For young, professional foodies on a budget, a wine shop is part nonsensical indulgence, part necessity.  Many times, the New Hampshire liquor store will have as good a wine selection as your local wine shop (if not better) and competitive prices.  Thanks to smartphones, you can note whether your purchase is available elsewhere at a discount.

And, let’s face it, sometimes we just want a cheap and dirty bottle of Cab on a Thursday night and there’s no sense in paying extra at a fancy wine shop.

On the other hand, there are benefits to shooting the breeze with a friendly oenophile.  The first, probably obvious, reason is learning from people who are passionate and knowledgeable about wine and have spent a lot of years drinking it.  Supermarket clerks and liquor store workers may be passionate and knowledgeable about a lot of things, but wine is not necessarily one of them.

So the Anti-Rat and I tried a few wine stores in New Hampshire with these principles in mind.  If we want extremely pleasurable wine, we will seek it from our favored wine purveyor.  Otherwise, we pick up a few bottles from the liquor store or supermarket.

Portsmouth has a high number of wine shops for a relatively little town.  We’ve stopped in to Attrettzi, which has free tastings and an uncomplicated wine selection.  We’ve enjoyed some moderately priced ($20) port and some toe-curlingly delicious Brachetto D’Aqui.  Yum.  But, frankly, the tasting manager drives me absolutely NUTS.  When I ask for a description of a Lambrusco, adopting a Soprano’s accent and asking “how you doin’?” tells me absolutely nothing.

And rhapsodizing about bonfires, your girlfriend, the beach and a bottle of port sets my teeth on edge.  Musky leather, first editions, pipe tobacco, a library in an English country house, yes.  A pre-party for a Jimmy Buffet concert, NO.  I understand de-snobbifying wine and making it accessible to everyone, but a patina of culture and refinement can remain, yes?

I’ll post Part 2 of my wine shop recommendations tomorrow.  Any suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

So you know Ima do it up today, yo. Starting with Great Harvest Nashua and their pumpkin chocolate chip muffin. I have a weakness for all things pumpkin, natch. Chocolate chips? Yes please. Oh, and did I mention that they have a special going on where if you buy a sweet you get a free iced or hot coffee? You have to mention this promotion. Go. Do it. You will thank me.

Here’s 5 things to love about Great Harvest Nashua:

They will let you sample, sample, sample their breads and sweets and not laugh at you when you’re on your 5^th bit of pastry. I tried the turtle cookie today (caramel, chocolate, macadamia…. everything awesome and delicious) and the cream cheese berry scone. Have to admit, scones usually ain’t my thang because they get a little dry on the bakery shelves. Not so at Great Harvest. Their scone was moist and full of juicy berries and deliciousness. I was in heaven.

However, I was not there for cookies or scones (or huge amazing cinnamon rolls — the rolls will be mine at a future date).    I got my pumpkin muffin (perfect and with the right amount of pumpkin pie spices) and FREE iced coffee and settled in to enjoy my sugar decadence.

Blurry camera phone pic

On an unrelated note, ever notice that if you go without sugar how FAST you move once you get a bite? Holy cannoli, I’m FLYING right now! Someone put on “The Wall!” Long and short of it, the pumpkin muffin was amazing. Get your biscuits down there and try their treats. You can’t go wrong.

They offer really cool, local gourmet things like marshmallows from Planet Marshmallow, a company based in our backyard in Milford, NH. Toasted Coconut marshmallows? Um, well, no, no… I couldn’t possibly… well, if you insist…. and chai spice marshmallows??? Are you kidding me with this?

Coconut love!

They also carry Naturally Nutty peanut butters. I confess I was unfamiliar with these prior to visiting Great Harvest. Where have I BEEN? Chocolate cherry peanut butter? For reals??  Flax and hemp seed butter? I mean, how much healthier and delicious can you get?! How many more gratuitous exclamation points can I USE!?!?!!!!! (Answer: Lots!)

