it looks like america’s favorite pastime is becoming a little more vegan-friendly, at least in the city of los angeles. now you can enjoy a good old fashion baseball at dodgers stadium with a vegan frank in hand.

now i’m no sports fan, and i will would have never even known the stadium was offering vegan hot dogs…but luckily for you a friend of mine spotted them, tried them out, and even got some snap shots of them for your benefit.

veggie dog. $6.25

dodgers stadium uses lightlife’s smart jumbo dogs, which are completely vegan, as well as bimbo bakeries buns, which are also vegan! while $6.25 is a lot to pay for a simple veggie dog, i guess it’s pretty standard considering the fact that everything is overpriced at sporting events. now you can feel ripped off just like the meat-eaters…it’s only fair.

baseball is way cooler when vegan hot dogs are around!

these vegan hot dogs are available in Reserved level Section 4 at the Wetzel Pretzel stand, so don’t miss them.

one of the concession stands selling veggie dogs! yay!

for more information about vegetarian and vegan options at stadiums all around the country, check out this site called soy happy. it’s great to see so many sports arenas introducing more vegan options. if you do go see a game, you should stock up on vegan food and show support.

special thanks to my friend for making this vegan hot dog discovery. hopefully you will keep this post in mind next time you are watching a baseball game in LA. and remember, veggie dogs taste great with baseball, beer and pretty fireworks.

fireworks at dodgers stadium. just because.

NOTE: Please see update regarding Green Leaves Vegan here

From the moment that we got our first POSITIVE result when sampling a “vegan” menu item from one of our favorite LA-area vegan restaurants, we knew that we were on to something with Operation Pancake. When POSITIVE readings gave way to HIGH and OVERLOAD results we were quite shocked. For us, though, the most memorable moment was when we unpacked the “vegan cheese (no casein) quesadilla” from Green Leaves Vegan and the acidic smell of “real” cheese came right at us out of the box as our sample crept toward OVERLOAD. We stepped back. We retested. We then warmed the quesadilla, played with the stretchy, greasy cheese and realized that the multitude of tip-offs we’d been getting about the sketchy ingredients and evasive staff members at Green Leaves Vegan might just be true.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is your vegan food really vegan? We pull out all the stops to test 17 LA area vegan restaurants for non-vegan ingredients, and to find out why seven of them failed miserably.

NOTE: Please see update regarding Green Leaves Vegan here

UPDATE: Please check out the follow-up post from today when you’ve read this. THANKS.

From Pure Luck to Green Leaves, Vegan House to Vegan Plate and Rosemead to Taipei we pull back the covers on the seedy world of vegan restaurants, and an international supply chain that pumps eggs and milk into our supposedly vegan food on a daily basis.

Vegan Quesadilla from Green Leaves Vegan tested “Overload” for casein, a milk protein.

Surely, a vegan restaurant is safe to eat at if I’m a vegan?

Really? Regular readers of quarrygirl.com will recall us publishing an email and photos from “Mr. Wishbone” detailing the contents of a dumpster at LA Vegan Thai with non-vegan ingredients plainly visible, and presumably used as ingredients in the food (pancakes in this case).

After we published Mr. Wishbone’s findings, several people wrote in with stories about potentially non-vegan ingredients being sighted in vegan restaurants, and one particular thread on the quarrums “Vegan Dirt” began to get rather busy, with accusations flying here and there about shrimp paste being spotted in some restaurants, and “vegan cheese” that looked and tasted exactly like dairy-based cheese being served in others.

While this blog hasn’t hesitated to call out non-vegan “vegan donuts” and non-vegan “vegan cheese pizzas” in the past, we can only make information public that can be empirically proven. Accusations and reports of non-vegan ingredients and suspect food handling (of which we get many) have to stay smoldering in our Deleted Items folder laying in a morass of uncertainty. Or so we thought until a couple of weeks ago, when Mr. Wishbone emailed again, and requested a meeting: “I have some knowledge of the food industry, and I think we can prove whether or not a food item contains certain non-vegan ingredients. I can tell you, though, it’s not going to be easy or cheap. If we meet I’ll share my ideas”. Intrigued, and under the strictest secrecy, we met up for lunch.

