Vegan Eats of the Week 09/29/18

Hope everyone had a good week and had some opportunities to eat well – whatever that means for you!

For me, there was a little bit more of trying new products this week. I saw a couple of ads on social media for No Cow protein cookies and bars, which are non-dairy/vegan and gluten-free, and I decided to give them a try since I’m always curious about new products. The bars are ~20 g protein and the cookies are ~12 g protein (from brown rice and pea proteins), and sweetened with Stevia and monk fruit extract.

I’ve only tried the chocolate chip cookie and the chocolate fudge brownie bar so far, and I can’t say that I love the bar’s texture. Much like some of the other bars I have tried out there, it’s like they crammed too much protein into the bar and the texture is chalky. As for the cookie, it’s much less chalky in texture and closer to a regular cookie, but the taste had that artificial sweetener taste (unsurprising given the Stevia AND monk fruit extract). 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

 

Speaking of cookies, I also tried these soft-baked Snickerdoodle cookies from Trader Joe’s that I stumbled upon while shopping there last week. They are free of wheat, milk, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, and soy. They seem to be Trader Joe’s version of Enjoy Life’s Snickerdoodle soft-baked cookies. They apparently have been around for years, but this was my first time seeing them … and yet, I have been eating the Enjoy Life cookies for years. They’re just as addicting (though, my roommate asserts that the Trader Joe’s ones are better).

• 

• 

• 

 

Perelandra continues to be a three-times-weekly stop at the very least. I go there to get dinner/lunch for the next day before I teach at Yoga Pole Studio on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, and on Sunday early afternoons for their brunch hot food bar. But sometimes I go there on Monday, too, before I go to my indoor cycling class.

Unfortunately, I do have to say that I have grown a tad tired of their baked tofu. A lot of their food is actually WAY too salty, so it’s getting hard for me to eat sometimes. Like their portabello mushroom caps? Like, I LOVE any mushrooms cooked in just about any way, but the ones they have at Perelandra’s hot food bar are SO SALTY that I can’t even eat them.

So, this week, instead of the tofu, I tried their vegan chili, which was nice because the weather started getting chilly (ha) and chili felt like a nice thing to help warm me up a bit. And it was tasty, and a little salty but tolerable. And because I was craving something sweet, I decided to try their gluten-free cranberry almond muffin, which tasted great and wasn’t too dry like many vegan & gluten-free muffins can be.

• 

• 

• 

• 

 

My weekly Sunday trip to Peacefood Cafe led me to a gluten-free veggie biscuit of theirs that I had not yet had before! Jalapeno Popper sounds like it would be very spicy, but it actually wasn’t. They must have done a really good job at scraping out the seeds and inner membrane of the jalapenos before baking them into the biscuits!

• 

• 

 

And finally, a street fair where I got my favorite street fair treat: the roasted corn on the cob with just a light sprinkling of salt; and the Farmstead Burger from Bareburger a few blocks from work. (I hadn’t been to Bareburger in a while, so it was a nice change to have their sweet potato/kale/wild rice patty again. But I was disappointed that a) they ran out of collard greens so my burger was wrapped in lettuce, which didn’t quite work, and b) even though they seem to cater so well to vegetarians and vegans, they did not have any non-dairy milks for me to put in my iced coffee! Like, how? Alas.

• 

• 

 

Stay tuned in upcoming weeks for more vegan eats from around New York City!