October 2011
1 post
Sometimes Vegan Night is Take-out Night →
Vegan fast food for families
April 2010
12 posts
5 tags
"It's Time to Retire The Pyramid."
Tuesday’s Natural Health: The Food Guide Pyramid is outdated. The Power Plate is the best (meat-free) answer. Check it out at http://bit.ly/b3RFwm
6 tags
BBQ Meat? No way: BBQ Tofu? Yum!
Monday It’s Vegan Night! An all-American, stick to your ribs BBQ Tofu and mashed potatoes meal at http://bit.ly/c9IU2y
6 tags
Welcome to VegMoms
Raising a vegan or vegetarian child? For kid-friendly vegan recipes, health news, inspiration and more check out my new site for VegMoms: http://bit.ly/cJuKC5
1 tag
The Skinny on Sleep
Tuesday’s Natural Health: How many hours of sleep do you get on average? For most people, even those of us who pride ourselves on living a healthy lifestyle, the answer is: Not Enough. But even a minimal lack of sleep has been linked in some studies to both obesity and a higher risk of diabetes. Just three nights of staying up too late and getting up too early increases insulin resistance,...
5 tags
Quinoa: Don't say it. Eat it!
Monday It’s Vegan Night: We serve two incredible quinoa salads at the natural foods market where I work, one with black beans, the other cranberries and walnuts. I love quinoa and I know other people do, too. But I think a lot of people don’t even try this protein-packed ancient grain because they’re veg and don’t want to butcher anything, including this...
5 tags
Must Have Milk?
Friday’s News + Gathering: The National Institutes of Health is pumping out some udderly confusing reasons why lactose intolerance may not be as big of a problem as many people seem to experience. The gas, bloating, abdominal pain, diarrhea and more that many people (including one of my daughters) experience from dairy products doesn’t necessarily mean those people should avoid...
3 tags
Schooled in Food
Thursday’s Working for Change: When I was a kid, the only thing the culture at-large taught most of us about food was:
1) Fast food restaurants, microwaves and TV dinners will make our lives easier.
2) Buying soda was somehow going to help the world “sing in perfect harmony.”
3) As long as breakfast cereals had cute, funny-named characters on the packaging and a prize in the...
4 tags
Ways kids can show vegan pride
Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: Encourage your child’s pride in his or her vegan lifestyle. Here are some fun ways you can support that:
1) Buy her a cool veg-message T-shirt or bag from PETA’s catalog online.
2) Offer a great vegan snack he can take to call.
3) Visit a farm sanctuary, and help your child create a class report about it.
4) Volunteer together at an animal shelter.
...
2 tags
4 tags
Easy, Healthy Guacamole
Monday It’s Vegan Night: This recipe is in our book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids and we can’t think of a better way to kick off warmer weather than eating a good bowl full of guacamole and some tortilla chips.
Easy Vegan Guacamole
(yields 1.5 cups)
4 ripe avocados (but not overly ripe)
1/2 tsp. cumin
juice of 1/2 a lime
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup frozen...
4 tags
Jamie Oliver is oliver the place!
Thursday’s Working for Change: Is it just me, or are we all seeing Jamie Oliver all over these days? And I haven’t even seen Jamie’s Food Revolution USA show on ABC (we don’t have a television that gets channels since we opted to not get a converter when it went digital, so now we just watch DVDs and skip all the network/cable stuff). From everything I’ve read,...
5 tags
Snacks Attack Kids
Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: There’s a new cloud hanging over The Snack. A new study suggests that too many kids are eating too many snacks comprised of the wrong kinds of foods.
In our book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids we recommend that vegan kids eat healthy snacks often, especially after school or when they’re on the go in between sports and other...
March 2010
28 posts
2 tags
Another reason to love vegan bacon →
Tuesday’s Natural Health: This story about how high-fat foods re-wire our brains to overeat was so good that it’s re-wiring my brain to crave a vegan BLT sandwich at 11 pm.
baconbaconbacon:
We can quit anytime we want!
That’s not true…
Submitted by sds
6 tags
Affor-Dhal-ble Dinner
Monday’s Speedy Vegan: Yellow split pea dhal has to be one of the most gourmet, least expensive meals on the planet. This one dish meal is inspired by a dhal recipe in one of my favorite all-time cookbooks (just veganize any meat recipes), The More With Less cookbook, written in 1976 by the Mennonites and Doris Janzen Longacre.
