Quick and Easy Juice Recipe

I was feeling a little lazy tonight and wanted to make juice as quick as possible so that I could catch Episode 4 of  Downton Abbey (my latest TV obsession).  This juice recipe calls for just 3 ingredients - kale, pineapple, and coconut water.  Since coconut water can be bought at any supermarket, and kale can be juiced immediately after a good wash, this juice was really easy to prep with my just having to peel the pineapple.  I play around with this kind of recipe a lot and I found that you can easily replace the pineapple and coconut water with honeydew or cantaloupes.

Mmmm...Firecracker Sauce

Last night I ate dinner at Table 35 for my nephew's 17th birthday and decided to order their vegetable wraps from their new menu. Before I go into how delicious those wraps were, I just want to mention how time is flying by before my very eyes. I swear it was just yesterday that my nephew was in elementary running around like a little tazmanian devil! Time is so sneaky like that.

I ordered the vegetable wraps because I wanted something light since earlier during the day, I had stuffed myself with not so few dinner rolls, olive dip, and enchiladas. I also liked the fact that it came with 3 sauces because a girl needs options you know?

When I was served the vegetable wraps, I knew I wouldn't want to share this with anyone. There was an awesome medley of vegetables in the bowl which I'm going to attempt to list - bok choy, celery, carrots, shitake mushrooms, spinach, and nuts all cooked together with some sort of soy based sauce. As if that wasn't enough to win me over, each of the three sauces the dish came with complimented the vegetables. The three sauces were sweet chili sauce, peanut sauce, and something they call "firecracker" sauce. The firecracker sauce (bottom sauce in the picture) was, I think, the best one out of the trio. I couldn't tell what was in it except it was tangy and spicy but not over-powerly hot. I think I just found my favorite dish at Table 35.

In my haste to post this, I forgot to mention where Table 35 was! It's on 665 South Marine Drive right next to First Hawaiian Bank in Tamuning.    

International Vegetarian Food Fair

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I made the drive down south to check out the International Vegetarian Food Fair, which was being held at the Guam Adventist Academy.  It was our first time going to this fair, but it turns this was the fair's 5th run.  I'm really glad we decided to go because there was so much good food.  There were booths showcasing Chamorro, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, American, French, Mexican, and Israeli dishes.  We arrived around 1pm and so unfortunately, we weren't able to try all the dishes, but the food we did get a chance to try was pretty good and filling I might add.  It's funny to say but we actually started out with sampling some delicious baklava dessert.  Then we made our rounds and tried chik'n adobo, cooked spinach, chalakilis, flour tortillas, stir fry noodles with vegetables, papaya salad, spanakopita and a fruit smoothie.  The turnout was pretty good I think and the fair itself was organized.  Food was fairly priced and some of the portions were pretty huge!  I actually scored the stir fry noodles with vegetables and papaya salad for just $2 so the fair didn't hurt our wallet at all but probably stretched our stomachs a bit.  I hope this fair is held again in the future, and once I know I'll definitely post the dates.  Here are the pics I took from the fair:

What's Your Eating Schedule?

I find so many articles on how many times a person should eat daily and they fall into basically 2 categories:  Those that recommend eating little meals every 3-4 hours and those that recommend 3 meals a day.  I'm more for the "little meals" school of thought because I found that when I really listened to my body and ate only when I was hungry, it turned out that my body gets hungry every 3-4 hours.  My daily eating schedule looks something like this: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and then dinner.  My breakfast is always a 16 ounce serving of juice and my dinner majority of the time is another 16 ounce serving of juice.  Snacks mostly consist of nuts, crackers, and/or granola bars.  Lately, I've been my own version of a trail mix and mixing nuts with dark chocolate covered fruits.  I don't pack a lot for snacks; majority of the time, it's just 2-3 handfuls of whatever I feel like snacking on.

