Best Seitan BBQ, EVER! (and a little casein vent…)

So Friday was our adventure “off the shore” and into the wilds of northern Delaware.  Ok, not really the wilds, but a good 2 hour drive away.  We saw some wonderful exhibits at the DE museum of Natural History and generally enjoyed the chance to explore a new area.  A quick trip to a Ten Thousand Villages store garnered some wonderful finds, including bamboo poles to be used as curtain rods in my bedroom.  (Do you know how much bamboo rods usually cost?  I mean, doesn’t it seem crazy to pay over $10 a rod for something that grows out of control??)  But the big excitement (Ok, for me, maybe not the rest of my group) was the trip to Newark DE to The Home Grown Cafe.  We were in two cars and the one I was in got super lost (well, who knew there were 2 main streets in Newark!  Not my fault the gps was wrong!) so by the time I got there the rest of the gang had already gone through some appetizers and Spanish wine!  I ordered the Tempeh BBQ, one of the things I suggested in my post prior to going that I might get.  What was interesting was that E ordered the same thing, except with meat.  I love that it was not “special food” but things I might have ordered as an omnivore just with a vegan presentation.  I should have taken a picture of my meal, but I lit into that plate like it was my last meal!  So you’ll have to settle for a picture of the restaurant taken after I was comfortably full.

After eating we wandered down main street and looked in some wonderful little shops.  There were sweets consumed, but none by me since none of the bakeries had vegan options.  If I could have just convinced the rest of the gang to let me go into that goodwill….

We drove back to Wilmington after lunch to hit the Trader Joe’s there.  We try to stop at stores like that whenever we can since there aren’t any options down here.  Perhaps it was the fact that I had been in a car for too long, or the fact that every person within the Tri-State-Area (and if you got the Phinease & Ferb reference then points to you!) was there, but I was disappointed. Having two people in one home with conflicting food issues is not going to make buying pre-packaged things easy.  I would look at a package and think “Well, I can eat that but T can’t” or, conversely, “Well, T can eat that but I can’t.”  The most frustration did come from the soy cheese.  Cheese is the thing I am missing the most.  Many vegan cookbooks say things like “use vegan mozzarella” and I roar in frustration since I can’t find it!  While there were a few soy choices they all contained casein, a milk protein.  Not that I walked out of TJs empty handed, mind you.  But without cheese.  I won’t abandon my TJ runs, but I think I need to add some other places into the mix.  MOM’s Organic Market in College Park deserves a visit soon I think…