)

1 Preheat oven to 425 degrees
2 Sift flour with baking powder into a mixing bowl, then add the butter and rub in with fingertips. Mix in the sugar. Add the soy milk and mix to a soft but not sticky dough. I added the blueberries at this point and further kneaded them (gently) into the dough.
3 Knead lightly on a floured surface and press out to about 1/2 inch depth.
4 Cut out scones at least 2-inches wide and place on a floured baking sheet.
5 Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden brown or just barely squishy on the sides.

That’s all there is to it! Within an hour you too can have about a dozen of these tasty little Vegan scones and cover them with more margarine or jam or whatever you like to put on ‘em. They’re definitely not the size or consistency of Panera’s scones but they make for a nice and quick change of pace for breakfast.

Organic Miso soup in cup packets are pretty good, especially to have stuck in a drawer at work. It’s vegan, easily prepared and pretty tasty. It doesn’t taste exactly like miso, but it will do. The tofu has a powdery taste to it at times and adding more seaweed helps a lot.  I buy packs of dried seaweed at Japanese food shops to add to soups, it’s very easy, tasty and healthy.

When I feel hungry at work and lunch is still hours away this really helps!

In this post I posted a link to an article about why table sugar is not vegan.

I was sad to find that the items from Tofutti that I have bought (pizza, toffuti cuties ice cream sandwiches & cream cheese), although they have no dairy, they do have sugar and are therefore not vegan.

I think I will write to them and ask them to switch sugars, because that is just lame & silly.