vegoftheweek

Inside The Oven: A Nori Wrap that just happens to be raw. Week Links: Kellie Pickler is a meatless country music star now.

So this package of nori sheets is sitting in my cabinet, already opened, meaning I’ve attempted to use it once. Whatever the reason or recipe was I can’t remember, which means it must have not been a good experience.

However, I’m a big fan of trying to clean the pantry from time to time, so I tried to make another creation with Nori. Speaking of cleaning the pantry, I read an article today on a method to save money by skipping a trip to the grocery store. You don’t starve yourself for a week-just eat whatever is left in the fridge, cabinets, and so forth. Sounds suspiciously like end of the semester times in college for me. Blah! But if it burns a bigger hole in your bank account or pocket because the money’s still sitting there on fire, I’d say go for it.

If you’ve ever tasted raw nori sheets (or even toasted) before, you’ve noticed it has a very dark leafy green vegetable taste to it. For me, the experience was kind of like a dried out fruit roll-up (flashback: grade school cafeteria, time to switch with your best friend), but only a vegetable roll-up instead.

But even the most overpowerful tasting vegetables can be complemented to accent, hide, or twist the flavor to a more pleasing one. Lighter fresh lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and roasted red peppers can all be ways to “sneak” in something a little less tastier.

And then there was Tahini Butter. Can’t believe I’d been secluding it only for falafel for so long.

Learn how to put together this wrap after the break…

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Farm Sanctuary Gala 2004

Dan Piraro is a cartoonist and comedian best known for his website, Bizarro.com, where he often incorporates his vegan and animal rights beliefs into his works.

His thoughts on hunting:
Well, I certainly think that if there are degrees of cruelty, and you can argue philosophically about that, I think that hunting is far less cruel than raising an animal uncomfortably in a cage with a lot of others (animals). It’s certainly kinder than factory farming to let an animal live its life in the wild, unmolested, until a bullet strikes it dead. I know that I would prefer a life like that rather than a life in prison until I was killed for someone’s food. I would prefer a free life until I was killed for someone’s food. To me there’s a huge moral dilemma. Hunting in our culture quite frankly is killing for fun, whether you eat it or not. If you pass a grocery store on your way to hunt, you’re killing for fun, not killing for necessity. I think killing for fun is certainly a no brainer. It’s sort of difficult to justify in my mind.
I went hunting with my dad (years ago). It’s interesting, my dad is a terrific person, not a vegetarian, but he’s a terrific person, still alive. He and I are very close. He had these very strict ideas about how animals should be treated and he taught them to me as a kid. You never kill anything that you’re not going to eat. And you never kill more than you can eat. He was very strict about that. He took me bird hunting and I remember one time when he caught me trying to shoot a sparrow in the backyard with a Bebe gun. He came down on me so hard. Took the gun away from me and gave me a big lecture, “You do not kill things just for fun.”
…It’s just wrong to kill things for fun. You can’t justify that. If I was an Eskimo, maybe, and there were no grocery stores. ..

An example of one of his cartoons that illustrates his beliefs:
It’s a laboratory with a scientist mixing stuff up. And behind him are cages of all sorts of animals. And the monkey says through the cage, “Hey, Einstein. How about working on a cure for insensitivity to other species.” To me that concept says it all, because that’s really what it’s about. It’s about something being not enough like us to care. We see this in society all over the place: There are people who think that foreigners are not enough like us to care what happens to them. Or people of another race are “not enough like me” to care what happens to them. It’s about the circle of compassion. I extend my circle of compassion to any sentient being. Anything that knows it’s alive, in my mind, has the same philosophical rights to an unmolested life as I do or you do. That cartoon to me kind of says that very thing.

On the vegan tattoos on his body:
(There’s) a little group of cartoon birds (on my arm) and then underneath that it says fly. And that to me is just the idea of letting animals be who they are. And then on my arm I have a banner that says vegan…And on my other arm I have a monkey’s head and he has a little banner that crosses and curls underneath his head that says “liberation,” which to me is just about the liberation of the slavery of animals.
My wife has a little small square battery cage with a chicken flying out of it. And then it says vegan next to that. And she has a full size spider monkey with a broken chain and it says, “liberation.” And she has a rooster with a bunch of baby chicks all around him with a banner across that says “unlucky.”
That tattoo is really interesting. In restaurants and bars, if a guy ever wants to start up a conversation with the pretty blond he says, “Oh, those are interesting tattoos. What does that “unlucky” mean?” And 45 minutes later, they’re sorry they ever asked. She launches into an entire story about what happens to male chicks in egg factories. The male chicks are all killed at birth because they’re not going to be egg layers.

Learn how Dan survives when wife Ashley Lou isn’t around to cook after the break… (more…)

Inside The Oven: A trip back to fun houses, funnel cakes, and grotesque looking teddy bears. Week Links: Flexitarians-those part time vegetarians.

Around this time of year, there’s a week long festival in a Midwestern town I lived in for years. It’s the pretty standard carnival type atmosphere with games, rides, and several blocks of food booths containing your traditional fair food of pizza, bratwurst, haystacks, and all things not vegetarian. My most repulsive memories were that of seeing and smelling fried brain sandwiches-made from brains of pigs and cows…As they say on airplane flights: there’s a trash bag or can at your side. Please regurgitate and get back to reading this when you’re done.

Anyway, there were a few, but scarce veggie options if you were a lacto-ovo. I was still eating cheese at the time (but not anymore) and every year I looked forward to finding the cheese stick booth of choice, as there were several to choose from. Depending on the year, it could have been Future Farmers of America to St. Anthony’s Catholic Church where I chose to be a cheese stick patron.

Normally, I’m a pretty flexible and laid back kind of person. So, in the company of friends at the festival, I had no problem standing around for hours as they futilely attempted to win life size teddy bears that frankly so looked so bizarre, you’d wonder what child actually liked taking these to bed. However, when it came to getting my cheese sticks, all manners, cooperativeness, and “thinking of the other person,” were pushed aside. Once satisfied with the taste of warm, soft, stretchy mozzarella cheese dipped in marinara sauce, I couldn’t care less how many teddy bears my friends and family threw horseshoes for.

Fast forward a decade. No longer doing the cheese thing, I thought I’d never bite into the fried mozzarella festival goodness again. Until I began thumbing through recipes for regular mozzarella cheese sticks and thought to myself, “Let’s veganzie this.” Learn how I veganized fried mozzarella cheese sticks and get the recipe after the break… (more…)