I realized in the middle of a conversation recently that someone saying "let's set up a time to get together and talk about our feelings" is about as distasteful to me as a puppy cookbook.
Not a feeling-talker. Particularly not on a schedule.
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When my alarm went off this morning, I'd been in the middle of a dream about making a slight change to hotel reservations--I was waiting on hold, slightly annoyed I couldn't deal with it online, looking at my notes to figure out exactly what I wanted to say.
Y'see? Even my *dreams* are boring right now. (Though it did remind me that I need to make a slight change to some hotel reservations, and I just figured out that I need to do it by phone.)
"A Ford-Tough Truck is the only one you'll ever need on the job site. Every model comes with a six-foot tranny."
"Six feet in heels, or out of them?"
"Pre-op or post?"
"What if I want a drag king instead? They might actually help with those 100-pound bags of sand."
"Will they pay for gas?"
"Will they steal my dresses?"
Some knitting:
I started a fourth kids' sweater, but just before starting the yoke, I realized that not only did I not have enough yarn, but I didn't have enough yarn to fudge things so it didn't *look* like I'd run out of yarn. That seems to have killed the kids' sweater run. So now, hats.
The two at the bottom used up the last of those particular bits of acrylic. Roll-brim hats--cast on 70 or 80 stitches, about the easiest thing ever. They'll go to Dulaan unless one of my friends has a girly-girl in the near future.
The hat on the top is for me. It was also a using-up-leftovers project, finishing off most of the yellow and pink oddballs I had from the socks I knit for the girls for Christmas. It's a cotton/elastic blend, so I can wear it at Capoeira and throw it in the wash after.
I just threw out some fairly lightweight machine-knit slippers that were falling apart, and I'm thinking of making a pair of felted slippers for myself to replace them. I have other, more heavy-duty slippers, but I liked the ones I had too because I could leave them on in bed without feeling like I was wearing shoes. Felted slippers, which I'd basically construct like thick socks, would fill the void, and I know from prior experience that I can make them pretty brainlessly. There's some worsted-to-bulky handspun I was thinking about using in a project for my mom, but it came out pretty goofy, so I might use that. I think felting will hide some of the goofiness. That yarn alone wouldn't be enough for slippers, but I have enough fiber oddments that I could probably knock out something that coordinates without too much trouble.
I've been spinning a bit, too. Today is just sublime. Nearly 70, partly cloudy, crocuses are up, snow's finally gone, dogs are sniffy. There's still ice on the lake, but it was plenty warm to take a study break by spinning out on our porch, watching what looked like a dozen or so adolescent squirrels being completely ridiculous in the back yard. Open windows! One forgets what it's like.
Wearing stupid t-shirts gives me far more confidence than one would expect--far more, indeed, than I normally have. (for the record, I have a new one: the one in the
xkcd store that says "Stand Back, I'm going to try science". The wee graphing calculator, in particular, makes me laugh.)
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I would like the scientific world to create a lab notebook that's big enough to easily fit a standard piece of paper with enough margin space for tape, writing the date, a few notes, etc. Maybe if each sheet was the size of that legal-sized paper?
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Speaking of lab notebooks, I'm starting to go through them at a disturbing rate. Though this may have to do with having to tape every printout onto two pages to get it to fit properly (Grr.) Things are going well, but just so busy. so expect some quietness, some one-sentence posts, and some failure to write a wrapup food post.
I made waffles for dinner last night. When I noticed I was hungry. After not getting up from the computer for 6 hours. *sigh* That's life, lately.(J was at work, normally his presence keeps me from completely withdrawing in that way.)
I did make *extra* waffles, and packed them up nicely into the freezer, so I haven't completely lost it. Cheaper and nicer than Eggo. The recipe I use, from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, asks you to whip up the egg whites. When you're in a hurry, it's not necessary, but it's does make the waffles a bit crispier, both the first time around and upon reheating. I overmixed the batter a touch, but besides that, success.
I'm surprised that my Korean coworkers haven't just given up on thinking that I understand the English language at this point. Every once in a while, one of them will come up to me and ask what a particular word means. And every dang time, it's a word where I have the right sense of what it means, but am not clear enough on it to explain it quickly or sensically, because their English is much better than they think, so they only get tripped up on exceedingly rare, archaic, or foreign words. I wave my hands around and babble for 10 minutes, then look it up in the dictionary because I've confused *myself*.
