Category Archives: art

The Jalopy- vegan friendly wraps

Suddenly there is a whole bunch of vegan friendly trailers just south of UT but I think The Jalopy on 15th and San Antonio might be the only one with a sandwich chute.

The whole trailer is covered in murals by local artists.

They make their bread fresh each morning and it’s totally vegan! The menu is split between chicken and veggie, the latter of which has several interesting vegan options. My first trip I tried the Jelly Gibson which has peanut butter, onion marmalade, almonds and berries.

The marmalade was not to my taste but I loved the bread and all the fresh ingredients. The next time I tried the Vegan Thai in a bowl.

And I really missed the homemade bread! Luckily, they were super nice and gave me some. I am excited to try the hummus sandwich next, I think it will be even better. They are open Monday – Friday 7-10 and Saturday 10-4. Sadly none of the breakfast options are vegan but it’s the perfect place to stop for lunch with someone that doesn’t want vegan food and still have plenty to eat.

Plus narwhals!

All I want for Christmas is you….NOT

God I love a good “not” joke. In my mind I live in a world where Wayne’s World just came out a couple years ago and the year 2011 still seems like the future. But the future is now and Christmas is coming, so here is my annual gift guide. This really sprung from a “things I wish people would buy me” post but the people in my life do not tend to buy me presents from the internet. So maybe your family will. Or maybe you just want to buy yourself something from independent artists or for the vegans in your life. Either way, it is one of my most favorite posts to do.

For vegans especially it is really nice to get gifts that go to a good cause so may I first suggest the Sunny Days in Texas which helps a farm animal sanctuary and was put together by myself and a bunch of awesome folks here in Texas.Or the Hungry Monkey Vegan Cookzine which I just got the other day and benefits rescued lab monkeys!

I really really want the Beagle Freedom Project 2012 calendar, because they are doing amazing work freeing beagles from animal testing operations and they are doing such a great job raising awareness of the issue. And I love beagles like crazy.

Another great gift idea that supports trap and neuter programs for feral cats is the Teal Cat Project, which reclaims or I guess claims old cat tchotkes and makes them beautiful. They are out of cats this second but more are surely on the way and they have cute T-shirts and other items. 

If you’d like to support a wonderful vegan artisan and know someone who longs for the days of Mystery Science Theater 3000 check out this awesomest of awesome Tom Servo Apron. Panda With Cookiehas the cutest stuff on ety including moose onesieis, tofu pirate pillows, and even personalized cat ornaments made to order!

Panda With Cookie also teamed up this year with Food For Lovers, aka the makers of the most addictive and greatest queso in the world to make a little gift set that includes a little felt ornament or a queso cozy (soooo cute)Another one of my favorite crafty vegans, my zoetrope had the cutest paintings, pins, plushes, and even a 12 month wall calendar on sale it her shop. I <3 the space dachshund!

If you know someone who is always cold Treewool could change their life for the better! Headbands, scarves, hats and even an ear warmer are all on sale inside her shop and it’s all vegan and handmade.

A lot of vegans are big Buffy nerds and most of them would be stoked to find these Yummy Sushi Pajamas so that they too can make rousing speeches while wearing them.

Or maybe the vegan in your life is a Star Wars nerd, if so they will probably love you for the rest of your life if you get them this R2-D2 planetarium. You can watch the stars while listening the John Williams soundtrack!

Or maybe your vegan is that other kind of nerd that has fantisized about wearing an original Star Trek uniform her whole life. Here is an etsy seller who will make them to order!

Or maybe you want to wear it for that special someone which could lead to needing these next Christmas.

Or if you know more of a general nerd baby, not necessarily star trek, then perhaps this narwhal plush is the way to go. 

Other gifts that your friend might like, or maybe your friendly neighborhood hippie is this amazing mushroom growing kit which has everything you need to get started.

This kitchen tape timer is another great idea for the person in your life who maybe would be classified as a kitchen nerd. Or a foodie or whatever. 

This robot tea infuser is the perfect gift for the tea drinker who is anti-lace and pretty flowers but pro robot and stainless steel.

