zenpawn

OK, let’s kick this project back off. If you’re a long-time reader, you may recall, a little over a year ago, I floated the idea of a collaborative cookbook of vegan CRON recipes.

So, I took a poll. The response was positive and the results were informative as to the desired criteria for recipe inclusion.

Then… <queue crickets>

Things got quiet. I received a recipe or two, but the rest of the promised contributors fell silent. Maybe I’m crazy to try again. But, here goes. Let’s assume the poll results are still valid, and we’ll take it from there.

Netflix sent me some first-month-free cards the other day, so I was going to award those to the first four entrants. But, it looks like they offer that deal even without the coupon code, so what’s the point? Silly!

Anyway, what I can do is give away a one-year subscription to E - The Environmental Magazine. This will be awarded via a random draw on October 19th. (I found this really cool “atmospheric” randomizer on-line I’ll be using to select the winner.)

So, read up on the idea and poll results thru the links above and submit your original recipe before the deadline for your chance to win. It’s a really cool magazine.

And by all means, if you miss it, don’t let that stop you. Remember, if you make it into the book, you still get a copy of the final compilation.

By the way, that cover is rather timely considering a recent initiative at the school from which I graduated. More in an upcoming post.

As promised, now that my blog is on a more professional host and I’ve time to come up for air, I’m ready to make my big announcement. I’m really excited about this and put in a lot of sleepless nights and weekends, installing and fighting software, crunching the nutritional numbers, etc..

As you know, there’s a lot of buzz these days about green smoothies. Even Oprah has whipped up a blenderful or two on her show. In fact, she’s currently trying a 21-day vegan challenge! It seems all my dietary modifications started with time-bounded experiments that continued past their fourth-dimensional boxes. Let’s hope it does the same for her and her fans.

My latest personal “challenge” (the quotes because it wasn’t challenging at all) was a couple weeks on a self-designed liquid raw healing protocol. Green smoothies were front and center. While there’s nothing new under the sun, I purposely avoided reading raw food books or searching the web for ideas during this period, in order to at least attempt creating just that.

I expected to emerge with twenty-one new raw blender recipes. Instead, I was having too much fun. With the habit firmly entrenched, I just kept going. Now, a smoothie a day is back in my repertoire. Back? Indeed. Funny thing is, before I went vegan, a yogurt smoothie was my breakfast of choice.

Toss the yogurt and replace with a tossed salad and you’ve got something closer to what I enjoy today. Ultimately, I stopped compiling the recipes at just over 50. After all, I’d told everyone they were on the way. And now, they’re here! Better yet, I set about creating a community forum where members can share their own creations, modifications, and in general just get to know each other.

Check it all out at…

p.s. - My chessblog is live.