Recent examples:
Skiving (blame the British coworker for that one)
Boule
Status Quo
Ides, as in "Ides of March", because someone told them to beware today, which is what reminded me about this always happening.
(I'll do a food wrap-up post soon, maybe this weekend. Just going through a sufficiently large life-splosion to not have the time right now.)
Food Week, Part VI: Building a Vegetarian Repetoire
Monday food:
Breakfast: Cereal
Lunch: Leftover fajita bits, yogurt, blueberry muffin, half a rice krispie treat (bought at the snack place at work)
Dinner: Veggie burger with sweet potatoes, some salad, the other half of the rice krispie treat for dessert.
Tuesday food:
Breakfast: Cereal
Lunch: Salad, a muffin, yogurt, dried apricots, some crackers
Dinner: Tofu sandwich with sauteed mushrooms and onions, couscous with broccoli, a dessert muffin.
Dinner was an experiment, though not a particularly tricksy one (I don't do tricksy dinners on weeknights when I'm already hungry). We had some uncooked tofu left over from the fajitas and some pre-sliced mushrooms that weren't going to last for a whole lot longer. Wasn't really enough for a stir-fry or curry, so I decided to treat the tofu in a somewhat hamburgery way. I sliced the tofu about 1/4 inch thick, patted it somewhat dry, and covered both sides with salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder, some chili powder, cumin, and a tiny touch of tumeric for some color. I put them in a fairly hot pan with some olive oil and kept them wiggling until they'd formed a decent crust.
Once they were reasonably well-cooked, I piled the tofu into one corner of the pan and put in the onions and mushrooms--I'm terribly lazy with pans, I'm always trying to put everything into one so there are fewer dishes. One advantage to doing it this way was that the oil and spices left in the pan got mixed in with the veggies. I set a couple of pieces of tofu aside for lunch tomorrow, and put some cheese on:
(the cheese was the overkill of the hungry--this would be a very easy vegan meal too.)
When the cheese was melted, I just put two pieces of tofu on bread, loaded it with mushrooms, and lo was a delicious sandwich created.
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A big part of any major dietary change involves replacing the tried-and-true recipes with new tried-and-true ones, which add, remove, or replace certain ingredients. Hopefully, most of these don't feel fancy, they're just Tuesday food. Something that I do, which I would probably do no matter how I ate, is keep a list of dishes that I like to eat. When I get in a rut I can consult the list and get some ideas for things I haven't eaten in a while. Below is a fair chunk of my list, not remotely ordered. There are some mini-recipes, where things might be non-obvious. Most of them, I can make out of the pantry.
Sesame and/or peanut noodles (that thing I made last week, or, that thing I made last week with peanut sauce.)
Chili, sometimes from a Fantastic Foods mix
Vegetarian Pot Pie--like a chicken pot pie, with vegetable stock, well-seasoned and fried tofu, mushrooms, carrots, potatoes, lots of sage and black pepper. Good for Thanksgiving, though it doesn't take long to make.
Meatless loaf--a staple of vegetarian cookbooks from the 70's, usually mostly made with rice and nuts, with some egg and/or beans and/or cheese to hold it together. I don't make this often, because J's not a big fan.
Pasta topped with sauteed veggie combo du jour
Curry
Fried Rice
Stirfry
Fried eggs/omelette/huevos rancheros
Quiche
Quesadillas
Fajitas
Veggie burgers with some sort of easy grain on the side
Black Beans and Rice, can be served like an almost-chili over rice, or well-mixed,
baked with cheese in a casserole, or tossed together sloppily 2 seconds before putting it on the table. Sometimes I use other beans even though I always *think* of black beans first.
Stuffed acorn squash --another 70's hippy cookbook staple, another thing that's nice at Thanksgiving, particularly with wild rice, cranberries, and corn, to go All-American on the turkey eaters. Alternately:
Zucchanoes, though I ate several lifetimes' worth on Star Island and have not been too keen since.
Lentil soup
Kitchen sink soup--when you've got a lot of leftover bits of things, you boil some water and throw everything but the kitchen sink into it.
