Targeted Marketing?

...or....Are You Serious???????

I am the proud recipient of my first Amazon.com package.



This medium-sized brown box, sporting the now universally-recognized Amazon smile, was wedged safely inside the screen door when I arrived home last night. Gleefully, I tore open the sealing tape and pulled out the following:



Whilst My Beloved was somewhat less than gleeful at the arrival of a raw food book ('Good luck with that' were his exact words if I recall correctly), he could barely wait to get his hands on Robin Robertson's Vegan Fire and Spice. I too was thrilled.....until I lifted it from the box to reveal the following lurking at the bottom.....



Let me get this right: I order two - not one but TWO - vegan cookbooks....which probably means that

a) I don't eat animals
and
b) I probably eschew the dubious 'merits' of the Golden Arches in favour of cooking actual food

......and they send me a coupon for a chicken sandwich????????

I guess the message inside the coupon flap could not really have been more apt.



"Your search for the perfect chicken sandwich is SO over."

Yeah.

It has been since September last year.

Since I learned of the unspeakable cruelty endured by the birds McDonalds thinks of only in terms of a cheap sandwich.

Since I turned vegan.

And started ordering vegan cookbooks.

Sheesh!

Perhaps it does lend weight to the theory that eating meat makes you stupid - I mean, what are the chances that a vegan shipper added that particular coupon to my order????

Stay Vegan, Friends!

On Being The Vegan in the Room

You may, or may not, know that I am a member of Curves. Well, our club recently changed ownership and the new owner, Bonnie, held a potluck today as a way of getting the members together and celebrating our new start. So, accompanied by My Beloved (yes, spouses were specifically invited), I went armed with some great vegan offerings. The general theme, being so close to Valentine's Day, was Romance - with a capital 'R'!

So, having taken this to heart - ho ho! , we sped up to Northampton with a vegan heart-shaped pizza, topped with heart-shaped peppers of various colours, egglant, tomoatoes ('love apples'!) and no cheese...well, that's heart-healthy! And three trays of quinoa with eggplant, peppers, onions, green and yellow squash, corn and edamame. OK, I'll hold my hand up and admit that I somewhat overdid it on the amount of quinoa, but I hate worrying about there not being enough. Especially when I'm being 'the vegan in the room' if you know what I mean! Oh, the pressure to perform....!

Anyway, to finish it all off, there was also a blueberry and orange bundt cake - the second one I've made this week, as it happens and it met the self-same fate as its predecessor. Of course, this was from The Joy of Vegan Baking and was - without any shadow of a doubt - the very highlight of the potluck. If I was asked once, I was asked a couple of dozen times what was in it and how the heck it could be so good if it was 'vee-gun'.

I just smiled and explained how the silken tofu took the place of the eggs, bypassing all of the cholesterol and battery chicken hell. The sweetly seductive scent of freshly squeezed oranges, 
the still warm pop of the whole blueberries, the lightly moist crumb, the fine dusting of powdered sugar....Suffice to say, not a single slice came home with us! 

Naturally, having spent so much time baking and cooking (I was at it at 08:30 this morning, and as you know I am not a 'morning person' - especially not at the weekend!!!!), no photos exist of this bacchanalia. I left My Beloved in charge of the camera and he was waaaaay more interested in slicing the pizza than in performing his 'documentary' duties. So I guess you'll simply have to take my word that these wonderous things happened.

But they did. Oh yes, indeedy!

Stay Vegan, Friends!

You Know You're Vegan When...#2

A few days ago, I heard from a friend about a restaurant in Hadley with an extensive 'vegetarian meats' section to their menu. I was intrigued: no-chicken chicken? shrimpless-shrimp? bovine-free beef???? How could this be? I determined to see - and taste - it for myself.

Butterfly is a fairly non-traditional Chinese/Japanese fusion sort of place. A new restaurant on the site of the old, and short-lived, 'All Fired Up' (a wok bar type establishment that just didn't seem to take off, even with the student crowd), it is obviously well-liked by the chinese community. This is always a good sign.

The menu was huge. I mean, enormous! And, to my absolute joy, there was a complete second menu of vegetarian and vegan options. Yes, you read that correctly - an entire second menu! I went to work with gusto!

We ordered the vegan chicken drumsticks, vegan fishsticks, hot and sour soup and vegan potstickers. Yes, yes, we over ordered, but I was excited to see soooooo many options, and My Beloved simply could not do without his favoourite soup....say no more! I wish, I wish, I wish, I'd had the mental wherewithall to bring the camera, but I was a fool and so no evidence of the feast survives. (Next time, I promise to fully document the meal!) However, suffice to say, the 'chicken' and 'fish' (made from chinese mushrooms, gluten, tofu and herbs/spices) were outstanding. They were almost perfect analogs of the 'real thing'....the chicken drumsticks, for instance, even had a sort of 'skin' on them which gave a disquieting snap as I bit into it. Although they tasted incredible, it was perhaps all a little close for vegan comfort....

Possibly because of this, I had a bizarrely hard time ordering a main course. I scanned the menu more than several times, trying to decide what to get. They offered around 15-20 different options for each of the 'meats' - 'chicken' in black bean sauce, orange 'beef' with sesame, 'shrimp' with green beans and water chestnuts...that kind of thing. But, even knowing full well that nothing more sentient than a mushroom was harmed in the making of these delicacies, I could not raise any enthusiasm for ordering a dish. I started to glance hopefully at the tofu dishes and experienced a palpable sense of relief until I remembered that the reason we'd come was specifically to sample the meat analogs.

Eventually, I chose the shrimp with broccoli - as I adore that cheeky green number! - and its significance was not lost on me. Seafood was the very last thing I gave up when I became vegan, and shrimp were definitely the last creatures with which I felt any kind of connection. So I guess it was probably understandable that I would opt for them over the beef analog or faux chicken. It has been only a short four months since my transition and yet avoiding eating animals and their secretions is already so very ingrained, so natural to me, that I find even the idea of eating 'flesh' unpalatable. Even when I know it is 'fake'.

You know you're vegan when....!

Stay Vegan, friends!

Jamie Oliver shows chicken's egg-to-plate hell

I am so relieved that someone of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's stature is finally getting involved in showing the realities of factory farming. That he's focusing on chickens first is also a step in the right direction as they are often - alongside fish - the last animals to come off people's menus.

According to an article in today's Telegraph, Oliver succeeded in showing the reality of a chicken's 39-day 'life' in Britain's poultry industry. Although it's hard to watch - and even harder to live with what you've seen - it is so vital that people wake up to how their chickens reach their plates. From the disposal of male chicks (via suffocation or maceration - yes, in the US they grind male chicks up alive) to beak-searing to the horrors of battery cage production of eggs to the torture of 'broilers' to the final slaughter of these gentle, docile birds...the whole industry needs to have the spotlight turned on it and people need to wake up.

Wake up!

This brutality cannot be acceptable to anyone with a conscience.

Thank you Jamie Oliver!