Grüner Zahn

Lumpily is now a word.

2010-09-23T23:14:00.000+01:00

So how long have I been absent? A freaking long time, that's how long. But of course, don't expect me to start spouting about how I super duper promise - pinky swear! - never to vanish ever again, partially because I doubt there exists a world in which such a declaration isn't massive jinx-bait, and partially because I sincerely doubt anyone really wants to hear it.

But I had a pretty photo of food, and thus, I return to post it.

This, my friends, is the 'Dawn's Vegan' salad from Specialty's in Seattle. Mixed baby greens, peas, sweetcorn, black beans, carrots, baby tomatoes, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, fresh mushrooms, avocado, and marinated artichoke hearts. It comes with a balsamic dressing, but I ordered it without, being a dressing-hating freak. It was as good as it looks.

I also found a contender for the World's Weirdest-Looking Orange competition, if such a thing exists. Yes, I like posting photos of oranges a little too much. Don't judge.

He was delicious. Lumpily awesome. I plucked him from my step-aunt's tree after she told me those oranges weren't very good. She was very, very wrong.

Citrus and shine like the sun

2010-05-25T19:44:00.000+01:00

I am sorry. I am not as dutiful and attentive a blogger as I think I should strive to be. But let me just say one thing: school got its serious-business face out, and it wasn't kidding around! Well, I suppose in the strictest sense I could have made the time to scratch out a few words in April (oops) but this month... yeah. Hello, exams. You're a lot bigger up close.

However, as any vegan must, I have been consuming consumables. That orange up above is one of a rash of glorious citrus which appeared early on in May, which has now departed, leaving me to mourn the loss. I have no idea what specific variety of orange they were - dappled with raspberry-red pigment in skin and flesh, sweet to the taste and unexpectedly easy to peel, they might have been slightly anemic blood oranges.

But their sudden disappearance got me thinking about the change in the weather, the change in the seasons. Up here in the northeast of Scotland, it's not hard to forget that the rest of the world is experiencing warm weather and sunshine. The locals have all been amiably joking that the golden sunshine and paradisiac warmth of last weekend was our three days of summer... and with the overcast, chilly days punctuated with spells of showers, they do rather seem to be correct. There is, however, something fresh about these squalls, something decidedly spring-ish. The smell of the rain is brighter, the drops are larger and they don't fall sideways. The birds only stop singing during the most tempestuous periods. And, oh yeah, the sun doesn't set until ten.

I'm a Californian by birth and early childhood. This concept of 'seasons' still amazes me, even having lived six years in Canada (well, as much as the Pacific Northwest counts - certainly more than the SF or Monterey bay areas!) and this being my second May here. There's something so magical about bearing witness to the slow but constant transition from the first hale and hearty robins perched on bare branches to the constant twitter from each green bough draped with fine white blossom. My feet haven't gone numb walking from the house to class in over a month. And - oh yeah, this is my vegan blog - ever so slowly, the fruit is coming into season.

I love snowangels and curling up with a mug of tea and hours of bad Christmas reruns, and I love the early spring robins trilling into a spun-sugar sky, but however much I bemoan muggy days and the smell of hot grass and the midges, I love the time at the step from spring to summer when the fresh, local produce arrives. Being so far up in the boonies has really made me appreciate this a heck of a lot more. I'm a lot more hesitant to make a mango smoothie in February than I once was. And I'm certainly more appreciative of a punnet of gooseberries or tomatoes that don't taste like sadness and ice.

So yeah, exams are hard. And I miss you, funny marled oranges. But roll on the springtime fruits, I say. I am more than ready.

Earn your happy ending, boy.

2010-03-28T22:32:00.000+01:00

Today, I am king of the castle. I, the Almighty Greenling, stand triumphant, surveying the magnificence of my deeds. Not only have I crammed a kitchen floorful of groceries (the dairy and wheat items being, of course, property of my aunt) into a single fridge, not only have I made my inaugural pot of compost broth, I have, for the first time, succeeded at that strange arcane alchemic art that is gluten-free baking.

This recipe is tentative - in the great an honoured family tradition of making it up as you go along, much of this was improvisation and extrapolation. It was a study in educated guesses patched together with abstract hopes. But, miraculously enough, it worked.

