Apron Finally Done

Remember that apron I was making, back in this post from November 20th? It's finally finished! Read all about it here.

VeganMoFo - The Final Chapter

And the month is ending on a whimper. The kid's night class has been canceled so I'll make something he likes instead of the lentil loaf I planned. He likes simple foods, so I'll make what we call Chinese Veggies - a honking big bowl of carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, pea pods, water chestnuts, a can of sprouts if I have any, and a small can of gluten. I'll make up a fresh batch of brown rice and serve it with our standards - baked Chinese noodles, soy sauce and sweet n sour duck sauce.

Summary of the Month's Meals:
Thanks to the cookbooks by Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero, Mary McDougall, and Bryanna Clark Grogan, there's no reason not to cook healthy, enjoyable and very flavorful vegan meals.

One bad thing about this is that although the great majority of the meals I prepared were very low fat, low salt, and low cal, I still ended the month about 4 pounds higher than how I started it. I guess it really is possible for healthy food to be bad for us.

VegMoFo Post - Now it's 0 for 3

Lasagna is usually my tried and true, always comes out fantastic with no problems. Well, life like to screw with me and I had a lousy lasagna yesterday. The whole wheat noodles (Healthy Choice) never fully cooked, even though the pan was wrapped tight and was in the oven almost 2 hours. The sauce was watery, even though it was a brand and flavor I've used successfully in the past and has been a family favorite. The ricotta was too salty, even though I measured exactly the same amount I use every week.

Tonight is un-chicken patty sandwiches. The boys will have dead bird and I'll take from the bag of Bryanna's chicken cutlets in my freezer, made from the recipe on the Everyday Dish dvd. The only way this meal will get screwed up is if the rolls I have rising right now flop. I've made rolls with this bread recipe many times in the past, but then again, I made that lasagna many times, too.

Tomorrow's the last day of November and the last day of VeganMoFo. I have planned a lentil rice loaf using a new recipe, but the way things are going this week I may just open a can of baked beans and make some mashed potatoes to go with it. I'm afraid to cook now!

VegMoFo Post - 0 for 2 This Week

Maybe it's because we're not wine drinkers, but that dish I made for dinner last night tasted so horrible I didn't even finish a third of what was on my plate and instead of looking for seconds hubby suggested we toss the rest out. Yes, it was that bad! I guess I better lay off the recipes from Marla's blogs, as this wasn't the first that bombed from there. I'm glad I made my veggie soup to go with the meal and a loaf of bread!

At least today will be better - Lasagna night! This is such a staple in this house I can make the tofu basil ricotta in my sleep and assemble the dish itself with my eyes closed.


And yet when I got on the scale this morning I was up 2 pounds from yesterday. I really should just give up!

VegMoFo Post - Marla's Marvelous Recipes

A long-time McDougaller known only as Marla has 2 different blogs with McDougall-safe recipes. The first is located on VegSource and is known as Marla's Marvelous Meals. The other one is on Yahoo's 360 and known simply as Foodblog. Today's dinner recipe comes from the first, but both sites have loads of recipes from different ethnicities to suit every taste.

Breakfast: same old oatmeal and applesauce
Lunch: same old veggies and rice
Dinner: Beans Bourguignon, maybe a loaf of whole wheat bread made in my Oster ABM, and some cauliflower on the side.


Now, about those Veganomicon Chickpea Cutlets I made yesterday that the vegan blogging world has been raving about. Hubby thought they were one of the best foods on the planet and that if the kid didn't insist on burger for his birthday on Thanksgiving we should have had those. I thought they were kind of meh, no better or worse than some of the seitan/garbanzo flour
cutlets or loaves made from one of the many Bryanna Clark Grogan recipes. Could it be because I baked them to avoid the high fat that comes with pan frying in oil? If I did that it would almost double the calories and it would be all from fat!

