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taqueria los gorditos vegan menu

February 7, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage

More good news for Portland (sorry, rest of the world): If you haven’t yet heard, Taqueria Los Gorditos has graduated from their truck parked outside of Citybikes and now have a real, live sit-down establishment at SE 12th & Division. There’s a catch: It’s not just vegan, but they do have a separate grill for vegan stuff…and this owl to watch over you while you eat:


I got the Soycurl Taco (no beans—they’re the mushy kind), the Onion Taco, and the Tamale, which I failed to get through—a girl’s belly can only hold so much food.


Tom got the nachos, of course, because apparently he was once hypnotized at a party and the seed was planted that when he sees the word “nachos” on a vegan menu he has no choice but to order it. Odd hypnotist, that one.

Here’s the vegan menu so you can get take-out or, if you’re not in Portland, show it to your local Mexican joint to prove just what can be done without meat and dairy and lard. My favorite part of the menu is the note that vegan items can be made vegetarian with cheese and sour cream (the dairy kind). How’s that for a switch-o-change-o? As always, I’m not being sponsored, I just wanted to share this fabulous menu with you because it’s not online…so if they change the ingredients or prices or whathaveya, I’m sorry, I tried. 

Where listed, cheese is Follow Your Heart and sour cream is Tofutti. Choice of “meat” can be Soyrizo, tofu, Soycurls, or grilled veggies. To add items, extras are 75¢ each

Gorditas (3) • $6.00
Small flatbread stuffed with beans, cheese, and choice of “meat”

Regular Tacos • $2.00
Corn tortillas with beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, avocado, raw onion, and cilantro

Tofu Tacos • $2.00
Corn tortillas with tofu, grilled peppers and onions, raw onion,and cilantro

Onion Tacos • $1.50
Corn tortillas with grilled onion, fresh lime, and salsa

Soyrizo Tacos • $2.00
Corn torillas with Soyrizo, beans, raw onion, and cilantro

Soycurl Tacos • $2.00
Corn tortillas with Soycurls, grilled veggies, beans, raw onion, and cilantro

Tamales • $1.75
Corn mesa wrapped in a banana leaf stuffed with seasonal veggies

Beans, Rice & Avocado • $4.00
Side of beans and rice, with avocado and corn tortillas

Sopes (2) • $6.00
Corn mesa with beans, choice of “meat,” cheese, lettuce, tomato, avocado, cilantro, and sour cream

Huaraches • $5.00
A longer version of the sopes, corn mesa with beans, choice of “meat,” cheese, lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, cilantro, and sour cream

Nachos • $6.00
Corn chips piled high with your choice of Soyrizo or tofu, beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, cilantro, and jalepeño

Regular Burrito • $4.50
Flour tortilla stuffed with beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, and cilantro

Tofu Burrito • $6.00
Flour tortilla stuffed with grilled tofu, pepper and onion, beans, rice, onion, and cilantro

Soyrizo Burrito • $5.00
Flour tortilla stuffed with Soyrizo, beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, avocado, onion, and cilantro

Soycurl Fajita Burrito • $6.00
Flour tortilla stuffed with Soycurls, grilled veggies, beans, rice, onion, and cilantro

Enchiladas • $6.50
Three corn tortillas dipped in red sauce and stuffed with choice of “meat” or FYH cheese, with a side of beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, and sour cream

Quesadilla • $6.00
Grilled with FYH cheese and a choice of “meat,” a side of beans, rice, lettuce, and tomato

Mulita • $6.00
Layers of corn tortillas filled with FYH cheese and Soyrizo, onion, and cilantro, with a side of beans, rice, lettuce, and tomato

Tofu Bowl • $6.00
Plate of grilled veggies and tofu, with a side of beans, rice, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, and corn tortillas

Empanadas Rellenas (2) • $7.00
Corn mesa stuffed with Soyrizo or tofu, topped with lettuce, tomato, onion, and cilantro, with a side of beans and rice

Rolled Tacos (4) • $5.50
Fried rolled tortillas filled with potatoes and Soyrizo, topped with lettuce, tomato, onion, and cilantro

Torta (Soyrizo or Tofu) • $5.00
Toasted bread with beans, cheese, lettuce, tomato, avocado, sour cream, onion, cilantro, and jalepeño

Posted in eatin' out/in | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

facebook, you win

February 5, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage

I know I said back in July that I wouldn’t be on Facebook, but as it turns out I’m a horrible, no-good, fire-pants liar. Vegtastic’s now on Facebook.

