Sorry to be spamming you all, but I was just checking my stats page, and found someone found my page while googling “eating with the rabbits” (quotation marks not mine).
Why they went to my page rather than Bonnie’s page, I don’t know.

This morning I made me another smoothie, using some fruit I still had around and the yofu that needs eating.

Ingredients:

Smoothie:

I had expected the smoothie to be, well, bluer, what with the blueberries and all. It ended up way pink, though. Which is kind of weird, since I didn’t actually add anything pink. It was just blue, white, and yellow/green foods.
Strange…
Vaguely disappointing, as well.
Still, at least it was tasty. And runnier than I’d expected. I didn’t need a spoon to eat it.

Yesterday I did my dishes, which enabled me to actually properly cook again. Which was nice, since the veg I’d bought earlier was starting to get a little iffy.

The veg:

Pretty mangy, as usual.

I didn’t really know what to do with the lone beet, since I wanted my food to be very, very green. Adding that one beet would ruin that completely, so I had to think of something seperate to prepare with that. In the end I simply added the frozen aduki beans I still had left and made a little red mash for when I’d finished the green mash, which I made using the green ingredients.

Green mash:

Red mash:

While it was cooking, I occasionally tasted the red mash, and it didn’t really taste all that great. However, once it was done and I’d added some blobs of yofu, it was quite tasty. Yay!

The green mash tasted yum all on it’s own, but I ate it with some pumpernickel. Just to make it a little more filling and less intimidating (it was very green. Which shouldn’t be scary, but still).

I actually made me some dessert, too, something I very rarely do. I’d bought me some silken tofu and agave syrup a while back, with the intent of making me some chocolate pudding. It took me a while, but I finally did it. It’s very easy to make, though next time I’ll probably chuck in some more cocoa. It tasted slightly watery.
Or maybe I should just drain it better. That might help.

To make it look even better, I added some of the berries I’d bought on the market the day before for practically nothing.
It was good.

Brown, blue, and red:

I made good use of my immersion blender yesterday. Such a simple tool, yet so useful.

~-*-~

Last Saturday I got to leave work earlier because it was way quiet and I’d already worked a lot that week, so I went for a bike ride. I took some foodie pictures and tried to film spring animals (including licky bovines), but I still have to organise the pictures and edit the video bits (anyone know of a good .MOV editor for XP? Gotta see if I can get my camera to store videos in another format…) so it’ll probably take some time before you get more details about that food.

As much as I love this theme, the sidebar is a little on the long side. This is mostly due to the category widget, though I did create a links post, now visible on top, to at least do away with the widget for that.

Maybe I’ll just sort out the whole tags/categories thing and make it a bit neater. A few very broad categories and a ton of tags.

ETA: I just realised that there’s no need for a “recent posts” thing, seeing as all recent posts are on the front page. And if I cut the top posts from 10 to 5, I’ll save some more vertical space. Whoo!

ETA2: Of course, a tag cloud takes up some space…
Drat!
Can’t I put those on a page, or something?

Since my time in Germany didn’t get me any of the falafel I was looking forward to, I thought I might as well get me some right at home.

At De Falafel:

Not too long ago a Maoz opened up fairly close to De Falafel, but I keep going to this one. I’m not sure if there’s a quality or price difference, but De Falafel has less of a chain feel to it than Maoz, which I like. BEsides, it was here first.
Also, it’s on a more convenient route to my place. While Maoz is probably not even half a kilometre further away, it feels weird walking that way.
The Stadhuisplein area is just not my kind of place.
Maybe it’s that SkiHut place…

They changed the prices somewhat since I was last there. IIRC, a white pita used to be cheaper than the wholemeal one, but now they were the same price. I think they simply raised the price of the white ones. Not that I really mind. It makes choosing the wholemeal one easier.

Falafel, hiding under a bunch of veg and sauce.

