Vegan picnic #2

More ideas for vegan picnic :

High in calories, sugar, and energy.

Apples keep well inside backpacks and during long stays. 

Eggplant, lettuce + tahini on wholewheat bread

Lasagna from Provence

Greetings from Provence!

Provence is known for its lovely lavender fields, olive-rich scented airs, and bouquets of sunflowers decorating the dining room table. From this sun-kissed region you also get recipes using its main produce : tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini. Since it's an ecological crime to buy these beauties in winter (they're stricltly summer-friendly produce) I'm using them as much as I can before winter hits.

One of these fabulous recipes with three simple main ingredients can be transformed into a lasagna. Mmm!

You'll need:

• Lasagna pasta
• A lot of tomatoes to make sauce from scratch (about 8) or you can do half from scratch, half with supermarket bought sauce like I did.
• An eggplant
• A zucchini
• An onion
• Garlic
• Herbes de Provence (optional)

Here's how to assemble the Provence Lasagna:

1) Preheat oven. Chop the eggplant and zucchini into round slices, not very thick. The thickness depends on whether you the razor-thin touch or leaning towards the chunky side. I went for chunky.

2) Lay the eggplant slices on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and bake in preheated oven for 5 minutes. This will get rid of the bitter aftertase.

3) Dice onion, garlic and tomatoes. Sauté the onions and garlic in a pot with olive oil. When onions are transparent and garlic is golden, add tomatoes. Keep stirring until the tomatoes dissolve. Add salt and herbes de Provence.

Note: Again, I like my sauce chunky. I cut into realtively large pieces of tomatoes and I didn't skin them. If you want perfect, puree-like sause, skin the tomatoes and remove the seeds.

If you cheated and got supermarket tomato sauce, now is the time to add it to the onions and garlic. Add Herbes de Provence anyways and salt if needed.

4) Once sauce is done, lay it on the table next to the lasagna baking dish. Start assembling lasagna like this: first, cover the bottom in sauce so that lasagna won't burn. Lay a layer of lasagna pasta on top. Cover with sauce again. Make a layer of eggplant. Cover with sauce and pasta. On top of that, zucchini. Repeat until ingredients are gone. Make sure that you have enough sauce before laying down another layer of lasagna pasta - you don't want to leave it uncovered or it won't cook.

5) Bake in oven for about half an hour or until it starts to smell really good.

Enjoy!

Questions I get asked. Number 2: How did you become a vegetarian?

This is a little story of how one day, little Catherine, who was a voracious omnivore, turned into a pacific vegetarian.

The first sign was when I was five years old. I was watching Lamb Chops on television. By some horrible coincidence, my mom made lamb chops for dinner.

I cried my eyes out, but darn if those lamb chops tasted good.

The second sign was when I was twelve, again with my dear mom. She showed me an image on Internet that she thought was funny : a sad piggy holding a sign saying 'Will work for roast beef'. I adore pigs. I remember getting mad at my mom and crying a lot for the poor pig. But I was mostly frustrated that we had to eat meat, we had to kill them to eat - at least that's what I thought.

A year later, I was thirteen, I was in the process of moving countries, my parents were divorcing, and I thought it was the perfect time to be a rebellious teenager. I told my parents I wanted to be vegetarian. My dad told me 'If you don't eat meat, your boobs won't grow.' What sort of teenager wants to hear that? I continued eating meat.

Two years later, parents were divorced and I was settled in at Florianopolis. I'd met other vegetarians. I knew then that it was possible. So I delcared myself vegetarian and launched into an anti-meat campaign. My mom agreed with me and became a vegetarian, also. We suffered the first social awkwardness together.

But neither of us really knew how to take care of ourselves. Eating instant noodles and pizza does not a vegetarian make. My mom got anemia after five months and started eating meat again. I held on a month later, but without my mom's moral support, I lost the will to be vegetarian and started eating meat also. But I entertained the idea : One day, I'll be vegetarian again, and I'll know how to make it work.

That day came on my eighteenth birthday. My last meal was a celebration lunch, with octopus salad and seafood. It was the cut-up octopus that made me think: I can't eat him, I've seen him swimming in the sea before. This is wrong. And if this is wrong, eating cows has to be wrong, to. I shoved the octopus around my plate, got home, and told my mom that I was a vegetarian again.

The next days I spent on Youtube. First I made myself watch all those horror movies: pigs being slaughtered, stoned, tortured. Mother cows getting separated from their calves. Hens being plucked alive.  I had to make sure that this time, I would stay vegetarian. I made a promise to myself: If I ever want to eat meat again, I would watch those videos again and see if I could live with that.

The next part was research. I trawled through dozens of articles online. I visited blogs, recipe books, stories of teenagers like me. I went to the bookstore and spent hours there, reading books. I made calculations: How much protein do I need? Where can I get it? I made lists of protein-rich foods and iron-rich foods. I quickly learned that the main problem for vegetarians is getting IRON, not protein.

I planned out my meals, using my new knowledge. I had lunch 5 times a week at my university, so that was easy: I had rice, beans, salad, assorted cooked vegetables and a fruit for dessert, which is basically the perfect vegetarian meal. On weekends, I cooked. My mom and stepdad were the first to try out my experiments.

