Too Many Great Eats for the List

It has been cold and frosty here, motivating myself for a long run this morning was a challenge. But I felt great after and needed to get some moving in after lots of great eating this weekend! For now we may have found a bed solution that Leela likes, for now. I was cleaning and rearranging the dog beds by the fireplace last weekend when I stacked two of the older ones to get them out of the way and Leela climbed right in to try out her new double decker bed.

And has been using them like that since with a little blanket cave. It looks crazy, but the things we do for spoiled dogs, haha.

There have been a lot of good eats this week from chickpea pasta with marinara sauce and veggies, salad, roasted butternut squash, oil free stir fries, and hubby’s awesome beans and rice.

But there has also been a lot of decadent eating this weekend thanks to birthday celebrations and coming down from a busy week! Starting with lunch with hubby at Pho Vegan Asian Cuisine Friday.

I will never get tired of this place and love that they’re so easy to get to for work lunch dates.

Then for dinner we headed to Mylapore, a delicious vegetarian/vegan Indian restaurant with a huge vegan menu.

Hubby for the poori plate while I tried the dosa sampler plate that he had to help with me with!

Last night we headed to Pho Fresh to celebrate a vegan friend’s birthday with a large group from the local vegan community. I was very impressed with the vegan menu, so many options!

And this friend sweetly arranged the menu with family style plates sampling a range from the menu, there was tons of food! The vegan lover’s roll was a divine veggie and rice noodle loaded “sushi” roll with a spicy, tangy peanut sauce. Then tofu belly tacos which were delicious. But the from this group was the vegan fried “calamari” with jalapenos which really stood out.

Fried calamari is not something I’ve found a decent vegan replacement for since going vegan, not like I’ve tried that hard. But the texture and flavors from this was pretty spot on – eerily so and had many of us asking how they pulled that off!

There was so much food brought out we were overwhelmed! Next round was spicy braised tofu soup, which was amazing with a daring level of heat. Hawaiian fried rice with pineapple – I could have eaten an entire bowl of that alone.

Bird’s nest Buddha delight with crispy noodles and very realistic vegan “beef” and spicy coconut curry tofu. And then we toasted the birthday girl with mimosas and tropical fruit vegan cake, whew!

Pho Fresh is amazing, I already can’t wait to go back for the vegan calamari and tofu soup alone and thankful to have another great dining out option. But it was also such a great evening with wonderful company. We spent hours chatting with great vegan company and reminded of how grateful I am to have such a fun community of like-minded friends with different backgrounds and journeys to a plant-based lifestyle. It inspired me to make an important resolution this year to spend more time with them and arrange more meetups to counter the negativity and crazy news in the world now and I’m gonna do it! And urge you to seek your local supportive vegan community through Facebook and Meetup groups and connect.

Okay, to the list!

Preacher Lawson entertains us with a great vegan pulled “pork” recipe.

David Carter, the 300 Pound Vegan, discusses his vegan lifestyle.

Trader Joe’s now has vegan mochi ice cream.

Ellie Goulding is joining the vegan club.

How going vegan changed this woman.

Looking forward to checking out this documentary.

Busting vegan myths.