Jananas

Today I had a long list of ‘to do’s’ and managed to get through most of them (and then some!). One of the big things is playing with our dehydrator and trying out some raw foods. Right now I’m playing with recipes found online, but I have a couple of raw food cook books coming in the mail – I’m excited to try more stuff out!

Today’s adventures were apple chips and raw bread. First picture is the apple chips. Its most of a bag of organic Macintosh apples we picked up over the weekend, peeled and cored and cut into little pieces. These apples weren’t structurally sound, so when I tried to core them they just fell apart into sections. The end result was that I didn’t end up with perfect little apple rings. Rather I have a bunch of smaller pieces. Good news? They all fit into this jar!

Next up is some raw bread – I used this recipe as a baseline. I’m terrible at following recipes, so mine wasn’t totally the same. I ground up golden flax seeds myself instead of using ground flax (didn’t have any around). I substituted a banana for the apple, as I accidentally used all of mine in the above apple chip experiment. Things didn’t grind up as easily as I thought they would – although that’s probably just more about learning how to use our food processor more effectively.

I made myself a sandwich this afternoon using this bread – organic ham (hey, I’m not vegan!), spinach, and dijon mustard. This bread has an awesome wholesome taste and a dry enough texture that it easily passes for what we would normally think of as bread. Although that may be partly because over the last few years I’ve made the switch to organic, whole grain-type breads (you know, the extra small loaf kinds) and this bread is more in line with those.

I’ll definitely be making more of this!

For Christmas we got a dehydrator from my parents. It had been sitting in a box in the basement while we got Jason moved in and everything else sorted out. I’ve been reading Lisa’s Vegan Cookbook Critic blog lately and her fantastic cookbook reviews and food pictures inspired me to pull this out and get crackin’ at making awesome raw foods.

First up – cheesy kale chips. I used 1cup raw almonds (soaked), 1 medium carrot (no red bell peppers in the house), 1 head of garlic as we still have tonnes in the basement from this past summer, and 2-3tbsp of nutritional yeast. I blended it all together, although sadly my blender isn’t fantastic so we didn’t end up with a nice smooth paste. [note to self - buy a blendtec as a gift to self/household once I'm working and have a paycheque.]

I had 1 head kale, 1 of collard greens, and 1 bunch of spinach in the house so those all got washed, torn up, and coated with the above mixture. They were dehydrated over night at about 115F.

I took them off the dryer sheets this afternoon and put them out of reach so that they’d last until Jason made it home. 30 minutes after he arrived they were gone! Its an easier way to add healthy greens to your diet while satisfying that need for a crunchy snack. Have no fear, our second batch will be going in this evening.

Jason’s vegan and I like vegan food, which means that we’re always on the look out for good vegan food. Traveling can be a little tricky sometimes, but a little bit of research normally smooths things over and leaves us with lots of possibilities.

In Hanoi, we mostly relied on our Lonely Planet travel guide. It has handy sections for things like Indian Food, which incidentally was our go to staple if we couldn’t find anything else veg friendly. Thankfully most of the veg places were reasonably close to our hotel.

We did stop by the Tamarind Cafe (80 Ma May St, Hoan Kiem District) one day, as they are a vegetarian restaurant with a selection of vegan dishes. The food was decent, but nothing super special to write home about. I did end up having a grilled cheese sandwich as I was craving some north american comfort-type food, although I was a little confused when they brought out two sandwiches. Not only is that a lot of cheese, they had marketed it as being a ’sandwich’. As in singular. I guess little grammatical points like that get lost in translation.

The highlight of my meal at the Tamarind Cafe was getting to try grog for the first time. I considered borrowing one of my mom’s parrots and wandering around town dressed like a pirate.

Next up was Fanny’s Ice Cream Parlour (48 Pho Le Thai To, Hoan Kiem District). This wasn’t cheap for Vietnam prices, but was still a steal for some of the best ice cream and sorbets I’ve ever had. In fact it was so good that we had dessert here three times during our 4-5 stay in Hanoi. And yes, they have vegan options and a wide variety of sorbet flavours (the lime is particularly good).

Last, and certainly not least is Com Chay Nang Tam (79A Tran Hung Dao, just north of Hoan Kiem Lake). It was a little sketchy finding this restaurant. The area its in closes down at night so there was this semi-abandoned feeling. And its way far back in an alley off an alley off an alley. However, it is 110% worth it. We had the best mock meats we’ve ever had in our lives here. Ever.

“In the Buddhist tradition, vegetarian food has often been prepared to resemble dishes favoured by non – Buddhist. In this way, Buddhist have been able to show hospitality without appearing to deprive their guest of favorite foods, at the same time not violating their own principles which forbid taking the life of animals.

And so it is the names of dishes of this menu, which your hostess Mrs. Diễm has collected from all corners of the country. Names not with standing, all dishes are prepared without meat. (In the best tradition of ancient Vietnam cuisine, they are also prepared without MSG).”