While the falafel was good and perfectly satisfying, I was vaguely disappointed about the whole thing.
I’m not sure, but I think I got more falafel last time I went there. And the salad bar wasn’t kept up as nicely as it normally was. The counter was kind of messy and they were nearly out of some things. The beet bits were just a few pathetic strings and there were just a few bits of carrot left. The veg didn’t have that much flavour, either.
The tahini dispenser gave pathetic little squirty blobs of sauce rather than a nice good amount. I had to push the thing a few times before I got what I wanted, when before just one push would do.
I hope it’s just this once. When I went there before things always looked clean and abundant, so I’ll probably go back there next time I want falafel because of habit and convenience. But if it turns out to be the start of a general decline of the place, I might consider checking out if Maoz has wholemeal pitas.
There aremany kebab places which sell falafel (most do, I think), but that big freaky meat thing they have hanging around kind of puts me off my food. Also, I doubt they do falafel as thoroughly as falafel places, with salad bars and everything.

Today I was lazy again and made something as close to insta-food as you can probably get without using a readymeal and a microwave.

While traipsing around the conveniently-located Globus, being not at all surprised at the German manufacurers’ tendency to chuck pointless and unnecessary animal products in their tinned readymeals, I came across some vegan tortellini. Since wrapped food makes me childishly happy, I bought me a pack.

Today I decided I should maybe eat that, as it looked convenient enough and didn’t need anything currently unwashed for the preparation. I only recently figured out that people put sauce on their tortellini. I always sort of assumed you just ate it plain, since there’s already stuff on the inside. So I figured I’d try it the way other people seem to do it for a change. I still had a jar of pasta sauce laying around I never seemed to get around to using, anyway.

Prepackaged food in all it’s plastic-wrapped glory:

I chucked the tortellini in a small pan of boiling water, drained it when I thought it was done (which was way before the ten minutes the instructions mentioned), added the sauce to let it heat up, and chucked the whole thing on a plate. Since I’ve not done my dishes in a good while, I didn’t have any of my deep plates more suited to this kind of meal. Also, this fork was all I had left of my cutlery.
Guess what I should do this evening?

Anyway, the result:

I’m glad I ended up going with the pasta sauce. It wasn’t a spectacular sauce by any means, and even my most half-hearted efforts would produce something superior, but the tortellini itself was as bland and boring as slightly salted food can be, so really needed something which had some flavour to make it at least half-way decent.
While bulky enough to keep me going, it’s hardly a meal worth repeating.

I should really stop buying vegan convenience foods just because they’re vegan. I’ve had similar stuff before and was similarly disppointed.
At least the minty Ritter Sport was most tasty. Should’ve bought more of that…

Remember when I posted about how the Nutrition Data blog ignored animal foods when going on about greening one’s diet?
I don’t know if it’s the comments left to that post or if they were pretty clued in to begin with and simply didn’t think of it for their nice list, but a bunch of their Earth Day-related posts have been all about eating plants because it’s good for our darling planet.

There’s a post about going vegetarian for a day (which could use a mention of maybe trying the thing for life), followed by a post about vegetarian protein (because that’s so difficult to find in plants), which is secretly all about the awesomeness of beans, and I also got a nice email about how some eco-conscious people have gone totally vegetarian, but how just a few vegetarian days a week can already make a difference.

While they don’t come on nearly as strong as I would on the issue (not to mention the lack of other relevant angles) and I couldn’t help but get ever so slightly sarcastic at times, this whole thing is making me all happy.

At the same time, some other people are making me happy as well. Yesterday we actually had band practice, and, since my pipes were still in someone else’s car, I actually went. Though I managed to miss the bit where the Germany trip was evaluated, I got a short summary during which I was also told that, should we do something like this again, they would make it clear to the organisation that they had a member with an alternative diet.
While this is in no way a guarantee I will get me some decent vegan meals (which isn’t a problem. I like taking care of myself on this one. Besides, the omnis have no guarantee they’ll get them some decent meals, either) and won’t stop me from bringing along my own food, I thought it was most lovely of the people to actually think of my dietary oddness without any prompting from me.