The Plan

During the meeting, Mr. Wishbone outlined an ambitious plan that would enable us to test for common non-vegan ingredients (eggs, casein [a component of milk], and shellfish) in a multitude of menu items from local vegan restaurants. The plan would be a logistical, financial and time-sucking nightmare but, if done properly, and to scientific testing standards, it would be a ground-breaking and highly reliable indicator of just how “pure” food from vegan restaurants really is. Here’s an outline of the plan:

• Locate a facility that has no traces of egg, casein or shellfish in which to perform the advanced tests
• Purchase anti-contamination equipment including industrial sterilization supplies, lab coats, uncontaminated bags, swabs, razor blades, gloves and floor coverings
• Obtain highly restricted industrial food testing “kits” only available to the food manufacturing industry
• Develop a regimented process to test each food item with the highest standards of inter-test cleanliness, ensuring that absolutely no food particles from one food item contaminate another
• Select a diverse set of menu items from 100% vegan-only restaurants throughout LA (with one exception, see later)
• Order the food for carry-out, and seal it in an airtight bag in its original packaging either inside, or very close to the point of purchase
• Transport the food items to the testing facility intact and sealed, and perform the tests within 48 hours of purchase, keeping them refrigerated until immediately before the test
• Develop a strict bracketing control, with a thorough analysis of the testing facility and equipment before testing: A negative control to ensure no pre-existing contamination, and a positive control test on a known-positive food product (containing all three target non-vegan items) to ensure that the tests do indicate positive results
• Conduct the test in absolute secrecy to ensure that no restaurant would know they were providing samples, and pose as regular customers ordering take-out food in a normal way, with no disclosure that the items would be used for a test

So, we divided up the work between us, and dedicated a Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday as well as over $1,000 of our collective money to pulling off the most extensive scientific test that we know of to find out, once and for all, if samples of restaurant food are vegan or not.

The Story

Here’s the story of what we did, how we did it and the surprising results….

Read the rest of this entry »

hey readers, i wanna encourage you to click over and check out this blog post i wrote for the popular LA blog, losanjealous.com. what you’ll find is some bona fide banh mi sandwich porn, and write-up on one of our favorite vegan eateries, vinh loi tofu.

curry meatball chicken sub. $6.50

if you don’t read losanjealous already, i suggest you start now. it’s a kick ass blog that’s updated regularly with los angeles news, concert pix, giveaways, food reviews and ramblings. plus, they cuss. and you know how much i love that. i’ll be writing for them sporadically in the “under $10” section, a recurring series of restaurant reviews for the tight wallet. hopefully i can help spread the word around los angeles about all the great, cheap vegan food there is to eat. stay tuned…

hey los angeles vegans, i have some pretty exciting news for you! on thursday may 14th at noon, jennshaggy of vegan twinkie fame will be selling some of her beloved treats as well as a slew of other no whey baked goods in hollywood to benefit various animal charities. since jenn has retired from baking officially, and her goods are no longer available, i highly suggest you get out to hollywood tomorrow and pick up as many twinkies and cookies as you can carry!

here are all the important details:
what: no whey vegan bake sale for charity
when: thursday may 14th, noon until sold out
where: 7200 Melrose Ave Los Angeles, CA 90046 (outside the fratelli cafe near melrose and formosa)
baked goods: twinkies, pinwheel cookies, sugar cookies, snickerdoodles, cakes, and fudge
price: everything will be between $2-$4

if you have ever tried no whey twinkies, you know how bad ass they are. don’t miss this rare opportunity, these baked goods are no longer available!

also try the pinwheel cookies, they are my personal favorite.

i don’t know what you have planned for your lunch break on thursday, but whatever it is, drop it and get down to this bake sale at noon! see you there!

