Tag: Things I Love Thursday

Things I Love Thursday – Vegan MoFo Edition 2

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Back again with the random things that caught my eye since last Thursday. Though I still really like checking in with all the blogs I posted on last week’s list, there is so much more, and there is so much more than is on this list, but while I read pretty fast, I’m sure I’ve missed a whole bunch of gems out there. We’ve made a slightly modified (more peaches!) version of this peach pie smoothie from Connoisserurus Veg about three or four times since I spotted it. Recipes This Vegan Mock Chopped Liver spread from Triumph Wellness. I can imagine this would be perfect on bagels, or anything really, and I’ve been dreaming of baking bagels the moment it started getting cooler outside. Soon the bagelling will begin, probably for post-Yom Kippur break fast next month. Muggle Pumpkin Juice Smoothies from Dumbledore’s Vegan Army. Last year, for my birthday we travelled a bit in the southern USA, as part of that trip we went to the Universal Studios park and visited Hogwarts… and they had this pumpkin juice…. If you’ve had the pumpkin juice you would understand. It’s so delicious. So delicious. So I want to try this, because I’m a muggle, and I like pumpkin juice. Also, it’s pumpkin time. JC’s youngest sisters loves the Nightmare Before Christmas. So I had to share this perfect for fall Jack Skellington’s Spicy Pumpkin-Soup (in german) – translate to English. (I’m also getting really excited for fall.) Spicy Vegan Chex Mex from House Vegan. Because snacks. if you…

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Things I Love Thursday – Vegan MoFo Edition 1

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Sure sure, it’s been only a few days of Vegan MoFo. How do I have things I love already? Easy. Vegan Mofo is pretty incredible, with so many wonderful vegan bloggers coming together to share all their different stories and recipes and reviews and hot tips and whatever. Like I said in my intro, I wanted to use my usual Things I Love Thursday post to share some of my favourite posts and themes of the week. I love travelling, and we went to New Orleans in December, so I’m loving the posts from Laughfrodesiac, especially focusing on New Orleans (this week) and a new theme and location every week. Mary’s Test Kitchen – An entire month of Vegan Cultured Cheese WITH video.  Yes, an entire month of vegan cultured cheese videos. Amazing. A 10 year old lifelong vegan’s blog – Peace, Love, Be Vegan – her theme is “How This Kid Gets Protein” but frankly, I’m just really jazzed to see a young vegan blogger, and what she’s eating. Dumbledore’s Vegan Army is back this year for VeganMoFo!!! Vegan twists on classic foods from the World of Harry Potter (and some tips on vegan stuff at The Wizardly World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios!!!) (how many more exclamation points can I add to this?) Tofu Mom is doing a month of Gravy. GRAVY people. Vegan, obviously. And then I saw this amazing looking biscuit recipe on Vegan Heritage Press from Zsu Dever’s Everyday Vegan Eats which looks like it would be amazing…

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Things I Love Thursday. Oh The Places You’ll Go

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JC and I have just come back from driving around North America for around 7 weeks, and I’m full of feelings of gratitude and awe at having such a wonderful opportunity this summer, and trying to take stock of all the incredible things and places and people we’ve had the privilege to visit. When we started planning our trip, I titled our shared Google doc – “Oh the Places You’ll Go, ” and 19,000 km later, we sure did. I feel a little more aware of the diverse and unique beauty and history that’s all over our continent and the parts of it we’ve been able to see so far. I’m looking forward to seeing more in the future, but what we’ve seen so far, has been pretty wonderful. So we’ve travelled from Toronto, to Chicago, then north through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota, across through the colourful Canadian prairies, including a stop at Riding Mountain National Park, east west across Canada to Alberta, through the yellow, green, and tan fields stretching through Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We went south through an International Peace Park (a collaboration of Glacier National Park in USA and Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada), and kept going through Montana and Wyoming (Yellowstone National Park), barely a stop in Idaho (I didn’t even buy any potatoes), delicious food and huge temples in Utah, a hacker convention in Nevada, blending together our love of natural beauty, history, delicious vegan food, and ridiculous/awesome random delightful nerdery along the way. We explored several beautiful mountain ranges…

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Things I Love Thursday – Google Location History.

