An apology and a recipe...

I've been away from Panhandle Vegan for a couple of weeks, for which I apologize. I've been spending most of the time shopping for a car, getting through a theater production at Full Circle Theater, and a pile of other things (I spend what time I have available keeping Under The LobsterScope going and we're in a heavy political season).

But I'm back today and I have a recipe tailored to diabetic vegans out there... Blueberry Coffee Cake.


OK... here we go.

Dry Ingredients:


1 cup old fashioned oats 
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup stevia powder
 2 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon Ener-G Egg Replacer
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt


1 1/4 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (thaw frozen blueberries after measuring - 1 minute in the microwave should do it.)


Wet Ingredients: 1/2 cup unsweetened almond, soy or coconut milk
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon canola or sesame oil


Topping:
2 tablespoons stevia powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon


Preheat the oven to 350 F. Lightly spray or wipe the bottom and sides of a 9-inch baking pan with cooking spray.


Put the oats into a blender and grind until they are a fine oat flour. Mix the oat flour with the other dry ingredients. Stir in 1/4 cup of the blueberries.


Put the remaining cup blueberries into a blender or food processor with the water. Pulse (quickly turn on and off) to coarsely chop the blueberries, but do not completely puree.


Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in blueberry mixture and other wet ingredients. Stir until moistened and completely combined, but don't over-mix.


Pour into the prepared pan (batter will be quite thick). Mix together the sugar and cinnamon topping, and sprinkle it over the top.


Bake for 25-35 minutes, until a toothpick or fork inserted in the middle comes out clean. Allow to cool.

You'll really like it and it will be pretty safe for any diabetic Vegan on my block!

Bill Clinton... Vegan?

There's been a lot of press lately about Bill Clinton having become a Vegan. If so, that's really great. On TV today he looked pretty trim... he's lost a lot of weight (and all the fat that used to be around his neck) and seems like his energy level is pretty high.

There was also some comment that he occasionally eats fish... now, I know this throws a wrench into the Vegan definition, but I think "Bill, do the best you can... you are looking great!"

Wow! Amy's makes a soy cheese macaroni and cheese and it is great!

I'm so glad I discovered this, after reading about it in one of the Vegan mags online. This comes in single serving units and takes about six minutes in the microwave.

And it is DELICIOUS. The Soy Cheddar Cheese actually tastes like cheddar.


For people who can't tolerate soy cheese, they are also coming out with a Non Dairy Rice Mac & Cheeze that uses a non-soy, non-dairy cheese (I think it's Daiya's cheddar)... this should be on healthfood shelves soon!

UTF Type Foundry: I've started using my picture fonts to punctuate blog postings.

UTF Type Foundry: I've started using my picture fonts to punctuate blog postings.
I guess I'll start using them on Panhandle Vegan postings as well.

Goodbye High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hello Corn Sugar (Signed, Corn Industry)

This is part of a longer article in today's Huffington Post which I suggest you read in order to stay on top of the obesity problem.

Cross posted on Under The LobsterScope.

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to sweeten up its image with a new name: corn sugar. The bid to rename the sweetener by the Corn Refiners Association comes as Americans' concerns about health and obesity have sent consumption of high fructose corn syrup, used in soft drinks but also in bread, cereal and other foods, to a 20-year low. The group applied Tuesday to the Food and Drug Administration to get the "corn sugar" name approved for use on food labels. They hope a new name will ease confusion about about the sweetener. Some people think it is more harmful or more likely to make them obese than sugar, perceptions for which there is little scientific evidence. Approval of the new name could take two years, but that's not stopping the industry from using the term now in advertising. Renaming products has succeeded before. For example, low eurcic acid rapeseed oil became much more popular after becoming "canola oil" in 1988. Will shoppers swallow the new name?

Read the rest HERE.

Related Articles

• Goodbye High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hello Corn Sugar (Signed, Corn Industry) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Corn Syrup Producers Want Sweeter Name: Corn Sugar (abcnews.go.com)
• A New Name for High-Fructose Corn Syrup (well.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Summary Box: New name for corn syrup? (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

I just read a really good analysis of McDonald's "real fruit" smoothies...

