21 Days of Giveaways: Spork Online Membership

First thing's first - congratulations to the winner of a Love Grown Granola goodie basket - #26, G!. You rock! Email me you address so I can get those coupons mailed out to you!

Today's giveaway is one I am especially excited about - brought to you by the sisters of Spork Foods and Spork Online. I love these women and have been subscribing to their online, vegan cooking classes for over a year now.

Meet Heather & Jenny Goldberg, the vegan cooking goddesses from Los Angeles, CA. They offer in-home, healthy eating consultations, cooking classes (both in person and online), and private cooking parties. They also just recently released their first cookbook, Spork-Fed. 

I own this cookbook and I absolutely adore it!

One of their also more recent endeavors is their online cooking classes. These are really awesome, super informative, and mouthwatering. As stated on Made Just Right, "Sporkonline is a membership-based website for anyone who wants to learn how to prepare fun, easy, delicious, vegan recipes - served anytime! Classes are filmed in HD by professional filmmakers to create an entertaining and engaging experience. A new cooking class containing a four-course meal and built around a specific theme is posted online and featured each month."

You learn how make beautiful, tasty foods like these...

And these...

And these burgers....

And this yummy pasta...

Is your mouth watering yet? I hope so! Heather & Jenny have kindly offered to award one PD reader a FREE 6 month membership to Spork Online so you can try out their cooking classes for yourself! How cool is that? 

Here's how to enter for your chance to win...just a leave a separate comment below for each entry. Thanks!

MANDATORY: Follow Passing Daisies and Spork Foods on Twitter and tweet the following: "I want to win free vegan cooking classes from @SporkFoods. You should enter too! http://bit.ly/nQkq1N #21daysofgiveaways @cityxlights13"

If you don't have a Twitter, just tell me why you want to win!

Want more chances to win? Who doesn't? Here are more ways to enter: 

1. Subscribe to Passing Daisies. If you subscribe, you get three extra entries!

2. Tell me something you would like to see more of on Passing Daisies. Recipes? Reviews? Workouts? Anything?

3. Be creative and write me a snazzy poem or song for my birthday. Bonus points if you make a YouTube video and sing it to me! :) I will feature your songs/poems on the blog if you do this! 

4. Follow me on Blogger.

5. Pin this post on Pinterest and mention PassingDaisies.net in the description.

THIS GIVEAWAY ENDS TONIGHT AT 11:59PM EST.

That's it! Side note - don't forget to like us on our newly updated Facebook, if you don't already. Thanks kiddos and good luck! The winner will be posted tomorrow morning, along with the next giveaway!

Much love, 

Vegan MoFo #31: The Best of PD MoFo 2011

Oh my goodness! It's such sad news! Today is the LAST day of Vegan MoFo 2011! :(

I can't believe it has gone SO quickly. I feel like the month just started and everyone still has 31 more days of amazing, crazy mofo-ing! I don't know what I'm going to do with myself!

In honor of the final day of MoFo, let's recap on some of the best Passing Daisies posts of the month.

1. All About Nutritional Yeast
This post got a lot more page hype than I thought it would! I guess people really need to know about Nooch!

2. Pumpkin Mac & Cheese
Delicious, pumpkin-y, cheesy goodness all in one bite.

3. What's the Deal with Honey?
Might be a bit controversial/surprising for those of you who don't know what goes on in the honey industry. Queen bee artificial insemination is sad and shocking.

4. Award-Winning Pumpkin Donuts
I couldn't believe my donuts won a competition! So exciting. Go check them out for yourself and try making them! They are super delicious!

5. An Interview with the Sporkie Sisters
If you don't know who the sisters behind Spork Foods are, are you really should check out this interview. I love these girls, and their new cookbook!

6. Banana Whoopie Pies with Coffee Crumble
Creamy coconut banana icing smushed between two incredibly soft banana ginger cookies. Heaven in every bite.

7. Pumpkin S'mores Cupcakes
Pumpkin icing, Dandies marshmallows, chocolate syrup, and a graham cracker cupcake. Can you say YUMMY?

8. Individual Sweet Potato Casserole
Just in time for Thanksgiving! Perfect for those who don't want to make an entire casserole. And with no sugar, either!

9. Mango Coconut Pancakes
If only you could dive into a big stack of these right now. Tropical, fluffy, sweet, and devilishly good.

10. Carrot Cake Larabars
My most recent creation for Iron Chef Vegan MoFo. Carrot cake without all the trouble of baking. Couldn't get much simpler! (You'll notice I'm trying to make my pictures look better, too!)

