Recipe: Vegan Quinoa Sushi Salad

Like all of the best ones, this recipe came about completely by accident. It has since become one of my go-to recipes for weekday lunches. It's chock-full of protein, omega fats, and vitamin B12 - all that good stuff that vegans love!

Over the summer, I made these vegan sushi rolls for a friend's birthday picnic. It took a few practice rolls to get the process right. I tossed those practice rolls into a container and later had it as a snack. Turned out those sloppy, falling-apart rolls became an awesome salad. I decided to play around with the ingredients a little and came up with this recipe.

For my salad, I used a Florida avocado instead of the more common California avocado. Florida avocados are bigger and are sometimes labeled as "Lite" avocados or "Slimcados." They have fewer calories and fat per ounce than a California or Hass avocado. They're not as creamy, but the flavor of the Florida avocado is perfect and delicious in this salad.

There are a variety of packaged seaweed products available, but I found that the sushi-style nori sheets tasted best for this recipe. It really made the salad taste more like sushi. Seaweed is one of the few vegetarian sources of vitamin B12, which is often lacking in vegan and vegetarian diets.

The ingredient that really put this recipe over the top was the vegan "caviar." I'd been wanting to try it for a while so when I saw the Carviart on sale on Vegan Cuts, I was all over it! I had tried making my own vegan caviar or "roe" in the past using amaranth seed and beet juice (recipe here.) It lacked the salty flavor of the real thing. The Caviart comes a lot closer to the real deal.

You can sign up for a Vegan Cuts account if you want to try some for yourself. For more information about Caviart, check out this page.

Vegan Quinoa Sushi Salad

Quinoa Sushi Salad

Dressing:

• 4 tbsp rice vinegar
• 2 tbsp water
• 2 tsp honey
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp low sodium soy sauce

- Combine ingredients at set aside.

Salad:

• 1 cup of quinoa - rinsed well
• 2 cups water
• 1 Florida avocado, sliced
• 1 cucumber, sliced
• 2 tbsp sesame seeds
• 2 sheets of nori sushi, broken/chopped into 1" pieces
• vegan caviar

1. Cook the quinoa by combining it with the water and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook until quinoa is translucent. About 15 minutes. Allow to cool.
2. Add dressing to quinoa along with seaweed, and sesame seeds. Toss to combine.
3. Top with avocado, cucumber, and caviar.

Further reading
http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/difference-between-california-and-florida-avocados.aspx
http://www.livestrong.com/article/18578-health-benefits-eating-seaweed/
http://www.veganhealth.org/b12/plant#seaweeds
http://thebroccolihut.com/florida-vs-california-battle-of-the-avocado/

It's Giving Tuesday?

It's come to my attention that today is "Giving Tuesday." A day of giving is a welcome alternative to the more Get-Themed Black and Cyber days.

Today, I'll donate money to provide Lifestraws to children and families without access to clean drinking water (donate here) and drop off a trunk-load of clothes and winter coats to a Buffalo-area shelter. I'll also puruse the Giving Tuesday website for more ideas about how I can give to others today and every day. I hope you'll do the same.

The Big Chew in Erie County

Here in Western New York, November 6th is The Big Chew! So after you do your civic duty and VOTE today, go out for dinner and help animals. Today when you dine at a participating restaurant or business, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the SPCA of Erie County!

 

 

Click here for more information and a list of participating vendors.

Donate Your Unwanted Halloween Candy

I hope you all had a safe and fun Halloween! Whether you didn't get as many trick-or-treaters as you expected, your kids have left you with their least favorites, or you just don't want it around for you to eat, you probably have some candy you want to get rid of after Halloween. That candy doesnt have to end up in a landfill OR in your belly!

There are a few great organizations that will accept your unwanted Halloween candy.

• The Halloween Candy Buy Back is a partnership between Operation Gratitude and dental care providers around the country. Donors can bring candy to any participating dentist's office in exchange for various oral hygeine products and services. The candy (often along with dental care products from the dentists) is then distributed to U.S. troops overseas via care packages.
• Operation Shoebox is another organization that sends care packages to troops overseas.
• You might also consider donating to your local food bank.
• A local Ronald McDonald House should also accept the candy.

Help by Gaming

I'm not big into video games. My inner- (okay outer) nerd is into enough dorky stuff. But a lot of people love playing games online, and that's great. Here are a few games that let you help worthy causes just by playing!