Or maybe you know someone who loves mushrooms, woodland scenes or terrariums, or all of the above! You could buy this super cool one on etsy or you could probably make one yourself for a few dollars and googling “moss terrarium” 

It is a fact that most vegans love cookbooks and a lot of us have a TON so if you are buying one for Christmas, be on the safe side and get them one that came out in the last couple months like Vegan Pie in the Sky (maybe they will make you a pie)

Or the nice glossy Candle 79 (maybe they will make you seitan piccata)

Or if they want to learn to grow their own food or flowers I highly recommend Garden Anywhere. 

A fantastic idea for the child in your life it “A Christmas Horse Named Cairo“  It’s about Cairo, the Palomino who was rescued last December, and told thru the eyes and voice of Brooke’s youngest, Gracie, age 5. Sunny Day Farms receives all the profit.

If you still have no idea because the only thing you know about this person is that they are vegan it’s hard to go wrong with Rescue Chocolate, who donate money to animal rescue organizations

Or if the only thing you know about them is that they stink, a nice Lush gift box will make them very happy, make sure to get one with the V symbol.

Don’t forget to that your four legged friend needs to feel love this holiday season as well, check out these adorable pet bowls, that are nice and elevated so your friend won’t have to struggle to eat. 

Or if your cat is scratching up the place might I recommend this turntable for him to try. 

Finally, if you know a human out there who wants to ROCK check out the Monster Ballads Xmas. 

And if you really do want to get me something check out my pinterest board. You will learn that I really like blue and orange.

Morning Spiced Rice

I am somewhat incapable of making breakfast at the appropriate time. This weekend, for example, by the time I decided I really wanted olive bagels for breakfast it was already 11am. Then I had to motivate to mix up the dough, let it rise, boil the bagels, and then bake them. I didn’t have breakfast until, like, 2:30 pm, technically brunch,  which is pretty standard for the weekend version of me. The problem is I get really hungry by about 9 so the laziness isn’t really an asset in this case. That is why I love leftovers for breakfast. My favorites are gallo pinto and polenta rancheros.

Sometimes I want something a little sweet and warm for breakfast and in this case leftover brown rice is the perfect thing to have.

I spice brown rice the same way as I make oatmeal, with cinnamon and sugar. First I put the cooked rice in a little pot with some hemp or almond milk. Then, once the rice starts to plump up I add brown sugar, a little cinnamon and sometimes even chai tea spices like cloves and cardamom. Sometimes I top it with maple syrup, if I have maple syrup which is pretty rare, but you could also add apples or bananas or really about anything you can think of. The best part is that it takes about 5 minutes to do and uses something I almost always have on hand, cooked rice.

Remember how I said my plan was to go camping over the weekend? It totally didn’t happen, it was way too cold for sleeping outside and there was a lot of stuff I wanted to do in town anyway, like the EAST austin studio tour, the Thanksgiving sampler party at Wheatsville, and brunch at Counter Culture. Would you believe I did none of it! If you know me at all, actually, it probably isn’t very surprising. Anyway, the laziness was kind of helpful because I ended up being somewhat productive. In a Vegan Girl’s Guide to Life, there are project instructions for a cross stitch project and I was totally inspired to try it. I ended up spending the weekend making a couple of cross stitch projects and watching  Twin Peaks….and then making cherry pie.

This is the one from the book except I changed the text, it was supposed to say “Flesh is for Zombies Go Vegan” but I remembered something I saw at the Renegade Craft Fair that said “I love you more than zombie brains” and made that instead.

It was so much fun, I haven’t made once since I was a tiny kid and now I have so many ideas now I want to make them for everyone I know.

My Ceramic Creatures

Over the summer I got to take a ceramics class with a wonderful teacher, Judith Simonds, and I really enjoyed it and I learned a lot. My pieces are finally all done and graded and I wanted to post them because I am just so proud! I took pictures of them today out at Laguna Gloria and I think they turned out really nice. Our first assignment was to recreate and ancient sculpture and I fell in love with this old Ganesh statue from Sri Lanka that now sits in a museum in Vietnam. I thought it was going to be really easy. It was not, but I love how he turned out! I think this is my favorite picture.Our next assignment was to envision the first sculpture so I made a Ganesh Jr., who kind of ended up looking like fetal Ganesha because he has the tiniest little legs and arms. Then the last assignment was to make a zoomorphic vessel. I really need a piggy bank because we always have change all over the place and I was inspired by pictures of pygmy hippos that I decided to do a Pygmy Bank.If you want to see more pictures there are some on my flickr page. All the pieces are really big and I am excited to bring them all home, they have been in my office for the last few weeks. (PS I got an A in the class wahoo!

