Veg Honeymoon Awesomeness

So Eric decided that for the length of our honeymoon, he would keep vegetarian. I don't think he really looked at it as a sacrifice even though he is an omnivore. After all, the Northwest is very vegetarian-friendly and we ate at some amazing vegetarian/vegan restaurants! So I didn't take photos of them all but here were the highlights of where we ate.

First stop was Portland, Oregon. What a great city! We loved it here. Portland is a compact and really friendly city, a town that attracts all sorts of people from hikers to bikers to dog lovers to vegans! Yes, a vegan-friendly city. Portland is the home of the world's first vegan mini-mall. This mini-mall is home to Food Fight, an all vegan grocery, along with Herbivore, a vegan clothing store, a tattoo artist who only uses vegan inks, and Sweet Pea, a yummy vegan bakery. We visited all of the above (with the exception of the tattoo artist). We shared a yummy cookie at Sweet Pea and bought a couple things at Food Fight. Would have bought most of the store if we didn't need to worry about stuffing it all into already-overstuffed suitcases! I thought their sign was so funny! Can you read what it says on the door?


We had dinner at Blossoming Lotus on our first day in Portland. Though it just looks like a tiny cafe in a yoga center, they actually have amazing food! All vegan and lots of it is raw too. Even vegan soft-serve! We had some amazing raw chilled avocado soup here.


Lunch on day #2 was at Karam, a Lebanese restaurant. We had lunch here with Eric's former coworker who moved out to Portland a couple years ago. This was a good place to eat and veg. friendly.

We had to make reservations to get a table at Andina, a lively Peruvian restaurant. Neither one of us had ever eaten Peruvian before and we were eager to try it. The food was amazing! Plus the restaurant has a separate vegetarian menu with several vegan options.

Another Portland favorite was the Vita Cafe, a mostly vegetarian diner-like restaurant. Here we had some awesome "buffalo wings," and I had a tempeh reuben. I think Eric had the seitan cheesesteak. Oh, and their vegan caesar salad rocked too.

We stopped into Veganopolis for a vegan milkshake. Veganopolis is a vegan cafeteria/restaurant. Unfortunately, we didn't get to try anything else there though.


Next stop: Seattle! Our first night here, we walked 1 mile (uphill!) to Carmelita's , a great vegetarian Mediterranean restaurant. Food here was great and they had a lovely patio which we ate on.

The next day we had dinner at Vegetarian Bistro, an Asian restaurant in Chinatown. We very much enjoyed the food here. The "Mongolian beef" reminded me of pepper steak, an old favorite from my pre-vegetarian days (many, many years ago)! Tofu with mushrooms was tasty and how often can a vegetarian/vegan order the won ton soup at a Chinese restaurant?

Our favorite Seattle restaurant, hands-down, had to be Cafe Flora. According to their website, "Cafe Flora's award winning menu features modern and sophisticated vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free cuisine that is inspired by international culinary traditions and created with local, organic and sustainable ingredients." In fact, we liked it here so much that we ate here twice! Loved the vegan caesar salad and the vegan portobella french dip. The Thai skewers were pretty good too. Eric had some tacos that he really liked here and some tasty coconut tofu with lime sauce.

Before heading North to the Cascades, we had lunch with Betty Tisdale at Tamarind Tree, a Vietnamese restaurant. I haven't eaten a whole lot of Vietnamese food before, but boy, was it tasty!

I'm skipping ahead to Vancouver now because there isn't much to say for anything we ate on the road or in the Cascades region. However, we did stop at a farm stand for some fresh berries. Ever hear of Cascadian Farm? You've probably seen their organic products in the supermarket. We had some fresh blueberries and I had a soy smoothie from their stand.

We loved Vancouver, but I can't say the restaurants we ate at were all that remarkable. We had some good Indian food and enjoyed Hell's Kitchen. The Szechuan green beans were tasty and we liked their thin crust pizzas (mine was without cheese) and beer selection.

Our last stop, Victoria, had a great selection of vegetarian restaurants. We ate at Rebar on our first night here. This was a delicious choice!

After our whale watching excursion the next day, we ate lunch at Green Cuisine's extensive and all-vegan buffet! Wow! Of course, when you are paying by the pound, it comes out to be tres expensive too! But worth it!

