Vegan Treats: Petunia's Has Punch Cards!

Smart move! I think, as you might be able to tell from my various posts on the subject, we were pretty likely to keep eating vegan treats from Petunia's Pies & Pastries every weekend without the punch card. Her stuff is all over, and it's always reliably yummy. Since the Farmer's Market started she has had something exciting and new every week. And I follow her on facebook, so last week I had my order figured out mid-week. All that was left was the matter of making it there early, before she sold out! Mmmm...Chocolate Hazelnut Carmel Cream Filled Cupcake, Just look:

 

And Chuck always loves a good doughnut, his was apple cinnamon. Anyway...so she has punch cards now and we've already got 4 out of 12 checked off. At the rate we're going we will get our free treat by June 25th!

Vegan Treats: More Petunia's!!

Over the weekend we once again had amazing treats from Petunia's Pies & Pastries at the PSU Farmer's Market. It's too hard to resist! This time I had a lemon tart, with strawberries, soo good, and Chuck had a Gooey Pecan Roll. According to facebook, there will be more of these at the market this weekend if you can get there early enough! 

  

Here are some other pretty things from the market. Had to have tulips for Easter, and Chuck with a bag of potatoes. Potatoes are always good. It was such a bright sunny day last Saturday, I hope we have the same kind of weather this Saturday!

Vegan Treats : Cloud 7 Cafe

Bare light bulbs everywhere we went this weekend in Portland! This is above the counter at Cloud 7. They have fantastic coffee, they really know what they are doing. They brew Intelligentsia coffee (which was founded in Chicago) with a pour-over technique. They also use Intelligentsia cups, mine was the large latte cup with a cute red star at the bottom that made smile, while Chuck's looked similar but slightly more masculine (and no red star.) He also wants one of these Coffee Kettles of which I saw three. So they scored a lot of pints with use design-wise, plus it was a cozy place to be. It's located right next to Jamison Square in the Pearl District for fun people (lots of families and dogs!) watching.

 

Petunia's Pies & Pastries are also everywhere, which is great because they are vegan and so good. We went to Cloud 7 on Saturday, having missed her at the market earlier, so we managed to still get our treats. Chuck had the crispy bar, which was already a favorite. I had a chocolate banana peanut butter cupcake and that was just the best that peanut butter icing can be done, I think. 

Vegan Dining: Blossoming Lotus

Yeah, we ate out twice last weekend just because it had been a while and we really need to explore all the vegan places Portland has to offer. Blossoming Lotus has been on the agenda for a while but we finally went for the first time Saturday afternoon (after sleet/hail, of which there was more of for just a few moments today. Spring in the Northwest is full of fun unpredictability in the form of freezing rain!)

 

Chuck had the Smoked Maple Tempeh and I couldn't resist the Spicy Butternut & Black Bean Chili Quesadilla. Quesadillas are always tricky to get or make vegan though. Without the cheese things do fall apart, usually. I thought the beans were going to help keep everything in place, but they didn't quite do that, so eating it was a bit of a struggle. However, it was really yummy. Chuck's wrap was really good (and stayed together a bit better.) I just had coffee, but Chuck ordered the strawberry banana milkshake....I was very sorry that I only got a few sips.

Their space is very cute, in a neat older storefront space on Broadway. Filled with art featuring birds and other animals. There were a pair of matching circular paintings of white barn owls (like in Labyrinth, yay!) that I particularly liked. Oh, and a very tempting cake from petunia's was on display. We'd just had some doughnuts from petunia's at the market that morning, but otherwise, very tempting...

Hmm...this has been a very food heavy week of blogging. Surprisingly our walks this weekend didn't involve stairs, but perhaps they are called for after having so much yummy food lately...

Architectural Details, More about PDX food & a new look for the Blog

Intuit Center for Outsider Art and 760 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL

While still in Chicago I had the idea to try to take one picture of an interesting architectural detail every day & started a flickr group based on that idea. Well, with the move and everything, I haven't been doing as well with that project as I had intended, but now that we're more settled I'm going to renew my focus. Both Portland and Chicago are cities with a great architectural heritage. I guess I tend to focus on the old historic buildings or at least we've been fortunate to live in areas with a lot of that stuff nearby. Ultimately I hope to cover both old and new, and may find out a little about some of the detailing differences between regions. And I hope others join me, I would love to get a sense of the architecture of different places from this group! I've found it's a challenge, especially since I don't have a particularly fancy camera and since many of the cool details may be high up and far away. So the group rules for now are pretty flexible, especially since I myself haven't been consistent about posting there. But I do promise I will try to be better!

Sullivan Center, Chicago, IL

Medical & Dental Building, Portland, OR

I also wanted to brag about the great lunch we had on Monday at the Pioneer Square Farmers Market. The people selling fresh mushrooms cleverly set up a neighboring booth selling mushroom dishes. They were well prepared, yet inspiring, and seemed like food that might be easy enough to recreate at home. We split their vegan dishes, the mushroom miso soup and mushroom salad wraps. Incredibly good. And there were not one but two vegan pastry booths! One had MINT BROWNIES! It was everything a mint brownie should be. We split that too, because there are so many great vegan goodies here we're starting to get carried away.

