J. Selby's: A Plant-Based Eatery

I had never been to J. Selby's before. It's a vegan restaurant located in St. Paul, MN. My husband and I decided to try it out before a play we were seeing. 

What I wasn't expecting was that you order your food first and then

go sit down at a table. I sort of thought this was going to be a kind of fancy sit down restaurant. However, I didn't let this bug me. We looked at the menu and ordered a plate of vegan nachos, and I ordered a chickpea salad sandwich with fries and my husband ordered one of their raw plates. 

I thought the nachos were pretty good. They came with vegan sour cream and guacamole. The hubby didn't enjoy the fake cheese, but I actually thought it was pretty good considering other fake cheeses I had tried. It was just the right amount of salty and in my opinion, didn't taste too different from a nacho cheese. It came topped with olives and salsa as well. 

The chickpea salad sandwich was pretty good. It reminded me of a tuna salad sandwich. One thing I don't like about restaurant versions of any sort of salad sandwich though is that they always make it sweet instead of tangy. I prefer tangy to sweet in most cases. But, the sandwich was edible and pretty tasty. The fries that came with it were not impressive. Just your average freezer fries with little to no flavor and not the greatest texture. I wouldn't order the fries again. 

The raw bowl was just that, a bowl of raw vegetables with a carrot

ginger dip type thing in the middle of it. When it came out and we realized what it was, we kind of wanted to return it for something more substantial. I mean, we can throw some veggies into a bowl at home and call it dinner for a lot cheaper. So, I personally wouldn't recommend the raw bowl. It worked for my husband because he needed something gluten free, but there were other options for him. 

All in all, I'd say it was a pretty good experience. What I love about this place is that it's all vegan. I didn't have to worry about cross contamination or wonder what I could eat. The menu was full of tasty items that were all plant-based. They had house made corn dogs even! I was sitting next to a guy who was eating their cauliflower wings, which are breaded cauliflower with your choice of sauce and my mouth was watering watching him eat those. I'll have to try them next time!

Well, signing off. I hope you enjoyed my post, and I'll see ya next time! 

Kale, Cauliflower, and Carrot Stir Fry

I was running out of ingredients and Chris and I needed dinner and

one of our go to dinners is stir fry. I took out all the veggies I had in the crisper, which ended up being only Kale, Cauliflower and Carrots because my broccoli was completely rotten, which was a bummer because it was a big bushel of broccoli. 

I normally put onions in my stir fry as well as broccoli, but I was short on ingredients. It actually turned out way more tasty than expected. 

I cooked basmati rice in the rice cooker while I sauteed the carrots in the frying pan. Then I chopped and added the Cauliflower and Kale and mixed it up with olive oil and garlic. After the vegetables started to get soft, I added 2 tablespoons of teriyaki sauce and 2 table spoons of soy sauce. Once it was a bit more cooked, I added a bit more soy sauce to make it saucy and then ate it over rice. 

It was quite delicious and easy. I just get sick of stir fry, since my

husband and I eat it all the time. But when it's all you've got in the kitchen, you just go with it! right!?

Thanks for reading! See ya next time:)

Easy Vegan Apple Kale Salad

First of all, kale salad goes with everything. You can make a small

kale salad as a side to any meal or even just eat it as a main dish. I use organic kale from whole foods or from our garden in the summer. The kale I got came in massive leaves, so since I was just making myself a salad, I just used one leaf. I washed it well with water and ripped it into pieces.

I added 1 honey crisp apple sliced into small bite size pieces and

added sliced almonds and dried cranberries. I get the almonds and cranberries from the bins at whole foods. It not only saves me money, but the product is delicious. I don't do well with full raw almonds due to my TMJ, so grabbing them pre-sliced is the best way to do it for me. 

I used Annie's Raspberry Vinaigrette for the dressing, however you

could use any sort of vinaigrette on this salad. My husband makes a great balsamic vinaigrette that would be great on this salad as well. I'll have to share that recipe some time as well. I suggest that you make sure that each leaf is covered in dressing as kale is a very healthy but strongly flavored leaf and the dressing helps to mellow that flavor out a little bit. 

