Day 3 - Soupe au Pistou

I took two years of French in high school and a couple more in my earlier college days. The gorgeous, intricate language and delicious carb-y food fueled my desire to learn about and visit France. For school potlucks, I made eclairs, earning me the "most popular when it comes to food" title. While IN France, I gorged on delicious baguettes and amazing espresso. The country's food (at least, the veggie friendly sorts) hold me in its grasp, beckoning me to recreate it and take a vegan spin on the dishes I wouldn't touch in their normal state.

If I must be honest, I had never heard of soupe au pistou until I searched for traditional French recipes for MoFo. The word pistou I recognized, but only because of J. Scone's post on this delicious sounding dish. As I read the ingredients, I thought "oh, this sounds like minestrone! But with pesto! WIN."

I used Wolfgang Puck's recipe, seen here. It's vegan minus the crouton thingies he's got going on, but Grand Central stepped up and held up nicely in the hot soup. 

(this photo is awful. Pretend that it's not)

And it was. My husband gives it two thumbs up. He actually said, "I like this better than your minestrone, which I love. So, make it more."

I cut the recipe in half to make three generous servings. It's almost gone.

Day 2 - A Giveaway.

Do you ever have a grand idea that backfires? This happened to me last night, when I tried to make pain au chocolat.

I used the recipe from Vegan Brunch. I saw phyllo dough in the ingredients and thought, ok, that's a little strange, but I trust Isa. I made just 3 (they were huge!) and waited 15 minutes to try it.

Folks, that is phyllo wrapped chocolate. Not the buttery, warm, delicious pocket of dark chocolate I remembered. This week, a real pain au chocolat will happen, and it won't be made of sadness.

While I get over my disappointment, I thought I'd have a giveaway. I have 3 So Delicious coupon booklets, 3 coupons for a free Earth Balance Mindful Mayo spread and 3 coupons for a free Earth Balance Coconut Spread. I've tried both the Mayo and the Spread and they are delicious! And coconut milk, c'mon.

Tell me your latest letdown and I'll choose a winner on Wednesday! This is open worldwide, providing that the cost of mailing a letter isn't too terribly expensive (I am broke, dudes).

ps, if you don't win this time, I will be having giveaways each week of this stuff!

Vegan Mofo Day 1

Welcome to Day 1!

The blogs racking up in my Google reader are astounding. I love this event, it brings such a feeling of community to the blog world. This time of year I also save so many recipes to try out myself, I never touch them!

Like I said, this year I will be focusing on cooking for a couple of different countries. My first week will be spent exploring France. When I was in France, we cooked in our little apartment for the most part, so I'm excited to try some food I wasn't able to eat the first time around. I'm definitely going to try my hand at pain au chocolat, French baguettes, soup au pisou and a not-beef bourguignon. We'll see what other goodies I can throw in there.

This year I'm also holding my first set of giveaways! I have lots of goodies to share with the world, so get ready.

Today I'll be spending the day at a Fresh Hops Fest in Hood River, so you'll just have to wait and see what is going to happen first!

MOFO!

Eeee! It's almost here!

Vegan MoFo is a month (this year, October!) dedicated to blogging about vegan food. Bloggers are asked to post at least 5 times a week but some post more, some post less. The point of the the whole event is to bombard the internets with delicious vegan food and just how much variety this lifestyle holds.

This will be my third year of participating in Vegan Mofo! I will definitely post at least 5 days a week but I am determined to post every. single. day. My theme? Each week will be dedicated to a different country that we've visited and its cuisine. I will veganize and/or make already established vegan recipes from each nationality. I figure since I can't fly away last minute, spending a lot of time in the kitchen will be more practical.

The countries I've chosen are France, Italy, Germany, Scotland and Ireland. If you have any suggestions, please send them my way! I'm currently constructing an outline of my plan of attack.

Are you participating?

Sticky in Frankfurt

The next day, we made our way to Frankfurt. If Salzburg was Portland’s sister in weirdness, Frankfurt was Portland’s twin in looks.

Not only was Frankfurt hot, it was incredibly humid. Like I’ve mentioned, we don’t have a whole lot of humidity in the NW, so I was a little (a LOT) uncomfortable. I tried not to let it ruin our time there, but I will say I broke down and bought a 7 euro dress and shitty flip flops in desperation. The couple we met in Munich told us that Frankfurt was mostly good for shopping, and they weren’t lying! The malls (!) were huge. At one point we spotted a Columbia Sportswear store, PDX represent!

