I’ve been staying at my mom’s little exposed brick studio on the Upper East Side which means a tiny dormitory fridge that opens the wrong way and a Holly Hobby stove wherein your butt is touching the counter behind you when you try to cook. All of this translates to very little cooking and lots of dining out. And since I’m a visitor in your fair city it also means that I’m often not footing the bill. And that means Candle 79 twice a day. Just kidding. Kind of. But when you have to share a futon with your mom don’t you kind of deserve it?

Candle 79, Mustard Something Tempeh, Wild Mushrooms, Horseradish Potato Puree, etc

 It’s stupid to get the hummus at a fancy restaurant, but I can’t resist the smoky hummus at Candle 79. You can’t beat smearing roasted garlic on grilled flatbread. Color me stupid.

This is Candle Cafe, not Candle 79. And it took every ounce of willpower not to order the Cajun Seitan Sandwich. Instead I went the wholesome 80s healthfood route with the make your own plate option. Grilled tempeh, buckwheat soba, aduki beans and steamed greens with two sauces. It hit the spot. (PS I actually took my friend out on this one, so I’m not THAT much of a cheapskate.)

This was Hangawi. I’d never been because for some reason, removing your shoes in a restaurant seems so high maintenance. I love their sister spot, Franchia, but the food here was pretty lackluster. I even heeded my friend’s advice and made sure to order only items with the spicy icon. This was the Spicy Mongolian Hot Pot. Neither spicy nor Mongolian nor…well it was in a hot pot.

My agent took this pic, and I like the pic. I didn’t like that the Pear Delight (or something) was nothing but a sliced Asian Pear. No joke! It was 7 bucks, and sliced in a really cool way, but not a 7 dollar way.  I would definitely return to Hangawi for the beautiful atmosphere, but I’ll order the surefire avocado bibimbap.

This was the surprise hit of my trip. From Gobo (the uptown locale), Grilled Oyster Mushrooms and Asparagus. Perfectly seasoned and charred. I’m all over it. 

The Benedict at Counter. A creamy sauce over a mushroom sauce over scrambled tofu over an English muffin. Not too shabby! (But mine is better.)

Chocolate Hazelnut ice cream at Stogo. Oh, and hot fudge sauce! The hand model is one Terry Hope Romero. The ice cream is simply sublime.

The stogo case, they’re great about letting you have tastes!

And of course some cheap eats at Food Swings. This is my MO: Steal some of my friend Amy’s hot wings and mac, order a chicken caesar for myself. No one gets hurt. And yay for Food Swings new ownership - a bathroom and non-disposable plates! PS Amy update your goddam blog! 

But it hasn’t been all mooching.  We also gave away some cookies and bookies at Book Expo America.

Terry, me, cookies and brunch. My infamous stupid photo kissy face!

Terry kissing Cookies

We met Fran Costigan! How cute is she!

And I gave back at the Moo Shoes Vegan Brunch launch party.

 Lots of minimuffins ready to for the grabbing hands

Sausages on toothpicks what what

Herbivore shirts, books and pumps

The Discerning Brute discerns a muffin

I’ve still got a little over a week here. This weekend I’ll be slinging BBQ seitan at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary Jamboree, so be there if you can. Other than that I look forward to reading in Central Park and wandering aimlessly around the city.

I always say that I’m not a raw person but that isn’t exactly true. When I’m in SF I’m practically tethered to Cafe Gratitude and one of the best meals I had in LA was at Cru. Brooklyn used to have a hole in the wall (almost literally) restaurant where I would enjoy soggy dehydrated pancakes. Yeah, I said soggy and enjoy in the same breath.

I think I just don’t have the patience for the preparation techniques, like dehydrating and spiral slicing. And while raw is all wonderfully healthy, I’m not positive that cooked spinach is going to kill me, despite the wacky emails I get from time to time. Luckily for us vegans, raw food is almost exclusively free of animal products and so that opens up a whole world of experimentation. I love, for example, using soaked cashews to create creaminess. In fact, many of my favorite vegan desserts have been raw. I’m just not into that vegan cheesecake, loaded with telltale, groan-worthy tofutti and confectioner’s sugar. My favorite cheesecake from Cafe Gratitude contains coconut, dates and Irish Moss. So gather your ingredients and…wait. Irish Moss?