Go here and see if you can take the amount of sugar they put into this stuff:
http://spoonfulofsugarfree.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/mcdonalds-real-fruit-smoothies

If the outrageous sugar content turns you off, Alex puts some great Smoothie recipes in her article... cheaper and MUCH less sugar:

Smoothie Ideas:
~I love making smoothies all the time! They are quick and easy to bring. Just throw the ingredients in a blender, and take it to go in a cup! I make mine by putting frozen fruit (or fresh) in the blender, fill it with juice, water, milk substitute, and add other miscellaneous items like spices, extracts, or protein powder

• PiNa Colada: coconut milk, pineapple, banana
• Chocolate-Dipped Strawberry
• Strawberry Mango
• Chocolate Peanut Butter: cocoa powder (or chocolate protein powder), milk, peanut butter, banana
• All the fruit in your pantry smoothie: and add milk and juice!
• Peachy: peaches, papaya, mango, orange juice
• Orange julius: orange juice, ice, milk
• Chai smoothie: banana, milk, cinnamon, chilled chai tea

The possibilities are endless!

Sustainable Shepherdstown to show "Age of Stupid"

"The Age of Stupid," a British environmental film made in 2009, will be presented by local environmental group Sustainable Shepherdstown on Friday, September 10 at 7 p.m. at the Byrd Center Auditorium at Shepherd University. The film runs 89 minutes and is free of charge.Oscar-winning actor Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father, Brassed Off, The Usual Suspects) stars as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055 who asks: Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?

Runaway climate change has ravaged the planet by 2055. Pete plays the founder of The Global Archive, a storage facility located in the (now melted) Arctic, preserving all of humanity's achievements in the hope that the planet might one day be habitable again. He pulls together clips of "archive" news and documentary from 1950-2008 to build a message showing what went wrong and why. He focuses on six human stories: Alvin DuVernay, is a paleontogolist helping Shell find more oil off the coast of New Orleans. He also rescued more than 100 people after Hurricane Katrina, which, by 2055, is well known as one of the first "major climate change events". Jeh Wadia in Mumbai aims to start-up a new low-cost airline and gets a million Indians flying. Layefa Malemi lives in absolute poverty in a small village in Nigeria from which Shell extracts tens of millions of dollars worth of oil every week. She dreams of becoming a doctor, but must fish in the oil-infested waters for four years to raise the funds. Jamila Bayyoud, aged 8, is an Iraqi refugee living on the streets of Jordan after her home was destroyed - and father killed - during the US-led invasion of 2003. Piers Guy is a windfarm developer from Cornwall fighting the NIMBYs of Middle England. 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau has witnessed his beloved Alpine glaciers melt by 150 metres.

"This is a signally important film--a very clever and very powerful reminder of exactly where we stand on this fragile, lovely planet."
Bill McKibben, Author, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

"Think An Inconvenient Truth but with a personality."
Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

Wow! Being a Vegan is paying off...

It is now the beginning of September and I am 10 months into being a Vegan... and I have lost 50 Pounds 0ff my 385 pound start (which means I've lost as much as Marie Osmond did on Nutri-System, but I am still not pretty!)

If I continue this way I should have at least 60 pounds off by the end of my first year (my ultimate goal, as folks who read my stuff know, is 150 pounds... at least another year away and probably two.)

Now it's time to increase the exercise (I can actually move around more than I could when I started. Amazing!)

Carrot Cake Update

OK... not too bad after being in the refrigerator overnight.  I think, though, that the next time I make it I'll increase it by 1 cup of shredded carrots and another half cup of erythritol powder.
Also, increase the cooking time by ten minutes.

I'm getting ready to try a Carrot Cake...

I got the recipe from Susan V's http://blog.fatfreevegan.com. I'm replacing a few things: I'm making a stevia tea with the 3/4 cup of warm water (done by boiling stevia in water and straining out) to replace the 1 1/2 cups of sugar in the cake. As a diabetic, the sugar does little for me.

I'm also trying some extra-ground (mortar and pestle) stevia crystals to replace the powdered sugar in the frosting. I'll tell you how it comes out in my next post.

Classic Vegan Carrot Cake

yields 2 8×8″ cakes (or 2 9″ round cakes)

2 1/3 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp salt

6 tbsp flax seed meal
3/4 c warm water
1½ c sugar
1 c oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 c shredded carrots
1 c walnuts, chopped

Cream Cheese Frosting
8 oz vegan cream cheese
¼ c margarine, softened
1 tsp vanilla
2 c powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350º. Line two 8×8″ pans with parchment paper. In a small bowl, sift together dry ingredients (flour through salt). In a large bowl, whisk together flax seed meal and water. Beat in sugar and oil. Add vanilla and carrots and mix until combined. Add dry mix and stir until moistened. Fold in walnuts. Pour equal parts into pans. Bake for 18-20 min, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in pans 10 minutes.

For the frosting, beat together cream cheese and margarine. Add vanilla and powdered sugar; whip until smooth. (Don’t overbeat; in my experience, store-bought vegan cream cheese has a tendency to get runny.)

