A few tips to keep in mind:

• It is best to use “second snow” or “later snow”: snow from after the first couple hours of snowfall.
• Make sure to collect your snow from a clean surface (above and below) that has not been trodden on or touched.
• Fluffy, dry snow works best for this recipe.  That’s one of the bonuses.  My kids are always disappointed when the snow is not packing snow, but at least we can make snow cream!
• Packing snow occurs when the temperature is within a couple degrees above or below freezing.  Fluffy snow comes when the temperature is more than a few degrees below freezing.

Vegan Snow Ice Cream Recipe 

INGREDIENTS
All amounts are approximate and should be adjusted to taste 

• 4 – 8 cups clean snow
• 1 cup soy milk* (or other plant milk)*
• 1/3 cup or maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 pinch salt

* You can use any flavor of milk that you choose – vanilla, chocolate, sweetened or unsweetened, almond, coconut, hemp, flax, macadamia, cashew, etc.  If you use a flavored and/or sweetened milk, you may desire to adjust the amounts of sugar and vanilla.

DIRECTIONS

1. Whisk together all the ingredients except the snow in a large bowl.  (Leave the snow in a bowl outside or in the freezer until ready to stir it in.
2. Place the mixture in the freezer for 10 minutes.  (This step is optional, but snow cream melts very quickly and this step helps it last just a bit longer).
3. Mix in the snow about 1/2 cup at a time until the snow cream reaches a consistency just thicker than soft serve ice cream.
4. Serve and enjoy immediately!

As always, if you try this recipe, please let me know in the comments, like, and share this post!

Disclaimer:  All food comes with a risk.  I can’t guarantee that eating snow is safe, though I certainly feel comfortable with the snow ice cream we make and enjoy.  I find this article has good information on the comparative safety of consuming snow:  So You Want To Eat Snow. Is It Safe? We Asked Scientists

The post Snow Ice Cream appeared first on Urban Earthworm.

The Pumpkin Spice Latte is a quintessential flavor of Fall. But if you, like me, live way too far from the nearest Starbucks, or if you just don’t like to dish out $4.25 every time you want that quintessential flavor, perhaps you should try out this simple, but utterly delicious, Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer recipe.

Part of the reason I love Fall so much is because of the flavors. Hot, spicy drinks. Pumpkin, squashes, and other roasted Fall veggies. Cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger! Wonderful. And, thankfully, all things I can use to get my Fall fix even on those odd days when there are no beautiful Fall colors, crisp breezes, or hayrides and when the only sweaters I’m wearing have short sleeves.

Even though I am a complete coffee house addict, I’m still not the type to be spitting up almost $5 a pop on a regular basis for fancy coffee drinks. MacGyver and I hit up coffee houses as a treat. One of our favorite impromptu dates is always to grab coffee down by the waterfront then go for a long walk. Those rare treats don’t even come close to filling my Pumpkin Spice coffee requirements for the season, though.

Enter, Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamers. My absolute thrill at discovering these fancy holiday creamers in the grocery store was short lived. Most grocery store coffee creamers are full of all sorts of yucky stuff: hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, and worst of all (in my opinion) factory farmed milk. The way those cows are treated is enough to make me wretch. And I can’t even bear to think about what they do to all those little baby calves.  Not to mention the stomach-turning health detriments caused by dairy.

Any way you slice it, whether it’s health concerns, sugar issues, fat issues, lactose issues, ethical, or humane issues, I just couldn’t continue buying those creamers. Your purchases say something! Not just about you, but about where you stand on various issues. I try very hard to keep my money where my mouth is, so to speak.

So, while I was sitting around pouting about the fact that the nearest coffee house where I could get a soy Pumpkin Spice Latte, was 40 minutes away, it occurred to me that there really isn’t all that much to coffee creamers. I mean, really, it’s just sweetened, flavored milk, right? So why not try to make my very own Urban Earthworm Ethical, Vegan, Healthier Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer? And, that night, that is just what I did.

I kept the recipe simple (mostly because I was trying to do this before making dinner ;-)), and was surprised by what a breeze this was to make. And, like most of my recipes, it’s pretty easily customized based on what you have on hand.

Ingredients
Makes about 2 cups of creamer
2 cups Almond Milk*
2 tbsp mashed pumpkin (canned is fine, but make sure it’s just pumpkin and not pumpkin pie)
2 tbsp maple syrup**
1 tsp cinnamon***
¼ – ½ tsp nutmeg***
¼ – ½ tsp ground cloves***
¼ – ½ tsp ground ginger***
½ tsp vanilla extract*

* If you use Vanilla Almond Milk, you may not need to add any additional vanilla. You can also use Soy Milk, Rice Milk, Flax Milk, or Hemp Milk. Do not use animal milk – it will separate, go spoil quickly, and taste off.