We decided to do take-out for dinner after a long, exhausting day! Vegan pizza from The Joint Pizzeria!

Be sure to check Eric's blog for his writeup of wine and beer tasting!

We're home!

We're home from our honeymoon! Had an amazing time! I have lots to blog about but in the meantime, here's a couple more wedding pics...

Mr. and Mrs. Strauss!!!

Eric and the Oakland Raiders garter!

With my cousins--Laurie, Kirsten (girlfriend of cousin) and Andrea, one of my bridesmaids

One Week Anniversary

Well, today is our one week anniversary. Yup, we're officially married. Everything went wonderfully and almost all as planned! We're enjoying our honeymoon and will be posting pics when we have time! Portland was wonderful and tonight is our last night in Seattle.

Anyway, here's a photo from Josh Lynn, our amazing photographer. There's a few more here. Jenn posted some photos on her blog too...

My New Rice Cooker

A couple weeks ago, Eric and I received a package in the mail. It was a wedding gift from a friend of Eric's father. He sent us a rice cooker! I never thought I needed a rice cooker until a few months ago when I heard about this one.

Our rice cooker is a Zojirushi model. Yes, it's Japanese. The coolest thing is this--it uses "fuzzy logic." That means it changes the temperature automatically in order to cook the perfect rice. It constantly adjusts and then it's done when it sings a song. Really. It plays songs in midi-type format. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star when it starts and some other song when it's done. It's so cute! And it makes good rice! I'm trying my hand at steel cut oats this morning.

My mother would probably tell me that I'm bringing bad luck upon myself by using a wedding gift before the wedding. But I don't care! I am using it anyway!

The Bachelorette

Yup, that's me with the goofy hat. Last Saturday was my bachelorette party. We had so much fun!!! Eight of us girls took a limo into New York, and let me tell you, the limo ride alone was half the fun! By the time we got to where we were going, we were all pretty buzzed!

We met three more friends at Lucky Cheng's for dinner, drinks and fun with drag queens. After dinner, we sang karaoke with a live band. It was awesome, but a lot more difficult than traditional karaoke.

Here's another fun photo. This is after the drag queens pushed my face into the cake.
We're now 13 days away from the big day, which explains my very infrequent postings! But we're almost there. The wedding plans are just about complete--we're now enjoying the process of planning the honeymoon! Eric and I are looking forward to exploring the Pacific Northwest including all of the awesome vegetarian restaurants!

26 Days

I have photos on my camera of things I'd like to blog about--like the best foccacia bread ever. Yes I baked it, and that's according to my family. Or my cute as anything niece Kayla who is five months old now.

I'm not working but I'm crazy busy. Yes, 26 days until the big day. That means most of my time is spent making phone calls to vendors, ordering last minute gifts and other things. I can't believe how fast it's coming up. I've got so much to do and I'm really trying to be very organized about everything which is not my nature.

So I hope all of you can forgive my infrequent bloggings as of lately. Things will get calmer around here after the wedding or so I hope.

Week Gone By

Well, the first week of summer break has flown by. Much of the time was spent at home doing stuff around the house. Norton and Pumpkin like to hang out on the deck when they have nothing else to do.

It was a busy week too though. Tuesday, I went with my dad to see Ringo Starr and the All-Star Band. They are amazing to see if you ever have the opportunity. Great, great show. I loved when they did Yellow Submarine!

Thursday, Eric and I had a two hour meeting with the dj down in Red Bank to finalize music choices for the wedding. After our meeting, we had lunch at No Joe's Cafe, a coffee house with a menu. I was a bit disappointed with what I ordered. I settled on the grilled veggie salad--the menu description reads an array of fresh, grilled vegetables served over greens with a sesame ginger vinaigrette. Well my salad was lettuce, grilled yellow squash and sprouts. It was fine, but I wouldn't call yellow squash an array of grilled vegetables. But it was okay, because I wanted to save my appetite for a smoothie anyway. We went to Smoothie King next and I had a fabulous smoothie with mango, papaya, soy protein and other fruits. It was delicious!