Yeah, so I wanted to make a minimum hassle recipe that was easy enough to create from ingredients you could procure from any health food store. I scoured the internet for hints on how to go about it and I decided on my beloved soaked cashews and coconut oil. The oil is solid at room temperature so ensures that everything stays together. No special equipment needed, this cake came together in a snap. The only prep you need to do is to remember to soak the cashews in advance. Also remember that the cake will need at least 4 hours to set.

The end result was a really, really rich and creamy cake. And you’ll believe me when I say I am not rich-dessert phobic, but the cake really does serve 16. It’s got plenty of strawberry flavor and a little tang from the lime. It needed a little extra strawberry blast at the end, so I threw together a quick strawberry sauce. The crust was modified from the Cafe Gratitude desserts cookbook. I Am Pilfering. To melt your coconut oil place it in a small covered container and place that in a bowl of very hot water. Melt it right before using so that it doesn’t solidify.

Raw Strawberry Cheesecake

Serves 16

Crust
1 cup pecans
1 cup almonds
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 medjool dates, pitted and chopped

Filling
3 cups raw cashew pieces, soaked overnight (or at least 3 hours)
1/2 cup agave syrup
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (alcohol free is preferred for raw desserts)
32 oz strawberries (reserve 9 for decorating), hulled and halved - about 4 cups
3/4 cup coconut oil, melted

Raw Fluffy White Frosting Recipe
1/2 cup raw cashew pieces, soaked overnight
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons agave syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla (alcohol free is preferred for raw desserts)
1/4 cup raw coconut oil, melted

Strawberry Coulis (Coulis is a fancy word for pureed sauce)
2 cups chopped strawberries
3 tablespoons agave syrup

Lightly grease a 9 inch spring form pan with coconut oil and set aside.

To prepare the crust, pulse nuts and salt in a food processor fit with a metal blade. When nuts are fine crumbs, add the dates and pulse until the dough holds together when squeezed between your fingers. Firmly press crust into the bottom of prepared cake pan. Set aside.

To prepare the filling, pulse cashews in food processor until crumbly. Add agave, water, lime juice and vanilla and puree until very smooth, scraping down the sides with a rubber spatula to make sure you get everything. Feed the strawberries through the top of the food processor and puree until incorporated. The filling should turn a pretty pink. With the processor running, add the melted coconut oil in a steady stream.

Pour the filling into the cake pan. It will look like a smoothie and you’ll think no way it will set, but it will! Cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge to set. Make sure it’s level so that your cake doesn’t come out wonky. Let set for at least 4 hours.

Prepare the frosting in basically the same way as the cake. Pulse the cashews in the food processor until crumbly. Add the water, agave and vanilla and blend until smooth. With the food processor running, stream the coconut oil in through the top until combined. Pour into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Chill until set, about 2 hours.

Prepare the sauce when you’re close to serving. Just mash the strawberries up with the agave until it’s all red and syrupy.

To assemble
Release the cake from its springform prison. Use a mini scoop to place 8 mounds of icing around the perimeter of the cake and one in the center. Slice the tops off the reserved strawberries and gently smush them upside down into the frosting mounds. If you don’t have a mini scoop, just use a spoon and make them as pretty as you can, they’re gonna get smushed anyway.

To serve, place some Strawberry Coulis on the plate and serve the cake over it. Dig in!

Guys. My winter has been, as the Republican Party might say, “off the hook.”  I’ve been doing a lot of traveling; LA, Chicago, NYC. Right now I am chilling at my mom’s on the Upper East Side, eating as many bagels as I can get my hands on. It’s funny the things you miss when you’re away from home. I did not rush to my favorite restaurant, Candle 79, but god help the poor shmuck who stood between me and my everything bagel. This weekend we set sail for that vegan cruise thingy so let’s just see if 7 days of sunshine and vegan cupcakes can stop my mom and me from fighting.

So I’m just gonna go through my FlickR and throw some stuff at you.

This is Pizza from the Pizza Research Insitute in Eugene OR. Girlfriend, it was good. Homemade smoky vegan cheese sauce, lots of veggies and…peaches!

This is Blythe breezing bye, hurrying up to serve delicious vegan ice cream to the masses at Lula’s in NYC.

Terry eating said ice cream. Hell yes in the dead of winter!

What’s this? You don’t say? The final cover for Vegan Brunch? It couldn’t be!

I’m developing recipes for Natural Health magazine, this one is Grilled Tamarind Eggplant.  It’s going to be for the July issue, so watch for it.

Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles, for the forthcoming cookie book. These are ok, but only if you like ridiculously delicious things.

And finally, the pile of cats that I can not wait to get home to.

I’ll be at Vegan Drinks tonight if anyone would like to give me a bon voyage wedgie or anything. See you in a few weeks!

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay”

-Robert Frost

And so it goes with scrambled tofu in Brooklyn. One day it’s there, the next day the restaurant is boarded up or just plumb stopped serving it. But the good news is that new places to find it pop up all the time, and the cycle of life continues.

It’s rough all over, Ponyboy. But scrambled tofu makes it easier.

My latest pilgrimage to tofuland was Flatbush Farm. There’s a lot of hoopla surrounding this place, so I was kind of expecting something awesome. Instead I got something pretty forking good, and I can’t complain. Their scrambled tofu ($10) was from the heavily curried school of scrambles, with little flecks of red that could have been either tomato or red pepper, they were too small to tell. It came with a side of tangy stewed collards, which were melt in your mouth yummy, and whole grain grilled bread. On the side I ordered hash browns ($5) which ended up being the sleeper hit. I love when a dish makes you think, and I have to say, if it’s a potato dish that makes you think, all the better. I have no idea how they did this! It was casserolish, baked and sliced into thick wedges. With potatoes I never want obtrusive flavors, I really just want potato, and you can tell that Flatbush Farm used good high quality ones that needed very little fanfare. Perfect.

Magical hash browns

Service was really speedy and friendly, and good about answering vegan questions. I think our food was on the table within five minutes of ordering, that’s really how you know you’re not in a vegan restaurant. The dining room is nice and sparse, with high ceilings and black plank floors. A good solid place for brunch I will definitely be returning to.

One thing that was funny, whatever font they use makes it look like their scrambled tofu is 18 bucks instead of 10. I was prepared to try it for 18, if that gives you any insight into the sorry state of vegan brunch in Brooklyn.

Flatbush F A R M

Brooklyn is woefully behind the times with vegan food. I mean, compared to Nebraska it’s aight, but being so close to Manhattan you would think that some of the magic would rub off. Instead, mostly the decidedly unvegan stuff rubs off, so here we are with a few dozen places that serve octopus salad or rabbit medallions, not to mention the 3K a month studio apartments, and hardly a tempeh reuben to be found. Jerks. So this week I’m going to post a review a day, sampling the best, the worst and the mediocrest that the BK has to offer.

On the rainiest day we’ve had in years, Jason Das and I scurried over to a new place called Earth Tonez. I was hopeful about this place, it’s located just down the street from the future Brooklyn ‘sNice (more about that later this week) so it had better be good, especially if their specialty is sandwiches. The sandwich and salad descriptions looked promising, if lacking in innovation. I would love to have a decent Caesar salad in the neighborhood. But it turns out that their fake chicken wasn’t even vegan, so there goes half the menu items. And, if it’s not obvious from that last sentence, most of their offerings were of the fake meat variety and so could be whipped up at home for much cheaper.

Which brings me to the next problem, the 9 and a half dollar sandwich. I settled on the Bada Bing, which the really nice owner recommended. It was store bought veggie sausage with marinara sauce, unmelted soy cheese and sauteed peppers sitting on a pile of blue corn chips. And it was 9 and a half dollars. It came with a tiny ramekin of a corn avocado salad but I don’t know that this was even standard. Jason got the Philly Cheese steak which was seitan and cheese. Decent enough, less expensive than my sandwich, and they obviously put care into the sandwich making, but not impressive enough to keep us from going to ’sNice when it does indeed open.

This sandwich is ok, but is it 9.50 okay?

The owner (who, as I said, was really nice!) was fiddling around with a Red Mango Bakery cake when we got there, so of course we finished our meal with a slice. Unfortunately, they don’t even serve real coffee, which was another minus, because it really would have helped. We picked a Chocolate Chai cake, and it must have been sitting around for a few weeks because the flavor was there but it was really dry and tasted a bit of fridge. So. That sort of sucked.

It’s a new place so I hope they step up their game, offer more vegan options and vary their menu. Lose the stunt meat, up the veggies and beans and homemade sandwich fillings. Maybe add a side to make the just-shy-of-ten-bucks price tag worth it; potato salad or a pasta salad, something cheap but satisfying. The things it has going for it are friendly staff, reasonably priced muffins and cookies (but with no coffee?) and a nice space with exposed brick and tin ceilings. I will give it another try, but not for a few months. And after seeing this review they might clock me one if I enter, so maybe I better not. But if fake meat sandwiches are your deal then maybe you would absolutely love this place as is.