Minestrone soup, or pasta fajool (minus the sausage, natch)
Butternut Squash Soup
Potato leek soup--creamy or not, depends on our mood and pantry that day
Cream-of-whatever soup--whatever's in the fridge, that is
Potato pancakes
Stuffed mushrooms--with button mushrooms, they're fiddly little appetizers. With portabellas, they're a major side dish.
Spanish rice with fried plantains--sometimes we put beans in the rice, sometimes not. The plantains are just about ripe when they look like bananas you'd throw away, and getting as firm as a fresh banana. Slice them like you would for cereal, or at a slight angle, coat them with sugar and salt, and fry. Good with mango chutney or fruit salsas.
Gnocchi, if I have the patience
Polenta, good with a strongly-flavored topping
Lasagna/stuffed shells. I usually put a lot of spinach in with the filling, and twice the spices that are called for. In restaurants, you'll often get a vegetarian lasagna drowning in white sauce, way overcooked, and full of odd things like carrots and corn. I like it with more personality.
Falafel, from a mix. Usually a meal I buy extra stuff for--plenty of pita, hummus or baba ganoush, lettuce, the veggies to make Mediterranean salad. The boxes of mix are usually enough for dinner and several lunches of food--if you're single, save half the mix for later.
Egg Salad
Dad Casserole, made with 100% organic Dad. No, it's vegetable-of-choice (dad version: mushrooms), cheese (dad version: Swiss), and cream-of-whatever soup (dad version: mushrooms again). With breadcrumbs on top, some spices, and a plunger for the arteries.
Baked spaghetti squash, more of a side dish, hard to pair with anything, but tasty. Cut the thing in half, scoop out the seeds, lay cut-side down on a cookie sheet, bake at 350-400F for about 40 minutes. Scrape a fork over it to separate the strands. As a child, I found this the most entertaining food in the entire universe.
Forgiveness Puffs (long story). Frozen puff pastry, thawed, rolled out, cut into squares roughly 8x8inches, filled with mushrooms, onions, what-have-you, sealed and baked for the length of time and temperature on the puff pastry package. Served with spicy tomato sauce.
Sweet potato casserole--cut up sweet potatoes, mushrooms, sweet peppers, with a rosemary-heavy flavoring and breadcrumbs on top, baked at low heat until the whole house smells wonderful. Good with fresh bread.
Baked tofu sandwiches
Wild rice salad with cranberries
Pizza
Calzones
Basic wraps/pita sandwiches, good on hot summer nights, just hummus, veggies, whatever is handy and doesn't require cooking.
Samosas
Savory waffles--cornmeal heavy, good with homemade salsa.
Vegetable kabobs, good for bringing to barbecues.
There should be lots of recipes available online for most of those. Happy eating!
Food Week, Part V: More "Minimal planning" recipes
Sunday food:
Breakfast: Cereal
Mid-day grazing (not really lunch, I ate these things over a 2-3 hour period): crackers, hummus, cheese, I think there was some sort of veggie in there, whole wheat blueberry muffins that I baked, topped with Nutella, some dried apricots.
Dinner: Fajitas
(a quick picture, mid-meal)
Snack, later: Another muffin, a small bowl of cereal.
We went on a major shopping trip yesterday, carrying home about the limit of what we can carry without tragedy. We've learned that it's better to go around with baskets instead of carts. It's much easier to fill up a cart without thinking about its weight. And anyhow, the aisles of our nearby stores are narrow and it can be hard to maneuver with the cart.
I considered writing out the grocery list again here, but 1)it was really, really long, and 2) Except for non-food items like kleenex and laundry detergent, it was all stuff in the list of pantry basics I wrote out a few days ago.
I'm pretty well pleased with my own accuracy.
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Fajitas are great, because they're so flexible. You can do a super fast version--just saute whatever veggies are in the fridge, add some onion and garlic powder, hot pepper, maybe cumin. You can do a fairly elaborate version, with little bowls filled with lime wedges, fresh-made guacamole and/or salsa, cheese, rice, refried beans, etc. This one split the difference. There was a nice spread, but it didn't take too long, either.