So, if you have the will and the spirit, set your oven to 175 C and let the mayhem begin. To start off with, you'll need 100 grams of ground almonds - one and a quarter cups. Chuck that in a large bowl. Add three quarters of a cup of gluten-free flour, because I'm but a callow novice and have not yet ascended to mastery of making my own, not to mention that there just happened to be some kicking about the kitchen cupboards. Top that off with half a cup of light brown sugar - something caramel-coloured and sandy but not damply cohesive; demerara, turbinado, unrefined evaporated cane juice, those should all work a tread - don't pack it down, and break up any big clumps. over this, sprinkle two teaspoons of baking powder, and a pinch of salt. Finally, add in anywhere between one-half and two-thirds of a cup of dried blueberries, then grab yourself a big ol' lime, and zest it over the lot. Stir just a bit to coat the blueberries in the dry ingredients and get everything more or less distributed.

Now, the wet ingredients. Measure out one-quarter cup of light-tasting oil. I used peanut; rapeseed, sunflower, or safflower should work just fine - solid fats would probably be okay, if that's your kick. Add the oil in slowly, crumbling it into the dry ingredients just until you get a sandy texture. If you make a fist, the mixture should stick together in a reasonably solid clump, but should be delicate - crumbling at just the whisper of a touch.

Now, that lime. Roll it across your countertop to get the juices flowing. Measure out just over a third of a cup of soya milk, six tablespoons. Cut the lime in half, and wring the ever-loving mercy out of that little hespiridium. Crush its feeble carpels. Stir the juice into the soya milk and let that citric acid work its magic, then pour that thickened coagulated goodness slowly in with the rest of the ingredients until it comes together into a thick, sticky mess.

Now it's time for coconut. Toss shredded unsweetened coconut liberally into the batter - I used roughly one-third of a cup to take a respectably fluid mix into the murky no-man's-land between dough and batter, too wet to handle with dry hands, too thick to easily spread with a dry spoon. But this batter-dough may be unruly, its caprice is merely adaptability in disguise. It is thick enough to hold together as drop scones on a cookie sheet, yet malleable enough to be pressed and patted and smudged into two oiled-and-floured shallow circular cake pans, where it will hold its shape well enough to be scored into triangles before baking. Bake them for roughly twenty minutes, until the tops attain a warm golden cast and they resist a gentle poke. The toothpick test is also a good indicator.

Enjoy these lovelies with a cup of tea and a contented smile, in all their perfumed splendour and delicate tenderness. Bonus points if you can leave them alone long enough to not burn your tongue. ;)

More like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.

2010-03-25T19:14:00.000Z

I'd had some iPhoto troubles recently, hence the picture of pigs in the snow posted in late March. That's been resolved by it being spring break and thus my transferring to a different network that doesn't have a tangled mess of firewalls and proxies. I guess that means I'll be back to trying to patch things together with spit and tinfoil when term starts up again... but let's not dwell on that.

Instead, let's get working on the backlog of photographs I have! Dorm 'cooking' at its finest.

Pistachios. Cranberries. Two separate entities. How can they be made one whole?

With a jam jar, naturally. Psh, like I'd have anything like a food processor. Or a knife. No big deal, though, somebody's years-out-of-date blackcurrant jam works just as well.

Smoosh the bits together...

And there, like magic, little cubes of joy emerge, ready to be eaten between classes. Easy as.

You got your ethics on my Sunday afternoon

2010-03-16T11:15:00.000Z

I know a good number of people who don't believe in factory farms. I don't mean that in the sense that they disapprove, I mean it in the sense that they regard the concept as they do the monster under the bed and spider eggs in bubble gum. I never used to understand how anyone could simply not think that factory farms and feedlots and battery cages exist. Until I hopped the pond to Scotland, and remembered the days when I didn't believe in factory farms, either.

My school is surrounded on all sides by farmland. Fields of grain, flocks of sheep, the odd herd of cows, and a fair number of pigs. Well, more seagulls than pigs, but the pigs are the ones the farmers intend to raise. I can sit on a drystone wall, with the chilly breeze in my hair and the sounds of birds in my ears, and watch any number of even-toed ungulates amble about the pastures as they please.

When I was little, I recall seeing a lot of farm animals in the conditions I think all too many people assume are the norm: along the sides of roads, rolling green meadows housing a few fat and furry cows or a clump of sheep huddled out of the rain. Cows resting in the shade of an old oak tree, while their calves nibbled on dry grass, and an old swaybacked horse fended off the attempts at play of its coltish young successor. Chickens scratching about in the dirt around a small wooden coop; turkeys wandering the length and breadth of a farmyard, having escaped confinement for the hundredth time. I thought all farms in the world were family farms, all farmed animals in the world living the quiet life of idyll I read about in storybooks and saw in the hokiest daytime television.