For the people complaining that they came out stringy - so did mine. I used cold veggie broth, even refrigerated it a few hours. I used the hint to use a food processor to crush the chickpeas and continued the recipe in it, and had a heck of a time getting it all to mix. This was probably where the seitan got hot, as the blades whirled but nothing was moving. Next time I'll process the beans and then pour them into a mixing bowl to continue the recipe. The amount made was perfect for the 2 of us, so I know I will be making this again.

And next time I'll be sure to take a photo before hubby grabs the plate.

VegMoFo Post - Chickpea Cutlets

Photo from Utopian Kitchen File's blog entry until I can make and photo my own

Today it's back to normal, food and exercise-wise. I have a pot of beans on the stove for tomorrow's dinner, and in a little while I'll start looking over the recipe for Chickpea Cutlets from the Veganomicon. Everyone's been raving about them since before the book was even published, so I guess I better get into the act.

I already have 2 other cutlet recipes that I use - the Chickpea Cutlets from Low-Fat Jewish Cookbook by Debra Wasserman, an editor of Vegetarian Journal, and the Chicken Cutlets from the Everyday Dish DVD by Bryanna Clark Grogan. I'll let you know which I like best.

VegMoFo Post - I'm Fat - So What?

I'm one of those people who was born fat into a fat family, and even when I starved myself on 1000 calories or less as a pre-teen I could never get the weight off with any success. For the past 20 or so years I've been following the McDougall Plan off and on, mostly on with a few indiscretions around holidays. I once lost 45 pounds on the Maximum Weight Loss Version, well, actually my version of the MWLP, which eventually brought me down to under 800 cal a day and was still gaining. And most of that weight has returned, anyway.

So I try to console myself in the fact that although I may still be fat and will be fat for the rest of my days, at least I'm healthier than the average Jo on the street because of my vegan food plan. My cholesterol is great, my blood sugars are no where near diabetic levels and even dip into the hypoglycemic range (thanks to CFS and hypothyroid), the arthritis is kept in check, and many other benefits. Better on the grocery budget, too.

Except for some goodies like Amy's Breakfast Burritos. I love those things, but at $2.50 a pop I really can't afford to continue eating 2 a week, cut down to one a week, and now have to cut them out entirely. My job for this week is to find a recipe for these luscious rolls of goodness and fill my freezer with my own home-made ones. But for now, I'm sitting here waiting for this week's burrito to cool off enough so I can eat it without burning my mouth.

Lunch today is more veggies and rice. Yesterday I tried to have just a bowl of that Red Beans and Sweet Potato Soup for lunch, and by the time we ate dinner my blood sugar was crashing on the ground and I could barely think! I guess I'll finish up that soup with my veggies, too.

Today is Sunday, so we'll have our traditional Sunday dinner of burgers. I'll have the oat-burgers from a Bryanna Clark Grogan recipe that I think is on Dr. Barnard's diabetes book's PDF file, and the boys will eat their dead turkey ones.

My evening snack will be my usual banana.

VegMoFo Post - Typical Saturday

Today we're back to non-vacation, non-holiday foods.

Breakfast was my usual oatmeal and applesauce.

Lunch will be veggies and rice with some salad dressing, probably Annie's Organics's Goddess

Dinner is pizza made with home made whole wheat crust, oodles of veggies, and either Follow Your Heart cheese or cheeseless, depending in whether or not the HFS got some cheese delivered since I was there the other day.

Damn, I wish my pizzas looked as good as this one on the Vegan Gourmet home page! (It only loads half-way for me so click that link and see if it opens for you.) Mine always look like this:



Looks like melted plastic. If I shred it instead of slice it still looks plastic. Many people say this is the best cheese for melting, but it doesn't "melt" as much as soften up. Sometimes I just take the back of a tablespoon and smear the softened cheese around on the pizza, but usually I just leave it or do without.

VegMoFo Post - Detox Friday

Okay, so I had a bit more to eat yesterday than I planned to, and of not-so-healthy foods, so today it's going to be nothing but super-healthy foods.

