Tofu Scramble Burritos

The Chef: Jenny

The Menu: Burritos bursting with savory scrambled tofu, arroz con Moros—traditional Cuban rice and black beans cooked together with red bell pepper and spices—lettuce and fresh avocado. With so many veggies packed into the perfectly soft tortillas, there was no room for salad on our plates or in our stomachs. The arroz con Moros is as filling as it is easy to make, and, of course, we always love a tofu scramble.

The Goods: It's sunny, it's Monday, and we got burritos. Life is good. For the first day back in the kitchen after all of our non-cooking last week, today's lunch started our week off right. We were busy little explorers this weekend, so make sure to visit Press Pass and check out all the fun we've been having.

The Return of the Lasagna

The Chef: Elizabeth

The Menu: Yes, it's lasagna. The sauce got a little extra pep from the addition of more tomato sauce and a huge handful of fresh oregano. Our starchy side dish was a warm potato salad with thinly sliced carrots and celery, Italian country vinegar, and more of the oregano. Is there anything fresh herbs can't do? Well, sure there's plenty they can't do, but they are extraordinarily good at making food taste better.

The Goods: "This is not the same lasagna as we had on Tuesday," says Elizabeth as she waves her hand in a subtle, Jedi manner. Okay, you caught us, it is the same lasagna, but we're not about to let lasagna go to waste! Sadly, we've now officially finished off the pan, so we're going to have to start cooking for ourselves again. Le sigh...

Taste Test Thursday: Curry Compilation

The Chef: Aurelia

The Menu: Myriad ready-made meals! Continuing with the taste test theme for today, Aurelia whipped up a variety of Asian-inspired packaged meals, and complemented them with perfectly fluffy rice and curried sweet potatoes with tomato. We sampled Kerala Vegetables from Tasty Bite and the Bangkok Beauty and Sherpa's Delight curry-flavors from Going Native. Oh, and you may notice a little extra curry (because there's no such thing as too much curry!) from Jenny's awesome lunch on Monday.

The Goods: When the taste-test fever hits the VNHQ, there's no stopping it! We love trying out all kinds of great, new, vegan products and getting to tell you all about them. In case you were wondering, the theme carried over into our dessert selection as well: We tried French Meadow Bakery's Peanut Butter Bliss Cookie Bites. These all-natural, slightly salty treats were a nice balance to the spiciness of the curries. We may get crazy and actually cook something tomorrow, but no promises!

VN Tea Party!

The Chef: Lisa

The Menu: A tea tasting! Today we enjoyed a variety of teas from Pixie Maté and Zhena's Gypsy Tea. Some of the yummy flavors we sampled were Dark Roast and Lemon Maté from Pixie Maté, and Coconut Chai, Pomegranate Rose, Red Lavender, and Gypsy Love from Zhena's Gypsy Tea.

The Goods: We are all tea fiends here at the VNHQ, though some of us moonlight as coffee drinkers, too. Since we had all these lovely teas in the office it seemed that the only thing to do was have ourselves a tea-party taste test! Favorites from among the flavors we sampled were the Coconut Chai and Gypsy Love, and with the stimulating effects of the maté, we should all be extra productive today!

Picnic Pintos and Potatoes

The Chef: Lisa

The Menu: A lovely corn and pinto-bean salad with fresh lime juice, grape tomatoes, cumin, and garlic served with tarragon-roasted fingerling potatoes and leeks. Though you can clearly see Lisa's flair for garnish, it was hardly necessary to dress up such scrumptious dishes. Given today's sunshine and (relatively) warm temperature, this lunch would have been the perfect meal for a picnic in the park.

The Goods: As it happened, we didn't lunch in the park, but we did get to enjoy the special treat of having a couple friendly guests over. The lovely Kristin LaJeunesse, who is an organizer of the New York Capital Region Vegetarian Expo, and her main squeeze Michael came all the way from Boston just to have lunch with us. Okay, of course they were really here on vacation to visit San Francisco, but we were happy to get the chance to meet them! Here they are with the VN team:

There is one more matter of business to attend: the winner of April's Café VegNews giveaway! This month's goodie bag—which will arrived stuffed with excellent VN swag, including a signed copy of columnist Rory Freedman's bestselling cookbook Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, cookies, and some great new vegan products—goes to Amey of springsandwells for her lime-liking. Lime-coconut cookies? Yes please. Ditto cashew-lime-jalapeño cream! Amey, send us over an email with your mailing address so we can ship out your winnings. Congrats to Amey and thanks to all who commented!

