Green Options

How great would it be if there were want ads in your local newspaper or on Craigslist for organic fruits and vegetables, grown in your town, by your neighbors?  A new website - Veggie Trader has sprung up that offers exactly such a service, a purchasing and bartering clearinghouse for locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Veggie Trader describes itself as the “place to trade, buy or sell local homegrown produce”.  The idea is simple, you register on the website and then offer to purchase, to sell, or trade any manner of surplus fruits or vegetables.  If you have too many tomatoes and want to see if anyone nearby has a surplus of peaches or peppers, you can log on, run a search, and find out who in the neighborhood may be willing to exchange with you.

Carrots straight from the farm are dirty little freaks. Knobbly, hairy, misshapen and covered in soil, these root vegetables bear no resemblance to the neon orange and uniformly shaped clones found in your average supermarket plastic bag. But I love knowing where the vegetables came from and supporting local farms through my veg bag of organic produce (British equivalent of a CSA). I enjoy confronting an array of unfamiliar vegetables or familiar vegetables in unfamiliar guises like a large green ball of cauliflower that’s nearly 90% leaves. My favorite new game is figuring out how to use all these vegetables in delicious vegetarian dishes.

However, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the carrots as they’ve always been lower down on my list of favorite vegetables. Once the more perishable items like the spinach and tomatoes have been eaten in fresh salads, I find myself with a big bowl full of dirty carrots and potatoes. It’s like getting to the harder advanced levels of the How-To-Cook-Up-Your-Veg-Bag game and I need to challenge myself to solve the cooking puzzle. So I’ve written up two simple recipes that explore the wonderful world of carrots and potatoes: a Carrot Potato Pancake and Crispy Veggie Fritter that’s essentially a vegetarian meatball. Perhaps it should be called a veggieball. Regardless, both recipes are simple and tasty and a great way to use up any root vegetables you’ve got lying around. Enjoy!

A lot of supermarket vegetarian burgers try so hard to resemble meat that they ignore the fact that vegetables actually taste delicious in the first place. Why try to replicate a beef burger with a monotonously colored brown thing full of mysterious ingredients and even weirder textures when you can eat a vegetable burger that actually showcases the flavors of the vegetables? Here on Eat.Drink.Better we’ve seen fantastic burgers made of black beans, white beans, lentils and portobello, and and even beets! Here’s another veggie burger that’s brightly colored, packed with exciting flavors, and simple to make with both fresh and canned vegetables. Plus, it’s healthy but still deliciously tasty thanks to the freshness of just-grated carrots and zucchini with the heft of canned chickpeas and the salty tanginess of halloumi cheese.

Do you ever have an insatiable craving for a delicious, summery burger — but don’t want the autolyzed yeast extract and soy protein isolates contained in many commercial veggie patties? There’s no need to go without!  You can make your own grain-free version using just a handful of healthy ingredients. Organic french lentils and fresh portobello mushrooms combine to make a nutritious, mouthwatering vegan burger.

Taking advantage of the shriveling stock market, PETA has been purchasing more and more shares in meaty companies, including popular chain establishments like Domino’s Pizza, California Pizza Kitchen, and Sonics. The surge in stock purchases comes shortly after PETA’s call for donations not only to them, but to other animal rights organizations also hurting in the economy.

PETA has bought stock in meat companies for years. They already had a large holding in Tyson Foods, one of the most notorious animal abusers in the meat industry, and recently purchased even more. But what will PETA do once they own enough shares in these companies to be a deciding voice?