Vegan activism in the workplace

The workplace is a great place for vegans to be food activists. Back when I worked in an office, my co-workers liked to bring packed lunches as did I. As long as you have fantastic tasting vegan food to share, people will listen to you harp about the health and compassionate benefits of a vegan diet. It helps when you don’t sound condescending and don’t talk about the animal cruelty part of an omnivorous diet.

Instead, focus on the positive: how you can get maximum flavour by using herbs and spices; how roasting or grilling vegetables will make a veggie lover out of a veggie hater; how tofu gets tasty from absorbing any marinade you soak it in; how beans are the most versatile ingredient there is and add heartiness to soups and main dishes.

Of course, the health benefits is a bonus too: yummy food doesn’t have to kill your arteries with cholesterol; you can solve that constipation problem without relying on psyllium husks or Fibrosine; you can easily manage your weight by eating whole food; and this isn’t a health benefit but a benefit nonetheless – plants are cheap. You can make a cheapy vegan dish and have it taste gourmet-ish.

Making your co-workers vegan should not be your #1 goal when sharing your food and discussing vegetarianism with them. People need to make the decision by themselves and on their own time. Your main goal should be to inspire your co-workers to think about the food they eat.

I think I’ve been a fairly good vegan activist in my workplace. I’ve already inspired a former co-worker friend to go vegetarian merely by sharing my lunch with her and sharing cooking tips. Two other co-workers have voluntarily tried TVP (texturized vegetable protein). In fact, I bought TVP granules for them to cook into spaghetti bolognaise, lasagne, burgers, and siomai at home.

Apart from sharing lunches with co-workers, office festivities are another tool to get vegan food in the spotlight. About a month ago, the October celebrants in my former office hosted a merienda for everyone on our floor. I think we served food for about 50-60 people. The others brought barbecue, baked macaroni and drinks; I volunteered to bring a pasta salad and brownies.

Here is a recipe for the farfalle and black bean salad I made for an office birthday celebration. The great thing about this dish is that it was so easy to make, and cheap too! The recipe feeds 8-10 people and you’ll end up spending about P25 / US $0.52 per person.

Farfalle and black bean salad
Ingredients
1 bag, 250g dried black beans / black sitaw, cooked
1 bag, 500g farfalle / bow-tie pasta, cooked
1 bag, 1kg calamansi, juiced
1 head garlic, grated or chopped finely
½ to ¾ c. vegetable oil – olive or combination of olive and canola
1 ½ kg tomatoes, seeded and chopped finely
1 large yellow bell pepper (optional), seeded and chopped finely
1 head onion, chopped finely
1 bag, 100g basil, chiffonaded
Salt and pepper
Additional calamansi juice or vinegar if needed, such as cane, balsamic, or red wine

1. Place the pasta in a large salad bowl. Combine the calamansi juice and garlic; add half of this mixture to the pasta. Drizzle in the vegetable oil – the amount is up to you. Add enough to lubricate the pasta, about ½ to ¾ cup. Toss to coat. The pasta may seem sticky because of the starch, but just be patient with it. The dressing will loosen it up.
2. Add in the black beans, tomatoes, bell pepper, and onion. Add the remaining half of the calamansi-garlic mixture as well as salt and pepper. Toss to coat.
3. Add the basil to the salad and toss. Taste and if needed, season with more salt and pepper. If the dressing seems to be lacking, add more calamansi juice or vinegar.

Suggestions

1. Serve the pasta in a large bowl and top with a basil branch.
2. This pasta is perfect for potlucks because heating it up is not an issue. This can be served cold or room temperature.
3. Play around with the ingredients:
• Pasta – aside from farfalle (bow-tie), you can use: orecchiette (litte ears), conchiglie (shells), ruote (wheels), fusilli (corkscrew), penne, or macaroni.
• Legumes – aside from black beans, you can use: kidney beans, cannelini / white beans, lima beans, chickpeas / garbanzos, lentils, even mongo.
• Vegetables – you can use: cucumber, julienned carrots, singkamas, roasted eggplant, etc.
• Herbs – aside from basil, you can use: cilantro (wansoy), rosemary, tarragon, parsley, dill.
• Acid – aside from calamansi juice, you can use: lemon, lime, or even vinegar such as cane, coconut, balsamic, or red wine.

