Work in progress

In between copious amounts of baking and projects, we’ve been trying to renovate and reorganize our apartment. One of the ideas that I’m in the middle of is updating the large book case in our living room. It has always been filled with stuff, masks, bike gear and various odds and ends. I wanted to make it a little more presentable and hide some of the storage aspects. I embarked on a crazy mission to not only fill it with our books that were placed randomly around the house, but also to cover them all in colored paper.

First of all, I had no idea how many books we had hidden away in various drawers and closets that now had a place to be. Second, covering books takes quite a bit longer than I thought. Third, nice colored paper is expensive and doesn’t cover nearly as many books as I would like. It seemed like a good idea in the first place, but now it seems like a daunting task to finish.

As you can see, I’m about half way done. I’ve covered the storage boxes with mat board as well. Soon hopefully we’ll get some handles for them so they actually open without the use of a fork or some other implement.

In any case, I think it is much improved from before. Please excuse all the strange things hanging out in our place. You accumulate a great deal of oddities when you make movies. Hopefully I’ll have a finished update soon enough, along with some other cool renovations in the apartment.

Homemade for Haiti

This past weekend I participated in the Homemade for Haiti bake sale hosted by Home Ec Shop in Silverlake. We were able to raise an amazing $1,220 for Doctors without Borders.

I cooked up some of my favorite cupcakes and some of my best sellers in hopes that they could get the most money to those in need.

While the bake sale itself wasn’t exclusively vegan, they had a whole table full of vegan goodness (and even soy milk for coffee)! The shop is so cute too and all the bake goods were packaged up to be exponentially adorable. You can see more photos on flickr.

If you want to do something really easy to help with the relief effort in Haiti, there are a ton of vegan bake sales going on across the country.  I’m particularly envious of the NYC vegan bake sale at Mooshoes (which coincidentally uses one of my cupcake photos taken by Studiodrome). There is even a bake sale here in Los Angeles this Sunday.

Also, if you’re in Los Angeles, you can currently get a hold of these cupcakes at Meet Market or at Vegan Bake Sale. Yay!

Vegan Road Trip: Part 4

Austin, Texas

Possibly my favorite stop of our road trip was Austin, Texas. I had wanted to visit for the longest time, and insisted that we go there at some point on the journey. Amazingly we were able to celebrate New Years Eve dancing in the streets of this awesome city. The next day were were able to explore and visit some of the great vegan restaurants. We started 2010 with breakfast at Snackbar. The restaurant is located in the hip SoCo district and has a really great modern yet comfortable vibe. All the waiters and waitresses were wearing handmade aprons. I love it. They have a number of vegan dishes as well as gluten free options all marked on the menu.

As soon as I heard that this restaurant had vegan biscuits and gravy, it became the only place on my list that we absolutely had to go to. It turned out to have some even more impressive items on the menu, including vegan mini waffles and vegan tofu benedict on top of these tasty waffles. The biscuits were pretty decent, with a great tempeh gravy, but they looked ridiculous so it’s best you use your imagination. The waffles were great; fluffy and perfectly moist. The tofu florentine was quite good, lightly flavored and fresh. The place was pretty hectic as people crowded in to eat off their hangovers. I wish we had been able to come at another time because they were obviously under-staffed on the holiday, but I still enjoyed going there very much. Because of the craziness, we were offered a $10 gift card which could be yours! Just head on down to the end of this post.

We spent the day walking around town and exploring. The weather was gorgeous and I pretty much totally fell in love with the place. Everything was just awesome and had a bit more of creativity. Where in Los Angeles we have food trucks, Austin has airstreams. We stopped in The Ginger Man just to peek inside, and ended up staying for some drinks, pretzels and a mean game of balderdash, aka the best game ever. They had a huge selection of beers on tap and a super comfortable sitting area that makes you feel like you’re at home or in your father’s library. We ended up spending a better part of the afternoon hanging here.