Here's more of a guideline than a recipe:
First, pick a combination of things off of the following lists that appeal:
Long-cookers:
Carrots or other tubers
Tofu or seitan
Onions
Medium-cookers:
Peppers (sweet or hot)
Mushrooms
Garlic
Celery
Broccoli
Corn
Short-cookers:
Any greens
Spices/flavorings:
Onion and/or garlic powder
Cumin
Cilantro
Lime juice
Hot peppers: fresh or dried or ground up in little jars or in sauces
Additional things:
Tortillas
Salsa (fresh or jarred)
Grated cheese
Sour cream
Lime juice (not if you added it earlier though)
Avocado or guacamole
Rice
Beans (I usually make rice and beans and have them on the side)
Cut the long-cooking things, and put some oil in the pan and set it to heating. Medium heat is fine.
Throw in the long-cooking things, and maybe some spices at this point. Cut the medium-cooking things while the long-cooking things go. Throw the medium-cooking things in once the long-cooking things start to get some color.
Cut the short-cooking things while everything else finishes up. I find that greens are pretty much ready as soon as they hit the pan, so when everything else is done, throw them on, flip things once or twice, taste and adjust, and serve with whatever condiments and side dishes sound good. You can see that we had some hot sauce and lime juice (though not fresh) last night, and there was also cheese and mild salsa on the table. The filling had tofu, green and red peppers, half a jalapeno, carrots, and spinach. Mushrooms got left off at the last moment because the pan was already pretty full.
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Fillyjonk mentioned something in the comments yesterday that I thought of as I was writing, but didn't get around to saying--a lot of those issues aren't necessarily vegetarian-specific, but go with any dietary change that doesn't jive with the norm (whether by choice, like going kosher, or not by choice, like if you have serious allergies). I'm allergic to pineapple, which is just odd enough to not usually be a problem--I just avoid cut fruit if I didn't see it prepped. I've found that people's sensitivity to my own dietary choices and allergies is largely dependent on if they've ever had an unusual diet, even if it wasn't by choice.
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I'm starting to run out of foody things to say; from time to time I think of starting a food blog, but it's hard to keep up the pace. If you have any questions, things you want me to elaborate on, etc., let me know. I'm planning on writing out a list of typical meals we can get out of the pantry (probably with a series of mini-recipes), and a bit on some meat-reducing ideas, and maybe a list of books and cookbooks that are helpful, though that will involve remembering the names of things I read in high school.
Food Week, Part IV: Veggie traps beyond "What will I eat?"
Friday's food:
Breakfast: oatmeal with apricots
Lunch: Last of the sesame noodles, some crackers and juice
Dinner: A piece of pizza and a salad at a nearby pizza place
Saturday's food:
Breakfast: some kind of cereal
11am: leftover pizza
3pm: Hummus sandwich with chips and a strawberry/coconut smoothie at a local cafe
8pm: Fried egg sandwich
The weekends tend to be a little less structured, food-wise, although we're also more likely to make a "real" dinner that takes a while to prep.
J and I had a good capoeira workout on Friday, and walked... *checking Mapquest* about 3 miles round-trip Saturday to a nearby park, enjoying the warmer weather and hopping over huge slushy puddles of melting snow. On our way back, we stopped at a nice local cafe, which has a busy entrance facing the street, and a just as busy entrance which faces the bike path. On Friday my stomach was a little off--I was worried with the initial rumblings about the stomach flu that's going around, so I had a pretty small lunch and dinner to be on the safe side. But I felt better on Saturday, and that, combined with the exercise, meant that I really plowed through the sandwich and the unreasonably-large smoothie. Then I ate most of J's tortilla chips.
While I was messily enjoying the sandwich, I got to thinking about how lucky we are to live in a pretty progressive neighborhood, where plentiful veggie options are the norm. There are some situations I never really thought about before going fully vegetarian, even though both my parents were off-and-on vegetarian as I grew up. So here's a list of somewhat challenging things a vegetarian or vegan is likely to encounter along the way, which have little to do with wanting to eat a big slab of flesh. If you're considering going meatless, you might want to have a little think about these situations.
-Food is a rather obvious way to bring people together, and also to keep them separate. Sharing food with others can bring about a powerful feeling of community, while rejecting other people's food can feel like you're rejecting the person. Will you eat meat on meat-centered holidays like Thanksgiving, to preserve the feeling of unity? Will you bring a meatless dish to share? What if your meatless dish is so good that everyone eats it before you have a chance to serve yourself?