Vegan MoFo fail + news shmews

Hey Vegan MoFo'ers, sorry for my embarrassing Vega MoFo performance. Nine MoFo's is really sad. But I have a good excuse. I was busy all October trying to help victims of Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. So things got busy. Which is too bad, because I wanted to blog about awesome things, like:












My lentil and quinoa Sunday lunch, which Francis seemed to like.

Vegan food activism in the office which you can definitely do at least once a year or when it's your birthday and your coworkers require you to feed them. In this case, it's a farfalle and black bean salad which I believe knocked their omni socks off.

Being vegan in Hong Kong, which was hecka easy.

And other non-MoFo topics, like despedida food!

Despedida meal #1 at Healthy Kitchen in Serendra; featured: fresh Thai spring rolls.

Despedida meal #2 at Som's, Rockwell; featured: Pad Thai.

Despedida dinner at home with the family; featured: tomato and aubergine linguini.

Why despedida? Well I temporarily closed up my baking shop and resigned from my real job because I'm gonna be away from home for at least half a year... I'm going to culinary school in New York! Which is another reason why I've been neglecting this blog -- I have been busy with work, baking and getting ready for school. I'm excited for this new adventure because I can't wait to seriously hit the culinary scene.

Watch out Manila, I'm gonna set you on vegan fire!

Vegan birthday lunch with the parents: Vegan MoFo #4

Ugh, it's just one of those days where you bake til 1am and you wanna take a bath but you're too tired to get off the chair...

So yesterday was my official birthday and the parents were nice enough to take me out to lunch in Power Plant Mall in Rockwell. Lucky for me, Power Plant has a few good restaurants with vegan options. One of my favorite restaurants there is Wild Ginger, which I've mentioned before in this post. It's not a fancy schmancy restaurant, it just has a good selection of Filipino, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Indian food.

First up: fresh Vietnamese spring rolls with spicy peanut sauce. It was good, not great. If only they added purple basil or cilantro inside the roll. The roll contained vermicelli noodles, lettuce, cucumber, and carrot.

Spicy tofu peanut salad. This is one salad that did not suck. Very few leaves, lots of fresh bean sprouts, julienned cucumber and jicama, fried tofu, and cilantro in a spicy peanut dressing.

One of my favorite sandwiches: spinach and dal chapati. This time it came with curry sauce on the side. This is usually served with yogurt sauce, so tell your server you want a coconut milk-based curry sauce.

And, the highlight of my lunch! Back story: I haven't had ice cream since January and I've been dying to get my hands on some. I made the mistake once of ordering a vanilla soy milkshake from Chimara in Greenbelt. People, please don't waste your money on Chimara soy anything, it is not good. This is the kind of stuff omnivores make fun of vegans for. I once tried their strawberry ice cream, blech!

I was told that a certain Italian restaurant named Pazzo served vegan gelato. The sad thing is, Pazzo is right in Power Plant, in the Rockwell Center where I work. And for the 2 years I've been working for my company, not once did I try Pazzo's gelato. I deprived myself of ice cream for 10 months for NOTHING.

Pazzo didn't have vegan gelato yesterday but they did have sorbet, which was naturally vegan, IN A WHOLE ARRAY OF FLAVORS. Strawberry, lychee, watermelon, lemon, limoncello and lovely tropical flavors such as calamansi, guava, and pomelo.

I got to taste pretty much all the available sorbet flavors and I ended up choosing a scoop each of lemon and pomelo. It sure was nice to taste some icy, fruity goodness.

Good lunch :)

A salad that doesn't suck for vegans: Vegan MoFo #2

Edited to add: I just reread this entry and man oh man did I have a lot of grammatical errors. That's what you get when you blog at 3am...

