Affordable Vegan Food

Global Warming? But first, coffee.

Dear Pete’s Coffee, won’t you please be a dear and put out one cup for dirty spoons and one cup for clean spoons? I’d like to enjoy my latté waste-free before I start my Sunday, and besides the mini wooden sticks and plastic-wrapped plastic spoons are gaudy. Your patrons deserve the opportunity to enjoy a cup of coffee without having to feel all that residual guilt from their stir stick. On a…

How to Create a Photo Collage in Photoshop

Have you ever wanted to create a photo collage in Photoshop? Learn how to create a basic photo collage in Photoshop, adding clean, symmetrical space between each photo. There are several ways to create a photo collage in Photoshop, but I’d like to focus on the most simple, intuitive way. Here’s how you do it:  1. Resize photos and move them onto a blank canvas. 2. Merge multiple photos into one…

The Reality of Waste-Free Shopping

Interested in living a waste-free life? This is no easy feat. Following a vegan diet is easy, but going waste-free can be an excruciating process. By choosing to follow this path you’re accepting the opposite of normal on a layer much deeper than veganism. Everyone participates in waste, it’s ingrained into our human experience and we are taught from birth that it’s normal to throw things away.…

With so many fancy-flavored hummus’s now available at the grocery store it’s easy to forget that you too can make your own delicious hummus. To save even more money, I like to cook my own garbanzo beans, instead of buying the precooked canned beans which can cost up to four times as much. Sure it’s time consuming, but by cooking a big batch and dividing them into small bags and freezing them, I’m…

Snacks, they cost money too, especially if they’re marketed as vegan, gluten-free, healthy, etc. So make your own healthy, vegan snack instead: homemade spiced nuts. 1. Toast the nuts. 2. Stir in the seasoning. 3. Toast again, then cool. 4. Enjoy your homemade snack. Homemade Spiced Nuts Prep time: 2 mins Cook time: 10 mins Total time: 12 mins Serves: 4 cups Ingredients 1 cup pecans or walnuts 1…

After dining out have you ever thought, “Wow that was good, I wish I could make this at home!” We all have our favorite restaurants, the ones we frequent time after time sometimes even twice per week, but this is a bad habit if you’re trying to save money. I can’t stress this enough, dining out will suck your wallet dry, so take control now and learn how to make your favorite restaurant meals at…

Eating out is tremendously expensive. Don’t believe me? After your next restaurant meal, go to the grocery store immediately after and spend your meal’s equivalent on groceries. How many meals were you able to prepare at the cost of one restaurant meal? I can make up to five, and I’m not just referring to pasta with tomato sauce, satisying, healthy meals at the cost of one restaurant meal. If…

There are few, if any, brands of raw vegan granola that actually taste good, or maybe it’s just that I can’t afford those. This homemade raw vegan granola is easy to make, you just need a food processor to do all the work. 1. Place nuts and date pieces in food processor. 2. Process into small pieces, no larger than a pea. 3. Add cinnamon, turmeric, and sea salt. Blend again. 4. Transfer to a…

These gooey pumpkin chocolate brownies are more like a warm pudding, rather a brownie, but we all need something warm and gooey every so often. Made with pumpkin and almond flour, this is a gluten-free treat anyone would enjoy. Heat one up in the microwave for 30 seconds and grab a cold glass of almond milk, or a scoop of vegan ice cream. This would also be an interesting dessert to share with…

Rarely does “just add water” equate with a high-quality, healthy food, which is why I was so excited to work with Cacoco– a vegan drinking chocolate company based out of Santa Cruz, California. The base for their drinking chocolate is made from raw cacao powder, cacao butter, and coconut sugar. This results in a creamy, rich drinking chocolate that is just sweet enough. They also use superfood…

Lately I’ve been really into steamed food served with a rich sauce on top, it’s easy and tastes good. Last week I was eating a cashew cheese sauce over everything, and this week it’s a tahini curry sauce. Instead of planning meals, I usually just have ingredients prepped so that I can quickly throw a meal together. This week I cooked some red rice, cut up some kale, and roasted butternut squash…

Italian Bean and Kale Stew

Cold weather always puts me in the mood for soup. This week I made a big batch of soup and ate it with some toasted whole wheat bread smothered in Earth Balance. Yum. There’s nothing like a big bowl of soup and warm bread to help comfort you during cold times, or hard times. This is an easy dish that can be made quickly and it reheats well. This is also a recipe in which the ingredients can be…

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Loaf

What better way to celebrate Fall than Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Loaf! Made with whole wheat pastry flour, this is a healthy take on something you’d probably spend way to much for at the coffee shop. “One slice of pumpkin loaf please.” The coffee shop attendant replies, “That’ll be $4.00.” And then suddenly you’re at $9.00 for breakfast, because those pumpkin spiced lattes aren’t cheap either. Not…

Have you ever tried “water sautéing”? Instead of using oil, you add just enough water so that whatever you’re cooking doesn’t stick to the bottom. This was the first time using this method and I was really impressed with the results. I was worried that if I didn’t sauté the onions in oil it’d result in an onion-y flavored soup, but it turned out fine. All of the vegetables cooked evenly and it…

Fall Spiced Banana Muffins

It’s incredible how much you can spend on a quick breakfast when you’re in a rush. So skip the trip to the coffee shop and make your own latte and have a homemade, good-for-you muffin instead. Just in time for Fall, these muffins are healthy, hearty, and spiced up just right. It was so nice having these for breakfast all week. The whole wheat flour and sunflower seeds helped to make these muffins…

Pumpkin Avocado Chocolate Pudding

Pumpkin avocado chocolate pudding. Amazing. This is my best Fall-inspired dessert yet! Last year I made an instant, edible pumpkin peanut butter cookie dough. I usually make avocado chocolate pudding, which is delicious, but we all know how expensive avocados can be, costing up to $3.00 each. eesh! So I thought I’d try to spread it out a little bit with pumpkin. I was skeptical about the…

Tips for writing a better recipe

Have you ever prepared a recipe and it turned out completely different from what you’d expected? I remember getting really excited about a vegan chocolate pudding pie once. I spent so much on the ingredients, as vegan baking ingredients often cost more than typical baking ingredients. And I’d followed the directions exactly. But when I went to serve myself a slice, I got a big scoop of mush…