If you are growing bored of anonymously eating the same dishes at the same old restaurants, Nasturtium might be for you. Nasturtium is the newest vegan dinner party in town. Hosted by Chef Scott Winegard, a friendly six-foot-something hardcore guy who has worked in the kitchens of various restaurants including Pure Food and Wine, Broadway East (back when it was veg), and Angelica Kitchen, the dinner party aims to bring his signature fresh twist to vegan dining and socializing. As a gardener does with the spicy, carefree edible flowers which inspired its name, Winegard plants seeds in the form of a delicious meal made of seasonal, locally-sourced ingredients and hopes that friendships and a colorful evening will grow.

Thank you, New York City. On Thursday, January 28th, in a little over two hours, we sold $1,450 worth of sweet and savory treats at our Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti! Not too shabby for a little bake sale in the corner of a bar on a frigid winter night. Sodopreca and Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH) will receive their checks soon!

Extra special, cherry-on-top thanks to those of you who baked! We had the most fantastic line-up of treats -- Hostess-style cupcakes, personal pizzas, gourmet chocolates (thanks, Lauren at Sweet Compassion), spinach pies, brownies and cookies of all sorts, doggy- and heart-shaped gingerbread cookies (courtesy of Patti at Baked Ideas), more cupcakes (thanks to everyone who made cupcakes and Allison at Minor Treat) and even bagels!

This week's Vegan Drinks marked our 21st event in NYC. (Vegan Drinks is now in 19 cities! Welcome, Nashville!) To celebrate, we gave away Sambazon, Alex Jamieson's new book, Living Vegan for Dummies, and a couple of sets of the "Cookin' with My Crawdaddy" vegan cajun cookzines. (Thanks for the donations, everyone!) DJ Lil Ray kept the standing-room-only crowd happy with the good tunes as everyone patiently waited for their chance to order a drink or devour an apple cider donut.

We're hosting a vegan bake sale for Haiti at this week's Vegan Drinks NYC on Thursday, January 28 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm at Angels & Kings bar! More than 30 talented bakers want to sell you amazing sweet and savory baked treats. Please come with small bills and big to-go containers and buy, buy, buy! All proceeds will be donated to Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH) and the Dominican animal rescue group Sodopreca. Angels & Kings will also be donating a portion of its sales to the Haiti relief effort.

This month's Vegan Drinks marks our 21st event! DJ Lil Ray will be present to rock your world. Sambazon is bringing some of their açaí juice by for drink specials and giveaways. And, we'll give an autographed copy of Alex Jamieson's new book, Living Vegan for Dummies, to one very lucky winner. (Thanks, Sambazon and Alex!)

As always, the drinks are cheap ($3 domestics, $4 imports and $1 off well drinks) and the crowd is cool.



We'll turn down the music around 8pm and encourage people to promote themselves, their groups and/or causes for 30 seconds. If you represent a veg*n or animal rights group, come prepared with your (very short!) spiel and literature.

Check out our map of restaurants near Angels & Kings where you can grab a bite after the event. And if you haven't already, link up with Vegan Drinks on Facebook and MySpace.

Vegan Drinks is held from 7pm-9pm at Angels & Kings, 500 East 11th Street (btw Ave A & Ave B), New York, NY 10009.

The main reason you should be getting your tickets right now to this Saturday, January 23rd's Mercy for Animals Celebrating Compassion gala is of course to support the grassroots group's amazing work on behalf of animals. But another great reason is the gala's exciting and mouth-watering menu featuring vegan foodie heavyweights like Match premium meat alternatives, VeganTreats pastries, Daiya cheese, So Delicious ice creams, and Frey Vineyards organic wines!

A few exciting highlights: chicken vol au vent, crab thermidor, and chicken-stuffed zucchini using Match and a baked lasagna with Match Italian sausage and Daiya cheese. (Yes, there are options for you silly folks who don't do fake meats too!) Catered by the Queens-based, all-vegetarian company Natural Delights, the gala will use local produce, 80 percent organic ingredients, and fresh herbs. Check out the full-menu after the jump.

Get your tickets now!