So how will I be using it? I’ll link to new blog posts as well as news stories I don’t have time to write a whole post for. And you can post your photos and links that you think others will find useful—please do. I’ll get some discussions going on there and have it generally fleshed out soon.

But no Twitter.

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more trial and error and success

February 4, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage

 

Of my two experiments the other night, this is the one that worked. It’s chocolate chips, hempseed, and unsweetened shredded coconut, sprinkled with a little bit o’ turbinado. It tasted as good as it looks. The one that didn’t work so swell was the Daiya cheddar; it tasted great but the one tablespoon of shreds melted way, way flat.

I’ve always loved phyllo dough. Some hate it because it can be difficult to handle, drying out very quickly, but if you have a helper, some plastic wrap to cover it during lulls, and a well-planned assembly-line setup it’s an easy-flakey-fun base for sweet and savory treats. If you’ve never worked with it before—or have, with disastrous results—here are some points to remember:

•Make sure it’s thawed. Right on the box (which you’ll find in the freezer section), it says you can leave it in the fridge for a day or on the counter for a few hours. It’s much easier to work with at room temp, so again, a little forethought goes a long way.

•Take what you need and only what you need—save the rest for later. Figure out what size and shape you’re going to need to wrap around whatever you’re wrapping around a few times. Cut out that shape and roll the rest up, stick it back in the plastic (no air allowed!) and refreeze it. I’ve done this and never had problems with later uses. Unless you’re cooking for a crowd it’s pretty tough to use the whole package, and this stuff ain’t cheap.

•Melt your Earth Balance and keep it melted. Back in the dairy days, I used butter and other margarine and had a hell of a time keeping it liquid, but Earth Balance behaves beautifully. I just keep it in the pot (no microwaves in this home). Use a pastry/BBQ brush to get a thin, even layer on your dough. Once I used a mist-o-matic bottle filled with olive oil on a savory bundle and it worked, but I like the light flavor of EB.

•Prepare your fillings for the quick bake. Because of the dryness, I like to cook these quickly. If 10 minutes in the oven isn’t going to thoroughly cook whatcha got inside, then precook. Apples, for instance, would likely still be hard so they need to be cooked down like a prepared pie filling. Soy curls, tempeh, or tofu should be sautéed up, as should raw garlic if it’s in big chunks. Try to keep the moisture of your fillings down to a minimum—nobody wants a soggy bottom.

•Line up your ingredients leading to the cookie sheet/baking pan and preheat your oven. Start with the phyllo, then EB, filling, and baking pan. If you have a helper to brush the phyllo with EB and hand it off to you for filling and rolling, awesome. You don’t even have to worry too much about the phyllo drying out. If not, keep a layer of plastic wrap on top of your waiting stack o’ sheets. Also, if you pull up a sheet and it’s stuck to another one, maybe just chuck ‘em; you don’t want to waste time separating them if all you’re going to end up with is holey, dry sheets. Boo.

I think that’s about it. Looks like a long list of stuff to think about, I know, but it’s all simple stuff. And it’s worth it if you like fun flakey foodthings.

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lamest show ever

February 1, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage

I can’t tell you how much I resent crappy pop culture finding me under my rock. Between photo-accompanied headlines and comedic spoofs, I know far too much about Lady Gaga, Glen Beck, <insert the name of that person or couple with way too many kids>, and now Jersey Shore. The way the public embraces these reality show people drives me insane; sure, they laugh at them, feeling an unhealthy sense of superiority, but if they got a chance to so much as shake the hand of one of them, well, it’d be a story to tell for years to come. 

