weekly eats roundups

Back to School Vegan Eats and Life Updates

September 4, 2019 by Katherine Baker Leave a Comment

Hello internet friends! Welcome to another recent vegan eats post (a back to school vegan eats, to be exact) where I show you some things I’ve been noshing on lately, give random life updates, and give you my hot take on new products I’ve tried.

I’m writing to you from my futon in my wee little studio; Millie is curled up on top of multiple pillows at my side. I’m watching YouTube, wrapping up some work, and trying to relax after a crazy week.

The past couple of weeks in general have been full of surprises, highs and lows. I feel like I can’t even process everything that’s happened. Less than a month ago I was home in Wisconsin, living a cozy familiar life, enjoying tons of laughs, hugs, meals, and sunshine with all of my closest friends and my family.

Now, literally everything is different, and I am just starting to meet new people, and just starting getting to know this new place while navigating a whole new work and study space. Everything still feels so unfamiliar. Eep! Life’s adventures are crazy. Thank goodness for my adorable, loving dog.

Adulting is hard! Self-doubt can be paralyzing! Anxiety is annoying! Decisions are tough! And the older I get, the more homesick I am! Oh, the struggles of change!

Also unsettling: there was a local shooting this week. It was way, way too close to home to not shake me up a bit. Yikes.

I just feel like my anxiety has been rearing lately. Which is why this weekend, I’m planning some down time, which will include lots of mommy/Millie time, a little blogging, junky TV, and some other content creation.

I have so much to be thankful for. I truly do. I just need some time to process my thoughts and settle into a comfortable routine. I’ve found that when I don’t have a routine, I really feel….off. So once I have settled into a weekly rhythm, I am sure things will feel more normal.

Now that I’ve blabbed my life at you, let’s chat about vegan eats. To be honest, I haven’t been taking many food photos lately, and food has been feeling pretty whatever these days.

After my stomach issues, my appetite has been just…different. I want a lot of simple foods and have been very much eating to get by for energy and less for enjoyment, and haven’t really been thinking about documenting eats for the blog.

But here’s what I have documented, and I hope you enjoy.

Let’s get into it!

Peanut Butter Sandwiches

‘Tis the season! Haha. Back to school means back to packing lunches. Until I’m more in my groove, I’m very into quick-to-pack easy and reliable lunch options. Which means a lot of peanut butter on Whole wheat bread with super exciting sides like bananas, apples, baby carrots, nuts and granola bars. I’m five years old when it comes to my school lunches, and proud of it.

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Some Exciting Recent Vegan Eats & Life Lately

May 20, 2019 by Katherine Baker 2 Comments

Hello friends! Let’s get right into it. Finals are over and playtime is in full swing! I have been enjoying some time hanging with friends and eating yummy food while tying up some loose ends around the NYC area and packing up my studio apartment! Read on for some yummies + life.

NYC Bagels with Vegan Tofu Cream Cheese

Bless the beauty of New York City-style bagels. Last Friday I went to Brooklyn Bagel and Coffee Company near NYU with an old friend from studying abroad in France.

We caught up over bagels and walked around campus and caught up on life. The kind people at Brooklyn Bagel and Coffee Company let me have half veggie tofu cream cheese and half strawberry tofu cream cheese to appease my indecisive personality. It was delicious!

Hummus Toast with Everything Bagel Seasoning

This was DELICIOUS and a nice change of pace.

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Some Recent Spring Vegan Eats, Millie’s Birthday, & More Random Stuff

May 11, 2019 by Katherine Baker 8 Comments

How’s it going friends? I hope you’re having a nice day. And if not, I hope tomorrow treats you with more compassion. I handed in my final remaining school assignment yesterday and feel empty and weird. So to busy my addicted-to-work brain, I’m here with another dump of recent vegan eats to inspire some deliciousness in your life, and/or give you insight into what a vegan graduate student on a budget eats on the reg.