• Free Rice is a vocabulary game that donates rice to those in need through the World Food Programme.
• Games that Give offers a whole list of games you can play, all of which let you give to charitable organizations by playing.
• Joy Kingdom lets you allocate money to organizations that help animals. Ellen Degeneres helped to develop this one.
• WeTopia is a Facebook game that helps real children while you play.

Where Does the Money Really Come From?

These games cost nothing to play, so who's actually donating? From what I can tell, the giving structure for these kinds of games is pretty simple. Advertisers pay money to have their ads featured on the game pages, or other sponsorship and marketing platforms, and that money pays for the games' development and the donations. So really when you're playing, you're just telling the advertisers where to donate their money. I'd prefer that the donors just give the money outright, but from a marketing perspective I can see that it's a great way to connect with an audience to increase awareness about a brand's charitable giving. Sojo Studios is the developer behind both WeTopia and Joy Kingdom. According to this article from Kotaku,

"Sojo's formula is pretty simple. Half of the profit from in-game purchases and advertising revenue is applied towards the various charities. Through choices made in game, you decide how your portion of that is distributed." 

And the Games that Give website states "GamesThatGive combined gaming with charitable giving to create the leading platform for engaging brands' customers in charitable activities."

Not into games either?

Care2's click to donate programs are even simpler. You literally just click to allocate funds to certain organizations. I like to add the links to my various online profiles and email signatures to encourage people to click!

No More Junk Mail

I recently started receiving huge amounts of travel catalogs. I'm talking multiple reams of paper worth of literature about visiting Colorado. I don't have any immediate plans to visit the Centennial State, so I'm not sure why they've been sending me so much literature. But it kept on coming, and filling my recycling bin. Seemed wasteful to me, so I decided to look into it.

Over 100 million trees are cut down annually to produce junk mail. That's a lot of deforestation! Unfortunately, most of that mail goes directly into landfills, contributing more than 4 million TONS of paper waste every year.

The average person receives about 40 lbs of paper junk mail every year. So imagine the positive impact that one person cancelling their junk mail can have on the planet!

Stopping junk mail is a great way to help the planet AND stop the annoying junk from showing up in your mail box. Here are some tools to help you do it.

• The PaperKarma App - I'm presently obsessed with this (free) mobile app. Take a quick photo of the junkmail in your mailbox, and the app takes care of the rest. The folks behind the app identify where the junkmail is coming from, and contact the sender to have you removed from their lists. Your profile can contain multiple addresses so you can use it for mail you receive at home, at work, etc. The whole thing is BRILLIANT.
• DMA Choice is a service offered by the Direct Marketing Association. It allows you to manage what kind of junk mail you receive.
• OutOutPreScreen is the official opt-out site for the consumer credit reporting industry. You can opt-out online to stop receiving mail from credit cards and insurance companies for five years, or print out and mail in the opt-out election form to have the mail stop permanently. You can also call 1-800-5-OPTOUT 
• Catalog Choice offers a product that will block large data brokers from selling your contact information.
• 41 Pounds is a paid service that contacts marketing companies on your behalf to remove you from major mailing lists.
• The Native Forest Network has a great list of other resources for getting your name off of junk mailing lists.

The PaperKarma App tracks all of your opt-out requests.

You Mailbox Needn't Be Empty!

Everyone loves getting mail. The advent of email and paperless billing is making your mailbox pretty obscolete. If you don't want to open an empty mailbox every day, here's a way to get something awesome in the mail that ISNT junk. Subscribe to the Paris Letters by my friend Janice. You'll receive beautifully illustrated letters from her about life and love in Paris. I'm pretty sure these will never make their way into a landfill!

Small Ones Surround Us Every Day

"Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day."  -Sally Koch

Welcome to Small Ones Surround Us. I'm here to share small steps I'm taking, and steps I hope readers will take, to make every day a little bit better for people, animals, and the planet. That means seeking out responsible fashion, buying and cooking food that's better for us and the planet, and teaching others about how they can make small changes of their own.

Sometimes small changes locally can have an impact on big changes globally, so occasionally my posts will be specific to my hometown of Buffalo, but everything I share is about making small changes that affect the big picture. I'm slowly making adjustments to my lifestyle that I hope are making every day better for our planet, our fellow man, and our animal friends.