i write this post for two reasons: to give you a wonderful, hearty chili recipe that can be ready in no time, AND to show you a great new product i just discovered.

extra protein seitan and worthington chili

this chili recipe is awesome, and soooooo full of protein…but even more importantly, i hope it introduces you to a WHOLE NEW VEGAN PRODUCT that’s been right under your nose for years: worthington! 

have you ever even heard of this product? i hadn’t until recently. but now that i know it exists, i find it in every ralphs i visit, from city to city. 

recipe after the jump. (and even if you are familiar with worthington, you’ll wanna read how to make this ultimate seitan chili meal anyways!)
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the final day of coachella 2008, sunday april 27, featured the best vegan festival food to date. yet it was a bitter-sweet victory over the past couple days, because the selection of food (and alcohol) was just TOO GOOD.

so good, in fact, that your humble narrator spent most of the day relaxing in the shade, munching on snacks, smoking cigarettes and sipping cocktails…rather standing in the heat, fighting off hipsters, coughing up secondhand weed and waiting for the “next big thing(s)” to take the stage.

vegetarian sushi with a side of inari: $12.

marinated tofu wrap with vegetables and peanut sauce: $9.

marinated tempeh burger with vegetable and tahini: $9.

that’s right, my friends…i was so seduced by the fresh sushi, crisp wrap, and savory burger, that i barely had time to enjoy any music at all. oh…and did i mention the alcohol?
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coachella saturday was the day of technical difficulties. the screens went out during death cab for cutie‘s set, when M.I.A. took the stage the lights broke, and the biggest technical difficulty of all made us several hours late for the festival, causing us to miss the beloved MGMT.

luckily, the food was even better than it was on friday! god bless vegan rockers—at coachella, i reap the benefits of their dietary choices.

combination plate: coconut rice with dal and tomato pea curry $8

taking veganism one step further than the night prior, on saturday we decided to eat dinner at the bombay station, a stand that proclaimed to be ENTIRELY vegan.
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friday morning we packed up our bags and headed to the desert for 3 days of festival madness. i must admit, i was looking forward to the music, but not much else. i figured the entire event would be a huge pain in the ass that i’d ultimately regret.

luckily, the food at coachella turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. it was definitely a highlight and one of the main things making me look forward to coachella 2009 (bear in mind, i have no idea who is on the line up yet, so that isn’t saying much!).

vegan tofu naanwich: curry sauce, vegetables and tofu served on a piece of naan. $7

friday night at around 9pm we were completely spent. we’d spent hours in the car, an eternity in the parking lot, and had walked miles around the polo field in hundred-degree-heat from band to band. when it came time to look for dinner options, i would have been satisfied with just a basket of fries or potato chips.
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The intersection of Wilshire and La Brea used to be one of the most famous crossings in LA. It was through here that the glitterati would be driven, gin-sodden, from an event in Hollywood to food, drinks, ladies of the night and (finally) bed at those catty-cornered sin bins of the Golden Age: The Brown Derby and the Ambassador Hotel. I guess scarcely a glance would be afforded to the Wilson Building, once listed for its historical importance (LA’s only dirigible landing station, destined to have flights direct from the Empire State), and now rudely emblazoned with a gaudy, blue neon Samsung logo.

[googleMap name=”Wilshire and La Brea” description=”Little Bar” width=”480″ height=”320″directions_to=”false”]757 S La Brea Ave, 90036[/googleMap]

Half a century since Charles Chaplain Jr. hung out at Pierinos, a drink of a very similar sounding name (Peroni) is making its way to that storied intersection by way of the Little Bar at 757 S. La Brea, only a block from Wilshire, and within easy walking distance of the El Rey.

(see the Wilson building, center-right with the Samsung sign? UGH!)

The Little Bar is a nice neighborhood joint with a balanced list of pros and cons:

Pros

• Great beer selection: 15 top-class beers on tap including rare brews like Chimay
• Always easy to get a seat

Cons

• Indifferent, almost rude service
• Locals and regulars get all the attention – they ride their bikes around the bar, push in front of patient customers (like me!) and get served whenever they want to.
• The juke box is awful, the audio quality of the speakers is shitty
• The credit card printer takes 5 minutes to process the fucking card swipe
• There’s no hard alcohol
• The seats (although available) are uncomfortable
• People order pizzas constantly and eat them at the bar
• There’s one man’s restroom which has dried puke on the floor (been there for over a month)

BUT, I’ll probably go there a few times a month because you can park on Olympic and Cochran after 6pm, and walk to the bar easily. If the constant smell of pizza and inane music don’t put me off I might keep frequenting the place so I have the opportunity to become a regular and become assimilated into the holier than though clique called the Little Bar clientele.

i love going to see opening bands when i don’t care about the main act. it’s awesome. i get to stand right up front in a semi-empty venue and watch the band as the rest of the crowd (who will have to wait hours until the show starts) pours in. and going home before the main act begins means i don’t have 3 hours of downtime, with nothing to do except drink ridiculously expensive and shitty bottled beer, as i wait for them to take the stage.