Although I am no dietician or nutritionist, I really feel snacking is necessary and good for the body.  The key things to think about when it comes to snacks are the content and the portion.  What I plan on snacking on and how much of it do I plan on eating are questions I normally ask myself when thinking about snacks.  Surprisingly, I stopped caring about how much calories are in a particular food ever since I found out half a cup of pistachios is almost the same amount of calories as an order of McDonald's medium-sized french fries.  Since I refrain from eating anything that's deep fried, my list of choices is narrowed and its easier for me to choose a snack.

I think the best thing to do before making a conscious decision to snack is to (1) listen to your body and see if you really are hungry and (2) to stop eating when you feel full.  Granted there's lots of environmental stimuli around us that can affect the way we think (ie. food commercials, people eating around you, etc.) so it'll take some time before you figure out what's your body's preferred eating schedule.  Trust me though, taking that time is definitely worth it.       

  

Carmen's Cha Cha Cha!

I love going to Carmen's Restaurant, which is located across the Hagatna Cathedral.  Their menu is so awesome for vegetarians and their prices are pretty affordable too.  It's a shame I don't go there often since I live far from it, but every time I do there, I'm not disappointed.  They always start you off with tortilla chips and two types of salsa right when you sit down.  I don't eat anything deep fried so I don't eat the chips, but the salsas are so good they're perfectly fine to eat sans chips.

Beans are a great source of protein, and Carmen's does a great job of cookin' some beans.  I ordered a bowl on the side to eat with my grilled vegetables taco.  Their taco is served in a warm flour tortilla filled with grilled cucumbers, red and yellow bell peppers, and onions.  The tortilla is so good I can and have eaten it by itself.  (Actually, I wish I had some right now.)  What I ate may not seem like a lot, but when I left the restaurant, my stomach was satisfyingly full.    

  
 

Cheesy Hash Brown Bake

It's true that delicious food doesn't have to be associated with complicated ingredients or recipe instructions.  This Cheesy Hash Brown Bake is a perfect example.  I only used 3 main ingredients - vegetarian chili, shredded hash brown potatoes, and vegan mozzarella cheese.  The only additional ingredients were salt and pepper.  The original recipe called for cilantro, but I didn't think it would taste great with the ingredients.  In the end, it turned out to be a spicy delicious comfort food.  It was supposed to be lunch for my boyfriend and I tomorrow, but I really couldn't resist eating a chunk out of the bake.  I'm sure my boyfriend wouldn't notice if his lunch wasn't the normal serving amount ;).

For my vegetarian chili, I used Health Valley's Spicy Tomato Vegetarian Chili because I was craving something spicy.  It tasted pretty good, but I am still on the look out for vegetarian chili with the least amount of sodium.  I purchased this at Micronesia Mall Pay-Less Supermarket.  For my vegan cheese, I used Daiya Shredded Mozzarella Cheese, which I posted about here.  They taste great by themselves, but I really prefer them in melted form.  They also make great cheddar cheese so you can definitely use that if you prefer it over mozzarella.

Icing on the Cake

I received a funny yet definitely helpful present from my co-worker this year - The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Baking.  I'll always be the first to admit that I'm no Iron Chef, so this book was perfect for a beginner cook like me.  Everything is simplified and there's a great section in the book about egg and dairy product substitutions.
The first recipes I tried from this book were the recipes for vegan mocha cake and vegan vanilla bean frosting.  I think my mocha cake turned into a chocolate cake which was a bit disappointing, but the frosting made up for it twice over.  It was the first time I ever used extract from a vanilla bean pod and it made all the difference in the world.  I was a little wary at how such a small amount of extract (scraping a vanilla bean pod can get a little sticky) would make the frosting taste better, but now I'm a convert.  This frosting was so good because it wasn't too sweet.  When I was younger, I was always excited to eat the icing off a cake and get as much sugar as I can into my system, but at some point in my life, I became pretty sick of super sweet icing.  So, I was pretty surprised when I found myself actually eating the spare icing I made for this cake.

For my shortening, I used Spectrum Organic All Vegetable Shortening which I found at Micronesia Mall Pay-Less Supermarket .  I chose this because it was non-hydrogenated, and in this post, I explain why non-hydrogenated products are better than regular hydrogenated products.  For my vegan margarine, I just used my trusty Earth Balance Natural Buttery Spread, which is available at both Simply Food and Micronesia Mall Pay-Less Supermarket.  It makes vegetarian life so much easier when products are easily available on-island!