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Full Disclosure: I’m writing this on Wednesday. Today we’re heading to Waterton Lakes National Park today to go camping, followed by Glacier National Park in the USA, followed by Grand Teton & Yellowstone. So on the things I love Thursday – all of those are definitely at the top of my list. When I booked our Yellowstone campsite about a month ago I was beyond excited. Now that we’ve done the camping thing together a bit more, I’m even more excited. It’s been a lot of fun so far. Visiting with friends in Winnipeg, showing JC some of my old stomping grounds in Saskatoon, and visiting family and friends in Edmonton over the last week has been incredible, and it’s hard to believe we drove here. (Or I should say – JC drove here, I still don’t have my license.) The last two weeks we’ve been in so many different places. I’ve been really enjoying the ability to look at my Google Location History to see the whole trip so far. You might find it creepy though, especially if you have an android device, but check it out (and change your settings if you don’t want your location tracked!!) This country is incredible, and if you ever get the change to explore the prairies, I promise it’s worth it. Especially if you’re from Toronto. The skies are amazing. Till next time… please feel free to connect on instagram, twitter, or facebook.

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Things I Love Whenever: Catching Up. Best of Toronto. Yummy Things. Vegan Donuts.

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This has been a really great week. I spent some of it feeling gross and yucky with flu-like symptoms, but even despite that, it’s been a great week. I started writing this on Thursday… but life got in the way. First of all, in “MeShell the Consumer” news, I ordered a couple of adult onesies from TopShop, which arrived this week. And, since I like to embrace my inner child, I’ve been happily wearing them around the house. When else do I have the opportunity to dress like a frog or a reindeer? Never. Board Games I played board games with vegan friends last weekend and it was pretty great. I never think of myself as a board game player or any tabletop game player, but when it comes down to it, I really enjoy them. One of my favourite memories from childhood is when my parents and I would play board games together around the dining room table. Usually it would be a fairly straightforward game like Payday or Aggravation (easily a family favourite) Hedgehogs I get to babysit a hedgehog for a little while. The best part is, I think my friend still thinks I’m doing her a favour… but really it’s the other way around. I don’t think I could commit to having a hedgehog full time (since, you know, cats), but there is something about their grumpy little sounds and mysterious personality quirks that does it for me. This grumpy ball of spikes is a hit at…

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Things I Love Thursday – So many things. Books, Art, Videos, World Record Achievements

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I’m glad I’ve got writing TILTs as part of my routine on Thursday. We’ve been back from our not-honeymoon for a few days and I feel like I’ve been playing catch up with the real world, projects, life stuff, house stuff, and foster cat stuff. West End Food Co-op CSO This week I picked up the remainder of the West End Food Co-op Community supported orchard program preserves I had amassed during the last CSO summer season. For anyone that has considered signing up but been put off by the initial cost – I think it’s worth it, especially if like me, you eat a lot of vegetables. Even splitting it amongst friends would leave you with lots of amazing preserves and treats for the rest of the year. The experience, the community, and the education at the WEFC Community Kitchen/Community Cannery is amazing. Future classes and events. On Tuesday, Doug McNish was also demoing his newest book Raw, Quick, and Delicious, so while I was there I picked up a free copy as a thank you for being one of the testers on this book. I’m not the most enthusiastic about making raw food usually – mostly because it’s typically so time consuming. So when testing for this one I was pleasantly and genuinely surprised at how actually quick (and delicious) many of the recipes I tried were. I’ll have to dig into the book again soon. Check out his demo on Breakfast Television Flowers My parents left Toronto while we…

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Things I Love Thursday: Wedded Edition.