Everyone who works there is so darn smiley and friendly. Probably because they are “Professional Loafers,” HA!

Puns! I LOVE puns!

Delicious bread. They’re not just decadent desserts baby! On my first visit to Great Harvest Nashua, I had the veggie sammich (they cheerfully let me swap out cheese and put in avocado instead).

They have soy milk. If you’re like me and you avoid the dairy, they have soy milk behind the counter and if you ask sweetly (and how can you not be sweet after all those pastry samples?) they’ll let you add some to your coffee. Love!

Here’s what not to love about Great Harvest:

Absolutely nothing. It’s an amazing place. I look forward to their expanded menu with breakfast sammiches and soups and such, coming soon.

Have you been to Great Harvest Nashua?  What’d you eat?  Make me drool.  How were the cinnamon rolls?

Leaving my Monster behind. In the freezer.  Which did me absolutely no good at work. I really, really missed the GM today.  I defrosted it and drank it tonight, but I was kinda full from dinner and am now a bit sloshy and poochy feeling.  I also ended up quite hungry at my evening Zumba class but soldiered through and shook-it, shook-it vigorously.  I managed to bruise one of my finger joints during a too-enthusiastic grapevine.

Sigh.

Eats:

Banana, apple, cinnamon and raw and wriggling almond butter

That was supposed to be my pre-Zumba fuel since the class starts at 5:30, which is right around when I likes to eat.  Instead, it replaced my Green Monster at the 10:30 am feeding.

Hey!  I found these random snacks on my camera, I think I forgot to post them yesterday:

'Zeke tortilla with banana and cinnamon

Almost empty Sun Dried Tomato Sabra (not as good as the pine nut flavor, in my opinion, but evidently I had no trouble eating it)

My "chip" to dip into the hummus

Chip & Hummus: Come to mama

Dinner tonight has become a favorite of mine:

Broco, yaller squash, zucchini, red bell peps stir fried.

With the star of the show:

Baked tofu

I had no idea that you didn’t need to fry tofu to get that nice crust on the top.  You can bake it after lightly brushing on some oil with a high smoke point.  Righteous!  I love this.  It has such a nice firm texture when you bake it this way.  I broiled this one a bit to get that nice brown-ness.

For dessert, I broke into this bad boy:

Sweet lusciousness!

I was so pleasantly surprised by this.  It was like… dessert.  I could eat it like a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.  I tried a little spoonful of it and promptly dove in while doing my best Homer Simpson impression.

Stop the presses! This was INCREDIBLE!

Yeah, I couldn’t even take the paper off all the way before diving in.  You wanna start something!?!  Actually, that stupid paper seal is a big complaint about these Peanut Butters.  It’s hard to peel off all the way, and this jar was sitting upside down in my cabinet and some of the oil leaked out before I even peeled the paper off.  That doesn’t seem too tightly sealed.

Anyway, this stuff rocks.  I love it so.  That’s all I can say.  I was afraid there would be a raspberry syrup or something in there.  I honestly couldn’t taste any raspberries, which is hunky dory by me because I find adding raspberry to desserts significantly decreases my enjoyment of said dessert.

Then I realized that white chocolate tends not to be vegan, read the label and confirmed that yep, for the second time* today I am a doofus and, as a result, broke my vegan vow.

The end.

*If you count bruising my own finger in Zumba while performing a grapevine as my second doofus act of the day**, cheerfully devouring white chocolate peanut butter while thinking it is vegan but not actually reading the label is actually the third doofus act of the day.  Depends on how you’re counting.  But I think grapevine injuries occur all the time, so I didn’t count that.

**  Obviously, forgetting another part of my lunch is the first doofus act of the day.  I feel like I did in the third grade when my mom decided I was old enough to get my own breakfast, collect my school stuff and get out the door without her help. I was a complete mess for a week. But that was, like, sometime in the mid 80s and I’m like 30 now.

Whatever, my footnotes are getting out of control.

Peace.

-E.