When we finally sought out dinner, it was no contest. We headed to The Parlour to devour some vegan pizza. This bar has pizza available with follow your heart cheese and a handful of vegan meats as well as veggie toppings. They even have a vegan french bread pizza which was SO GOOD. Now, I might get myself in some hot water here, I know a lot of you are big fans of Daiya, but I am not. I am saddened every time I find that a restaurant that used to carry something I liked, has switched to daiya. Having this pizza was like a breath of fresh air. I honestly almost cried after eating it, I was that happy. Luckily, I just found a new place to fill this gaping hole in my vegan pizza heart that is quite a bit closer. Possibly my new favorite pizza spot is actually in town.

Ok ok I bet you were wondering when I was going to get to that gift card…right? Well there it is! Since I don’t live in Austin, and who knows when I’ll be back, I’m going to offer this lovely $10 gift card that I received to one of you lucky readers. All you have to do is comment! Oh, and you should actually be in Austin, or nearby. I’ll choose a winner on February 1st. So you have until then…Get to it!

And the winner is….Miranda! Congratulations!

Winner selected using random.org

Brainwashed Love teaser trailer

You may remember back in June, I took a little break from blogging, baking and well my entire life basically and made a feature film. You probably don’t remember, but yeah, I did that. Shawn and I wrote the script to Brainwashed Love together and paid for the entire production ourselves. It is by far the craziest and hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was also one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had.

We’re still working on the last details to polish it up,  but in the meantime, we put together a little teaser trailer to show, and well, I’m so excited I have to post it here as well. Please watch, enjoy and share! Support truly independent films!

If you’re reading this on an RSS feed you can click here to watch. You can also become a fan on facebook and follow us on twitter.

Vegan Road Trip: Part 3

The East Coast and more

We made it to the East Coast just in time for Christmas Eve with Shawn’s family. We relaxed for awhile, ate some home cooked meals, went to the movies, had a vegan taco night and played lots of Little Big Planet. While there was snow on the ground when we arrived, it rained all of Christmas day, so no snowmen were made as I had hoped. Though we had planned to head in to NYC from the New Jersey suburb where we were staying, we opted to stay home and stay dry.

Luckily this meant we got to try out a (new to us) vegan Chinese restaurant, Veggie Heaven. Oh and it was heaven. I have enjoyed some fabulous vegetarian Chinese restaurants but there was just something about this place that has me dreaming about it. Maybe it was the sushi. Okay, so that’s not Chinese specifically but I’ve never had such amazing vegan sushi. I love sushi. Hey, I’m from Los Angeles, I’ve been eating sushi since I was two. As soon as I saw the fireball roll on the menu, faux spicy tuna with avocado and a signature spicy sauce, I knew it was the one thing I had to have. My goodness, it was divine. But it wasn’t just the sushi, we also had a great wonton soup and some fantastic crispy duck. So good, I can’t wait to go back…

Soon enough we were on the road again, heading to Asheville to pick up our backseat companions. I should mention that this is probably around the point where I was far enough from home and a computer that I forgot about taking photos of much. We went to some really neat restaurants and it just never even occurred to me to take photos. These things happen when you just enjoy your trip and forget about blogging for a bit.

After getting stuck in traffic on the horror that is the I-95, we were ecstatic to find the Blue Nile in Harrisonburg, Virginia with a bar that was open late  (we drove through at about 11pm) and yummy vegan sandwiches. Also, I should mention I now have a deep affection for Hampton Inns. After staying in the creepiest Motel 6 ever, and after one of our more stressful driving days, it was so nice to fall asleep in a clean room (and watch Animal Planet). Not to mention, their complimentary breakfast actually has a few vegan options.

Asheville ended up being one of the surprisingly awesome stops on our trip. We spent most of our time exploring the amazing Biltmore House, but also had the opportunity to try a couple restaurants including Green Sage, where the reuben you see above is from, a cafe with a bunch of vegan options clearly listed on their menu. We had an amazing pizza with a super thin crust made from beer mash at Barley’s Taproom. And get this, Mellow Mushroom in Asheville has Cheezly vegan cheese! This isn’t true for all Mellow Mushroom locations either. As far as I know, it’s only Asheville. Did I mention that Asheville has the most craft breweries per capita in the US? Oh I didn’t? Well it does.

I’ll have one more episode of our road trip tour, featuring my favorite stop: Austin, Texas. In the mean time, I recommend you check out Shawn’s beautiful photo sets from our trip here and here. You can see much more of the places we stopped, some of our crazy antics and not just food.