Meatless Monday: Fast Food

So, as I may have mentioned, I'm in the process of moving. The prospect of doing such a thing always sounds so easy, but of course it's not. The movers come tomorrow, so I've been frantically trying to get every little trapping of my material life stuffed into boxes over the past couple of days.

Last night, I packed up the last of the kitchen items. As you might imagine, it's a little difficult to cook without pots, pans, spices, utensils, and whatnot. Couple that with the dilemma of not having very much time to eat and an inevitable evil looms in the near future . . . FAST FOOD! How's a girl to eat healthy and, today, meatless with the kind of options available at your average fast food restaurant, where sometimes the "healthy" items rack up just as much fat and and as many calories as a burger-and-fries combo meal?!

I'm not going to eat at your average fast food restaurant, that's how! In California, I've got some great options . . .

California Crisp
This small chain only has 7 locations, but they're worth seeking out. A lot of items on their menu come with chicken, but you can always ask them to hold it. Try their BBQ Chicken Wrap sans chicken. The sauce is yummy and the jicama adds a great juicy crunch. LOVE jicama.

Natural Cafe
This restaurant only has 10 locations, but, as with California Crisp, they're worth seeking out. Their menu offers a HUGE list of vegetarian options. I'm a big fan of the "Mr. Natural" - fresh, seasonal vegetables steamed and served over short-grain brown rice. I get it with sauteed tofu. I don't know what they cook the tofu in, but it is DELICIOUS!

Orean's Health Express, Inc.
Where I'm moving is relatively close to Pasadena, which means I'll finally get a chance to check out Orean's, which touts itself as "the first vegetarian fast-food take-out." Their menu is definitely more fast-food-y than the first two places I've mentioned here, offering items like burgers, dogs, burritos, and fries. Their website says they're open from 9:30a - 9:00p, but I remember trying to go at least twice when I lived in Pasadena and it being closed. If memory serves, I think both times might have been a Sunday, so maybe they're closed on Sundays. I drove by a couple of Saturdays ago when we were still house hunting, though, and saw that they were open. So, fair warning, African Burrito - You Will Be Mine!

Hopefully someday on-the-go vegetarian places will be as ubiquitous as McDonald's. Until then, . . .

If you know any good fast-food vegetarian places (or fast-food places with good veggie options), please share!

Other Meatless Monday posts

Blogging Community

So, I’m new to this blogging thing, but really enjoying it. Well, technically, I guess I started a blog with my husband (my boyfriend at the time) back in 2004 to journal our restaurant experiences in Pasadena (we called it . . . PasaDiner. Yes, how clever.). But we never really wrote much and ended up abandoning it altogether when we moved out to Ventura County. (Although I did add a couple of my entries from that blog to this one, so you can check them out here if you like.)

While, I’ve been new to blog writing, I’m not new to blog reading. Over the past couple of years, I’ve stumbled across quite a few good ones, some of which I’m totally addicted to reading on a daily basis now (see the list in my sidebar to the right). One of those is a blog I encouraged an author of mine to create back when I was an acquisitions editor for a textbook publisher. (Without me there to prod him, however, I do fear that his blog may go the way of my PasaDiner blog . . . .)

Blogs come in so many flavors – personal, professional, topic-specific – but there does seem to be at least one unifying element to each and every one of them – they are created for sharing and connecting with other people. I haven’t quite figured out what I want my blog to be yet, but I do hope it connects with people. I imagine that group of people will be comprised primarily of my friends and family, but, if that generates some organic growth, I say the more the merrier! In the meantime, I’m also looking into getting involved with some blog communities. For instance, recently, I discovered BlogHer, an online blogging community for women who blog.

For my female reader friends who also blog, here’s info from BlogHer’s “about” page:

“Founded in February 2005 as a labor of love by three bloggers, BlogHer's mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today, BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, via annual conferences, a Web network, and an advertising network of more than 1,400 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates. BlogHer Inc. is majority-owned by three co-founders and has backing from Venrock.”

I won't likely make it this year, but, for anyone interested, they’re also having their annual conference in downtown San Francisco July 18-20:

The Westin St. Francis Hotel
Union Square
335 Powell Street
San Francisco, CA
(415) 397-7000

They offer opportunities to carpool and different, reasonable pricing packages, including student pricing.

