To Live and Eat in L.A. – A Vegan Food Photo Blog

Flore in Silver Lake has become one of my favorite lunch spots. It would probably be one of my favorite breakfast spots too if I were ever up that early. I’ve eaten there a bunch of times lately and have been saving ‘em up just for you.

Let’s open with the Avocado and Seitan Salad: a bed of mixed greens with sliced avocado, daikon sprouts, grilled seitan and tomato with tahini dressing. I love this salad and order it often, you can see a previous version of it here. It tends to look a bit different each time but the jist is usually the same, and it’s always tasty. There’s a lot more of the seitan in there than the picture shows, it’s hiding under the sprouts.

Now for my new favorite sandwich, Flore’s Club Sandwich: battered & baked tofu, lettuce, tomato, avocado and daikon sprouts served with eggless mayonnaise on toasted organic sourdough bread. Served with their awesome potato salad. This sandwich is so good, the way they make the tofu is fantastic… it’s chewy & slightly crispy with really good flavor. Their fake tempeh bacon rocks too, adding the perfect touch of meaty smokiness to make this a really hearty meal, made even more so by the buttery fresh avocado. YUM.

The yum doesn’t end there, I’m also giving Flore the distinct honor of being my current favorite veggie burger of the moment. As described: The Flore Burger: Our own black bean burger grilled and served with tomato, sprouts, green leaf lettuce and Thousand Island dressing. I also had them add in the extra avocado and cashew cheese.

This is one outstanding vegan burger. I sometimes worry that bean burgers will tasty too beany… you know, nothing but a mouthful of mashed beans like some of those hippie burgers? Nope, this was no granola hippie shit, this was an action packed powercombo of black beans, brown rice, oats, corn and I don’t know what else they stuffed in there but I can tell you that they worked it. It was solid, thick, fat, delicious AND healthy. I slathered that sucker up with both the cashew cheese and Thousand Island, packed on the avocado slices… then had to figure out how to get that monster into my mouth. I love love love this burger and if I could marry it I totally would. Consider yourselves invited.

And what’s a raving review about a restaurant without the obligatory desert porn?

This precious beauty is a vegan lemon cupcake. Sounds simple but it was anything but… more like smooth and silky and sinful. When you taste vegan treats this good it baffles the mind why people still cook with milk, eggs and butter by choice. It’s so not necessary and exquisite deserts like this are proof. Flore is also now selling the vegan Twinkies (because the vegan Twinkies are taking over the world).

There are a number of both good and bad reviews of Flore floating around out there, the bad stuff mostly having to do with service issues. While some of that stuff is to an extent true, I’ve been lucky to usually get that one excellent waitress who just kicks ass. I don’t know her name but she’s the dark haired gal who’s always there and is often the only openly friendly person working. She more than makes up for some of the restaurants other shortcomings, and their great food wins out over any other minor complaints that hipsters on Yelp like to make about other hipsters.

Oh and they’ve got their own website now so I can send you somewhere other than Yelp or Myspace to check them out:
www.florevegan.com

This is a very tasty seasonal item currently on the specials menu at Hugo’s in Studio City.

The “Blood Orange Salad” is made with “a blend of Napa cabbage, organic mixed greens, strawberries, slivered fennel, roasted baby beets, blood oranges and California pistachio nuts. Accented with a dressing made from balsamic vinegar and blood orange juice reduction”. It comes with a choice of protein, I had their grilled tofu which is always reliably good.

The salad was great, what with all it’s different flavors going on… it’s got your sweetness coming from the blood oranges, strawberries and beets, and it’s also got the unexpected licorice flavor of the crunchy, raw fennel (and carrots too), and all this is backup by the powerful underhanded punch coming from the balsamic vinegar. It makes for a unique and delightful (and not cheap) combination.

The Dressing Room in Sherman Oaks is a fresh and clever upgrade to the dreadful old-school salad bars. Instead of leaving everything out in the open for everyone and their mothers to cough and sneeze on, the plethora of salad options here are kept behind glass and are assembled right in front of you instead. Think of it as a salad bar meets Subway, only a lot less gross.

The Dressing Room uses “locally grown & harvested produce from Southern California, purchased from environmentally sensitive farmers who believe in cultivating the finest organic produce.” They get their produce delivered daily.

The way it works is you fill out a little sheet which lists all the options that can go into your salad. You can pick from any of their “classic” or “specialty” salad suggestions or totally make one up just the way you want it. As their website explains, “we provide 6 types of greens, 64 amazing toppings, 32 delicious dressings and 16 quality protein sytles to choose from”.

Their “salad specialists” will then put the salad together for you and then chop it all up with these wickedly cool chopping blades that I am quite envious of. I opted to pick my own ingredients, and after much deliberation finally settled on: romaine, beets, carrots, green beans, hearts of palm, red & yellow peppers, jicama, cranberries, roasted butternut squash (a special they had for the day), and blackened tofu. I worry when I order anything tofu at a place that’s not catering exclusively to vegetarians, because it’s really easy to mess it up and make it taste blah… but the blackened tofu here was very tasty, I liked the seasonings (nice kick without being too salty) and the tofu had a nice, chewy bite to it.

Now that’s a salad! As they promised, everything was fresh and crisp and flavorful. By all means, it’s a perfect lunch, and big enough to share between two people. Be careful when chosing a dressing though. I wrongly assumed the roasted red pepper dressing would be vegan but it was quite creamy. They’ve got many others to pick from though including the good old stand-by of oil & vinegar. With so many options to choose from here, you could have a different salad every day of the month and never have to repeat yourself.