Breakfast: Bob's Red Mill Scottish steel-cut oats with diced peeled apple
Lunch: Red Bean Sweet Potato Soup and some bread for dunking

Dinner: more soup, maybe some veggies and Jasmine brown rice
Snack: banana

VegMoFo Post - Thanksgiving 2007

Obviously, no turkey in this house. In fact, because it's also our son's birthday, and the birthday person gets to choose the meal, we're having burgers today. I'll be making stuffing, taters, veggies - all the traditional Thanksgiving sides - to go along with them, though.

Just remember what my buddy here says:

VegMoFo Post - More Boring Vacation Foods

I warned ya that this week would be boring!

Breakfast - oatmeal and applesauce
Lunch - veggies and rice with leftover pea soup
Dinner - pasta with Brussels sprouts instead of veggie meatballs, now that I found out they're not vegan, maybe tomato soup


Snack - banana with a schmear of peanut butter

It's the day before Thanksgiving, so waddaya want, a feast?

VegMoFo Post - What to Wear

Yeah, you don't want to hear about more boring vacation foods, like the pot of split pea soup I tossed together last night to go with the sandwiches, the veggie soup I'll toss together with whatever veggies are in the fridge today, or the same faux chicken cutlets from the Everyday Dish DVD by Bryanna Clark Grogan. You want to read about aprons.



Yes, I admit it: I wear an apron when I cook. It's a habit I got early in life from my Hungarian grandmother. She was raised on a farm, and because back then in Europe it was almost as bad as here during the time of the Little House on the Prairie books of Laura Ingles, and she and her sisters had 2 dresses each - one good one that was worn on holidays and those rare Sundays they drove miles in a horse-drawn cart to church, and an everyday dress that they wore full length aprons over, because aprons not only take less fabric to make but they're easier to wash than whole dresses, especially if the dress is hand-sewn because nobody had their own sewing machine.

Anyway, even as a little girl I loved to sew aprons, and even though my neuritis and arthritis keeps me from sewing as much as I want to, when I do sew lately it's usually been another apron. My favorite pattern, one that fits all my flab, is from Mary Mulari, and even she calls it :

Mary Mulari's Favorite Reversible Apron Pattern

I make my pockets different, though. There's always enough fabric left over to make a full-width rectangular pocket that I divide into three sections.

A yard of fabric for each side is easily found in my stash, although for specialty aprons, like the Fall-themed one I'm working on now, I buy new fabric from the only store that sells yardage in a 30 mile radius, a small Joann's store. This particular one has apples on one side, carrots on the other.

It'll look great if I ever get it done. It took about 2 months just to cut it out. Maybe later today I can talk hubby into taking a nap and I'll finally get a chance to stitch it together.

Some of the other aprons I already made up over the years have stripes, teddy bears, candy canes & peppermints, M&M candies, stars and planets, chickens & cows, frogs & bugs, even Winnie the Pooh. Quilting calicoes come in so many different novelty prints! I wonder if I can find fabric that has tofu on it to make a true vegan-themed apron?

VegMoFo Post - Boring Vacation Foods

There really isn't much to say for the next 5 days. Oatmeal for breakfast, soup and sandwich for lunch, and hubby decided it'll be easier to also have soup and sandwiches for dinner, unless we decide to order take-out, instead.

Today's plans for lunch include leftover potato chowder (see yesterday for recipe link) and hubby will have a non-veg cheese sandwich and I'll have seitan on mine.

Dinner, so far, will be a meat-based sandwich for hubby and I'll probably grab veggies and rice, unless we order out for Chinese food.

VegMoFo Post November 18 - Missed A Day

Not my fault - I tried to log in a number of times before heading out for the day but it just wouldn't connect to Google/Blogger.

Nothing much to say, anyway, for either day. Yesterday we ate at a relative's house and I ate a plate of veggies and pushed everything else around on the plate. For dinner at home I made up a gigantic bowl of veggies - carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, pea pods and water chestnuts - and cooked up a batch of rice and hubby and I ate that with soy and duck sauces.

Today I made up another big pot of McDougall's Potato Chowder
and we had that and leftover lasagna for lunch (made with Basil Tofu Ricotta) and we're having burgers for dinner.

