Trapped in a hotel - 2012 Edition

So, just like last year, I start VeganMofo and immediately start traveling. It makes it really difficult to keep a food/cooking blog up to date! Today, I am keeping my post short as I am kind of hoping to get out of the hotel and get a drink or two... or three tonight.

Peoria doesn't seem like a very good place for a vegan to hang out... however, I am now into my 6th trip here over the past year and like any new place, once you do your homework, there are enough places you can go and get a decent meal. I am pretty lucky and usually only have to deal with lunch while I'm here. For breakfast and late night snacks, I stock my room up with enough to get by. I also always have a couple things that I can eat for dinner, just in case I end up somewhere with little choice for me. I always try to get a room with a fridge and microwave. If I can't find one, I tend to ask very nicely if the hotel can stash some non-dairy milk for me. When I come to Peoria, i tend to stock my room the same every time. Here is what I find works for me for a one week trip:

• Non-Dairy milk, usually almond because I find it goes with more things
• Cereal or granola.. usually granola, but I am not going to pretend like a box of cinnamon toast crunch hasn't snuck its way in before
• Green smoothie or juice 
• Couple frozen vegan burrito's or frozen dinner (Amy's has lots of options)
• Hummus
• Pita chips or a couple bagels
• Instant Starbucks (hotel room coffee sucks.)
• Fruit (only if the hotel doesn't have complimentary)
• Couple protein bars (I actually always have a bar with me... just in case)

I find that when you travel for a while, your eating habits really suffer. I am definitely guilty of this. I figure at least having a few somewhat healthy things on hand is necessary. That way if I eat junk, I can at least say I chose to do that. Plus having a few of my normal snacks kicking around makes traveling a little easier.

Tonight I was supposed to go out for a group dinner with my class. They were going to an Italian restaurant and sadly when i checked the menu, all of the sauces had something non-dairy. If you know me at all, you'll know that eating garden salads for dinner infuriates me!! It was a long day, and this time I opted out of eating with the group and went for dinner at the strip mall across from the hotel.

Dinner tonight was at Sushi Gawa, a little Japanese restaurant at Westlake. I really like this restaurant. Fairly basic menu, but they have a few more veggie options than many Japanese places I've been to in Edmonton. I ended up having fried tofu, seaweed salad and some veggie sushi. They have about 5-6 sushi options available and a few other items like teriyaki  tofu, noodle dishes, veggie tempura and a cold tofu dish. It made for a much more delicious and filling meal than I would have had at the Italian place. Another thing I likea bout this place is the staff looked at my order and asked if I was vegetarian and then when I said I was, they noted on my order no fish product. Turns out some of the garnishes have roe or fish flakes (I don't even want to know what that means... makes me think of goldfish food). I always really appreciate it when a server goes beyond taking an order and is sensitive to possible allergies or diet choices. I wish more places were like that!

After dinner, we walked by a new self-serve frozen yogurt place called Cherry Berry. These are just starting to pop up in Edmonton and they all seriously look so delicious. I assumed that there would be no vegan options, but my co-worker wanted to try them. When I went in they tried to offer me a sample and I declined and told them I was vegan, so no dairy yogurt. To my surprise, they have dairy free sorbet! Only a couple flavours, but the ones they had were amazing!! 

I combined a blue raspberry and orange flavour together. Normally I am not into toppings.. one max, but this time I decided to go all out. I got nerds, blueberry, kiwi, pineapple, cherries, coconut and mochi. again, SO good! I rarely care when I have to pass things up because there is no option for me, but any time a restaurant accommodates for more than the typical american diet, I am so grateful. 

What started to be a crap end to the day with likely no more than a salad for dinner turned into a pretty good night. The Japanese food was great, but the best part was the FroSo (Kind of like FroYo, but vegan-style). I haven't had a good frozen dessert like that for a while. Plus they charge by weight and in the end I got a ton of sorbet with tons of toppigns for under $3.00 I doubt I could get that deal in Edmonton. Makes me happy :)

Frozen Sorbet... made my night!