Before the holidays my mom asked me to take her downtown for some bargain shopping on Santee Alley. I did my homework ahead of time and researched our food options, and decided we’d try out Tierra Cafe, a “vegetarian cuisine, organic coffee and tea house”.

They’ve got a small space in a shared food court, but this thankfully wasn’t your usually cafeteria style fast food. They’ve got a full menu including breakfast (vegan french toast!), soups (vegan tortilla soup!), salads, Mexican entrees (vegan nachos!), sandwiches & wraps (portabella panini!), plenty of beverage specialties including their own freshly made herbal elixirs.

It was early for me so I opted for breakfast with their tofu scramble, which involves tofu, onion (no thanks), tomato and mushrooms, served with La Brea Bakery bread. It was pretty simple, yet tasty, warm and filling.

My mom, being an earlier riser than I, was already in lunch mode, so she ordered “The Salad” (they have other salads but that’s what this one is called). Mixed greens, shredded carrot, alfalfa sprouts, avocado, mushroom, red cabbage, tomato, tofu egg salad and hummus with lemon-tahini dressing, dill sauce, and that same yummy bread. I usually don’t photograph or post pictures of what other people are eating, but this salad was so pretty and tasty (you know I tried it) that I figured it was worth sharing.

Good stuff to be found here, if I worked or lived downtown I’d probably become a Tierra Cafe regular thanks to their quick, healthy and very vegan friendly food.

When making food for myself, the simpler the better. Here’s a few recent meals…

This was an easy salad I put together of shredded purple cabbage, garbanzo beans, red grapes, fake bacon bits and Bragg’s vinaigrette dressing. Good stuff I tell ya.

This was two firsts in one. My first time making the ‘Vegetarian Nature’s Burger’ by Fantastic Foods and my first time using my new cast iron grill. The veggie burger mix comes in a box and you just add boiling water, then cook ‘em up. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at the chickpea cutlets from Veganomicon that everyone is raving about, but I don’t have the book yet (it’s on the way!) and this was the closest thing I had going on in my pantry that would satisfy the craving in the meantime.

Once I concocted the mixture I could tell it didn’t smell all that flavorful, so I added in some chopped fresh garlic and ginger as well as about a tablespoon of the FYH ‘Unforgettable Balsamic BBQ Sauce’. The grill worked out really nice and the burgers were quite good for something out of a box as well, though I’m glad I added the embellishments as without them they would have tasted quite plain.

This was a quick saute of broccolini, bell pepper, shitake mushroom and baked tofu in a little bit of fresh garlic and ginger, sesame oil, rice vinegar, chili flakes and a dash of nutritional yeast and gamasio to seal the deal.

Today I got to enjoy a fun mini-meet-up with two other Los Angeles area vegan food bloggers Vegyogini and Your Vegan Mom (with Her Vegan Son). We chose Pure Luck for our lunch, whose close proximity to Scoops across the street made it a no-brainer.

I had the cold noodle salad, a delightful rice noodle dish with fresh spinach, basil, sprouts, grilled tofu and peanuts. It was similar to pad thai but without the usual tamarind flavor. It had it’s own unique and delicious dressing, and unfortunately I’m not remembering what was in it right now (I’ll get back to you on that). It also came with these yummy, chewy, doughy things that you can see over on the right side of the plate, they tasted like eggroll skins. I mixed everything up with the chili sauce and fresh squeezed lime and it was awesome. It’s nice that there’s a diet friendly option on their menu (which you’ll see quickly becomes irrelevant when followed by the next two paragraphs).

Over yonder at Scoops, I tried Strawberry & Jasmine and the Spiced Pumpkin. The strawberry was excellent, not too sweet or tart with a nice flowery hint of jasmine. The texture was like buttery smooth ice cream, just right. The pumpkin was pretty good too, but I can’t say that I loved it. The spice was a bit much and the texture was kinda grainy. The strawberry would have passed as real dairy ice cream with no problem, the pumpkin not so much.

And to top all that off, our fabulous Vegan Mom brought us some delicious homemade almond-apricot-chocolate cakey thingies. These wonderful little treats were so good! The cake part tasted like amazingly soft marzipan… then top that off in your mind with sweet apricot filling, more almondy goodness… then chocolate and nuts. Wow. It’s a good thing I only had two because I probably could have eaten 20.

I feel somewhat silly labelling this as “raw” mainly because I’m not a raw foodist, just someone who happens to eat plenty of food that just happens to also be raw.

The salad consists of chopped carrots, fennel bulb, tomato, baked flavored tofu, chickpeas and fresh basil. I added in a few splashes of Bragg’s “Healthy Vinaigrette”, lemon juice and couple dashes of black pepper. I guess it doesn’t qualify as raw now that I think of it, considering the tofu. Either way, it was a cool and refreshing dinner on a hot and humid SoCal night.

The “Power of Green” salad currently on the Hugo’s specials menu pretty much rocked my world.

Check it out: “Chopped spinach, green chard, broccoli, green beans, asparagus, organic dried cherries and avocado. Served with toasted sunflower seeds and a Matcha green tea honey herb dressing”. I had it with their fantastic grilled tofu. Note that honey is not vegan so if you don’t eat it you’ll want to have this with a different dressing.

The vegetables all had a perfect texture, still crispy but not tough or woody. The star of the salad was the amazing Matcha dressing which was both very flavorful and yet still subtle and light, letting the flavors of the individual vegetables and the tart-sweet cherries to come through.

This was so great, tastier than it looks in the picture actually. I was riding a nice green chlorophyll rush for the rest of the day.