I know there are vegans out there who LOOOOOVE their salads. Some eat one at least once a day. Sorry guys, I'm not one of you. Quite frankly I detest salads. If I'm in a very veg-unfriendly restaurant I'm usually served a couple of leaves with tomatoes, onion, and store-bought dressing. I've been vegetarian for almost 2 years now (anniv on October 8, woohoo!) and in that span I've had a couple of really bad salads.

There must be wrong with chefs out there. For some reason they think that vegetarians would be perfectly happy with a salad that was unethusiastically put together. So, no actual edible vegetarian food on menus except for the boring salad. The sad thing is, salads can be lovely to look at and to eat -- no restauranteur wants to invest in them because they'd rather focus on the meat.

Don't get me wrong, there will be times when I would enjoy a salad as long as the salad is interesting. I love my salads with lots of color and lots of vegetables. I'm not a big fan of the leaves but of the concept of a hearty mixture of veggies.

I made this salad back in September but never got around to blog about it. But check out the picture. Now, wouldn't you want to consume it? I've never come across a salad that interesting in this country. If you have, do let me know, I'd want to check the restaurant out.

What a salad should have so it doesn't suck:

1. Color. Even the salad greens shouldn't be all green. Check out the varieties with purple leaves. Raise your hand if you hate iceburg lettuce. Add reds with tomatoes, orange with carrots, yellow with peppers, purple with eggplant and Thai basil.
   
2. Texture. An all leaf salad is just that, all leaves. Add crunch with bell pepers, carrots and jicama, tenderness with roasted eggplant, juiciness with tomatoes.
3. Flavor. Leaves have a fresh taste, but you can add even more freshness with bell peppers. Any baked vegetable gives it smokiness too, such as roasted peppers or eggplant.
4. Herbs. They aren't just for sauces or marinades. Herbs really play up the gourmet factor for cheaps. I added dill in mine, and the large bundle I bought from the grocery store that day was P6!!! I also like lots of parsley, basil, cilantro / wansoy, tarragon.
5. A good vinaigrette. I get tired of vinegar + oil dressings with no thought given to their flavor. Add herbs to your dressing to make it more flavorful. I like thyme with lemon, cilantro with lime. I've tried dill with balsamic vinegar, not a bad combination. Play up the acid! There are so many vinegars out there that isnt' your regular red balsamic. I've tried white balsamic and it's fruitier and less acidic than the red. Kalamansi is great for tropic salads. Mix in some fruit in the dressing such as mango. Adding jam to your dressing also tones done the acidity. Try some ideas here and here.
6. Wildcard ingredient. Make your salad definitely not boring with toasted nuts, dried fruit, fresh fruit (I love apples, mango, and suha / pommelo in salads), beans (flavored with dressing).
   

If you're an omnivore / restauranteur and reading this, give your vegetarian friend / customer a break and make her a salad that doesn't suck.

Overdue post about stuff I've made + out for Holy Thursday - Easter

Wow, seems like it's been awhile since I've blogged... Hmm, I reckon it's been 2 weeks? And 5 weeks since I've talked about actual food! Truth be told I've been busy with actual baking, actual work (i.e. my real job), and catching up on my favorite shows. I've been watching marathons of The Office, which is my absolute favorite TV comedy. I can watch that show all day everyday and not get bored... My new favorite obsession is True Blood. Well I love the Dracula legend and anything that stems from it.

I am also currently watching The Godfather for the very first time. I got around to readind the book end of last year and I loooove Mario Puzo. Been pining to watch the movies and am glad I'm finally watching them.

Anyway, on with the food.

My last food-related blog was about indoor grilling which I utilized in making this dish -- a toasted couscous salad with chickpeas, zucchini and bell peppers. This was my second time to make couscous, I love it! It's easy to make and people who look and eat it are easily impressed, since who in this country makes couscous in their home? I was going to make a separate blog post about this but I've been lazy -- I mean, busy watching my shows. It basically has toasted cooked couscous, chickpeas (canned), lemon zest, caramelized shallots, basil chiffonade, and grilled zucchini and peppers. The dressing is just lemon juice, olive oil, grated raw garlic, and salt and pepper.