UPDATE!

Later I got home and Dinger started furiously barking at the sculptures, I got just a little bit of it filmed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGXZUyFj-no

Herbivore Clothing Company

When I was in Portland a few weeks ago I got to go to the vegan stip mall. It is always so weird to go to places that are entirely vegan because you are so used to asking questions all the time (there isn’t any cheese on there, right? Can you tell me if these shoes are made of leather?) and then you go to an all vegan place and it kind of blows your mind. You still want to ask the people working there a bunch of questions and they generally sigh and say yes, it’s vegan, everything here is vegan, and then feel silly. Going to a strip mall where every store is vegan was even harder to wrap my head around and I didn’t really trust it but it is true! It was fun to get soy curls and look around at Food Fight and I loved everything I got at Sweet Pea Bakery but Herbivore was the coolest shop for me because they appeared to have every vegan cookbook and zine ever made. I wanted to buy everything! Damnit I don’t need any more cookbooks! Today they are donating a percentage of their profits to good causes so if you haven’t bought anything from there now is the time to do it! I think I am finally going to get Yellow Rose Recipes.and I really want this walletand I am veery curious about the book “A Vegan Taste of Eastern Europe” but I can’t find any reviews! So if someone has it let me know….

Lazy Smurf goes to SXSW

For the past 5 years I have been a volunteer at the South By Southwest Music, Film, and Interactive Festival. This year my volunteer crew was dissolved (since no one shoots on film anymore) and I almost let the laziness take over. See, I am lucky enough to have a job where we get Spring Break off and it falls during the festival and with the beautiful weather it was hard, very hard, to not go with my true nature and spend the week, blissfully, in my hammock, doing yoga, and taking the dogs on epic hikes. But another part of my nature is taking advantage of things that are free, and watching movies, learning about technology, and enjoying music. In the end I decided to participate and it was so much fun. The first part of the week I spent seeing movies.

Some of my favorites were Moon, a low-budget but wonderfully acted  science fiction. I was really excited to see this because I love sci-fi but I am not into big-budget independence day-type movies that saturate the market. Indie Sci-fi is lot more interesting but a lot more difficult to make well without a budget. This one was great, the effects and set design were very believable and the premise was really interesting and original. The direction and the acting made it a really enjoyable and thought-provoking flick.I also enjoyed Sebastian Gutierrez’s Women in Trouble. It was one of those movies that makes you really happy independent film exists, or rather independent video in this case. You seldom see women characters in a mainstream movie and this one had at least 10 main characters that were women. Off the top of my head the only interesting female movie characters I can think of…. I can’t think of any, really. They mostly exist in TV (hello Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica) but they exist in real life as well (hello every lady I know) so it is disappointing that in movies women are only ever sex objects or family members. This was a movie where the women were either professional sex objects or mothers, daughters, and sisters and yet they managed to be dynamic multi-dimensional, entertaining characters as well.  And it was really funny! Women are never funny without being over the top emasculating bitches in movies so this was a real switch.It was sometimes confusing for me because it was shot on video with a lot of porn actress characters so I kept expecting the sex to start any second but it never did. Well, there was one very disturbing scene involving a story about sex but you will have to see the movie to learn about that. Instead, there was scene after scene of women in L.A. living their lives.

Speaking of women, if you are as terrified as I am by the idea of birth you might enjoy the movie Grace and the short animation Birth. Two very different but equally chilling takes on procreation.

I always enjoy the animated shorts but I especially liked the stop motion animation “Sweet Dreams“. It was original and fun and,  I think, even had a message although it starred a cupcake. I wonder if the filmmaker, Kirsten Lepore, is vegan?