Aren’t I up-with-omnis today?

I’m back!
And I had fun.

I didn’t get particularly close to Berlin, nor did I spot any falafel places. I didn’t sleep as much as I normally do, I didn’t manage to find any particularly humorous licence plates, and I could do without hearing the Radetzky March for a good while.
But I managed to have a very good time regardless.

I found something vegan among the catered stuff about half the time and actually had one of the catering people ask “vegan?” when I asked if something had milk in it in my best German, which made me exceedingly happy (though I was also most appreciative of the guy who bothered to ring someone about whether the mash had milk in it, even if he assumed food sensitivities rather than ethics), I met my quota of conga line-fun for the year, if not the decade, spent a lot of time in a car yet didn’t get carsick even once, got delightfully loopy due to lack of sleep and abundance of social time rather than abysmally grouchy, and had a ton of fun hanging out with people from all over and making music.

And while I spent most of the time indoors, either in hotels or in sports halls, I did manage to visit a supermarket for some extra food and got to see enough of the outside of Germany to aquire a strong desire to go back there for a nice holiday.
Preferably the sort that involves some nice hiking.

Conveniently, it turns out my German isn’t actually that dismal. My dad did say I’d pick it up easily.
The weird thing is, though, if I didn’t quite know how to say something in German, my brain quickly switched to French. A language in which I may have been fairly fluent some years ago, but with me not having anyone to talk to and losing TV5 and thereby the ability to watch French-Canadian news during breakfast and French krimis during the weekend, my fluency level has dropped dramatically. So it makes no sense whatsoever to switch to that.
Also, with me not coming across too many Germans who seemed to speak English well enough to try it on me (the Musikparade had an overwhelmingly geriatric audience), I doubt French would be much use.
My brain is delightfully strange at times.

The Spanish I knew was of little use in trying to communicate with the lovely (and remarkably polite for a bunch of teenagers) people from the Mexican band, but then my Spanish is limited to the most basic stuff picked up from U.S. television, and maybe a handful of insults. I also have some vague recollections regarding the correct pronunciation of “pollo” and remember correcting my dad on it il y a quelques années, with some embarrassment due to the meaning of the mispronounced version, but I forgot what you’re actually supposed to be talking about when you’re saying it wrong.
Probably penises or something.

There were a bunch of other bands, either more showy marching bands, or military marching bands. There was a Polish one, a Ukranian one (which mixed the military with the showy into something pretty damn cool), a Czech one, a German one, and another Dutch one. The public were told we were Scottish, which we aren’t technically, but no one seemed to care.

Though I took my camera, I forgot to take pictures most of the time. Besides, while there was some vegan food, it wasn’t all that spectacular overall, so apart from being very happy that, unlike the rest of the people, I had my own food to fall back on and wasn’t fully relying on the catering, I didn’t really bother taking any pictures of it.

I did, however, take some other random pictures, mostly not related to food.

Don’t feed the water birds.

Use condoms.

Bracelet I got from one of the Mexican kids. At least I got to use some of the Spanish I did know to properly thank them.

DNA car! This is about as funny as it got for me, licence plate-wise.

And for your entertainment, a minute’s worth of afternoon autobahn, showing you, among other things, that I don’t have very steady hands.

To make this seem at least vaguely like a vegan food blog, I’ll tell you that I very much loved the Berief Soja Fit Schoko +Kalzium and wish I could get my hands on it here.

~-*-~

While going through my stats from the last few days, I noticed someone found this site by searching for “picture of twigs as a meal”.
Cracked me up something good.

Last post before my little trip. I’ll be back next week, with more tasty vegan things and most likely a tl;dr report on the food situation during the trip.