Vegan 7-Layer Taco Dip

For New Year's Eve, I decided to make a dip instead of an actual dish since I was going to spend most of my time drinking wine.  I normally spend New Year's Eve with my family at home so I was safe to drink since I wasn't going to be driving anywhere.  I actually made this dip before for my work's Christmas luncheon, but this time, I was able to make it vegan.  So, even though this taco dip had sour cream and cream cheese (both vegan), I pigged out on it guilt-free.  You could eat this dip by itself, but it tasted so much better with baked chips.

I was very lucky to find vegan versions of sour cream and cream cheese at Simply Food.  I tasted each one before placing it in the dip and they both tasted like their regular dairy counterparts.  They're both made by the brand Tofutti and it looks as though this is the only brand available on Guam.  I'm not complaining though because both the sour cream and cream cheese tasted good.  The cream cheese was actually softer than regular cream cheese, but that was a good thing for me because it made mixing a whole lot easier.
Another great thing about these two products are that they're both non-hydrogenated (not injected with hydrogen gas).  What this means is they have significantly less cholesterol and saturated oils than their hydrogenated versions.  Here's a link I found that explains how hydrogenated food products endanger your health.  

The original recipe I found on the Internet uses tomato salsa as one of the layers, but I nixed that and went with chopped fresh roma tomatoes.  This made the dip have less sodium, and who doesn't love fresh ingredients?  In fact, I think I'll be adding more tomatoes the next time I make this dip.
When I finished adding all the layers, I warmed the dip in the oven just until the cheese started to melt.  Daiya's Shredded Cheddar Cheese melted perfectly in the oven, but it also tastes great just by itself.  If you're like me and prefer your dip warm, I suggest putting in the oven at 400F for about 10 minutes.  A word of caution though: Warming up the dip in the oven will probably cause it to become a little watery because of the fresh tomatoes.
My New Year's Eve was a blast since I was able to spend it with my family eating dip, drinking Moscato, and lighting up lots of sparklers.  Happy New Year Everyone!

Cheers to the New Year

This is the first blog post of the year and I'm so excited!  Last year's highlights revolved around making lifestyle-altering choices and I think this year is going to revolve around upholding them.  Wish me luck!

2012's first post is going to be about tinola (ginger stew with vegetables), which, in my family, is served as a main course.  It's normally cooked with chicken as its meat, but in this case, I used Quorn's Naked Chik'n Cutlets as my chicken substitute.  In the box, there's 4 cutlets and I only used 2 of them since I was only cooking for my boyfriend and I.  I've only started using this chicken substitute since October, but I find it does really well in soup/stew dishes since it soaks up the flavor of the dish.

Tinola is known to be a ginger stew but the ginger flavor isn't overpowering at all because the dish has green papaya and spinach as its vegetables.  Come to think of it, tinola can be called the "Filipino chicken soup for the soul."  You could eat it by itself, but I grew up eating it with hot white rice.  Like with most Filipino dishes, the instructions on how to eat a dish usually ends with placing the food on top of hot white rice. 

 This dish was extra-exciting for me to make because I was able to use green papaya fresh out of my backyard.  My mom has grown several papaya trees and lucky for me, they're just beginning to bear fruit.  What was unlucky for me was that the papaya I wanted was much too high for me to easily grab.  I think I spent a good 15 minutes swinging a pole my mom uses to grab fruit high up in a tree and praying the papaya doesn't land on me.  I hope no one caught that on video because it wasn't exactly the most graceful sight.  In the end, I was pretty pleased with the papaya I selected since it tasted so delicious in the dish.  

I've noticed that whenever I replace the meat in a Filipino dish with a meat substitute, the dish automatically becomes a vegan meal.  It's a great discovery for me because I am really trying my best to transition over into the vegan world.  This is definitely something I need to work on this year and hopefully by 2013's first blog post, I'll be able to proudly say that I am vegan.