After smoothies, I headed up to David's Bridal for my first fitting. Woo hoo! The dress was huge! It needs to be taken in a whole size! I guess that is what happens when you lose 20 pounds before your wedding!

Wednesday night, I made Ethiopian lentils. We love our Ethiopian lentils! It's a cold lentil salad with a chopped jalapeño, onion, parsley and the dressing is dijon mustard and lemon juice (or vinegar). I love this salad and I ate it in wraps all week. Sorry, I took pictures but they didn't come out good for some reason.

Last night, my cousin came over for dinner with her baby. Vincent is now four months old and is getting so big. He's such a cutie! We had a yummy dinner--a big salad with miso-tahini dressing (dressing from VCon), buffalo tofu, zucchini chips and steak fries. I attempted to make the peach upside down cake from Fat Free Vegan with my huge supply of plums, but I sort of screwed up on little part and we ended up with a very tasty plum cake trifle.

Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend!

Fajitas, Margaritas and Chocolate Soft Ice Cream

It was a wonderful weekend. This was the first weekend in ages where we didn't have 500 things to do! Friday was my last day of school and it was a happy day! I will miss my third graders who "graduated" and will spend the next four years at the middle school. It's nice to see them grow up in front of my eyes--some of these kids I worked with since the beginning of first grade. But it's sad to see them go.

But now its summer. Saturday morning, Eric and I ran errands. I was eager to check out our local farmer's market now that the season has started. However, there was only one farm stand open. We bought some local blueberries for an astronomical price but did get a good deal on a humongous head of red leaf lettuce! After that, we did our weekly food shopping.


Saturday night, we decided to go with a Mexican theme. I tried out my new cast-iron skillet and made portobello mushroom fajitas. They were yummy! First I marinated the mushrooms, onions, and peppers with a spice marinade that I found here. In our fajitas were mushrooms, onions, peppers, avocado slices, tofutti sour cream, and salsa. With our fajitas, we had some brown rice and deliciously spicy pinto beans. I found the recipe on Fat Free Vegan, though I modified it some...the beans came out too liquidy, so I drained some of the liquid, added some cornstarch and extra spices.



After dinner, we had margaritas. I combined fresh lime juice, agave, water, tequila, and shook. Then we drank. Then we drank some more later that evening--wine for me and Bailey's for Eric. We decided to walk over to our friends' home a couple blocks away to play some board games after their four children had gone to bed.



Sunday morning, we met with the rabbi for a final meeting before the wedding, then picked up a couple wedding-related items at the Judaica store, and got Eric fit for his tux. Fun stuff! Then we got to the spend the rest of the day at home--organizing, relaxing, and playing video games. Oh and chasing a mouse. We have a bit of a mouse problem. This was the 6th mouse we've found in over a month. Pumpkin killed the first three. We chased the last three out of the house. Not an easy task, mind you.

Dinner was some of Veganomicon bbq tofu (I cheated and used store bought sauce cause we already had it) and a big salad. Then we decided to use Eric's favorite shower gift that he begged his mother to buy me--a soft ice cream maker. We made some soy chocolate ice cream. It was pretty darn good!

Six weeks and six days

Yup, that's how long it is until Eric and I tie the knot. We had a very productive weekend as far as the wedding checklist goes. We ordered groomsmen gifts. Check! Ordered yarmulkes for ceremony. Check! Picked up toasting flutes and cake cutting set. Check!

Saturday, I spent the afternoon with my mom and sister. We had lunch at Chipotle, which was very good. Similar to Baja Fresh or Q'doba but everything is fresh! Then we went to see Sex and the City which we all enjoyed.

Saturday night, I made some raviolis I picked up at Whole Foods not too long ago. The brand is Rising Moon organics and we had the artichoke olive flavor, which was also vegan. However, they also have regular cheese ones too. They were delicious and pretty low in calories!

Sunday, we celebrated Father's Day with our families. Eric and I took our parents' out to lunch to Krogh's, a local bar and grille with yummy food! They have an awesome bean taco salad, which I love! Plus, its right across from Lake Mohawk, so we enjoyed a beautiful walk after lunch.

