To Live and Eat in L.A.

I like Chinese food but it usually takes a back seat if I’m given my choice between it or far more exciting Asian cuisines such as Thai or Vietnamese. That said, I’ve reignited my love for it after revisiting a restaurant I’ve neglected for far too long, Garden Wok in Reseda. Part of the reason I’d been away for so long is that Garden Wok is located just a couple miles away from my favorite restaurant in the entire universe, Vinh Loi Tofu… so whenever I’m in the neighborhood Vinh Loi usually wins me over. Not this time however, and I’m glad I strayed for once as the food at Garden Wok is superb.

My last visit to Garden Wok was way back in 2007, and I really enjoyed it then too. Their menu is extensive, offering Cantonese-American style cooking, 99% of which is vegan, while a few of their faux meats do contain whey (and everything is clearly marked on the menu so there’s no confusion). If you don’t like meat analogs this isn’t really the place for you… while they do have noodle dishes, soups and the like, their specialties revolve around the amazing things they do with fake chicken, beef, pork and fish. This stuff is delicious, homemade, and nothing like the same old stuff that all the Thai places are serving (which all tastes the same and may or may not be vegan). You don’t have to worry about mystery non-vegan ingredients imported from Taiwan finding their way into your food here, Garden Wok makes it all from scratch using stuff like taro root, yam, wheat gluten, mushrooms and seaweed. What they do with those ingredients is something extraordinary.

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Good news, the excellent, mostly raw food restaurant Cru in Silver Lake is now open daily for lunch! Daytime service is from 11am-4pm, with dinner starting up from 5:30pm-10pm.

Previously their only daytime hours were on the weekend, now it’s everyday with a special brunch on Sundays from 11am-2:30pm. I haven’t been to the Sunday brunch yet so I don’t know what goodies are on that menu, but I can tell you that I so enjoyed their new daily lunch that I went back two days in a row. Cru was already one of my favorite restaurants, now it’s become even more so.

The daytime menu features a selection from their regular menu, which inlcudes quite a few new dishes since my last visit. There’s a nice selection of appetizers, wraps, and even stuff like their take on a raw pizza, a tostada made with raw vegan chorizo, rice bowls, über healthy salads and more.

Bruschetta is pretty much at the top of the appetizer food chain. I love love love it. The Bruschetta Rustica at Cru isn’t the traditional version as usually served on thick crusty bread, but they’ve got the essence down pat, and this reinvented raw(er) version is delightful.

It comes on sunflower flat bread with chopped tomato & basil and cashew cheese. I believe the saucy drizzle along the plate is a pesto infused oil. Everything about this bruschetta tasted so fresh and clean, the cashew cheese was delicious and the tomatoes perfectly ripe and full of flavor (in January!).

You know what’s even cooler about Cru being open for lunch? It’s that they’re also serving breakfast and brunch inspired dishes, all with a unique and tasty twist. The dishes I’ve had so far all sound so simple on the menu but then when my meals arrived, I was dazzled by the presentation and tastiness of it all. Behold:

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I’ve been sick all week and haven’t left the house, not even for food. Come the end of the week I had very little left at home to eat… what I really needed was some nice hot soup or some healthy greens or veggie dishes to warm me up and boost my immunity. But I didn’t have any of that sort of stuff left, all I had left was white flour and peanut butter. On the one hand it sounded like a recipe for disaster, on the other hand it sounded like delicious peanut butter cookies just waiting to happen!

I found the simplest peanut butter cookie recipe in the world inside the Sinfully Vegan Cookbook. This book, subtitled “Over 140 Decadent Desserts to Satisfy Every Vegan’s Sweet Tooth” has been sitting on my shelf for over a year and I’d never made anything from it before. The recipe seemed so easy though and only uses a few ingredients (peanut butter, flour, oil, vanilla, maple syrup) so it sounded like the perfect cure for what ailed me (my sweet tooth, that is).

The recipe gives easy instructions for regular peanut butter cookies as well as a variation with jelly… I made both!

The results… DELICIOUS! I ended up making them with fig jam because that’s what I had, and they were so ridiculously good! I was surprised by how tasty they were considering the simple ingredients and how fast they were to make. Since the recipe uses maple syrup as the only sweetener I thought they might end up tasting too much like pancakes or something, but they didn’t, they tasted like the most perfect peanut butter cookies made even more perfect by awesome (and expensive I might add) figgy goodness. I absolutely LOVE these cookies and have no doubt they will be coming out of my oven on a regular basis.

You can find the recipe and more enticing (and fancier) stuff in the Sinfully Vegan Cookbook available at Amazon.com. A lot of the recipes in there are far more advanced than this one, which is why it’s taken me more than a year to crack the book open and use it, but considering how well these turned out, I am encouraged to give more of them a shot.

It’s safe to say that in recent years Vietnamese food has replaced Thai food as my favorite Asian cuisine. It’s really exciting to see more and more restaurants starting to cater to vegans and vegetarians as Vietnamese cooking grows in popularity. While Vinh Loi Tofu will always remain the reigning champ among all Vietnamese restaurants (no one else even comes close as far as vegan food is concerned), it’s nice to see other places offering animal-free options as well.

We recently visited the newly re-opened Vietnamese Soy Cafe in Silver Lake and enjoyed their limited but satisfying vegan offerings. Today let’s visit another vegan friendly Vietnamese eatery, this time across town in Highland Park- Good Girl Dinette.