Buckle in, cause it’s a long post. I recap my friend Sarah’s visit, and also feature some meals-at-home from the past couple weeks. Enjoy!

Beyond Sushi

My friend Sarah came to visit a couple weekends ago before I disappeared into a cave to do homework for the next 14 days. Friday night we hit up Beyond Sushi (my favorite restaurant in NYC) for some plant-based goodness. We shared The Badge dumplings, and 3 rolls (The Sweet Tree, Spicy Mang, and Sunny Side.

YUM.

Van Leeuwen

For dessert we met some of my grad school friends for my favorite ice cream, Van Leeuwen. We both got a scoop of vegan cookie dough, which was delicious. I hadn’t had this classic flavor in a long time and it hit the spot!

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Mid-April Recent Vegan Eats

April 14, 2019 by Katherine Baker 6 Comments

Back at it with another recent vegan eats post! Amidst the season of excessive school work, I’m delaying some more research-intensive content since right now my brain is so overwhelmed I found myself sitting on the futon staring at the ceiling debating whether to continue working or just go to bed the past two nights.

To give you any sort of scope of how incredibly boring I am these days, upon reflecting on my weekend, I can safety say the most invigorating thing I did was impulsively add an avocado to my cart at Trader Joe’s after overhearing someone mention avocado toast and being stricken with an instant craving. It felt so bold and whimsical!

This weekend I’ve also been trying to secure an apartment for next fall (fingers crossed!) and have been relying on my compression braces to deal with carpal tunnel symptoms from excessive typing.

Wild weekend, I know. Today is actually exciting because it’s Millie’s birthday! So we are going to celebrate HARD (which I will recap in next week’s post). Here’s a photo from her first birthday party. I’m not crying, you are!

Anyways, if you want some more nitty-gritty nutrition or climate reads, stay tuned or search the ‘nutrition’ or ‘climate’ tabs, but or for now, simply enjoy this recent vegan eats roundup in the meantime!

Giant Salads with Banza and Oodles of Nutritional Yeast

When the weather starts to turn warm, I crave all things FRESH, including giant salads.The key to a meal-worthy salad in my books is including a variety of textures, flavors and including all three macronutrients (carbs, fat, and protein).

This meal reflects a version of something I make often: leftover roasted veggies (in this case, purple sweet potatoes, yay carbs), organic mixed greens (I buy the family-sized for $4.49 every week at ShopRite during salad phases and plow through them), frozen thawed peas for a pop of freshness, flavor, protein and fiber, hemp hearts for fat, protein and omega-3s, raw cashews for more fat, protein, flavor and crunch, and cold Banza because pasta on salads = <3. I covered the whole thing with some Panera dressing I had in m fridge + oodles upon oodles of nutritional yeast.

If you haven’t put nutritional yeast on salads, you must give it a whirl. It somehow amplifies the entire experience exponentially. Please try it and thank me later. ;-).

Also, I cooked my noodles in the microwave and quickly cooled them in the fridge. Yes, I often cook noodles in the microwave. That’s what living in apartments in NYC with no working stove/oven for many years gives you – microwave and toaster oven skills galore. Some people asked me about this, and I could totally write a post/make a quick video tutorial. Let me know if you’re interested!

Fancy Fruit:

My building had a surprise resident-appreciation breakfast the other morning, which was nice. On my way out, I grabbed a sesame bagel and filled a Pyrex container with fruit salad (shout out to my EHS department for always training me to BYOTupperware).

I adore fruit salad and for some reason it is such a treat to me. Maybe it’s because as a solo-living human I never buy all the ingredients to make it myself, so it’s novel. Or maybe it’s because it reminds me of staying in a hotel with continental breakfast, which is my favorite thing in the universe. Either way, when it comes to fruit salad, I’m always excited.

Non-fancy fruit:

I go through phases where I want to just eat ALL OF THE FRUIT. This spring weather shift has made me want freshness at every meal and snack! That means oodles of fresh produce. I recognize that being able to consume fresh produce regularly is a privilege. Shout out to ShopRite for having organic pink lady apples at $1.49/ pound as their regular non-sale price. I don’t know how they do it, but I am here for it.

