Tassili’s Raw Reality

As far as I know, there are only two pure raw food restaurants in Atlanta: Loving it Live and Tassili’s Raw Reality. Loving it Live is great, but it’s pretty far for us. So we were happy to discover Tassili’s Raw Reality a couple of months ago.

Outside they have produce and herbs growing. How awesome is that!

The inside feels very cozy. Partly because it’s small but mainly because it’s decorated with warm, inviting art and colors.

It’s the kind of place where you place your order at the counter and they bring the food to you or you can take it away.

A lot of the menu items are displayed in the front glass case. 

Since a lot of things are prepared fresh, a longish wait time during peak hours is not uncommon. The wait is not bad since it’s such a cozy place and on Sundays they have live music.

On our first visit, we got a lot of food in order to try a bunch of stuff. Neal got (clockwise) the sweet coconut corn, pad thai noodles, curried plantains and karamu couscous.

I got (clockwise) black love stew, spicy kale salad, a nori roll and black-eyed pea hummus.

Now I think we’ve figured out our favorites. These descriptions are taken from the online menu.

• karamu couscous:  A lightly sweet, fluffy, festival of couscous, raisins and berries that is perfect on its own or as a complement to the Spicy Kale and other savory dishes
• sweet coconut corn: This dish is like drinking sweet kernel corn right from a freshly split coconut bowl cut straight from the tree.
• spicy kale salad: With one of nature’s most nutritionally complete foods as its base, Tassili’s Spicy Kale is a flavorful blend of fresh kale, red onion, sun dried tomatoes, spices and, of course, the love that brings it all together (personal note: this stuff is for reals spicy and I don’t normally like spicy but this is soooo good!)
• nori rolls: How can so much satisfaction be packed into such a little unassuming roll? Taste it and you’ll understand. Tassili’s Nori Rolls is a flavorful blend of sunflower and pumpkin seed, wakame seaweed, scotch bonnet and spices (I cannot eat at Tassili’s without having at least one nori roll)

There are still many things on the menu that we want to try like the w-raps, spicy naked tacos and the eggplant pizza so we will be back.

What are your favorite raw foods and/or restaurants like?

Good Vegan Reads: Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?

What is direct action in terms of the animal rights movement? As opposed to passing out leaflets, blogging and other forms of vegan education, those involved in direct action will commit acts of civil disobedience and sabotage. These acts could include destroying fur traps, breaking and entering labs or farms to rescue animals, or something as simple as defacing a billboard that is advertising meat. A recent example of direct action was the release of customer information from Hudson Valley Foie Gras.

But does direct action hurt or help the movement? Do those that carry out direct action only reverse the hard work of vegan educators by making all vegans out to be militant extremists? Or is there a place for both vegan education and direct action in the movement? How is direct action related to other social movements in history?

TERRORISTS or FREEDOM FIGHTERS? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals foreward by Ward Churchill, edited by Steven Best, PhD and Anthony J. Nocella II.

This book explores all of the above questions and more through an anthology of essays written by various people including Gary Yourofsky, Karen Davis, Kevin Jonas, Paul Watson, and Rod Coronado. Essays cover the history, motivation, ideology and perceptions surrounding direct action, analyses of all strategies used in the movement and interpretations of the relationship, or lack thereof, between “terrorism” and direct action.

I highly recommend this powerful and thought-provoking book. I gained a greater understanding about a part of a movement that I only knew superficially. Reading this confirmed my stance that direct action does have a place in the animal rights movement.  However, just like any form of activism, some instances of direct action are more meaningful than others. In the case of the Hudson Valley Foie Gras incident,  a chef decided to stop selling foie gras because things were “getting out of hand”. The “things” he refers to is the harassing anonymous phone calls. So, on one hand we’ve got one less buyer of foie gras, but on the other hand he doesn’t really get why the harassers are so upset about the foie gras. He just thinks they care more about animals than people.

But when I stop and think about the millions and millions of animals suffering in labs and farms every single second of every single day and then I think about the brave people who risk their freedom to go in and rescue them, I do get a little teary eyed. To me, they are freedom fighters.

What are your opinions on the role of direct action in the animal rights movement?

