Image from Reuters
Feel helpless? Like nothing you can do to help the people in Haiti will be enough? Only have a few dollars to give?
Do whatever you can, however you can, with whatever you have.
Got a skill? Use it to raise some money. And if you’re in Vancouver and you’re handy in the kitchen, join Vancouver vegans from the Post Punk Kitchen forums in our effort to organize a vegan bake sale to raise money for Haiti. Go here to visit the forum and sign up to get involved.
And if you don’t have time or don’t have a skill, just give money. Whatever you can give. Nothing is a small amount. As little as $5 could give clean drinking water to family or it could provide a meal for a NGO rescue worker so that person can go on to give more help to people who need it. Five dollars could even mean a tetanus shot or another life-saving and simple medical procedure that could save a life.
You can give to Doctors Without Borders, the Canadian Red Cross, the American Red Cross, Oxfam, The Humanitarian Coalition. Or give to whoever you choose. Just give. And let the people of Haiti know that though we’ve never met, we love them.
Mum's vegan manicotti
Over this past week the idea of blogging about anything other than Haiti has left me feeling that anything else I could talk about would only be self-aggrandizing. But that’s just how I feel for myself. To talk about myself or anything I’m interested in just feels really selfish. So I will talk about Haiti – in another post. First, I must also someone else.
That someone else would be my mother (hi mum!). She’s fabulous, 59, and went vegan just over two years ago. It’s been a struggle for her at times. We all have our own journeys, they’re all as different as each of us is different, and I am very proud of her. So it was in a flurry of well-deserved happiness she called me on Sunday night asking me to check my e-mail for a surprise. And there you see it, at right. A picture of glorious vegan stuffed manicotti. Cheesy stuffed manicotti. Browned on top. Oh muh gawd! She promised to make some for us. I plan to wear extra stretchy pants to hide my overly full belly.
The recipe is a modified version of the stuffed manicotti recipe from 500 Vegan Recipes, which my equally fabulous partner gave her for Christmas. If you don’t have this book, borrow it, buy it, pilfer it from your best friend’s bookshelf and promise to make one of Celine’s bread recipes to make for tasty amends.
Photo from hostessblog.com
Yep, you read it right. Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Cookie Cups. How’s that for a happy Monday? The recipe’s not vegan, but it could easily be made so. And rather than having the awkward crunch of chocolate chips amongst the creaminess of the cake-cookie, how about a drizzle of caramel over top instead? I think a tea party with this recipe as the starring guest is definitely in order.
Click on the photo to get the recipe from the Hostess with the Mostess blog.
Have a wonderful day, everyone!
Image from marthastewart.com
Last summer, the man and I stupidly paid $15 each for two sets of three magazine boxes. They were the nicest I’d seen and are sturdy enough. But $15? The boxes at Ikea are smelly and ugly, and after searching around town, $15 was the cheapest I could find for something that won’t fall apart too quickly and looked nice with our bookshelves. Later on I came across a tutorial whereby someone had gone through the trouble of cutting out the parts of a magazine box out of furniture packing boxes (like the kind you get from Ikea). At the time I had a load of cardboard around, but I wasn’t up to spending hours cutting out pieces and gluing them together.
When I saw this idea I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of making something this simple. Cereal boxes. Seriously. As organizers. Not just for magazines, but for pretty much anything. Bills, loose papers, receipts, maps, small notebooks – really, their uses are limited only to the imagination.
We don’t buy cereal often at all. But if it means I can get a magazine or storage box out of it then heck yes, I’ll eat more cereal. And as you can see in this example, they’ve even used those tiny Kellogg’s cereal boxes. You know, those ones you can cut open to make a cereal bowl that never actually work? I’d also have never thought of using something like a cracker box as a recipe card organizer.
You could use any sort of box for any sort of organizer, actually. If you have a long rectangular cracker box you could slice off the top at a diagonal and use it to store longer stationary items, like rulers. You could even use such a box for storing long knitting needles. Worried about the box tipping over? Just weight it down with a small bag of lentils or rice in the bottom of the box. If you’re extra crafty, you could sew a quick bag with some fabric scraps, fill it with the lentils or rice, and sew up the opening. Or you could just lie it down flat and apply a tab to the top of it to pull it out of a shelf when you want something inside of it. That way, you could stack a whole bunch of boxes that shape into a cubbyhole-like space.
Check out the super brief “tutorial” here.
Now, how cute is that little gnome? Lately, I’ve been lurking around the webpages of some of the most talented and generous designers and crafters I’ve laid eyes on, and one of my favourites is A Print a Day by Yasmine Surovec. She’s the sweet, creative genius behind the little guy to the left, not to mention a number of other lovely designs – many of them free downloads directly from her site (for personal/non-commercial use only). You can also visit her online shoppe to buy her gorgeous work.
Here are some of the other delicious sites that make me happy. I’m pretty sure they’ll make you happy too:
Just Something I Made – endlessly inspiring.
The Graphics Fairy – stunning vintage graphics, all free!
Craftzine – has anyone not heard of this site/magazine?
Sew Mama Sew! – awesome *free* tutorials.
Betz White – really cute, with more free tutorials.
The Long Thread – so. much. stuff.
It was only a matter of time until the Capers Community Market up the street from my home turned into the extravagant Whole Foods store I’d visited in Toronto a few years ago – crazily expensive and exotic produce available at times of the year totally out of season to most parts of the world, and especially Canada.