Nice people means repeat customers, even with the problems

I couldn’t find any online info for Earth Tonez- not even a MySpace or blog or anything, but click the thumbnails for the menu. It has a very odd tagline: Healthy Alternatives For The Meat Eater. Maybe that’s part of the problem?

Broccoli Rabe, Capers and Garlic Pie

I’m not sure what I did before Pizza Plus. Wandered around the streets of Park Slope aimlessly, bumping into baby carriages, eavesdropping on home-owners’ tax conversations and the injustice of it all. But now my life has a point, and that point is Pizza Plus.

In the past I’ve been known to say things like “It melts. So what?” But Pizza Plus seems to have found the perfect melting point for Follow Your Heart Cheese. I feel like the Germans must have a phrase for this melting point because they have a phrase for everything. But it comes out of the oven drippingly hot, then cools down ever so slightly to become…well, cheese for lack of a better word.

Mushroom, Tomato and Basil Pie

Everyone who works there is really nice and Brooklyn accents are included. They also have a range of fresh, creative toppings. So far my favorite pies have been 1~ broccoli rabe, capers and garlic 2~pineapple, peppers and soy sausage 3~tomatoes, basil and mushroom (also with garlic cause that’s how I do.) And since it’s a real pizza place and not a vegan place they don’t completely rip you off. Yeah, I said it.

Call ahead to make sure they have soy cheese, just in case!

And down the block The Chocolate Girl serves vegan soft serve in chocolate dipped and sprinkled cones. Not quite chocolate-y enough for me, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I’ve been gone for most of the summer. I’m sure you missed me. The purpose of my trip was to attend Vegan: The Gathering, a gathering (duh) organized by the PPK message boards. So I will bore you with the details of that in the following days, but right now I will just bore you with the details of my too brief pit stop in Seattle.

Last time I was there I was just a poor gutter punk, sleeping in parks and on stranger’s floors, getting my boyfriend out of jail for shoplifting cigarettes at Safeway, and what have you. That was 14 years ago, but still, I liked it there. It seemed to me as east coast as a west coast city could possibly be, from the way the actual city looked - bricks, big urban parks - to the way the way the people were - they walked fast, talked fast (or at least faster than people from Oooooooregoooooon), and wore black.

I would love to spend more time there, but we really only had time for a drive by veganing. So we stopped at Wayward Cafe for brunch. Wayward is a collectively-run restaurant that serves vegan home cooking. I loved it so much in there that they could have served me a cold block of tofu and I would have been happy; bright orange walls, flyers everywhere, stuffed panda bears - if someone made a play about a collective vegan cafe the set would look just like Wayward cafe. And they were playing the Smiths, so I was in heaven.

Luckily, the food was good, too! I had fried tempeh, scrambled tofu, hummus and veggies with a side of biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were more cakey than I’m used to, but still wonderful, and even if anything wasn’t wonderful the rich, luscious gravy would make up for it. And they aren’t stingy with the nutritional yeast, they even trust you enough to leave out shakers so you can sprinkle it on all by yourself. Seward Cafe in Minneapolis does that, too. No place in Brooklyn would ever do that, but places like this aren’t really a possibility in Brooklyn these days because Brooklyn just wants people to come here, spend all their parent’s money and run back home to the midwest once their dreams are crushed and all of the bodegas have been turned into French restaurants.

Our next stop was, of course, Mighty-O Donuts.

My heart turned into a ball of mush when I saw the place, it was like a real donut place. Like, this is what the vegan revolution will look like. Like, you could take your grandma here and not have to apologize for anything. And the donuts reminded me of my grandma, too. Old fashioned cake donuts, the kind that I longed for even in my pregan days. Not sickly sweet, not sticky and deliriously fluffy, but still light and “toothsome.” We got a dozen and ate them over the course of the next few days for the long ride home through Canada. And thank god we did because if I didn’t have a vegan donut while driving through Saskatchewan I might have dirven of a cliff, if there were any cliffs. But there weren’t, only A&W drive-thrus. I think my favorite, if someone held a gun to my head and made me choose, was a chocolate donut with cinnamon sugar.

More pics here, if you so desire.