Yellow Rose Testers, yay joanna!

Maple Ginger Tempeh Strips on a TLT. We all devoured this one. Delicious!


Chick salad, huge hit here.


and closer up.


Lemon Mint Pasta with Zucchini and Petit Pois. Must make this again soon. YUM!

Joanna's next book will be just as great as Yellow Rose Recipes! <3

Shae & his "cous"

These are pictures of me and my cousin, Hailey. She's 5, the one with the cake is from her birthday party. And the one with her sleeping on my dad is after her birthday party. She's my favorite.

Birthday Cake and Chocolate Bunny

This is my dad's birthday cake, he's so lucky to get that!!! It was vanilla cake with oreos crushed up inside it and oreos on the top inside of the buttercream frosting. My mom, the best mom in the world made it!
(I swear he said actually that. haha)


Thank the easter bunny! He gave me this whole chocolate bunny! We never see these that I can eat anywhere, it was delicious!

random stuff

St Patricks Day. Living in the spirit! It freaked out my cousin Hailey, but I liked it.

Field day at school, me & my buddy Austin were in the sack race together, but no one won because the race was just for fun.


We found this cool lizard guy in the front yard eating a bee. It was so weird watching him devour that bee! That bee must've been sick for him to be able to catch it, they are normally so fast.


I got good grades all year in school so my parents surprised me and bought me the Wii Fit. It is soooo fun. My grades were all A's, all year long. And I got the highest scores on both of my FCAT's and I won the best kid on the bus award for not getting in trouble.


I was playing survivorman in the yard. That's a tshirt on my head.


I dug a huge hole in the yard and constantly filled it up with water and then played in the mud! The funnest!


Rocking out on my guitar

Baseball season!

Baseball season is over! This is my trophy. My team was a first place team and I'm an all star!"


This is my team, we're called the Gators. I am not a Florida Gators football fan. I like the seminoles, but I didn't get to chose my teams name.



This is me on first base, ready to steal second. Stealing bases is my favorite part. I'm really fast."


This is me pitching for the first time ever. It was so fun!

Finally! Shae's 9th Birthday Party Post.

"Mom's first 9 year old hug! I'm almost as tall as mom now!"


"Delicious! Chocolate 2 layer cake with peanut buttercream frosting! everybody loved it! it was the best!"
(cake recipe from La Dolce Vegan, and frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World)



"Happy Birthday to me!"


"Night time lightstick tag! One of the funnest game ever invented!"


"Ahhhhh they're getting me! Haha! Silly string fight. We all got covered in that stuff! So much fun, the funnest!"



"Me and all of my buddies, after we did races and contests!"

"I love babies!"

"Me and my buddy Cole! He's so funny, he makes me smile every time I see him!"

We Heart Kittee!

Kittee's pure magic, she really is. We made these Peanut Butter Rice Krispy Squares from her zine, Papa Tofu, but you can follow that link to the recipe on her website too.

We used Envirokids Panda Puffs cereal and Dark Chocolate Dreams Peanut Butter. Shae took these babies to school for Valentines day and they were a huge hit! Shae was also thrilled to have a few leftover at the end of the day.

Kitty shelf!

So first of all, be prepared for a huge backlash of photos and events past. I've finally uploaded my camera cards! The pictures go back to January or so. We're just randomly choosing ones we liked to share here. Shae's going to do some narrating.

"These are my cats, Karma and Topazy. They are never near each other until the kitty shelf came along. The kitty shelf is actually a part of our new coffee table, but the kitties like to sleep there."

Topazy is the brown flat-faced cat, she's a total sweetheart, just lays around in random hiding places all day. She so quiet, can't even meow. The most noise she makes is this little squeaky sneeze sound if she wants something really bad. We adopted her from a cat rescue about 3 years ago. Karma is the silver kitty, we've had her since she was a kitten, since shae was a little over a year old. She's got a crazy personality, sweet as anything one second and then trying to murder you the next. She's shae's baby, he can get away with anything with her and she'll just play bite him and then cuddle him. We, however would bleed if we did half the things shae does, like pet her stomach, lay our head on her, etc. Karma makes up for Topazy's quietness, by being insanely vocal. She doesn't just meow, she screams. All the time. Just for fun. She pretty much owns us.

Here's Shae cuddling up with Ms Karma Lynn.

Yeah, so I didn't actually update when I said I would. Give me a break, I've been busy growing this little guy! Yep, "little guy". Shae's going to have a little brother!

Have tons of pictures and random things to post, so we'll continue to work on getting this updated.

So Close!

Shae turns 9 tomorrow! Last night we worked on his birthday treat for his class, he didn't want the typical cupcakes this time and instead requested oreo pops. This is one of our favorite quick treats and everyone flips for them! Just a lolipop stick inside an oreo (or healthier faux oreo if you can find them, we were not so lucky this time), dip them in melted chocolate (we think ours with a bit of soymilk), and then drop the sprinkles on top and chill.

This morning, as I was about to furiously start wrapping them up, we found out that schools are closed today due the flooding in our area, so these babies fill have to wait till monday to hit the classroom. Shae seemed to think I was going to allow him to eat all 20 of them himself, instead. Good luck there buddy!

Tomorrow is the big sleepover birthday party, and the day this blog does it's annual name change... look for "Adventures in the life of a 9 year old Vegan" soon!

Where are we?