Here a picture of the pre-packaged food I’ll take along to Germany:

Looking at it like this, it seems rather a lot…
And it’s not even the whole thing. There’s still some sammiches I’ll have to make, I have some small containers with soy nuts, raisins, and dried apricots, and I still have to fill that missing Heinz tomato juice-like bottle (not buying those again, ever. There’s still a lingering taste of tomato juice in spite of all the fruit juices added. Not my thing, tomato juice. Oh, and it’s pointless, overpriced and overpackaged food. Even less my thing) with Brinta so I can make me some runny porrige if I mix it with some rice- or soymilk in the missing Tropicana juice bottle.

Maybe some of my carrots look presentable enough to bring along…

Now lets see if I have some jim-jams lying around. Might be nice if I have to share a hotel room. I should also maybe prepare me some dinner before going on home to my parents. And do my dishes. *sigh* I’m terrible at planning trips. It’s a good thing I don’t have to plan the whole damn thing, really. We’d never get anywhere.

ETA: Found jim-jams. And all cool and retro ones, too. Got them from my Gran. One problem, though. The food doesn’t really fit. That kind of sucks. I guess I could chuck some in my clothes bag, but then I won’t be able to use that as a pillow. And I suspect I will want one…
Maybe I should use the meshy side pockets for drinks…

For this dinner, which I ate yesterday (today is some more of that not-bami with the leftover tofu), I made something I’d intended to make days ago.
And added some couscous in an attempt to make it more like what other people seem to eat. Proper grain base or whatever.
Of course, I forgot the garlic. It’s been ages since I’ve properly used garlic, which is a bit weird for me. Normally I chuck it in every possible dish, which is probably why my mum occasionally tells me I smell somewhat macrobiotic.

The veg:

(ignore the spotty bits. It’s a student kitchen and technically Flatemate’s unofficial part of the counter. Mine was, and still is, too full with dishes to use)

Notice the browned bits on the leek? Yeah. Days ago.
The tomatoes were a little soft in places, but that suited my purposes. The bell pepper didn’t look that shiny either, but this was the way I bought it. It’s not from the regular big chain supermarket with fascist and pointless beauty standards, obviously. Really, nothing about this less-than-optimally-fresh look made any difference to the taste, so supermarkets suck at some things.

I actually bothered to marinade the tofu a little more thoroughly than I usually do. I’d intended to let it lounge on a small plate, soaking up some shoyu, easy. But this time, this time, I thought I’d add some of that lovely liquid smoke and have every cube covered properly. Since my otherwise lovely and useful plates aren’t exactly equipped for that unless I want to mess about with turning the cubes regularly, I tried being vaguely inventive with what I had on hand. No MacGyver-worthy feats accomplished, but I did make good use of the mostly-empty pb jar, the only empty jar around that was unlikely to have mould inside.
I simply chucked in the cubed tofu and added the liquid mix and shook it occasionally. As an added bonus, I got some of the peanut butter still left in it.

Jarred tofu:

While this was a neat idea and I’m most chuffed with myself, I should prepare a little more marinade next time I do something like this. The tofu I used wasn’t in any way pressed, so it didn’t soak up as much of the shoyu as I’d have liked it to. The end result was tasty enough, but could’ve had more flavour.
I think I’ll be use the jar-thing more often. It was neat and convenient and I love new ways of using old jars.

While I had most of the veg in the frying pan, I realised I could eat this with couscous.
Nice idea, right?
In theory, yes.
Thing is, I kind of suck at couscous. I never quite know how much any given amount of the dry stuff will give me after I’ve let it play with the boily wet stuff, so I either end up with a lot or not very much at all. And since I’m a grains-with-my-vegetables kind of person rather than a vegetables-with-my-grains one, I prefer less couscous to more, so I’m rather cautious about how much I use.
It had been a while since I’d last made me some, so yesterday, I was very cautious.
So while I technically ate my veg with couscous, it was only about two-ish tablespoons and didn’t make much of a difference.
That’s okay, though. That’s kind of the way I like it.

Food:

Right after I took this picture I poured on the rest of the veg and the couscous became completely invisible. Hah! Take that, couscous!
Like I said, the tofu could’ve done with some more flavour, but it wasn’t bad, and the whole thing together was quite tasty.