just when you thought onion rings couldn’t get any better, the sexy vegan is here to teach you how to make onion rings encrusted with vegan funyuns. sounds crazy, right? well this guy is a genius, so check out his guest blog post and video to learn how to make this insanely brilliant snack. oh, and follow him on twitter!

A ring is a helluva thing. It’s circular form has been recognized throughout this planet’s history as being a symbol of unity, infinity, life, and perfection. And that’s really very nice and all…but If you ask me, a circle can’t truly be perfect unless it’s a circle made out of onion…which then gets coated with a bunch of other, smaller, crushed-up circles, that taste like onions. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? You know those rings of pure joy, that a trader named Joe occasionally bestows upon us, known as “Baked Onion Rings?” Wait, what am I saying? You’re a loyal reader of quarrygirl.com, of course you do. Then you also know that they are both vegan and delicious. Well, they’ll be the coating for these oven baked beauties that I like to call: “Oven Baked Onion Ring Encrusted Oven Baked Onion Rings!” A more perfect circle, I could not imagine.

Read the rest of this entry »

for thanksgiving this year, we here at quarrygirl.com threw a non-traditional dinner party and invited the parents. sure, my parents will still have their slaughtered carcass tomorrow…but today, their holiday feast was all vegan.

everyone seems to be blogging about their thanksgiving menu, so i thought i may as well do the same. i’m no cook, and i didn’t spend tons of time in the kitchen. but we did manage to throw together a mix of store-bought and homemade dishes that pleased our omnivore guests. here is the rundown:

suds: we celebrated nonturkey day this year by opening up our first bottle of homemade beer. it’s been brewing downstairs in our guest room for two weeks, and today it had finally reached a very drinkable and alcoholic point. full disclosure, we made our wort beer from a kit. we didn’t go all mad scientist, boiling hops or anything. that’s for next time. thankfully, the beer came out quite well. a strong, delicious, fruity dry-hopped lager.

appetizers: we really, really know how to class it up for thanksgiving. that’s why for a pre-meal snack we served a bag of doritos spicy sweet chili nachos with terra potpourri potato chips, along with fritos hot bean dip and calavo guacamole. super fancy, eh? in our defense, this dish was super last minute. (duh.) we stupidly headed out to go grocery shopping on thanksgiving morning in search of horderves and ended up abandoning ralphs because the parking lot was too crowded and bristol farms because it was a fucking zoo in there. (i did see pauly shore though, and had to explain who he was to my husband, yay!) we ended up at the closest place to our house by far to purchase food, the canyon country store. i don’t know if you’ve ever been to this little hippie shack, but they don’t have much selection. hence the truck stop appetizers we ended up serving. it’s all good though. tasty as fuck, and no prep time.

salad: mr. meaner took care of the salad this year, because he kicks ass at that. he made the previously blogged about “best salad in the world”, although this time he toasted the pine nuts and whipped up his own batch of zesty lemon balsamic vinaigrette. total hit.

stuffing: this is actually the first year i’ve ever cooked homemade stuffing. usually i just grab a box from whole foods, add a few ingredients and call it a day. this year, i decided to try a really healthy and simple stuffing from happy herbivore’s cookbook, pudge-free holidays. she’s compiled a list of tasty-sounding holiday recipes without all the fat and calories that usually come along with this time of year. i made a batch of the traditional thanksgiving stuffing with mushrooms and vegan sausage. the only change i made was i added some garlic, because i can never have enough of that. i can tell you this is much tastier and much healthier than the store-bought box crap i’m used to making.

sides: we outsourced the cooking of our side dishes to the awesome vegan soul food restaurant, a taste of life. i could never make food this good, so why even try? we ordered two sides of mac and cheese and two sides of kale. both were delicious and impressed the hell out of my omnivore parents. if i could cook this well, i’d never eat out. but i can’t…so i get take-out on thanksgiving day. yay.

vegetables: mr. meaner took it upon himself to toss some thickly sliced potatoes and carrots in olive oil and oregano, then bake them to perfection. we also had some steamed broccoli and cauliflower to round it all off.

roast: since our favorite thanksgiving centerpiece, the unturkey, is no longer available, we have been looking for a worthy replacement. we spent the last two years with the tofurky, which is good but not great. this year we opted for the very scrumptious celebration roast. field roast is a company up in seattle who makes tons of great faux meats, from sausages, to slices, to several different flavors of roasts. their products are kind of hard to find in los angeles, so if you ever see them, buy ’em up. follow your heart consistently stocks the celebration roasts, and a handful of whole foods carry the sausages. while the celebration roast is no unturkey, it’s pretty damn incredible. the body, crust and middle stuffing are all magnificent. (please note, some folks have made a website and posted a recipe for the original unturky. i’m way to much of a cooking n00b to try it, but others have. and i am jealous). the celebration roast will totally do for now.

dessert: i actually did some baking some baking this thanksgiving! when i bake, things usually go wrong…but luckily, this holiday my shit came out pretty nice. i went through several recipes online and adapted my own from many to make a chocolate-chip vegan cheesecake. a total crowd-pleaser, this cheesecake made me so proud. plus it satisfied my sweet tooth for the day.

here’s the recipe i “came up with,” standing on the shoulders of giants:

vegan chocolate-chip cheesecake

ingredients:
1-14 oz package firm silken tofu
1-8 oz package tofutti better than cream cheese
2/3 cup sugar
splash of lemon juice
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp cornstarch
about 1/2 a 12oz bag of chocolate chips
1-9 inch vegan pie crust

method:
preheat oven to 350F.
put silken tofu and tofutti better than cream cheese in the blender and blend until smooth.
add the sugar and blend until no granules remain.
add a splash of lemon juice, the vanilla and the corn starch, then blend until smooth.
add 1/2 a 12oz bag of vegan chocolate chips and stir it up with a spoon.
pour the mixture into the pie crust and bake for 40 minutes.
refrigerate before serving for at least 4 hours.

result:
yum.

all around, we had an epically delicious thanksgiving. good to know we could gorge ourselves on all kinds of dishes—healthy stuff, junk food, salty appetizers, sweet deserts, salads, roasts and vegetables—all without killing any animals. what a fucking concept, right?

here’s to hoping the rest of the world will catch on. hope you had a great thanksgiving!

back to restaurant reviews now for quarrygirl…

There’s a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard called Ari-Ya. It is descended from an identical restaurant in the same location called Murakami. I remember when Murakami became Ari-Ya: the only thing that changed was the name, even the menus were the same, with sticky labels gracefully replacing Murakami with Ari-Ya. It’s still that way, if you check it out!

They have a regular sushi menu (the veggie rolls are a perfect vegan treat), but the reason I go there is a totally unique salad that’s SO GOOD. While, technically, this should be an Ari-Ya salad, I’m calling it by its maiden name of Murakami salad. Why? Just because.

In keeping with the Quarrygirl modus-el-operandi, I decided to emulate said salad at home, and hopefully improve the recipe to my own taste. The secret to a good salad is proportion: too much of any one ingredient throws the taste off balance quickly.

Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Read the rest of this entry »