May 2014

From May 23, 2014, to May 28, 2014, I was fortunate enough to attend Victoria Moran’s Main Street Vegan Academy.  This intensive 5 day course trains students to become certified Vegan Lifestyle Coaches and Educators (VLCE). Victoria gathered some of the best vegan educators to help conduct the course.  Our instructors, in addition to Victoria, included Dr. Robert Ostfeld, Jennifer Gannett, Sharon Nazarian, Joshua Katcher, Marty Davey, JL Fields,  Chef Fran Costigan, Jasmin Singer, Mariann Sullivan, Robert Notter, Michael Parrish DuDell and Robert Cohen.  Each person who spoke to us was truly a master of his or her subject. We were instruced on everything from animal rights to performing cooking demonstrations to setting up our own coaching businesses.  It is truly a fast paced, information packed course. As stated on the MSVA website, the topics covered during the session were: • History and philosophy of veganism • Basics of plant-based nutrition •

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During the summer, I like to grill as often as possible.  In fact, when I am a t barbecue, I am often appointed grill master for the evening and take over all grilling duties.  When I became vegan, I didn’t think I would be grilling again, aside from vegetables anyway.  But I loved my grill and I was not giving it up. I just needed to figure out what to grill.  Tofu was a logical thing to try. It just needed a good marinade. I got some tofu, put in into my teriyaki marinade and voila!  Success.  My days of grilling were far from over.  This recipe will even get the “I don’t like tofu” people to love tofu. The longer you let this marinate, the better. You want the flavors really getting into the tofu. Prep Time: 10 miuntes, plus at least 1 hour to marinade Cooking Time: 8

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This recipe came to me from a former co-worker at my first job out of law school.  We were working on a large anti-trust document review project and we all sat at the table in a conference room for 10 hours a day, every day for 5 weeks. Everyone brought his or her lunch to work as we didn’t have enough time to go and buy lunch somewhere, bring it back to the office and eat. The work was dull, but the working environment was great. One day, one of my co-workers brought in a huge container of sesame noodles to share with everyone. They were fantastic. I asked her for the recipe, which she readily shared. In fact, I still have the orginial paper she copied it on to. It stands out in my recipe binder as it is on pink paper from the photocopier at the office. The original recipe

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  As we all know, being vegan does not mean missing out on delicious food.  With the abundance of vegan desserts available, there is no need to ever skip the most important meal of the day, dessert.  Here is a quick and easy recipe for chocolate mouse that uses on 3, yes 3, ingredients.  Not possible, you say.  Totally possible.  Not only possible, deliciously rich and creamy. The trick here is making sure your bowl is ice cold.  If you have an handheld mixer, this is very fast.  If you are using a wisk, it takes a little time, but you’ll get a great arm workout.  Aside from being creulty free, the best thing about this dessert is it is fool proof.  At the end of the recipe are ways to handle any problems that you may have. And if you want to take this to the next level, serve

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Very rarely do new kitchen experiments work right off the bat. Sure, if I am veganizing a recipe of mine, I can usually do on the first shot. But a new recipe idea I have never tried before? That is going to take some work. Sometimes it is close, but needs tweaking; other times, it can be a complete flop. However, every now and then I have a kitchen event that is such an epic disaster I can only laugh about it after the horror is gone. What follows is one of those moments involving chocolate…  (and for those of you who were there in 2006 for the Chocolate Spin Art, that is not the event I am talking about.  The rest of you are really intrigued by that now, aren’t you?)  But I digress: Picture it, New York City, 2005: Ethan had done a day trip to Albany to see

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One night when trying to come up with an idea for dinner I was stumped. It had been a long day and I was not up for cooking anything. I figured I would just make some pasta and sauce and call it a night. But I knew that as much as I like that, I would still be hungry and not fully sated. So I looked at what I could do with it and saw the answer in the freezer.  As for where the name came from, that is all Ethan.  One of his nicknames for our dog Phoebe is Kooka.  For some reason, when I made this, the name Pasta Chick’n Kooka just sort of fit. This is really a jazzed up version of pasta with red sauce. This is a great dish for kids; they all love pasta and chick’n fingers, so why not put them together in

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