Delicious but boring.

VegMoFo Post November 16

Ah, vacation time. For hubby it means not waking up at 4:45 am and going to work, being able to actually eat three meals a day and doing what he wants and staying up late. For me, it also means not waking up that early with the alarm but I'll naturally be awake by 5am, 6 the latest, anyway. It means not being able to do my usual stuff around the house but catering to hubby's whims, doing what he wants to do, going where he wants to go, cooking what he wants to eat.

Officially, his vacation won't start until Monday morning, but unofficially it starts at 12 noon today, when everyone in his company gets the afternoon off to go to the annual awards luncheon. All he has to do is show his face, push some veggies around on his plate, listen to the president make a speech, then he can take off, usually by 2pm. He won't eat anything because he has a 90 minute train ride home, subways and light rail trains that have no restrooms either on the trains themselves or at the stations. That means I have to start feeding him his vacation meals as soon as this afternoon.

Soup and sandwich. That's probably what I'll make for his lunch today and most of the days next week. I recently bought Nava Atlas' Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons, so between that, all the McDougall and Moskowitz/Romero cookbooks, I'll probably make up about 5 different soups in the next 10 days.

Today's lunch time soup will be the Potato Ratatouille from the McDougall Maximum Weight Loss Plan book (MWLP). I'll probably have a sandwich made from the Seitan O'Greatness recipe. I keep a log of this in the freezer at all times.

Dinner tonight is just leftovers from the chili I tossed together the other night, served again with Isa's cornbread. When only 2 people are eating, that cornbread lasts a long time!

VegMoFo Post November 15

Half-way through already.
Food-wise, today will be a boring day. The usual oatmeal for breakfast, leftover potato soup for lunch and dinner will be my weekly lasagna meal. Because we delayed hubby's birthday celebration to day I was originally going to make up some cupcakes from VCTOTW but hubby begged me to please, not do it. He's 57 and still breaks out like a teenager, even from banana bread made with whole wheat flour and a bare minimum of sweetener.

VeganMoFo - Plans go awry

I planned on making lasagna, fresh-baked Italian bread, and a tomato-y soup for dinner. It's waht hubby requested for his birthday today. I even have the tofu basil-ricotta cheese in the refrigerator.

Then the kid tells me he has a seminar to go to this evening at the college, that it starts at 7pm, meaning he has to leave here about 5:30pm to take his 3 trains to get there. So now he won't be home for dinner. It's not worth making a whole big lasagna - the kid's favorite food - without him being here, even if it was what hubby wanted on his birthday, so when DH called me from work at lunch time I told him my dilemma and he aid to skip the lasagna until tomorrow when everyone will be home, to surprise him for dinner.

Okay, a surprise birthday dinner of something he loves with the foods I already have in the house. Can't go shopping - I have $2 in my wallet.

Alright, a bag of red kidney beans! Picked through them (Very carefully - I chomped down on a lentil from a can yesterday) and tossed them in the Crockpot, covered, and on High it went. Chopped up an onion, a few cloves of garlic, tossed in a cup or so of frozen corn and mixed pepper strips, sausage flavored TVP, and 2 packages of Old El Paso fajita flavoring (The chili one is too hot for us).

Then I tossed on a pot of soup with a load of veggies. I think I'll add some of the tiny alphabet pasta that I bought by mistake, too.

Last step is cornbread from Vegan with a Vengeance.

Tomorrow we'll have the lasagna and as a special treat I'll grab my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and make some birthday cupcakes for the poor guy. He said no cake, but after deferring his birthday to one more convenient for the family he deserves it.

Soup & Sandwich Days

Aren't they great? Just slop some stuff between two pieces of bread, heat up some leftover soup, and you've got a warm, hearty meal that fills your belly for hours on end.

Tonight we're having one of our family's favorites, sloppy joes. Instead of opening a can of Manwich today I'll be making Isa & Terry's Snobby Joes's from their latest cookbook, Veganomicon.

