Putting the finishing touches on the salad

Thank you so much to everyone who came to the Let Live Conference benefit dinner and to everyone who helped prepare and serve it. Especially Katie and Jessie from Sweetpea and Lisa for lending the kitchen to us for the night. I learned so much about my cohorts. Like that Katie can lift the heaviest pans in the world, as if they are cars and her babies are trapped under there. And Emiko either really loves doing dishes or has a strong work ethic. It was really gratifying to work with such goddam competent people! Dinner went off without a hitch (except for a small grease fire) and I think a good time was had by all. I actually didn’t get enough pics of the food, but one of the diners, veganaddict, got shots of everything! If anyone else got pics let me know. I got some pics of us working on stuff on other ephemera here. Edited to add: Jess of Get Sconed has a wrap up on her blog, thanks Jess!

Katie and the brownie batter

And now down to business. This weekend the actual conference is happening and I am so excited about it! All of the workshops and speakers look incredibly enticing. And I don’t just say that because I am one of them, check these out: Organizing Grassroots Groups with Lauren Ornelas, Nathan Runkle and J. Johnson (because sometimes we’re sitting around with our friends doing nothing), Solo Activism with Veda Stram and Mark Hawthorne (cause sometimes we have no vegan friends!), Verbal Self Defense with Pulin Modi (because sometimes people are mean), Becoming the Media and Getting Creative with Jessie Duquette, Glenn Goetz Gaetz and one Josh Hooten (because making our own media is fun!), Researching Animal Abuse with Peter Young and Nathan Runkle (because information is power and Peter Young is cute!), Exposing the Green Scare with Will Potter, Lauren Regan and David Hayden (because skateboarding shouldn’t be a crime, but driving a car should! And I’m sure all the presenters are cute, too.) Food Fight has posted the entire schedule in PDFs in both long and short formats. Check them out and register today!

My workshop on culinary activism will be on Sunday at 2:30 in room 238. I hope to see you there!

EDIT: This event has sold out, thanks everyone! 

There’s only 5 tickets left at the community table for the Let Live benefit dinner. Stop shuffling your feet! Get in there so that Jason Das has someone to sit with.

Fizzle says not to miss this!

EDIT: This event has sold out, thanks everyone! 

Join me at Sweetpea Bakery for a 4 course dinner to benefit Portland’s Let Live Animal Rights Conference. A few Sweetpea staffers and I will be transforming the bakery into a candlelit bistro for the evening and serving a seasonal, organic, intimate, four course vegan dinner for 40. I’ll even be using herbs from my garden, that’s how local we do. Please see all the info below the menu for ticket purchasing info, and I bet any other questions you have will be answered. If not, then email me at postpunkkitchen@gmail.com. Thanks everyone, I’m excited to cook for you and I hope to see you there.

Menu

Soup
Spicy Cream of Sweet Potato with Lime
A creamy puree of sweet potatoes and a little parsnip, with a kick of lime and chili

Salad
Jicama Salad in Citrus Vinaigrette
A Thai inspired salad of crisp, sweet jicama in a tangy vinaigrette of orange, lemon and grapefruit. Served with grilled and chilled asparagus and garnished with beansprouts, cilantro and roasted peanuts

Main
Blackened Seitan With Corn Pudding And Chocolate Chili Mole
Cajun rubbed blackened homemade seitan and grilled zucchini over a sweet and savory creamy corn pudding, with a mild chocolate chili mole

Dessert
Raspberry Brownie And Vanilla Ice Cream
A warm raspberry brownie with chocolate drizzle, raspberry sauce and vanilla ice cream

Homemade ginger lemonade will be served. Please bring your own beer and wine.

When:
Wednesday, June 18th. Please arrive between 7pm and 7:30, dinner will be served at 8pm.

Where:
Sweetpea Bakery
1205 SE Stark off SE 12th Ave
Google Map

Ticket Prices
Since seating limited, you must buy tickets in advance to attend the night’s festivities. Tickets are a sliding scale, from 40 to 100 dollars. Diners who pay 100 dollars will receive a signed copy of my cookbook, Veganomicon. All proceeds go to The Let Live Conference, and anything left over will go towards local grassroots vegan organizations.

To Purchase Tickets
To purchase tickets, paypal 40 to 100 dollars. Print out your thank you email, this will be your ticket when you arrive to the dinner.

Seating
If you are buying tickets for more than yourself, please put their names in the paypal comments and a table will be arranged for you. If you would like to sit with people in addition to the ones you are purchasing tickets for, please put their names in the comments as well, and let me know that you want to sit with them. If you are flying solo, you may end up sitting with strangers. But we promise that they will be fascinating strangers.

Allergies And Substitutions
If you require a gluten free dinner, your entree will change to tofu and your dessert will change to a gluten free brownie. If you have a peanut allergy, the peanuts in your salad will be replaced with cashews. Please email me at postpunkkitchen@gmail.com if you have any other questions. You must put your dietary concerns in the paypal comments in order to be accommodated.

Alcohol
Please bring your own beer and wine.

Any other questions? Just email me! postpunkkitchen@gmail.com. Thanks!

Despite my Brooklyn Jewish roots, I’ve never been to Florida. But next March I am going to do some cooking classes on this Taste Of Health cruise. I’m not suggesting any one should take the cruise for that reason, I’m just saying that the reason I said yes was so I could meat meet Dirk Benedict from the A-Team. If only everyone had their priorities so straight.

From the list of presenters…will he be making gluten free cupcakes with me?

Farm Sanctuary’s online auction is a go. And yeah, they have other awesome stuff, like a visit to Sarah Silverman’s set, but really, aren’t I just kind of a chubby vegan Sarah Silverman who cooks for you? Does Sarah Silverman cook for you?!

