Turkeys!

Look at that beautiful face!

           It is almost Thanksgiving here in the States and I am most definitely looking forward to eating a ton of delicious food.  My wife always makes the best meals for the holidays and since she’s Canadian, and since her Thanksgiving is in October, I get 2 Thanksgiving meals.  What a sweet deal I landed, eh?  Generally speaking, each year we have meals that features new dishes or variations on the old standards that make each holiday unique and never dull.  Not once has there been a meal that’s disappointed.

It’s odd to think that since I used to always associate the holidays with specific dishes and any variation on that would feel catastrophic.  Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and broccoli casserole were absolute musts and I would eat them until I would collapse.  But now?  Now, each holiday is something new and different – variety truly is the spice of life and I don’t miss the animal-centered meals that used to constitute my traditions at all.  I don’t mind doing something different.  Doing something different has become our tradition.  This brings me to my next point.

Just because something is a tradition, doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.  We’ve outgrown many traditions as human civilization has advanced without giving it a second thought.  It used to be traditional to use leeches in medical procedures but I don’t see people being treated with leeches in every hospital across the country.  Why?  Because it’d be silly to do so when we have the knowledge to make better decisions.  The same can go for the traditions we hold around our food options.

Why raise turkeys by the millions just to be tortured, killed, and then consumed by us for one or two meals out of the entire year?  Just for tradition’s sake?  Turkeys don’t deserve that weak excuse and if you’ll keep reading, I hope to explain why that is.

To start, turkeys are incredible creatures.  My wife and I were able to discover this firsthand when we visited both the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary and the Farm Sanctuary location in Watkin’s Glen in New York.  They will stroll right up to you if they’re in the mood and let you pet them.  It’s very cool to see how brilliant their colors are in person and to feel how soft their feathers are and how unafraid they are of humans.  It would be like petting someone’s dog or cat that would come rubbing up against your leg.  If they’re feeling particularly friendly, they’ll show off by spreading their tail feathers at you.  I must’ve taken over thirty pictures of all the turkeys I saw while at the two farms.

They are incredibly social and I could’ve watched them cuddle next to each other or walk around in their enclosure together all day.  Not only that but turkeys can identify each other by the noises each makes and can form bonds with each other that lasts forever.  Their mothers will also sleep with her poults (baby turkeys) under her wings at night until they can be on their own.  I had no idea but their heads can also change color depending on their emotional state.  This may also blow your mind:  wild turkeys can fly.  What’s more, turkeys can adjust their sight to gain a 360-degree view.  I think the coolest fact, however, is that they have such an amazing memory for location that they can recall a place they’ve been only once before.  Turkeys in the wild can have a roaming range of up to 1,000 acres and can remember where they found food the previous year and return there in hopes of finding food again.

Sadly, there are way too many turkeys that don’t make it to safe havens like the ones I visited last year.  Millions of turkeys are raised and killed each year for those holiday meals.  Right from birth they know only terrible conditions.  Most of the turkeys raised will never feel the grass under their feet or the sun on their heads.  More and more turkeys are being consumed and so bigger and bigger turkeys are in demand.  To reach this goal, most are genetically enhanced to reach a weight that they would never achieve in nature.  These overgrown turkeys suffer health issues because their frames were never meant to carry the weight.  Think of all those supermarket tabloids or the daytime TV shows that show morbidly obese humans that are over 400 pounds.  Just like our bodies weren’t meant to carry that much weight, neither are turkeys’ bodies.  Remember how I said wild turkeys can fly?  Unfortunately, domesticated birds can’t due to their larger frames.

Since they are crammed into tightly packed barns where they only receive a few feet of space to stand or sit, many turkeys suffer from incredible stress.  Imagine being crammed into a bus or train and being stuck squished between people you don’t know for any amount of time.  You’d go insane within five minutes.  Imagine having that for your entire life.  Due to the stress turkeys feel, they have to be painfully de-toed and de-beaked to avoid them attacking and injuring each other.  The process is performed on newborn poults with shears or a hot blade and without any pain medicine.