All in all, this is just a really easy salad with only 5 ingredients and is super easy to just throw together for a quick lunch or a quick side dish. 

Enjoy and thanks for reading! :)

Sugar and Carbohydrates VS Cancer

When it finally hit me that I had cancer, trust me it takes a while to

set in, I started doing research on diet. I had already heard from several people and had read several articles via Facebook about how a plant-based-diet was beneficial to anyone who was sick. 

This wasn't just people with cancer, but people with other sorts of diseases, like auto-immune diseases, heart disease, MS, and all sorts of other ailments. I read and watched documentaries and found that a plant-based-diet had helped many people with horrible diseases, including cancer, to heal themselves of the disease, or decrease their symptoms to the point that they no longer needed any medications. In some cases the diseases were cured completely. (I strongly suggest watching the documentary on Netflix called Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.)

Well, in one of the books I was reading called Crazy Sexy Diet, the author mentions that cancer feeds on sugar and there were studies done that proved this. So when she switched to a plant-based-diet, the only sweeteners she consumed were Stevia and Agave. Stevia apparently is known to not react to our body the same way that regular sugar does. So it doesn't feed the cancer cells.

Anyways, I had to look into this because it was already hard to switch to plant-based-diet and get rid of all animal products. Did I really have to get rid of sugar too? Was I feeding my cancer by eating carbs and things with sugar in them? Sugar is plant based. So I did some research, and I'm still unsure. There are differing ideas out there. 

Most of the articles say that exercise along with having small meals will decrease the cancer's ability to gain access to the glucose and use it to grow. Other articles say that this is just a myth and that sugar does not make cancer grow faster. It's scary to think that, as a

cancer patient, I'd have to worry about, not only eating well, maintaining my weight, but then also avoiding sugar and carbohydrates. If you are interested, feel free to read the two articles that I got most of my information from below. 

Article # 1

Article #2

Chemotherapy makes you feel yucky and it decreases your appetite or takes it away all together. So eating healthy is very difficult at times because all of the oncology nutritionists will tell you to just eat what you feel like eating. They are concerned with their patients maintaining their weight and nothing else. If you have cancer, diet is the one thing you can control. I suggest watching the documentary What The Health on Netflix and also the documentary Vegecated if you are interested in learning more about plant-based-diets and what they can do for your health. 

I chose to change my diet, and instead of getting rid of sugar and carbohydrates all together, I have just lessened the amount of sugar that I eat in a day. Natural sugars are fine (like in fruits), and good carbohydrates like potatoes, whole grains, nuts, and rice are fine.

You can control your diet and what you eat and if not heal yourself, then assist in the healing process. With my kind of cancer, I didn't have much of a choice to try and heal myself with diet. Acute Myeloid Lukemia is fast acting and so the doctors had to act fast and had me on Chemo my the day after I was admitted to the hospital. Now I'm doing my best to help my healing along by eating a plant based diet and giving my body all of the healthy nutrients it needs to heal the cancer and to stay healthy. Check out the below articles. Article 4 is great if you aren't totally sold on the plant-based diet. Even though I'm vegan and am moving towards a whole food plant-based diet, I thought Article 4 was really helpful. I hope you do as well!

Article 3

Article 4

The Vegan Crispy Potato Taco Night

This was a really easy recipe and I would definitely make it again.

Basically, you chop up the potatoes into small pieces and then saute them with taco seasoning spices. After which you put them into vegan tortillas with whatever toppings you wish. 

We used Avocado, Vegan mozzarella cheese (store bought), Vegan sour cream (store bought), green peppers and tomato salsa (store bought). They were surprisingly delicious and just so darn easy! 

Most of the vegan recipes I have been coming across have had several ingredients, many of which I don't have around, and they involve several steps and lots of food processing or chopping, it's always a big mess and so much work. However, this recipe was worth it, easy, and didn't make a big mess. 

