Update, 5/14/09:

Yay! We’re winners! Thanks for the copy of Veganomicon, Vegan Soapbox!

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On March 1st, Convenient Vegan @ Vegan Soapbox issued the following challenge:

The rules:

1. Go into any convenience store with ten bucks.
2. Choose vegan food.
3. Take it back to your house or motel room, add water, spices, herbs, or nutritional yeast if you like, to make a meal that serves one or more.
4. Add nothing else.

That’s it. The meal does not have to be super-healthy, low-fat, low-sugar or anything like that. It does need to be something that most of us would recognize as a meal, not a snack.

Post your pictures or at least your description of what you got and what you made here and tell us what convenience store you bought from. OR post your meal on your blog and give us the link here. [edited Mar 2, 2009: can post your meal on your blog and put the link here]

Deadline: March 31, 2009

Shane and I were out and about on Thursday, so we decided to give it a try. We stopped for gas at a Shell station along our route, then popped into the store – without any luck. There were precious few non-snack grocery goods to be found, and most of the canned stuff contained meat. So we went across the street to a Pour Boys store, and…same story. On our way home, we decided to give it one last try, this time at a Quik Trip. Success!

We actually came up with a few different meal plans*, but ultimately decided to go with Shane’s idea: spaghetti, topped with salsa, corn and Spanish olives, with a small bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos (yes, they’re vegan!) for dessert.

Shane’s Spicy Sweet Spaghetti

Ingredients

16 oz. pasta (we used thin spaghetti, American Beauty brand)
16 oz. salsa (we used medium, Don Pablo brand)
15.25 oz whole kernel corn (we used Green Giant brand, and only half a can)
5 oz Spanish / Manzanilla olives (we used Best Choice brand, and only 1/4 of a jar)
2 1/8 oz bag (or more) Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos
salt to taste

Directions

1. Prepare the pasta according to the directions on the package.

2. While the pasta is cooking, empty the entire jar of salsa into a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer. Add corn and quartered Spanish olives.

3. When pasta’s done, top with salsa sauce, season with salt to taste, and top with a Dorito(s) for decoration. Enjoy!

Makes: 2-3 servings of pasta. (The Doritos won’t last but five minutes!)

Shane enjoyed the meal, and described it as mildly spicy and a bit salty. I only like mild salsa – and smooth, non-chunky salsa, at that – so I had leftover pasta for dinner.

The whole meal, before taxes, came out to $9.65. Taxes bumped us a little over $10, to $10.08. That Shane, what a cheater! *grin*

Anyway, if you’d like to enter, it’s not too late! The deadline is March 31st, so you’ve still got 10 days left. Details here.

* My idea involved Bisquick – pancakes! – with a fresh apple and a jar of peanut butter blended with grape jelly for dessert. We weren’t really sure that EnerG egg replacer counted as an allowed “staple,” though.

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Tagged: food vegan veganism vegetarian vegetarianism recipe recipes contest challenge pasta spaghetti salsa corn spanish olives doritos spicy sweet chili doritos shane’s spicy sweet spaghetti Vegan Soapbox Convenience Store Challenge flickr photos

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 11:15 am and is filed under Contests, Food & Recipes, Human. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.