What is your favorite thing that you've made this month? Or your favorite thing you've seen on PD, if you didn't partake in Vegan MoFo?
Much love,

Vegan MoFo #15: Spork-Fed with the Sporkie Sisters!

Have you ever dreamed of being a Sporkie?

(P.S. - have you entered my Manna Bread giveaway yet?!

What about my Fair Trade Chocolate Giveaway?!)

I was recently able to ask the ladies of Spork Foods a few questions. I was really excited to hear about their new cookbook, Spork-Fed, released October1! (Mine came in the mail today, by the way - I love it! Can't wait to start baking!)

P.S. - It's totally a dream of mine to meet these ladies. Such an inspiration to my dreams of becoming a professional vegan baker/opening my own vegan bakery!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Jenny Engel and Heather Goldberg are the entrepreneurial sisters behind Spork Foods, the most popular vegan cooking school in California. They offer people all over the world the opportunity to take their innovative and fun cooking classes through their membership-based website, Sporkonline.com. Quickly becoming the go-to girls on the future of vegan cuisine, Jenny and Heather are regular contributors to VegNews Magazine and the recipients of a prestigious “Veggie Award.” The Spork sisters have been featured in The Los Angeles Times and other leading print publications, and have appeared on television as cooking instructors to the stars. Jenny and Heather feel like twins, separated by three years. They both became committed vegans while studying Environmental Studies in college. Jenny also trained at the Natural Gourmet Institute for Food and Culinary Arts in New York City and has over five years of professional cooking experience. Heather has a decade of business management experience in the environmental non-profit world. They reside in Los Angeles, and take a sister trip every year for inspiration.   

How do you begin to develop a recipe?  

That's a great question! It really comes down to thinking about a veganized version of something that we want to eat that maybe we haven't had in awhile, if at all. We figure, if we want to eat it, surely someone else does too. We are very focused on seasonality/time of year/holidays so we tend to focus our creations on those for that particular time.  For instance, we have been really inspired by Thanksgiving and the Holidays coming up so we will be creating a vegan version of Chicken Cordon Bleu! 

What inspired you to choose the recipes that you did for the new cookbook, Spork-Fed? 

Our main goal with this book is to get it out to the mainstream. If vegan food tastes good, people will eat it, plain and simple. These are our time tested recipes that we have been refining for years, so we chose the recipes that we heard appeal to everyone. Things like Creamy Baked Macaroni and Cheese with a Spelt Bread Crumb Topping and our Seitan Pot Pies with an Herb Biscuit Topping have been converting people for years!  

You were both environmental studies majors in colleges. What did you want to do with those degrees before you started Spork Foods?  

We wanted to put them to use!  So we worked for an environmental non-profit organization called TreePeople!  Jenny was there for about 2 years and Heather was there for 8.5 years. During that time we dreamt of having our own sissy biz, and here we are!

Jenny – Congrats on your recent marriage!! Can you tell us about how you kept your wedding vegan, in regards to food, cake, your dress, etc? 

There was no question that my wedding- from the cake to the dress to the shoes even down to HIS shoes would be totally cruelty-free. We gave the caterer our recipes that they recreated, we made a four layer white cake with peanut butter frosting and we searched high and low for a vegan wedding dress that had no silk in it!  Brides, check this out!  http://www.dollycouture.com/

You can now order their book on Amazon! I totally recommend buying it! 

Also, Sporkie sisters left me with a recipe to share with you all! Click here to download their recipe for Apple Pie Milkshakes!

What is one recipe you wish you could re-create, vegan style?
Much love,

well then.

Superhero program.. I've given up on...because I love sugar But only for now!

I will try it again soon. But seeing as I am home for the holidays, I have been inventing and creating my own cupcakes...which have been turning out VERY successfully, I might add. Of course, I will have to make a few tweaks the next time around, but all is going well.

Tonight, my family and I are going to dinner at Aladdin's Eatery. The restaurant looks very vegan friendly, and I am really excited to try it out! Plus, I love ethnic foods, so I'll let you know how that goes!

Last night for dinner I made Baked Mac and Cheese, courtesy of Spork Online. If you haven't heard of this site, check it out! You can subscribe to their cooking classes online for about $8 a month, and it's totally worth it! The classes and the website is run by two vegan sisters.  I can say I have honestly learned more about my food just by watching their cooking shows than by reading books!

Soon I will post recipes for my Key Lime Cupcakes (filled with a key lime curd) and my Oatmeal Raisin Cupcakes (delicious, and they taste just like a cookie!). Stay tuned!