Wedding Favors Made Easy
If you’re getting married this summer or fall, we’d love to help! We offer 2- or 4-piece vegan wedding favors in a variety of colored boxes to match your theme. We’re happy to personalize your order with a printed message and if you’re looking for a color you don’t see, just ask. 
We’re happy to special order boxes as long as we have enough advanced notice. Let us help you make your wedding or other special occasion compassionate, delicious, and worry-free!
I say “other special occasion” because, although we call them vegan wedding favors, they also make great party favors for showers, birthdays, or soirées of any variety.
From Allison’s Test Kitchen: Our First Wheat-Free Cookie Flavor
We’ve been working in Allison’s test kitchen for the last couple of weeks to perfect our first flavor of wheat-free vegan cookies! 
We’re getting close, and hopefully we’ll have the formula for new Wheat-Free Peanut Butter Cookies perfected in time for July’s monthly club shipments next week.
Creating wheat-free vegan cookies is no small task even for a master baker like Allison. But, since we have such high standards for the quality of our ingredients, and Allison insists that only the very best products make it out of the testing phases, even the duds are pretty tasty. I keep sneaking into the kitchen to steal cookies from the reject batches. 
Being taste-testers is part of everyone’s job here at Allison’s, and we love it! It’s one of the sweet perks to working at a vegan bakery.
Coconut Ice Cream with Sautéed Spiced Apples…YUM!
Just because she owns a rockin’ vegan bakery doesn’t mean that Allison’s creativity in the kitchen stops at brownies and confections. Many of her creations, like this awesome Coconut Ice Cream with Sautéed Spiced Apples, we would love to be able to share with you, but they just wouldn’t survive the shipping. 
So, we’ll tantalize you with this photo instead, and encourage you to try your own version of this decadent dessert.
Allison makes her own vanilla bean coconut ice cream, but for us mere mortals, there are several excellent vegan ice cream choices available in most health food stores. My favorite is Turtle Mountain’s Purely Decadent Made with Coconut Milk. As for the Sautéed Spiced Apples, here’s Allison’s recipe:
What to use…
4 Gala or Fuji Apples
1 tablespoon lemon juice, freshly squeezed
1 teaspoon non-hydrogenated vegan margarine
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon mace
1/8 teaspoon cardamom
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
…and how
1. Wash, peel, core, and slice the apples into 1/4-inch thick slices. in a large bowl, toss with lemon juice and set aside.
2. Over medium-high heat, place a large skillet. Add margarine, spices, salt, and prepared apples. Saute for 5 minutes. Reduce heat and cover. Simmer for 15-20 minutes, or until soft.
3. Serve over your favorite vegan ice cream.
That’s it, just few easy steps! You don’t have to own a vegan bakery to make outrageous desserts for yourself and your friends!
Weekly Wrap-up: Blog Mania
Welcome to the weekly wrap-up. This week we had a lot of buzz on our blog for the Father’s Day Giveaway and chose a winner on Wednesday. Congratulations again, Lori! Allison’s blog post yesterday, “Where do you get your protein?” also got several retweets. All this attention to our blog made me realize that there are a few specific veg blogs that I check everyday, no matter how busy the ‘interwebs’ are.
These are blogs that always have the latest and greatest info, some of them share super interesting info and others are just plain hilarious. I wanted to share with you some of my faves. Here they are in no particular order:
VeganSaurus!
Girlie Girl Army
Ecorazzi
The Discerning Brute
This Just In
Café VegNews
Eco-Vegan Gal
Gone Raw
These are just a few of the thousands of helpful, educational, funny, and interesting veg-related blogs out there today, but they happen to be at the top of my personal must-read list. What’s your go-to veg blog for recipes, helpful tips, fashion, etc?
Join Allison’s Gourmet on Facebook and Twitter today!
That’s all for now; have a great weekend!
Where do you get your protein?
I’ve been asked this question so many times since becoming vegan (heck, even when I became vegetarian!) that I’ve lost track. 
This seems to be such a big concern that I want to touch briefly on a few of the issues and possibly allay some fears. A friend of mine recently answered this questions by saying, “The short answer is ‘everywhere’!” In fact, you may be surprised to know that most plant foods contain protein.
If you eat high-quality, nutritious, plant-based foods in standard portions, it’s likely that you are getting enough protein, especially if you live in a developed country. 
The source of this protein confusion is that the RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for protein is based on animal sources of protein, which are digested differently from plant foods. Some of my favorite healthy and delicious foods include organic greens: kale, collards, spinach; organic grains: quinoa, brown rice; and organic beans: pink beans, lentils and garbanzos.
In the US, most people eat too much protein. Take a look at some of the most common health problems in our society and you’ll see that they all point to over-consumption of animal products: heart disease, stroke, high cholesterol, osteoporosis, kidney disease, obesity, cancer and more. Even the American Dietetic Association acknowledges the benefits of a veg diet!
I suspect there are more people who are deficient in dark leafy greens than in protein. I love this ANDI (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) chart from Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s website. After seeing this, I immediately boosted our family’s kale intake and as a result, I am the lucky Mama of a toddler who LOVES kale.
It’s easy to get enough protein on a vegan diet and many top athletes do just that. Take a look! If they can get their nutritional needs met on a vegan diet, I’m confident that those of us who aren’t professionals are perfectly fine. If you wish to delve more deeply into this topic, information abounds on the web, making it easy to get an in-depth education on this topic.