After our delicious lunch, we weren't very hungry for dinner Sunday night. So I made the marinated home fries from the Made From Scratch cookbook. I wrote more about that cookbook here. Sorry, no pic but they were delicious. Diced the potatoes, then boiled, then marinated with tamari-oil-mixture with onions, then sauteed with lots of garlic and onions and peppers, topped with FYH soy cheddar. Delicious!

Happy Shower!!!

(Photo: my mom, then me, Eric and his mom)

We left the house Saturday mid-morning to attend a high school graduation party--a month before the actual graduation. I suspected it wasn't really a graduation party we were heading to. And, I was right. It was my shower!

My mother and the bridal party held the shower at a nice Italian restaurant and everything was wonderful. It was so nice to see so many of our friends and family. It was a lot of fun and we got a lot of great gifts too!

I was exhausted when we got home that night but Eric had one more surprise in store for me. He had a shower gift for me too! Eric bought me five vegan cookbooks--Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, Vegan with a Vengeance, The Joy of Vegan Baking, Vegan Italiano and The Asian Vegan Kitchen.

Sunday morning, I tried out the waffles recipe in The Joy of Vegan Baking, though varied them by making them cinnamon apple waffles. Later on that morning, I followed the basic chocolate cupcake recipe in VCTOTW but added some chopped up thin mint cookies to make mint chocolate cupcakes to bring over my brother's house for his birthday. Yummy! And I loved using my new mini food processor and KitchenAid stand mixer too!

Cotton Candy and Veggie Heaven

Today we had our annual carnival at school. The kids love it; there are games, face painting, cotton candy, popcorn, and inflatable jumpy things and slides. Us teachers love being outside for hours while the kids run around on sugar highs. For real--one of my third grade female students had twelve cotton candies!!! TWELVE!!! And then we are supposed to teach them all afternoon long after this insanity?

The carnival was set up right outside my classroom so well before 9:00 this morning, the aroma of popcorn was drifting through my windows. So when I finally was able to go outside today at 10:00, I had my morning snack of fresh popcorn (chock ful of coconut oil!) and cotton candy.

After school, I spent a couple hours in Montclair, a great town. I lived there a few years back so it's always nice to go back. My first stop was The Bread Company, a tiny organic bakery blocks from my old apartment. I had only visited this bakery maybe twice in my six months of living in the neighborhood, but I remembered their yummy breads! Well, the woman from the bakery actually remembered me, even though I hadn't been there in at least four years! So most of their breads and sweets are vegan and many are gluten-free as well. After much deliberation, I chose a chocolate ginger treat to bring home to share with Eric for tomorrow morning's breakfast.

After perusing Montclair's great independent bookstore, I decided to have dinner at Veggie Heaven, an all Vegetarian Chinese restaurant that I'd been wanting to try for a while. It did not disappoint--I had tofu with mushrooms and brown rice with a little extra spice and it was delicious!

The real reason for my being in the area was to take a drive to the next town over to pick up our finished wedding invitations. And they came out perfect! I am so pleased and impressed! If you're looking for some custom invitations, check out Hyland Creative Design. Melissa did a wonderful job.

Well, I'm exhausted after my super-long day. But it was a good one!

(I forgot to mention that I sampled some grapefruit at Whole Foods today. I always thought I hated grapefruit. But it was tangy and I liked it! Yay!)

Day at the Shore

This morning, Eric and I headed down to the Point Pleasant Boardwalk to play some skeeball, ride the rides--and take our engagement photos! We met our wedding photographer, Josh Lynn, down there--and we had a blast taking the photos! I am so excited because Josh posted a few of them on his blog already! Look here!

While we were down there, we had lunch at Kaya's Kitchen in Belmar. Kaya's is a vegetarian eatery which used to be Veggie Works. I had eaten there often while I was in college and it was a real treat to be back today. We had the most delicious vegan buffalo wings (karma wings)!

Thanks, Eric, for letting me choose vegan restaurants two days in a row!!!!

Out West we go!

This week, I finally began officially planning our honeymoon. I booked our airfare and most of our lodging. Here is our plan:

8/4 Fly out of Newark into Portland, Oregon on an early evening flight. We'll get to Portland at 9pm Monday night and we'll be staying in Portland through Friday.

8/8 After driving to Mount Hood, we'll head up to Seattle, where we will stay until Monday.