Sadly, within just a few months of age and due to the genetic manipulation to increase their size, the turkeys that are sent to slaughter can be injured by the rough treatment they experience during the shipping process and many die even before they reach the slaughterhouse.  No matter if you are buying a “humanely raised” turkey (which is a bullshit expression no matter what you were told or what you believe) or not, all turkeys are hung upside down for slaughter while they are both alive and conscious of the process.  Not only is the process barbaric but there is such disgusting conditions on these farms that the chances a turkey is covered in some sort of disgusting by-product of other animals is probably quite high.

You don’t need me to tell you that turkeys face terrible conditions at the slaughterhouses.  You probably have heard or seen reports from such places that service familiar turkey companies like Butterball.  Sadly, such stories tend not to be the exception to the rule.  Cruelty abounds in the animal food service like with THIS story.

This all brings me to my next topic.  If you feel sad over the conditions these smart and beautiful creatures feel and you want to do something to help the few that make it out of those conditions alive, I highly urge you to donate to Farm Sanctuary.  Currently you have the chance to ‘adopt’ a turkey for just thirty dollars.  That thirty dollars will go to help care for the turkeys at Farm Sanctuary.  It’s such an easy thing to do and the feeling you’ll get knowing you helped improve their life is worth it.  If you don’t want to adopt one or if you are reading this and they don’t have their annual adoption drive, then you can always make a donation for all of the animals at their locations because not only have turkeys suffered, all farmed animals have suffered.  We’ve adopted turkeys in previous years and this year we’ve adopted Cecilia (Who is so cute.  Just go look at her inquisitive stare!).

I can hear you ask, “But what about my turkey at Thanksgiving [or any holiday]?!  What do I do instead?”

Fear not!  There are plenty of options out there nowadays for you to try.  Tofurky still has one of the best go-to options for those craving a turkey substitute.  Quite honestly?  Their roast is very good with gravy and I never thought I’d ever eat anything from a company called “Tofurky”.  Seriously, give it a shot if you can.  Not only that but a great company called Field Roast has a few options for you to try (also quite good!).  You could always try your hand at homemade roasts using seitan if you feel confident in your cooking skills.  My wife has made a few homemade seitan dishes during the holidays and they have all been amazing.  They might not taste the same as that turkey did but when you combine the knowledge that you aren’t hurting another living being and you’re eating a bit healthier, you won’t even care.  Many of the vegan roast options also have a similar consistency as animal flesh so if you’re just craving that experience, you won’t be lacking in that department either.  Or you could just as easily make several amazing vegan dishes without any animal flesh substitutions.  You are only limited by your imagination and the amount of spices you can throw together.

"See? Going turkey-free is easy as can be!"

See, who needs those silly food traditions when you can try cool, new, and even tastier options?  Besides, eating turkeys at Thanksgiving only really came about in the 19^th century.  We think of the first Thanksgiving meal coming shortly after the arrival of the pilgrims to the New England area.  That leaves a few hundred years where turkeys were not apart of any fall celebration.  So, as easily as turkeys became apart of our traditions, so to can it become separated from our traditions.  It just takes one meal to start things off for you!  If I can do it, anyone can!

If you’re vegan or vegetarian, and you’re reading this, what is it that you do  for food around the holidays?  Let me know!

I hope you all have an awesome and safe Thanksgiving this year filled with good times and great food!  I shall update about the meal we will have on my next post.  Since my wife is making dinner tonight, the house is filling with mouth-watering smells that are making it difficult for me to concentrate on writing.  I will have to end this here and try to sneak a bite or two before we eat.  Until then, keep calm and vegan on!

To learn more about Farm Sanctuary and/or their turkey adoptions, go HERE.  They’re also on a number of social media sites including Twitter at: @FarmSanctuary

To learn more about Tofurky, go HERE.  They, too, are on Twitter at: @Tofurky

To learn more about Field Roast, go HERE.  They are also on Twitter at: @fieldroast
For more on turkeys, go HERE or HERE.