Use a knife to loosen edges of cake from pans. Using parchment paper, lift cakes out of pans. Carefully remove parchment paper from one cake. Frost cake, layer, and decorate with a marzipan carrot (brush a little cocoa powder into the indents for some realism). Serve chilled.

CHANGES I MADE:

In the first recipe (Cake Part) I used the stevia water as I said earlier, plus a added a half a cup of erythritol powder ( a low calorie sweetener that does not effect blood sugar and is about 70% of the sweetness of cane sugar). In the Frosting Part I used 1 1/2 cups of erythritol powder instead of sugar, plus about 20 drops of Vanilla Cream stevia liquid to replace the vanilla.

Vegan diet has led this fatman to a 47 pound loss in 10 months...

The last time I posted an update on my weight loss activities (back in June) I had lost 35 pounds. As of this morning, I'm now down 47 pounds, with 103 to go on my overall goal of 150 pounds.

So that means I've lost 47 pounds in just about 10 months. I know to many folks who watch those horrible nutri-whatever commercials on TV that that may sound like a lot, but when you start out at 385 pounds it is really only s small achievement.

I do feel a lot healthier and have more energy than before. And my blood sugar seems to be easier to control, so I won't complain.

It is also 10 months or so since Elly and I adopted the Vegan Lifestyle (and I started Panhandle Vegan.) Of course, this has a great deal to do with the weight loss... it has caused a complete change in my "eating lifestyle", but that change had been surprisingly easy to pull off.

Someday I am going to head a post that says "Thin Diabetic Vegan is Down 150 Pounds." It will be at least another year and probably more... so please bear with me.   -BT

(Posted in cooperation with Under The LobsterScope)

6 Quart Jars of Organic Kosher Dills

We have had such good luck with our cucumbers this season that I have had to move into pickles four times already. Today it was kosher dills and, where I thought I'd get three quarts I ended up with six.

I have now done kosher dills, a variation on Claussen recipe dills, sweet pickles and a pickled vegetable mix and the jars are decorating the top of our china cabinet.

We'll be remembering our garden all winter.

Here is the Kosher Dill recipe I used today:
1.    Wash cucumbers, and place in the sink with cold water and lots of ice cubes. Soak in ice water for 2 hours. Refresh ice as required. Sterilize 1 quart canning jars and lids in boiling water for at least 10 minutes.
    2.    In a large pot over medium-high heat, combine 8 cups white vinegar, 16 cups water, and 2/3 cup of kosher salt. Bring the brine to a rapid boil.
    3.    In each jar, place 2 half-cloves of garlic, a fresh sprig dill, then enough cucumbers to fill the jar (about 1 pound). Then add 2 more garlic halves, two teaspoons of mustard seed, a teaspoon of black peppercorns and 1 more sprig of dill. Fill jars with hot brine. Seal jars, making sure you have cleaned the jar's rims of any residue.
    4.    Process sealed jars in a boiling water bath. Process quart jars for 15 minutes.
    5.    Store pickles for a minimum of 8 weeks before eating. Refrigerate after opening. Pickles will keep for up to 2 years if stored in a cool dry place.

Did this catch any of my readers?

Apparently the new Tweet button, which I ALMOST loaded on this blog, had a flaw, especially for Firefox users like me.
I'm glad I didn't connect it.

clipped from mashable.com New Tweet Button Temporarily Hoses the Internet Apologies if our homepage looked like the above momentarily, but it wasn’t our fault, we swear! The new official “tweet button,” which was rolled out yesterday, had a malfunction that rendered an error message in Firefox () and essentially rendered Web browsers useless. Lots of other people noticed too, including popular blog host Squarespace () and tech news site Ars Technica. While not a long lasting problem, you can imagine the scale of it being pretty enormous, considering Tweetmeme () reported yesterday that its button (now the official tweet button) is viewed 750 million times daily. Twitter ()’s acknowledged a “momentary problem” and says the issue should now be fixed. Whew. If you’re still seeing the errors here or elsewhere, be sure to clear your cache.

Study shows Organic farming gives similar yield with less environmental destruction,

Take a look at THIS ARTICLE on Organic vs. Conventional Farm Yield. It will give you a lot to think about (and firms up our own belief in Organic Farming.)

A snatch:

The 22-year farming trial study found that organic farming produces the same yields of corn and soybeans as does conventional farming, but uses 30 percent less energy, less water and no pesticides.

The Story of Cosmetics (2010)

A presentation worth taking a look at:



Presented in cooperation with Under The LobsterScope.