The Smoothie Vegetarians

For quite a few years now I've been making my own face cream. It's nice. It's easy to make, only four ingredients and I've been happy with it until recently. I'm getting older and it's starting to show. So I went on the hunt for a vegan, cruelty free face cream – I wanted something with retinol to help with the getting older thing. It took awhile, but I found one! It's a great product by a Canadian company called Maritime Naturals. Picked it up on Amazon and it was quite inexpensive. Now I can age with grace! It gives me great satisfaction to find a product that is wonderful and is in alignment with my beliefs. It's a constant battle though – looking for cleaning products, personal hygiene products, even things like vitamins and supplements. It involves scrutinizing labels and then googling the company, googling the ingredients, looking at who the parent company is – it's exhausting. I've gotten a lot better at it as time goes on, bu...

This week I will be sharing some ideas for making taco salad and taco boats. What I did this week was I made some taco boats. There are some in the taco aisle of a grocery store and they can be baked and stuffed with any ingredients of your choice. I got some of the taco boats and baked then and while that was in the over, I seasoned some of the Gardein beefless beef and cooked it with some onion. Then when the shells were done I put some salsa and lettuce on top. Then I drizzled taco sauce and creamy homemade sauce. Then I topped it with avocado and crushed tortilla chips. If you run out of taco boats and do not have leftover shells, you can have a taco salad on a plate or in a bowl. I took all of the leftover ingredients and cooked them, then arranged them on the plate. You could also make some nachos with the leftover ingredients. You can customize the ingredients to your liking and you can leave out anything that you may not like or have in your kitche...

Hi All, Happy Monday! The topic of my discussion today focuses around words. What I mean by that is, depending on the words you use to describe something, someone will automatically get the impression whether it is good, bad, cheap, expensive, old or new just to name a few things. First let's talk about food. Meal kits, meal starters, one skillet meals have a nice ring to them but when you look up the word leftovers there is nothing appealing about. If you look up synonyms for the word leftovers you can find words like scraps, remnants and crumbs so who would want to eat that? Maybe we need to change the way we think of leftovers. Personally I love it when I have food leftover because that automatically becomes my "meal kit" that I can use as the basis for a new dish. Yes. you can just reheat your original meal but that can be boring. However if you add some ingredients and change the flavor profile by adding some spices, you have not only saved money but c...

So the new Canadian Food Guide rolled out a week or so ago and it is amazing!! Dairy and meat are virtually gone – ok, not totally gone, but close. They've done away with portion sizes and the focus is more on half your plate being fruits and vegetable and the rest being healthy proteins and grains. This makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. To be truthful, I didn't actually think it would happen. They have, of course, had a whole lot of opposition from groups who make their money off meat and dairy. I am so impressed and proud that this new food guide came out regardless. So, so overdue. I think back to the food guide that I was taught in school so many years ago. We were taught that it was the right way to eat – the only way to eat and be healthy. It was so wrong. Three to four servings of milk for teenagers, as well as two servings of meat. As a teenager, and well into my adulthood, I consumed monstrous quantities of milk. I sometimes had two or three large glasse...

A lot of people think that you have to cut out tasty foods when you go vegan, but good news, it is FAR from the truth! There are many different ice creams out there and cheesecakes that I have tried that I have really enjoyed. One of the first brands I have tried was Haagen Dazs and I have tried three of their non-dairy flavors including chocolate salted fudge truffle, peanut butter chocolate fudge, and mocha chocolate cookie. Also, Breyers has an Oreo flavor that is also wonderful. They also have a peanut butter flavor that I would like to try as well. I had the oreo flavor with some fruit and the original flavor of the Daiya Cheesecake. They also have other flavors of the cheesecake including key lime, strawberry, pumpkin, and chocolate. I also love having some sparkling water, juice, or some kombucha if I am feeling like I want something other than water. This can be a better alternative to sodas if you want something with some fla...

Trying to create a new eating habit and switch to Veganism is something that more people are attempting to do each year. From a lifestyle that used to be quite uncommon, it has grown into a much more popular option and is finding a massive amount of support in all walks of life. People who work two jobs, people who live in multi-million dollar houses and even the rebelling teenager down the block are all likely to be vegans at this point. With so many people turning to veganism it is no doubt that you have wondered exactly what it would mean for yourself as well. Most people think that veganism is exactly like vegetarianism. However, this is actually highly incorrect; they are two completely separate ideas that only share a few similarities. Typically speaking vegetarianism is a much easier lifestyle to adapt and is much less rigid. Vegan is much stricter and can be much harder for someone to change to on a quick basis. This can make it extremely complicated to actual...

Hi All, How everyone is doing well this fine Monday morning? Right now it is about 7 PM Sunday night and there is no snow in sight but it is freezing out! On a cold day there is nothing I enjoy more than cooking. I wanted to focus my discussion today on a couple of inexpensive, easy dishes that will feed at least two people for two meals. The main ingredient for these two dishes is a single eggplant. For the first dish  after I peeled the eggplant ( you don't really have to but I prefer it without the skin) I sliced it into 3/4 of inch rounds. I picked out 4 of the slices that were roughly the same size. At this point I realized that I did not have any BBQ sauce at home to marinade them. So I had to whip some up.  As you all may have realized I am a firm believer in using what you have at home so I mixed some siracha, ketchup,molasses soy sauce, maple syrup and a bit of brown sugar and created my own. Again if you don't have these ingredients on hand yo...