** Adjust to taste and desired sweetness. If you use sweetened Almond Milk, you won’t need as much sweetener. Fair Trade/Equal Exchange brown or white sugar or agave nectar can be substituted for the maple syrup. The Maple just Falls up the flavor that much more.

*** Adjust spices to taste. You can also substitute pre-mixed “pumpkin pie spice.”

Directions

1. Whisk all the ingredients, except vanilla if you’re planning to add some, together in a sauce pan over medium-high heat.

2. Heat until steaming, but not boiling.

3. Whisk in vanilla.

4. Pour into a jar for storage.

It’s that easy!

Shake before using, as the spices may settle.

This stuff makes my morning!

What flavor would you like to see me try out next?  My co-workers have requested eggnog.

What do you put in your coffee?

The post Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer (Vegan) appeared first on Urban Earthworm.

As a devoted chocolate lover, I was horrified to discover that many of my favorite seasonal treats – treats that bring so much joy to children here in the US – are produced using cruel, abusive child labor.  The bigger the brand, the more likely it is to contain chocolate harvested with the sweat and tears of child slaves / child slavery.

Boycott Hershey’s, Mars, Reese’s, and (in the US) Cadbury this year, and instead choose from one of the many brands devoted to ending this horrifying practice (see the list at the end of this post).

I was disgusted to discover that  according to an investigative report by the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children are being purchased from their parents, or outright stolen, and then shipped to Ivory Coast, where they are enslaved on cocoa farms.  Destitute parents in these poverty-stricken lands sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send some of their earnings home. But that’s not the reality. The terrible reality is that these children, 11-to-16-years-old but sometimes younger, are forced to do hard manual labor 80 to 100 hours a week. They are paid nothing, receive no education, are barely fed, are beaten regularly, and are often viciously beaten if they try to escape. Most will never see their families again.

Over a decade ago, two Congressmen, U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, D-New York, and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, attempted to remedy this issue.  They introduced legislation mandating a labeling system for chocolate. After the deep pockets of the chocolate corporations protested, a compromise was reached that required chocolate companies to voluntarily certify they had stopped the practice of child labor. The certification process would not involve labeling products “child-labor-free,” as initially proposed.  In my opinion, the movement lost its teeth at that point.

Instead of the “Child Labor Free” label, it called for public reporting by African governments, establishment of an audit system and poverty remediation by 2005. The deadline had to be extended to 2008 (read Fortune Magazine’s report on the state of the protocol in 2008) and again to 2010. Today, many aid groups say some of the provisions have still not been met, and it is the biggest corporations who refuse to comply.

Why should they?  Child slavery allows them to sell cheap chocolate to a clueless US American public.  Heaven knows I was a sucker for Reece’s Pumpkins and Easter Eggs before I found out about this epidemic of slavery – not to mention a cookies and cream bar once in a while (this was also before I quit dairy).  The CEOs of these corporations make millions upon millions of dollars off of children suffering and dying.  And so many people are completely unaware the problem even exists.

So the next time you reach for a candy bar, when you go to buy candy to hand out to trick or treaters or to stock your holiday candy dishes or include in your cookies, consider the price thousands of children are paying to bring you that chocolate.

Am I telling you to swear off chocolate?  Absolutely NOT!  Thank heavens!  All you have to do is be aware that your dollars have a voice, and your support of various brands sends a message.  Make that message a positive one, and buy chocolate from an ethical source.  There is a whole list of chocolate companies who use ethically sourced chocolate below, or you can simply look for Fair Trade or Equal Exchange on the label.

Not a fan of chocolate slavery, child slavery, corporate douche-baggery, and what-have-you?  Here’s what you can do (some of these are excerpted from Is There Child Slavery in Your Chocolate?):

* Purchase chocolate products from companies who only use cocoa that has definitively not been produced with slave labor. These companies include:

Clif Bar
Cloud Nine
Chocolove Dark Chocolate bar
Chocolove Cherries and Almonds Dark Chocolate Bar
Chocolove Crystallized Ginger Dark Chocolate Bar
Chocolove Orange Peel Dark Chocolate Bar
Chocolove Raspberry Dark Chocolate bar
Dagoba Organic Chocolate
Denman Island Chocolate
Divine Chocolate
Equal Exchange
Gardners Candies
Green and Black’s
John & Kira’s
Kailua Candy Company
Koppers Chocolate
L.A. Burdick Chocolates
Montezuma’s Chocolates
NewLeaf Chocolates
Newman’s Own Organics
Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company
Rapunzel Pure Organics
Shaman Chocolates
Sweet Earth Chocolates
Taza Chocolate
The Endangered Species Chocolate Company
Theo Chocolate.

