Ho, boy. Where is my appetite lately? With my rampant meal skipping (sorry, lunch, but it's not like you didn't already know that you're my least favorite meal) over the past week or two, my blood sugar ought to be wacky enough to drive me to eating whatever's around. Bizarrely, it has been calm and stable... almost... too calm and too stable.
Today I ate what is probably my second favorite breakfast that doesn't come out of my house: a vegan breakfast burrito from the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz. You know, I sometimes harp on and on about how Santa Cruz's good restaurants are few in number. What I rarely ever rant about is that the couple of places that serve vegan stuff that appeals to me at all (which is basically anything vegan) are all really very good. Yeah, okay, the goodness of a restaurant isn't really rant worthy material I guess. Sorry, I'll try to keep my rants more posi in the future.
Anyway, the Saturn Cafe: excellent vegan junk food. I grew up in south east Pennsylvania, which is basically the land of diners. More or less everyone in my family (myself very much included) has worked at a diner at one point or another. Diners are the only places that exist in the town I lived in during middle and high school to eat at other than fast food. (Really, the town I lived in is in the Guiness Book for having the most fast food restaurants in a square mile. There are NO non-diner restaurants there... just fast food and pizza places.) When I was a busboy (busgirl, I guess) at one diner, I'd always spend my free meal of the day on the same thing: a bagel, not toasted, with cream cheese, and an order of cheese fries. Those days are long, long behind me now, of course-- even if I still ate dairy, there's no way my body could hack that many carbohydrates at the same time. Alas.
I really thought that my diner days were over until I met the Saturn. The Saturn delivers all the same things to me that traditional diners ever did (other than a salad bar) and yet they still accomodate my veganness. How is that not perfect? It's perfect.
It seems like they've cut back on their vegan options some since I started going there, which bums me out; however, after I asked to get their awesome, awesome nacho fries (half order, please... a whole order is the size of my torso, and my torso is not small) vegan about seventeen times, they put them as vegan on request on the menu. Score!
As of a couple of weeks ago, you can ALWAYS get breakfast there. This fills me with a warm fuzzy feeling, because my favorite thing to eat there is definitely the vegan breakfast burrito. They're simple enough: large tortilla filled with soyrizo, home fries, and tofu, with salsa, guacamole, tofu sour cream, and a couple of slices of orange on the side. It's not fancy, but that's exactly the point. It's just filling and good. I have NEVER managed to eat an entire one of these bad boys in one sitting. Usually I get halfway through this beast (c'mon, homefries AND soyrizo AND tofu, my stomach kind of curls up into a frightened ball just thinking about it) and then have to take the other half home for lunch.
And that's exactly what happened today, except that it's 9 p.m. and I've only had about two (awesome) bites of the other half. I have got to get motivated and finish this thing!
Moral of the story: vegans like junk food as much as the next person.
Oh man, that reminds me of one last thing: my favorite damn dirty hippie store in town has stopped selling normal Tings. They ONLY sell the baked ones now. I like the baked ones, don't get me wrong, but sometimes you sit down with a bag of Tings fully intending to use it as your sole source of caloric intake for the day and with baked Tings, the numbers just don't add up. Agh!
I'm laughing at the last part, about the Tings. Not that I know what a Ting is, 'cos I don't, but I know what you mean about saving your calories for one sitting of something.
ReplyDeleteThat burrito sounds pretty fancy to me!
Tings are these little crunchy cornmeal snack things covered in nutritional yeast... they're sort of the vegan equivalent of Cheetos, only better. They are really really delicious... savory and salty at the same time. Mmm. Tings.
ReplyDeleteThe company that sells them tries to market them as a healthy snack food, buuuut they're still pretty much junk food. But, when I'm really busy with school, I will sometimes sit down with a bag and graze throughout the day while I do work. They're delicious!
Thanks for the suggestion on my ring, by the way-- I don't wear gloves for dishwashing, but it made me think of a few more places I hadn't checked. (Still haven't found it yet though, sigh.)