Birthday Corn Muffins, Paul Frank, and May Wah.

 

Yesterday our baby girl Em, turned 11.  She didn't want to celebrate her birthday with cakes or brownies, she wanted corn muffins.   If you've visited Home Sweet Vegan Home before you might have noticed that our youngest daughter is a bit of a corn bread/muffin fanatic.  Her favorite corn muffins are the Sunny Corn Muffins  from The Post Punk Kitchen, http://www.theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/index.php?RecipeID=68 This is one of Isa's recipes and it produces the lightest, sweetest corn muffins you will ever bake.  I leave out the lemon zest though. 

The only birthday request Em had was a trip to the Paul Frank store.  We ventured into NYC for the afternoon and made our way to the 195 Mulberry Street location. 

Just a few blocks away from the Paul Frank store on Mulberry street is May Wah on Hester.  May Wah for those of you not familiar with them are producers and suppliers of vegan and vegetarian mock meats. You can find everything from vegetarian squid to vegetarian mutton to my favorite, vegan ham there.  If a trip to NYC is out of the question May Wah will ship anywhere in the 50 states. May Wah's entire catalog is available on their website, http://www.vegieworld.com/ . All of their products ingredients as well as the nutritional facts are listed on the site. Many of the products listed as vegetarian as also vegan.

I picked up vegan chicken legs, vegan ham and vegan shrimp. (Well, actually vegan prawns but District 9 killed the word prawns for me so we'll just say that I bought vegan shrimp.)

So a couple of hours and a ton of cash later we headed home from our trip to NYC.  Em, thrilled with her Paul Frank loot and me looking forward to a vegan ham Easter dinner. But Easter dinner will be a post for different day!

Vegan Mofo day8 Vegan Shrimp Fra Diavolo

17 years ago, before we both became completely vegetarian, my husband was a shrimp and fish fan.  Me, not so much. When we stumbled upon vegan shrimp ~ boy was he excited to make Shrimp Fra Diavolo.  His Fra Diavolo sauce is always excellent. The vegan shrimp is a bit fickle, drop it in the Fra Diavolo sauce and it was really good.  But saute it Scampi style in garlic, 2 tbs of earth balance, lemon juice, white wine and fresh parsley and the vegan shrimp became very rubbery. In our opinion Vegan Shrimp, Fra Diavolo = good, Scampi = not so good.