A weekend, brought to you by the letter F

F is for freeing a caterpillar from a dangerous bike ride.

F is for feeling like a kid again when getting up close and personal with trains.

F is for festival, the Inman Park festival where we got to see Jeanette Zeis (a local vegan artist) selling her goods alongside Kenn Twofour.F is for food…

Friday night take away from Chinese Buddha. They have a separate veg menu and these are satay sticks.

Strawberry-banana pop from King of Pops.

Vegan reuben from Dough Bakery/ Gutenfleischers (click for link)

A sad version of raw ackee scramble with green onions. We needed to get groceries. (click pic for a better version)

Enh. This was just enh. But again, we had no food in the house. We needed to get to the store.

F is for furbabies that need their nails trimmed.

F is for f*ck, I have to go back to work tomorrow.

Dump-it-in Chili

As much as I love to eat, I don’t always have the time to get cray-cray in the kitchen, especially weekdays after work. This is a great meal for when I don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen because “ain’t nobody got time for ‘dat!“.

It starts with the crock pot. I turned it to high and sprayed the insides with oil. Then I dumped in a 28oz can of chopped tomatoes, a 14oz can of kidney beans and a 15oz can of black beans. I only drained the beans, but I didn’t rinse them. 

Next I dumped in a cup of frozen corn.

And one small chopped onion and one zucchini.

Then I dumped in approximately: 1/2 tbs chicken broth concentrate, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp chili powder, a dash of harissa and a 1/4 tsp black pepper. I didn’t really measure it out. I just tasted it with my mouth to see if it was seasoned to my liking.

At the last-minute I decided to throw in these Gardein beefless tips. We had a boatload of these because of a “buy one get one free” sale at Publix (Thanks A, for giving me the heads up on that one!).

Then I stirred it all up and let it do its thing while I did other important life stuff, like watch youtube videos and take a nap.

We ate about 2.5-3 hours later. Depending on when you get home from work this could make for a late dinner but this works for our house because we usually don’t eat until 9pm anyways.

So the moral of the story is I let my crock pot do the work. My mouth couldn’t tell the difference and I got my internets fix. Its a win-win!

Veganized Zucchini Pie from Oprah

So, Oprah didn’t write this recipe, but it is up on her website. Needless to say, it ain’t vegan. Usually I am scared to veganize dishes, but this one only had two non-vegan ingredients so I gave it a go.

I followed the recipe exactly EXCEPT I used Ener-G egg replacer for the eggs and I used Daiya chedder cheese. And instead of using store-bought Bisquick, I followed this guide on how to make homemade Bisquick (it’s basically flour, salt, baking powder and oil).

The veganized dish was a success! The Daiya cheese kind of released more oil than I would have liked while it cooked or maybe I just greased my pan too much out of my  fear of “food sticking to pans”. Is there a name for that kind of phobia? Whatever the reason, I baked it for about 10 minutes longer than the recipe called for in order to get rid of some of that extra oil. Didn’t really work, but the dish was still delicious!

We ate this for two meals (dinner the night I made it and lunch the next day). It reminded me of quiche and was so tasty that when we finished off the pie, I wanted more. But best of all (ahem, Oprah) no cows or chickens were harmed for my taste buds.

Verdict: I’ll make this again but will probably experiment with the amount of Daiya and vegetables.

Weekend Update

What I did this past weekend:

Tried to finish some knitting projects, but did not succeed. The yarn I am using is cotton based, no wool for me!

Went to a vegan bake sale. A lot of stuff had sold before we got there, but we got to see Neal’s work on a postcard/flyer and still came home with some goodies (they melted a little because we were on bikes).

Went to the co-op to get some stuff from bulk and ended up trying this new popcorn from Earth Balance (it’s good!) and rehydrating with coconut water.

Rode bikes everywhere.

Had to do some work. Boo.

And ate some food:

Left over Mellow Mushroom pizza (vegan) with some ginger ale.

Homemade vegan Ethiopian food from a student…one of the few perks of being a teacher!