I'd been a vegetarian for several months when my first veggie Thanksgiving rolled around. While almost everyone was fine with me eating whatever I wanted, a few people pushed some turkey on me, saying "but it's Thanksgiving! What's Thankgiving without turkey?"
How would you answer the question?
-Many people reduce their meat consumption because of health-related factors. However, most junk food --chips, candy, chocolate, cakes, french fries, etc--are meatless. If you're in a situation, like living on a campus, where you don't have full control over your food, your options may be limited to the wilty-looking salad bar, some white rice, and some overcooked pasta. How will you balance your diet when it's very easy to eat both vegetarian and poorly?
-Many restaurants have few vegetarian options. Some have none. A few months ago, we were in DC with my mom, and went to dinner at a very chichi place with my uncle, who lives in the city. There were no fleshless dishes.
I know several people who only eat meat when they're out, so they don't feel limited, or because the sight of raw meat in their fridge grosses them out. Are you comfortable getting specific with waitstaff, either by requesting a meat-containing dish without the meat, or by choosing an odd assortment of side dishes and ordering them together?
-Sometimes there is meat in dishes that look innocent from the description in the menu. I've ordered food from a part of a menu labeled "vegetarian" and gotten food containing bacon and shrimp. What will you do when presented with such a situation? Would you rather the food be thrown away and wasted? Will you wrap it, give it to someone else, and pay for two meals? Will you eat it?
-How you will respond to people who feel they have the right to challenge your personal choices (this one bothers me a *lot*, because I don't hassle people about their choices). Will you get confrontational with them? This can get tiring. Will you consider it an opportunity to teach them the value of a vegetarian diet? This can get tiring too. Will you laugh it off, or change the subject? They might think your choice isn't a very serious one.
These certainly aren't the only difficult situations a new vegetarian or minimal-meat-eater can get into, but I included these because they can either come up suddenly (in the case of being served a salad covered with bacon in a restaurant), or can slowly creep up without your noticing (like eating a lot of technically-vegetarian food with no other redeeming nutritional value). Other situations, like choosing to wear leather, errors of translation while traveling, deciding whether or not to purchase foods containing homeopathic amounts of animal products, are generally more easier situtaions to see coming, and to deal with as they happen.
Part III Eat Locally, Act Full:
What I ate on Thursday:
Breakfast: one of those cereals with granola bits in it.
Lunch: Leftover sesame noodles, egg salad sandwich from the sandwich spot downstairs.
Dinner: Pasta with sauteed mushrooms and pesto (I went out to eat, though I make this sort of thing often during the summer when there are huge lovely bunches of basil at the farmer's markets).
Speaking of the farmer's markets, there's one aspect of my diet which I consider very important, which only indirectly links in to vegetarianism, and that's eating seasonally and locally.
I'm lucky. Madison is just chock-full of farmer's markets when the weather's nice. I generally fall off of this in the winter, though there's definitely more root vegetables, winter squashes, and dried beans about the kitchen this time of year.
Eating more locally requires a different approach to food. Rather than thinking of a list of meals I might want to eat, writing down the ingredients I don't have, and buying them at the store, I have to have a more general idea of what might be tasty--a cold salad, something sauteed (either a stirfry or pasta topping), something I can make sandwiches with. Since I've been doing this a few years, I have a fair idea of what will be up and ready at various times, but some weeks are surprising.
I usually do two circuits around the market. The first, I'm just looking to see what's interesting, or perfectly ripe, or plentiful and inexpensive. I usually end up with a mental list of 2 or 3 must-haves, and a few other things which I may or may not buy. Then I try to think of how things will go together.
Maybe the basil and sweet peppers look great on a late July afternoon, there's some nice greens, early raspberries are just coming up, and I've gotten around early enough to catch the feta man while he's still got my favorite. I could combine those in a few different ways--maybe some sauteed peppers with pesto on pasta, with feta on top, with a salad on the side and raspberry sauce on pancakes on Sunday. Maybe I'll have delicious sandwiches this week, with roasted peppers that will keep a few extra days if I douse them to death in olive oil. Maybe I'm more in the mood for an Asian stir-fry, in which case I'll leave the basil, or freeze a batch of pesto to hold onto in January when I need a blast of summer.