And, on an emotional level at least, I understand the comfort of that delusion. I see why until that misconception is soundly proven false, it's so very easy to look the other way and ignore suffering because it's more comforting to pretend what's out of sight is out of existence. I guess I can kind of grasp the base emotional response at work there.

But I don't know why that should be any kind of excuse. I'm not saying that in a judgmental way - unless I'm judging myself right along with everyone else - because walking along by those fields of snuffling pigs, I did have the thought cross my mind: "Why is this so bad?" The reason I don't think I should even let 'happy meat' cross my mind as an excuse is not so much because happy meat is a load of crap, but rather because my core reason for veganism isn't a matter of animal rights or even, really, animal welfare. I'm not saying those things haven't become very important to me. But the spark that lit the fuse wasn't the suffering of individuals; it was damage inflicted on the environment. Ungulates trotting to slaughter with happy little hearts and the fresh scent of daisies in their lungs are still an intense drain on land and natural resources.

Yep, you heard me, all you green consumers with your grass-fed local beef and your cage-free organic eggs. Feedlots and battery cages look bad and evil and rapacious, and that's why people think they're doing a good turn. The sad reality is that giving animals more space, better food, more time, more attention just means they take up even more resources and spread the drain over a larger area. Grass-fed beef is worse in terms of carbon emissions and ecological footprint than factory farmed feedlot meat.

I mean, that still won't convince the omni crowd that meat is evil. And it's pretty much a downer that it seems it has to be a zero-sum game between suffering and environmental destruction. But I guess that just means the only real easy way out isn't trying to consume different animal products. It's consuming less animal product. ;)

I'm a student, I eat food.

2010-02-09T15:58:00.002Z

My RA is a lovely and wonderful person, with endearingly hippie-organic-all-natural leanings. Having heard me rampaging the halls bitching and moaning about my inability to be a ~~perfect~~ ~~decent~~ marginally acceptable student, she took a moment while she was in town and got me a chocolate bar, just to cheer me up. And because she is a lovely and wonderful person, I received a gluten-free, Nakd Cocoa Orange bar. Love!

Don't let its unprepossessing appearance fool you - this little thing has a heady chocolate-orange aroma that's almost floral. As I boiled the kettle to make myself a cup of tea, I took a tentative bite, wondering how the taste would compare.

O. M. G.
My tongue savoured, my mind whirled back - years back - to a half-remembered sweet, chewy and dense and fudgy and sweet just like this. Through the haze of memory, it took me a moment to realise... This bar tastes just how I remember a Tootsie Roll.

(It totally made up for the 'Oh wait, did we write 'pimento'? It's meant to be 'pepperoni.' Who marked this as vegan?' thing at lunch.)

And now... to try and make good on this gift of a snack and go attempt at least to be a better student. -_-;

Oh, to heck with it

2010-02-02T19:26:00.002Z

I should be writing Englist lit coursework comparing the aspects of tragedy and comedy as they relate to themes of love within Old English poetry, Elizabethan theatre, and the modern novel, and doing various editor-monkey tasks, and looking up exactly what it is that copper (II) sulphate does when it gets happy with ammonia, but seriously? I'd rather be lazy and procrastinate. And, you know, let my mind drift back to... oh, Christmas or so. Not that the day itself is really significant or anything. What's important is that some time between Christmas and New Years', I made the most decadent trufflepiething concoction I have ever eaten.

It was sort of based off a smlove, but because I have only so much of a deathwish, I left off the crust, caramel, and pecans, and instead just made it in a springform pan. Oh, and I kind of kludged all the rest of the ingredients and substituted this and that and... well, anyway, it was a smlove at heart.

(The fact that it contained seventeen ounces of chocolate and no small amount of Cap'n Morgan's might have had something to do with its ridiculous sexosity. Yes, Pound Plus, you're reading that right. But hey, it's not all bad! We have fruit in the background, or something. Yeah.)

(Don't even try to tell me that's not the sexiest thing since time began.)

(Just thinking about the smell of this thing is getting me a little high.)

Go! Do! Make a smlove! If I can nearly kill my entire family and all our acquaintances with just one layer... man, I don't even want to imagine the colossal damage one so inclined could inflict with a full-on smlove attack. It boggles the mind.

I need a real hobby.

