Thursday, October 29, 2009

Fats: flaxseed and oat bran

You can't see the flaxseed in this picture, but it's there, and it's full of fat.

Here's the important thing about flaxseed:











Its calories come mostly from fats. Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, which you can also get from nuts, coconuts, and vegetable oils, among other things.




Flaxseed is always in my refrigerator. I add it to stew, oat bran, cereal, sprinkle it on squash, salads, sandwiches, toast. You can put it on anything. If it has a taste, it's a slightly nutty taste, but it doesn't really have a taste.

What you see above is a bowl of hot oat bran, with two tablespoons (or thereabout) of flaxseed mixed in, and granola sprinkled on top. This is an incredibly filling breakfast. The oat bran (1 cup of it) has 33% of your "recommended" daily protein, along with 28% of your iron, 58% of your fiber, and 10% of your fat.

The granola is just fucking delicious and has maple syrup and vanilla, so there you have that. The granola contains: rolled oats, walnuts (again, look at the fats and protein), sunflower seeds, maple syrup, raisins, cranberries (look at the color!), coconut, canola oil, and vanilla extract.

This breakfast (or -- if you're studying for a test or you have a deadline and/or you're sleepy and lazy -- dinner) is a powerhouse of fats, protein, and iron. Also, you can have it with toast and blueberry preserves, and then it's just game over. Look at this. Shut up.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

The best dollar-fifty I ever spent: A pint of tomatillos

Imagine the taste of a raw green pepper mixed with a strawberry. That's how a raw tomatillo tastes.

I removed the skins of these three (save the skins for your soup stock), cut them in quarters and threw them into the skillet for the last two minutes to heat with my curried blue and white potatoes. Start by cooking the potatoes thoroughly with olive oil, onion, and salt. At the end, add the curry powder (don't be shy about it), and I added a little rosemary as well.

Then add the tomatillos. They taste so good raw, it nearly breaks your heart to cook them, so only add them at the end, give them a little heat and toss them around to coat them with the other flavors, but they've got plenty of flavor inside, so don't lose that.

We're going to have these with a breakfast sandwich. Most of the time, we don't have things like soy sausage (or any fake "meats") or tofu in the house. We do eat tofu hoagies from Fu-Wah probably at least once a week, but as a general rule, the kitchen is stocked with vegetables, grains, beans, and fruit, not manufactured nonsense. However. I've been craving these soy sausage on English muffin sandwiches like crazy lately.

We bought fennel seeds at the market today, so I embedded some of those into the Gimme Lean soy sausage patty. I also cooked some thin, thin slivers of portabella mushroom. This is all cooked in the olive oil with the leftover tastes from the curry potatoes and tomatillos.

We're going to slice a tomato to top this with and put it on a toasted white-wheat English muffin. As these are cooking, you've got the potatoes setting aside. When you take the soy sausage and mushrooms off the heat, throw the potatoes back on for a minute or two to reheat while you put the sandwich together.


I have to be someplace tomorrow at 9 am and I have to be there all day. So I'm going to bring some raw tomatillos for snacks (remember, they're high in Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, so they're nice and filling), along with some raw carrots, maroon, orange, and white.

Right now, I've got a butternut squash and three apples baking in the oven with olive oil, cinnamon, and brown sugar. They're not for tonight. I'm going to make fried apples pies in the morning to take with me, and wrap the squash (stuffed with apple) in foil and bring that as well. I'm moving up in the world, I now have big, re-usable aluminum pans to bake in, rather than folded aluminum foil. One day, I'll own a casserole dish. I will.

Saturday market: tomatillos, spices, red beans, and mud

It's like summer outside. Another rainy day at the farmer's market, but instead of last weekend's Nor'easter, today we have 70 degree weather, low clouds, and balmy air.

Last night, I decided to buy something today that I've never bought before, but I didn't know what. At the market, I decided to buy tomatillos. I used to order something at a Mexican restaurant that had tomatillo sauce. Where was that? I remember, it was the place at 40th and Sansom, where I used to eat when I worked at the salon. I would get the black bean burrito with tomatillo sauce. It seemed hot and cool at the same time. Like if you had a spicy cucumber. I hadn't even gone vegan yet then, but I always ordered vegan things from there. I was such a closet case. It's always so obvious in hindsight.