This is a picture of the first savory dish I sold back in mid-February. It's a farfalle and black bean salad with yellow peppers and tomatoes, with a mango-cilantro vinaigrette. A big hit! Wish I took a more appealing photo...

Vanilla cupcakes with lime buttercream. Remember how I would sometimes bake a cake to get rid of excess frosting? Well I do the same (getting rid of frosting) by baking mini cupcakes. Again vanilla is a perfect neutral flavor to any kind of frosting (usually).

Err... This is a vanilla cupcake with chocolate buttercream. Unfortunatley it looks like crap on a cupcake, hence the attempt to make them look more festive with the nonpareils. What do you think -- fail?


I'm a so-so fan of chocolate chip cookies. However I am a big fan of coconut chocolate chip cookies. Here they're made extra-coconutty with virgin coconut oil and muscovado sugar. Heaven.

New favorite cupcake -- the banoffee cupcake. Essentially, a banana cupcake topped with coffee buttercream and encrusted with homemade toffee bits.

Random cupcake porn -- red velvet cupcakes and carrot cake cupcakes.

And, favorite cupcake #2 -- banana cupcakes with peanut buttercream!

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Last year during Holy Week I did some missionary work in Tingloy Island in Batangas. This year it's not a whole week but rather Thursday to Sunday, and not in Tingloy but somewhere in Rizal. I am going to miss the Tingloy kids :( But, I hear they switched to Rizal because it's easier to reach via car while with Tingloy one has to take the bus to the Batangas deck then take a wooden banca to Tingloy. Apparently some parents are still too queasy to let their "little girls" ride a boat to a different island. It was an amazing experience, am hoping this time it'll be amazing as well. I'm planning to subsist on canned chickpeas, cereal, soymilk, and bananas.

For the record, I'm no saint... I mean, I try my best to be a good person -- being vegan is definitely a part of it. I am not super religious, but it's Holy Week and I'm Catholic, so I look at it as an opportunity to do some sacrifice and spend time with my poor countrymen. Wish me luck!

Braving a cold winter's night with soup + classy impromptu salad dressing #2

Last Christmas day my family and I trekked over to Lake Tahoe for our first time to experience snow (!!!!). My dad rented a cabin "that could comfortably fit 10-12 people" but in reality could've fit 20. Seriously, there are residential cabins out there that could house 20 people. Anyway all ten of us plus my three cousins made the trip at around 4pm on December 25 and arrived there at around 9:30. It was EXTREMELY cold but we enjoyed every moment of it, especially because we got to snowboard!

What we did NOT enjoy was our first night. So arriving at the driveway we had to shovel the snow off the garage door. Then we entered a 49 degree F / 9 degree C (if I can recall correctly) house, tired, hungry, cold, and cranky. The heater was broken. We literally could see the fog coming out of our mouths when we breathed. We had to wear our winter clothes inside the house.

My mom cooking in her parka. Nice.

While some of the boys tried to figure out the heater issue my mom and I decided to cook some dinner. We didn't have much supplies... To be frank I wasn't in the mood to open a can of beans and chop onions. Everyone was cold and the only thing that could've helped us was soup. We didn't have any soup supplies except for...

Excuse the ugliness and the extremely not vegan taxedermied snake in the background. The snake came with the house.

Behold the V8 vegetable juice. We bought this because my American cousins don't eat enough vegetables (sorry guys, potatoes aren't really vegetables) and American restaurants don't serve 'em. During my stay in the US I drank this everyday so I could get a dose of veggies and vitamins. Anyway we ended up making fake soup: V8 juice gently simmered with Italian spices, chili pepper, salt and pepper. I think I may have added powdered garlic (too cold to peel and chop fresh). All the spices were found in the kitchen cupboard.









