Awareness Wednesday: Maraschino Cherries

Hello everyone and welcome to March's Awareness Wednesday!  I feel like most of my posts lately were about foods containing gelatin.  While many foods have gelatin in them, I thought it was time for a change.  So today I have a food for you that is not vegetarian, and this time gelatin is not the culprit.



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We all know about these little cherries, though I don't even know if you can still call them "cherries" since they taste nothing like real cherries.  They are super sweet and artificial, and usually found on top of sundaes or drinks.

According to the FDA, "The term 'Maraschino Cherries' is regarded as the common or usual name of an article consisting of cherries which have been dyed red, impregnated with sugar and packed in a sugar syrup flavored with oil of bitter almonds or a similar flavor."


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So what makes them not vegetarian? The ingredient in the red dye: Carmine color.  Just to refresh your memories, carmine color is a red dye that comes from the scales of the cochineal insect.  The scales are ground up and the deep red color is extracted.

Ground up bugs. Yum.

Alternatives to Maraschino cherries?  How about some real cherries!  Not only are they vegetarian, but all natural and healthy, as opposed to all the chemicals and sugar that gets added to the Maraschino verity.


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So next time you are making desert, opt for real cherries from your produce section, and make sure when going out for drinks you let the bartender know to not put any cherries in your drink!

Will you be swapping Maraschino cherries for real cherries for your next dessert or drink?

Bye from the Veggie Side!

Awareness Wednesday: Hostess (RIP)

Hey guys, I have quite the unusually Awareness Wednesday Post for you guys today.  When I first started my blog, I made a list of foods and topics that I wanted to be sure to talk about, which included a list of non-vegetarian foods for my Awareness Wednesday posts. Well the time came to write another post, so I am looking through the topics, and I see Hostess.  My first thought was "damn, they don't even exist anymore!"

But I have decided to talk about them anyway.  Why? Maybe to celebrate that another anti-veg food is off the market. Maybe just in case they start production again.  Or maybe so you can start using the remaining Twinkies you have stocked up to build that bomb shelter.

Here is another food that I ate in my beginning years of vegetarianism because I didn't even think twice.  Its cake, why would I even bother to check if it is vegetarian.  Well one day I did looked up the ingredients of my favorite Hostess snack, SnoBalls, this is what I found.

Beef Fat. Gelatin. Carmine. BAM, three culprits!

And this isn't just reserved for SnoBalls.  Twinkies, and many of the 100 calorie cakes also have beef fat.



So, thank goodness this "food" is off the market (for now).  Lets focus on some desserts that are vegetarian friendly,and not PACK with chemicals.

Were you a hostess fan?

Bye from the Veggie Side!

Halloween Candy Vegetarian Style

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!

Hello everyone and welcome to my favorite holiday! I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday so far, but I know its early and the real Halloween fun will happen when the sun goes down.

 But why am I so obsessed with this day?  First off, I love the fall! And Halloween is the quintessential fall holiday.  I love the emerging pumpkins as both decorations and food.  I really enjoy the darkness of it too. Ok, ok, so I might be a little weird, but I just love skulls, blood, bats, and pirates.  In fact I actually HATE all things scary, but I do like dark and creepy.  But most of all, I just love dressing up.  I feel that every time you leave your house, you are dressing up.  When I go to work I wear my work costume (khaki pants and a uniform shirt), when I go out with my friends I wear my going out costume (usually a pair of jeans, a cute top, and lots of accessories), and when I need to be somewhere nice I wear my dressy clothes costume.  While most kids stopped playing dress up at a young age, I played until I was almost 15 years old.  I don't think I enjoy dress up because I don't like the person I am (though my crack pot shrink said that was the reason, glad I don't see her anymore), there is just something about being totally weird that really appeals to me. I hate the normal, to me it is a synonym for boring.  I love completely crazy, outlandish, and different. What I don't love is judgement.  Dressing up as a princess on just a random Wednesday, and walking down the street would yield the strangest of looks and remarks.  But on Halloween you can dress up as anything you want, can wear the strangest clothes and insane make up and no one would even think twice.  I wish every day were like Halloween, where you can go out completely expressing yourself and not one person judges you.  Only in a perfect world.