Saturday shopping list

1 lb small red beans (dry)
3 leeks
1 pint tomatillos
2 portabella caps
1/2 dozen tomatoes
2 butternut squash
2 large yellow onions
1 bunch curly kale
big bag of multi-color carrots
1 oz curry powder
1 oz fennel seeds
1 oz southern seasoning mix
1 oz lemon pepper
1 loaf multi-grain bread
1 loaf sourdough bread
1/2 dozen brownies

total at farmer's market: $52.21

We did great on money at the market today, especially considering that we bought all those spices and a half-dozen brownies, and it still was under $55. However, to the total grocery bill, we have to add about another $10. We had to go downtown for cat food and a vacuum cleaner anyway (apparently, they don't sell vacuum cleaners for under $80 anywhere in West Philly), so we used the opportunity to go to Trader Joe's.

@ TJ's

two 14-oz packages of Gimme Lean soy sausage
1 lb of firm tofu
1 dozen English muffins

total: I didn't save the receipt, but $10 and change

So, about $60, and we are stocked with what I feel is deluxe food. I feel completely spoiled right now. Mark is frying up a couple of soy sausage patties while I blog this up. Nothing like breakfast for dinner. When he's done, I'm going to make a side of curried potatoes before I fix a soy sausage sandwich for myself.

Featured on today's shopping list: Tomatillos. Tomatillos are a good source of Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids. Those are good for anybody, but they're really great things for vegans, and especially vegans with a high metabolism, because fatty acids burn slow on your metabolism fire. (Remember, carbs are like paper on the fire, and fats are like logs on the fire.)


Friday, October 23, 2009

Friday noodles

We're out of nearly everything. It's time for noodles. Picked these up at Fu-Wah this morning. You could use any type of light noodles. I cooked these with the stock packet that is provided with them, but it is very mild. The toppings are going to be the good part, anyway.

At first I underestimated the size of the portion and didn't saute enough portabella mushrooms, onion, and garlic to put on these. When I came to my senses, I increased the amount you see here by about three times. When it was done (about 3 minutes), I added the toppings, sprinkled on some oregano, and enjoyed with toast spread with a mixture of olive oil and crushed garlic.





The finished dish was surprisingly good. Nonetheless, tomorrow is Saturday, and I'll dream of grocery lists tonight. I want something different tomorrow. I'm going to do something we don't usually do. I don't know what yet. I want to buy something that's a different color or a weird shape or a stronger taste than anything we normally cook. I will, of course, report back.

Featured in this recipe: Portabella mushrooms. An excellent source of several good things, including protein, vitamin B6, potassium, and fiber.


(Source)


















Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Juicing carrots, kale, and broccoli

Juicing is so simple, I can't even imagine why we don't do it more frequently. It takes ten minutes. You split the carrots in half lengthwise so they'll go into the shoot easily, you rinse everything, and you drop everything into the juicer. Every time I do it, I insist that I'm going to remember how quick and easy it is, but somehow I always forget.

This evening, I juiced some of the maroon carrots we bought last Saturday. Maroon carrot juice is not as pretty as orange-skinned carrot juice, but the pulp is beautiful. It's orange with red flecks. To that, I added some broccoli stalks and a lot of kale.

Jonathan Safran Foer!

Has a book coming out November 2nd called Eating Animals. And he wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine recently entitled Against Meat. In which he tells about having a babysitter who one night declined to eat chicken with him and his brother, and they asked her why she wasn't eating chicken. She said because she didn't want to hurt anything. They didn't understand. Hurt anything? So she explained about animals and how they become food. From there:

My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.

What our baby sitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed so self-evidently true, but also because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include farmed animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.


You know Jonathan Safran Foer, right? Of Everything Is Illuminated fame?


One of the reasons I love that passage so much is that that is exactly the reason my sweetheart gave me when I asked him why he was vegan. He didn't want cruelty to be part of his life. (I was instantly smitten... and nearly instantly vegan.)