In any case, I try to come up with a plan which fits with everything I'm buying; I've learned that just going with what looks nice is a good way to have a bunch of nasty, half-used veggies a week later.
Going with a lot of local food isn't just for vegetarians, but I do feel like for most meat-eaters, the answer to "what did you have for dinner" is "chicken, with a couple of side dishes". Vegetarians rarely have an obivous food focal point, which makes every sub-part stand out more*. Local, seasonal food is *delicious*, if you're paying attention. Farmers can pick the types of vegetables that taste the best when not worrying about trucking those veggies for thousands of miles. Everything's picked when it's fresh. You can talk to the person who's cared for the plants, find out what their favorites are, and why. You can eat strange, beautiful things you wouldn't see or notice in a supermarket--yellow and purple carrots! Green beans in a million sizes and shapes! Fresh soybeans! Concord grapes! Bitter melon! Morels and other non-cultivated plants! Asian herbs! Muskmelon! Rainbows of swiss chard! Three kinds of cucumber! 20 kinds of hot pepper!
Meat eaters often consider vegetarian diets limited, but I certainly eat more species now than when I ate meat.
Find a farmer's market near you
Avoid the market entirely and get a local farmer to deliver fresh produce to you every week. (I didn't get into CSAs here, but we did one for a few years and really enjoyed it.)
What's in season at different times of year?
*This is a sticking point with J and I at most big chain restaurants. The meals we're served there, it's always painfully obvious that they've arranged everything around the motto of "at least they'll fill up on the big slab of meat". When that meat is taken away--and we're not ordering steak fajitas without the steak, we're ordering things from the menu that they've put together--there's an obvious missing piece there. The things-that-aren't-meat are just barely edible, and as a result, we assume places like that aren't interested in our business and avoid them when possible.
Food Week, Part II: Typical day #1:
Breakfast: Oatmeal.
Lunch: A lunchtime meeting where food was served; I had black beans and rice with a nanotortilla (too small to hold the beans and rice in a satisfying way, so I used it as a scoop). There was shredded romaine lettuce as a taco-topping, I took a pile, with a bit of salsa on top, and treated it like a side salad. Also, a cookie.
Snack: Another meeting cookie which I'd grabbed on my way out--I didn't get home until kind of late, so this was around 5pm, to put off dinner.
Dinner: Sesame-Tofu Noodles.
It's still cold enough that I want something warm and cozy at mealtime, but it's been winter for long enough that I'm getting tired of all this heavy food. This is a nice light vegan dish, but warms me up when served hot with a bit of spice.
I can usually make it out of the pantry without advance planning, and it's pretty fast. It's just tofu, soba noodles, basic flavorings I usually have, and which are easy to subsitute. Julienned carrots or snow peas would be nice, or maybe some edamame instead of tofu. I often make a near-identical thing with
peanut sauce, but that was a little heavy for my mood.
A better person than me would fry the tofu in one pan while boiling the noodles, but on a Wednesday night I can't abide messing up two pans for one basic dish--I fry the tofu in the pot I'll cook the noodles in, give it a quick rinse, and fill it with water. Gives me more time to do the dishes.
The dressing contains soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, brown sugar, ginger, garlic, green onions, some salt and pepper, red pepper flakes or hot sauce sometimes, and sesame oil. Just keep putting those things in until you have about 1/2 cup of liquid for a 8-ounce package of noodles. I marinated the just-cooked tofu in the dressing while the noodles boiled. If I'd thought of making this in the morning I might have cut the tofu and set it marinating all day, but I'm rarely that organized.
Sesame seeds on top are nice, but it's not something I'm guaranteed to have. I had them last night.
They're good hot or cold. I had them warm for dinner, but will have them cold with a sandwich today.
Kathy, over at What Do I Know? is answering some questions about daily vegetarian life from someone who's thinking about going veggie.
And this reminded me of my continually-put-off plan to talk about an average vegetarian week, and what I cook, and all that stuff. I think part of the trick is that it's not an unusual thing to me; I've been vegetarian for nearly 11 years, so I write something down one day and then forget to notice my own meals.
But I've been reminded now, and am in the mood to write about it again, so, welcome to Food Week at the Nanopants Dance. Some pictures, some recipes, some God-Only-Knows.
Part 1: The Pantry and Grocery Shopping.