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Recent Vegan Eats + Blogging Every (Other) Day in April

March 31, 2019 by Katherine Baker 5 Comments

Hey there friends! It’s a Sunday evening and I just enjoyed some dinner and (non-dairy ice cream) and decided to check back in with another random round-up of recent vegan eats in the past month or so.

I choked last night home alone and it scared me good. So I decided even though I have plenty of stressful stuff to do, it’d be a good time to unwind and update the good old blog.

I also wanted to use this opportunity to acknowledge that I stink at being consistent with blogging this academic year. My interview/travel schedule has been absolutely cray cray. And then this thing happens where the longer I go between posts, the weirder it feels for me to get back into posting. I draft a thousand drafts, decide they aren’t good enough or that no one cares, and delete them. How productive! Not. I also get frustrated because my blog isn’t as good as it should be or as good as I know it could be and that really, really bothers me.

Between full time school, my two jobs, and the interview cycle, taking care of my mom, and trying to be a human, I find myself so burnt out this year all I want to do is hide under the blankies with my doggo whenever I have 5 minutes of free time.

(A random pic from Tuscon, AZ from one of the zillion trips I took this semester)

Yet, I have all of these ideas and the need for creative outlets. So then I get frustrated in the reverse. I had lunch with some old food media friends on Friday and it really made me itch to get back in the creation groove.

So, to try to get back in the swing of things, I’m going to try to post roughly every other day in April. It will be like old school blogging where people actually blogged diary style with short posts instead of essay-long, curated, edited-photo blogs. I’m usually a fan of quantity of quality, but I want to try to push my comfort zone with the blog and get my creative juices flowing again. Let’s see how I do! April looks like a stressful (but fun) month so I’m pumped to give this a whirl.

Without further delay, let’s get some vegan noshes coming your way…

Lunch at Supernatural

Vegan queen Chef Chloe Coscarelli had a pop up with Tom Colicchio at Craft this month and I got the chance to go on Friday. I had the animal lover’s burrito, a couple bites of some vegan mac, and way too much sprinkle cake.

The cake was certainly the highlight. It was vanilla with a slight lemon undertone. And the sprinkles were somehow the crunchiest and freshest sprinkles I’ve ever had.

The photo of my burrito looks like I accidentally sat on the burrito. I promise I did not. I’m just not great at cutting things in half.

The pasta wasn’t really my thing (I’m usually not into vegan ‘macs’ at restaurants, but the cake was something I will dream of for years to come!

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Recent vegan eats (Trying New Vegan Yogurts And Trader Joe’s products)

February 24, 2019 by Katherine Baker Leave a Comment

Hey hey! I decided to bring back random bi-weekly recent vegan eats post after this recent post about food as an afterthought. So here we go! A couple of bites that went into by belly the past couple weeks. This is just a all snapshot of what I eat. I hope it inspires some yummy snacking or meal making in your life! Enjoy!

Salted SunButter Caramel Date Truffles:

An old favorite! I love making these because they are easy, require minimal ingredients, and are so very sweet and satisfying. They make an ideal mid-day snack or after dinner treat when you want something sweet but energizing. You can use any nut butter you’d like, but I can’t get enough of the sun butter + date combo. They are so good together!

The recipe is here, and the video tutorial is here!

A Big Old #TBT Simple Goodness Bowl:

The other night I realized it had been a while since I made a kbakes-style bowl. So I got down to business and roasted some sweet potato wedges, and paired them with organic mixed greens, Trader Joe’s frozen grilled cauliflower (the BEST frozen veggie product), hummus, random frozen broccoli, cherry tomatoes, avocado, and some crunchy seeded ShopRite crackers. I drizzled Trader Joe’s Green Goddess dressing all over this bowl for an extra punch. All the flavors + textures = veggie-powered satisfaction. Yum.

