Roman Holiday Cookies

Last year, we had a massive snowstorm and my friend Caroline came over and we baked all day and watched Roman Holiday. Now whenever its too yucky to go out and you have to stay home and bake, I think of it as a Roman Holiday. Today I’m trying these Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies from HERE. You should too.

Absolute BEST vegan chocolate chip cookies!!

Ingredients (use vegan versions):

3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup non-dairy margarine (I use Earth Balance)
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar (I use vanilla-infused granulated sugar)
1/2 vanilla bean
1/4 cup plain unsweetened yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

2. In a bowl, combine whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, and salt.

3. In another bowl, cream together non-dairy margarine, brown sugar, and white sugar with a fork. Scrape and add the contents of your vanilla bean. Mix in non-dairy yogurt and vanilla extract until incorporated (save the leathery outside of the vanilla bean to make your own vanilla sugar!).

4. Mix in the flour and chocolate chips. Roll the dough into ping-pong sized balls and bake for 18 to 20 minutes. Allow to cool on cookie sheet. This dough can also be rolled and frozen to cut later!

xposted to my blog (http://neuroticvegan.blogspot.com/).

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If you are in NYC…

For the NYIGF (aka heaven and hell in one gigantic catacomb), you are in luck. NYIGF blissfully coincides with Restaurant Week, which is really 2 weeks where you can eat basically anywhere in NYC for a flat fee of $35 dollars per person for a 3 course meal. I use it to try new restaurants that I havent eaten at before for one reason or another.

Enter Rouge Tomate, a restaurant on the Upper East Side( its actually across the street from Barney’s). Anyway, the “American” food was great and I love finding great new places to eat that are uptown. (Going downtown seems like so much work!) But the really interesting thing is this note attached to our menu and our bill: Apparently, this place is serving fancy health food.  Local, Organic and yummy? Sounds awesome! (I don’t get how they managed to find local mango, kiwi and pineapple for the desert cup, but whatever.)

What do you think about this SPE: A culinary & nutritional charter? Pretentious? Or something more restaurants should embrace?

Two other great restaurants I tried this week on the east side: Yama and David Burke’s Fishtail.

Just a heads up: Fishtail serves $5 dollar burgers(meat, tuna, Portabello mushroom)  between 10 Pm – and 12 Pm every weeknight. How awesome is that? VERY. Very good to know if you live in the area….

Another NYC dining tip: Milos, the best greek food and my favorite restaurant in NYC has a $24 dollar lunch special and a theater special as well. Just a little tip, DONT order ANYTHING extra! Even a drink (they can cost up to $18) will screw up your deal!!!

I write about this because I want to include you all in my local food adventures. So does Michael Pollan. You can read the little food journal he wrote while in NYC promoting his book a few weeks ago. Apparently, not being an asshole is more important than not eating tuna. I love this guy.

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Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.

(I needed to reward you all for reading all my long posts with no pictures.)

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Food, Defined.

Remember a few weeks ago when I explained that I was investigating FOOD and had no idea what to eat?

Well, its like Michael Pollan read my post, because he just put out a little book called:

Food Rules. An Eater’s Manuel.

JUST what I asked for!!!!

You can read it in about 15 minutes and its filled with all kinds of fun little tips:

1. Eat Food

2. Dont eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.

8. Avoid foods that make health claims.

11. Avoid foods you see advertised on television

18. If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.

22.Treat meat as a flavoring or a special occasion food.

31. Eat wild foods when you can

35. Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature.

37. “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

39. Eat all the junk food you want, as long as you cook it for yourself.

44. Pay more, eat less.

45. Eat less.

57. Dont get your fuel from the same place your car does.

60. Treat treats as treats.

64. Break the rules once in a while.

Of course, all of these are explained in delightful little paragraphs. I LOVE this book.

I’m still curious as to what fruits & vegetables I should eat during winter.

How do vegans/organic/ and local eaters make it through winter?

What about imported bottled products like olive oil and italian tuna?

What about frozen/canned products? Are those generally bad? Or are they acceptable in some cases?

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Make this for dinner, eat it all weekend.

My mom and grandma taught me how to make the best chicken soup ever. Its still in its elementary stages in the photo above.

Its definitely that kind of a day, and I feel  like I might be getting a little sick… Plus I make chicken soup every friday and we eat it all weekend!

Ingredients:

Im not going to give specific amounts because it doesnt really matter and you can put as much or as little of each thing as you like. You can even not include somethings.

Large onion

Celery

Carrots

Zucchini

Potato (peeled)

Sweet potato (peeled)

**Fresh dill (dont skip this one!)

Chicken (you can throw in the whole chicken, just a few legs, or even a breast if you want it to taste less oily.I make it with chicken breast when I am lazy or when I make it for the baby. For vegetarians – Osem also makes non-meat all natural consume, and the soup comes out great! )

Sea salt

Black pepper

Instructions:

1. Cut everything up into small but not tiny cubes.

2. Throw into pot with a lot of water.

3. Cook for hours. Seriously, throw everything in there and let it cook for at least 2 hours on medium heat. Sometimes I cook it for 3-4 hours and my mom cooks it all day. The longer you cook it – the better it tastes. You can add more water later if it looks too thick.

4. The last step, I do an hour before serving.

Matzo Balls.  I follow the recipe on the Maneschewitz box.

2 tablespoons oil
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/2 cup Manischewitz® Matzo Meal
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons soup stock or water

(I recommend using the soup water for the matzo balls. I also grind a little pepper into them.)

Mix oil and eggs together. Mix and add Manischewitz® Matzo Meal and salt. When well blended, add soup stock or water. Cover mixing bowl and place in refrigerator for at least twenty minutes. Using a two or three quart size pot, bring salted water to a brisk boil. Reduce flame and into the slightly bubbling water drop balls formed from above mixture. Cover pot and let cook 30-40 minutes.

Some people serve this soup with noodles, but I eat mine with a scoop of rice!

Yum!!!

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Our government is retarded.

A man tries to blow up a plane in the last hour of a flight. Hence, no one can move for the last hour of a flight from now on. Who is that going to fool?

I was actually going to write about this anyway, because I have been reading up on the food industry in this country and I am trying to figure out: What the hell should I be eating?

It all started about a year ago when I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.

“Eat food, mostly vegetables. Not a lot. ” Sounds like good advice.

Then I saw Food, Inc.

Then I went a step further and read the book of Polyface Farm’s owner Joel Salatin “Everything I want to do is illegal.”

This book subtitled “War stories from the local food front” is his description of the complete and utter backwardness of the government and bureaucracies involving our food. And this guy might be the single most innovative and successful small farmer around.

Now, if there is one thing we have all learned in the past year its this: The people who run the government are idiots. They seem like they are running things with our best interests in mind. The economy: ha. The food industry: double ha.

We are trained since childhood into thinking the people in charge are smarter than us and know whats best for us ie parents, teachers, rabbis, presidents, cops etc…. What happens as you become an adult and you can look at the people in charge as equals is you realize: remember in the sixth grade when you thought you were smarter than your teacher? you probably were.

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I think I have a problem….

…and apparently, so does everyone else! This arrived in my inbox this morning, courtesy of my brother-in-law.

It’s an Iphone App that counts the amounts of sodas you have a day… Its probably a shitty app, since you have to remember to put it in your phone every time you have one…

I dont know why my love of Diet Coke bothers the people around me so much… I dont smoke, I barely drink, I dont do drugs, I dont eat red meat! COME ON! I freakin shop local & organic in NYC… (do you know how much that costs!!!!) and I run… Who cares if I have one little indulgence/vice? For some reason, many people.

I have to tell you all: I will never quit.

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