Foer tells how he oscillated between not eating meat and eating meat during most of his growing-up years from that time on. He goes through many familiar stories, including going veg in high school to meet activist girls, eating meat in college to resist the vegetarian culture on campus, going veg again upon taking a philosophy course and doing some self-described "pretentious" thinking about reason, eating meat again upon graduating and telling himself it was because he was only human, going veg again upon getting married out of a grand idea of improving himself and his new life with his bride... and then, well, oscillating again:

Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests, some of whom traveled from great distances to share our joy. (Find that logic hard to follow?) And we ate fish on our honeymoon, but we were in Japan, and when in Japan. . . . And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only whenever we felt like it.


And then going veg again when his first son was born:

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (their physical health matters, the pleasure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter.


Foer is not vegan. I guess the desire not to hurt anything doesn't always extend to chickens, and it doesn't extend to baby cows and their mothers. Wait, that's not right. The desire not to hurt anything, I'm sure, extends to everything. The reason doesn't follow through for him, though. The practice doesn't follow. His actions are not in line with his thoughts, knowledge, and ideals.

Maybe someday he'll get there. And retreat, and get there again, and retreat, and hopefully get there again.

Even while contributing to factory farming, Foer can help raise awareness of it in people who might not otherwise pay attention but who like Foer as a writer. He points out in the article the fallacy many meat-eaters use as a defense. Which is: I know factory farming is bad, but that doesn't mean I have to cut out all meat. In their minds, there are little farms that probably maybe just might have produced the meat they ordered last night at a restaurant. It's just not so, though:

According to an analysis of U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise, genuine alternatives — which do exist, and make many of the ethical questions about meat moot — are very difficult for even an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare.)

According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating factory-farmed animals — which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants — is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.

Safran still needs to do the research on animal testing:

This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering.
What? Wow.

But what he lacks in consistency (by his own admission), he makes up for with skill in drawing comparisons that make sense and illustrating them in a way that matters:

This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.


Foer doesn't mention dairy, the lives of cows, eggs, or the lives of chickens in this excerpt from his book, but he does describe himself and his family as vegetarians, and I assume that doesn't mean vegan.

I am looking forward immensely to the new book, Eating Animals, and I plan to stop resisting all the people who have told me to read Everything Is Illuminated. I shall read it. Hopefully, one day, for Foer, everything finally will be.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

I'm making a soup out of this and some potatoes, three cloves of garlic, and a whole onion.

I want to show you this leek, seriously. Remember, I told you this leek would make a whole pot of soup? To appreciate its size, look at it next to some common objects, like other vegetables, animals, and minerals:

The leek took up most of the pot (just that giant leek, not the little one), on top of an entire sweet yellow "candy" onion and three cloves of garlic. There was barely any room for potatoes, but I added four Russets and two Yukons. Still the soup is less potato-heavy than before and is more about leeks and garlic. There's a huge pot of it in the fridge, and I already had a bowl, with sourdough toast.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Nor'easter weekend baked butternut with apple.

It looks a little like certain varieties of dulcimer. I could call it an Apple Dulcimer. At the end, I mush it up, though.

This is a butternut squash from the market this morning, stuffed with apple (I don't know if the apple is an Autumn Crisp or an Empire, I didn't keep them separated).

I cut it (carefully) in half, with my tiny knife. I need to buy a larger knife for baked squash season. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds and pulp.

This pretty butternut squash is a good source of calcium and various vitamins. It doesn't even seem to know that, the dear little thing. It smells like a pumpkin.

After you scoop out the seeds and pulp, you're going to fill the empty bowls with apple, drizzle with olive oil & molasses and sprinkle with cinnamon & brown sugar.

You've been pre-heating the oven to 375 degrees. You're going to cover the two squash halves with aluminum foil or something and bake them for about an hour. Do something else while they bake, they'll remind you they're baking by filling your home with a wonderful, pumpkin-pie smell.


That's the squash before it goes into the oven. When a fork slides into it like it's butter, the squash is finished baking.

I added a little more molasses and brown sugar to mine, mashed up the squash and mixed the apple in with it. You could also eat it as shown at the top of this post, as a baked squash with a side of baked apple. Mine tasted like pumpkin pie with hints of apple pie.

Squash, potatoes, apples, leeks, and a long walk to the park.

Another rainy market day, but this time cold as well. And our trip to the farmers market (four blocks from our home) took two and a half hours.