Some of you have been inquiring as to where we are, why we haven't updated... it's all sheer laziness! I'll try to get back in the habit soon. I'll definitely have a big update in 2 weeks when Shae turns 9!

We really, really, really love Veganomicon. Omg. This is Herb scalloped potatoes, roasted portobellos, and roasted green beans. All 3 of us really loved this dinner. We've made these potatoes a few times already, they are unbelievably good and so easy! I love easy! Shae's a huge mushroom fan, so he was insanely happy about the portobellos, I like this marinade a lot better than others I've used. I added some oregano, basil & thyme. I have no idea why it didn't occur to me earlier to roast green beans, but let me just say Yuuuuuuummm! So much better. Screw steaming.

A few nights ago, Shae went into his bedroom and I, teasingly, locked his bedroom door. I expected him to giggle and demand to be released. Instead he got really, really quiet. We listened at the door and nothing! No response. Then pushed this note, wrapped around a crayon, under the door.

Another obsession, foreign money. Except you cannot call it money, you have to say "currency" and if you mess up his sorted piles he'll look at you like the world is ending. Unbelievable how much enjoyment he's getting out of this. Comparing coins to each other, converting them to US money to see how much they are worth, pondering what the countries cultures are like. This is so much better than video games!

Some awesome vegans are offering to send him coins & bills from other countries and he is downright thrilled. Yet another reason why

Shae <3's Cozy Inside

Ever heard of an 8 year old boy obsessed with food? I use the word obsessed because Shae's very all or nothing. When he gets excited about something, he gets really, really full-force into it.

Today he came home from school and spotted Joni's book- Cozy Inside open on the counter (to the fluffy omelets) and started oohhhhinng and aaahhhhing over everything. Screaming "mom! come look at this! we have to make this!". Getting more and more excited with each page and picture. He was downright giddy. He's begged for corn fritters, easy cheesy sauce, breakfast burritos, potato cheese soup and curried cashew chicken salad.

And get this! He saw garlic in one of the ingredient lists and he said "That's okay. I'll still eat it!". Yeah. He agreed to knowingly ingest garlic.

Something strange is going on here.

We heart etsy!

We are so in love with etsy! First of all, we sell lots of pins and things there, so yeah, we love that. Actually, let's just get that out of the way first...

Etsy Buy Handmade teenytinytantrums

Check out our shop! And see that adorable little robot vegan kids pin? That's Shae's. He asks every day if he sold any or not and gets so proud of himself when he has. He's saving up right now to go to the skatepark, he says. He's working on a vegan themed coloring book thingy that we'll be selling before long, so keep your eyes open for that.

If Shae sees me on etsy, he'll run over and question me about his pin & his profits, then he wants to search for pirates and bikes and animals and stuff. I've caught him searching for different types of foods before and giggling over the fake food toys and jewelry. Then of course he launches into his next entrepreneurial plan to get rich and famous. He's always entertaining.

I stalk all of the crafters who are by far, more talented than I and try really hard not to buy everything! For jewelry, I am obsessed with BlueRoo, of course, but also brookadelphia and lilikoi designs. My favorite artist of-the-moment is Unconventional Ida, by K Smith. But the shops that I browse the most often, who literally hurt me with their product photos are the vegan bakers! Vegan Honey and Vegan Propamanda.

We're trying really hard this year to give handmade gifts. We're making photo albums for some people, scarves, jewelry, ornaments, pins, cookies, muffins, etc. Etsy has been a great source for crafts outside of our realm of creativity. I'm way more excited shopping for and giving handmade gifts than I've ever been buying the same old stuff from the box stores. Handmade is where it's at! Support crafter and the love of craft!

basketball season!

First basketball game! Shae's been playing baseball and soccer on teams since he was 4, but we hadn't found a good place for him to do basketball at until now. We got really lucky with a great coach through the ymca. Shae's loving it! He's picking up on everything really quickly and doing a great job listening to his coach's feedback. He played point guard for the first game, they won 14-2!

So long, VeganMoFo.

This post was from November 30th, the official end of Vegan Mofo, the Vegan Month of Food. Course I didn't post it that day, why would I? We didn't actually stick with VeganMoFo we well as I would have liked, but it did really get me in the habit of updating this blog and also discovering loads of fun vegan blogs. I hope everyone keeps up with them now that we are off the clock.

On our last day of the month, we baked a cake for my parents for their anniversary. it was a quickie cake, as I wasn't feeling too great and we had to be done before basketball practice, but it was yummy! Just ask Shae....

Haha. Totally drunk off chocolate cake mix! We used our favorite easy cake recipe from La Dolce Vegan, and topped it off with Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World's Fluffy White Buttercream. Tinted some of the frosting pinkish red and flavored it raspberry and threw some letting on the cake. My first time, so yeah, that's kind of obvious I think. It was good though!

Things we love:

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade bleuroo.etsy.com

This is the start of something new I'll be doing, linking to various things that we love. Starting off is my friend Amanda's etsy shop! She makes really great earrings and the cutest hand embroidered onesies & baby shirts, ever. I almost always am wearing her earrings, I'm so in love with them. I'm really, insanely picky about earrings too, most are so overdone. Too many details, too frilly. Amanda's are just simple and pretty! And my super-sensitive ears like them, which is nothing short of amazing. Check her out, it's not to late to buy for christmas!

ps- Bleuroo has a great article up on the North Florida Craft Revolution blog about crafting moms. read it!