Ecuador & Peru: Part 1

            I was going to wait to discuss my vacation until I had finished editing my photographs but if I did that, I’d never end up talking about the trip.  It’s quite sad how many photographs I take on vacation.  I’m still editing photographs from vacations we took five years ago.  So in the interest of memory’s sake I shall at least discuss the first few impressions of Ecuador that I had as a vegan.  You know, incase anyone of my readers here wants to go there some day.

            First of all, here is Ecuador:

            That may seem odd to those reading this if you’re not from the U.S. but it really is necessary.  Geography and Americans are like the continental drift:  as time goes on, the distance between the two groups grows.
            …Anything?  Come on, that’s a decent geology joke.  Anyway.
            I was quite apprehensive about our trip to Ecuador.  I had visions of the streets roaming with pickpockets, volcanoes spewing down in every town we stopped (it seemed like every travel book said some active volcano was right next to wherever we were staying), and having terrible food poisoning throughout the trip.  I must also point out that this didn’t happen just because we were going to South America, per say.  I also got nervous before our trips to Ireland, Costa Rica, and Germany.  Any destination far from home where I either don’t speak the native language fluently or where I expect culture clashes to occur can fill me with dread.

            Then you add in the fact that I’m vegan and I have to somehow convey this message whenever we eat out?  Checking out the Happy Cow site didn’t do much to calm my fears much either.  Even 1 review of, “I tried to tell them I’m vegan but I could definitely taste dairy cheese,” can be enough to fill me with panic.  I had taken Spanish for 2 years in high school and off-and-on while in college but even with a small refresher using Rosetta Stone, I still couldn’t remember every fruit and vegetable out there.  What if I thought a word that was in a dish was a vegetable but was really some sort of animal product?  Yeah.  Fun.

How I knew everything would be ok. Bumblebee was at the Quito airport!

            So, with all of this apprehension, we arrived safely in Quito after a long day of flying.  After walking through the airport and taking a taxi that seemed to zip in-and-out of lanes with a speed barely slow enough for the human brain to process, we were dropped off at our hotel in the heart of Quito.  Being almost ten o’clock, we didn’t feel like eating anything despite having nearly nothing of substance to eat all day.  Instead, we decided to just eat a snack bar and some homemade bread we had stuffed in our backpacks.

Quito!  From the slopes of Pichincha

            Because we were there for only a limited amount of time, and because we wanted to see as much of the country as possible, we crammed as many activities into one day that we could.  After hiking around the slopes of Pichincha volcano (exhausting, by the way, if you’re not acclimated to the heights. We went from about 10,000 ft. to about 13,000 ft.) and parts of the old town, we went for a late dinner at El Maple, which was about a ten-minute walk from our hostel.

            It was a bit difficult to find, however, since Happy Cow’s directions were both a bit off and vague.  I walked up and down the block it was supposedly on and tried to get directions from people inside a fast food joint (awkward much?  Being a vegan and going into a chicken fast food place for directions.).  That didn’t pan out.  I finally found someone inside an internet café that had heard of it and we were on our way!

            It was a cool little vegetarian restaurant with brightly lit rooms on the inside.  We had one room all to ourselves for most of our meal but that’s probably because we were eating after eight and most people in Ecuador seem to have dinner either earlier or later.  Either way, I was looking to devour some food.  Besides a very small breakfast in our hotel that morning, we hadn’t had much since.  Eating one or two meals a day would be a regular thing for us on our vacation.

Breakfast at 1 of our hostels.

            With the apprehensions I spoke of earlier running through my mind, I nervously ordered dinner for myself.  Thankfully, the meal turned out to be quite good!  For an appetizer we had ordered a plate of diced potatoes covered in some sort of sauce (sorry, my memory is fading) and for a main meal we each had a plate with rice, seitan ‘steak’, lentils, a plantain, and a tiny salad.  I was worried about the raw salad because everything I read said to avoid raw salads but I figured that was mainly aimed at people eating in omnivore restaurants, so I ate it anyway.  Besides, when you’re ravenous, you will eat anything.

