The book description says it’s got “125 flavorful recipes” and that “readers will find all-occasion dishes that use familiar ingredients and require minimal effort.” I think by “familiar ingredients” what they mean are ingredients that are in mainstream American grocery stores, not in specialty health food stores or in Mexican grocery stores or Indian markets, etc.

Of course, since it’s a vegan cookbook, the recipes are free of animal products. But these particular recipes are also low in fat and contain a low-to-moderate glycemic index.

I was excited to see this cookbook because this style of eating is my ideal way of eating. To me, it’s the most satisfying and the most natural way to eat. That’s probably because of how I grew up – as a Californian vegetarian with a mother who knew how to cook well. So to me, these foods aren’t just healthy, they’re comforting. I feel nurtured when I feed myself the way my mother would feed me: healthy vegan food.

Alas, I am likely unique in that aspect. Not many people grew up vegetarian. This way of cooking is new and “different” to most people. In that vein, I’ll explain how this cookbook makes vegan eating easy:

• For each recipe, it lists the estimated preparation time and cook time.
• Likewise, each recipe offers nutritional information, so you can clearly and quickly count up protein, carbs, or fat… whatever your heart desires. Literally. This cookbook will help you prevent or even reverse heart disease!

Here’s your warning, though: beans, beans, the magical fruit…this cookbook is filled with them! Now, I love beans so for me that’s a good thing. But some people shy away from beans. If you’re one of those people, you might not get a lot of use out of this book. Or maybe you just need to give beans another try. The cookbook says:

“Okay, we’re bean happy! You will find a bevy of bean recipes in this book. Beans are among the most inexpensive and most nutritious ingredients. They are loaded with fiber, calcium, and iron. [...] If you have trouble digesting beans, start with small servings – a little bit goes a long way. And be sure they are very well cooked.”

The cookbook also gives information about the glycemic index, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, cholesterol, and more. Overall, The Get Healthy, Go Vegan Cookbook by Neal Barnard, MD and Robyn Webb is a great resource for any vegan or aspiring vegan.

Chloe Coscarelli is no lightweight in the culinary department, having a culinary degree from a prestigious school and now host of her own web cooking show, courtesy of VegNews Magazine.

But credentials mean nothing to suspicious competitors and judges. At least two of Chloe’s competitors spoke derisively about her cupcakes without having tasted them, one even referring to them as “fake this…fake that…”  The judges were more open-minded, fortunately, but had some reservations before tasting. Candace Nelson, owner of Sprinkles, the first cupcake bakery, said she did not believe a good cupcake could be made without butter – but after tasting Chloe’s she became a believer. This trend continued through the competition, with Chloe’s cupcakes consistently gaining the highest marks from the judges.

I doubt the competitors went away believing in vegan, but perhaps the Food Network is just a tiny bit closer to offering that vegan chef show that is so sadly lacking. In the meantime we have Chloe on YouTube! And expertvillage and Dreena Burton and of course Colleen and so many more.

“We all want a vegan world, but only a tiny handful of us have realized the enormous personal power we have in bringing this world closer. The rest of us are off baking brownies.”

Elsewhere I’ve seen the brownie-bakers referred to as “inactivists” or worse.

Now, there’s a little bit of truth to the criticism. If ALL you’re doing is baking vegan brownies, then you’re not doing a whole lot for the animals. You have to share those brownies with nonvegans, share the recipes, talk about vegan baking, or do some of the other things I’ll list below in a second.

But even if ALL you’re doing is baking vegan brownies, that’s still a TON better than what most people are doing for animals. Most people are buying or baking nonvegan brownies. Most people are buying or cooking animal flesh, meat that comes from animals who have been treated like meat before they were slaughtered!

So don’t feel bad if your form of animal activism is culinary-style, just try to make the most of it. How do you turn baking vegan brownies into real animal advocacy? Here are some suggestions:

• Share your vegan cooking with friends, family, coworkers, or even strangers. Bake vegan cupcakes for your mom’s birthday. Make veggie deli slice sandwiches for a picnic with friends. Bring your vegan food to work or donate some to a homeless shelter. You could also have a “feed in” where you give away free vegan food. (Get funding from VegFund).
• Sell your vegan baked goods. Have a bake sale and raise money for your favorite charity. Vegan bake sales raised over $25,000 for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. (link)
• Show off your tasty vegan food by posting pictures of it on Flickr, Facebook, and other places where nonvegans and see for themselves what vegans eat. You’ll help educate the public about vegan food. (As an added bonus, if you can include the recipe in your picture description, that’s great, too. People LOVE recipes!)
• Share your experiences. You can start a blog about vegan cooking and share your recipes or even just your favorite cookbooks. Blog about how your boyfriend loves a certain recipe or about how it took you three tries but finally you found the perfect vegan pizza dough recipe. Whatever, just share your vegan cooking experiences so others can learn.
• Teach a vegan cooking class. Make it a one-time class held out of your home or organize a 6-week course with the local community college, it’s up to you. The point is simple: share your knowledge.
• Make a cookbook. If you do a lot of cooking and you’ve come up with some of your own recipes, why not gather them together into a cookbook? You can sell it without any startup cost if you use an on-demand publisher or you can find a publisher who wants to print up your vegan cookbook. Either way, there’s plenty of room for more vegan cookbooks. The sky is the limit on this one!