8/11 We'll spend this night at North Cascades National Park. We'll we'll actually be staying at an inn nearby. North Cascades looks gorgeous! There are glaciers and all!

8/12 British Columbia, we arrive! We'll spend two nights in Vancouver.

8/14 Two nights in Victoria on Vancouver Island. We'll be staying at an amazing little inn right by the ocean and a huge nature preserve.

8/16 Back to Seattle for one night.

8/17 Fly out of Seattle back home.

Using Trip Advisor, I was able to find some amazing bed and breakfasts for us to stay in. We will be going in a little over five months!

Wedding Registering Madness

I couldn't wait to begin the whole registering process back when we got engaged last Spring. Everything we had for the kitchen pretty much was either hand me downs from Eric's parents, my parents, college leftovers, and other stuff I got really cheap.

Our first registry was created at Williams-Sonoma. We figured it would be easy because it was a small store. We registered for a handful of things there. And we got some of them as engagement gifts.

Then we began a Fortunoff registry as oppose to a Macy's registry. My mom said Fortunoff was better. From visiting either store, they seemed the same to me. So we registered for our "fine stuff" at Fortunoff.

We registered for much of our everyday stuff at Bed Bath & Beyond.

We were done. Or so Eric thought. Then these things happened.

1. Martha Stewart came to Macy's!
2. I realized Macy's has a better website than Fortunoff.
3. Rumors began floating of Fortunoff going belly-up. (Okay, it seems as this point that Lord & Taylor is buying them out.)
4. I visited Crate & Barrel the other day, in search of the perfect everyday glasses, and decided we must register here!

So we decided to abandon the Fortunoff and Williams-Sonoma registry in favor of having only three registries--Crate & Barrel, Macy's, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

So yesterday, Eric and I went to Crate and Barrel to register there. It was amazing. We didn't argue. Not once. We always argue when it comes to registering. So if you're looking to buy us a gift, please don't shop at Fortunoff or Williams-Sonoma because you won't find much left there!

A Big Day

Well, today was a big day. Not JUST because the Giants won tonight's Superbowl.

Today marks the one year anniversary of my first date with Eric. One year ago today, I never would have believed it if somebody had told me I was going to marry that guy. It was a good date. I liked Eric's sense of humor. He seemed like a nice enough guy and we got along well.

The next day was Superbowl Sunday, but instead of watching the game, I was spending the day with a girlfriend. We made pizza and brownies and watched a movie instead. While I was there, I had gotten an email from Eric asking me out for another date.

I asked my girlfriend what she thought. Should I go out with him again? She and I decided, why not? First date went well. Might as well give it a try.

Tonight, I want to thank that dear friend. That first date turned out to be the love of my life.

And six months from today, we'll be married.

And wedding plans are moving along...yesterday we had our second premarital counseling session with the rabbi AND we picked out our wedding rings! We've found a new videographer since the whole Celebration Studios nightmare. And we've contracted somebody to design custom invites for us! Yippee!

Cat is out of the Bag

I didn't want to detail the scandal surrounding the previously mentioned wedding vendor. However, we got our money back and it's all over the news so I'm ready to spill the beans!

After Eric and I got engaged, one of the first things we made sure to do was find a photographer. We met with somebody from Celebration Studios, a tri-state wedding photography and videography company. Celebration was referred to me by a coworker whose daughter is getting married a month before we are. They were recommended to her by some other happy clients.

CS had many different locations all throughout NJ, NY and Philadelphia. We met with Karen Towerton from the Montclair office. She offered us a phenomenal package which included a videographer too! I should have realized it might be too good to be true.

The catch? If you pay up front, you get a 20% discount. The red flags should have popped up then. Over lunch that day, we decided to book this company. We were later able to choose our photographer based on an online gallery of some samples of different photographers' work. We then met him in person and were really excited about his style and thought he'd do a wonderful job shooting our wedding.

Things were fine until last month, while perusing message boards on The Knot, I came across some negative feedback about CS. I was shocked. The more I dug, the more information I unearthed. Brides and grooms, married for 1, 2, 3, even 4 years, still waiting for wedding albums, videos, proofs, all paid in full. Some turned in baby pictures to be used as a montage for their videos. Phone call after phone call, email after email, they were fed lie after lie. And by late fall, it was impossible to get a hold of anybody by phone.