            Even though the meal was delicious, it definitely wasn’t an American-sized meal.  Needless to say, I was still a bit hungry even after the meal but it probably would’ve been fine had I had more food throughout the day.  Thankfully, worrying about the raw salad was pointless because I had no trouble that night or for most of the three-week vacation.  I’m not sure if that is due to veganism or because I was just lucky but I’ll take it.

Restaurante Manantial

            The next day was another day where we had one main meal but this time it was a late lunch at Restaurante Manantial, a vegetarian restaurant.  Again, the place was impossible to find because there was no sign outside to indicate where it was and the directions on Happy Cow were vague.  Again, we were hungry as hell when we showed up.  The portions for our meals were small but that was my fault.  I misunderstood the guy at the counter and asked to have the fixed menu for my wife and I.  The meal cost us about six dollars and while the food was good, it wasn’t enough for people who were starving.  And again, I ignored the warning about raw salad and ate some anyway.

            That night my stomach was just killing me.  I even passed fast food joints where I knew there wouldn’t be anything to eat with a look of longing.  We ended up ducking into a place called the Toronto Restaurant, a buffet place, because if I was going to resort to eating in an omnivore establishment, it was going to be in a Canadian-themed restaurant in Ecuador.  My wife didn’t partake but I devoured the hell out of a ton of potatoes, broccoli, rice – to name a few.  It was a pit stop made out of necessity rather than desire, really.  I was really nervous because it was our first stop into an omnivore restaurant and a buffet to boot.  My mind’s paranoia was screaming at me not to put anything on my plate but my stomach won out.  I’ll admit that I’m not really proud of this food stop.  Not because the food was bad but because after leaving, I felt like someone sneaking out of a one-night stand’s apartment with disheveled clothes at five in the morning.

            Overall, my initial fears around food were somewhat misplaced.  Up to this point I didn’t really have trouble communicating that we were vegan and didn’t eat certain foods.  I enjoyed Quito a lot more than I thought I would even though there were quite a lot of people.  The food for vegans and vegetarians is pretty decent and there are several vegetarian and vegan restaurants throughout the city.  If you ever make it there, you won’t go hungry.  Just make sure you don’t do it like I did and eat one or two meals a day (womp womp).

            One thing that made me a bit sad was the amount of street cart vendors that had piles of dead animals roasting on open grills.  The smells wafted through the air around these carts and there were quite a few people eating off of them.  It was a sad sight for a number of reasons, not least of which was the image of all the animals being raised for these food carts.  Plus, it just looked so incredibly unhealthy.  If even half of all the food carts that we saw in Ecuador and Peru started to operate in the States, every single one would probably be shut down for poor sanitation.

            South America also has a lot of stray dogs roaming the streets and every sad or sick or malnourished dog I saw, I could only think about our Collie.  I wish I could’ve taken care of each one of them.  I had to resist the urge to go pet every dog I saw.  My wife, on the other hand, picked and chose which dogs she would or wouldn’t pet, leaving me exasperated as I tried to urge her to back away.  I secretly was glad she ignored me to show the dogs a small sense of compassion.

            Other than that, however, it was a positive experience in Quito.  I would definitely go back.  I think this is as good a place as any to end things for part 1.  Perhaps I will pick it back up at some point in the future.  Until then, keep calm and vegan on!

If you want to learn more about El Maple, you can go HERE.  You can find them on a number of social media sites including Twitter at: @elmaple  (they have yet to tweet anything, however.)
If you want to learn more about Restaurante Manantial, you can go HERE.

The map of Ecuador was found using a Google search.

Restaurant Review: The Chicago Diner: Part Deux

            I know I have reviewed The Chicago Diner before (check out the entry and feast your eyes upon the pictures of delicious foods!) but I’ve never been to their second location in Logan Square.  We’ve always loved the original location but today time was a bit more pressing to us than preference so we went to their newer location.  Even though it was the same company, I had this weird feeling like we were cheating on the Halsted Street location.  I know that I’m odd, thanks.

