Backtracking

TLT With Avocado at The Green Owl

As I've already mentioned in previous posts, this has been a long (a good thing) and crazy (some questionable aspects) summer, and my posting so far has been out-of-order and disorganized, with lots of holes. This is a little hard on me, as a somewhat organized person, to deal with. Do I just forget about posting stuff from July and early August and move on, or keep sneaking old stuff in to more current posts? Do I review books that have been waiting in a pile, post recipes I've tried recently, or talk about restaurants from the summer? I think I should stay in the present, but it's no use pretending that it won't drive me nuts to just ignore July and August. I think I've got to get through the summer antics before I can move on to the present. It will just bug me if I don't. Lucky for you (or not, if you like travelogs) I barely broke out my camera, so there are relatively few photos, and many are of the phone variety. I guess I'll just start with the Midwest portion of the summer today, move on to the Oregon Coast, and then tackle recipes, cookbooks and such.

Greek Salad at The Green Owl

Let's start with Madison, where we spent most of July. Most of the restaurants in Madison tend to be vegan-friendly, but there's only one certified vegetarian/vegan restaurant in town — The Green Owl. Every summer we end up going there multiple times but never get tired of it. We go out to eat a lot with friends while we're in town, and it was especially true this summer when it was super hot for much of our visit, and no one wanted to cook. Most of our friends are omnivores, but they are always willing to hit up The Green Owl. The sandwich at the top of the post is a TLT With Avocado and a side of roasted potatoes, and it was delish. Green Owl makes its own GF bread and I like it better than wheat bread. My husband always orders a Greek salad with lemon-grilled tofu instead of ricotta. The little white blobs are cauliflower. One night we even had a slice of amazing raw, GF coconut cream pie, but alas, I gobbled it up before I even thought of taking a photo.

Another place we enjoy visiting is The Nile, which serves great Middle Eastern food. On one of our visits I ordered a cup of lentil soup and a mixed platter, and though I checked on the veganness of everything, it still came with yogurt. Oh well, easy to remedy. One of the reasons it's easy to eat out as a vegan in many of Mad-city's restaurants is thanks to Dave, the organizer of the Madison Veg Meet-Up group. He works closely with restaurants to provide vegan meals for Meet-Up events, and the restaurants learn how to provide meals for vegan customers. Now, when we say the word "vegan" in restaurants where meet-up events have been held, they know what we mean. Kind of.

We tried some new places this year, and one of them was Umami Ramen and dumpling Bar. As you might expect, this is not an ideal place to visit if you are both vegan and gluten-free. Though you can find something to eat. It's not especially easy being just vegan here, either — I'd describe it as limited but possible. I had a bowl of vegan ramen which was  very tasty. Behind my soup you can see vegan dumplings and edamami.

That's all I've got for Madison, though it's just a sampling of the restaurants where we dined. It doesn't, for example, include a vegan meet-up at Ian's Pizza which was pretty interesting. (Anyone for mac 'n cheese pizza?) After the event, Ian's decided to make every Monday night "vegan night." It wasn't that long ago that I was unable to go to Ian's for lunch with co-workers because they couldn't come up with a vegan slice. Thanks, Dave!

When we travel between Seattle and Madison we tend to spend nights in the same towns every year, and though we have favorite places to eat in the towns, on this trip we went to a few restaurants we had never been to before. Both on the way out, and back, our favorite (and the only) Ethiopian cafe in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was closed for various reasons, and we were forced to find a new venue. We ended up at Tokyo Japanese Restaurant. Our server seemed to understand our request for vegan food and steered us towards the available options. I had edamame, veggie sushi and veggie soup. All were better than I'd hoped. My husband had a veggie and udon noodle dish which he seemed to enjoy. Now we have two places to eat in Sioux Falls!

Stolen from the Community Coop Web site. Sorry, Coop, please don't sue me.

On the road, we tried a new tactic for making the trip more pleasant this year — on both the way there and back, we stopped at a couple of places to relax a bit to enjoy a snack or a short tour. This actually made the day's drive seem shorter, though that seems counter-intuitive. In both directions we stopped at the Community Food Co-op, in Bozeman, Montana. We love the beautiful Coop, especially the top floor restaurant and juice bar. On the way to Madison we stopped for tea and green juice, and took advantage of the free wifi to register for the next Vida Vegan Con. On the way back to Seattle we stopped for green juice and also to purchase a tee shirt for Miss E.

We also stopped in Sheridan, Wyoming and had dinner with Laurie, the blogger extraordinaire who writes Mehitable Days, and her delightful husband, BW. Now, I hope Laurie will still be my friend after she sees this. Although my husband and I thought the photos I took of them were very nice, Laurie and her husband hated them, and I promised not to put them on the blog. But, I had a little fun playing with the images to make a collage, just to prove we were actually there! They took us to Olivia's Kitchen, a Mexican restaurant we had never been to, and we all had delicious burritos. Sorry, Laurie and BW, but you have to admit I disguised the two of you well! I promise never to take your photo again. I will only take pictures of food.

I'm not going to disguise the fact that I was thrilled to see Laurie wearing a t-shirt I designed. What an honor that she chose to own it!

At the Missoula farmers market.

In Missoula, Montana, where we spent a night, we visited the downtown art walk in the evening, and the farmers market the next morning. At one of the galleries on the art walk there was a very large, arresting painting of a cow that I was completely taken with, but it was so expensive, as in thousands of dollars expensive, and so incredibly large, that I reluctantly had to leave it behind. At the farmers market, I was surprised at the lack of organic produce, but we still managed to snag some Flathead cherries, and a melon.