Sure, some of these brands can be a little more expensive than chocolate provided by slaves (not exactly a shocker there), but the extra few cents is worth it every single time.  If I can’t find ethical chocolate, I will just not have chocolate.  It’s not worth the price otherwise.  And if you order in bulk, you can save a lot.  We recently ordered a TON of Equal Exchange chocolate miniatures for Halloween that even come with little cards about the benefits of ethical chocolate, and we’re encouraging everyone we know to hand out cruelty free candy this year.

A few weeks ago when MacGyver gave a lecture about Ethical Eating, during which I also spoke, one of the topics he covered was the chocolate slave trade.  A week later a friend of ours who had been at the lecture walked up to me and said, “I hate you.  I was going to grab a chocolate bar in the checkout line this week, and I remembered those poor kids and I just couldn’t do it.”  I think I’m totally ok with her hating me for that!

* In addition or alternative to ethical chocolate, consider purchasing something from this cruelty free candy list:

Airheads taffy
Brach’s Cinnamon Hard Candy
Brach’s Hi-C Fruit Slices
Brach’s Hi-C Orange Slices
Brach’s Root Beer Barrels
Brach’s Star Brites
Chick-o-Sticks
Cry Babies
Dots
Dum-Dums
Fireballs
Hubba Bubba bubblegum
Jolly Ranchers (lollipops and hard candy)
Jujubees
Jujyfruits
Laffy Taffy (some varieties)
Lemonheads
Mambas
Mary Janes (regular and peanut butter kisses)
Mike and Ike
Panda Licorice
Runts
Smarties (U.S. Brand)
Sour Patch Kids
Super Bubble
Swedish Fish
Sweet Tarts
Twizzlers
Zotz

* Hershey has asked the public to give feedback on their corporate responsibility via an online survey. Let them know what you think. They’re asking for it. Urge them to work toward Fair Trade certification of their chocolate products. Tell them there’s nothing sweet about manufacturing 80 million Hershey Kisses a day, using cocoa is often produced using abusive child labor.

* Get a free DVD copy of the film The Dark Side of Chocolate, along with information about Fair Trade, from the dedicated people at Green America. Watch it, show it to your friends, and spread the word.

* Tweet about this article, pin it, and post it to your facebook page. Tell your friends to read this article and take the Hershey online survey. The more people who do, the greater the chance Hershey will realize that the time has arrived for it to take responsibility for its actions.

* EDUCATE YOURSELF AND OTHERS.  Here are some excellent resources to read and share on the topic of chocolate and child slavery:

Is There Child Slavery in Your Chocolate?
The Bitter Truth About Chocolate
The Human Cost of Chocolate
Equal Exchange Farmers – the way it should be done
Tulane University Assessment of Child Labour in the Cocoa Supply Chain
The Dark Side of Chocolate – Spread the Word, Host a Screening with this Free DVD and Kit!

The post Chocolate and Child Slavery – Say NO This Holiday Season appeared first on Urban Earthworm.

Carrot cake was an obvious starting point for me because our whole family LOVES carrot cake, but we rarely get to indulge.  Plus, Flintstone thoroughly enjoyed his carrot cake at his first birthday party:

But I knew I wanted to add more than just carrot since traditional carrot cake doesn’t actually have that much nutritional value. I decided on zucchini because I happened to have some very nice local zucchini from the Farmer’s market on hand, and I know zucchini bakes well.

Finally, I decided to come up with a vegan recipe. We are not technically vegan. We have backyard chickens for eggs, and I could have just as easily used eggs in the recipe, but then I probably wouldn’t have posted it. Some people don’t think twice before using grocery store grade eggs in a recipe, even with all my harping on ethical eating. So by posting a recipe that calls for eggs, I worried I would be inadvertently encouraging people to buy or use more eggs. If you aren’t familiar with the sickening practices of egg factories, including throwing thousands of baby chicks into meat grinders ALIVE, the please be a responsible human being and educate yourself about the products you buy.

