continuing in our hot sauce series, here’s a little ditty by organicville.

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you probably already know that i’m obsessed with hot sauce. no seriously, i suffer from capsicum addiction. i put it on everything. EVERYTHING! so i figured, why not start sharing my favorite sauces with you guys?

…starting with one that most people assume isn’t vegan: frank’s red hot buffalo wing sauce.

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just a quick bit of good news this morning: the dandies tweets (a vegan version of peeps) that we tried out at expo west are now available to the masses via vegan essentials!

i’m so glad these are on the market just in time for zombie jesus day. they come in both orange and lemon flavors, and i speak from experience when i say the orange ones are out of this world.

i used to love peeps when i was a kid, and these are even better. get on it.

hey everyone! natural products expo west, the world’s largest natural products tradeshow, is going down this weekend in anaheim and we were there all day yesterday.

we got a pretty good feel for the new vegan products that are about to hit the market, so sit back and enjoy this post full of our favorite finds. we’ll start off with stuff from brands that we already know and love—established quarrygirl favoriteses that should be familiar to you guys.

first up: chicago soydairy!

these folks didn’t have a booth at the expo in 2010…but daaaaaaaamn, they made up for it this year with all kinds of craziness! where do i start? their booth was like a vegan party. they had an endless supply of deep-fried vegan mozzarella sticks using teese (pictured above), which were INCREDIBLE.

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dear friends and readers, i have recently become completely enamored with the vegan queso by food for lovers. i’m not kidding when i say that this is something you all need to try immediately, and share with your omnivore friends.

being a vegan blogger, i get sent free products from time to time, yet none has ever captured my fancy like this one. when food for lovers offered to mail me a complimentary jar of their vegan queso, i accepted with moderate expectations. perhaps i mentally lumped their product in with the other vegan quesos i’ve tried in the past—all decent, but nothing game-changing in the world of vegan cheeses. perhaps it’s because their product is fat-free and very low in calories, i was expecting it to taste “healthy,” and therefore not insanely delicious. boy, was i wrong.

one bite of this vegan queso and i was hooked…

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earlier this week, i put the call out for readers to send in photos of veganized recipes from the sriracha cookbook, because we here at QG HQ are obsessed with the cock sauce.

shortly after that, kevin from vegan brew sent us some extremely appetizing photos of his veganized “honey-sriracha glazed buffalo wings.” funny thing is, he made the same recipe that we posted on earlier…but he veganized it in a totally different way, using seitan rather than gardein. check it:

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we bought the sriracha cookbook the day it came out, with hopes of working our way through it and veganizing the recipes. it looks like ryann from my whole deal has beat us to it and already gotten started with sweet-sriracha glazed buffalo tenders.

vegan sweet-sriracha glazed buffalo tenders by mywholedeal.com

check out her blog post to see how she did it, using agave, gardein, and of course…SRIRACHA. have you veganized any recipes from the sriracha cookbook? if so, send me pix and i will post them. i am sriracha obsessed.

i looove chocolate, so naturally i jumped at the chance to receive some rawkin raw samples—vegan raw superfoods that (as i found) totally taste like candy.

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wow, some hardcore vegan sleuthing has gone down. we posted earlier this week on some shocking findings by mr. wishbone (you all remember him from operation pancake, right?) regarding some completely non-vegetarian gummy bears that were mislabeled as vegan at whole foods. after some digging, it appears that whole foods isn’t entirely to blame; the fault actually lies with the distributor. please read the original story here, and check out the following update from mr. wishbone:

After reading the comment from “LE” on the gummy bear post, (“I just had some agave-sweetened gummy bears yesterday from Rainbow Acres. They had the exact same ingredients list. Sigh… should have known it was too good to be true.”), I thought that if the Rainbow Acres gummy bears were from the same manufacturer/distributor then the error in labeling might not be Whole Food’s fault at all.

I went to Rainbow Acres and found two products: Agave Sweetened Gummy Bears and Vegan Agave Sweetened Fruit Slices. I spoke with the Greg at Rainbow Acres, and he was happy to provide me with their distributor’s name, telephone number and item numbers from their catalog. I asked Greg to remove the two products from his shelves until we could determine if the ingredient listings were correct. Rainbow Acres should be commended for their transparency and genuine desire to please their customers and do the right thing.

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…well, sort of.

they aren’t the official doritos brand, but the new salsa picante tias by kettle brand taste almost exactly like the old school cheesy doritos that are now off limits…

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UPDATE 2/1/11: i am hearing mixed things about the availability of these funyuns. a worker at the store on sunset told me they were gone, but commentors can still find them at certain trader joe’s locations. plus, a TJ’s employee commented on our older post and said they were still available. what does this all mean? there’s hope.

noooooOOOOOOOOooOOOo!

it was just over a month ago that we were singing the praises of the trader joe’s vegan funyuns, and they’ve already been retired from the shelf until further notice.

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if you aren’t already hip to figueroa produce in highland park, you need to get over there. the neighborhood grocery store is super vegan-friendly and has more cutting edge products than anywhere else in los angeles.

insane vegan meats

when i popped by over the weekend for one of the epic deli sandwiches, they were handing out samples of vegan meat by a company called fry’s that totally blew my mind…

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zenergy powerballs! come on, with a name like that, they’ve gotta be awesome. and they are.

zenergy powerballs are completely raw, vegan, organic snacks that are packed with superfood for nutrition. when the company that makes them offered me some to sample, of course i said yes.

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xmas came early this year in the form of VEGAN FUNYUNS from trader joe’s!

i don’t know if you’ve ever eaten the original frito-lay creation, but i used to love them back in the day. it’s like an onion ring got together with a potato chip and had a bag of delicious babies…funyuns! unfortunately, real funyuns contain dairy and i haven’t eaten them in about ten years, so imagine my excitement when i saw this thread in the qg forums talking about a new breed of vegan funyun-style snacks at trader joe’s! of course i had to try them out…

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curasé is a local company that specializes in “raw chocolate remedies“, organic vegan chocolates prepared by hand, one batch at a time.

recently jessica erler, the creator and maker of curasé chocolates, sent me a box to sample and they completely blew my mind. this was some of the best chocolate i’ve tried in my entire life (vegan or not)…

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