Pining for Pasadena

It’s hard to believe the time has passed so quickly, but it’s been a little over two years now since Matt and I moved to Ventura County from Pasadena. While we’re pretty happy where we are, there are so many things we miss about our old ‘hood – the Huntington Gardens, Amnesty International chapter 22, swing dancing and old movies outdoors in the alley behind Colorado Boulevard in Old Town, free jazz concerts behind Vroman’s, good Indian food (Moorpark, seriously, what gives?), and hot green tea, apples, and Marni at the Yoga House – so we try to get back every once in a while. This past Saturday, we headed down for a salon visit (for me), some soul-nourishing sushi at Zono Sushi, and lots of indulgence at our favorite indy bookstore, Vroman’s. Ahh, Vroman’s. Right next to the fabulous indy movie theater, Laemmle. Right down the street from Zona Rosa Café and their amazing Mexican hot chocolate. *Sigh* We also mixed in some “driving down memory lane,” swinging by our old apartments and by our dream (make that pipe-dream) homes. (Oh, craftsman on the corner of Hillcrest and Wentworth, you will be mine!). After days and days straight of nothing but rain, we even got a showerless, sunshine-y day despite meteorological predictions to the contrary. All in all, a great day.

Restaurant Review: Lucky Baldwin's

A real pub. A "man's man"'s bar - or a no-frills-kind-of-gal bar. It's not trendy. There's nothing pretty to look at. The music selection shuffles between a few CDs that someone on the staff popped in that night. But there's sports on the TV, Guinness on tap, and they sell cigarettes up front in a little shop if you're so inclined.

There's even outdoor seating. But don't get excited, my frilly ones. If you're envisioning a lovely outdoor cafe in Paris, you'll be sadly disappointed. It's my educated guess that the outdoor seating came to be for two reasons, neither inspired by a desire to create ambiance. Imagined reason number one: as Old Town slowly became more gentrified over the past ten years and other restaurants opened up nearby utilizing their space out back for seating, LB's followed suit to stay apace. Imagined (and more probable) reason number two: since you can't smoke in restaurants (since 1994) and bars (since 1998) in California, where are the blokes who buy cigarettes up front going to smoke . . . and, more importantly, continue to buy drinks?

I know what you're thinking. "Smoking and drinking? Sounds pretty Parisian to me." Well, if we were talking about a pack of Gitanes and a bottle of Bordeaux, maybe. And I suppose if you squint your eyes as you sit al fresco in your green plastic chair under the glow of mutlicolored holiday lights strung above you, you can pretend you're in the City of Lights. But, again, we're talking about a Camels-and-Guinness kind of crowd. If you wanted Frenchy sophistication, you wouldn't be at a British pub, now would you? (Unless you're one of those people who goes to Legal Seafood and orders a hamburger. In which case, please take your I-go-out-of-my-way-to-be-difficult-and-disatisfied self to another site please.)

Okay. Now for the cons. No-frills is one thing. Uncleanliness is quite another. The stench of rancid beer shouldn't hit you like a wall when sitting at a bar, no more than you should smell something fishy at a sushi bar. In the days of the early west when unwashed cowboys with a penchant for spitoon use were the local clientele and we called them saloons not pubs, fine. In the days of running water and refrigeration, that just doesn't fly. So, let's hope they clean up their act - or consider sitting at one of the tables and leave the bartender in squalor, er, um, I mean peace.

Another con - the food. I'll spare you the details. Just stick to the fish and chips, or eat somewhere else before you get here. You shouldn't be coming here for the food anyway. Refer to my Legal Seafood/hamburger comment above.

Walking in through the shop brings to mind the days of speak-easies when businesses and even homes were fronts for hidden bars. Ah, the forbidden. You feel like you're entering a special, secret place. In a crowded, pretentious place like L.A., it's like finding an oasis - a dingy oasis, but an oasis nonetheless. It's the type of place you could picture Colin Farrell walking into, buying a pack of smokes, recognizing the owner, striding over to him, slapping him on the back, and growling with a smile, "Hey ya fuggin' prig, how are ya?" And, really, who could ask more of a pub?

Lucky Baldwin's
17 So. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91105-1913
626-795-0652
Mon-Fri 3:30am-1:30am, Sat-Sun 8am-2am