Go Easy

Well, I’m sorry to say that I have little to report that is very interesting from my weekend away.  Failed veganventure.

H and I and our two travel companions began our trip south early Friday morning.  The first leg of the trip consisted of snow, freezing rain, ice, and fog.  And traffic.  Not pleasant.  I had packed a whole giant bag of food for the ride, knowing that there might not be many roadside options for me.  The bag contained: bananas, two PB&J sandwiches, a bag of original flavor Pop Chips, a baggie stuffed with pretzels, another baggie full of Oreos, and a container of Very Simple Blueberry Muffins from VegWeb (see below for recipe and pictures).

The entire journey took about twelve hours and was very pleasant in terms of company and conversation.  Biggest problem for me was being hungry for alot of the time.  I don’t know what it is about my body/preferences/metabolism (?), but I can’t just subsist on snacky food.  I wanted to eat something real after all that time.  Unfortunately, our three stops for food consisted of McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and KFC.  No thanks.

By the time we got to Charlottesville my body was practically begging for some real food.  Before we checked into our hotel, we stopped at a veg-friendly Chinese restaurant called Ming Dynasty.  I got some sort of veggie-pork with vegetables and brown rice.  I didn’t take a picture because my camera was packed somewhere in the car and I was too hungry to wait until we got out and unpacked and everything.  So no picture…sorry 😦  However, karma repaid me for being too greedy to do my blog duty, because after a few bites, my food then spilled all over the car floor, and got filled with grit and who knows what else so that I couldn’t eat it anymore.  But from what I remember, it was tasty.   And it smelled pretty good in the car the next day, since the sauce got into the carpets (sorry again!!)  So, go Ming Dynasty, I guess.  (I was extremely upset about this whole incident, by the way.)

I didn’t eat or do anything for the rest of the weekend that I’d care to share on this forum.  What I can tell you is that I had a muffin and banana for each of Saturday and Sunday breakfast, and on Saturday, I had a salad from Chipotle (with all the vegan trimmings) while the rest of my friends chowed down at Buffalo Wild Wings, and then Saturday night I had a similar dinner (rice, beans, hot sauce, veggies) from Qdoba.  Again, not my best weekend.

So there you have it.  A failed veganventure.  Hey, we can’t win ’em all!  And anyway, the muffins were delicious!  I made another batch that had blueberries and strawberries in it and those were good too (though I preferred the blueberries-only version).

Here are some pictures, and the recipe is here.  I used unsweetened vanilla almond milk in both of my batches.  I also added about 1/4-1/2 tsp. vanilla extract and 1-2 dashes of nutmeg to each.  Just my personal taste preference, but I was happy with how it came out.  These are super-easy and very quick.

A beautiful blueberry muffin

The whole batch (I made four giant ones and one smaller one [seen top left–cute, right?]…you could definitely get at least 8 cupcake-sized muffins out of this recipe)

I thought this was cool…the one blueberry that didn’t burst in the oven! Here you can see the cakey texture, too.

Back soon with a positive attitude and more delicious vegan eats!