I suggest these delightful Vegan Crispy Potato Tacos to anyone who needs an easy vegan meal, it's also really easy to add meat to if you are a vegan in a family of animal product eaters. Chris (my husband) added some tilapia cooked with the same taco seasoning type spices. 

Lemon Waffles with Blueberry Maple Sauce

I can't take credit for this one, but we got the recipe from a vegan

cook book that was given to me from a friend of my Mom's. Also, I didn't make it. We decided to make breakfast for dinner and also had meatless sausage along with it. 

The waffles were a little dense, but still delicious and the blueberry maple sauce was delicious on top of them. The sausages were just store bought and they were very spicy, so I put some store bought vegan sour cream on top of them to help with the spice, which it did help, however, I don't do well with eating a lot of spicy foods, so I decided to skip eating any more than one sausage. 

The waffles were made with several ingredients including lemon juice, lemon zest, cornmeal, and gluten free flour along with a few other items. You could taste the lemon in the waffles which was a little strange at first, but the blueberry maple sauce really complimented the flavors of the waffles. 

If I ever have my own waffle maker, I will make these myself some day. My Mom and Dad were nice enough to make these for me on a Saturday night when I was lonely. :)

If you are vegan and gluten free, you won't want to eat the sausages, they were not gluten free, just vegan. If you are interested in the recipe. You can purchase Vegan with a Vengeance  by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. 

Thank you for reading! 

Easy Vegan Spaghetti and Meatballs

I had a Chomp and Munch Lunch! I wanted something easy and

delicious. My favorite meal growing up was spaghetti and meatballs and I was craving it this afternoon. So first of all, I've found that all the gluten free pastas we have in the cupboard is not only gluten free, but has no animal products in it, which is so perfect. So for this pasta, I used a version of Gluten Free Veggie pasta, which is my favorite. I like the consistency and the different colors of the pasta and the fact that it adds a bit of extra vegetable to the meal. 

For the sauce, I purchased a simple marinara sauce from the store, making sure to check the label for animal products before purchasing it. 

For meatballs, I used a version of vegan meatless meatballs that I had gotten from whole foods in the frozen section. It is totally worth it once you cook them in the sauce, they almost taste like the real thing. 

I suggest this meal to anyone who needs an easy meal day or night. Feel free to add a side of vegetables to get some more vitamins and minerals along with it, but as a quick lunch, I think it's fine on it's own. 

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more vegan recipes! 

Spaghetti Squash with a Vegan Cauliflower Alfredo Sauce

So, my husband Chris bought a spaghetti squash from the store the other day, and I was like, "So, did you just feel like spaghetti

squash or something?" and he was like "Yea, something like that." Luckily, I remembered there was a recipe for Spaghetti Squash with a Vegan Cauliflower Alfredo Sauce on Pinterest. 

Last night, we tried it out! It was surprisingly good. Chris even said that he wouldn't have even known it was vegan if he hadn't helped me make it. 

It did require a food processor to make the sauce, so if you don't have one, your sauce might be a bit more chunky and less creamy then ours. Even with the food processor, I'd say the sauce still wasn't creamy enough, it didn't have that alfredo sauce texture. 

However, it was delicious! It was a tasty and healthy dish. I'd make it again sometime, but I think I will be turning towards more simple recipes every once in a while because I just don't have the energy with my low blood counts lately to get through all of these crazy recipes, as delicious as they are. 

Well, see ya next time. I have more recipes planned over the next few days. Oh and Juicing, I'll share with you my best and tastiest juicing recipes as well! 

Our Vegan Anniversary Dinner

So this was a weird day because of my Leukemia and the chemo,

my blood counts were extremely low and both of these dishes were a lot of work. So about halfway through cooking the Summer Corn Chowder as our main dish, I lost energy and started getting shaky. Chris said he was running late because of traffic, so I just got everything to a point that it could just simmer for a while and sat down and ate an apple and drank some water. This helped give me a second wind and I was able to finish chopping up vegetables and get the soup to it's sit and simmer point.


