Sunday, March 6, 2011

Musical coincidence?

In this household, we make pancakes every Sunday morning. My standby is blueberry pancakes, but I've been wanting to get rid of use some very ripe bananas for the last week (without freezing them or just tossing them in the garbage. It is definitely still too cold to walk my butt to the compost bin in the corner of the backyard).
My original intentions for these overly ripe bananas was banana bread, but I still have two bananas left...it could still happen!

Pure coincidence happened this morning: "Banana Pancakes" (by Jack Johnson) filled the air as I was dancing and flipping banana pecan pancakes this morning. Yes, I dance while making food. It is a totally common thing to do. Try it yourself! Recipe found in Vegan with a Vengeance.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Actually, less tofu now than ever

I want to re-title this blog. Mainly, I find myself not posting because the items we make at home don't contain tofu (or soy) anymore, and the title of this blog was: more tofu please!

You can see the contradiction, right?

How are we reducing our soy intake? and why?
- We eat less tofu and more seitan; seitan has a firmer texture most of the time, so El enjoys this more than tofu.

- Most of the time, we incorporate beans into our meals instead of faux meat. I love most faux meat as much as the next vegan, but El really doesn't enjoy the fauxness. This is probably because he still eats meat. However, beans add flavor and a different texture to meals. Our favorites: black beans and canellini beans.

- We drink (or use) almond milk now instead of soy milk. I enjoy soy milk, especially the holiday flavors (Pumpkin Spice is my favorite). However, I LOVE hemp milk. And really enjoy almond milk. And then there's rice milk. For people who enjoyed skim milk in their pre-vegan lives, then I highly recommend rice milk. I just can't drink it. Because the price of hemp milk is sky high, we drink almond milk. From our experience, it subs really well in pancake, waffle, and baked-goods recipes. Our product recommendation: Blue Diamond unsweetened original. Next would probably be Trader Joe's almond milk, then Silk's variety.

- When it comes to yogurt, I eat the soy version. While I'm waiting for a commercially available almond milk yogurt, I stick with Whole Soy's vanilla flavored yogurt.

- This leads to: why the reduction? I have felt a noticeable difference in how I feel (physically and emotionally) since I've cut most of the soy out of my diet. That's enough for me! El might say something like: "Moobs"