I thought I'd go through and list stuff in the house that I'd consider "basics": it'll be in the house 70-80% of the time. Some of these things are either-or (frex, it's usually hummus OR fake meat, because those go on lunch sandwiches, but not necessarily together). I try to note them where non-obvious.
This looks like a lot of food, all laid out like this, but go through your cabinets and see what you end up with. It certainly surprised *me*.
More-or-less unprocessed protein sources
Cheese
Eggs
Yogurt
Canned and dry beans (black and red canned, dry lentils, sometimes larger dry beans for chili.)
Hummus (usually store-bought)
Tofu
Peanut Butter
Some kind of nuts
Jars of tuna, sometimes (J eats fish. I didn't like fish in the first place.)
More-or-less unprocessed grain sources
Rice (sometimes brown, sometimes white, sometimes both)
Sliced bread
Pita
Tortillas
Soba noodles
Some kind of plain pasta
Oatmeal
All the basic baking stuff you'd expect to need to make cookies or cake
Some wacky grain--kamut, quinoa, wild rice, sticky rice, polenta. Not usually more than two in the house at once.
Prepared/Frozen Protein
Fake frozen meat of some description (garden burgers, Boca Brats, pseudo-ribs, soy breakfast sausage, all common. I'm not a big fan of stuff made to look like meat, but they're fast on lazy nights.)
Fake sandwich meat (if you want to try it, for God's sake get a kind studded with some sort of spice. The plain stuff is sawdust.)
Frozen edamame
Prepared/frozen grain stuff
A few boxes of stovetop grain-with-flavor-packet stuff: macaroni and cheese, couscous, wild rice, rice pilaf. Usually made with the fake frozen meat for lazy dinners.
Cereal
Cans/Jars
Jarred curry goo (I always intend to learn how to make good curries on my own, but haven't gotten around to it)
Jarred tomatoes
Tomato sauce
Salsa
Fruits and Vegetables
A frozen bag of spinach or corn.
3-5 of the following things, in various states of usedness: carrots, green, red, or white onions (cut a lot at once and frozen), garlic, sweet peppers, cucumber, mushrooms, sweet or regular potatoes, winter squashes, some kind of green, snow or sugar snap peas, or odd thing I found in the store and will find a use for.
1-2 of the following things: Apples, bananas, pears, oranges, mangoes, or berries(frozen, fresh seem impossibly far away right now).
Some kind of dried fruit: apricots, mangoes, papaya, dates, cranberries.
Frozen bag full of little vegetable leftovers, ultimately for stock. Sometimes, containers of frozen homemade vegetable stock.
Crap
Crackers
Chocolate
Granola bars
The latest thing we baked. Mostly likely chocolate chip cookies.
Some crap-loaded, yet pseudo-healthy cereal (honey nut cheerios, golden grahams, granola)
Those wasteful cardboard cups of dehydrated soup.
Misc.
Lots of spices and goos, heavy on Mexican/Indian types of flavors
A couple of vinegars
A couple of oils
Tea and honey
Milk, soy milk, juice boxes, beer, homemade iced tea in the summer, juice rarely. (The only food I feel the need to emphatically mention that we *don't* have, besides meat, is soda. I hate the stuff, and J doesn't care enough for it to have it at home)
Lemon juice, which gets used enough to mention.
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I bought groceries tonight on my way home from work. Since grocery shopping is mostly done by foot here (there are two stores within 5 blocks), we usually just buy stuff as we use it up, so I don't have any good plan-ahead tips. I should also mention that one of those two stores is a food co-op, heavy on veggie options and unusual foods, so we're pretty lucky in that respect. Here's what I bought, with notes on its probable foodly destination, to give further idea of normal food around here.
Tortillas (Just a staple we ran out of, no specific plan. We had quesadillas last night, but black bean burritos, fajitas, and huevos rancheros are all common.)
Mozzarella (another staple. J expressed disappointment at my pedestrian choice.)
Eggs (For baking, quiche, scrambling.)
Yogurt (for lunch)
Garden Burgers (for lazy dinner)
Hippy Crackers (I have a tendency to call anything with organic/feelgoody labels "hippy", but it's with love, I swear.)(Oh, and it's mostly for lunches)
Jar of curry goo (we have curry once every week or so)
Hippy juice boxes
Sweet potatoes (possibly baked like a regular potato, possibly roasted with peppers and rosemary, maybe put in the curry)
Tofu (to replace the tofu I was going to use tonight, except that tofu had gone bad, in spite of it being 3 weeks from the sell-by date, so it's already being digested. Details soon.)