So go bid on me. Although I will totally understand if I get outbid by Pee Wee Herman. Anything to make this little guy quit torturing us with cuteness.

Coffee And White Russian ice cream, from Wheeler’s Black Label Vegan Ice Cream

And I mean the best ice cream you’ve (n)ever had. And it wasn’t just chocolate and vanilla or (god forbid) hemp and carob. Our choices were rum raisin, peanut butter, pumpkin and white russian, which tasted like a luscious liqueur spiked vanilla latte - only in creamy frozen form with a generous handful of white chocolate chips.

The namesake of the ice cream first made the ice cream in… god, he told me the whole story and I forgot. He either went to Harvard or MIT where they built replicas of 19th century ice cream makers. I think that’s why the texture of this ice cream is so slammin’, he built his own forking machine!

Judging from the highly uninformative website, the ice cream will be available in Boston sometime in November. This was their first business venture out. But I expect that he won’t have any problems getting it out to the masses sometime soon.

[stuff about cupcake drama deleted]

Other than that, we sold copies of Veganomicon like hotcakes and met lots of people that we had only known from the internet. Of course, we mostly stuck to our NYC friends who had a hard time figuring out how to use a cookbook.

Jason from supervegan.com and jimb and evelyn from veganfriendly.com, otherwise known as our friends.

We got some quality time with Lauren and Josh and picked up some promotional mini-book previews of Vegan Yum Yum. They are both coming down today for an event at Moo Shoes*, so we plan on getting even more quality time. In fact, maybe too much quality time. I’m beginning to feel like I need my space.

*That event is Josh reading from the latest issue of Herbivore. You should come and check out Moo Shoes’ new space. And, fine, listen to Josh’s reading, too. I think it starts at 8pm, but I can’t find the info on their site.

Terry and I are going to be at Boston Vegetarian Food Festival this Saturday with signed copies of Veganomicon. We’ll be at a table with Josh from Herbivore, and lolo from VeganYumYum. In other words, we’ll be at the most drunkest*, deranged and debauching table. We’ll be swiping goji berry juice samples out of people’s hands and pocketing vegan donuts. Stop by!

*God, just kidding! I don’t even drink and you should know that.

Olivia and Jessica selling raffle tickets for setting yourself on fire. Feds lurk in the background, dressed as farm animals. Like, duh, we’re on to you.

Okay, guys. We need some serious self-reflection as a movement. What happened at the Farm Sanctuary Walk For Animals can never happen again! This is how stuff always goes down and we are making little to no progress. Below are my suggestions for things that can be done differently next time.

1) Did we really need to flip over that hot dog cart? Yes, it was a daring daylight action, I’ll give you that. But what did it really accomplish? Those hot dogs are just going to be replaced with other hot dogs and now the hot dog vendor hates vegans and will probably never go vegan. And I had actually been outreaching him for a few weeks now, I think he was about to go at least pesco.

2) The walking on all fours thing. That was sort of…creepy? I don’t know, I understand wanting to be in solidarity with our non-human brothers and sisters, but it still came off as speciesist. Some animals walk on 2 legs, you know. Some don’t even walk. I think the point was lost on everyone.

3) When was the last time slapping milk bottles out of baby’s hands ever changed anything? Besides, we don’t know for sure that it was cow’s milk in those bottles and we…wait, one sec. BRB.

Oh, okay, the lab tests just came back and it was confirmed to be cow’s milk. But my original point still stands.

4) We are against the horse carriage rides. Why were people “liberating” the pedicab cyclists?

5) Nice to say that we were all going to set ourselves on fire afterwards and then look around to see who else was setting themselves on fire and when you see that no one else was because they were looking around to see who else was doing it and so you don’t set yourself on fire. So, fine, no one set themselves on fire. But you can not then go around setting everyone else on fire except for yourself!

I don’t know, the examples just go on and on. I am really dismayed and just feeling a general lack of unity, support and respect. See the carnage for yourself then tell me if you think I am overreacting.

Way to straighten up for the media. Also, nice dirty apron.

This article features just about everyone in the vegan baking world, but the picture is of me so that’s all that matters. Because I am narcissistic to compensate for my low self esteem. In any case, even without me, it is a really nice article about vegan baking for the Associated Press, which will get lots of exposure. So yay.

That’s quite a manicure, Moskowitz.

There’s also a recipe for Orange Chocolate Chip Biscotti that goes along with the article, but strangely they aren’t in the same news pieces.

Have a great weekend, everyone! I hope to see you at the NYC Walk For Farm Animals on Sunday. And visit the blog on Monday for the next Veganomicon giveaway!

Terry and I demo’ed a recipe at the BBG Chile Fest yesterday and although rife with drama (or maybe because it was rife with drama) it was a good time. The first weird part was that there was no one to introduce us - a fend for yourself sort of thing. The second weird part was that it was outdoors and there was no amplification. So everyone was shouting for us to talk louder (mostly my mom that traitor!) and there were planes flying overhead.

I implore the masses to go vegan 

At one point my pushy pregnant sister actually came up to the front, got up in my grill (no pun intended) and told us we had to talk louder and we had a big sister fight in front of everyone. Somehow Terry and I still managed to complete the recipe - Yucca Latkes with Chocolate Chile Mole and Apple Salsa. The samples we prepared ahead of time came out cold but that didn’t seem to stop anyone.

Anyway, I love the gardens and I it was great to be able to do the demo but from now on I am going to make sure that our demos have mics, because shouting and cooking is no fun. My spies told me that people were whispering “You can’t have Hannukah without eggs!” Yeah, just watch us!

Yucca Latkes with Chocolate Chile Mole and Apple Salsa