So I know this is a food related blog, so I will stop talking about the deeper meaning of Halloween and what It means to me. I don't really have the biggest sweet tooth, but seeing that its Halloween, I thought I would do a candy related post.  I haven't been trick or treating since I was 19...ok so that was only 3 years ago, but I'm most of you stopped that tradition way before that.  But it is Halloween, so you know there is going to be candy..everywhere, and you might as well know which ones are meat-free!  Here is a list of my favorite Halloween candies.

1.Reese's Peanut Butter Cups


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I am obsessed with peanut butter and chocolate, peanuts and chocolate, peanuts, peanut butter  caramel, pretzels and chocolate.  If if has peanut butter, chocolate, and no meat, I'm pretty much in love. So it is no surprise that my favorite candy of all time is Reese's.  Not just the cups, but all the variations they make.  There is just something magical when chocolate and peanut butter comes together and get wrapped in orange.  When I went out and collected candy I was always thrilled when I got a Reese's in my bag, especially the pumpkin shaped ones!

2. Sour Patch Kids


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As I have mentioned here, the majority of gummy candy contains gelatin, however, those little sour colorful kids do not!  Not only do I love buying a big, over priced bag of these at the movies, but I love the little fun sized bags floating around the stores this time of year.  The are sweet, sour, chewy, colorful, and vegetarian. Winner in my book!

3. Twizzlers


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Now, unlike Reese's and Sour Patch Kids, Twizzlers are a candy I pretty much only eat during Halloween.  I love the chewy, fruitiness in those long strands.  And while the straws are great, nothing will ever beat pull and peal! Its like the candy version of string cheese.  Nothing beats a fun sized Twizzler after a night of trick or treating.  Again, chewy sans gelatin!

4. Almond Joy


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While I can't wait for pumpkin in the fall, I have almost the same amount of excitement for coconut in the summer.  So I love a little bit of summer coconut on a cold fall night.  Sometimes I am amazed of the perfectness of these coconut and almost covered in chocolate.  We all know you got your Mounds, which is just coconut and dark chocolate. But the amazingness of almond joy has both a delicious almond plus milk chocolate. Perfection.

I am interested to hear what your favorite Halloween candies are! And don't forget to keep an eye out for those not so friendly candies.  Make sure to always check your kids candy! Explain to them why you need to throw away certain ones.  By the time I was 12, after I came home from trick or treating I could check my own candy.

Here are the rules my family went by:
1. No candy that comes in a twisty wrapper (like Jolly Rachers).  It is easy to untwist them, add poison, and then re-close and look like nothing happened.
2. Nothing with no wrapper.  Again, sick people might poison it and just leave it out.  That means no fruit, or candies out of a bag.  One year a woman gave me a hand full of cookies from a box. Those when straight into the trash.
3. Check for open wrappers. Double check that all candy is 100% sealed.  Even the slightest opening might be evidence of being tampered with.
4. For the vegetarian houses, make sure to remove the candies that are not compatible.  I gave up meat at 11 years old, so that was 8 years of removing candy that wasn't meat free.  Check candy for gelatin and carmine color.  If you are unsure what's in your candy, the internet is a wonderful tool.

I hope you guys enjoyed my Halloween post.  I hope everyone as a safe, fun, and candy filled holiday!

Bye from the Veggie Side!

Awareness Wednesdays. Nerds.

As you can tell most of my Awareness Wednesdays will be about gelatin.  So this week I decided to change it up and talk about another sneaky food ingredient.  This one isn't even a food, it's a coloring.  I am talking about carmine color.  Carmine color is a red pigment.  While most red foods usually use Red 40 as the coloring agent, a rare few use carmine, since it is more expensive.  What is carmine exactly? Carmine comes from the scales of the cochineal insect.  The scales are ground up and the deep red color is extracted.

Most foods that use carmine are candies since they usually need some form of red coloring to be added.  One candy brand that uses carmine is Wonka.  Most commonly it is used in Nerds.

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The alternative?  Well most candies do not use Carmine since it is more expensive.  So it is most likely that your red candy is colored with Red 40.  The reason some companies prefer Carmine is because it is natural while the Red 40 dye is artificial.  Or you can just get the best for both worlds and opt for natural candies colored with fruit juices. Yum!

Will you be cutting out Carmine from your diet?

Bye from the veggie side!