ATTENTION, EVERYONE: We've updated the shiitake out of our NYC events calendar, where we post all the super duper vegan events in and around NYC, notices of book and movie releases, announcements of restaurant openings, and all sorts of stuff you care about. Our calendar can be your calendar; click! and it's in iCal, or select the event on the calendar page and add it to your Google calendar. You can also receive updates via RSS (my fav!) or e-mail, and be alerted the very minute we add an event. Lots of ways for you to be an instant vegan event know-it-all/socialite/activist!

FOR EXAMPLE: If you subscribed to our calendar, you would know that this Saturday, January 23, is going to be insanely jamity packed with events--MFA's Celebrating Compassion Gala, 4 Course Vegan's seven-year anniversary, and author Mickey Z. speaking at Bluestockings. All three events are at basically the same time, so if you want to enjoy all of them, you'll have to bring a change of clothes and pay off a cab driver to taxi you back and forth and not peek at your hot body in the rearview mirror as you change, and you need to plan ahead for that, so, see, you NEED this calendar!

Besides pimping Bluestockings, 4CV, and MFA events, we've got goings on at Farm Sanctuary, NYC Vegan EatUP and NYC Vegetarian Meetup, NYC Animal Advocacy Network, and bizillions of vegan cookbook releases coming this spring. If the calendar is missing anything, hit us up!

Like Isa, we're tired of sitting on our asses tipity-typing away our concerns for Haiti, so we're holding a VEGAN BAKE SALE to support Haiti during Vegan Drinks on Thursday, January 28, 7-9 p.m. at Angels & Kings. WE NEED YOUR HELP, NY VEGANS!! I know many of you have crazy vegan baking skillz (Mattie!), and we want you to put those superpowers to work on behalf of the critters of Haiti.

We'll donate proceeds from the sale to Sodopreca, a group of veterinarians from the Dominican Republic who seem to have their shit together; they're going over specifically to help animals, and they have a real, live departure date. Lots of groups are having trouble traveling via plane; the Port-au-Prince Airport is chaos. Sodopreca, because they're in the Dominican Republic, can get there by land, so we think they're the surest thing right now.

If you can bake for the sale, e-mail me right this second! Let me know what you'd like to bake and how much of it and what you propose we charge for each one, and send a list of ingredients. If you need ideas or recipes, e-mail me for that, too. Obvs, everything should be v-e-g-a-n. Vegan bake sales are totally going to save the world, so let's get to it!!

Oh, and before we quit -- there's another NYC vegan bake sale for Haiti, and it's at Mooshoes on Sunday, January 31. Proceeds for this one will go to Doctors Without Borders. Message those folks via Facebook if you want to contribute.

It's TIME. Time to get tickets for MFA's Celebrating Compassion Gala, Saturday, January 23, 7 p.m. to midnight. Tickets are $75 (c'mon, I know you spend that much on ice cream every month!) and they buy you a chance to get all fancy shmancy and accidentally totally on purpose bump butts with Dan Piraro, Peter Max, Jane Velez-Mitchell, GirlieGirl Army's Chloe Joe Davis, Discerning Brute Joshua Katcher, Nellie McKay, and a bunch of other awesome vegans and animal supporters. And of course it's another opportunity to EAT. There will be vegan hors d'oeuvres from Natural Delights and Match meats, desserts provided by Vegan Treats and SO Delicious, and booze! Also a silent auction and an awards ceremony, all to benefit MFA's efforts to help other animals.

So that's Prince George Ballroom, 15 E. 27th St., January 23 at 7 p.m. MFA has the deets. E-mail questions about volunteering your pretty face and bankrolling MFA to Matt Rice.

It's been a buzzy holiday weekend in the vegan news department. Tonight we catch up on all the goings-on since Wednesday.