Gregory’s Coffee Lemon Poppyseed Loaf:

I love love love Gregory’s Coffee. It always holds a special place in my heart. I used to work at NYU Child Study’s Center on Fridays while in undergrad, and would always treat myself to Gregory’s after. The fact that there is a Gregory’s in Jersey City warms my heart and soul!

You know what else warms my soul? The fact that they now have 1/2 price baked goods after 5pm! Yes!!! I keep picking up half price lemon loaf as a treat. It is so delicious, moist, and lemony, and barely sweet. I love it. Can’t wait to try their new Vegan Egg Scramble breakfast sandwich (made with JustEggs!)…will report back!

Pancake mix cookie chocolate chip cookies:

I had a craving for chocolate chip cookies the other night, and was low on ingredients, so I whipped up some cookies using Bob’s Red Mill 10-grain whole wheat pancake mix, oats, flax, a bit of baking soda, almond milk, and avocado oil. And a solid handful of dark chocolate chips, of course.

Honestly, they turned out pretty good. They tasted hearty and substantial. Not the sweetest or most indulgent cookie, but really good in its own right. I’m gonna work on this concept and share on the blog when it’s ready….

NYC Birthday Weekend Vegan Eats and Being a Hot Mess

January 21, 2019 by Katherine Baker 1 Comment

Hello everyone! I haven’t shared a “what I’ve been eating lately” -type post in a while. I didn’t blog a ton over break because I was in serious need of some down time, and had a bunch of technical issues with getting my computer fixed. Anyways, I had a great break and an awesome final weekend to top it off. My sister and her husband flew out to celebrate my bday/just hangout (okay, they came to eat), so I thought I’d share some highlights.

This is definitely not reflective of my normal eating pattern (I rarely eat out, especially when I’m at school), but since this was a fun weekend, I thought some things were worth sharing. Enjoy!

(Pst, if you’re looking for more NYC recs, here’s my Guide to Vegan Eating in NYC. It could use an update since last January, but it’s still a solid list!)

Friday:

Early Friday morning I flew into LaGuardia from Milwaukee. About 15 minutes into our uber ride home, southwest called me to tell me I left a bag there. I had a mini lack-of-sleep-induced panic, but my uber driver was super understanding and took me back to get the right bag. Not sure if it was the lack of sleep and coffee, lingering sickness, or the fact that I was traveling with my dog and disabled mom, but I was so out of it this day! Mood:

Thankfully there was no harm done, and the correct bag made its way back to me, and after that, I headed home to my apartment in jersey where I dropped off my luggage and doggo and quickly freshened up before heading to a meeting on campus.

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Midterm Season Vegan Eats + Cherry Bombe University Recap

November 7, 2018 by Katherine Baker 2 Comments

Hello once again to my fine internet friends! I hope you are having the warmest coziest fall filled with mugs of tea, hearty soups, scrumptious baked goods, and warm blankies. I’m back in the blogging game after a fatiguing few weeks of midterms and application work.

Midterms really did not bring out the best in me this year, and after crying in public from lack of sleep and overloads of stress, I decided it was a healthful idea to take a step back from the internet and putting pressure on myself to blog for a few days and focus on learning how to chill and sleep and and socialize and eat like a normal homeostatic human being again.

But! I’m feeling quite restored after this weekend of naps and friends and oodles of baking and wanted to share some meals and snacks from the past few weeks. Hope you enjoy! Leave me your favorite snacks and cozy meals in the comments below, or pop over to my Instagram and slide into my DMs.

I’ll also be recapping my experience at Cherry Bombe University, so keep on reading for that!

Avocado Toast with Za’atar:

This was a new-to-me-combo that I’d wanted to try out for a while. I also added some hemp hearts and nutritional yeast for extra flavor/texture/satiety. It was pretty good, but not my favorite avo toast flavor combo. Still fun to try though!

