Category Archive: Celebrities

Here are all the SuperVegan blog posts categorized under Celebrities. XML

Farm Sanctuary’s Poker Tournament, Where Poker Is Optional But Saving Animals Isn’t.

by Andrea Wachner

March 13, 2013 11:31 pm

Filed under: California Celebrities Events Farmed Animals Los Angeles

This Saturday, March 16, the very funny, tall, and compassionate KEVIN NEALON will host Fun For Farm Animals: Celebrity Poker Tournament & Cocktail Party to benefit the work of Farm Sanctuary, America’s largest and most effective farm animal rescue and protection organization. This amazing night will feature tasty treats, delicious drinks, and yours truly! Did I mention you don’t have to play poker? You and I can play that game where we stand by the door where the hors d’oeuvres come out from and eat them all. Once that game ends (read: we get full) we can join the carnival atmosphere with psychics (I’m going to ask how fat food blogging is going to make me), magicians (I have bad eyesight, so they always amaze me), caricature artists (like my Bat Mitzvah!), cocktails (like my Bat Mitzvah!) and an intimate acoustic performance by Grammy winning artist COLBIE CAILLAT (like my… nope. Nothing.) If you do want to ante, poker players will battle Farm Sanctuary members, celebrity players, and poker pros to make the final table and win amazing prizes! Continue Reading…

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Go Veggie! And Signed Spork-Fed Cookbook Giveaway!

by Andrea Wachner

January 24, 2013 3:30 pm

Filed under: California Celebrities Events Film, TV, & Video Food Los Angeles Product Review Recipes & Cooking

Ladies, Gentlemen, Mammals of all orders,

I have a secret to spill:

GoVeggie! or as I like to call it, Go Veggie Exclamation Point (GVEP), formerly known as Galaxy Nutritional Foods (which never had astronomical imagery as part of its branding, nor was it made on the moon), a switch I wrote about earlier, are the makers of the new vegan cheese products available at Trader Joe’s (a store that is so very good to us). Their new and improved shreds are their shreds, and their new and improved cream cheese is their Not Your Average Tub Of Cream Cheese (which I think should be called Above Average Cream Cheese). How did I find this out? I never kiss and tell! Wait. Yes, I do: some good ol’ fashioned sleuthin’ and um, this blog post.

To celebrate all the cheesy goodness, GVEP threw a rager last night that was hosted, and when I say hosted, I mean “Hi, how are you, thanks so much for coming, I’m Heather, let me feed your face!” HOSTED by the effervescent energy balls (but pretty), the Spork Sisters, Jenny and Heather. There were people; like Rory Freedman, who has given up cursing (oh, the irony for a Skinny Bitch!) and has a new book called Beg : A Radical New Way Of Regarding Animals coming out on April 23rd. Television’s Jason Wrobel who is waiting to hear if the pilot episode of his Cooking Channel show How To Live To 100 did well enough to get picked-up and in the interim told us all about the importance of Vitamin K2 (which sounds like Scrubbing Bubbles for your heart). And my friend The Insufferable Vegan and I both masquerading as QuarryGirl.

There was Sporktastic food:

Cream Cheese and Olive Tapenade Layered Dip, Mini Mediterranean Pita Pizza Bites, Saffron Scented Arancini with Mushrooms

There was drink:

Courtesy Frey Wines– America’s First Organic Winery

And there was a cooking demo, where I learned pepper is now just called ‘pep’ and a Vita-Mix is a ‘Vity’:

Heather & Jenny make basil oil!

And best of all, for one lucky SuperVegan reader (that could be you!) there’s a copy of Spork-Fed, the cookbook any vegan who wants to make Strawberry Cream Cheese-Stuffed French Toast must own, the cookbook I personally had signed by both sisters just for you, PLUS a coupon for one free GVEP product!

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment (make sure to leave an e-mail address!) telling us about the best or worst vegan cheese dish you’ve ever eaten, by Monday at noon, PT. Good luck!

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Chef Roberto Martin On 95% Veganism, Cooking For Ellen Degeneres & Portia De Rossi, And The Vegan Police (yes, we asked him about the eggs); Plus Recipes for Chick’n & Mole Tamales and Black Beast Cake!

by Andrea Wachner

December 6, 2012 8:37 pm

Filed under: Celebrities Chickens Food Los Angeles Recipes & Cooking

Remember way way back to last week, when the famous face of veganism, TV’s Ellen DeGeneres, mentioned, while interviewing Ellen Pompeo, that she gets eggs from her neighbors’ “happy chickens”? Well, who better to talk about Ellen, her diet, and veganism than Roberto Martin, her personal chef! Whether or not you subscribe to their beliefs, it’s wonderful of him to share his thoughts with us, dontchathink? Big thanks to Chef Martin for obliging our Qs with some As and especially for sharing his recipes for Chick’n and Mole Tamales and Black Beast Cake (with a crust!) from his cookbook, Vegan Cooking For Carnivores!

SuperVegan: How long have you been vegan and what’s the best change you’ve seen to the state of veganism since then?

Chef Roberto: Not long, three years. It’s hard to tell because I’m in the middle of it all but it seams that vegan food has exploded in last few years. It is being heavily represented in the best restaurants.

Were you a chef first or a vegan first?