2010-01-27T22:38:00.001Z

Well, it might at least be good to hold off on obsessively reading Choosing Raw. Every second entry seems to set me off into a maelstrom of introspection and philosophical ramblings, and that kind of existentialist nonsense seriously can't be good for my health. In all fairness, though, it was not Gena's entry that got me thinking, this time. No, it was a comment on an entry.

"The cookbook author Deborah Madison writes the more intact a culture is, the fewer cookbooks it produce." (sic)

I can't verify that Madison wrote any such thing, because Google is being coy and I'm feeling lazy, but whether or not the statement is correctly attributed is less important than the assertion of its claim - I have no idea who Deborah Madison is, and I don't really care either way what she herself may or may not have specifically said. It's the idea that matters.

Is it true? Well, I don't know. I'm not going to lie or posture about it; I'm not sure. Maybe. We'll go with maybe.

See, in one sense of the word 'intact,' the statement is correct. A small, tight-knit community, one which operates like a close family, hardly has any need of a written record of instructions for domestic tasks. There's really not much need for a written record of anything, for that matter. Anything that is known by one individual can be as easily and quickly conveyed by demonstration and word of mouth. Knowledge is passed through the generations directly. What need is there for a written recipe for stew when you've grown up watching your mother make it the way she grew up watching her mother make it? Why would you need to read a novel when the myths of your culture are practically alive?

In this sense, the cultures of the present day are certainly 'broken.' We don't live in small, tight groups. We may meet dozens of new people every single day of our natural lives. We may live in cities where we don't even know everyone on our block, let alone everyone who falls under the same strata council, or the same waste collection. We don't live with our parents and grandparents, our children and grandchildren. As I write this, I'm in the northeast of Scotland, my father is on the west coast of Canada, my siblings are in California, and the closest relative I have (geographically speaking) lives somewhere near Manchester.

The people to whom we're genetically a close match and the people who live within walking distance of our front doors are no longer our neighbours. Our culture is not determined by biology or proximity. Culture is global. Connections span the entire face of the planet. But a worldwide culture is not just a scaled-up version of the smaller models that preceded it; nor is it merely the result of the bleeding together of all the previous collectives. With postal services and telephones and mass media and the internet, society become a fine mesh of overlapping threads, connecting individuals indiscriminately of distance or background; rather linking people by ideas and ideals.

In a society without cookbooks, where does that leave vegans? Nobody is going to argue that vegans are a minority group. There are places we seem to crop up like weeds, but no matter how many dandelions you see crowded beneath the hose spigot, there will always be one or two in the middle of the lawn or out by the rhododendrons. Somewhere out there, someone newly resolved to abstain from any and all animal products is wondering how to make cupcakes without eggs, what the hell they're supposed to do with this 'tofu' stuff anyway, and, the ever-pressing question, what to serve their Aunt Maisie to prove that they really are eating food. Fair enough, this vegan likely would never have existed without the widespread communications and information and media and this that and the other thing, but even if they otherwise lived in an 'intact' community, someone who is different from the norm isn't going to last long trying to make their way on their own. With Veganomicon? Things are looking a lot brighter.

I mean, that wasn't the point of the comment, I know. The point the author of that comment intended was something more along the lines of: 'We're all disconnected from our own basic needs and from each other, so we try and engineer a better version, but only come up short of the real thing.' That's totally valid. I agree. I think the surge in popularity of cookbooks and food blogs and Food Network reality television is very strongly linked to the tendency to disengage from ourselves and from each other. Quite frankly, I find the fascination for what someone else has eaten in a day a little - well, extremely - weird. At the same time, here I am reading Choosing Raw. I certainly live in a glass house.

I think it's sad that in a time when we have more and more ways to connect with one another, when we know more and more about how to nourish our minds and our bodies, when we can be anywhere in the world in mere moments, we seal ourselves away in a bubble of artificial life. I think there's a place for cookbooks. That place is not at the head of the dinner table, while we lie prone on the plate.

And so it begins...

2010-01-19T17:16:00.000Z

Because I cannot bear to face the shame of having my personal life and my vegan food ramblings overlap, and also probably because those involved in the one are not so interested in the other, I have at long last caved and started a vegan blog.

Hopefully, the address reads as the German for 'green tooth.' Look, don't ask me, I just work here. And live in a dorm full of Germans but rather than get up and ask one of them, decided it was easier just to Babelfish it. You know.

So here is my log of vegan things. Expect pretension, rambling, whining, ranting, and possibly some recipes which may or may not suck. Don't say I didn't warn you.