so, imagine how happy i was when i went to see the fuck buttons open for caribou at the el rey, and i found out the bar was selling large cups of tap beer. they were plastic cups, i admit, and they cost $8…but they were 20 oz! budweiser, bud light, and even stella were all readily available. now i know even if i need to go see a headliner at the el rey and stand around waiting for several hours, at least i can pass the time by drinking cold draught stella.

on a side note, the fuck buttons were awesome…totally unique. it’s not like at every show you get to see someone screaming unintelligible ramblings into a fisher price microphone.

here is one of their tracks that i quite enjoy.
sweet love for planet earth

i recommend checking them out while they are still an opening act, then you can leave when they are done and still get home early just like i did! 🙂 i know that makes me sound fucking old, but going to gigs is a stressful hassle. thank god i always have the beer to rely on.

overall, the el rey bar gets a B! I love the fact that they have stella on tap, but have to take some points off for the high prices and the plastic cups.

We British love our curry. For sure, a vindaloo is the British national dish over fish and chips – factually, more brits eat curry on a regular basis than any other cuisine. They say “you never miss what you never had”. Well, I’ve had it and I miss it, yearning frequently for a rainy evening where I can pop out of my local pub into the Bombay Palace restaurant across the road, and order an onion bhaji followed by vegetable vindaloo with pilau rice and a roti. Don’t get me wrong – there are Indian restaurants here in LA, but none of them come remotely close to the taste, texture and experience of a British curry.

So, I set out to emulate the Great British Curry in my own kitchen, and I can tell you that I’ve come pretty close.

Here’s a close-up of what you can expect:

And here it is in a dish ready to be served:

Within an hour of prep time I can make a curry dish that tastes so similar to a curry house back home that I can close my eyes after eating it and hear the patter of rain on the streets of London.

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ahhh…sunday morning breakfast. what better way to begin the end of the weekend than with a stomach full of homemade vegan food?

fantastic frittata: quarrygirl.com’s veganized version of the monterey frittata

i REALLY love a leisurely sunday breakfast. 3 cups of coffee and a calorific vegan feast sounds like the perfect way to prolong the agony of the forthcoming week. but in a world where most restaurants are packed on sunday mornings and/or pride themselves on the fact they shovel heaping piles of eggs onto peoples’ plates, it’s hard for me to get morning meal satisfaction on the day it matters most. 

this week, i found solace in this amazing recipe…located right under my nose, in the back of my cupboard, on the back of a tofu scrambler box. all it needed was to be veganized…
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Ordering pizza was one of my favorite activities before I became a vegan. Now, though, that avenue of pleasure is firmly closed off to me since I don’t eat dairy. All is not lost, though — if you live close to Hollywood in LA, there’s always Damiano’s, but their delivery customer service is appalling (last time I ordered it took them nearly two hours to deliver a cold pizza — and that was when I lived under two miles away). There’s a reasonable frozen pizza option, but nothing beats freshly made pizza with ingredients you can select and add at will.

So, I set about creating a similar experience to delivery pizza in terms of taste, timing and effort. I succeeded in two of those (taste and timing), but on the effort front, nothing beats the convenience of calling a ‘phone number to get hot food delivered to your home, just as nothing beats not being milked to death if you’re a cow.

When I used to order pizza, it would take around 40-50 minutes from picking up the ‘phone to the local Pizza Hut to when it arrived on my doorstep. This method of preparing this pizza takes a little less time, but the end result is very comparable to delivered pizza if you’re happy to put in the effort.

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every time i go to the uk, i try new and wonderful food that i wish i could take back home to los angeles. well guess what? turns out i can!

spicy dumpling noodles (the quarrygirl version): steamed vegetable gyoza, asian vegetables, udon noodles, and miso broth

on a recent trip to london, i felt so out of my element. i was wandering the streets looking for any one of the vegan restaurants i’d so carefully researched online…none of which i was finding. to make matters worse, i was with my ex-vegetarian (now vegan) english husband who was kindly patronizing me as i promised to show him all the “vegan friendly” restaurants i’d bragged about finding in his hometown that he’d failed to notice, because he must have been blind!

2 hours later…no vegan restaurants. he’s late for a meeting…and his stupid american-girl-of-a-wife, who doesn’t even know from which direction the traffic will be crossing, is aimlessly pulling him around the west end looking for a restaurant that understands the difference between vegan (vg) and vegetarian (vo). disaster.

15 minutes left before the lunch window slams shut and my husband has take off, we happen across a little shop called itsu on regent street, and he convinces me to give it a try. completely pwned, i agree, and follow him in and try to make the best of the situation.

and boy am i glad i did!

recipe after the jump…

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I buy most groceries that I can from Ralph’s here in Southern California, and wine is no exception. Once the bastion of exclusive vintners, wine is now a commodity where quantity (of New World wines) and quality have driven down price to a point where a very decent bottle can be bought for well under $10. It’s been that way for a while, actually, but the key here is that I don’t WANT my wine to taste like it cost under $10. I don’t mind it tasting like it cost $20, or even $14 but $2.99 isn’t going to cut it with me.