Game of Thrones night meal…mock chicken wings, mashed taters and asparagus.We also went to a raw restaurant over the weekend, but I’ll blog about that in a separate post because I am tired and have to get ready for the grind tomorrow. The grind is work and tomorrow is today since I am not posting this until tomorrow which will actually be today if you read this Monday. Ya follow?

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!

Salt ‘n’ peppa’s here!

Sometimes, fruits and vegetables just need a little salt and pepper to bring out their natural goodness.  For this “dish”, I mixed up a bunch of halved grape tomatoes with diced avocados and then sprinkled it with some flavored salt and pepper.

The flavored salt I used (a gift from Neal’s sis) is a mix of salt, parsley, rosemary, sage, garlic, thyme and Arbol chili. Flavored salt isn’t the only way to give this simple salad pizzazz.  Jennie at She’s Vegging Out mixes in olive oil, lemon juice and cilantro.

Either way, it doesn’t take much to make these fruits and veggies sexy-good! Aww yeah…”p-push it real good!”  (if you’re a child of the 80′s, you know what I’m talkin’ about!).

Atlanta Veg Fest 2013 and Vegan Bake Sale!

It’s seven months away but we are super excited about the upcoming Atlanta Veg Fest on Saturday, November 9th.  Not only because last year’s was a great success and a lot of fun, but this year Neal has created an original illustration exclusively for the event!

Click on the pic to see all of Neal’s work.

The masterminds behind Atlanta Veg Fest will be putting up Neal’s hand printed design for pre-order on their website sometime soon. The Atlanta Veg Fest facebook link has all the up to date info on everything surrounding the event, including info about the Atlanta Vegan Bake sale on April 20th which benefits the ATL vegfest.  That’s THIS Saturday people! I can’t wait to see what kind of goodies they have there this year!

Image from Atlanta Veg Fest facebook page.

Oh yeah! So much good stuff coming up for vegan ATL!

Veg Tuesdays at Wrecking Bar Brewpub

It’s great when omni-restaurants make an effort to cater to the vegan community. The Wrecking Bar Brewpub in Atlanta offers up a unique vegetarian menu every Tuesday which usually features several vegan items.

We went last Tuesday and this was the menu. Three out of the five items were vegan!

We each ordered the seitan burger and it came with their “wreck fries”.

I don’t think I’ve had a burger this good in a while. Most vegan burgers are made out of soy protein, beans and/or grains, which can be quite dense sometimes. This one was a pure seitan chunk offering a unique lightness in texture. And the flavor was smoky, sweet and onion-y. My mouth is watering thinking about it right now. This should be made a permanent menu item because every bar needs a good veg burger!

We don’t get out to the Wrecking Bar on every Tuesday, but after that burger we will definitely make more of an effort to see what else they have to offer. Their facebook page often updates with the veg specials each Tuesday.

Are there any omni-restaurants near you that make an effort to cater to vegans?

The Last Weekend

As you read this, I am probably back at work answering a question that I answered five times already. This past weekend was the last weekend of my spring break. Cue the violins please. Here’s some random stuff I did on…”The Last Weekend”.

1. Caught up on blogs in the early morning. Since Google reader is going away soon, I transferred to Feedly. So far I like it a lot because it has a nice, interface. I set mine to show thumbnails of my feed.

2. Spent time with puppies. Miles is waiting for his sister to come back up after their morning pee.

3. Strolled through the neighborhood. I picked up an Arden’s Garden green smoothie with pineapple juice, banana, strawberry and mango.

4. Hung out at an art festival.

5. Ate a good brunch. Neal made the peanut butter swirl pancakes from Oh She Glows and I made my own chocolate raspberry sauce to go with it. Pure decadence.

6. Spent a lot of a rainy day in bed. I’m drinking peach tea, reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63,

and eating this.

7. Made a snack. This is a raw cashew cheese dip with sundried tomatoes from vegreviews. It was pretty good!

8. Piled fresh out the dryer clothes on Nikko. She likes the warmth.

9. Watched Neal be weird. He was laying flat on the floor and then tried to get up without using his arms to prop himself up while holding one leg completely straight. He said it was impossible. I tried it. It was.

What kind of shenanigans did you get into this past weekend ?