That's the fault of Philadelphia Federal Credit Union. That is due to the check-cashing policies of Philadelphia Federal Credit Union, especially those policies involving payroll checks, which do not seem like good policies to me. They can't cash payroll checks. I opened a checking account with them back in May, and I have yet to begin successfully using them as my primary banking institution. I'm trying to leave Wachovia and stay with something locally owned and more secure that doesn't keep getting sold. Unfortunately, PFCU, in my five months with them, has done things like: giving the wrong digits to the company that printed my checks, causing a loan payment to bounce and throwing off my finances for the better part of a month; failing to issue a debit card for my new account until after two phone calls, a branch visit, and an email; and now they tell me they can't cash my payroll check and would have to hold it for two business days before I could access the funds, even though I have an account there and it is a payroll check. So after standing in line at PFCU for a long time, we were given the above news, which caused us to walk to 36th & Chestnut (about 15 blocks), me in uncomfortable rubber boots, hungry, to stand in line at Wachovia and cash the check, then walk back to the farmers market and shop, before dragging ourselves home.

We were met at the door by hungry cats. We should have been to Center City and back with their food by now. It's after 2 p.m. Usually, we're home from the market before 11 a.m. Today, we left after 11, because of the downpour this morning, but we should have been home well before noon and then back out to run our errands after a quick meal. This whole day is off.

Anyway, here's the grocery list:

2 butternut squash
1 acorn squash
12 apples - Autumn Crisp and Empire
1 head of cauliflower
about 3 lbs of blue and red small potatoes
a big basket of yellow potatoes for soup
4 sweet potatoes
3 huge "candy" onions
2 huge leeks (huge... one leek will make a whole pot of soup)
4 ears of sweet corn
4 big tomatoes
1 portabella cap
1 loaf sourdough bread
1 loaf multi-grain bread

Total: $44.36

Less than $50! Less than $45, even! We were still good on greens and carrots (we didn't juice, all week, I just snacked on the carrots, and the cooler bag in the fridge keeps them crisp and perfect). The people with the fresh Lima beans weren't there. The lady with the spices wasn't there, which is too bad, because we need some spices. (Maybe these folks were there this morning... who can say? We weren't there. We were in line.) We still have plenty of dry beans, which we stocked up on some time ago.

I got those dozen apples so that I can make lots of the delicious fried apple pies I 've been making. I bake the apples in the oven with oil, molasses, cinnamon, and brown sugar, and then fill pastry wraps with them and fry them. I can make up a bunch of apples and keep them in the fridge, then fry up the pies for a perfect, quick breakfast on work mornings. The next step will be actually to bake a pie. A real, whole pie. I think it will happen sometime before this winter is over.

Have you ever seen one of those annoying commercials where the voice-over tells you what you'll be able to do "with all the money you'll save" by buying their product or using their service? I always hated those, because the point of something being cheap is that you don't have any more money than that. You don't have stores of extra money that you'll now be able to use for a cruise to Costa Rica if you just order from the dollar menu or rent a cheaper carpet cleaner.

You know what, though? That line of faulty reasoning makes a great excuse.

With the money we saved by only spending $44 on groceries for the week, we called in an order to Lee's Deli, the greasy spoon/corner store at 47th & Baltimore. We both had greasy veggie burgers and fries for breakfast. Ew. Mmm. I think we earned it.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Falafel in the rain, with light activism

I found this 1923 Russian galoshes ad on Wikipedia's entry for galoshes. It says, Rainy rain, you cannot hurt me. I would not go out without galoshes. A good mantra.

Here in Philadelphia, we're having a bit of a Nor'easter... or two. Yesterday, the weather turned cold and rainy. Today it turned colder, continued raining, and turned windy.

In response, did I bring a nice hot bowl of soup for lunch, so that I can stay warm in my office building and eat my soup and look out the windows at rainy Philadelphia? Nope. That's what I did the first three days of this week, when it was nice out.

Yesterday, out of soup, out of fresh butter beans, and momentarily tired of okra, I decided to buy lunch. There is an Au Bon Pain in my building, so I could have gone there. But I wanted something hot, something filling, something delicious... and that was on 20th Street.