What’s that got to do with vegtastic voyaging? As my mind throws out tangents faster than I can usually follow, one of the more entertaining ones involved myself in a reality show. What could the hook possibly be? What segment of wacky subculture do I share with those around me? How could I be neatly generalized, marginalized, and packaged for mass consumption? Well, I’m vegan, and that’s ridiculous enough for many. I live in Portland—or Little Beiruit, as the GWB staff reffered to it—whose unofficial slogan is “Keep Portland Weird.” And I’m a 30-something, childless, bookish, crafty, aging hipster/punk, former gifted child without a grown-up, full-time job. To top it off, I keep a handful of others just like me around and call them friends.

You could put us all in a house together (with a yard, please, for the garden) and fill it with cameras, and it would be the most boring show ever. More boring than C-SPAN’s Congress-Cam. We’re quiet. We paint and sew and read and write and ride bikes. When we hang out together we eat and watch funny things on computers or TVs and we listen to records and we talk about old punk shows we were at and cities we’ve lived in. We get excited when Food Fight! gets a new shipment of Daiya or one of us buys new shoes or gets a new kitty. The only scandals that arise are when an old acquaintence (vegan when we knew ‘em) is spotted eating a can of tuna (this really happened) or…no, I can’t really think of any more. Man, we don’t even deserve nicknames.

The producers could try to shake things up by placing an omnivore in the house with us. We’d have separate pots and pans and such, and we’d all do our own dishes immediately, but the first time the omni filled the house up with the smell of scrambled eggs or his poorly wrapped steak dripped blood in the fridge (oh no! my cilantro!)…house meeting. I’d give that guy a month. I know omni-veg couples who get by, but they lo-o-o-ove each other. Without an emotional bond or financial necessity, I don’t see it going well.

Who’d watch that? As one who hasn’t watched unscripted television since Candid Camera, not me, even—no, especially—if I was in it. I guess all this little mental hiccup did is tell me we can’t be that outrageous. You can’t be boring and crazy at the same time.

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peanut butter and chocolate and banana, yeah yeah

January 21, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage


An after-school snack that you can eat even if you haven’t been to school in a long, long time. This is Peanut Butter & Co Dark Chocolate Dreams on a perfectly ripe, just-out-of-the-fridge banana. Out of the fridge? Yup. I plan ahead for my banana treats and chill them for a few hours. Too long and they get gross, not long enough and they are creepy and also gross. Oh, feel free to eat your fruit however you please, but I need mine crisp and cool. You can’t see it in the photo, but i carve out a little trench/cargo bay to maximize my peanut butter delivery system.

Peanut Butter & Co has held a place in my heart since I lived in New York. Working downtown, the Village restaurant was an easy lunch destination. They did this sampler platter with five or six peanut butters, celery, carrot sticks, melba toast, and apple slices. I never did finish it in one sitting, and it was always met with jealousy by others, “Doh, I shoulda ordered that,” as they drank their tummyache-inducing milkshakes. I always made sure to pick up an extra jar or two for home. Well, now with their plastic jars, they’re shipping them all over the place, so if they’re not at your local Whole Foods, you can order them online. Dooo eeet.


Banana-related, sort of, is this rather confusing image. My friend pointed this out to me while we were shopping at the craft store. We couldn’t figure it out. Is it a fun toy, where kids can pretend they just captured an ape in the wild and are carting it to the circus or zoo or research lab? Is it only one installment in a monthly program, like those multivolume library things we used to get in grocery stores in the late 70s, so kids can collect a long train of animals behind bars? Just confusing. Well, sad and confusing.

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thanks, seattle

January 11, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage


Oh, but they do taste better fresh. Last weekend we drove up to Seattle to see some old friends. And, of course, my list of stuff to do included pretty much just a bunch of places to eat, including Mighty-O Donuts. Guilt over the fact that one of our party was gluten-free couldn’t keep me from sampling these sweeties. We get these delivered to our Whole Foods, but they do seem to suffer from the commute. Straight from the source they are soft and light and, well, fresh. I got the Pirate’s Treasure, a spiced rum cake coated with coconut. Tom’s is a chocolate cake covered with cinnamon sugar.  

