It’s been a great weekend so far! One thing that is fabulous about this area is the huge selection of Thai restaurants with great new ones popping up a lot. Friday night hubby and I ventured out to try another new Thai restaurant where I got a vegan tofu drunken noodle dish that had a nice veggie to noodle ratio and wasn’t just a pile of greasy noodles.
And it was also surprisingly spicier than I expected, but that was great too.
Yesterday I got to be part of an awesome local event that raised money for the SPCA – a huge vegan swap party!
The concept is genius and I already can’t wait until the next party. Everyone brings in stuff they don’t want anymore like clothes, books, household items, etc. And they just take what they do want for free. And people could trickle in and out with stuff during the entire party time slot so new stuff was constantly arriving and leaving.
And there was a fun vegan snack table loaded with splurge foods too.
I ended up leaving with a lot of clothes, mostly cute tops for work and casual skirts for the weekend and for hubby too. I also grabbed a new Bungalow 360 purse and matching wallet with the tags still on and lots of books. It’s like getting new stuff for free, I refreshed my wardrobe nicely without the financial baggage – love it! And we had a lot of stuff leftover, at least a trailer load full, that was donated to the SPCA Thrift Shop.
If you’re interested in a party like this, check out MeetUp.com and Facebook to see if any local interest groups are hosting anything like it or host your own with a group of friends and pick a local thrift shop to support with the leftovers. It’s a great excuse for a get together and so much fun.
I also had an interesting electric vehicle experience there. Driving to the south Sacramento location from my house and back is pushing the battery range on my EV, but I carefully planned my route there to include more stop-and-go surface streets for regenerative braking to maximize the range and it worked out fine, the battery was only down to 30% when I got home – plenty left! I did that because the trip cost us about $1.50 in power versus costing about $9 in gas if I were to take our economy gas car since gas prices are going up again, that’s a huge difference! It’s geeky, but I can calculate the costs quickly of taking an EV versus a gas car for just about any trip now since joining the local EV group and researching all things EV to answer questions at shows. Now I try to take the EV more when possible to save money and gas. There was also a couple at the party that lived in the same area as me and have an EV, but they brought their gas car to the party since they’re newer EV owners and getting used to the battery range. I got to chat with them for awhile and give tips on making longer trips on one charge and saving tons of money which was awesome.
Okay, enough geek talk and back to the food! Last night I used the gorgeous mushroom I got in this week’s farm box in a delicious version of this soup recipe.
Only I added more veggies, bok choy and chard, and simmered the soup in a wok with an added drizzle of toasted sesame oil and sriracha sauce for flavor.
The mushrooms came out great! I’m a picky person when it comes to mushrooms, I don’t like them too slimy and have problems with eating them in larger quantities. I can barely tolerate an entire portobello mushroom patty. But the texture on these mushrooms was wonderful – firm, hearty, and a great flavor. They weren’t slimy at all, I could eat an entire bowl of soup with nothing but these mushrooms.
Sounds awesome! That meet-up! I just joined – shooting for Erie, PA area tho – closest I could find. FUNNY…just found out about the WNY Veg Fest in Buffalo and it’s the ONE week out of the year I can’t plan anything…grrrrr! I really want to go!