vegan columbus: vegan living in central ohio

So it seems that the Mr. and I will be moving to Athens, Ohio over the next several months. I'm not sure what's going to become of this website (I might continue to maintain it, or I might hand it off to a trusted individual, or it might become "Vegan Ohio" or something) but at least I don't worry so much about what will become of me. At least, not since I found the Veggin' Out in Athens blog. Also corroborating some of the restaurant recommendations is the vegan-friendly blog of omni grad student Jasmin, called Graduate Students Guide to Athens, Ohio. Incidentally they both make use of the same, very green, default Blogger layout. So far I can't personally vouch for their recommendations, but here's a quick list of what I've heard about so far:

So this will be my first Rosh Hashanah as a vegan. And to me, Rosh Hashanah means lots and lots of sweet noodle kugel, which in the past also meant loads of butter and cream cheese and egg noodles. Alas! So here's a few links to kugel recipes I scrounged up from the internet. I haven't tried any of them yet, but I'm sure I will soon enough. If you try any of these, post a comment saying how it turned out!

• Vegan noodle kugel at aura's kitchen ("health food" kugel? oxymoron. but this one does use loads and loads of tofu)
• Melody's Vegan Noodle Kugel (involves silken tofu in moderation, as well as apples and raisins. great for fall!)
• a post about noodle kugel at jewishvegan.blogspot.com/ (doesn't actually contain a recipe, but you could ask her real nice.)
• You could also try veganizing a conventional recipe, with Tofutti better than cream cheese or better than sour cream, Ener-G egg replacer, tofu, or bananas instead of eggs, Earth Balance for butter, and vegan wide noodles.
• If you have a vegan family kugel recipe passed down from vegan mother to vegan child along with the Jewish lineage since the time of Moses, this is the place to spill your family's carefully guarded secrets! Let the world in on your Bubbe's vegan kugel recipe in the comments.

Rad Dog will be at the Ohio Green Living Fayre at the Flying J Farm in Johnstown, OH serving their delicious vegan hot dogs and brats from 11am to 6pm.

I live within easy bike-riding distance of a Kroger, but not so close to any other grocery stores. However, I was driving to Meijer on occassion for awesome vegan Morningstar products such as their Chick'n meal starter strips.

Columbus now has its very own, real-live, all-veg hot dog stand! Opening Saturday, July 12th at 10 am in front of Patty Cake vegan bakery (3009 N. High St.).

Event info up on PattyCake's MySpace:
Rad Dog grand opening info!

I'm a little late to the game with this, but maybe someone will still find it useful. If you're planning a veg*an wedding, you might want to pick up June's issue of VegNews. It's got a 10-page feature on various couples' vegan weddings, including details of their reception menus, photos, and relevant highlights of their wedding experiences. These menus sound amazing, and there's tons of variety. (They do this feature every year, so you might also check out their back issues.)

(Also I personally was happy to read them because for some reason I'd been feeling like I need to keep everything somehow in a theme or matching. So I was pointlessly distressed about wanting pan-Asian finger food AND brunch-type food at my late morning wedding. Reading Marisa and David's (pp. 42) Asian-Mediterranean menu liberated me from the fear of culinary eclecticism!)

Here is a creepy PDF of a papercraft dinner. The meats, bowl, silverware, and carrots are all printed. Perhaps it would be a cute practical joke on someone that thinks vegetarians can't eat anything. The instructions are in Japanese, but you're smart; you can figure it out.

So everyone knows eBay is amazing. I just bought a wedding dress for $20 including shipping from eBay. But when I did a search for "vegan wedding shoe", it did that thing where it crossed out each word and said maybe if I tried without "vegan" or without "wedding" or without "shoe" in the search. Lame! Granted, you can always go to "normal" shoe stores and try to find labels and stuff. Which is fine for finding sneakers at Goodwill, but we're talking about flippin' weddings here! How hard can it be to find fancy-pants white shoes that necessitate no animal deaths?

Not that hard! Here are links to a few of the white/silver/otherwise vaguely wedding-ish in some way, vegan shoes I came across on the glorious Interwebz (click the image to go to each shoe's respective site):

Like alcohol distributors, perfumers are not required to list all their ingredients. Even if they do, it may be ambiguous and include undisclosed animal products. Many perfumes produced by big fashion houses and cosmetics companies are definitely tested on animals. In response to these concerns, the perfumistas at Basenotes recommended Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an independent company based out of North Hollywood, CA with a unique Gothic aesthetic and a dedicated cult following. This is perhaps due to BPAL's charming melodramatic literary descriptions of each startlingly unique fragrance.

Self-description from their about section:

RANT!, a delicious anti-establishment feminist local 'zine edited by a good friend of the vegancolumbus team, and fabulous feminist vegetarian, Stephanie Diebold, is out now! It features a short story/random anecdote by yours truly, a vegan taco recipe, and some other good stuff like a review of the PStyle and some feminist poetry and illustrations. It's also funded by ads from none other than our own wonderful sponsor, local webdesign masters Kosada Inc. (full disclosure: I work there and designed the ads too.)