So what are you waiting for? Put that oven mitt to good use!

Across the nation people will be cooking up special Mother’s Day breakfasts and brunches for their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, female mentors, teachers, and other women who have played a mothering role in their lives.

To help you cook up a tasty morning meal, here are some vegan recipes:

• Banana Waffles
• Fluffy Coconut Waffles
• Pecan Waffles
• Whole Wheat Pancakes
• Simple Pancakes
• Scrambled Tofu
• Easy Tofu Scramble Breakfast
• Sweet Potato Hash Browns
• Hearty Hash Browns
• Blueberry Muffins
• Carrot Spice Muffins
• Pumpkin Muffins

For more vegan recipes, check out the recipe search here at Vegan Soapbox >>

www.VeganBakeSale.org

What is it?

The Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale (WVBS) was started in 2009 as a way to combine fundraising and vegan outreach. 100 groups participated in the first year, raising over 25,000 dollars for a variety of worthy causes and introducing nearly that many people to the deliciousness and diversity of vegan baked goods. VegNews magazine called it the “Veg Event of the Year.”

The WVBS concept is simple: Groups around the globe hold vegan bake sales during a nine-day period (two weekends and the week in between). Participants can do whatever they want with the proceeds. Everything sold or given away must be vegan.

Sweet Vegan Outreach Potential

Vegan bake sales are an effective yet relatively stress-free form of vegan activism:

• Bake sales are also typically tabling events. Alongside cupcakes and muffins are brochures and veg starter guides.
• You can combine bake sales with other forms of outreach. In Oakton, Virginia, the bake sale table was at one entrance to a store and volunteers handed out vegan starter guides and free samples at the other entrance. In Guelph, Ontario, Stormy, a very social pig, stopped by the vegan bake sale for tummy rubs and was an eloquent spokespig for Ruby Ranch Pig Sanctuary, the beneficiary of the bake sale’s proceeds. There’s practically no limit to vegan bake sale tie-ins.
• The “vegan-ness” of vegan desserts is above all their lack of dairy and eggs, which inevitably leads customers and onlookers to inquire about those products.
• Bake sales are usually fun and festive and thus conducive to productive discussions about otherwise tense topics. The defensiveness-to-effectiveness ratio at vegan bake sales is refreshingly low.
• When someone bites into their first-ever vegan cupcake or cheesecake, you can practically see the barriers melting away. Two reasons why people don’t eat more vegan food are unfamiliarity and fear that it won’t taste good. It’s amazing how one chocolate chip cookie can cause a skeptic to re-think both of those points.
• Vegan bake sales attract vegan “inactivists” who are not interested in other types of events, such as leafleting and protests.
• Vegan bake sales are a nice change of pace for seasoned activists. Compared to, say, a day of anti-circus demonstrations, a vegan bake sale is a piece of cake (sorry). At the end of a vegan bake sale, you’re tired but ecstatic. There’s very little energy-sapping stress.
• Being invited to participate in a vegan bake sale is a good excuse for non-vegans to try vegan baking. Ask your non-vegan baking friends if they’d like to contribute to your vegan bake sale. You may be surprised at how many respond affirmatively. You can lend them copies of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and other relevant cookbooks to give them ideas. Some non-vegans regularly bake vegan desserts once they see how good their bake sale entry turns out.

Perhaps the bottom line is: Vegan bake sales combine a well-liked tradition with tasty vegan food; they introduce veganism to the public in an upbeat, engaging manner.

If one vegan bake sale is great, 100 or more are better

The WVBS magnifies the positive effects of vegan bake sales by having a profusion of them at locations all over the world in the same short period, and heavily promoting them.

Join in the meaningful fun

The success of the WVBS depends very much on the number of bake sales. The more bake sales, the greater the buzz, the greater the camaraderie, the greater the interest by both mainstream and alternative media.

If you’ve never organized a bake sale before, it’s probably not nearly as difficult as you think. The most important step is securing a venue. Popular locations include farmers markets, community centers, supermarkets, food co-ops, campus gathering places, and churches. The WVBS web site, www.veganbakesale.org, has lots of tips on finding a location and on just about every other aspect of putting together a vegan bake sale. The web site also has vegan baking tips, links to thousands of vegan baking recipes, and promotional materials such as web banners and sample press releases.

Bonus! You may be able to get your bake “sale” funded if you make it a feed-in. Details are here: http://www.veganbakesale.org/veganbakesale/vbs-funding.html.

The official start of the WVBS is in about two months. That gives you enough time to reserve an ideal spot, amass your team of awesome bakers, promote the event every which way, sign up on the WVBS site (don’t forget that!), and decide which tantalizing creations to feature.