When Chris got home, I told him to take over the Twice Baked Spinach Artichoke Potatoes because I had already screwed them up and decided they were just going to be Spinach Artichoke mashed potatoes but I didn't have the energy to do all the mashing. 

Everything tasted really good, however, there are some things I would change. First of all, for the Corn Chowder, be careful when you cut the corn off the cobs not to cut too close to the cob, that gives the corn a tough sort of overly crunchy feel that is not pleasant to chew. Also, make sure you take all of the strings off the cob before you put them in the pot for the vegetable stock. Otherwise, it turned out very well, and was similar to the Vegetarian Corn Chowder found at Panera Bread. 

The potatoes worked perfectly as mashed potatoes. They are made with coconut cream to make them creamy, so there is a bit of a coconut flavor to them. You'd think this would ruin the dish, but it really didn't. They were still delicious. I might try a different way of making them creamy next time though. Although they were still good, I'd like to try them without the coconut flavor.

Who knows? Maybe the mashed potatoes will become a holiday side dish, and the soup will become a staple. We shall see. 

Thanks for reading! 

My Vegan Weekend

This was such an exciting weekend. My aunt and my parents who are both very supportive of my vegan diet, even if they aren't completely sold on missing out on cheese and meats, we decided to try out some vegan recipes. Here was our menu for the weekend. 

Friday Night: Thai Pineapple Fried Rice
This was delicious! It had a little bit of a kick to it from the curry

powder and the red pepper, but even for someone like me who is very sensitive to spice, I could handle it. I will definitely be making this again. 

Saturday: 
Breakfast: Rolled oats with cinnamon and nutmeg cooked in vanilla soy milk (found at Trader Joes) After it was cooked we added bananas and honey as we wanted to our bowls. It was very good and very nutritious. 

Lunch: Zoodles or Spiralized Zucchini with vegan butter (Earth Balance) salt, pepper, and garlic. This was surprisingly good.

My aunt added Parmesan Cheese to hers and to be honest, I cheated a bit as well and put some on mine, but I didn't need to. It would have been just as good without it. This meal was very simple and super easy to make. You can buy the Zucchini already spiralized from Whole Foods or Lunds or you can do it yourself and then use them in place of any pastas you might use. This was my first experience with Zoodles and I can see how they would make a healthy pasta substitute as well as make Zucchini a great veggie to add to all sorts of recipes. 

Dinner: Spaghetti with Vegan Garlic Bread and Meatless Meatballs with homemade marinara sauce, and Kale Salad with Annie's Raspberry Vinaigrette and Sliced Almonds and dried cranberries.   We got the marinara recipe from pinterest, so if you want to make it feel free to check out the link

above. Making your own sauce, is A LOT of work. We started by stewing all the ingredients together for an hour, and then used the food processor to make it smooth which was not only hard work, but it was very messy. The results were so delicious. Eating fresh sauces will be my saving grace. Adding something flavorful to recipes is what the vegan diet needs. Once everything was completed. I made some vegan/gluten free veggie pasta and added the sauce and the meatless meatballs that I purchased from the frozen section of Whole Foods. We made the garlic bread with vegan french bread we found at trader joes and vegan earth balance butter and garlic. It was so delicious to take the pieces of garlic bread and dip them into the fresh sauce we had made. The vegan meat balls were not the greatest at first. But when I ate leftovers the next day, I enjoyed the meatless meatballs more because they had been soaking in the sauce overnight.

Dessert: Gluten Free Vegan Black Bean Brownies with Coconut Milk Ice Cream

These brownies were surprisingly good, especially with the coconut ice cream and as an added bonus, they were low sugar and had protein in them! They are rich and delicious. I strongly recommend the vegan coconut milk ice cream on the side to cut the richness. It can be found at Whole Foods. 

