Recipe- Yoga Soup

Today's recipe is from Michelle of Sticks In Stones. She has it posted on Vegweb, where it received a lot of postive reviews!



Yoga Soup

broth:
2 vegan broth cubes (veg, mushroom, fake chicken, etc)
4 cups of water

Soup Ingredients:
1/2 cup shelled frozen edamame
4-6 vegan frozen Asian dumplings or pot stickers
equivalent of 1 cup of rice noodles/rice stick
1 cup frozen broccoli
handful of chopped dark greens: spinach, kale, or chard

Optional additions:
soy sauce or tamari
hot chili oil, sesame oil
lime juice
ginger - pureed, thinly sliced or minced

Directions:
Boil the water on high in a medium sized pot and dissolve the cubes in the water.
Add the edamame and dumplings. Stir in a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce or tamari and the ginger.
Bring water to boil again. Cook for about 5 minutes.
Add the broccoli. Cook for another minute at medium heat.
Turn off the heat and add the rice noodles, making sure they are completely covered by liquid. Keep the pot on the burner to keep the soup hot, but not at a boil.
Let the pot sit for about 10 minutes on the burner or until the noodles are fully cooked, adding chopped greens to the pot to steam for the last few minutes.
Ladle into bowls, topping with chili oil, sesame oil and a squeeze of lime juice.
other additions: - thinly sliced or shredded carrot - miso (added to the bowl of soup) - sesame seeds sprinkled on top - chopped scallions - green beans instead of, or in addition to, broccoli
I make this soup every Tuesday after my yoga class - it is very fast, easy and filling. Enjoy!

Serves: 2
Preparation time: 15 minute

THREE Team Treasuries!!!

Three wonderful members snagged treasuries today. Thank you so much to all!! Please check each one out and don't forget to leave a comment and click on each item!

Paws In The Sun made this one.

Pink Bubble grabbed this one.

This Is It! Creations made this one.

Welcome to this week's new members!

We have three new members this week that I'd like to welcome to the team-

Lemon St. Photography
Sebo
Dang Argyle

Please give them a warm welcome and take a look at all of the wonderful things they have in their shops!

Recipe- Carob Brownies

Today's recipe is from Erica of Sierra Pelona Crochet. She worked hard at perfecting this recipe, so any fan of brownies would be sure to love these!

Carob brownies

Sift together:
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup roasted carob powder
1/4 cup Sucanat
1/4 tsp. salt
1 Tablespoon flax seeds, ground

Mix together:
2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 cup oil (I use walnut oil)
1/4 cup water, or soy / rice / oat / almond / hempseed milk

Combine together and put into an 8" X 4" loaf pan. Bake at 300ºF for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on wire rack.

Variations: Instead of vanilla, use 1 tsp. peppermint extract (my personal favorite) or 1 tsp. orange extract (DH's favorite).

Congratulations My Zoetrope!

Michelle of My Zoetrope wrote a wonderful article about her journey to veganism which was published in The Storque yesterday. The article has received a huge amount of positive responses and even more, several people that responded are looking into veganism!

This is what our team is all about- doing positive, non-aggressive outreach with vegan education. Thank you so much to Michelle for writing about her personal experience and sharing it with everyone!

Recipe- Easy Vegan Soft Serve Icecream

Today's recipe was submitted by Nicole of Late July Photography. I can say from personal experience that this is quite good!

Easy Vegan Soft Serve Icecream

Bunch of bananas frozen
Carob chips
Table spoon of nut butter (I like almond butter)
*optional nuts or chunks of vegan candy

In a food processor take bananas frozen and place one or two in at a time. At first it will be a little choppy but it will smooth out, the icecream will start to form, into a creamy thick soft serve. Add in the nut butter, carob chips or whatever else. If you don't want your carob chips chopped up add them at the end. DO NOT OVER MIX or else it will get like pudding and the bananas will get too warm. This is a great snack for when I'm needing my sweet tooth filled but don't want the extra sugar; its all packed with potassium. I get creative and add fruit, whatever I feel like. It has JUST the taste of soft icecream... its delicious! It doesn't freeze well like ice cream so only make enough for what you plan to eat right now :)

The Storque featured us!!