We had their set menus both times we went, as they offered us the opportunity to try multiple things on the menu so we weren’t just limited to eating one big dish. I can only wish that we’d had the chance to go with a big group so that we could have tried one of their large tasting menus. Their fake beef-dishes are especially succulent, as in literally melt in your mouth good. Oh, and did I mention that the 454mL bottles of Bai Ha Noi were only 10,000 dong (that’s about the equivalent of $0.60 at the time of writing). In fact, our meal with two set menus, an appetizer, a 1.5L bottle of water and a beer came to less than $10 USD.

Anyone want to open up a franchise here?

We’d put our first two bottles of root beer in the fridge earlier this week, but hadn’t quite found the time to taste them until last night. Root beer, homemade popcorn, and a horror movie – yes please!

First up - Thomas Kemper Root Beer & Low Calorie Root Beer. Even though they’re technically two different root beers, we thought that it made more sense to try them at the same time. This way we could compare them to each other as well, on the diet vs. non-diet spectrum.

Here’s our non-expert review*. Both versions smelled good. Really good. They had that awesome root beer aroma. It made it a little bit of a shock when I took my first sip. My initial reaction was to be a little disappointed. Turns out that this wasn’t because it was bad, but rather because its a different formulation that I’m used to drinking. Once I realized that it was much simpler to appreciate what this root beer is awesome at – having a rich, creamy, not too fizzy flavour. Creamy as in really creamy. Not what I was expecting (which would have had more wintergreen), but good.

Now for the diet (aka low calorie) version. At first this was quite good – I liked that it wasn’t as sweet. However, it had that terrible sucralose aftertaste that overwhelmed the good root beer flavour. Lesson for us? If we have diet versions, try them first in case the sweetener used doesn’t taste great.

For Christmas I bought Jason the popcorn maker pictured above. He’s a huge movie buff and he loves popcorn when he’s watching them, so it seemed fitting. Its a pretty fun accessory to have and it certainly gets more use than most of our kitchen gadgets. I found some small plastic old movie theatre/carnival style popcorn holders on the curb one day. I grabbed ‘em and they really complete the experience.

Look closely. Look very, very closely at Gucci’s mouth. Notice the small piece of popcorn? Yup, turns out that our Thai dog likes popcorn as much as Jason does. Although to be fair, he wasn’t sure of it at first. Classic was getting the popcorn stuck to his lips – surprisingly it stayed long enough to get a picture.

* Disclaimer: We are not root beer experts! We have not been paid to give reviews. We’re just two root beer loving folks who decided it would be fun to actively try as many different kinds of root beer as possible. We’re keeping track of the experiment so that we’ll remember which ones we liked best. And what we like, may not be what you’d like.

I spent two-ish days in Montreal this week, leaving Monday afternoon and returning to Toronto at 3am on Thursday morning. The reason? I got a $30 roundtrip ticket through Coach Canada. Its a good enough reason for me. I arrived Monday evening and my friend Sebastian picked me up at the bus station. We grabbed some food and then headed back to his place for an early evening.

Tuesday morning we got up and Seb was nice enough to play tour guide. First we headed down to Old Montreal to look at all the lovely old buildings. We also found Notre Dame de Bon-Secours Chapel (aka the Sailor’s Church). Seb didn’t know it existed, so it was neat to get to look around it. Its a highly decorated church inside, but I really did like the style of the paintings on the ceiling.

After wandering around the church, we followed the footsteps back to the Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum, which is dedicated to her life and the early history of Montreal. First, we walked the 69 steps up the tower in the church. The steps were a little scary, mostly because the wasn’t really a handrail and when there was it was so low my fingers barely touched it! The view from the tower was pretty awesome.

There are some lovely statues of angels, made of beaten copper over wooden cores. This was taken from the first stopping point. We went up the last stairs and made it to the top of the tower – we were at the same height as the roof of the church! Sadly, from that vantage point we couldn’t get good photos of the statues (even though we were at the same level).

We then made our way back down into the museum. This included going on a little section of spiral stair case that was suspended over the roof of the church in order to get to the stairs. From there we went through the crypt, the special exhibit on pilgrimage, and then through the sections on Marguerite Bourgeoys. Which led us to a room of dioramas of important parts of her life. Women from the church had made all the scenes themselves and for the most part they were well done (or at least not laughably bad). Until we found this one of the stable school she started…

First, why are some of the children dressed like elves? Use the young sir in the front row wearing a white shirt and a red, pointed hat. Yup, elf. We laughed about this for a little bit until we noticed something much, much worse. Why is the Amerindian woman in the doorway have a green face? Green. Green. Green. Ooops.

We wandered around Old Montreal for a little bit longer, poking around in shops when they were interesting and avoiding anything related to Souvenirs. By this time we were starting to get a little hungry. I put in a request for poutine and we ended up at one of Celine Dion’s Nickels restaurants. As far as celebrity owned joints go, not bad! I had decent poutine, although I am a little sad that I didn’t go to any of the places that were recommended to me. We then wandered along China Block, where we picked up some Dragon Beard candy which was delicious (and vegan!). I brought some home to Jason and even though it didn’t survive transit & two days very well it still tasted delicious.