This is the photo from the PPK Veganomicon page. I'll replace it with my own photo after I take it tonight. I can't tell what was used in the photo as a base, but mine are always served over whole wheat kaiser rolls.

I know I said I wasn't going to make stuff from the 'Nomicon for a while, but after adding some of the McDougall recipes into Mastercook and seeing their calories per serving were the same if not higher than some of Isa & Terry's recipes I said Screw it! I'm going to make these foods again. Not that McDougall foods aren't tasty, but they're usually on the plain or Mexican side when it comes to general flavor. I really don't like Mexican food all that much and would prefer not to have to add tons of salt to a dish just to taste something. The leftover potato chowder that will accompany today's sandwiches is good, but very bland.

Dessert will be more of that Best Banana Bread from yesterday.

Veggie Patch Meatless Balls

To quote Harvey Fierstein's character in Independence Day: "Oh, crap!"

I haven't bought those meatballs in a few years, but I do remember that they were vegan - no eggs or dairy were hidden in them, unlike some other veggie meat substitutes. I just went to get them heated for dinner and the package screamed out to me that it contains both those products. Well, it is a special occasion today and I can't afford to throw good food in the garbage so I'll cook 'em, but never again!

VeganMoFo - Now With MOre FOtos

Get it, MoFo could also mean "more fotos" (photos) as well as "Month of Food"?

Yeah, I'm a sick mofo.

I finally got around to uploading the pics from the camera to the computer to Flickr, so now the foods have not only links to the recipes but the photo of the actual dish I made. Cool, huh?

VegMoFo Post November 12 - Anniversary Dinner

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary, but being a work night we're limited as to how we celebrate it so we had our mandatory anniversary pizza over the weekend.

Mandatory? That's because 30 years ago tonight, after we got home to our apartment after our wedding reception, we popped a frozen pizza into the oven, put a Tom Waits album on the stereo,
(Nighthawks At the Diner, if you care) and counted our cash gifts, putting some aside to take with us to the Poconos the next morning and putting the rest in an envelope to drop off at my parent's house before we left so my mom could deposit it for us. It was the first time either of us ate all day, as the waiter took our untouched plates full of food away from the table when the photographer called us for the cake pictures. The idiots both served and removed the dinner in the 15 minutes we were posing, then when we complained to the caterer he explained there were no extra dinners, that he was terribly sorry. We grubbed some leftover rolls from guests so we had something in us before we started drinking, and ate that pizza with genuine hunger when we got home.

No pizza tonight, though. We'll have a nice spaghetti dinner with meatless meatballs from The Veggie Patch. I'll be making a loaf of Italian bread to go with it this afternoon and will most likely spread some roast garlic on the slices. Nothing fancy, but one of our favorite meals.

Oh, and I finally got that banana bread made, too.

VegMoFo Post November 11 - More Soup

I thought fall was finally here with winter rapidly approaching, but yesterday we saw our first mall Santa and all the stores have holiday decorations up. While waiting for our trains to come, I was freezing because I went dressed for fall weather in a hoodie sweatshirt and a light denim jacket. How was I to know the temps would drop 20 degrees since we left the house only 3 hours before in the middle of the day? Hubby started wearing his rated-to-minus 20º-double-insulated winter coat when the temps dropped below 60º last month, so he was only slightly chilly. Of course I barely slept all night, thanks to a runny nose and ear ache from the wind going right through the hoodies's hood.

And I woke up today to 29º outside. Good bye, Autumn. Next time stay more than a few days, okay?

The only good thing about winter is that it's perfect soup weather. It looks like I'll have a pot constantly bubbling on the stove from now until next Spring, so expect a lot more soup recipes for the rest of this month. When we get back from the grocery store today, I'll put on a pot of McDougall Potato Chowder, another recipe from the McDougall Made Irresistible DVD. I'll either pop a loaf of bread on in my ABM or just buy a loaf of crusty bread at the store this morning to go with it.