Our hostel was very close to the train station, but you had to walk through the Red Light district to get to it. The district is not nearly as safe as the one in Amsterdam. There were a lot of shady, angry men stalking around, keeping an eye on their “employees” and a severe lack of police. To get into our hostel, we had to be buzzed inside and then show our ID to the front desk, who would then buzz us into the stairwell. We felt very safe inside the hostel, but you kinda wonder what happened to put those security measures into place.

After dropping our stuff off, it was time to explore! Ok, and find food. We happened upon a Japanese place, where I filled up on the biggest, most delicious bowl of veggies, tofu and noodles. Believe it or not, you can get sick of pizza. But apparently, we don’t get sick of beer.

After our lunch we set out to explore. Frankfurt was a last minute addition to our trip, so we didn’t have an itinerary whatsoever. It turns out that the Women’s World Cup was taking place all over Germany and Frankfurt had an awesome viewing party going on at the waterfront.

We did manage to find the touristy historic quarter, where we were overcharged for beer and privy to the most awesome graffiti I have ever seen.

The rest of our time in Frankfurt was spent wandering through the various pub quarters, checking out a cute street of food carts, eating fantastic treats from a natural foods store and grimacing at the incredibly loud Americans staying at our hostel.

 

Our last day in Frankfurt was really our last day in Europe. We hopped the trains to Brussels, making a stop in windy Cologne along the way. We gawked at the ENORMOUS cathedral and drank some of the most delicious nectar I’ve ever had, Gaffel Kolsch. I asked our server where I could buy one of these delicate Kolsch glasses and he replied, “Oh, I see nothing,” and walked away. I managed to get it home without breaking it, but it barely lasted a month before I managed to knock it to the ground.

My next post will be a follow up on eating vegan in these beautiful cities and more of my thoughts on travel. I’ve had so much fun reliving our adventures and I hope that I’ve inspired somebody to get out there and explore our world!

Today.

Despite the horrible war and all the innocent lives lost to a cause I don't believe in, 9/11 will always stand out to me as the day the world changed. In the weeks following the attacks, I could not get over how much American citizens reached out to one another, proudly displayed our nation's flag and supported New York City in their time of suffering. The attacks may have been only on the East coast, but the pain reverberated throughout our country.

I'm not the one to hype up the USA in any way or form, especially after how the country responded (war) but this video broke my heart. I feel it's a video that could only be made here. Despite the shit going on in the Middle East, we DO have heroes here at home, heroes that rushed in to those burning towers to save lives and for the most part lost their own. Heroes that didn't even think twice.

For that, I am eternally grateful.

Recharged.

Our last few days spent in Germany were wiled away in Rothenberg ob der Tauber and Frankfurt. The former is an incredibly well preserved medieval town, the latter a city surprisingly reminiscent of Portland that I will explore all over again with you tomorrow.
  
Rothenberg is a gorgeous town that we likened to an adult Disneyland. The houses (actually, all the buildings) were built in the beautiful Bavarian style and the streets were small and cobbled. The wall that surrounds the city was bombed in World War II and has since been rebuilt and honors those that donated with plaques inscribed with their name and hometown.

We spent two nights in Rothenberg and, for the most part, it was peaceful. If you were to visit, be prepared to either shop or be bored out of your mind. The walking tours suggested take up only a small part of the day and there really isn’t a whole lot to do outside of that. There were a lot of student groups (which we found out why later) and older couples strolling through the streets. I’m pretty sure we were the youngest ones there that were NOT part of a group.

The morning after we arrived, we were lunching on pizza (surprise?) and heard what sounded like cannons going off. And then marching type music. We finished our lunch and went to investigate. There was a parade! We had no idea at the time, but Rothenberg was hosting music ambassadors from the US.  We watched for a bit and then followed the parade route to find out there was a Volksfest happening outside the town wall.

Wandering through the Volkfest, we marveled at how similar it was to American fairs. Until we came to the beer garden.

Oh yes. A giant beer tent was set up, complete with German size steins and traditional music. We picked the most awesome of weekends to come to Rothenberg. We ended up visiting the beer garden twice that day as there really wasn’t much else to do in Rothenberg besides the Night Watchman tour, which we missed. We ended up wandering the walls the rest of the day and part of that night and took some pretty photos. I think I’m making it sound as if we were bored out of our minds, but I feel Rothenberg was the perfect town to stop and take a breath.