Last week I was thrilled when Etsy contacted me to let me know that Vegan Etsy would be the first team featured in The Storque. What an honor for us! Yesterday, the article was posted and received an overwhelming amount of positive, supportive comments from many. Along with the feature was a front page treasury, which not only caught a lot of people's eyes but also brought us some new members!
I'd like to thank Etsy for featuring us and give a big thanks to all of our members that help to make this team successful. Nothing is too small when it comes to participation, so anything that anyone does is very much appreciated. Whether it is using our team tag, mentioning us in your store, posting about us on your website, creating a treasury, being active on our message board or any number of other things that help to promote us, it's all so helpful. You're all wonderful!

Clearing up the confusion- veganism & tagging

Neva of Neva Jewelry and Art wrote a wonderful piece about veganism and tagging items appropriately that I wanted to share with everyone. We originally submitted it to Etsy so that it could be published in The Storque, but unfortunately another person had already written a short piece on tagging, so administration felt that the topic was already covered. Neva's piece goes into depth with it much more, so I'm hoping that this helps to clear up some misunderstandings and confusion when it comes to what is and isn't vegan. As always, if anyone has any questions about veganism or if you're wondering if something is vegan, please feel free to contact us. You can send me a convo through my shop or post a comment here. Also, please check out our vegan information links on the right sidebar of this page. Lots of good resources are listed!

As a vegan and an artist, crafter, do-it-yourselfer, and all around nerd, I love ETSY. I like buying unique items. I like finding handmade, no-exploitive-labor-involved products like soaps on ETSY. I would have to buy soap anyway, and it's great to have the chance to buy a unique handmade soap on ETSY.

However, I have a great frustration. I've searched ETSY for vegan products and have found products that aren't vegan labeled as vegan. This is annoying to everyone involved. As a buyer I have to read through pages of erroneous search results to find what I'm looking for, sometimes having to open each listing and check the ingredients. I think I've just found the exact soap I've been looking for, but wait there's goat's milk in it. For sellers it's difficult because they think their products are vegan, they just don't have a clear understanding of what that means.

The term vegan, when applied to soap, baked goods, or any product means there are no animal ingredients or components, and that animals were not used in the creation of the item.

I'm an ethical vegan and I've been vegan for other thirteen years, and I was vegetarian for five years before that. To me, veganism helps to make the world a better place. I eat foods and use products which don't contain any animal derived ingredients. My main motivation is a desire to not directly hurt animals, to limit the harm I do in the world. With all the attention on global warming, we've learned that animal agriculture causes forests to be cleared, generates carbon emissions, and pollutes land and water. Using items made from plants instead of animals takes fewer resources, because to raise animals we must feed them plants, grains and legumes over their lifetimes. I also view animals as having their own lives, interests, and purposes. I don't feel animals were put on the planet for me to use. Rather than viewing other species as inferior, I see them as different, distinct, but no less valuable. For these reasons I choose to be vegan.

Other vegans might have other inspirations, some do it for the animals, like me, others do it for health, many do it for the environment. Most vegans value all of these reasons. But the term "vegan: to tag a product means only one thing: that the product is completely free of animal products and was not made in a way that used or exploited animals at all. This is short hand that people can trust. Some people searching for vegan products might not be vegan necessarily, but might want a vegan product due to allergies to milk or eggs for example. Some people who aren't vegan might search for vegan items as gifts for vegan friends. The label needs to be accurate and consistent or else customers won't find what they're looking for.

Sellers might be confused and think that vegan means organic, or that it's ok to use "humane" animal products and still call them vegan. This is not the case. If you knitted a sweater using only the fur you combed painlessly from your own dog, you're to be admired for your thrift and resourcefulness, but the sweater can't be labeled vegan. Local honey is no more vegan than any other honey. Likewise even animal products that are obtained by finding them long after the animal is gone, are not vegan. Vegans don't use bone for example, so even if the bone used in your jewelry was found lying in the woods, possibly years old, it's not vegan. Some people think that vintage items made from animals can be considered vegan because they are so old and the animals may have died more than 50 years ago, but these items still cannot be called vegan.

I'm not using the term judgmentally here, merely factually. It's a label that denotes no animal products of any kind, and as a label it will help your customers find what they're looking for, but only if it's used correctly.

Sometimes people who aren't vegan don't give much thought to where the materials they use come from and so are surprised to find that something isn't vegan. I'm going to give you a cheat sheet below to help you see what can't be called vegan. But a good rule to think about is if your material came from an animal at all, it isn't vegan.