Green Onion Cakes

One night back in the summer, I got into a conversation about favourite festival food. My favourites all changed after going vegan. No more pizza, mini doughnuts and corn dogs. None of that for me anymore. Now I tend to gravitate towards cotton candy, snow cones and green onion cakes. When I mentioned green onion cakes the response back was, "What is a green onion cake". I think my mouth dropped. Here in Edmonton, these tasty little snacks show up at every festival and are on almost all menu of any restaurant serving up anything Asian. My first thought was that he had to have another name for them... There is no way these are not served in the US. I described them as best I could and it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to let him see them and try them. I'm really hopeful that these have made it into the US, maybe just not where he lives... I did a little googling to see if these were on some list of random awesome food that isn't popular there. Luckily it seems to be just him and I will be putting an end to this one soon.

Key Ingredient

Green Onion Cakes (Cong you bing or scallion pancake) are a Chinese street food. Very similar recipes are found in Korea, Vietnam, Japan and India. Sadly here in Edmonton, this type of street food only seems to show up in the summer time, but much better than not at all. They are also in lots of restaurants, so even though they leave the food carts, we can get them all year. They are generally served on their own, or with a dip (soy sauce, chili sauce, plum sauce, sweet chili sauce etc) Every place is a little different. When I make these at home, I tend to just put a little soy sauce on them. Mostly because I am lazy and have a slight salt obsession. I personally think it's the bast way to serve them.

I never bothered making these before because I assumed they were deep fried and I am a little scared of deep frying. My sister tipped me off to the fact that not only are these insanely easy and cheap to make, but they are pretty handy to have around for an easy way to kill a salt craving.

All of the recipes I found were fairly similar. This is the one my sister gave me:

Green Onion Cakes
*Makes 14-16, takes about 90 minutes, most of it inactive

Ingredients:

• 3 cups of all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup of water
• 1 bunch of scallions (green onions), chopped thinly
• salt and pepper (about 2 tbsp of each handy)
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
• Peanut Oil for frying

Put the flour into a large bowl. Now boil the water. I tend to use a little more than 1/4 cup because some of the water boils away on me. As soon as the water is boiling, pour it into the bowl of flour. Stir it well with a fork until it is crumbly. Now use your hands and kneed the dough until it comes together into a ball (If you are like me, this will hurt. the dough will be hot and could burn your hands a little bit. Don't say I didn't warn you. I know this from experience!)

This is what the dough looks like before kneading 

And.. after needing. At this point you let it rest in the fridge

While you wait, set up your assembly. Chop the green onions,
and get the oil, brush and salt and pepper ready

Cover the dough in the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for an hour. When the dough is ready, set up a station to get the pancakes ready. Chop the green onion and have it available in a small bowl, have the salt and pepper hand and another bowl with the veg oil in it. I use a brush to get the oil even on the pancakes.

Separate the dough into 14-16 pieces. Take the first on and roll the dough into a ball. Now roll it out as thin as possible (about 1/4 inch thick). I bought my first rolling pin for this. In the past I have always used cans because I am kind of cheap, limited on space and really cans do a decent job. My $2 wooden rolling pin did not do a great job on this. The dough was sticking like glue. I ended up wrapping my rolling pin with plastic wrap and it helped a lot. Hopefully this doesn't happen to you!

Roll the dough out, brush with oil and sprinkle the green onion,
 salt and pepper.

Roll it up like a cigar and bring the two ends together.
Kind of looks like a doughnut

OK, back to recipe. Once you have it rolled out, brush the dough with a bit of oil, sprinkle a bit of salt and pepper and add about 1-2 tsp of green onions. Next, take the edge of the dough and roll it up so it looks like a cigar. Take the two ends and press them together, so it forms a circle again. Lastly flatten out the dough again to make the pancake. Should be about 1" thick.

Repeat these steps for the remaining batter. If you are not making all of them at once, wrap the pre-made pancakes in foil and you can freeze them for up to a couple months.

To cook:

Heat peanut oil on high heat in a frying pan. You want enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan, but not deep fry. Add the green onion cakes and cook about 2-3 minutes. Watch them closely because they go from perfect to burnt fast. Once they are golden brown, flip them and cook the other side 1-2 minutes. Get them out of the pan and transfer to a plate lined with paper towel. Put a second paper towel on top and press lightly to get the excess oil off.