I went out in the rain to Mama's. Got a small falafel and eggplant and brought it back here under my hoodie. Ate the delicious, still-hot falafel in the breakroom while chatting with folks on Daily Kos about PETA and the merits of adopting cats and dogs.

A well-meaning diarist had posted a diary about the damaging effects of purchasing exotic pets, such as snakes, and then letting them go when you're tired of them. I recommended the diary and tipped the writer. But the diary also included that all-too-familiar disclaimer: I'm Not A Member Of PETA Or Anything.

Being "a member of PETA or anything" is the new gay, circa 1995, apparently. You can sympathize with animal-rights activists from time to time, but you need to acknowledge publicly that you are not affiliated.

I advised the diarist that it would actually be OK if he or she were a member of PETA. Someone else advised me that, no, it would not be OK for anyone ever to be a member of PETA.

Someone suggested that PETA thinks we should use human breast milk in Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I explained that, no, PETA was just using high-impact language to point out that there is breast milk in Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Then someone wanted me to provide a source for that information.

Did you get that? They wanted a source showing that ice cream has milk in it. (This is where you end up when you bring up PETA.) That's a little out-of-touch, is it not? To not realize immediately that ice cream has breast milk in it?

That's OK. Someday, it will become normal to say: I'm Not A Member Of PETA Or Anything... "Not that there's anything wrong with that." And we'll work from there, just like we have with gay rights and other civil liberties, until eventually members of PETA will be allowed to intermarry. Er... Did I confuse the issues? Ah, yes, I meant to say we'll become familiar enough with our food that we'll know right up front that there is breast milk in ice cream.

Anyhoo. I was talking, not eating, so I ran out of time and had to get back to work. I stashed the eggplant at my desk and ate it cold at 3:00. It was perfect.

Today, I'm going back. In the rain. In my rainboots. For falafel and eggplant.

A co-worker of mine is going to join me today. She's not vegan, but I can reassure her that if a non-vegan eats something vegan and enjoys it, it doesn't mean they're vegan, too.

[beat]

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Fall Lunch: Potato-Leek Soup

The handsome vegetables you see here are about to become part of an even handsomer potato-leek soup.

I originally tried this recipe, approximated some measurements, and here's what happened.

The two smaller leeks on the left in the picture are the ones we're going to use. Rinse them, trim off those stringy roots, and chop them into small slices, from the white ends up to the green tips.

You already have an entire chopped sweet onion simmering in oil on the stove. Let it simmer until you have finished chopping two medium-sized leeks.



Next, you're going to add the chopped leeks to the onions on the stove, stir the leeks and onions together and let them simmer. Crush at least three cloves of garlic and add to the mixture in the large pot. Sautee this mess for about 7 minutes or until you're done cutting up and rinsing the potatoes.

As you can see, I used huge Russet potatoes. Chop them and add them to the pot. To that, add the vegetable stock. The recipe says four cups of vegetable stock. I used four cups of our homemade vegetable stock plus three cups of water.

Our vegetable stock turned out very dark and gravy-colored and oily this time. Which is perfect for soup stock. It had huge amounts of broccoli stem. We had this questionable broccoli whose ends had gone yellow and sort of slimy. I cut off the ends and threw the heart of the broccoli tree into the stew pot. There were also four giant orange carrots that had been kicking around in the fridge for a while. We had a fair amount of kale, the greens and some stems from a cauliflower, lots of green bean ends, some onion skins, the tough outer layer of onions and the heart of an onion, and the last of the last round of leeks. I was concerned that the heady result would overwhelm my fresh leeks and potatoes, so I nearly matched the amount of stock I put in with water.


Bring your soup to a boil, reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for about 25 minutes or until potatoes are tender.

Here comes the fun part. Blend the soup in a blender. I only have a smoothie-maker, so I did it in batches. I added a teensy bit of rosemary before blending.


Again, this soup made four servings. Four really big servings. I took a lot of it for lunch today. Bought two slices of rye bread for 70 cents from the store downstairs in the building where my office is and dipped them in the soup. The nutrient-dense vegetable stock makes the soup very hearty and fulfilling. Today was one of the first chilly days Philly has had this fall. This was the perfect lunch for the weather.