Speaking of eats, I mentioned before I bought about a dozen of those bars from Whole Foods to bring with me for my trip to Colorado last weekend — I brought some for me and some to share with my mother-in-law, who is the OG greens eater in the family.  She’s been keepin’ it green since the 70′s.  I originally considered bringing a shaker with some Amazing Grass Superfood, but I wasn’t too sure how I’d like the taste, and filling up a shaker from a bathroom tap just isn’t that appetizing to me.

The bars worked out really well, and it brings me to another tip in healthy eating (remember, tip 1 was pre-chop and cook your veggies and tip 2 was to call ahead to restaurant to scout out your food options).  Tip #3:  Take control of your own destiny.  If you are like me, and your family considers fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn to be a balanced meal… well, if you go home to visit, you are going to need to do some preparation.  Gena has some fabulous tips for traveling at her blog when you’re a guest in someone’s home and you have healthy habits you are trying to stick to.

This past weekend, Husband and I weren’t staying with family or friends, we were in a hotel with no mini-fridge or sink to prep foods.  Before we arrived at our destination, I googled around to find vegetarian or vegan restaurants and ended up discovering the Egg & I looked like our best bet for breakfast since it served lots of egg dishes for Husband and oatmeal for me.  Unfortunately, most of the restaurants in the area looked like they weren’t our kinds of places, so I scoped out the nearest grocery store for emergency trips to the salad bar.  Husband is very patient and supportive of my efforts, so it all ended up working out.  Those bars were total life-savers though because when I get hungry, I get HUNGRY.  That means I want to eat NOW, not 45 minutes from now while we search for a restaurant and order and wait for them to bring us our food.

I really recommend both the Amazing Grass Green Bars and the Greens Plus Chia bars as they were tasty and filling.  Sorry I don’t have any pictures again!  I eat my food way too quickly.  The Greens Plus bars were particularly interesting.  I got the chocolate covered kind, and the insides were very fluffy, almost like a 3 Musketeers bar.  I found that intriguing.  The chia seeds gave it a fun little crunch.  I also brought along raw pepitas and sunflower seeds to snack on.

Okay, more food stuff coming later.  The house is a disaster, time to fix it.

Peace!

-E.

I’ve had good luck with soaked oatmeal (although I haven’t had it in awhile because I was going a bit crazy with it).  And Polly’s Oaty Cakes were heaven, obv.

This morning I went back to my eggs and toast roots, vegan style:

Tofu Scramble, 2 sprouted grain toasts with coconut oil

I made my own Tofu Scramble seasoning, although Husband tells me he grew up eating Tofu Scramble made with an official, store-bought packed of seasoning.  I googled for their recipe and just spiced mine with some cumin, paprika, turmeric and a seasoning blend that kind of has a rich, umami taste to it.  Husband smelled it when he got out of the shower and thought I actually went to the store and bought the packet of seasonings, so I guess it was pretty close to the real thing.  It tasted good.  Real good.

I’ve also had luck with these:

Trader Joe's High Fiber O's with Hemp Milk and a droplet of Vanilla Stevia

This is one of the most satisfying cereals I’ve ever tried.  Cereal burns right up when I eat it, I’m starving like an hour later.  Husband has the same prob.  This stuff sticks with you longer though.  It’s nice to be able to have a quick, roll-out of bed breakfast that doesn’t involve dirtying pans or soaking the night before.

This box is your friend.

Can you read this? It might be too small. It's respectable though, take my word for it.

Always a perfect addition to any breakfast - hemp milk, bananas, kale, spinach, watercress, strawberries, Amazing Grass Superfood powder and a wee bit of Vanilla Stevia. My capitalization of proper nouns is getting out of control.

I’ve decided to switch from using hemp milk to unsweetened vanilla almond milk as my regular dairy replacer.  It’s like a $2 difference and if I’m going to be buying enough peanut butter to fill my bathtub, I should save money where I can.  I’ll try and use the hemp milk sparingly because the nutrition is so rockin’, but for things like cereal I will be using the Blue Diamond Almond Breeze because it turns out money really does not grow on trees.   Who knew?