Another film that I missed but really wanted to see and thought I should inform you all about is the movie Mine. It won the best documentary category but I was working my volunteer shift when it was on and missed it. It follows the story of dogs that got left behind in hurricane Katrina and then got adopted by new people. The hurricane survivors eventually found their dogs and a legal challenge ensued. What a nightmare. I hope it gets released and if it does I am going to see it. I love dogs.

One political doc that I did see and really enjoyed wasthe Yes Men Fix the World. If you haven’t heard about these guys, check out their first documentary, “The Yes Men” they are a couple of corporate pranksters who got their start making fake websites for places like Halliburton and then waiting to get invited to conferences and giving hillarious presentations. They are really funny and the movie even ends on a hopeful note.

I had one moment when I was a little bit star struck during the Q&A for Observe and Report. I really like Seth Rogen and everyone from Freaks and Geeks because it is the greatest tv comedy in the world but I probably would have passed if it he hadn’t been there along with one of my heroes, the funniest woman I know of, Anna Farris. I first fell in love with her in the creepy movie May but she completely won me over in the only girl stoner movie, Smiley Face. If you have ever enjoyed a stoner movie please check this one out, it is so hilarious and she plays a stoner better than anyone. I really enjoyed getting to see her!Finally, I learned a lot about mushrooms and mushroom culture in Know Your Mushrooms. First, I want to mention that I didn’t even know there was a such thing as mushroom culture, and for a while I lived in the heart of it in Olympia Washington. I wish I would have learned about foraging for wild mushrooms then! It looks like so much fun and tasty. It ended with a beautiful sequence of time lapse mushrooms growing and then we got a Q&A where I learned that it is supposedly really easy to grow your own mushrooms.

I didn’t attend the screening that had free mushroom pizza but I did try some new things in Austin, until I ran out of money.  Alin over at Pulling it Together raves about Lulu B’s little trailer and I have been wanting to go there since it opened, the hours just don’t mesh with my schedule but with a week off I finally got to go and I tried the tofu vermicelli bowl.It was really fresh testing with the cumber, greens, vegetables, and basil. The tofu was seasoned nicely and was the perfect texture, and perhaps best of all is that it was really a lot of food for a very low price so I will be coming back for sure! I want to try the avocado sandwich mmmm sandwich.

Halfway through the week my sister came to town which has been great. Dan has spent the week as her intern and is hoping to land a spot in the organization.

She is tough to keep up with! I don’t usually hang with people that consider going home at two am an early night. Her first day in town we saw some bands at Habana where they were offering free pancakes.

Did you know they have pancake batter in a spray bottle now? I don’t know if it is vegan but regardless I wasn’t about to try it. Instead, Sistah Smurf bought me lunch and I got the vegetarian platter. They have the best salsa in town and I am going to try and recreate the yucca fo’ sho’.While we were there I got to here the band Brothers and Sisters and they were really good.

I also got to see Erykah Badu at Auditorium shores which was followed by the always fantastic Explosions in the Sky which were followed by explosions in the sky.It was a good week.

A review of “The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur”

I was a little hesitant at first to read “The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur” because I thought it was going to be a really difficult read that would leave me emotionally tapped and hopeless. I ended up having a very different reaction. The author Daoud Hari has such a great outlook on life that I couldn’t help but love him and enjoy his story. The book starts with a little about what it is like to be a translator in Darfur but it quickly moves into an autobiography of Mr. Hari giving the reader a little background information about how he got to where he is in life. He moved around the region quite a bit before the conflict started and he hadn’t been back to his village in a few years when the war starts. We follow him as he goes to see his family in the village and flees with them and goes to refugee camps where he starts helping different reporters cross back over into Darfur and interview people.

Some of the scenes were very chilling and disturbing but what was great about the book is the tone of the author and his sense of hope in spite of so much destruction. The pages seemed so full of life and love although in a subtle way. It was easy to see how Mr. Hari earned so many friends among all sides of the conflict but it is hard to believe that he could keep such a positive attitude despite his many ordeals. His sense of humor was so enjoyable. When I finished the book I didn’t feel at all despondent but instead ready to help the people in Darfur which is exactly what his point was in witting the book. I would recommend this book to any one. It was a fast easy read and totally engaging and I learned about another place in the world. I highly recommend it. ( )