Oatmeal with frozen blueberries and almond butter

I cannot get enough of this combo lately. I basically make this cinnamon banana-blurberry-oatmeal thing by cooking a 1/2 cup oats with 1/2 a mashed banana and about 1/4 cup frozen blueberries stirred in towards the end of cooking. I then pour my oats into a bowl and top with almond butter while the oats are still warm so the almond butter gets melty, and pour almond milk on top to cool it off, and enjoy.

Dumplings and the Sweet Soy Bowl from Luanne’s Wild Ginger

I visited one of my BFFs Raag in Brookyln last weekend for an early bday celebration. We grabbed lunch at Luanne’s Wild Ginger and it was excellent.

We started with dumplings (<3) and tempura. I’m not a huge fried-foods person, but I love me some doughy doughy dumplings.

For my entree, I got a sweet soy something bowl (can’t remember the actual name), with chewy brown rice, tangy-sweet-sour-spicy gluttonous soy medallions, steamed Japanese pumpkin, house-madee pickled veggies, and kale, and some yummy sauces. This was incredible. I’d eat it every day. Yum.

Happy birthday Raag!

Cinnamon Rolls

Made from scratch with Raag. We used this minimalist baker recipe. Delish! Cinnamon rolls are life.

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Mid-October Vegan Eats

October 14, 2018 by Katherine Baker 3 Comments

What is up lovely internet friends? I hope your October is chugging along in a spooky and spectacular fashion, full of treats and maybe some fun tricks too. Here are some recent eats that have entered my belly. Haven’t been the best at photoing food as of late, but here’s a bit of plant-based inspo for ya if you need it!

Pasta with Spicy Marinara:

Spaghetti with spicy tomato sauce was my favorite dinner growing up. Like for my birthday instead of going out to dinner I asked that my grandma (who was Italian and am amazing cook) made me spicy penne and salad. It was the.best.

Then I went off pasta for a while when I went to college. I’m not sure why. I think it was a combination of no pasta tasting as good as Oma’s pasta and the fact that prior to starting my nutrition education (started junior year) I was going through a phase of being overly concerned with eating more protein than I needed (hey, it happens: ‘health’ marketing is so effective and floods all our social media channels and ads!)

Anyways, I’m back on team spicy pasta with red sauce. I’ve been making it a lot lately. I had a Brandless gift card and although I’ve found their stuff to be overall hit-or-miss, I got a jar of their arrabbiata sauce and found it surprisingly good! So I’ve had it with some perfect foods chia noodles a couple of times and Banza a couple of times. Still obsessed with Banza. That hearty texture though! 🤤

Bagels with tofu cream cheese from Wonder Bagels

Good bagels are everything. Good whole wheat everything bagels with amazing tofu cream cheese are quite literally everything. Especially served toasty warm. A couple of local friends turned me on to this spot and now I’ve been dreaming about going back on the regular.

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Recent vegan eats: fall edition

September 27, 2018 by Katherine Baker Leave a Comment

Hello friends! It’s vegan eats roundup time. Today I’m sharing some eats from the past few weeks in hopes of inspiring some yummy planty goodness in your life. Hope you enjoy!

Cinnamon sugar toast:

Been on a kick lately. Who’s with me? Pure nostalgia in every bite. When I want something sorta sweet and Cathy after dinner these days cinnamon sugar toast is where it’s at. This is just TJ’s 100% whole wheat sandwich bread ($1.99) with vegan butter, cinnamon and sugar. Mmm yes please !

Pasta + Salad + Green Goddess dressing + roasted veggies, all in the same bowl:

Am I the only one who likes them together? Always have, always will. This is some Banza I boiled up and added some Trader Joe’s green goddess dressing + nutritional yeast, roasted broccoli + tomatoes (I took home some raw veggies that were leftover at an event a couple weeks ago and about to be thrown out), frozen peas, and hemp hearts on top of some mixed greens. Yum! Flavors + textures all the way.

Vegan oatmeal cookie dough protein bars:

So frickin’ yummy! Recipe is here, ICYMI.

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weekly eats roundups