Pumpkin Ice Cream!

1/2 cup evaporated milk
1 cup cooked pumpkin
1/2 cup - 2 cups ricemellow
1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon of allspice
1/4 teaspoon of ginger
1/4 teaspoon of salt

Heat the evaporated milk. Stir in seasonings and pumpkin. Take off heat and place in a bowl in the fridge. Chill. Once cooled, mix in ricemellow. Freeze overnight.

This is quite possibly the best snack I've made from pumpkin. I took a bite this morning to see how it turned out--all the flavors came firing out at once. It's vegetarian and gluten-free with no refined sugar. The sweetness all comes from the ricemellow. For those of you unfamiliar wtih ricemellow, it's vegan fluff made from rice and rice syrup, naturally sweet from the rice.



(More Photos coming!)

Soups: Smarty vs. Farty

Since I started this blog, I've lost sight of the point. The point was not just to bitch about my gassy belly, but to talk about food.

To get back on track, I'm going to start running Smarty vs. Farty lists. Smarty foods are healthy and tasty. Farty foods are not.

Today's Smarty vs. Farty is inspired by the current weather conditions in the northeastern US. If you aren't aware, let me catch you up to speed. The low temperature is below thirty. Basically, autumn never happened. We went straight from Indian summer to winter. From hoodies to wool coats. From salads to soup.

Soup!

All week, I've been toting boxes of Imagine soups. They are my absolute favorite. They are portable, easy to open, light on the tummy, AND DELICIOUS! They can be found in almost any supermarket in the US.

While they can be found, they can also be ignored. There are so many kinds of "healthy" soups out there. How do you know which ones to buy?


Farty

1. Pacific
Pacific soup angers me more than any other. For two reasons. First, Pacific soups LOOK like Imagine soups. So it's easy to get them confused. They both tout the same promise of organic ingredients. And while the ingredients are organic, they're also not completely healthy. Pacific soups contain sugar and "natural" flavor. Nothing with sugar in it is healthy. End of story.

2. Soup in a cup
No matter what the brand, soup in a paper cup is neither healthy nor tasty. The old school "Cuppasoup" brand is a styrofoam cradle of white noodles, MSG, and chemicals. Even healthy brands are unable to cook up a satisfying version. I'm thinking of the chunky soups... the ones that you have to pull back the paper lid and then keep covered for five minutes after nuking. The little bits of veggies and beans never cook through. If they do, they turn to little pebbles.

3. Trader Joe's Soups
One word. Sugar! Unlike Pacific soups, who use sugar to make the soup taste good, Trader Joe's uses sugar to make their soups taste like fucked up dessert. Their tomato tastes like hot ketchup. Gross.

4. Campbells, Progresso, Healthy Choice, etc.
Do I seriously need to go here? Don't eat Campbell's or Progresso. Eat a piece of cake instead. Or pizza. At least make the calories and high fructose corn syrup worth something. As for Healthy Choice, whatever's been taken out has been replaced with chemicals. You might as well hit up the cancer ward of a local hospital, nab an extracted tumor from the lab, and eat that instead.

Smarty

1. Imagine
You heard me already. Try the tomato, the butternut squash, the potato leek, the sweet corn, and the Cuban black bean. Broccoli and sweet potato are okay, but they don't really taste like broccoli or sweet potato.

2. Amy's
A few weeks ago, I dined on a vegan, gluten free enchilada from Amy's. As I chewed, I penned a letter to her. Dear Amy, it read. I love everything about you. Most people have a tragic flaw. But Amy's tragic flaw is that she has no tragic flaw. It's impossible for her to fuck up food. Everything she makes is amazing and healthy.

3. YOUR OWN!
Soup is so easy. You don't even need a recipe. Buy some vegetable stock. (Use Imagine soups as base, if you are nervous about working with spices.) Chop up a couple cloves of garlic and throw it in. Salt. Pepper. Then add your favorite vegetables. When I make soup, I throw stuff in, taste test, and cook it until everything's soft and tasty.


Whatever you decide to do, STAY WARM!

apparently i use the word "like" a lot

Eating Bad and Feeling Great

As much as I preach on this blog, I have to admit that a lot of what I say is hot air blown out of my ass.

I have a persona to live up to, you know?

It's easy to charge ahead and write assuredly and obnoxiously on this blog. No one, other than a few friends, knows my true identity. There's no way that my employers can discover me. So I take the liberty to run my mouth, snottily preach for the healthiness of the vegan lifestyle, and stink up the room a bit.

But lately, I've been feeling like a moron.

While I try to support my nutritional news with proof, it's hard to know what justifies as proof nowadays. Every day, journalists report different health trends. These trends all cancel each other out. Think back to the eighties, when nutritionists claimed that fat was causing Americans to become obese. Now, post-millenium nutritionists claim that fat is good, but bread is bad. We can argue anything and find proof for it.

A few posts ago, my IBS-BFF left a comment that has been reverberating in my guts. She said something along these lines: Listen to your body. Eat what makes you feel good. Don't diet. Work on making yourself feel better.

Recently, I've realized how right she is.

For the past few days, I had the farts, BAD. It made no sense to me; I'd been gluten-free for a few weeks, since my accidental Beano dosing, which ironically has wheat in it. (FUCKERS!) Still, I could not get these stinky pockets to quit firing out of my butt.

As I drove home from work, I wracked my brain to think of what I could do to quell the farts. Nothing was working. Not Gas-X. Not peppermint tea. Not fiber. Nothing.

Then I remembered an old trick from my pre-gluten-free days.

Philly pretzels.

For you non-Philadelphia rezzies, let me take a sec to describe Philadelphia pretzels. They are like regular soft pretzels, but supersized and pulled out longways. They are chewy and soft and salty. They are my most favorite food ever, and they used to cure my farts like nothing else.



Of course, since becoming gluten-free, I lost the comfort of my Philly pretzels. Come to think of it, I lost the comfort of a lot of bready foods. I started to wonder: Why did I stop eating bread? Because I read that it could be making me fat.

How many limitations can I put on myself? Seriously. I'm a friggin' gluten-free vegan who eats no refined sugar. And I'm supposed to worry about dieting on top of all that?

Goddammit, I thought. I'm going home and eating gluten-free waffles.

Almost instantly, my gas dissipated. And I got to enjoy kick-ass waffles with peanut butter and honey on them.

Thanks, IBS-BFF! I love you.

It's not a Chicken-Fetus, It's a Choice

This weekend, I give you a choice.

You can make an omelet out of eggs, chicken fetuses, which are riddled with salmonella and gross stringy undeveloped chicken parts.

Or you can make an omelet out of chickpeas.

With only a little bit of chickpea flour (aka garbanzo flour), salt, tumeric and water, you can make the most incredible vegan/gluten-free omelets. Add a little chili powder, and you've got a vegetable pakora pancake. So much tastier than eggs. Insanely healthy.

The trick is to get the water to flour ratio right. It took me a few tries. At first, I kept making the batter too thick, like bread. Eventually, I threw a half cup of flour into a bowl, and stirred it while pouring in a cup of water. It took more than a half cup of H2O, but definitely not the whole cup. I stirred until the consistency looked like pancake batter.



The first one was BORING. Plain with cheese. But it was good. I ate it, watching Remington Steele with my mom. She laughed as I moaned and groaned over the tastiness. Like a pakora, minus the grease. I've never seen a cheesy pakora, but dammit, it worked.