Three years later, I'm a vegan. I've never had anemia. I've actually gained weight, which is great, because all my life I've always been too skinny. My allergies have vanished and my skin is healthier. All in all, I feel great to be a vegetarian and I hope that this blog will show you, too, that is possible and it can be one of the most amazing changes in your life.

How vegan am I?

Me at Lemon Festival

This isn't a question I get often. Rather, I get a 'AHA! You ate my chocolate cake! You have abandoned your principles and caved to the mighty chocolate god!'

I then explain that I'm not 100% vegan. What does that mean, for me?

It means that I'm against eating eggs, milk, cheese, yogurt, and other dairy products because it's against my personal convictions. I know the suffering cows and chickens go through in farming industries, and I know that eggs and milk is a by-product. So, I boycott all animal-related products because of that.

I won't buy any of the products mentioned above. If I go to a self-serve restaurant, I won't serve myself something that I know contains one of these products. When I cook, I choose 100% vegan recipes and on my blog, I promote being vegan.

But I will eat dairy products on special circumstances, for example: My friend invited me over, and offered me a slice of chocolate cake. I'll accept it and eat it without asking if it's vegan or not.

Why?

Because being vegetarian in a world where 90% of people aren't, you're already an anomaly of society. People might not understand your decisions, but they will accept the fact that you don't eat meat. Now, you don't eat meat AND eggs AND milk? How am I supposed to offer you food?

So I keep it simple for my friends: I don't, won't, eat meat/chicken/fish/pork/other meats on ANY circumstances, because for me that's like signing an animal's death sentence. I'll accept your food that has eggs/milk in it, because I want to be polite, and I think you might be more receiving to me and open-minded of what I have to say if I make some concessions on my part.

I make similar concessions when I'm at a restaurant with my friends, and there's no vegan option. I also make concessions when I travel and when it's hard to find vegan snacks. I keep it easy for me: I'm allowed to be only 'vegetarian' while traveling.

So in between accepting the occasional non-vegan snack, going to a restaurant (very rare for me) or traveling, I'm vegan.

I hope I cleared up any doubts, and kudos to you that have succeeded in being 100% vegan :)

Preparing for your vegan picnic

Hey guys!

Since I study environmental science, I get to go on a lot of field trips and I do a lot of outdoor sports with my friends. Every time this happens, I know that I'll have to plan my food in advance- mainly because there's not a snack-shop in the middle of your hiking trail. And even if there is, odds are that they will sell ham & cheese sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, chicken breast sandwiches . . . you get the idea. It's hard to sell fast snacks to a vegan.

But I have some clever ideas I've coined up over the years. This is one of my favorite: the roasted eggplant sandwich. There are many variations: you can dice the eggplant and fry it with garlic and fill your sandwich with that. This is the best, yummy alternative I came up with, but it has downsides. It's greasy with olive oil and it's not really nice eating garlic and not having a place to brush your teeth later. But it sure hits the spot, and can be eaten hot or cold.

Diced eggplant & garlic, served on pasta.

Another alternative is picking the roundest eggplant you can find at the supermarket, and slicing it so that you have a plump disk that is roughly the same size as a hamburger. Cut it a little thicker, though, as it will flatten.

Bake it for about 20 minutes with a sprinkle of salt. It will be charred on the outside, slightly gooey on the inside, and substitutes perfectly a hamburger/ham/meat option. 

Then add lettuce, mayonnaise, tomatoes, and everything else you like in your sandwich. I added black olives


to mine.

Other ideas for vegan sandwiches:

-Grilled bell peppers, roasted shitaki mushrooms with lettuce and tomatoes

-Shredded carrots & shredded beets with a hint of olive oil and salt on whole wheat bread

-Lentil or bean burger (this takes considerably more time. Best if made way before, and frozen for when it comes in handy)

Other ideas for vegan picnic:

-Pasta salad with diced celery, spinach, green beans

-Cold rice salad with diced carrots, cabbage and veggies

-Bean salad with chopped veggies

-Tabule

Hopefully I'll get to show some of my other ideas with pictures.

This is my baggy, all set to go spelunking. I added cashew nuts, tabule, peach and iced water in addition to my eggplant-burger sandwiches.

Bon appétit!

Economias inesperadas numa loja de alimentos naturais

Sempre que posso, eu vou numa lojinha de produtos naturais e orgânicas que tem aqui na minha cidade (tem váriasm eu prefiro a que se chama Biocoop). Eu vou preparada, sabendo que vou pagar um pouquinho a mais por alimentos de melhor qualidade e produzidos sustentavelmente, do comércio local. Mas essa vez que eu fui eu percebi...

Que no total, o que paguei nessa lojinha foi menos que eu pagaria no meu supermercado de costume. Como assim?

Biocoop, lojinha de produtos naturais

Acontece que essa vez, eu optei por comprar meus alimentos a granel. Ou seja, peguei sacolinhas ecológicas de papel e enchi com arroz integral, lentilha, feijão, cereal. . .Pesei tudo e coloquei etiquetias. E deu uma economia tão grande que pagou a diferença dos produtos mais caros que eram orgânicas: frutas, verduras, etc.

Compartilho essa dica com vocês para que vocês possam aproveitar das economias e preferir de comprar alimentos em lojas orgânicas, dando mais valor à produção sustentável :)

Lentilha verde 

Musli para um café de manhã especial (o novo ano letivo)