Lasagna-Palooza Lunch

The Chef: Colleen + the Castorias

The Menu: Oozy, melty, dense lasagna with perfectly crisp edges and smothered with a potently savory Italian "meat-ball" sauce. Balancing out this right-side-heavy plate sits a piece of hearty Italian bread and a heap of fresh romaine, cucumbers, and grape tomatoes tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette.

The Goods: While we'd like to take full-credit for this outstanding meal, we cannot possibly pass this off as entirely in-house when 1. lasagna takes the better part of a weeknight to make properly and 2. the talented chefs who did make this meal poured their heart (and secret family sauce!) into this oustanding main. One of our resident editors is lucky enough to a have a family so generous and suppportive that they slaved over 12 pans of vegan lasagna and "meatballs" and hosted a community event this past weekend to honor those who choose an animal-friendly lifestyle. As if that weren't enough, they were kind enough to donate some of the leftovers for our VN lunches. Needless to say, we are as touched as we are stuffed!

Guess Who Came to Lunch?

The Chef: Jenny

The Menu: A robust and rich tomato-spinach, coconut-curry soup served with toasted mustard- and sesame-seed infused rice, and then a new-agey twist on an old-world favorite: lemon-soaked channa masala stir fried with sprouted granola and goji berries.

The Goods: While we didn’t enjoy this beautiful spread with Sidney Poitier himself, our lovely Ms. Elizabeth brought in her equally dashing man-friend—visiting from Connecticut—to meet the VegNews family. Armed with a pretty box of organic artisan chocolates from Manchester’s Divine Treasures, one of our favorite vegan and gluten-free chocolatiers, we all wished guests like him visited more often. Don’t these morsels look delicious?

Leftovers Shmeftovers

The Chef: Colleen

The Menu: Roasted red-pepper and broccolini rotini borrowed from yesterday’s leftover bounty, fresh oregano and olive oil crostini, and a light, slightly sweet salad of romaine hearts, grape tomatoes, shredded carrots, celery, cashews, almonds, and goji-berries.

The Goods: Here at the VNHQ, especially when Colleen’s at the kitchen’s helm, we don’t do leftovers. (Okay, truth be told, we don’t exactly exhibit restraint when it comes to cleaning our lunch plates —let's just say our Tupperware is on the bottom shelf of our pantry collecting dust). But we had such a delicious mountain of pasta left over from yesterday’s VegNews Wedding Celebration, and Colleen knew just how to turn it into something new and fresh. Delish!

Note #1: The opinions expressed by the preceding may or many not have been influenced by Colleen’s homemade cupcakes which we enjoyed for dessert and that you’d swear came from a professional, butter-happy bakery.

Note #2: Don't forget to get your submission in for this month's blog (cough *goodie-bag* cough) giveaway!

VegNews Wedding Celebration 2008

The Chef: Aurelia

The Menu: We should really say "menus," as the dishes of today's lunch were inspired by two of the wedding menus from our 2008 wedding feature in the May+June issue, which hits newsstands today! Our culinary compilation was comprised of southern-inspired fried "chicken" with barbecue sauce from Amanda Moeckel and JC Callender's menu, and from the wedding of Sharon Troy and Tim Moore we enjoyed pasta primavera with sage oil and a salad of baby greens with candied pecans, pears, and Balsamic vinegar. Most of us here at VN are unwed, but if it meant we got to eat like this, we might consider matrimony!

The Goods: We had a slew of special guests who were able to come together and celebrate vegan weddings with us today at the VNHQ. The two couples whose menus we recreated live in the area and joined us for an extremely sunny afternoon. Here they are, in all their happily married glory:
Of course, no wedding-themed celebration would be complete without a cake, right? (Well, no wedding celebration that we'd want to go to, anyway.) Thanks to the generous nature of super-star vegan baker Hannah Tai, we had an amazingly beautiful chai- and almond-flavored wedding cake. There's no way to properly describe just how lovely this creation was, so instead here's a picture, complete with the benevolent baker:
Today may go down in history as the fanciest VegNews lunch of all time. Thanks so much to our beautiful guests for coming and congratulations again to all our couples!

Special: Cookie Alert!

The Chef: Crumbz Cookiez, Inc.

The Menu: Cookie dough!

The Goods: Here at the VNHQ we love cookies. You can just imagine our glee, then, when Crumbz delivered some of their preservative-free, ready-to-bake, vegan cookie dough right to our offices, complete with baked samples for us to try. Pictured above, you see the very chocolaty staff-favorite flavor, the Double Chocolate Chip. Crumbz also offers Oatmeal Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip, and Classic Chocolate Chip flavors, and yes, it totally thrills us to see the words "chocolate chip" repeated that many times. Right now the dough is only available at a few stores in Northern California, but the company hopes to continue to grow. As for us, we might be continuing to grow too—ahem—since discovering Crumbz!