So, the trick is to find the best loyalty program with the best selection of wine that you can consistently find whenever you run low. I’ve found that Ralph’s has just that. Here’s a story about how I bought 24 bottles of wine worth $141.34 for only $81.22 — a saving of $60.12, or an average of around $5 a bottle. AND IT DOESN’T STOP THERE!

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Mr Meaner’s mantra about restaurant food is “If they can make it, so can YOU!”. And the corollary is often “BETTER”. Here’s an example of creating a dish from scratch with nothing but the taste memory of some truly outstanding airport food.

On a recent trip back to LA from wine country, we happened to hang around in SFO for an hour or so while waiting to board. The post-vineyard pangs of hunger began to set in, so I was wandering between Baja Fresh, Subway and a minimalist food court in Terminal 3 when I happened upon “Tomokazu Japanese Food”. An unassuming little place with two very helpful Japanese serving ladies who were only too happy to explain that the only “non meat” thing on the menu was Curry a with a choice of Chicken, Beef or Tofu.

Moving on from the “non meat” Chicken or Beef curry, I focused on the Tofu option asking if it had anything animal-derived in it (chicken stock, cream, milk powder… The usual questions). One of the servers pulled out a flip book with the ingredients listed, and showed it to me. Indeed, it had nothing remotely animal in it, so I went ahead and ordered the dish.

Two minutes later I was eating one of the most satisfying tofu/sauce/rice bowls I’d ever come across. It was spicy, yet very flavorful and the bed of rice (which the sauce soaked into) was absolutely divine. After boarding my flight back I spent quite a while thinking about how to emulate the feast.

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i used to love the holiday season. i’d look forward to it all year long, not because of the silly holidays themselves, but because every november through january, i could go to my local health food store and stock up on the recently deceased unturkey.

since the unturkey’s passing, i’ve unsuccessfully been searching for a substitute. now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with tofurky, and i do appreciate the fact that it’s everywhere. it’s just that unturkey set such a high standard, i can’t help but search for something better to replace it.

luckily, this january i stumbled across the celebration roast at my favorite whole foods. i had a good feeling about it, and i was wise enough to buy 3 roasts, which were all gone within a month! while it’s still not quite as good as the unturkey, it comes pretty damn close!

the catch is, celebration roast is made by a company called field roast, and in los angeles their products are very hard to come by. as of this posting, the whole foods in el segundo (the mother of all health food stores) is the only place i’ve been able to find them.

i suggest you make a trip out there and grab anything field roast you can get your hands on. while they no longer have the celebration roast (DAMN!), they do have some really tasty vegan sausages. again, not to dog on tofurky, but these are just SO much better. if only they were more widely available. not even this massive whole foods heaven carries all the products on the field roast website, which i imagine are amazing as well.

for now, i’ll just have to look forward to the holiday season and get by with my sausages. they make a great breakfast atop some potatoes and smothered in hot sauce.

On a recent trip to Silverlake in LA, I had my iPhone pressed to my face listening to a voicemail about something so uninteresting that I won’t even begin to explain it.

I was also typing away a message on my BlackBerry at the same time, my remaining brain cells were having difficulty keeping aligned and delivering the right thought processes for me to be remotely competent at either endeavor. A bit like walking and chewing gum can (allegedly) be difficult for some people.

The traffic on Sunset was pretty heavy (it being Saturday lunchtime) so I sought shelter in a natural place. So natural, in fact, that I felt a calm come over me and a sense of being “in the right” that is very rare.

I was in a relic known as a “phone booth”, once the ubiquitous item of urban decorative utility found every few hundred feet or so along most city streets.

Indeed, I recall a story in from the 1980s about bidding wars between telcos for prime locations to place a ‘phone booth. These corporate idiots, who probably thought a cellphone about as far-fetched as the communicator from Star Trek were paying up to $50,000 (yes, that’s 200,000 quarters JUST TO BREAK EVEN in cash) to cities for long term rights to lease 6 sq. ft. of real-estate.

Of course, those leases came with dilapidation clauses and long term liability which, combined with decades of regulatory philandering, bankruptcies and in-booth drug deals have rendered these once valuable oases of purpose about as relevant as shoulder pads.

As I ducked for cover, I snapped the picture above and remembered the age-old real estate adage that there are three things important: “Location, location and LOCATION!”. What I needed was a LOCATION, and there was one right where I happened to be.

Sadly, it looks as though it was at least five years since a call was made from that LOCATION, but I was standing there in sun drenched harmony listening to my voicemail and emailing at the same time. A thing that would have been unheard of when PacBell probably paid the City of LA $10,000 for that LOCATION back in the late 80s.

How times change. I’ll take my BlackBerry over a ‘phone booth anytime.

i love food that causes me pain and makes my eyes water. so naturally, i find a typical potato salad rather dull. last night i came up with this recipe (adapted from many others) that’s extremely spicy, rich with flavor, and 100% vegan.

here’s what you’ll need to make it happen:
2 pounds of red potatoes
4 stalks of celery
1 red onion
1 1/2 cups of vegenaise
5 tablespoons of colman’s english mustard
1 teaspoon of salt
black pepper to taste (i use lots!)

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