(Serve as a stew with vegan naan to dip or on a bed of rice)
...
3 tags
The Sexual Politics of Meat
Thursday’s Working for Change: The 20th anniversary edition of the enlightening, empowering, life-changing book The Sexual Politics of Meat is due out this month. I pre-ordered my copy, and can’t wait to read it — again. Written by feminist and veg activist Carol J. Adams, I first read this book as a college student when a hip, mysterious unusually empowered (compared to the...
4 tags
Hey, Vegan Easter Bunny
Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: It’s almost Easter for Christians around the world, a time that celebrates new life by coloring dead eggs and eating pigs and lamb. There’s an irony there (my husband says I’m being too harsh and he’s going to stop sending my blog out to his non-vegan friends if I rain on too many people’s Easter parades, so I won’t explore that...
5 tags
Champions of Breakfast
Tuesday’s Natural Health: Vegan foods are some of the easiest, best and most nutritious of any breakfast options. A package of homemade vegan granolas arrived in my mailbox this week from from a friend in Virginia who is an amazing chef and the brains and craftswomanship behind MacShack Acres so I’ve been eating pumpkin seed-ginger granola or cranberry pecan maple granola with soy...
4 tags
Fruity stir fry
Monday’s Speedy Vegan: This stir fry recipe was inspired by necessity. We were low on groceries and had very few veggies in the house, a block of tofu, lots of fruit and nuts and some rice. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I’m sure glad I invented this sweet dinner treat.
Fruity Stir Fry
2 cups red cabbage, shredded
3 carrots, thinly sliced (I used a food processor)
4...
5 tags
Caviar's flavor is worth extinction?
Friday’s News+Gathering: Largely because of the popularity of $5,000 per pound caviar, the fish species sturgeon (including the highly prized beluga) is now pushed “to the brink of extinction” more than any other group of animals on earth, according to a report Thursday in USA Today.
This is the sort of issue that makes my head spin. As a tried and true, fully...
3 tags
3 tags
The Meatout Is In
Thursday’s Working for Change: This Saturday, March 20, is the 25th official Meatout day, one of the oldest, largest anti-meat events in the world. The non-profit organization FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement) sponsors the event, and grassroots gatherings fuel it. It’s not too late to get involved. Find out ideas and register your event here, and help spread Meatout around America...
4 tags
Salt shakes kids' health
Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: It’s easy to let too much salt creep into our kids’ daily diets without even noticing. Too much salt can contribute to high blood pressure and obesity, even in childhood. But more than that, kids who eat a high sodium diet may expect all food to taste unnaturally highly flavored, thereby predisposing them to want all the foods that are high in salt (like...
GENERAL INTEREST: Vatican official cautions... →
(via chemicalfreeskinny)
3 tags
An apple a day keeps ... arsenic in your child's...
Tuesday’s Natural Health: I’m the kind of mom who thinks about every element of my children’s school lunch. Every morning, I make sure I’m sending them off with the healthiest choices (that they’ll actually eat). I felt really good about that — until I read the investigative report in the St. Petersburg Times that shows potentially unsafe levels of arsenic (a...
5 tags
Quick Vegan Cake and Ice Cream
Monday’s Speedy Vegan: Nobody’s birthday to celebrate, but still craving cake and ice cream? We know the feeling. A few nights ago, we sat down to an Amy’s vegan chocolate cake, topped with some Tofutti vanilla almond bark ice cream (not so sure our health-o-meters are okay with the corn-heavy ingredient list, but it’s not a oftentime treat) and organic raspberries on...
3 tags
World Peace Diet Day
World Peace Diet Day: I deeply admire the work of author, musician, PhD and vegan activist Will Tuttle. So I’m posting a message about a project to get his book The World Peace Diet into more hands. Here’s the message from Will and his wife, artist Madeleine Tuttle: “We are coordinating a special offer today for The World Peace Diet called “The March 12 World Peace Diet...
3 tags
Are you dark green or light green?