            While the Halsted location had a 1950s café vibe to it, the Milwaukee Avenue location in Logan Square felt a bit more upscale.  There were longer booths in the middle of the restaurant and a bar directly to the right as you entered.  Along the far wall was a big “Meat Free Since ’83” sign hanging from a wall.  We were seated at a smaller two-seat table along the wall and began scouring over the menu.  Let me tell you that that was no easy task.  Every time we go in there I find it nearly impossible to narrow my choice down to one dish.

My mocha shake (on left) and my wife's Lucky Leprechaun Mint shake (on right)

            I ordered my regular mocha shake, since nobody should ever leave The Chicago Diner without trying one of their shakes, and somehow resisted ordering the larger size.  This turned out to be a wise decision since I stuffed myself on the food.

            For appetizers – yes, plural – we ordered the Thai Chili Wingz and the poutine.  We seem to get the poutine whenever we go there but how can you pass up fries covered in vegan sour cream, ‘bacon’, Teese vegan cheese, jalapenos, green onions, and gravy?  You can’t, is the right answer if you know what’s good for you.  However, I think the most amazing appetizer I’ve had there are the Thai Chili Wingz.  HOT. DAMN.  They were amazing!  These seitan ‘wings’ could probably fool many omnivores if they didn’t know it was vegan.  They came with a chili lime marinade and served with Sriracha Ranch dipping sauce.  I was seriously considering the notion of getting an order to go.

            For my main dish I ordered the Caribbean risotto.  I was having a very tough choice deciding because the avocado tostados, scrambled tofu deluxe, and pierogi quesadillas (!!) all sounded so good.  This was a bit of a gamble for me, however, because I’m still hit-or-miss on eating beans.  My wife was pretty surprised I even ordered this.  I figured that it would be tolerable since it was in a risotto and I love risotto.  I could eat risotto every day.  Grilled veggies and plantains surrounded the risotto.  Despite my love-hate relationship with beans, this dish was really good!  The rice, beans, and plantains reminded me of our vacation to Costa Rica and it got me in the mood for our upcoming trip to Ecuador and Peru.

            So, definitely check out their second location in Logan Square if you’re in Chicago.  It’s a cool place with the same fantastic food.  I already want to go back.  I think my insatiable appetite is partly why I’m the broke vegan.

            Until next time, keep calm and vegan on!

The Chicago Diner in Logan Square is located at 2333 N. Milwaukee Avenue.  Check out my previous TCD review for the link.

Restaurant Review: The Chicago Diner

            If you haven’t been to The Chicago Diner or heard of it, then you are missing out.  There are many times when I regret not having gone vegan sooner.  That is particularly true whenever I think about how The Chicago Diner has been in my backyard nearly my entire life and I never once went there until a few years ago.  They’ve been praised left to right, been featured on television segments, and even have their own cookbook out.  Located on North Halsted, The Chicago Diner is basically THE place vegans and vegetarians seem to go to whenever they’re in town.  Once you go there, you’ll probably see why.  Every time my wife & I go there, we can’t help but stuff ourselves full of food.

            We try to make it a point to stop in whenever we’re in the area.  We usually stop in either before or after seeing a movie at Landmark Theatres, which is just a few minutes away.  That was the case last Thursday.

            My wife has begun working overnights and since I had Thursday off, she suggested we see The Grand Budapest Hotel (an amazing movie that has skyrocketed to my top 10 movies of all time) and get brunch at The Chicago Diner.  I’m often slow and reluctant to wake up before 9 on my days off, so since I’d have to be up anyway to pick her up from work, I decided this would be an acceptable idea.  Truthfully, it wasn’t that hard to convince me.  Even now, my stomach is grumbling just thinking about the food at The Diner.