Coming around a display in the store this afternoon, I saw what looked like thick yellow fingers sticking out from a large basket. Thinking it was a bunch of star fruit gone terribly wrong, I discovered what to the Asian world is a highly prized culinary treasure rarely found in North America: Buddha’s Finger Citron. Nearly the size of a Hawaiian pineapple and priced at $6.99 each, these eye-catching lemons were a mass of rind and pulp. I wasn’t certain much juice could be gotten from such a fleshy thing, but it seems that it’s favoured more for its smell than its taste. Apparently people in China and Japan have been near-worshiping this odd-looking citrus fruit for more than a millenium, and in China it is said to be good luck at Chinese New Year and to bring good fortune to the home. I’m willing to bet that most of my Chinese friends and family have never even seen this lemony behemoth or else I would certainly have heard of it before.
Last week I saw sweet limes at the same store, and the week before that clementines so fresh their glossy leaves and stems made them look as though they’d been picked no less than a day or two before they were put out for sale. Whole Foods was the first place I discovered yellow beets and multi-hued carrots, baby cauliflower heads so small the were the size of cupcakes, and mangoes so massive their weight and size rivaled that of a newborn child. But they’re all outrageous prices, so who’s buying this stuff? And do we really need something as frivolous as this crazy lemon, flown halfway across the world and likely harvested by workers paid pennies an hour?
If you really want to go on a visual tour of Southeast Asian fruit in Vancouver, head to the Public Market at Granville Island. There’s nowhere else in Vancouver I’ve ever seen fresh fruits such as dragonfruit, rambutan, mangosteen, breadfruit, cherimoya, Chinese dates, lychee, longan, passion fruit, prickly pear, soursop, tamarind pods, to name just a few of the exotic things you can find at the market. None of them are local, and most of them come from as far away as the lemon above. Nice to see but shown off more for the wow factor than as necessary cuisine.
I have so many DIY projects lined up I think it may now take me years to actually make everything. And then this morning along came The Long Thread’s Top 100 Tutorials of 2009. Gah! So much bloggy eye candy. Pretty 10 minute aprons, oodles of bags, an amazingly thrifty cake stand, love birds for Valentine’s Day (which is only 6 weeks away, I might add), and more nerdy crafty wonderfulness than even I can handle.
Get a steamy mug of coffee or tea ready – actually, you’ll need several – and prepare to settle in for an afternoon of some serious browsing and planning. And don’t forget a notebook – I’ll bet you’ll be searching for pen and paper about two minutes into checking this hugely inspiring list.
Red and White Baker's Twine
You know that super cute bakers twine popping up everywhere in the DIY world? The stuff you see in Martha Stewart holiday magazines and all over eye-candy craft blogs that’s ridiculously expensive? On Etsy, some vendors are re-selling 30 yards/90 ft. cards and spools for nearly $4 (plus taxes and shipping). I love the stuff, but good luck finding it for cheap or finding it in stores at all. Fancier suppliers hip to the stringy trend have created some neat looking color combinations in their twines, but for premium prices. Personally, I prefer the red and white kind.
Thinking that there must be a cheaper supply of it, it didn’t take me long to find an online bakery and paper supplies company selling 2 lb. spools of it in no less than red, brown, dark green, light green, and blue for $8.95 per spool (again, plus shipping and taxes). That’s more than 3,400 yards or 10,200 ft. of twine per spool. Feeling quite gleeful about the awesome savings, I ordered two spools – one red/white and one light green/white. So what the heck do you think I might do with so much twine? Lots of stuff! Gift tags, gift bag and box ribbons, hand-made greeting cards, gift card holders, ornament and mobile string, book marks, general household use, etc. Plus, it’s biodegradeable and looks way cuter than plastic or nylon ribbon.
If you wanna get your mitts on some, check out Country Clean Paper Supplies and try not to go too twine crazy.
Chard Florentine from Vegan Yum Yum (click on image for larger view)
To kick off the new year the right way, this morning I made the Chard Florentine from the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook. Except I somehow forgot to buy chard, so I went with collard greens, which worked just as well (and which I think I may prefer more than the chard). It may be pouring rain and grey in Vancouver today, but this brekkie put sunshine in my tummy and on my face. This recipe is a definite keeper – what a delicious way to get my greens!
I’ve also made the Hurry Up Alfredo and the Super Quick Tomato Basil Cream Pasta from the cookbook. Both use cashews instead of soy to create a rich, creamy sauce. The book is 290 pages, most of them with mouth-watering full-colour glossy pictures. I’ve read it from cover to cover and many of the dishes are not only fast and not too complicated but I also seem to have most of the ingredients called for on hand all the time.
If you don’t have the book, or can’t spend the $$, check out the Vegan Yum Yum blog.
Hand-cut oven-baked Russet potato wedges + Simply Organic’s vegetarian brown gravy + Earth Island’s vegan mozzarella cheese = vegan poutine heaven.
Steps:
- Preheat oven to 400 F.
- Wash and cut into wedges 3 medium Russet potatoes in the oven.
- Toss the wedges with 2 tbsp canola oil and 1/4 tsp salt in a large bowl. Spread wedges out on a cookie sheet.
- Bake wedges in the oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy. Turn the wedges at least once so both sides get crispy. Remove the wedges and tun the oven up to broil.
- Place wedges in a small covered casserole. Scatter 1/4 of a block of diced mozzarella cheese amongst wedges. Pour entire package of gravy over wedges. Scatter another 1/4 of a block of diced mozzarella cheese over the wedges.
- Cover top of casserole with a small sheet of tin foil, shiny side down (this helps keep in moisture to help the cheese melt).
- Cover the casserole with its lid. Place it in the oven for 5 to 10 minutes, or until the cheese has started to melt.
- Remove from the oven and transfer the poutine to serving bowls with a large spoon.
Makes 4 small side-servings or two generous main servings.
If you don’t know about the French-Canadian deliciousness that is poutine, read about it here and then get busy in the kitchen!