Dried apricots (snack, or put into breakfast oatmeal)
I'm always wondering what little projects my brain is working on that I'm not fully aware of.
Example: at capoeira, we often learn a song in class. Sometimes it's one I already know, but often it's not. They're all in Portuguese, so it's mostly learning by rote (though I've picked up enough to have an idea of what a song is about at least).
After class, I can't sing the song. I might remember what the song was about, or a word or two, but the tune is totally gone within an hour or two.
For a few days, nothing. Can't remember a thing about the song.
Several days later, I'll wake up with the tune in my head, and I'll've remembered most of the choruses by the time I eat my breakfast. There's often a bit or two that are permanently gone, but most of it's there. Enough that I can Google for the rest, at least.
I'll sing the song in the shower, and have it stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
Where did it go? Why did it come back? It's not like I spend much time thinking about the song in the interim--if I do, it's not even a "tip of the tongue" feeling, it's a "file not found" feeling.
Little known fact: If there are two CDs stacked in a single-CD player, the music will still play normally.
There's a stereo in the lab on a shelf high enough that I can't see into the little CD holder thingie. I was impressed with myself, though; it only took me 15 seconds of not-what-I-put-in-there to figure out what was happening.
I'm working on the hat with the zig-zags. Well, one of them, anyhow--on Friday, I watched J playing video games and doodled up 7 or 8 different gender-neutral kids' hat patterns, several of which had zig-zaggedy things going on. Iteration #1 is complete, but some things aren't quite in the right spot, and I need to figure out how to make it more goofy and obvious.
Now, I'm trying to decide what to do with them all. There's a lot of variety there, a bunch of novel techniques, some results I think will be really cute. The right knitter would fall right into love with them. I'd love to put together some kind of little pattern booklet. Maybe publish it through Cafepress or Lulu or something. Then again, there are so many unwritten patterns around here, it's getting silly, so I'll probably never even get to it.
A little knitting thought experiment:
So, you want to have a hemmed edge. You also want to have the edge be zig-zaggy. There's
that picot edge, but it's not zig-zaggy enough.
What can you do to make it look that way? Right now, I'm thinking short-rows. Entrelac might be neat, too, but I just can't picture how to do it in a way where it folds over like that, and is also easy to sew down when it comes time to hem.
Apparently the boring sweaters (and hat, that's what I'm working on now) have hit their usefulness threshold, now I've got some little design ideas.
So there's a fairly major production of Equus that just started up in London's West End right now. Equus is an awesome play, one on a short list that I've always wanted to see live, despite not being a big theatergoer. It's creepy and sexy and lends itself to dreamy, over-the-top set dressings. The central character of the play is a compelling and disturbed 17-year old boy--he has a lot of long monologues, a very rich character development as the play goes. It's the kind of role most serious young male actors would give one nut to play, and the other to be successful at.
The main character in this London production is being played by Daniel Radcliffe,
who you may have seen in this little indie movie series about a scruffy kid named Harry Potter.
Now, mostly, this makes me respect the guy a lot. Almost all his public acting experience up until this point has been in a role where just showing up makes him great heaps of money. To go from what's viewed by the public as kid's stuff to the meatiest role for someone his age I can think of offhand (he needs another 5 or so years for Hamlet) is gutsy as all getout, and the play seems to be getting good reviews, so good on him.
Oh, and if you hadn't heard, he spends a good 10 or so minutes of the play naked.
Actually, that's probably *all* you've heard. "Harry Potter gets naked! OMG!" It seems like everyone's responding to that one aspect of the role--either negatively or positively, and really, both reactions creep me out. And I feel bad for him, too--it's his big opportunity for a career beyond his 7-movie contract, and the whole audience is just waiting to see his hairy potter.
I'd hope that the hoopla might get people interested enough to read the play, but I know that's probably not going to happen. Nevertheless I thought I'd recommend reading it, even though it is superdark. I read it in the spring of '01 and bits from the play still pop up in my mind and give me the shivers.
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