Celebration Studios was going to be "new and improved," or so they claimed. They were just backlogged. Their design center was closed in order to restructure things, to make it better, they claimed. It was supposed to reopen January 2nd. However, on that day, a sign was on the door at the center in Clifton, promising a reopen by January 31st.

However, just a couple days later, there was a for lease sign hanging in the window.

It was that week, I started to really get frightened. I started spending every waking minute on the Wronged by Celebration Studios yahoo group. I found out CS stopped paying their photographers and videographers. Some are owed $10,000 or more. They quietly closed each and every office. Sales staff quit. Basicallly within the course of a week, there was nobody left working for this guy.

Except one office actually didn't close. Their Philadelphia office became Accent Studios. Marc Schwartz, the owner of CS, claims it's an unaffiliated business. Then why did it not only have an identical website until people caught on? Why is it owned by Marc's girlfriend, Shani Whittemore? Clients of CS claim that they booked with CS, yet their credit card statements say Accent.

Schwartz is claiming to have no money left. His lawyer says he's going to be filing bankruptcy. Then he won't have to pay back anybody. But where did all this money go? There were SO many shady dealings. It's been all over the news. Check out these links if you're curious.

By the way, we're sooo lucky that we disputed our charges with the credit card company. We got every penny back that we paid that scamming CS! Not everyone was so lucky though. Hundreds of brides and grooms may never see those pictures and albums they paid so much for. My friend was telling me about her coworker who hired CS to shoot her wedding this weekend. She paid up front. In cash. Even though she has retained a lawyer, she'll never see that money again. People have been filing criminal complants and there are a couple class action law suits that are forming against Schwartz.

And we found an awesome photographer to boot. We really did our research this time. His name is Josh Lynn and we can't wait for him to shoot our wedding!

Links

• The Star Ledger article
• NJ 12 TV report
• NBC news report
• CBS news story
  

What a week!

We've been ensconced in this madness for the past few days surrounding one of our wedding vendors. It's not something I can really talk freely about online, especially because we're disputing the charge with Visa now. We went with this particular vendor because they were highly recommended.

We paid up front for the services because we were offered a 20 % discount. We thought it was a great deal. And they were recommended and did great work.

Wow, how things change in a matter of months. After the CEO has been writing bad checks to employees and not giving clients what they have paid for, I think he'll be filing bankruptcy.

Keep your fingers crossed for us that Visa will follow through and give us our money back.

There's lots of chatter about this on The Knot as well as a yahoo group about it. It's just mind-boggling.

Thursday Thoughts

Lets start with the visit with the behaviorist. I think it went very well and I was very pleased with her. Over the course of a two hour visit, she and her tech observed Norton, caught some video, watched him play and asked lots of questions. The doc then sat down with me after over an hour of this in order to put together a plan. I'm feeling optimistic that things will improve.

1. We're doubling his one medication and tripling the other.

2. I'm working on desensitizing him to exit cues--picking up keys, putting shoes on.

3. I'm teaching him down and stay--two commands he never mastered.

4. Norton now has a "safety blanket." Its a blanket that he can lay on and good things will happen on it. He'll get petted and he'll get treats. Hopefully it'll work to "calm" him one day.

5. We need to use a visual cue when we leave. I ordered a lavender scented stuffed lab that I'll put on the table when we leave and put it away when we get home. Hopefully, it'll calm him and he'll see it and recognize that we're coming home.

6. We need to use a cd to desensitize Norton to gunshots and fireworks and thunderstorms.


We have another wedding this weekend. This one's in Pittsburgh. Eric's college friend is getting married.

Speaking of weddings...I picked out and ordered my wedding gown on Friday!!!!

Look What We Made!

Eric and I saved the bottle of wine we drank the night of our engagement. Then we made sand art so we can display it forever!

More Wedding Goodness

All things wedding, I know you're either intrigued by it all or nauseated. I love The Knot. All weddings, all the time. Check out our wedding page on the Knot. I'll be adding a picture to it very soon and more registry stuff when we get to it (because gifts will graciously be accepted)!