Thursday’s Working for Change: Listen to an eye-opening (or is it ear-opening?) story on American Public Media’s show Marketplace about what motivates people buy enviornmentally friendly products — it’s not the environment. (The segment is near the end of the show, so if you’re not interested in other business stuff skip those stories).
Along with that little...
4 tags
Carb crazy kids?
Wednesday’s VegKids: Many kids go through phases where they will eat pasta, bread, crackers, rice, tortillas and cereal in abundance, but turn up their noses at nearly anything else — even anything in, on or over those beloved carbs. Solution: Begin to put small amounts of healthful toppings, spreads and vegetables on or in those favorite carb-based meals — and I mean...
“Check out (at the bottom of the article in the tag line) who pays the guy who...”
– VeganDreamJerky
4 tags
Pandora's Water Bottle: A must-read Audubon...
Tuesday’s Natural Health: Worried about all those hormone-affecting, hidden chemical compounds in water bottles, baby bottles, our water supply, cosmetics, shampoos, kitchenware and more? Also worried that most information out there about BPAs and these other chemicals is either too heavy, dry or contradictory to understand? My hand raises on both counts.
There’s hope in the...
“This is the amazing movie I mentioned here a few weeks ago. Glad it won the...”
– lunchboxbunch
3 tags
French Toast a la Vegan
Monday’s Speedy Vegan: Spring is on its way, so that means maple trees will soon be producing more of my favorite sweetener in the world.
True, real maple syrup is extremely expensive, so we don’t always have it on hand. But it’s incredibly versatile and, like many Native American cultures, I happen to believe that because it’s so natural and so delicious there must be...
“Sure, you already know who won at the Oscars last night. But do you know...”
– vegnews
3 tags
Speak up for our fellow Earthlings
Thursday’s Working for Change: A whistle-blowing veterinarian called USDA officials on the carpet today in testimony before Congress for what he says were covered up or ignored inhumane and unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses including ”butchering days-old calves that were too weak or sick to stand. He also describes being threatened with transfer or demotion after citing a...
1 tag
You're vegan, your child's not?
Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: Wouldn’t it be nice if families ate perfectly healthy food in perfect harmony, together, every day? Yeah, right. Back in the land of reality some meat-eating families have one child who comes home and announces that she’s not eating anything made by or out of animals anymore. In others, it’s the parent or parents who have a change of heart and...
5 tags
Easiest Cleanse EVER!
Tuesday’s Natural Health: The Master Cleanse, as it’s called (maple syrup, lemon juice and cayenne), always seemed like a big hassle to me. But this organic Vibrant Cleanse powder simplifies one of the most oft mentioned cleanses for optimum health. (Note: Fasting and cleanses are not for everyone. Consult your doctor to decide if any health issues you may prohibit you from doing...
5 tags
If u can't beet 'em, join 'em!
Monday’s Speedy Vegan: Two out of three of my kids hate beets, but I love them (both my kids and beets, that is). Beets are a good source of: Potassium, Iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Phosphorus and Copper, Vitamin C, Folate and Betaine, Vitamin A, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6 and Pantothenic Acids. Many people believe that beets help flush the body of toxins. Not to mention that...
February 2010
26 posts
2 tags
Vegan Ginger Molasses Cookies
Friday’s Vegan Gourmet: These chewy, lightly sugar-coated cookies are a good source of iron, thanks to the molasses, and they help your kids learn to love ginger.
3/4 cup vegan margarine or shortening
1 cup sugar
Egg replacer, equal to two eggs, prepared to package directions
1/4 cup molasses
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
2 tsp. baking soda
2...
3 tags
Keep 'em in the nest
Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: My family and I just finished watching the strangely sweet documentary Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. It’s about a flock of escapee parrots in San Francisco and the eccentric man who has befriended them. There’s a similar flock of roving parrots in the Florida metro area where we live and it was fun to hear about another community that has a similar...
“Animal protein/fat increases risk of pancreatic #cancer: http://is.gd/97oHc...”
– VeganCapitalist
5 tags
1 tag
“Another myth debunked: How To Be A Vegetarian Bodybuilder?...”
– veguide
“Re-blogging this amazing video of Jamie Oliver talking at TED conference about...”
– MollieKatzen
“Re-blogging this excellent video of Jamie Oliver at TED conference where...”
– MollieKatzen