Peace!

Elizabeth

(For any of you readers who were like, born, when that movie came out (grrr!) and don’t remember it, Heathers was in 1988 what Mean Girls was to your as-yet unwrinkled generation.)

Setting aside the fascinating topics of 80s movies and my dumb dog, here’s a handy tip I’ve just put into practice recently at the Granite Casa.  One of the major downsides to eating a veggie-rich diet, or any diet that moves away from packaged, processed, pre-prepared foods, is the amount of time it takes to wash the veggies (if you’re using a pesticide removing veggie wash, which I hope you are), chop, cook and then clean up!  Even if you’re not cooking them and just making them into a salad, you’ll still have a cutting board, knives, and the salad bowl to clean as well as the countertops and, if you’re a sloppy cook like me, the floor.

What has worked for me is to wash a whole mess o’ veggies at once.  Cleaned leafy vegs can keep in the fridge for a few days provided they are DRY when they go in.  Wash them in veggie wash, dry them in a salad spinner, and place them in a large bowl lined with paper towels to absorb any moisture you missed.  It takes me 20-30 minutes a day to wash and dry salad vegs and it gets BORING and I get HOSTILE because I am at the sink three times a day completing the exact same sisyphusian tasks. But if I do a bunch at once, it doesn’t add that much time to the washing procedure and it gives me a break for a few days.

Pre-preparing cooked veggies is an even more versatile way to save time and have quick meal options available.  Check out mine from last night:

• Cooked toppings for raw salads
• Fillings for wraps.  Add some hummus and salsa (and cheese if you’re a cheese eater) to a tortilla with the veggies.  Eat cold, nuked or grilled on the stove.  Add some beans and make a veggie burrito!
• Side dishes to quick meals like canned soups.
• Toppings for make at home pizza.  Or add them to the pizza you buy to improve the nutrition!

I'm so cute! I don't need to be smart!

From her blog, I glommed right on to  Sticky Fingers, which is Vegan Dessert Porn (is that a gross description given the name of the bakery?  Ew.) Unfortunately, everything I want to try from Sticky Fingers is a cupcake with frosting (addict!) and they don’t ship those.  Maybe they could just ship the cupcakes unfrosted and then send me a bag (or two!) of frosting I can add myself?

Anyway, this is not about dessert.  This is about new ideas on eating vegan.  Check out The Korean Vegan!

Husband and I LOVE the Korean food and Sushi at Shira Kiku in Nashua.  Of the two of us, only Husband has been to Korea.  He dug the stone pots with rice and veggies and the little dishes of pickled goodness.  If he hadn’t tried it, I don’t know if I ever would have been brave enough to try kimchi.  I’m so glad I did!

The lady who runs Shira Kiku is so sweet.  Every time we wolf down the kimchi she brings us, she seems so pleased and surprised that we did. Tonight was date night and, partly because of some work-related digestive issues, I was craving Korean food.  Kimchi is fermented so it is rife with healthy bacteria for your digestive system. In addition to all the little mini dishes of kimchi, scallion pancakces, tofu, potatoes, and sweet radishes, I ordered the Kimchi stew with pork, veggies, and tofu but asked for no pork.  Meanwhile, Husband got a spicy pork dish.  No pictures, sorry, we forgot the camera.  BUT!  Later on, the already great meal got even better so Husband busted out his iPhone for posterity.

