So full disclosure here I am not getting paid to do this post but books are how I make a living. My normal 8 to 5 day job is working for a wholesale company to buy books for the retail chain Books-A-Millon (BAM). Books-A-Million is the 2nd largest bookstore chain in the country and I buy the books for certain non-fiction categories for all of their stores. One of the perks of my job is I often get sneak peaks at new books and I have access to advance reader copies (ARC’s) of books before they are published. ARC’s are kind of like the manuscripts that the publishers work with…

We are back home from our Virginia Blue Ridge road trip. We got back into Birmingham just in time for rush hour traffic Wednesday evening. We stayed at a condo in the Wintergreen ski resort. The resort is in a great location. Because we were at a higher elevation up on the mountain it was at least 10 degrees cooler and a lot less humid than back home.  It is close to the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National park but it is also close to cideries, breweries, and wineries. The first night we checked out the Bold Rock cidery in Nellysford. This is their flagship location. We had visited…

We are on the road again! We drove up to Virginia today. We drove to Knoxville, TN last night to split up the drive. We made it into Knoxville at dinner time so we stopped at Sanctuary Vegan Cafe. This was or first time there. It’s tucked into an old strip center next to a movie theater with a simple sign that says Vegan Cafe. The employees were all super friendly. They have a decent sized menu with a lot of seitan items. We shared the cauliflower buffalo wings. They were amazing! They were crispy and just the right level of spicy and how can you go wrong with vegan…

I have never really talked about my yoga practice on Vegetarian South before but it is a big part of my life.  I am not a teacher. I am just a student. Actually scratch that I am not “Just a” anything. I am a yogi. I am working on limiting the word “just” from my vocabulary. It is weak and unnecessary. I often find myself drafting an email at work “I just wanted to check on” but thats not exactly what I mean I don’t need to be polite about it “I want to check on” fill in the blank and it is probably because it has been over a…

So excited! Counting down the days! We are road tripping up to the Virginia section of the Blue Ridge Parkway and staying near Shenandoah National Park. We have never been to this park or done the northern part of the Blue Ridge so we are looking forward to seeing some new places. If anyone has hiking trail recommendations in that area send them my way. We are trying to find a couple of easy day hikes. Around this time last year we did a Blue Ridge trip to the section near Asheville, NC. Since Asheville can get expensive fast we stayed in Waynesville to save money. Waynesville is about a…

I like to eat seasonally and local as much as I can. We go to the farmers market some but you can’t get fresher than going straight to the source. So saturday morning we went blackberry picking with my mom and sister. Eric went with us too but he was convinced he was only invited to be berry picking labor. I told him that it would be easy and we wouldn’t be there long but was he wasn’t buying it. My mom found the farm online from pickyourown.org it is a site that connects you to local farmers in your area. The farm we went to had blackberries and blueberries…

We just got back home from our road trip to Colorado. We had a great trip! It’s about a 20 hour drive from Birmingham so we split it up into to days. The first night we stopped in Kansas City. KC was nice it had some very modern architecture and was larger than I imagined. We had dinner at a vegetarian restaurant called Fud. It is a small place in a cute neighborhood and it is cash only. It is always exciting when we can go to a vegetarian restaurant because it is nice to have choices and be able to order anything on the menu. Fud has a large…

It’s Birmingham Restaurant Week and today we had lunch at The Pantry in Mountain Brook. They have a $15 lunch and few veggie options.  For the appetizer Erin tried the Figs on Toast and I tried the Coddled and Swaddled which is a poached local duck egg in a nest of microgreens. The Figs on Toast with rose-lemon ricotta cheese from Stone Hollow Farmstead. I love microgreens. The apps were a great start and may have been the stars of the meal. For the main we both had the one vegan option the Pintos and Pot Liquor. Then for desert I had the vegan Raw Mocha Fudge and Erin had…