Posts tagged ‘YDV Reviews’
Vegan Food in Columbus – My belly is full
(A quick and huge shout-out to Ms. Laura (aka Peace Chicken) for offering to be the gastro-tour guide for the YdV team. Our day in Columbus, Ohio was filled with great vegan food and great vegan company.)
Brunch, dessert, and dinner can be had at will in this capital city and college town. A simple search online can verify this, and so can I.
Welcome to brunch at Whole World Natural Restaurant on N. High street. They’ve got a menu of variety for all tastes. This is a self-described “vegetarian restaurant” with a “vegan option” on nearly every item (dairy is the ingredient to be substituted in most cases, eggs are in some items). Be sure to to tell your server that you are vegan and commence ordering the “vegan option.”
Our choice: Seitan Gyros
While not like a gyro at all, still delicious.
Friendly staff and fair prices at this small and homey eatery will lure us back in the future.
After galavanting around this cool town, it became the hour of indulgence. What better way to indulge than to have sweet gooey pastries. I give you- Pattycake Bakery, also located on N. High Street.
Dear Pattycake, I love you. Sweetly yours forever, Me.
You are enticing me with your menu, and I like it.
This all-vegan bakery has no limits when it comes to offering a gazzillion different choices. Disclaimer- We don’t get to Columbus often, so we had to stuff our faces test many different pastries, for fear our lives wouldn’t be complete it would be some time before our next rendezvous.
Giggly with anticipation
So, a cashew cheesecake, chocolate raspberry cake with delicate whipped frosting, blueberry muffin, iced sugar cookie, pumpkin whoopie pie, lemon cupcake, sticky-bun later…. we had our testing results: Quite easily a 5 Goatz experience.
Pattycake Bakery, we have been craving your sticky buns ever since we tasted the first bite. Pure perfection. Hope to see you soon.
After filling up, we were escorted away from the High street marketplace over to Hal & Al’s bar on Parsons Avenue. Take a gander at this menu- greasy bar food gone vegan. Hallelujah!
Pretty colors give way to an ALL VEGAN BAR FOOD menu. I'm still in shock.
Yes, you do see fried pickles and fried avocado on that menu. And yes, they are down-right tasty. We munched on these and sauerkraut balls, tacos, franks, and tacos. Would have loved to sample more, but one can ingest only so much in a day. It’s a bar, so they offer much to imbibe. Not all the beer is vegan, so choose responsibly.
Fried Pickles. Enough Said.
Eating fried, and I mean fried, food makes me happy in a carnival kind of way. Someday I will return to Hal & Al’s to try the rest of their menu. Next time I’ll make sure I won’t be hopped up on sugar and filled to the brim with vegan treats, that will ensure maximum storage space for fried pickles. Seriously, why didn’t someone tell me about those things? They’re so addicting. Yum!
I have affection for you Hal & Al's, I shall hug you.
Thank you Columbus, for your fine vegan food and your fine vegan peeps. We will return, yes indeed, we will return.
PureFit is a Vegan Power-Pack
Everyone needs a power pack every now and again. Running a blah-k, trekking the blah-trail, traversing an urban jungle, attending the obligatory niece/nephew 2nd b-day party, surfing the pipeline, playing the corporate office game, or really toughing it out through a marathon session of something you just recently purchased for your Wii and can’t stop playing until you beat the boss.
It just so happens that sometimes the most convenient and appropriate power pack is an energy bar. We’ve tried many- and loathed many. Sometimes barely palatable, often un-food-like in its appearance, and, most importantly, rarely vegan. Well, some of these less than desirable features have been conquered by PureFit Nutrition Bars.
PureFit bars are: Vegan (no animal products), soy based (non-GMO), and do not contain badness such as hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners, or sugar alcohol. They also are wheat and gluten free for those who avoid such things. And, hold on to your stuff…18 grams of protein per bar! And…these nutri-bars won’t melt!? I’ll let PureFit explain,
Both Cliff and PowerBar offer ½ the protein of a PureFit bar, and it is that protein that is essential to stabilizing blood sugar levels. Moreover, the higher protein choices now being offered by both companies contain hydrogenated oils (palm kernel oil / fractionated palm kernel oil) in their chocolate coating. Palm oil, although less harmful than partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, is far more conducive to heart disease than heart-protecting liquid oils such as olive, soy and canola. Furthermore, while some palm oil is produced in an environmentally sustainable manner, most comes from decidedly non-sustainable sources. Unlike other nutrition bar manufacturers, we will not use hydrogenated oils that are found in the chocolate covered coating of other’s bars. Hydrogenated oils break down and melt under normal heated conditions. PureFit Bars don’t.
There you go. Sounds like good stuff. So you ask, “how does it taste?” Well, pretty decent. You’ll note that was a rather subdued answer. Keep in mind these are nutrition bars, but for that genre, they are far better than any I’ve tasted. Offered are five flavors to choose from: The Chocolate Brownie tasted like brownie, but more condensed; Expected. The Peanut Butter Crunch was was a bit blah; Standard peanut butter flavor. Granola Crunch was a hit; A bit crunchy, a bit unexpected. Almond Crunch; Best of the bunch. I’d totally pack this one with the Choco Brownie for my next excursion.
Oh, and they don’t melt. This was the feature I was most eager to test. I put one of these in my pocket- my back pocket. It resided there through several errands lasting approximately 3 hours. I estimated the temperature of my ass-pocket at 98.6F, as the bar was trapped there while driving a good part of those 3 hours. Not melted, just more “bend-y” than normal (I don’t use the word “limp,” personal policy of mine).
PureFit Nutrition Bars get 4 Goatz for being a decent tasting vegan power pack that can survive the rigors of a hot day, a hot car, or a hot ass.
Have you tried PureFit Nutrition Bars? Rate your experience below!
I’m not a horse, Tofurky.
I don’t need that much salt. Neither do you, really. The US RDA for sodium is about 2,000 mg., on the average. Health experts say it should be half that. And most consumers of the fiendishly evil and nasty Western diet, consume twice the RDA. Here’s where Tofurky comes in. Most of the sodium consumed in the Western diet comes from processed foods- and vegan foods are not immune to this phenomenon.
If you’re not reading the nutrition labels and ingredient lists on food, still, then, well, that’s just stupid.
One Tofurky Kielbasa log is 660 mg. So, if you eat it, you’re half-way to the healthy limit of sodium intake. The internets be chock full of infos regarding what too much sodium does to a body, so I’m not going into here. But for the sake of my health insurance premiums, can you please cut down on your salt?
Regardless of the very real dangers of salt in processed, ready-to-eat foods, these Tofurky kielbasas, and the other varieties as well, taste too damn salty. They have good flavor, but my mouth is shriveled from dehydration after chewing this stuff. Who are the taste testers at Tofurky? Horses?
I did find these cool S&P shakers while writing this review, so not a total waste.
Tofurky Sausages gets only 2 Goatz because due to the extreme salt, I can only eat half of one at any one time, and it has to be chopped into small pieces and distributed amongst large amounts of other salt-free food stuffs, thereby giving me only half the protein in the thing.
Have you tried Tofurky? Share your experiences and rate your experience below!