Too simple to make, it shouldn't even be blog-worthy. But it had a cold-winter's-night story so I thought I'd share. Moral of the story: always make sure you have V8 juice on you in case you're stranded in a freezing cabin.

We brought some Boy Bawang (extremely garlicky deep fried corn kernels) from home which made an excellent crouton-like topping. Yum with the ever dependable white rice.

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The next night after a full day of snowboarding I had to make salad dressing. We were in the middle of winter and all my mom got for veggies were salad greens. With no dressing.

Something good always comes out of a salad dressing dilemma, I always say.

This time the only acid on hand was bottled orange juice and the sweetener, strawberry jam. Orange juice isn't as tart as kalamansi juice so we had to add a good dose of salt. It was a good "gourmet-tasting" dressing.

Strawberry Citrus Salad Dressing
1/4 cup orange juice
1 heaping tablespoon of strawberry jam
1-2 cloves of garlic, grated
1/2 to 3/4 cup olive oil, to taste
salt and pepper to taste

Add the juice, jam, and garlic in a small bowl and whisk together -- try to break up the clumps of strawberry with the whisk. Slowly pour in the olive oil while whisking the whole mixture together. Add salt and pepper to taste. If still too sweet, add more oil or splashes of water.

Me making the dressing with Pop, my oil pourer. I had to keep on wearing a beanie to hide my Medusa hat hair.

Hmmm I think this is my last Christmas entry! Finally. Now I can get on with more current stuff.

Bro #6 enjoying the sun and cool air on our way back to the Bay area.

Impromptu Salad Dressing with Class: Vegan MoFo #3

Today I had lunch at my tita's / aunt's house with my tita's in-laws visiting from Australia. The thing is, this house had an empty fridge. All that was inside the fridge was fruit, jam, some bottled sauces, and butter. We had a lovely salad with sliced apples but no salad dressing. What to do?

I ended up having a go at making the dressing with ingredients that I found around the kitchen. Turned out to be a fortunate accident because I discovered this awesome dressing that wowed the Australians. It's pretty versatile too. The dressing was essentially made up of: an acid, sweetener, salt and pepper, garlic, and oil.

Depending on what you have on hand, your acid can be kalamansi juice, orange juice, lemon juice, lime juice, pineapple juice, even vinegar. The sweetener can be sugar, molasses, a liquid sweetener (steer clear of high fructose corn syrup, please); in my case, I used jam, homemade mango jam to be precise (yes I belong to one of those families where preserved fruit recipes -- mango, banana, santol, etc -- aren't written down and are passed down via oral tradition). There are a ton of jams you could use: strawberry, blueberry, grape, mangosteen, guava, even marmalade and applesauce. The jam helps with the emulsification too. As with the oil, you can use any oil you got on hand; we only had sesame oil in the cupboard, so that's what I used.

Mango Sesame Dressing

1/4 cup + 2 tbsp kalamansi juice

2 heaping tbsp of mango jam (preferably homemade; check out a recipe here)

1/4 cup + 1 tbsp sesame oil

2 garlic cloves, grated

salt and pepper to taste

2 tbsp water (optional)

Throw everything into an empty glass jar and shake well until emulsified. If too tart, you can add a bit of water.

The dressing was too darn easy to make and it was different. I mean, it wasn't your run of the mill balsamic house dressing, or some vinaigrette. Sometimes it's nice to mix and match the dressings you have at home.

There are so many permutations to this recipe. You can easily do the following combinations: lemon-strawberry, orange-blueberry, lime-maple syrup, pineapple-guava, lemon-apple, etc. etc. As with the oil, you can use any neutral vegetable, extra virgin olive oil, even virgin coconut oil.

I'm really not a big salad eater only because most restaurants with crap veg options usually only have leaves and tomatoes (aka "salad") as their sole vegetarian dish. If I was forced to eat dinner in a place that only had a salad, and the salad was leaves and tomatoes and balsamic dressing, I'd rather eat nothing. I am so tired of plain salads!

Sometimes the dressing really makes an impact on the salad and turns a crap salad into an awesome salad.