I didn't take nearly as many travel photos as I usually do, but I thought this one came out really well considering I took it with an iphone pressed against the car window! I might have to paint it.

And I'm very fond of these cloud shots, taken with the same method.

The last little unplanned side-trip we experienced on our way home was a tour through the historic silver-mining town of Wallace, Idaho. You know how you can pass interesting-looking places over and over and never stop for a look. Wallace is one of those places. It has a shrinking population of fewer than 800 people and seems to keep adding festivals and events to help keep the town alive.

Every downtown building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Peeking into the Silver Tea Room and antique store.

While walking down the street I met a man who was visiting Wallace with his wife (she was in the jewelry store) who told me they had come for a night but had had so much fun they extended their visit by a few more days. They loved the hotel, the shops and the restaurants.

I took a photo through the window of the Real Estate office, in case anyone thinks Wallace might be a fun place to live — lots of festivals, good skiing and bike trails in a beautiful, historic setting. Not sure about jobs, though.

That about wraps up July.

Traveling vegan (lots of eating-no cooking)

Since we were taking a four-day weekend to visit relatives in Florida and I couldn't do any cooking, I decided to document what a vegan might find to eat in Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the airports along the way. When we got to the Madison airport (where we could certainly find vegan food) we found our flight to Milwaukee had been cancelled, and we were to be bused to Milwaukee airport (MKE) in time to catch our flight to Ft. Lauderdale. As far as we knew, we'd be in Florida by 6 p.m. — in time for dinner.

When we got to MKE and went to our gate we saw that our flight was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. We also discovered that nearly all the food places and shops were on the other side of security. We'd brought some baked tofu slices and crackers with us as well as some nuts and Clif bars, but they were mainly supposed to be snacks and to tide us over until dinner. But, it became increasingly clear that we wouldn't be arriving at dinner time. If we didn't find some food, the snacks would be our lunch and dinner. We wanted something to take on the plane - assuming we would get on the plane. The only thing we could find in the gate area was a bottle of Dole smoothie and some under-ripe bananas. I passed them up. Even Starbucks, which usually has veggie wraps and salads in other airports, only had pastry.

With a sigh, we crossed back over the security line. We hung out for a while in the used book store (MKE actually has a good used book store with knowledgeable staff) and then set about searching for vegan vittles. Too bad for us. MKE is a meat-eatin' kind of place. The only thing I could find was a side dish of wild rice salad at a very crowded sit-down restaurant. Duh. And it had ingredients that I wouldn't really want to eat. We went back through security empty handed and bought the smoothie and banana. I had the smoothie, a banana and the Clif Bar for dinner. I can tell you that MKE is NOT vegan friendly. (The Detroit airport, on the other hand, has Japanese and Middle Eastern restaurants—but that's another story.) We finally landed in Ft. Lauderdale about 11 p.m. and went straight to our hotel and to sleep.

Our room package included breakfast and we went to the hotel restaurant the next morning quite starved.

The breakfast menu included a tofu scramble and it wasn't bad. It came with fresh squeezed oj, roasted potatoes, whole wheat toast and Tazo tea. Ate every bite. (The restaurant also had several vegan options for lunch and one for dinner but we didn't have time to try those.)

We spent the day with family, and that evening we all went out to a "Nouveau Thai" restaurant that was supposed to be fabulous and veg friendly. We ended up ordering an appetizer salad, a vegetable side dish and rice, because it was all we could find on the menu. And it actually took 1 1/2 hours before our table received food. Although I'm really not a big eater, I was still hungry. I wanted to photograph the extremely attractive food but it was too dark in the room. Each thing I had was tasty but small. And expensive.

The next morning at the hotel we opted for the stone-cut oatmeal with raisins, juice, toast and tea. I've never heard of stone-cut oats but it was delicious. (And it wasn't steel-cut oats. I know what that is.) It was huge and filling and we left feeling happy and healthy.




Early that afternoon my kind sister-in-law and brother served a large lunch with bagels and vegan cream cheese, mock chopped liver, eggplant salsa, and salad stuff for the vegans and fishy stuff for the non-vegans. Later in the day, when the Super Bowl came on, she put out a big tray of chips, veggies, hummus, tapenade and other stuff that we snacked on. They know how to treat their guests well! After stuffing myself and, not much into football, I went out for a while with my other sister-in-law and niece.

About 9 p.m., although not really very hungry, my husband and I decided to go to dinner at the renowned Ft.Lauderdale vegan restaurant, Sublime. I have mixed feelings about this restaurant but, on the other hand, it's such a relief to go to a restaurant where everything is vegan. I think they try too hard to make the food seem like it's not vegan rather than try to make delicious food from vegan ingredients. There are lots of meat substitutes and not enough creatively used vegetables. The manager once bragged to me that most of the people who eat there are not vegetarian. Maybe they have to take this direction to survive—and I hope they continue to find success.

That said, there are a couple of things I really like, even though I think they are too fattening. There's frito misto which is crispy, crusted, fried-I-guess cauliflower with sweet and sour sauce. It's so addictive. And I also like the portobella steak with spicy tomato confiture, whipped mashed potatoes and garlic spinach. It also comes with three, huge french-fried onion rings which I try to only eat one of (photo at top of post).  My husband got a cup of quinoa soup which was delicious, and a salad. The desserts are yummy but we couldn't possibly eat any more food so we declined.

We opted for the oatmeal again the next morning and set off for another unexpectedly long day of travel and food deprivation, but at least we'd been more than well-fed over the weekend.