After we were full of cabbage and rice and spice and other good things, the chef stopped by our table to ask how we liked the food.  He kidded me about not liking pork (last time we were there, he kidded me about ordering an extra dish of his mom’s spicy kimchi) and I explained to him that I’m a vegan.  THAT was when the fun began!  Rob, the chef, is a terrific guy. He immediately told me that I should have told him I was a vegan because he could do any dish I wanted vegan-style.  I thanked him and thought we would definitely be back next week to put his offer to the test.  Little did we know while we were finishing up our tea and paying our bill, Rob had a treat in store for us:

Sweet Potato Sushi

This was incredible!  I’ve never had vegan sushi before (I think the only veggie sushi I’ve had are California rolls, but those have cream cheese in them and I think they’re kind of icky).  Rob proceeded to sit down with us and go over the entire menu and listed the different vegan sushi selections already featured on the menu and the modifications he could make to the Korean dishes for me.  He mentioned one of the other people dining in the restaurant was gluten-sensitive, so he makes special dishes for her all the time. He even knew her by name.

For awesome service, for incredible food and for being so willing to make wonderful food for vegans and no-gluten peeps, I encourage everyone to try Shira Kiku.  If you’re nervous about the more exotic dishes, there are plenty of stir fries and Pad Thai type dishes to try that aren’t intimidating.  In my pre-vegan days, I had the sashimi and fish sushi and it’s super fresh and delicious. I asked Rob how he learned all of his sushi skillz and he told me he got it all from his Dad — a sushi chef of 47 years who works in Boston. It’s a family gig for sure! Meat lovers will certainly find amazing morsels of animal here as well — Korean’s ain’t famous for their barbeque for nuthin’.

I was sort of sad I was so full of Kimchi stew, because I wanted to giddy-up on some of that vegan sushi.  Oh well, the next date night is just a week away!

Peace,

E.

PS.  The kimchi?  Took care of what ailed me.  Bless the Koreans for this magical tummy elixr!

It was 4 miles round trip and it was so nice to be out in the sights, smells and sounds of the real world instead of in my car.  I sometimes will catch a faint whiff of something unidentifiable… a mix of exhaust and hot brick pavement and funky gas smells and it will remind me of the hot summer I lived in Europe.  I think it’s probably a smell common to all cities, I just never notice it at home because I only walk when I’m in foreign countries.  Here’s what I saw and ate:

A really nice, stone public bathroom. A mama lets her baby dabble in the fountain.

Shady trees and a swinging park bench

Here’s Polly’s directions with my changes:

1 cup quick oats + 1 cup plain greek yogurt I used homemade coconut milk yogurt (directions to follow) but I think soy or any other non-dairy yogurt would work… mix well.

stir in…

1 egg 2 tbsps ground flax seeds soaked in 1/4 cup water until it forms a gel, 2 tbsp canola oil 2 tbsp apple sauce, 1/4 cup ww flour, 1 tbsp brown sugar maple syrup, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp cinnamon… mix well.

The batter

To make homemade coconut milk yogurt, do the following:  Open can of coconut milk (read the label for preservatives, a lot of companies like to dump in sulfites).  Pour into airtight container.  Place container in fridge and forget it it is there for 1-2 weeks.  Open container, notice how the coconut milk has become thick and puffy (don’t worry, it still tastes like coconut milk, it’s just puffier).  Or you can try a variation of Ange’s homemade soy yogurt, which I would have tried but I don’t have a microwave.

So my first attempt at cooking these cakes up massively failed.  Check it out:

Off to a good start, right?

OH NO!!! They stuck majorly. I don't know if it was the pan or because I used coconut oil. The pie server was not my original pancake flipping tool, I just needed something to scrape up the stuck cakes.

Never fear!  This is a good recipe and was quickly saved:

Cooked in grapeseed oil in a calphalon pan, they are nicely browned and crispy.

My pretty plate:

Bananas, salvaged oaty cake (the ones that stuck in the other pan) and pure maple syrup from our family's maple syrup farm in Canada.

These were delicious — even the ones I saved from the sticky mess I made in the first pan.  Too good to let go to waste!  I would make these again and again.  I had a glass of green lemonade with them to make sure I got my morning greens in.

(Haha, notice the classy shredded to-do list/ grocery list in the background.  Definitely am not a perfectionist!)

Thanks Polly!

Peace,

E.