One thing that surprised me is that in this organic, vegan donut shop, the default milk in your coffee is the cow kind. I only asked “That’s soy, right?” to make sure they weren’t using ricemilk. So if you go, now you know.


The other super-amazing-gotta-go destination was Teapot Vegetarian House. All vegan all the time. I’d read a gazillion references to this place and, in spite of the fact that it was upstairs from Subway, I had to go. Pictured above is my lunch, the Bobo Platter: spring rolls, vegetable-filled wontons, tofu rolls, tofu fritters, and satay (sitting on the little grill). I’d like to make clear that it was for sharing and there were leftovers.


Tom got the Curried Vegetable Hotpot. Quality and quantity. The vegetables, tofu, and spices were all perfect. He also got some amazing tea…which we can’t remember the name of…something blue flower something… If you’re there and you see something with “blue flower” in it, order it.


Friend boy ordered Tofu Rolls in Spicy Tomato Sauce. It was sort of like an Asian enchilada, filled with tofu and vegetables and smothered in tomato and a bunch more vegetables. Like the rest of us, he failed to clean his plate, but not for lack of trying.


And friend girl—the gluten-free one—got the Fried Wide Noodles. So pretty and simple: stir-fried vegetables, tofu, and rice noodles. She was the clean-plate winner. Not completely, but she did way better than the rest of us.

And boys and girls who don’t clean their plates don’t get dessert. Maybe next time—they’ve got a tight yet impressive dessert menu.

And that was Seattle.

Posted in eatin' out/in | 1 Comment »

happy new year

January 5, 2010 by vegtasticvoyage

A couple of days is not a week, so I’m already doing better than X-mas. Not ones for big parties, Tom and I had some friends over to watch the calendar change on the ol’ laptop. Luckily, even if we lost track of time, the locals and their amateur fireworks would have clued us in. See? Here’s our backyard:


Yes, it was a foggy, rainy night, but at least there was no snow. Besides, it was lovely indoors. And what goodies did I whip up, you ask? An old favorite and a new twist on an old one.


I just don’t think you can ever go wrong with sushi. Lots of options to meet the unexpected tastes of your guests. Some sun-dried tomato; some avocado only; some carrot, cucumber, scallion, and avocado; some sans avocado…with Bragg’s, soy sauce, and wasabi. I picked up this big stacked bento box of sorts a few years back in some Chinatown or another, and I use it more than I ever thought I could. It’s not airtight but it’s fine for a day in the fridge.


And teeny, tiny pizzas! These are each about 3 inches wide and I fit eight of them on my pizza stone, two per person. I made the crusts, chopped up some vegetables, and mixed the bases (marinara and pesto) ahead of time, then my friend and I threw them together and popped them in the oven for 10 minutes. They were great. I suppose for a bigger crowd cookie sheets would have worked—but nothing beats a pizza stone. 

We didn’t even touch the hummus or salsa.

Tom and I consider ourselves lucky for being able to tread the waters of 2009, but we’re ready to make some sort of advancement this year. Maybe I’ll even find a fulltime gig with insurance and stuff, like a real grown-up. To those of you who have also been trying to keep up, and maybe not having an easy go of it—hell, even if you had an amazing ‘09—have a good one this year. Hug more people than you punch. Engender more laughter than tears.

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happy belated x-mas

December 31, 2009 by vegtasticvoyage


As evidenced by my holiday decorations (see the X-mas mushroom above), I don’t do much deckin’ the halls. We did, however, have a surprise quicky feast with an old friend. Luckily one grocery store was open so we could do more than Tofurky franks.


A bit predictable, sure, but still good. Tofurky roast, mashed potatoes, and roasted vegetables (carrots, sweet potatoes, broccoli, and garlic).

