So much good

One of my favorite places to totally stuff my face and be a giant fatty AND be full for the entire day is Nyala Ethiopian where they have all you can eat vegan lunch special for less than $7! Warning.. this place is DANGEROUS! The food is so tasty that you keep wanting seconds. How I like to approach all you can eat is sampling everything that looks good then coming back for my faves during seconds. This tends to make my first plate pretty big. For seconds I chose to only get the greens and the browns but still filled my plate. By the end we were stuffed but we didn't know how stuff we really were! I was full for the entire day and felt like a beached whale and didn't want to do anything all day but lay on the couch, which is the tell all that it was a great meal! But I am pretty sure my cravings for Ethiopian food is sated... for now.


I usually don't post food that I make at home, no reason. But I might start doing it because I do make delicious dishes at home but by the time its done I just want to eat it! I made a ruben (actually a few rubens) for the first time. I made it a little ghetto fancy because I used really good sourdough bread but it being a hot LA spring day, I wasn't feeling the whole spending time making faux meat at the moment so I just seasoned and fried up some tofu, mixed up my own thousand island, slabbed on some sauerkraut and fried it up! I was surprised how good it was! I think a smothering something in thousand island does make it even better even the tofu came out tasty! The only regrets was that I didn't make more...


Today I traveled up to Pasadena to visit my oldest friend who has now recently became vegan (whoo hoo!). She gave me a mini-tour of a few vegan treats around town. She lives right behind Orean but the only thing I really dig on is the Philly Cheese steak (w/o the sketchy cheese) but there is a new restaurant in town so watch out! My Vegan is actually like many other Thai influenced vegan places but it has a very big menu. They have the standards like curry, noodles, burgers, wraps but they mix up the flavors and aren't afraid to try new things. They even have lunch and dinner specials available on weekends. So my friend got the green curry with this fake meat called Near (what is new to me) lunch special and I tried out the chicken curry burger (with an order of fries and vegenaise mmm). I tried some of the Near meat and it tasted just like pepper steak seitan and it was good but I still don't know what the heck it is (no thanks google!). My chicken curry burger was good but it really needed more curry! When I read it on the menu I was thinking a chicken burger dripping in curry but it was just lightly on there and I could hardly taste it unless I took a bite only of the meat. I mean they might have tried out having more curry on it and it didn't fly well but I don't know I like lots of intense flavor! None of this hints of subtle flavor for this gal. All and all it was pretty good and a nice change of pace from Orean.



After we went over to South Pasadena where the curbs are high and the trains go by. This adorable little bakery My Sweet Cupcake where on Thursdays and Saturdays they offer a variety of vegan cupcakes! OMFG right? Well it turns out that they are testing out the waters to see the most popular vegan flavors and might even offer to have vegan options everyday! Nom Nom Nom more of a reason to travel to that side of town. The options for the day were green tea, Mexican chocolate and oreo. We got the Mexican chocolate and oreo. I usually don't like the idea of chocolate and spicy but it was really good! And the cake part was moist and the frosting was just the right amount of spicy to sweet and the chocolate was even rich and dark. The oreo one was almost sold out but for some reason it was not as good as the Mexican chocolate. It was dry and the frosting did taste lie oreo but it just wasn't satisfying. So my vote of the day would obviously be the Mexican chocolate but if nobody tries it how will they know to keep it on the menu!?!




For din I made a bacon cheese burger with sauteed mushrooms tomato and avocado vegenaise and bbq sauce