[googleMap name=”vegan bake sale with no whey twinkies!” description=”outside fratelli cafe at melrose and formosa”]7200 Melrose Ave Los Angeles, CA 90046[/googleMap]

It’s been a rip-roaring week in the no-holds-barred quarrums! From Paul McCartney debates to vigilante undercover investigations of vegan dating sites it’s all there. Here are some highlights:

Vegan Pizza Photos. The world is going nuts for vegan pizza. If we didn’t execute tissue samples on the posters of every picture here, we’d be concerned that some of these amazing pizzas might not be vegan!

vegan teese pizza posted by quarrygirl. check out the forums for pix from other users.

Vegan Thai Food Boycott? The world is also going nuts for vegan Thai food. Read about how little of this cuisine really is vegan, and the paces to frequent as well as avoid.

What did you cook today? Tons of great pictures from nutso vegans that cooked food at home.

Share your stories about perceptions others have about you being vegan. Funny observations from others here.

The undercover vegan dating site. Member jvedman went out on a limb to investigate eligible vegans in Atlanta. Read all about out here.

Finally – if you’re on Twitter, check out this topic as it’s full of cool vegan cats to follow.

Are the forums missing anything that you think people should be talking about? If so, feel free to go in and add a topic. The more the merrier!

Happy weekend!

** NOTE ** These forums are NOT necessarily the views of quarrygirl/aka Ms. Anthrope alone. Several people moderate.

After realizing there are limited vegan-oriented forums anywhere on the Internet where one can engage in frank discussion about the seamier side of vegan life, we stayed up all night and created the quarrums. Feel free to register and join in the discussion. ANYTHING GOES.

quarrygirl.com: a silly vegan blog headquartered in Los Angeles
forums: a place to go on the internet where you can debate issues and share thoughts
quorum: Noun “a gathering of the minimal number of members of an organization to conduct business”
quarrums: the quarrygirl.com forums check them out!

Do enjoy the forums, and let us know what you think. Moderation will be kept to an absolute minimum, and there are no ads or anything anywhere on them. Have at it!

hey kids, we are heading across the pond to blighty for the next couple weeks. we have tons of awesome vegan los angeles posts stored up, so keep checking quarrygirl.com like you normally do. we shall be rolling them out on a regular basis.

if you wanna stalk us and see what we are up to in the UK, follow me on twitter!

alright, that’s it. off to devour massive amounts of curry.

tonight is last night was the 2 year anniversary of the vegan happy hour and potluck at the short stop in echo park!

come check it out, it was awesome to drink some beer and eat some fine vegan foods. 5 to 9pm.

hope to do it again some time! maybe next week!

the short stop
1455 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
(213) 482-4942

On Friday, actress Hayden Panettiere dined in Pure Luck…. this awful amateur paparazzi video shows her very clearly getting some food! Funny thing is, the poster of the video didn’t know the name of the restaurant, and called it “Friar Tuck”… Enjoy your celebfix below, with the Pure Luck action kicking in at 00:20s.

Link to the full story is here.

it’s true—that was me you read about on laist.com the other day, when i broke the news of the accident at pure luck.

sorry i have been a too busy to answer your countless emails recently—i’ve been overwhelmed fielding all the offers like book deals, celebrity appearances and free food. not sure what my next move will be, now that i’ve “made it”. if you want to re-live all the excitement of my major media mention, you can catch my laist feature here. and i will post the article below as well….for your sake.

JULY 22, 2008

Truck Crashes into Pure Luck Restaurant

Around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday morning as staff at Pure Luck were closing the Bicycle District/HelMel vegan restaurant down, a truck rammed through a window. Local vegan blogger, quarrygirl, visited for a meal later on Saturday only to find the restaurant closed. “Why does this shit have to strike at the best vegan restaurant in town. boooooo,” she blogged. According to one server, as luck would have it, no one was hurt and the restaurant is still open for business during regular hours as they work to fix the window and damage.

thanks laist, for the recognition. i know i deserve it, but it still feels great. and for all you trying to reach me to congratulate me, don’t give up! 🙂