Located right around the corner from the vegetarian Mexican restaurant Cinnamon, Good Girl Dinette serves up simple, clean and mostly organic ingredients sourced from local farmers markets, and transforms them into what they refer to as “American diner meets Vietnamese comfort food”. And it’s as good as it sounds! There is enough on the menu to keep both the carnivores and the herbivores happy.

We’ll start at the heart of any decent Vietnamese meal, with a hot bowl of Pho. Pho is a traditional soup usually made with all manner of horror inducing cuts of meat, beefy broth and exotic spices. Luckily for those of us who want the delicious taste of a well-seasoned Pho soup without all the beef juice, Good Girl Dinette makes an all-vegetarian version just for us.

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We’ve been eagerly anticipating the arrival of New York City’s fabled vegan bakery, Babycakes, here in L.A. and our patience has finally paid off! The brand new Los Angeles location of Babycakes opens this Sunday (January 3rd)! They even made a super cute video about it… check it out below:

In their own words: “BabyCakes offers all-natural, organic and delicious alternatives free from the common allergens: wheat, gluten, dairy, casein and eggs. Rest assured, all sweeteners have been chosen responsibly and used sparingly. White sugar will never be found in our bakery, nor will we ever use toxic chemical sweeteners. Instead, most products are sweetened with agave nectar—a natural syrup from a cactus which is low on the glycemia index and often a safe alternative to most non-insulin dependant diabetics. Occasionally, unprocessed and unrefined sugar is used in certain goods, although sparingly.”

Babycakes makes all kinds of goodies, including cupcakes, loaves, cookies & cookie sandwiches, crumb cakes, muffins, skinny bunnys, cinnamon & sugar toasties (what’s that? I want one!) spelt tea cakes, brownies, macaroons, scones, savory items, apple pie and more. And the best news I’ve heard all day? THEY WILL ALSO HAVE DONUTS!!!

The grand opening is Sunday, January 3rd at 10am. If you’re one of those who will be waking up early to push your way past all the other bloggers trying to be the first to eat there, feel free to come back and leave a comment telling us what you thought!

Find the brand spankin’ new Babycakes Los Angeles in Downtown at:
130 East 6th Street (between Main St. & Los Angeles St, near Cole’s Buffet)
Los Angeles, CA 90014
(213) 623-5555
www.babycakesnyc.com
www.twitter.com/babycakesnyc

Did you know Babycakes also put out a cookbook?

BabyCakes: Vegan, (Mostly) Gluten-Free, and (Mostly) Sugar-Free Recipes from New York’s Most Talked-About Bakery
By Erin McKenna

Publishers description: Simply, BabyCakes is your key to an enlightened, indulgent, sweets-filled future. This is important news not only for parents whose children have allergies, for vegans, and for others who struggle with food sensitivities, but also for all you sugar-loving traditionalists. The recipes in these pages prove that there is a healthy alternative to recklessly made desserts, one that doesn’t sacrifice taste or texture.

Having experimented endlessly with alternative, health-conscious sweeteners, flours, and thickeners, Erin McKenna, the proprietress of beloved bakery BabyCakes NYC, developed these recipes–most are gluten-free, all are without refined sugar–in hopes of combating her own wheat, dairy, and sugar sensitivities. In BabyCakes, she shares detailed information about the ingredients she uses (coconut flour, xanthan gum, and agave nectar, for example) and how to substitute them properly for common ones–all the while guiding you safely through techniques she’s spent years perfecting.

For confectionists of all kinds, delicious alternatives lie within: Red Velvet Cupcakes, Chocolate Shortbread Scones with Caramelized Bananas, Strawberry Shortcake, and BabyCakes NYC’s celebrated frosting (so delicious it has fans tipping back frosting shots!), to name just a few. Finally, Erin’s blissful desserts are yours for the baking!
For more info or to order your copy, click here.

See you at Babycakes! Please save me a donut…

Vegan Cholent, a Jewish style stew, another treat from the Veganomicon cookbook.

It’s made with potatoes (I subbed half of them with sweet potatoes), french lentils, carrots, TVP, kidney beans, green peas and flavored with caraway and tarragon. Doesn’t look all that pretty in the picture but it’s a fragrant, delicious and hearty favorite of mine.

I made the Banana Flapjacks from the Vegan Brunch cookbook… first time making pancakes ever!

They turned out delicious despite my fears of messing them up. Hopefully it wasn’t just beginners luck because now that I’ve ventured into the world of pancake making there will be no stopping me :)

I skipped Thanksgiving this year. Not only was I sick with a bad cold, but more so, I have a hard time participating in a holiday that revolves around worshipping the consumption of a tortured, dead bird. The farther away I get from that heinous tradition, the less I am able to tolerate “celebrating” it with friends & family (instead of eating one, I become a foster parent to Eliza the turkey at Animal Place). That said, I have always loved all the other delicious foods that are part and parcel of the Thanksgiving package. I’d spent the entire month of November drooling over all the amazing veganized recipes that were showing up online, eventually I got the idea to have a vegan Thanksgiving-themed potluck because I really wanted to try my hand at some of these recipes, plus I wanted my friends to cook and feed me as well :) Thus, my vegan post-Thanksgiving dinner party was born.

We gathered at my place a week after the real Thanksgiving. There’s nothing quite as awesome as having a few of your most bitchin friends show up at your door bearing armloads full of homecooked food. I myself had been in the kitchen for the previous two days, I ended up breaking all kinds of personal records having cooked more food than I’ve ever cooked in my life… and I didn’t mess any of it up! Here’s a peek at just some of what we got to indulge in…

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