That's it - Serve with any of your favourite dipping sauce.

Finished product. Yumm..

It does take a while start to finish, but really only about 15-20 min of work. It is so great being able to keep these on hand in the freezer. They make an excellent salty snack and once you have them assembled, you can have them ready to eat in just a few minutes. So nice I can have these at home anytime I want now. The only tricky part for me is only eating one or two. Something about these makes me want to binge.. they're like potato chips that way.

Fruity Pebble Waffles

Post number one of VeganMoFo 2012! I am pretty excited to start this up again. I miss blogging and it seems like if I don't force it, I never get around to it. I am really going to try to blog every day this month. Tonight is going to be a shorter post. I am traveling again. Spent the weekend in Minnesota with my boyfriend and he has agreed to try a weekend being vegan with me. Plan A was to do that this weekend, but we started things off having lunch at a restaurant without a lot of options. I know he would have sacrificed and had a salad with me, but I let him off the hook.. mostly so he wouldn't start off this attempt with no options for a good meal. I hate that people think vegans never get a good meal.. my other reason is that next week is Thanksgiving, and I am planning to make the dinner. I haven't hosted a holiday dinner in a long, long time and I am really excited that he is letting me do it and wants to be a part of it.

Even though this weekend did not end up being his vegan weekend, this morning we decided to make breakfast. The first time I went to visit, he made me waffles. It was a lot of fun and today marked 6 months of being together so it was a great reason to break out a vegan breakfast again. We used a really basic recipe for this waffles, but this time Tony had a genius idea, fruity pebble waffles. Seriously, genius! I had never had fruity pebbles up until a few weeks ago... they are kind of like fruit loops, but better. I was a little worried that adding them to the waffles would make them a little swamp water coloured, but they ended up looking and tasting fantastic.


Fruity Pebble Waffles

• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1/8 cup of ground flax
• 1 Tbsp of sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 - 1 tsp ground cinnamon 
• 1/2 a very ripe banana, mashed
• 1 1/2 cup almond milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/8 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup of fruity pebbles 
• 1 peach, diced
• maple syrup and powdered sugar

First mix all the dry ingredients into a large bowl and set aside. Get a second smaller bowl and add the banana and mash is with a fork. Add the milk, vanilla and oil and mix.

The dry ingredients - Cinnamon is the secret. It makes any breakfast better

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and use an electric mixer to combine. You want it so there is little to no lumps in it. Now get out the fruity pebbles and add about a quarter cup to the batter and stir it until combined. We added ours by the handful until it looked like there was enough. I think this everyone is a bit different. You want the batter to kind of look like rainbow chip cake batter.

Secret #2 - Fruity pebbles. Sometimes it pays to cook based on cravings!

Next, heat up the waffle iron and spray with some oil. While you're waiting for the pan to heat up, dice your peaches. I did about a 1/2" dice, but again, this is up to you. If you are feeling like fancying this up, try making a peach sauce:

take peeled, diced peach and add it to a small sauce pan. Add about 2 Tbsp of white sugar and about a Tbsp of orange juice. Simmer it on low until the peaches are soft and the sugar is absorbed. You can add more juice if you want or use other juices if you have them. In the end, you are looking for a think glaze or sauce.

Action shot - the batter really looked like Rainbow cake mix!

Waffle time - Minutes away!

By now, your pan should be heated up. Add about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of the batter to the pan (amount is going to depend on the waffle iron. Cook to waffle iron instructions (about 3-5 minutes). When your waffle is ready, serve it with pure maple syrup, powered sugar and some extra fruity pebbles for garnish. Coconut Vanilla ice cream would also be an awesome what to serve these. Get creative.

Tony's waffle - He went fancy. 

My waffle - Not so pretty, but so, so yummy!!

Perfect start to Vegan MoFo. I can't wait for next weekend. Not only to be back with Tony, but to see what else he come sup with. Pressure is on Tony! ;)