Potatoes and Vegetables as a Main Dish

Chris and I enjoyed a lovely vegan meal last night that we both

enjoyed. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of it. I have to get into the habit of doing that so you can see what it looks like. We used Mini potatoes sliced into about 1/2 inch slices, about 1 cup of spiralized zucchini, also known as zoodles. We added about half of a shallot for flavor along with 2 chopped carrots. We sauteed it all in a frying pan with olive oil until everything was cooked. We seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic, and parlsey. It tasted like a potato hash of some sort, only healthier than any potato hash I could think of. It was really good and super easy and worked out really well as our main dish.

Along with it we had a kale salad made from kale and lettuce from our garden. We added cucumbers and green peppers to it and Chris made a balsamic vinagrette and added pepper and garlic for flavor. I added raw sliced almonds and dried cranberries. The end result was a delicious and nutritious kale salad that I'd eat again and again. As you probably know. Kale is high in iron, vitamin K and tons of antioxidants. It's one of the healthier vegetables out there. 

This is the first meal since I have gone vegan that I put together with what I had in the kitchen and didn't follow a recipe and I was surprised at how easy and delicious it actually was. I'll keep sharing my concoctions with you as I make them as well as any recipes I find that are delicious that I can't take credit for. I've been researching recipes to make for Thanksgiving and Christmas and I'm excited to share my research with you on those as well. It will be interesting to see how they turn out. Tune in next for what we make for our vegan anniversary dinner! 

Cancer Forced Me to go Vegan

One day I was living my life. I was going to work at my dream job as a career counselor, I was carpooling with my husband to work every day and going home to spend time with friends and family every night. 

Then, over 4th of July weekend 2017, my friends and family and I started to get concerned about bruises on my legs. They kept appearing and it got to the point that there was no way that I had run in to things that many times. I made an appointment to see my doctor. Upon seeing her, I told her about some other symptoms I had been having as well including shortness of breath, the inability to walk up a flight of stairs without being winded, and some dizziness and vision issues. She was concerned and ordered a blood test. I was worried, but not too worried because every other time I had visited the doctor and gotten tests done, everything came back normal and it continued to be a mystery. I figured this would be another on of those times. 

That night, I received a phone call from the on-call doctor telling me that my blood tests were "wonky" and that I needed to get to the emergency room as soon as possible. I asked him why I needed to go to the emergency room, and he said my hemoglobin and platelet counts were so low that they could be effecting my organs, not only that, but they were concerned about Leukemia. I asked the doctor if he would tell my husband everything he had just told me. After he did that, my husband and I were off to the hospital and confirmed the Leukemia diagnosis at 4:00am that morning. It felt like a nightmare. I kept thinking, "This can't be real. I can't really have Leukemia." I was in denial. 

I ended up in the hospital for a whole month, the second day I was in the hospital, I was started on the strongest chemo they can put you on. At the time, I wasn't aware of that because I was in a daze and was asking for as little information as possible. After several blood transfusions, I recovered from the chemo and lost my hair. 

I was one of the lucky people, I went into remission after 1 dose of the chemo when only 50% of people normally do. Now, I am doing what they call consolidation chemo, where I have to go into the hospital for 3 days at a time and get 6 high doses of chemo. Then I go home, and wait for my blood counts to drop and then recover, during this time I get blood transfusions as needed, and am in charge of paying attention to how I'm feeling since I may need to go to the ER if I develop a fever or chills. Apparently, when your white blood cell count is at 0, an infection wreak havoc on the body and you have to go in for IV antibiotics immediately. 

After I was diagnosed with cancer, I started doing research on diet. And that is why I am starting this blog. I am on a journey to learn as much about dietary health as possible and I have started eating a plant-based-diet with as many vegetables as I can handle. 

I want to share my story with you, and help others out there understand what is healthy to eat and what things will help you avoid cancer and have to go through what I'm going through. 

I hope you enjoy my Vegan Blog!