I tried something new with the mashed potatoes and it worked a treat. For two giant russets I used a whole head of garlic, slicing into chunks, and slowly, slowly, slowly sauteed it in Earth Balance, so it got carmelized and sweet, soft enough to mash up. As soon as I turned off the heat I added some chopped-up fresh rosemary.  I mashed this into the potatoes with some plain soy creamer and more Earth Balance. Mmmm.


For dessert, I used Vegan Yum Yum’s veganized Gourmet recipe for plum kuchen, with cherries and apples instead of plums. It’s a yeasted cake so if you’re interested, have a good few hours to set aside for this. It’s worth it, though, super creamy and satisfying. Not super sweet, it’s a great coffee cake. I’m not even ashamed of the fact it was my breakfast for the next two days.

So that was that. Tonight’s New Year’s and seein’ as we’re having some friends over, I’ve got to rustle up some ideas for snacky treats. I’ll try to get back to ya in less than a week. Have a good (and safe) one tonight. If you’re still looking for vegan bubbly, here’s my guide from last year.

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faux

December 18, 2009 by vegtasticvoyage

I’ve been noticing little bits and pieces online about fur. It’s popping back up in fashion, it’s being labeled eco-friendly, and it’s looked upon in a nostalgic light, part of the back-to-basics, what-would-grandma-do way. F that S.

Even back when wee Michele was eating Happy Meals, I knew fur was gross and wrong. My mother drilled that into my head. Faux wasn’t really an option then, so when someone looked like they were wearing fur, they were. So I grew up confidently sneering left and right. I can picture myself at 12 or 13, doing my girls-day-out X-mas shopping on State Street, purposely not wearing sunglasses so evil bitches could get the full force of my laser-eye stare of disapproval.

Today it’s not so easy. I saw a woman at the grocery store in a big ol’ fur (maybe). As my sneer reflex began to kick in, I pulled back, thinking, “This is Portland. It’s 2009. There’s no way that’s real.” Maybe I was wrong, but I couldn’t be sure. I changed my expression to one of concern. Just in case.

The faux furs today are so advanced that you can look and feel just as creepy without the slaughter. What bothers me about the faux furs is the aesthetic. You’re still saying there’s something desirable about animal fur. As a matter of disclosure, I do have a faux fur coat—but it’s a bright Merlot, more like wearing a shag carpet. Unless I find myself in some Jim Henson-inspired alternate universe there’s no danger of being associated with actual fur.

Anyway, the aesthetic opens the door for those working the greenwashing angle. True, vintage furs aren’t hurting any new animals. True, most faux furs are made of plastic. But also true is that it takes resources to raise animals and chemicals and energy to turn that animal skin into fashionable clothing and accessories. And much like the factory-farm opponent who knows that guy who raises his own chickens and whatnot, you’ll hear about the culling of the New Zealand possum or whatever, but how much of the fur today comes from those isolated cases?

I’m not saying I think you’re evil for wearing your grandmother’s fur coat or keeping your hands warm in the faux muff that’s so soft it feels like you’re petting your kitty all day. What do I know anyway? I was just thinking out loud.

Posted in on your person | Tagged | 2 Comments »

save some cash on vegan essentials

December 14, 2009 by vegtasticvoyage

UPDATE (12/18)—TWO NEW CODES through midnight 12/19:
•For 10% off all orders, use code holiday10.
•For free shipping upgrade from UPS Ground to UPS 2-day on orders $50+, use code upgrade2day.

Hi all! Winter blahs have produced a very unproductive Michele. But I’m also a guilty Michele, so I’m sure in the next few days I’ll be back in action.

I didn’t want this to slip by, though. Vegan Essentials is offering a few discounts today and tomorrow (12/15).

•For 10% off all orders (shipping excluded), use coupon code Holiday1.
•For 15% off orders $100 & up (again, shipping excluded), use coupon code Holiday2.

The coupon code entry is easy to miss, so keep an eye out for it. And once you make an account, you’ll get monthly newsletters with discount codes.

So try something new, buy some gifts, and save a few bucks. Talk to you soon. I promise.

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