A bend in the road

Friends, it's been a long time since I posted here and since I've been in the Resource Centre (or podcasted) with any regularity. Having bought a business with my husband I found that I really needed my Saturdays in order to maintain any kind of balance in my life - for with "working" in the RC those days and working every other day of the week in my shop, I was starting to lose my mind a little.

I'm still acting as a pinch-hitter for the Saturday RC crew and will be there on both Dec 5 and Dec 12. I do hope I'll get to meet some of you on Dec 12, which is when this year's annual Holiday Open House is happening. Drop by for some great conversation, cookies, and gift ideas for the veg-convinced and veg-sympathetic loved ones in your life.

You can also talk to us about finding ways of getting involved in TVA. TVA has lots of volunteer opportunities - even possibly helping out at the RC on Saturdays and podcasting with John and Liam! We will all be really happy to talk to you about ways you can help TVA meet its goals, about what sorts of roles are available, and the great satisfaction we've all gotten out of spending time with TVA's amazing cast of contributors.

Speaking of which, my own volunteering role within TVA has recently changed quite considerably. Having had to step away almost completely from my Saturdays at the RC, after a suitable break I felt like I needed to find something to fill the gap; helping to make the world more veg-friendly is really important to me. I decided to run for the Board of Directors and this past Thursday, I was honoured to win enough votes at the Annual General Meeting to allow that to happen. I'm really looking forward to helping TVA realize its plans for 2010 which, as the final year of its current 3-year strategic plan, will focus on compassion for animals.

So, be sure to drop by 17 Baldwin St. on Dec 12 (but of course, you're welcome before then too!) and see us. And afterwards, you can always have pie in a class downstairs at Vegetarian Haven if the cookies we provide don't make you sufficiently sugar-sick!

Here's a random photo of some TVA volunteers I found on that series of tubes known as the internet. Look at how happy they are! You could be that happy volunteering too.

Delicious veg eats in Wolfville, Nova Scotia

Okay, so delicious veg eats in Wolfville, NS, are not clearly related to what's happening in the Toronto Vegetarian Association resource centre. But I'm an RC volunteer (although on a little sabbatical) and I ate at The Vegetarian Lunchbox in Wolfville recently, so I think that's good enough.

A few weeks ago, I went down east for a little R&R and to visit my family and a friend and I went on a road trip. Happy Cow told me there was a veg restaurant in Wolfville so that's where we stopped. Thankfully, the Blissful Bovine was up to date on this one. On the main street in tiny, picturesque Wolfville (most famous, I think, for being the home of the most expensive university in Canada!) was The Vegetarian Lunchbox, looking all cute and artsy in the sunshine.


I was excited to try their stuff and I wasn't disappointed. I had the rice bowl which had lots of tofu and veggies and my choice of sauce (I chose the miso gravy, because miso is pretty much my favourite thing in the world these days). It was delicious and a beautiful thing to contemplate - before it ended up in my belly anyway.


One thing I find really interesting about travel is how different tofu can taste, depending on where you are. In The Vegetarian Lunchbox and a number of grocery stores I shopped in while in NS, I saw what was, to me, a new brand of tofu: Acadiana Soy products. I tried their smoked tofu and it was just fabulous - to me, much tastier than the West Coast Smoked Tofu available in Toronto, and that's pretty fantastic stuff. I've asked a few local businesses to start carrying the Acadiana, if possible, but so far I haven't seen it.


What I love about this down east vegan lunch experience is how it reflects how things have changed for veg*ns in NS since I left. When I moved away in 1999, you could get only one kind of soy milk in the stores and it was disgusting. There were no fakey meat products around and indeed, almost no tofu. Now, the variety of non-dairy milks and non-animal based protein sources are as numerous there as they are in Toronto, which to me is a veg*n mecca.

Rock on, east coast! I'm not moving back, no matter how nicely you may ask, but it sure is cooler to visit you now.

Free Vegan Cupcake Day at the Resource Centre!

On Saturday, April 25, John, Liam, and I hosted our first ever Free Vegan Cupcake Day at the RC. It was a beautiful day in Toronto - sunny and about 28C - and so people into trying delicious vegan eats were out in full force.

To make sure people could find us easily, Liam made a little sign for outside on the sidewalk which you can see him shyly displaying here, as he hides behind it. As you'll see below, however, Liam's shyness dissipated in the face of eating one of his own delicious vegan cupcakes (which, incidentally, his girlfriend made - but he watched, so it amounts to the same, right? Just kidding, Diane!).

Liam's cupcakes, like mine and John's, were from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's and Terry Hope Romero's fabu book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. He chose the marble cupcakes, in a mini-version so there would be more of them, and they were so delicious and cute that they required no icing at all.

Liam menaced one before eating it and that was pretty much the same intensity with which all of our visitors consumed these delicious little morsels.

(In case you're wondering why I'm writing Lisa-style, the answer is, I don't know. Except that she's awesome.)

We made a total of about 55 cupcakes and they were all gone by 4pm, when we closed and recorded a late podcast. It was definitely a good day, getting to talk to a bunch of cupcake loving people - especially Elliott and friends who were not only appreciative of our baking efforts but also hilarious and charming.

John, whose fantastic idea this cupcake day was, made the super-fantastic looking Coconut Lime Cupcakes.

(I say only that they looked amazing because I didn't get the opportunity to try one!! They were just too popular with our visitors!)

The aesthetic of his cupcakes was a little different than Isa and Terry's, but no less beautiful and appetizing for all that.

There was some discussion about whether or not one should be eating the lime slices, or if yes, with or without the rind. John left that up to our guests to decide but I would have eaten it; I like cupcakes that make it feel like the top of your head is being blown off.

Finally, there were my cupcakes, the Peanut Butter Cupcakes with the quick Melty Chocolate Ganache. As chocolate and peanut butter together form pretty much the most perfect taste combination, I was fairly confident they'd go over well and they seem to have done so, in spite of not being nearly as pretty as either John's or Liam's cupcakes.

We'll be hosting other free vegan vittles tasting events in the future so we'll keep you posted on that, once we figure out what the vittles in question will be. In the meantime, I'll be dreaming about putting the lime in the coconut and eating up those delicious cupcakes...