Hello Vegalicious Ones,
I’m still buzzing from my recent trip to Portland! Thursday, my friend Jenelle – blogger at York & Spoon and the creative mastermind behind “Your Vegan Punk Pinup” on YouTube – and I headed to Portland to attend the Plant-based conference, “Enhancing Health with Plant-Based Nutrition: A Professional Conference for Health Care Practitioners.” The Presenters were Dr. Kent Thornburg, PCRM’s Caroline Trapp, Sharon Palmer – author of The Plant-Powered Diet and Plant-Powered for Life, plus others! They were all excellent and we met some wonderful new people! The last presenter was Dr. Joel Fuhrman, one of my personal heroes. I meet him before he started speaking. Also so he could sign a couple of books that I had brought.
Let me tell you, Dr. Fuhrman, in case you haven’t experienced him live, is on fire when he starts presenting! His talk was called, “Combating Obesity and Treating Disease with a High Nutrient Diet.” As intense and passionate as he is, he is also very humorous and engaging! My favorite joke he fired of was…
… “We’ve got it down to a science how to kill people here in America.” When talking about how poor the diet and nutritionally deficient the Standard American diet is. Another joke he fired off was, “Americans are on a race to see who can die first.” Who can argue with him? No one! The statistics for this country are pretty grim with 29 million people affected with diabetes alone. The health of the U.S. population has gotten increasingly worse since the 1990’s. Why is that? Well, that’s when pizza with cheese made its big debut! Now it seems they’re putting cheese into everything! But that is only one issue! Here are more caused by the dairy industry. And, no, I did not come up with this brilliant poster! I wish I had!
After the conference, we headed to my favorite vegan restaurant in Portland – Blossoming Lotus. My friend, that I’ve known for more than twenty years, Greg, picked us up and joined us for dinner. He just happened to be in Portland at the same time!
Here are the dishes that we decided on to split and share. Here is the “Raw Golden Beet Ravioli with sunflower seed-cashew pate with a mixed green salad with fennel, heirloom tomato and pesto dressing”.
We also shared the “Maki Roll – 8 pieces of live sushi, made with cauliflower rice, pickled plum, carrot salad, and cucumber, served with tamari and kimchi”. YUM!
And we had to try the “Baked cashew brie with fingered fig jam under a puff pastry lid, served with baguette and fresh fruit.” It was very yummy! Totally had the texture and bit of taste of real brie, but with the delightful twist of the fig jam!
For dessert the three of us shared this Chocolate & banana “cheese” cake with berry ice cream. All non-dairy, of course!
The three of us were stuffed by the time we got done! After dinner, Jenelle met up with another friend and Greg and I headed out into Portland’s nightlife and went to a jazz club downtown where this lovely group was playing. It was the first time for both of us to hear a woman play the saxophone. She was very talented!
Part Two of my Portland adventure will be posted tomorrow or later this week! Here are a few links to check out!
First here are some links to my friend, Jenelle’s YouTube Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/results?q=Your+vegan+punk+pin+up
Sharon Palmer’s website. Jenelle highly recommends her books, so they are next on my reading list:
http://www.sharonpalmer.com/book.php
And of course Blossoming Lotus’s website:
http://blpdx.com