• Obama poster artist Shepard Fairey immortalized Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson with a print of his very own. Posters measure 18 x 24", are signed by Watson, and cost $55 each. Buy 'em at Obey Giant. PAUL WATSON CAN NEVER DIE.
• The California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund released its 2009 State Animal Protection Laws Rankings. (Old news? Yeah, sort of. Still worth reading? Totally.) ALDF ranked New York in the middle tier -- not laying down the law with the best or permitting certain atrocities with the worst. Illinois ranked highest and Kentucky lowest. Read the full report here (PDF).
• In other ranking news, the Humane Society gave the Obama administration a B- for animal protection. Full report right here (PDF).
• Ingrid Newkirk reminds us via Huffington Post why it's awesome to be vegan, and then she rhymes with food.
• Vegan Twinkies are BACK. No Whey! Kitchen is going to fill the hole left in your heart by the closing of Vegan Honey Bake Shop. No Whey! sells to restaurants and is taking private orders for a limited time.
• Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, will deliver her lecture "The Social and Secret Life of Chickens" at the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan branch on December 30. That's 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, 6th floor, 6:30 p.m. this Wednesday. BE THERE.
• Your average dog eats a LOT of meat, VegNews reminds us: "research teams found that a medium-sized dog consumes approximately 360 pounds of meat and more than 200 pounds of grain each year. The agriculture needed to sustain this kind of companion-animal diet emits twice the greenhouse gas emissions that come from driving an SUV 6,200 miles per year."
• MEANWHILE, Annalisa Lazzaro of NYC asks The Ethicist whether it's cool to feed her cat a vegetarian diet. Duh! And you've got to be resilient! If one vegetarian -- or better, vegan -- kitty food doesn't work out, try another one. Then try cooking for Mr. Pus. Why support animal cruelty or slaughter in any way if you can avoid it, right?
• Don't know what to do with your sad, leftover shepherd sticks candy canes? Vegan Cookies brings us this recipe for peppermint candy cane chocolate chip cookies AND shows us how to crush candy canes. Holiday anger issues: resolved.
• Cafe Blossom's UES location opened, so go there and eat everything.

A LOT of folks bundled up and headed to Thursday, December 17th's Vegan Drinks at Angels & Kings Bar. If you were busy typing a final exam or avoiding awkward holiday office party conversations or simply stuck at work, then you missed one of the biggest Vegan Drinks to-date. The 20th Vegan Drinks in NYC featured vegan nog and rum cocktails, DJ Lil Ray's selections on the sound system, and giveaways from V-Spot, Compassionate Confections, Evolve Accessories and Rational Animal, as well as books from Melanie Joy and Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero.

The good people got up and made their "Shout Outs", too. Matt from Mercy For Animals made a general call for volunteers. Joyce & Jenny from Pets for Life NYC reminded the crowd about all of the good work they do. Brian introduced us to the Ulster County SPCA. Beth spoke about the Healthy Planet mission. Kate explained where to learn more about her jewelry line, Evolve Accessories. Lauren told everyone how to get more truffles from Compassionate Confections. Dawne announced that she is opening The Good Pantry, a vegan grocery store(!), in NYC soon-ish (Update: Dawne is planning to start a pilot version of the store inside the V-Spot). And, Andreas needs a new vegan neighbor to fill the vacant apartment in his all-vegan apartment building in Manhattan.

If you would like to get in touch with any of the folks mentioned above, please email info@vegandrinks.org.

Extra special thanks to Jesse the Bartender, Jesse the Raffle Ticket Giver, and Matthew the Photographer.

The first 2010 Vegan Drinks NYC is Thursday, January 28th, at Angels & Kings Bar from 7pm to 9pm. We are looking forward to seeing you in the new year! Get on our mailing list!

Need an excuse to avoid your awkward office party? Feel like skipping your Torts exam? Want to make new friends while drinking vegan nog & rum cocktails? Well, we can help you do all of those things and more at the next Vegan Drinks on Thursday, December 17, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm at Angels & Kings bar.

This month's Vegan Drinks will be jam packed with awesome tunes selected by DJ Lil Ray, $3 vegan nog & rum cocktails, and a ton of giveaways, including: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, jewelry from Evolve Accessories, a selection of truffles from Compassionate Confections, and a calendar (or two) from Rational Animal, t-shirts and more! Plus, Compassionate Confections will feed you free samples all night.

As always, the drinks are cheap ($3 domestics, $4 imports and $1 off well drinks) and the crowd is pretty great.



We'll turn down the music around 8pm and encourage people to promote themselves, their groups and/or causes for 30 seconds. If you represent a veg*n or animal rights group, come prepared with your (very short!) spiel and literature.

Check out our map of restaurants near Angels & Kings where you can grab a bite after the event. And if you haven't already, link up with Vegan Drinks on Facebook and MySpace.

Vegan Drinks is held from 7pm-9pm at Angels & Kings, 500 East 11th Street (btw Ave A & Ave B), New York, NY 10009.