It’s not like me to forget to take pictures of food, but I was pretty wrapped up in Flintstone’s birthday, so this it the only decent picture I got of his cake:

I was worried when I was making it because it had SO many veggies veggies in the batter and it looked a little dense, but it turned out really great, and it was a huge hit.  As soon as it was served, people started asking me what was in it and asking for the recipe, and it was at that moment that I realized that I needed a better picture for the post, but, alas, the entire cake was quickly consumed.  Which is why I have dubbed it my “All Gone” cake:

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp Ground Flax Seeds
6 Tbsp water
2 Cups shredded organic carrot
2 Cups shredded organic zucchini
2 Cups Fair Trade/Equal Exchange Brown sugar (white sugar is ok, too)
1/2 Cup coconut oil (or other oil, your choice)
2 Cups fun flour and all purpose whole wheat flour*
2 Tsp ground cinnamon
1 Tsp ground nutmeg
pinch cloves (optional)
1 Tsp salt
2 Tsp baking soda

* We have been experimenting a lot with alternative kinds of flour.  I actually used about 1/3 coconut flour, 1/3 teff flour, and 1/3 all purpose whole wheat flour.  Different kinds of flour are fun and can really up the nutritional value of the recipe, but be aware that they may change the liquid requirements.  I just continued adding almond milk and water until my batter reached a “batter” like consistency before I added the veggies, and it turned out perfect!

Directions:

1.  Preheat oven to 350 (or don’t, and save a little electricity).  Use coconut oil to grease and flour a 9X13 cake pan.

2.  Thoroughly blend the Flax Seed Meal with the Water – you may want to use a food processor for maximum effect.  Let sit for at least 5 minutes.  During which time, you can:

3. Grate the carrots and zucchini.

4.  In a large batter bowl, mix the flax seed goo with the sugar until creamy, then stir in the coconut oil until well mixed.

5.   Add in the flour(s), spices, salt, and baking soda, and mix well.  Add almond milk or water as necessary to achieve a “batter” like texture.

6.  Stir in the carrots and zucchini – you could also throw in some nuts in this step if you wanted.

7.  Pour/spread into the prepared pan.  Bake approximately 50 minutes until a reusable skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.

Vegan “Cream Cheese” Icing:

Do you have any idea what they do to dairy cows, and, even worse, what they do to the baby cows they have to continually impregnate dairy cows with to keep them producing milk?  I, quite honestly, had no idea.  I went on eating cheese long after I stopped eating meat.  Even though I have tried to train myself to always questions where my food comes from, I was raised in a culture that takes food for granted.  And I LOVE cheese.  Love it.  It was the one food I never thought I’d give up.  Until the first time I saw a newborn calf being brutally dragged from it’s mother, both of them crying out for each other, the baby being carelessly injured in the process, and the mother remaining locked in a small cage, producing milk, set to repeat the whole process every year of her life.  Just remembering it is almost making me cry now.

I love cheese, and there are still some places I can get it, local goat farmers who I know don’t engage in these practices, and maybe one day we’ll have our own cow.  It is, after all, possible, after allowing time for cow and calf to establish a relationship, to take 1/2 the cow’s milk production humanely.  But you won’t catch me buying cheese, or any other dairy product, from a grocery store ever again.

So, please, if you can’t find or are unwilling to use vegan cream cheese, which is now available in almost every grocery store except Piggly Wiggly (ugh!), top this cake with something else.  Use Cinnamon icing, or any frosting recipe from Happy Herbivore.

Ingredients:

VEGAN Cream Cheese
Fair Trade Confectioners/Powdered sugar
Almond Milk (or your choice non-animal milk) – Vanilla flavored works great.
Cinnamon

Directions:

There are no set proportions for this recipe, at least the way I make it.  I used about 3/4 a standard container of vegan cream cheese, maybe 3/4 a cup of powdered sugar, and more almond milk than I needed.  I like my icing so that it drizzles over the cake, but really I had intended to make frosting so the cake would be easier to decorate.

Put your cream cheese and sugar into a bowl and add small amounts of the almond milk, mixing in a little at a time, until you reach desired consistency.  Adjust sweetness with more sugar.

Add cinnamon to taste.

***

Stand back, and watch it disappear.  This cake will be all gone faster than Todd Aikin’s credibility at a feminist rally.

As always, if you try it, please stop back by and let me know how you like it!

***

Today I’m linking up with Impulsive Addict and Seriously Shawn for Talk to Us Tuesday.  I rarely do blog memes, but this one has no rules, so it’s hard to resist (almost as hard to resist as the lovely hosts).

The post Carrot and Zucchini “All Gone” Cake appeared first on Urban Earthworm.