Definitely a chef first! I hated cooking vegan food, I made fun of vegans and dreaded a vegetarian guest at the table. I was a successful personal chef for ten years when I was asked cook for Ellen and Portia. I took the job as a challenge to myself and I never dreamed I would start eating this way

How did you come to be Ellen & Portia’s chef? And do you get to eat the leftovers?

My agent Jack Lippman (Elizabeth Rose Agency) set up the interview and they hired me on the spot. Ellen, Portia, and I got along from the start. They were unhappy with the food they were eating at the time. They are all about the animals. There were a lot of non-vegan foods that they enjoyed in the past but their love for all living things made it impossible for them to go back. They wanted GOOD FOOD that was incidentally vegan and that became my approach.

The Vegan Police were all abuzz about Ellen’s comment on her show the other day about getting eggs from her neighbors’ “happy chickens.” I’m hoping that maybe it was just a one lettered mistake and that she meant ‘got’ instead of ‘get’, as in, past tense– especially seeing as they have you! Can you comment on her comment? Do they, in fact eat eggs? And if so, where do you stand on that?
Continue Reading…

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Why it Matters that Ellen Degeneres Eats Eggs

by Jason Das

November 27, 2012 4:39 pm

Filed under: Celebrities Companion Animals Farmed Animals Stupid

On her TV show today, Ellen Degeneres, who is frequently mentioned as an example of a celebrity vegan, had a conversation with actress Ellen Pompeo about Pompeo’s backyard chickens, exchanging all manner of trivializing light banter. But the real humdinger comes when Ellen mentiones that “we” (presumably Ellen and her wife Portia de Rossi) “have neighbors that have chickens, we get our eggs from those chickens, cause they’re happy, they’re really happy chickens”:

And maybe those particular chickens are happy. And if they are, good for them. I hope that in addition to being protected from hawks and coyotes as Ellen worries about, they are also well cared for into their old age, just as a family cat or dog would be.

Maybe these chickens don’t dwell on the fact that their brothers, uncles, nephews, and other male relatives were virtually all killed at birth for being “useless”. Maybe they don’t dwell on the fact that many of their mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, and other female relatives will die from lack of adequate health care, or due to dangerous housing or transport. Maybe they don’t mind that they were bred, raised, sold, and shipped as a commodity. And maybe they don’t care that humans collect and eat their equivalent to menstrual waste. (I’m just talking about rich peoples’ backyard chickens here; not even getting into the horrors that befall their factory-farmed cousins.)
Continue Reading…

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Five New Vegan Restaurants Hug LA!

by Andrea Wachner

June 18, 2012 9:30 pm

Filed under: Booze California Celebrities Food Ice Cream Las Vegas Restaurants

It’s good to be a Super Vegan in L.A., and it’s about to get better. There’s like a bajillion places to get your Vegan Pizza Day on. And now, or within a matter of minutes from now, not one, not six, but FIVE new Vegan restaurants are opening. They all sound pretty amazing, too. Here’s the rundown:

Maddy’s
This is the second shop, previously known as The Shoppe, from Madeleine Bistro brain–>stomach whizzes, the Andersons. Some of you might remember them from their fundraising efforts for an all Vegan ice cream shoppe slash sandwich spot on Pico and Westwood Boulevard (i.e. near the Westside Pavillion) that was to open in November. Well, howsabout June, or July maybe? Still waiting on word of the official opening but I think I might want to live in there, so landlord, consider yourself noticed.

Shift
Now, you might be judging this place based on the fact that their only web presence thus far is on The Facebook, but before ye cast thine Vegan stones, go look at the pictures of the food this Vegan bar is going to serve. Then wipe the drool off your keyboard and count down the days until it opens. LA’s first all Vegan restaurant, bar and music venue! I hope shoes are not optional.

Cafe Gratitude Venice
They close one, they open two! Due to the star-studded success of the first LA branch, Cafe Gratitude is opening a second in Venice, land of all 2nd branches of things. It was supposed to open today, but didn’t. Maybe Wednesday? Or whenever the tarot/astrologist/numerologist/Psychic Friends Network/Miss Cleo tells them is an auspicious day.

Green Peas
This place is a local favorite for anyone who is in or around Culver City, and has been sorely missed during their, what feels like, 18 year renovation. Jose, the nicest owner in the world, said that they were tentatively going to re-open today, but he also told me they were going to re-open in early June, so I dunno… but don’t give up just yet.
UPDATE! Green Peas to re-open June 28th!

The Village
Now, this is an educated guess, but I believe that the long-hyped, well-anticipated Vegan restaurant from the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, Chrissie Hynde and Steve Bing with a menu written by none other than Tal Ronnen is called The Village and might open on June 30th. Now any google search will lead you, Super Vegan, to think I’m crazy, as there is no trace whatsoever of this news elsewhere. But! Staywithme: there have been reports for some time that this resty will be housed in the former Bokado space in Studio City. Being the SuperVegan Sleuther that I am, I called the phone number listed for Bokado, and was treated to a voicemail explaining that I had reached the place formerly known as Bokado, and as of June 30th, will be The Village. So, you do the maths. I might be wrong, but let’s hope I’m right, for our guts sake!

UPDATE:
Dangit, looks like my detective cap and I were mistaken.
According to EaterLA, Bokado WILL reopen as The Village, but not with Ellen or any other Vegan star power. And while there will be a few Vegan menu items, it will not be the Tal Ronnen Haven of our dreams.

2nd UPDATE:
It’s now SIX! Another Native Foods will open in Santa Monica on July 3rd! Hurrah!

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