Shopping Vegan & Kitties! (again)

No real cooking today.  Granola was for breakfast with a glass of rice milk.  For lunch, the quesadillas (mushroom, onion, bean puree & quinoa) from yesterday's cooking session.  It turns out that I'm not a huge fan of quinoa, which is probably a good thing due to how expensive it is.  I will probably make myself eat the rest of them, but we'll see how it goes. 

Oh, the Spouse & I went to check out Veggie Paradise, a Vegan market of sorts.  The store is quite small, but there was a large selection of prepared foods and ready-to-cook convenience foods.  The shopkeeper was very informative and showed us lots of neat stuff.  She pulled out some frozen 'shrimp', and I swear they looked like the real deal!  They had some of the Tartex Pate (in three different flavors!), that I remembered seeing on Lady Vegan's Blog (she won the pate for submitting a recipe to vegweb.com).  I was tempted to buy the pate, but didn't.  Overall the items seemed a bit pricey, but convenient if I get in a pinch for dinner. 

On another note, it seems like I'm having more losses than wins in the kitchen lately, so I may be just doing some recipe testing from the cookbooks I have instead of doing my own thing.  Isn't that is what cookbooks are supposed to be for, to cook things?  :)  Hopefully I'll get my cooking groove back, because I am bit discouraged.  So when discouraged/sad/lonely/happy/cuddly where do I go for comfort?  To the kitties of course! 

Cat photos from this point onward, you may want to skip reading the rest if you aren't interested.  Starting from the oldest to the youngest (who made her Internet debut here):

Theo in all his furry glory.  Look at the fur on his paws!  It actually grows between his little kittie toes!  Despite appearances, he is quite skinny and sometimes borders on the anorexic side.  He had to have surgery about a year ago on his urinary tract and it almost bankrupted us.  I was seriously considering breaking into the animal hospital to steal him back after they completed the surgery.  But family loaned us some money and we got him back legit.  He is now 7 1/2 years old.

Here we have Theo again with a baby Nova, who is actually about 2 1/2 years old now.  Theo is the 'alpha' male of the group, but is very playful.  When we moved from the states, where he had free reign of about an acre and hunted avidly (much to my dismay), into an apartment in a high-rise condo in Ontario on the 8th floor, he became depressed. His personality changed from a VERY active & playful cat, to one who slept all day and ate very little.  We decided to adopt a playmate for him to hopefully bring him out of his depression without the need for medication.  It worked!  :)

Full grown and looking for trouble (please ignore my messy desk).  Nova is...well, different.  Imagine a cat with ADD who is super smart and has dependency issues with Yours Truly.  He can also be temperamental, stubborn and occasionally, melt-your-heart sweet.  He loves to sleep on the Spouse's chest at night. 

Ahh, and then there is baby cat, Mizea.  She melts my heart and turns me to a cooing, crazy cat lady at the blink of her little innocent eyes.  I would probably knit her little sweaters and booties if I could learn to knit.   :)

And one more of Mizea to show how tiny she is.  She was sleeping so soundly that I got to take a ton of pictures.  That is a 'AA' battery beside her.  She is 5 1/2 months old.

Not-Ribz Two Wayz & Kitties!

I had some help on this one from baby cat. I was taking pictures from different angles with only a few seconds between each one, when the little one jumped up just as I was hitting the capture button:

Luckily she only sniffed the Thai sweet chili sauce! :) We have three cats, and all of them were rescued. Our oldest, who is 7, was dumped with his brothers and sisters in a tied garbage bag on the highway. Luckily someone finally noticed the bag was moving and took them to the nearest veterinarian who was able to save a few of the kittens. The middle cat, who is 2, was adopted from the Canadian Humane Society. And baby cat who is making her Internet debut in the above picture was rescued by Colony Cats Rescue. She is the sweetest cat ever and melts into an adorable boneless mass whenever you hold her, which she demands quite often.

A couple of kitty things before moving onto the food. Please, if you are a Canadian Voter in Ontario (I'm not yet, unfortunately) visit the Canadian Humane Society's website to learn about the new proposed Bill 50, the Provincial Animal Welfare Act. This Bill will not protect many animals from cruelty including farm animals, zoo animals, performing animals, etc. Please visit the site or Google the Bill to educate yourself on this issue! (yes I know I'm begging and sounding preachy)

Secondly, having animals puts me in the dilemma a lot of Vegans with animal companions have. Cats are made to eat meat, but I wondered if they can adapt like humans. I came across a blog [broken link] blog where this [broken link] explains how she is feeding her cats Vegan food. There was only one visitor comment on the blog, so if any of you reading this has experience with changing a cat's food to Vegan fare, please let me know! Also on that article was a link claiming this is what PETA says about feeding your companion animal a Vegan diet. I'm going to talk to the Spouse tonight concerning this.

Oh, and I have a job interview this afternoon for a position that is paying big bucks. I hope to dazzle them. :)

Ok, onto the food! Here are what I've lamely titled "Not-Ribz Two Wayz". Hey, no ribbing, I don't get paid to think of cool sounding names. :)

I made Seitan last week and it turned out pretty good. I'm not thrilled with the results, but satisfied. I basically used a combination of two of Bryanna's Seitan recipes and a mix of my own spices. I believe that just about any standard Seitan recipe would produce similar results, so I won't post the recipe until I tweak it a bit. However here's what I made with part of the roast (I still have about 2 pounds of Seitan in the freezer).

The Seitan on the left is tossed with salt and pepper and the one on the right is coated with BBQ sauce. There isn't really a recipe for this, but just a method to put it together: I cut the Seitan into chunks, coated them with flour, added salt and pepper and fried them in oil until crispy and brown. I halved the batch and immediately after frying and tossed half with salt & pepper. The other half went back on the stove with some store bought (yeah I was lazy) BBQ sauce until it was bubbly and sticky. I thought the Salt & Pepper chunks were tasty dipped in Thai Sweet Pepper Chili Sauce (store bought again). The remainder of the BBQ chunks made a reappearance with some Vegan cheddar cheese in a pita the next day. I nuked it and boy did that add a nice chewiness!

The verdict? The BBQ chunks were a HUGE hit by all! BOOYAH! In fact upon finding I ate the leftovers the Teen Daughter was quite disappointed. She would like these as part of our regular family meal options. I almost did a happy dance! :) I can't wait to try Seitan in other recipes.