VegMoFo Post November 10 - Stoup

Rachael Ray is so cute. Many people can't stand her being so chipper all the time, but she reminds me so much of how I used to be before Chronic Fatigue Syndrome , menopause, and hypothyroidism took its toll. OK, so her idea of a "vegetarian" meal is load of pasta with cheese, so she rarely makes anything that I would personally eat, but I still watch her show now and then. I love her made-up words, like "Yummo" and, my all-time favorite, "stoup," for a soup so hardy it could also be a stew. So why not just call it a "stew" and be done with it?

Yesterday afternoon, while creeping half-blind along the apartment*, a yearning for soup came over me, and thanks to the new DVD from Dr. McDougall called McDougall Made Irresistable I knew the one I wanted to make. So I felt my way to the computer, realized that the light of the monitor was hurting my eyes, and called my slave, er, I mean husband, over and talked him through how to open my AZZ Cardfile program, point it to the McDougall recipe file, and copy the recipe. He then had to paste it into another program's blank page, greatly enlarge the font so I could read it, then print it out. For a mostly computer-illiterate person he did quite well. I could see well enough to open the container of chopped onions I always keep in the fridge, and opening cans I could do in my sleep. Hubby helped with what I couldn't see well enough to do.

The result was a delicious Festive Dal Soup that was so thick that Ray Ray herself would debate whether to call it a soup, stew, stoup, or even a casserole dish! Two weeks ago hubby declared the Tomato-Rice Soup with Roasted Garlic and Navy Beans soup from the Veganomicon as the best soup he ever ate in his life, but yesterday he said the same thing about this soup.

Thanks, Mary McDougall, for another winner!

You can find the recipe on my VeganMoFo 2007 Recipes Page.


* The half-blindness was the result of pupil-dilating eye drops given to me just an hour or so before at the opthamalogist's office. No increase in my inter-occular pressure so no glaucoma treatment is required - yet. Still no explanation for the flashes and twitches, but I'll just chalk all that up to the CFS and the weird things it does to people. The eyedrops make my eyes very sensitive to light (Think of Gizmo, the gremlin, creeping along yelling "Bright light! Bright light!" and seeing everything in a hazy grey with no sharp outline edges, just a big blur. That's how I am for at least 4 to 6 hours after those drops go in my eyes.

To keep this side-bar in the topic of veganism, the doc is an enlightened one who believes the lack of glaucoma progression or retinal detachment could possibly be the result of my low-fat vegan food plan, that eating this way certainly keeps those tiny capillaries in good shape.

VegMoFo Post November 9

You didn't really believe I would go on the Rice Diet now, did you? Everybody knows that diet's don't work. Scientists have known that since the 1950's. Gina Kolata, one of the New York Times' science writers, wrote about that in her latest book, Rethinking Thin. Great read - grab it from your local library if you can't afford to purchase it.


Besides, I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing now, eating the McDougall way! I even have a little blinkie proclaiming that fact: Well, it used to be a blinkie but it doesn't seem to be moving now. :(

So what did I do yesterday? I made a batch of Pumpkin Muffins from Dr. John McDougall and his wife Mary's latest DVD - McDougall Made Irresistable.




Today we still don't know what we're doing for dinner. Originally I had planned this elaborate meal using a few more recipes from the Veganomicon, but I had forgotten I had an opthamalogist appointment and the eyedrops make me almost blind for a few hours afterwards and unable to read, so no new recipes. I'll probably just toss a soup together and grab a loaf of crusty bread on the way home from the doc.

VegMoFo Post - Weight Gain and Loss

We usually eat pretty boringly, having the same meals on certain days week after week. This is how our week usually goes:

Sunday - burgers
Monday - baked beans and biscuits
Tuesday - anything goes
Wednesday - lasagna
Thursday - chicken patty sandwiches
Friday - soup and bread
Saturday - pizza

For the burger and chicken patty meals, my guys eat meat versions and I eat vegan versions, and never the twain shall meet. OK, once in a blue moon hubby will have a veggie burger if the kid is hungry and wants an extra burger that day.