Actually, if you’d like to participate but can’t do it during the “official” nine-day period (April 24 through May 2), that’s ok. It’s invigorating and impactful to part of a crazy week-plus of bake sales happening all over the globe, but really any time is a good time for a vegan bake sale. In 2009, some vegan bake sales on the WVBS schedule were in December.

Note that bake sales can be as big or small as suits your style, budget, and time restrictions.  The massive bake sales put on by the San Francisco vegan foodie cartel have practically redefined the bake sale concept; they are stunning and their impact is enormous. Yet one person with a table of homemade vegan cookies is, in some ways, even more inspiring, by showing that any individual can make a positive difference.

Whenever and wherever your vegan bake sale happens to be, and whether it takes up a city block or is in your workplace lunchroom, you’re showing people that they can indulge in cookies, cupcakes, muffins, brownies and other delectables without cruelty, without exploiting animals. Together, the vegan bake sales in the WVBS – each with their own distinctive flavor — blend together to create a finished product that is not only richly rewarding but changes the world.

If you’re not up to organizing a bake sale, there is another very crucial role you can play. Check out the WVBS schedule, find a vegan bake sale near you, enjoy some super-tasty treats, help out a worthwhile cause, and support your local talented and hard-working vegan bakers.

Spread the love, spread the frosting. The second annual Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale – April 24 -May 2, 2010.

—

About the writer: Gary Loewenthal became vegan in his mid-40s, in 2004, and has been very active on behalf of animals since then, “to make up for lost time.” He is the co-founder of Compassion for Animals (www.compassion4animals.org), started the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale, has written animal advocacy articles for a variety of online and print publications, and regularly volunteers with Washington, DC animal protection and animal rights groups.

And here’s a video for vegan waffles:

Here’s a slight modification of the recipe:
Vegan Pot Pie

Ingredients:

• 1.5 T olive oil, vegetable oil, or canola oil
• 2 cups diced onion
• 1 cup chopped celery
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• 4T nutritional yeast or flour (all-purpose organic or conventional, whole wheat is best)
• 1 ea. 10oz bag organic frozen peas and carrots
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 2 cups diced vegan sausage, salted eggplant, fried or frozen tofu, mock chicken, seitan, or mushrooms (this part is the “meat replacement”)
• 1 package vegan pie crust or homemade pie dough
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Heat oil in a small pan and sauté onion and celery until they are clear.
2. Add garlic and sauté a few minutes more.
3. Add flour and stir with a wooden spoon until well incorporated.
4. Pour in vegetable stock and stir.
5. Simmer until the mixture has thickened.
6. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
7. Add remaining vegetables and meat replacement. Simmer till meat replacement is heated through.
8. Roll out pie crust and cut it about 1/2 an inch larger than the ramekin you are using. Rub top side of crust with a little oil.
9. Place the sautéd mixture in ramekin and top with pie crust.
10. Bake in pre-heated 450° oven for 10-15 minutes until crust is golden brown.

I convinced my husband to test one of the recipes from it. He made a batch of cookies from the “fancy cookies” section called Lazy Samoas. Then he, my 10-year-old nephew, and I tested the cookies. They were fabulous!

We will continue to test recipes from the cookbook, but I wanted to give Soapbox readers a heads-up that this book is now available in stores and that so far, the cookies produced from the book are fantastically delicious.

This cookbook would make a nice holiday gift alone or in combination with a gift basket full of vegan cookie baking supplies like flour, sugar, vegan chocolate chips, flax seeds, baking powder, etc.

Gourmet and Healthy Holiday Recipes – This list of vegan recipes with photos is mouth-watering. The post description says, “Don’t just suffer through another Thanksgiving only eating only the side veggies! A healthy, vegetarian Thanksgiving as easy as reading the recipes below, putting on an apron (with heels if you feel naughty) and getting going! Or just forward this blog to Mom, she knows what to do.”

A Vegan Thanksgiving Celebration – Written by an omni, it’s still chalked full of vegan goodness. Sadly, there aren’t photos.

Thanksgiving Dinner (a little early) – One vegan holiday dinner and description. Plus links to recipes and more info.

Martha Stewart offers two vegetarian Thanksgiving menus: Hearty Vegetarian Thanksgiving Menu and Fresh and Festive Vegetarian Thanksgiving Menu. Though the menus are not entirely vegan, they could easily be made vegan with a few substitutions. Substitute olive oil or Earth Balance for butter and soy milk or rice milk for cow’s milk. Sub agave nectar or maple syrup for honey. Use vegan cream cheese instead of nonvegan, etc.

What are some of your favorite vegan Thanksgiving foods or recipes?

• a spice and nut mix that’s perfect for topping salads or serving with bread
• a Turkish style lentil soup
• a recipe for stuffed eggplant called Imam Bayildi

The subscription is free, so if you’re interested in fantastic vegan recipes, why not head over and sign up? Go here to sign up: http://www.veganculinaryexperience.com/