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We are in the beautiful North Bruce Peninsula this week for a little break after the excitement, stress, and fun of planning, then having our wedding last weekend. I’d like to post a more detailed update about the wedding soon, but for now – I (and JC) had a lovely time. I went in thinking whatever will happen will happen, and no matter what I would be leaving married to an amazing partner, lover, and friend, and that’s what it was all about. Everything else was just icing on a tasty vegan wedding cake. I loved seeing friends and family I hadn’t seen in a while and meeting new people and some of my new family for the first time. Unfortunately it was a tough year for some of my family/friends and several pairs couldn’t make it due to illness, but they were in my thoughts. I’m still left with this lingering wish I had invited more people that were important to me – but didn’t invite because I thought they wouldn’t/couldn’t come, or it wouldn’t work out some how. Because there were some invites I sent out, with no expectation of attendance, where I was pleasantly surprised. I also wish RSVPs and Invitations didn’t get lost. We mailed out about 70-80 envelopes, and it turns out some still haven’t arrived. This doesn’t completely shake my love of the postal system, but I do wonder if my terrible printing had something to do with cards never arriving. I’ll try and…

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Things I Love Thursday – Home Sweet Home

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In mid July, JC and I took possession on a new house, but with all the travelling we’ve been up to we haven’t really had the opportunity to live in it. In fact, as someone recently pointed out to me, since we’ve  “moved” I have spent more time away from this house than living in it. Time to change that! So, in addition to missing our sweet little kitties, I missed the house too. Even briefly, it already feels like home. With its nice red door and ivy covered brick exterior walls, for some reason it still surprises me that we live here and it is ours. Most of all, I’m just happy that everything just seemed to fall in to place when we found it. It’s one of those unlikely Toronto stories, which sellers are always afraid of. One single offer. And it was ours. Sure there are still bits and pieces we need to fix up, and I’m looking forward to digging up most of the yard and planting herbs and vegetables for our neighbourhood raccoons to enjoy (partially kidding – but I’m sure they’ll be wrecking stuff as soon as it’s there.) It still feels like we’re house sitting for someone else, but at the same time, I’ve realize what a comfort it is to be here. This is home, and I appreciate it. Even if we still don’t have internet. Or only intermittent hot water. But really… let’s not talk about that. We’ll have those in September.…

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Things I Love Thursday – On Friday – I’m on a Train.

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I’m on a train to NYC (magic of internet!) Since returning home from Las Vegas, the last few days have been a frenzy of activity, where we got a few things taken care of for the new house, amongst other things. But most of that was really time spent waiting for installers (that didn’t show up), repair persons (that didn’t actually fix anything), delivery folks (that brought us a nice new bed frame!) and cat sitters (that were lovely). So, a little bit of good, a little bit of bad. Vegan MoFo What I’m really excited about is that VeganMoFo registration has opened up, and you might want to join up if you haven’t yet. I’ve had a lot of fun in past years, and I like how a lot of people have done themes for the month, and since I’m getting married in October, I’ve opted to do an entire month of wedding themed posts in addition to other stuff I feel like posting that month. Hopefully people can make use of some of our planning experience. The Big Apple Now were heading to NYC, and, other than just being happy to be heading down there for a little while, I’m also pretty thrilled that’ll I’ll get to check out the Vegan Shop Up while we’re in the area. (It’s happening tomorrow!) Vegan Shop Up Deets Saturday, August 10th, 12- 6pm Pine Box Rock Shop 12 Grattan St. Bushwich, Bk And it’s even free… until you want to eat…

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Things I Love Thursday – Taking a moment.

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This week has been wet and wild in Toronto. We got the equivalent of a month’s worth of rain in the span of a few hours, which led to flooding, power outages, traffic delays,  and a lot of property damage. There is an underpass near our house that was completely flooded, as you can see the picture below. There were many other’s like it. JC was on one side of this underpass, and I was on the other. And not to be dramatic, because we were very minimally impacted by this, but as this was happening it was hard to know what was really going on or what the weather would be like in a few hours. There was thunder and lightening, and we lost power for a few hours, and it just wouldn’t stop raining. I think the situation in Calgary was very much on the collective consciousness, especially since it was so recent. But the rain stopped, and everyone started cleaning up. Sadly there were lots of people without power, some people were trapped on Go Buses or Subways for several hours, or had flooding in their basements. I’m thankful that our experience was comparatively easy, but my thoughts go out to those that weren’t so lucky, and hope that things are getting a bit closer to normal. Most of all, I’m thankful that it wasn’t worse and that things are getting straightened up again. Moving I’m not sure if I like this, but I think I do.…

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