      Fall is in the air.  At least, I suspect Fall is in the air back in Michigan where I grew up – to whence I am trying to return.  Here in the South, it’s just not quite as oppressively hot as it has been for the last 5 months.  But Fall even down here there are still signs of Fall popping up in some places.  Like Starbucks.  Imagine my thrill when I found out that the Pumpkin Spice Latte is back! 

      Part of the reason I love Fall so much is because of the flavors.  Hot, spicy drinks.  Pumpkin, squashes, and other roasted Fall veggies.  Cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger!  Wonderful.  And, thankfully, all things I can use to get my Fall fix even when there are no beautiful Fall colors, crisp breezes, or hayrides and when the only sweaters I’m wearing have short sleeves.

      Even though I am a complete coffee house addict, I’m still not the type to be spitting up almost $5 a pop on a regular basis for fancy coffee drinks.  MacGyver and I hit up coffee houses as a treat.  One of our favorite impromptu dates is always to grab coffee down by the waterfront then go for a long walk.  Those rare treats don’t even come close to filling my Pumpkin Spice coffee requirements for the season, though.

       Enter, Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamers.  My absolute thrill at discovering these fancy holiday creamers in the grocery store was short lived.  Most grocery store coffee creamers are full of all sorts of yucky stuff: hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, and worst of all (in my opinion) factory farmed milk.  The way those cows are treated is enough to make me retch.  And I can’t even bear to think about what they do to all those little baby calves.

       Any way you slice it, whether it’s health concerns, sugar issues, fat issues, lactose issues, ethical, or humane issues, I just couldn’t continue buying those creamers.  You purchases say something!  Not just about you, but about where you stand on various issues.  I try very hard to keep my money where my mouth is, so to speak.

       So, while I was sitting around pouting that the nearest Starbucks, where I could get a soy Pumpkin Spice Latte, was 40 minutes away, it occurred to me that there really isn’t all that much to coffee creamers.  I mean, really, it’s just sweetened, flavored milk, right?  So why not try to make my very own Urban Earthworm Ethical, Vegan, Healthier Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer?  And, last night, that is just what I did.

      I kept the recipe simple (mostly because I was trying to do this before making dinner ;-)), and was surprised by what a breeze this was to make.  And, like most of my recipes, it’s pretty easily customized based on what you have on hand.

 Ingredients
Makes about 2 cups of creamer
2 cups Almond Milk*
2 tbsp mashed pumpkin (canned is fine, but make sure it’s just pumpkin and not pumpkin pie)
2 tbsp maple syrup**
1 tsp cinnamon***
¼ – ½ tsp nutmeg***
¼ – ½ tsp ground cloves***
¼ – ½ tsp ground ginger***
½ tsp vanilla extract*

* If you use Vanilla Almond Milk, you may not need to add any additional vanilla.  You can also use Soy Milk, Rice Milk, Flax Milk, or Hemp Milk.  Do not use animal milk.

** Adjust to taste and desired sweetness.  If you use sweetened Almond Milk, you won’t need as much sweetener.  Fair Trade/Equal Exchange brown or white sugar or agave nectar can be substituted for the maple syrup.  The Maple just Falls up the flavor that much more. 

*** Adjust spices to taste.  You can also substitute pre-mixed “pumpkin pie spice.”

Directions

1.  Whisk all the ingredients, except vanilla if you’re planning to add some, together in a sauce pan over medium-high heat.

2.  Heat until steaming, but not boiling.

3.  Whisk in vanilla.

4.  Pour into a jar for storage. 

It’s that easy!

Shake before using, as the spices may settle.

This stuff makes my morning! 

I think I’m going to experiment with other flavors when I’m through with the Pumpkin Spice.  Any requests?

What do you put in your coffee?

The post Pumpkin Spice Creamer appeared first on Urban Earthworm.

Tonight, we had mexican cabbage, a recipe from Happy Herbivore, using up a bunch of the leftover green and purple cabbage in a simple, delicious, vegan recipe packed with nutrients.

And since everyone ate all they were served, we got to have individual Apple Crisps for dessert.  These are really easy to make, just core some organic apples, but leave the bottom in so it’s like a cup.  Coat the inside with cinnamon. At the same time, soak 1/2 cup of steel cut oats (I use the 5 minute kind) in water for 10 minutes or so and preheat the oven to 350.

Mix together the oats, drained, with1/4 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup brown sugar or a substitute, and 1/3 cup butter substitute.  The mixture will be rough and crumbly.

Fill the apples with the mixture and bake for 35 minutes or until the apples are soft and the crisp is crisp.

These are excellent with Stonyfield Farms humane vanilla ice cream.

The post Mexican Cabbage and Individual Apple Crisps appeared first on Urban Earthworm.