Mint Chip Brownies, Petunia's Pies & Pastries

Mushroom Dishes, Pioneer Sq. Market

Lastly, I just revamped the blog layout. I guess I had been ignoring the new features on blogger for a little while. I am happy to report that they are definitely an improvement. I no longer have to go into the html mess to set up a blog that is a bit wider and can accommodate various widgets in a nice clean way. I guess there's also some fun sharing and rating things at the bottom of each post now, so you can let me know that I'm funny, cool and interesting. Hey everyone needs a little reinforcement, right?

Vegan Mofo Day 1: Trip to the market

 

Today is day one of the Vegan month of food (vegan mofo)! I participated once before, in 2008. The last few years I've been more of a casual observer, but I can tell you there are lots of awesome posts including reviews, recipes, and more happening all month long. I'm pretty excited about participating this year, although I signed up on a whim, but I hope it will motivate lots of cooking and experimenting this month. And, hey, if not maybe I can just review lots of great vegan and vegan friendly restaurants here in PDX instead.

Saturday was a pretty great day to start vegan mofo, since the Portland State University farmer's market is on Saturdays almost all year long. It just seems appropriate to have the first post be about stocking up. We got a few things, pictured above.  A bag of peppers, Italian prunes, Acorn & Spaghetti Squash, tomatoes, Apple & pear cider, and zucchini. No particular plans just yet, but I'm sure Chuck & will come up with something.

 

We also treated ourselves to some morning snacks for all of our shopping effort. One of our favorites, Petunia's Pies & Pastries, had a fancy pancake sandwich. I was more in the mood for a muffin, so I picked up a marionberry muffin (the marionberry was developed here in Oregon, FYI, and it's one of my favorites) from Blacksheep Bakery. There's definitely no shortage of vegan options here in Portland.

Weekend Recap: Treats & Crafty Wonderland & Calendars!

 

We braved the somewhat more rainy than usual rain on Saturday to run over to the PSU Farmer's Market on Saturday morning after I saw Petunia's Pie's and Pastries post it would be the last one they attended. (the last market until next spring is this weekend!) It's so hard to resist every week, that was just excuse I needed. I got the peppermint chocolate cake because it was so pretty, while Chuck got the Blondie, which I had a sliver of, it was amazing. I was also really impressed with the band who were carefully crammed under tent, each with hats on, still happily performing despite the rain, and they even had a small crowd. Impressive!

And of course we went to Crafty Wonderland, which was overwhelmingly awesome. We waited in line to try get some of the goodie bags, and as is my standard luck, the last one went to someone from the group just in front of us! (That's happened to me before!) But no big deal, it was still nice to be there before it got very crowded, although that didn't take very long. We ended up hanging around until 2pm -ish with a break for coffee & crowd watching in there somewhere. I'm not even sure where to start with all the awesome vendors, just click anywhere on this list!: http://craftywonderland.com/vendors/
A few I liked: Tako Fibers, littleblackrabbit and Puji studio. But I didn't see much I didn't like, so I'm still working on add many favorites from that show...

We also spent some time this weekend getting some 2011 calendars of Portland and Chicago printed up for the orders I've had so far, and a few more for future orders. They're all packed up and ready to go, and there's still time to get them shipped out before the 20th, so they arrive by Christmas! (hint hint) Portland has been a lot more popular than Chicago so far, but I'm hoping that evens out somewhat!

Happy First day of Spring!

  

Happy First day of Spring! I haven't posted for a bit, I've been pretty busy lately. One of the things I've been up to is trying to take a lot of walks. More exciting right now, with spring starting up. The pictures above are from Washington Park, but the cherry blossoms all around town are starting to bloom. None on the waterfront just yet, but it won't be much longer!

  

We had a fun St. Patrick's Day. The PSU Farmer's Markets started up again just in time & we were able to get some really yummy vegan treats from Petunia's. I also convinced Chuck to make us a Shepard's Pie. He decided to make it in our skillet so we had a lot of leftovers. I started knitting a really tricky light green sweater, while wearing other green things I made. I definitely did not get pinched, but I made up an appropriate Etsy treasury just to be sure.

   

And I've been doing various crafty things lately. I finally got started on the Craftsy Block of the month on Leap Day, but so far I've only done one of the blocks. I'm way behind! I really enjoyed the first one though and I'm confident I can catch up sometime soon. I'm planning to stick with just a few solid color fabrics which I really like the looks of so far. I've also been rephotographing items for my Etsy shop for a more consistent look. I still have some of that left to do. And lastly I recently did a set of wedding invites for my cousin. I'm really happy with how the turned out, and hopefully I will share more of that project here soon! (Chuck bought me tulips very similar to the ones on the RSVP cards, which strangely seem to be Mutant Siamese Tulips. Interesting or Scary?) 

First PSU Market of the Year!

It's nice that we don't have to go very long between markets here, but I missed it while it was gone! It stopped in December and we got a nice Christmas wreath at the last one.

 

Lots and lots of nice root vegetables, radishes, parsnips, you could even just smell the carrots as you walked by one booth with stacks of carrots. Daffodils dominated the flower booths, but I was excited about the booth full of hellebores/lenten roses since I just learned about those recently. Also lots of greens, like this Chard, and potted plants including catnip, mojito mint and rubarb starters.

 

Vegan treats too! Cheesecake and Bundt Cake from Petunia's Pies & Pastries. Her stuff is so irresistible. We picked up brussel sprouts and some Heidi Ho vegan cheeses, which is a new booth at the market this year!  The market is the perfect way to spend Saturday mornings and I'm so glad it's already back!