            Jump to Thursday and we showed up to at The Diner twenty-minutes before they opened.  Yes, we’re just that intense when it comes to our food.  No, we don’t consider ourselves ‘foodies’ (an abhorrent word if ever there was one – it just elicits such snobbery.) but we just love to eat.  Plus, with Chicago’s incredibly crappy traffic no matter what time of day, I figured it’d be a good idea to leave earlier than needed.

            We parked across the street from the three-story building that The Diner is located in and headed inside.  The interior is designed like any diner-styled restaurant with the usual decorations hanging from the walls, booths lining one wall, bar stools at the counter across from the booths, and small, square tables lined up in the middle.  It’s really a fun and cool place to go for a meal.  It’s also fun to people watch, whether that’s the other patrons or the employees.  You’ll find your share everything from hipsters (at a vegan place? NO WAY!) with their beards and black-rimmed glasses to your punk rockers sporting all sorts of piercings, tattoos, and hair colors.

            After getting our much-needed coffee with soy milk, we dug into our appetizers:  cinnamon buns.  Good lord.  That is one thing I never get enough of as a vegan.  I used to eat so many cinnamon buns from Cinnabon that I am highly surprised I never got diabetes a long time ago.  I’ve had a few cinnamon buns as a vegan but a few just seem to be mediocre.  The best ones came from a recipe my wife made but The Chicago Diner’s were nearly as good.  At the very least, they were the best ones I’ve had that weren’t homemade since going vegan.

            We were so hungry and had such a hard time making up our minds that the two of us ordered three meals.  My wife had her own meal – the ‘STK’ & eggs (seitan ‘steak’ and tofu eggs), I ordered the Big Bang Breakfast, and we shared an order of ‘biscuit & sausg gravy’ (made with seitan).  I do not know how I finished everything I ordered.  I could’ve exploded had I had another bite!

            The biscuits & gravy were good but not my favorite veganized version of the meal.  The gravy was good but overall nothing mind-blowing like I’ve come to expect.  Don’t let that give you the impression that I didn’t wolf down my half of the plate, because I did.  I also used the excess gravy on my ‘sausag’ patty and seitan ‘bacun’ that came with my Big Bang Breakfast.

            The Big Bang Breakfast was really delicious!  It came with tofu ‘scrambled eggs’, toast, fruit, potato hash, and – as far as their menu states – either the ‘sausag’ patty or the seitan ‘bacun’.  However, either they messed up or changed things because I received both.  I was not going to complain at all!  Both were really good and tasted good in the gravy.  The potato hash was probably my favorite on the plate.  I could eat platefuls of that stuff.  The tofu eggs were good but I prefer my wife’s because she makes scrambled tofu eggs and throws in a ton of ingredients – really jazzes things up and adds a lot of different flavors to the mix.  As always, I did douse my tofu eggs in ketchup, which helped give it more flavor.  (Damn, I just realized all of that made me sound like the food snobs I loathe.  I’m not, I swear!  I’ll eat anything and enjoy it!  I just have different levels of likes.)

            My wife somehow managed to finish her meal off with a shake.  How she was able to finish a shake after all of that food is beyond me.  I really wanted one of their shakes but I just couldn’t bring myself to have one.  It really bummed me out because they have THE BEST vegan shakes in the world!  We always seem to get a shake whenever we go there – it doesn’t matter how cold or hot it is, either.  If you go there, you MUST order a shake.  I love the mocha and despite wanting to try others, I tend to order that whenever I’m there.  It’s just too good to pass up.

            All in all, brunch was a fantastic idea!  Plus, parking was super easy that early in the day and it wasn’t as crowded as it always is in the afternoons and evenings.

            The Chicago Diner also recently opened up a second location (not in the suburbs, however.  Do you hear me, Chicago Diner?? Hmmm??) in Logan Square, but we have yet to go there.  That may have to be rectified!

            Well, that about wraps things up.  Has anyone else been to The Chicago Diner?  What are your favorite meals or drinks?

            Until next time, keep calm and vegan on!

The Chicago Diner is located at 3411 N. Halsted, Chicago, IL, 60657 & now at 2333 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60647

You can follow The Chicago Diner on Twitter at @chicagodiner