"Anything goes" days are usually the only time I make things from the dozens of vegan cookbooks I own, but because Veganomicon is a brand new book that I've been waiting months for, I've been cooking from there instead of our usual Monday and Friday meals, or like last week, the Friday soup was a V'con recipe.

All of this good eatin' has shown on my scale, so I'm going to have to scale back (Get it, "scale" back! Yeah, you can smack me now, cuz if you don't my kid will.) on all these new recipes, or at least how much of them I eat. I need to cut back on the amount of salt I consume, too.

So my VeganMoFo post for today is going to be about the Rice Diet.

The original Duke University Rice Diet, as written by Dr. Werner Kempner back in the 1940's was very spartan, led to loads of weight loss and reversal of kidney damage (The original purpose of the food plan) but was really hard for people to keep up with in real life, not just because it was a starvation diet but the main focus of the plan was the low sodium, and in normal people the food plan led to electrolyte imbalances unless they were closely monitored by a doctor and had frewquent lab work done. When Dr. Kempner retired he left (sold?) the food plan to his protegé, Dr. Robert Rosati, and his wife, nutritionist Kitty Rosati. The Rosati's eventually broke the Rice Diet away from Duke University, started what is now known as the Rice House in Durham, North Carolina, and revised the Rice Diet so it's much safer to do on your own without constant medical intervention to assure you're not going into electrolyte imbalance or becoming anorexic or have nutritional deficiencies from the very low amount of calories and food choices in the original plan. The first time this was made available to others was in Kitty Rosati's book, Heal Your Heart. In 2006 the Rosati's came out with the book, The Rice Diet Solution, which explains their "dieta", what they're calling not just the food plan but entire way of life associated with the Rice Diet. This past year Kitty came out with the official Rice Diet Cookbook, which was disappointing because many of the recipes had been developed by members of the forum and posted there previously.

A former forum member named Nathalie has a great web site called The Rice Way that explains the Rice Diet in detail, but the best place to go for support is the official Rice Diet forums. Plenty of information about the program and loads of recipes. There are also 2 Yahoogroups devoted to the Rice Dieta, The_Ricers, where the owner abandoned the list and it's now full of spam, and The Rice Diet Solution, a new and very mall (for now) list.



Click to visit The Rice Diet Solution group

My favorite Rice Diet recipe is Rhonda's Rice and Beans.

VegMoFo Post November 7

Breakfast - the same boring oatmeal and applesauce, but today with a drizzle of pure maple syrup

Lunch - the same boring veggies and rice with Goddess dressing, but for "dessert" I'll have the leftover Corn Pudding from last night

Dinner: Vegetable Lasagna with spinach and Basil Tofu Ricotta from Vegan with a Vengeance
I might also make some tomato or veggie soup to go with it - it's certainly cold enough for soup every day!



Snack: Best Banana Bread from Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn (Well, his wife Anne wrote all the recipes)

VeganMoFo Posts Tue Nov 6

Let's see, what's on the menu for today?

Breakfast: the same boring oatmeal and applesauce
Lunch: the same boring veggies and rice with Goddess dressing, maybe a cup of broth
Dinner: Here's where the excitement of the day is. Today will be 2 more recipes from Veganomicon, the Chile Cornmeal-Crusted Tofu

& Southwestern Corn Pudding & I served cauliflower with it.

Monday November 5 VeganMoFo

Let's see what today will bring. This is what I have planned:

Breakfast: oatmeal and applesauce
Snack: 2 sliced toast (Alvarado Street Bakery California style) with apple butter
Lunch: mixed veggies and rice with Annie's Organic Goddess dressing
Dinner: Chickpeas Romanesco from Veganomicon
Snack: banana

Photo from a Veganomicon Tester Photo page on Flickr

I might also make that Saffron rice dish shown in the photo - I did finally splurge and buy some saffron threads yesterday. I'll also make a loaf of Italian bread (half semolina and half white whole wheat flours) to go with it, too, as well as a big green salad with store-bought fat-free Italian dressing.