Best Selling Vegan Products
Shojin's Caterpillar Roll
Jane and I are off to Montana for a week. Since it looks like vegan dining will be Taco Bell and The Pita Pit, we figured we'd get a quick fix from our favorite vegan restaurant, Shojin.
As always, dinner was fantastic. We started our dinner with our all time favorite, the Caterpillar Roll. When we first went vegan the idea of "vegan sushi" was a bit of a joke to us. Sushi was fish, and we had loved it. But let me assure you, we are converts. This roll starts with a base of Shojin's barbequed seitan and is topped with sliced avocado. YUM! We've tried other vegan sushi, but this is our absolute favorite.
Our next course was the Barbequed Seitan. It's sliced seitan with some kind of light barbeque sauce. In our opinion, Kimiko (Shojin's master chef) makes the best seitan. It's far and away better than any other we've ever eaten.
Shojin's Seitan Pepper Steak
One of the reasons we enjoy Shojin so much is that they are constantly changing their menu. They keep the core items, but add things as certain foods become seasonally available. Our main course was the Seitan Pepper Steak, which is one of those new things. It was delicious. If you haven't tried Shojin, and can get to Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, go... you won't be sorry.
So we're sated, and hopefully our expectations of our food options in Montana will be exceeded.
Click here for Shojin's website.
Best Selling Vegan Products
Zesty Lemon Tempeh-Tations
A little while ago we tried Lightlife's Tempeh-tations, Ginger Teriyaki flavor. As I mentioned in that post, Lightlife also had come out with two other flavors of the product. We recently tried those as well.
Jane is always on the lookout for new vegan products, especially convenience foods for the nights she isn't going to be cooking. We don't tend to eat a ton of pre-packaged foods, but having something you can heat up and have ready in 5 minutes has its appeal! The next flavor we tried was the Zesty Lemon. In our opinion, it was by far the weakest of the three, we wouldn't eat it again - and wouldn't recommend it.
BBQ Tempeh-Tations
We had the classic barbeque last week. As I've mentioned previously, Jane really doesn't care much for tempeh. She's always willing to give something new a try, but has come to expect little from it. Maybe the barbeque sauce is all she needed, but we both really enjoyed this product. Jane served it up with corn on the cob, red cabbage slaw, and our usual green salad.
So, if you're thinking of trying the lightlife tempeh, we both recommend the barbeque.
Nutritional Information:
Best Selling Vegan Products
We received a comment from one of our readers (hi Addie) questioning the validity of PETAs list of "I Can't Believe It's Vegan." She says she used to use that site as a reference tool, but has since learned that sugar is absolutely not vegan, and since it is in many of the products on their website, she feels that the list does not give an accurate portrayal of vegan products. "I researched the heck out of sugar to save those white Oreos for myself (an item listed on the site as Vegan), but finally had to just let them go 
." Well Addie, you can put your Oreos back on your shopping list.
Most refined white sugar is processed over bone char and that rules it out as a vegan product. However, there are sugars that are not. These are the brands of sugar we know to be vegan:
You can use these tidbits to help you navigate through the sugar aisle: Beet sugar is vegan. Raw sugars or turbinado are also vegan. Other acceptable vegan sweetners include:
C&H refines their sugar over bone char, so they are definitely not a vegan option. And supermarkets buy their private label sugars from a variety of refineries, so it is likely they are not vegan. Brown sugar is usually made from refined white sugar with molasses added. So if you know the manufacturer to use bone char in refining their white sugar, you can bet the brown sugar will not be vegan either.
Since the processing methods are not indicated on the packaging, it is very difficult for consumers to know which sugar is indeed vegan. And it becomes much more difficult to make that determination when buying packaged foods. If the ingredient list contains beet sugar or evaporated cane juice instead of "sugar", you're good to go. If the list says sugar, you have to decide for yourself. You can do the legwork and contact the individual manufacturer, but it's unlikely that you will get an honest answer. Most manufacturers source out sugar that is cheapest at the time, and so they don't even know how it was processed, also the sugar used may vary from batch to batch.
I trust Peta to have actually contacted the manufacturer and done the legwork. If they give a product their seal of approval, that is good enough for me. But then again, I'm not all that concerned with by-products (I do my best to avoid them, but don't make myself crazy about them. I do however strictly avoid milk byproducts especially caseine). Bone char is a cheap throw away. Once animals are no longer slaughtered for food, I would expect the refining of sugar to be done in some other manner. No one is going to raise animals for their bones. It wouldn't be economically viable.
Best Selling Vegan Products
Today is our two year vegan-versary. Over the past two years we've learned a lot about the positive health benefits of a vegan diet, about the benefits of being vegan on the environment, and about the horrific conditions in which livestock spend their entire lives. And while we may not be "perfect" vegans, we have found our stride and are quite confident that we will be vegan for the rest of our lives.
When we first went vegan, we experienced a considerable amount of trepidation. Would we be able to do this? Would we miss meat and dairy? Would we be any healthier? Would we be able to eat out again? I've blogged about many of these experiences, and you've shared your own with us, and on your blogs as well. I think most of us have found the transition to veganism to be far less painful, and much more rewarding than we could have anticipated.
The most unanticipated thing though, is our shift in thinking. There is no way we would be able to go back to a meat-centered diet. We went vegan for our health, we're staying vegan because we cannot conceive of eating meat again after learning how that meat is produced. (And some of you can say you told me so!)
