Time To Eat… Again!

Believe it or not, I've grown wary of cooking. Every time I’m right in the middle of something (making headway on my novel, reading a book, or berating myself for pouring over FaceBook drivel), it’s 11:30 and Seb’s going to be arriving home for lunch and, freak, gotta make something to eat. Then suddenly it’s 5 p.m. and, again, time to figure out what to eat!

Last week there were two lunches where Seb didn’t come home and I just threw some frozen fruit into a cup, stuck a hand-blender inside, pureed the blueberries, rice milk, flax oil, and banana, drank it right out of the measuring cup and was done. Throw in a couple slices of Dave’s Killer Bread and I’m set.

My best friend these past couple weeks has been The 30 Minute Vegan cookbook Seb gave me for my birthday. (Yeah, after I told him to. We’re the kind of couple who says, “OK, so what the heck do you want, already?") We’ve had the vegetable stew with dumplings (pictured), monk bowl with enchilada sauce, udon bowl (yuck), mushroom onion gravy on tofu cutlets, potatoes, and biscuits, grilled veggie salad, tempeh enchiladas, and our favorite: veggie fajitas, which I could make (and have been making) several times a week. (This book also has our fav of all favs: Vegan Ranch Dressing. We also love the Vegan Sour Cream.)

And now it’s time to make dinner… again!

Cheers to Friendship and Health

Last year our friend Dan introduced us to the wonder drink known as kombucha. The drink can be made at home by fermenting tea using a scoby (a mushroom that reminds me of a thin jelly fish), which reproduces itself with every batch you make (a second scoby forms on top of the original). It’s pretty nifty because you can start making multiple batches or pass extra kombucha cultures onto friends. Dan just blogged about kombucha and I recommend checking out his instructions if you have any interest in becoming a home brewer. I’ve tried commercial kombucha tea and the locally brewed kind from TownsHend’s Tea Company (and I’ve been making my own), but nothing so far has matched what Dan served us in Willits and I have yet to get my own to carbonate the way he does.

Last night our friends Tracy and Raj introduced us to another marvelous drink, Yerba Mate: The ancient drink of health and friendship. Their friends Santiago and Tanya had a private opening at their Top Leaf Yerba Mate bar in downtown Bend. Yerba Mate is loaded with vitamins A, B, C, and E, plus Calcium, Iron, Potassium and Magnesium. The amount of antioxidants per serving is outstanding: 24,000 for the original Top Leaf Mate compared to 2,700 for green tea or 2,400 for blueberries.

We tried samples of the Shanti Blend (organic fair trade unsmoked Yerba Mate infused with Chinese licorice root, lavender, chamomile, kava kava, and vanilla bean). Santiago Casanueva prepared us each one with steamed rice milk and Seb said he’d take it over a mocha any day.

I purchased my own authentic Argentinean gourd and alpaca straw for drinking mate. Raj told me that in social settings people drink from the same gourd, passing it around much like a peace pipe.

At one time we were slated to be roommates with Tracy, Raj, and their son, Makaiah, in Willits during the GROW BIOINTENSIVE internship with Ecology Action. Like us, they never planned on moving to Central Oregon, but somehow we all ended up here. Raj works on water ionizers, water machines which remove the various toxins found in our drinking water. After watching the documentary FLOW, I am very interested in Kangen Water.

Holiday Blues, Greens, & Reds

I hate to say it, but I’m having an adverse reaction to Christmas. It started at the grocery store where they were playing soft holiday tunes, melodies that followed me relentlessly up and down the aisles. Usually this music makes me feel warm and happy inside. This year, I vowed not to return for groceries during the month of December without an iPod and earphones planted firmly over my head.

Christmas is normally my favorite holiday; my favorite because of the time it usually means spending with my family. For ten years, it meant a long weekend in Wasilla, cooking and baking with my mom and sister, a fire crackling in the fireplace; games during the day—movies at night; mimosas in the morning—mulled wine in the evening. Gary and I were always the first to get out of bed. He would sit on one of my mom’s bar stools drinking tea talking about life with me while I prepared another morning’s brunch. My mom would join us after a relaxing soak in the tub and eventually Seb and Chelsea would emerge in their PJs still waking up. (My brother wouldn’t arrive till Christmas Eve.)

Outside the lake was covered in at least a foot of snow and at some point during the weekend it would come drifting down in big beautiful flakes we watched over mugs of hot cocoa from inside.

This year there is no family, no presents, and no decorations. Somewhere in Wasilla there’s a box of my treasured Alaskan Christmas ornaments. They didn’t make it on either of the two pallets that arrived at the beginning of the year. In September we decided we wouldn’t exchange gifts this year.

Christmas 2009 is destined to be just another day.

Last year, I spent my first Christmas without family. That was our California Christmas. In the end, it was a lovely holiday. We came down from the mountain to cook and play games at Margo and Dan’s place where they were apprenticing at the Golden Rule Garden. They even broke their “no dogs in the house” rule and welcomed Cosmo to curl up beside us at the table where we cut out paper snowflakes and played Scrabble. Margo played Christmas tunes on the piano and I sang along, suddenly feeling like I’d stepped into a scene from Little Women.

On Christmas day we had a beautiful brunch, half-vegetarian/half-vegan, with John Jeavons and his family, Carol, Dan and Margo. That night an Ecology Action staff member had us over for dinner with her own mish-mosh of misplaced friends, without family, and far from home. Celebrating with other transplants is a welcomed experience. The thought of tagging on to another family’s holiday depresses me—like rubbing salt into the wound.

I’m not going to be a Grinch about it, I simply want to retreat from the public this month and hole up inside with my books and writing. If I stick with the new daily word goal I outlined for myself, my novel will be finished on December 20th. I picked up a stack of new fiction from the library and have dived into it with enthusiasm. I realized that I haven’t really read for fun in nearly a year and a half. I was also reminded of how my love of reading began at an early age when we were moving around the states and my mom would leave town for a gift show. She’d place several books in my hands and say, “These will keep you company while I’m away.”

Obviously I’m going to need a lot more books.

(Thanks to Seb for this fun article, "In Defense of the Grinch" about the "herd mentality" and pushing for a January 15th Christmas. Very cute. I'm game!)

Romancing the Vegan

This has been a successful novel writing month. I finished NaNoWriMo on November 24th, typing nearly 200 double-spaced pages in three weeks. By finish, I mean I surpassed the 50,000 word goal that constitutes “winning.” On the other hand, I didn’t run around the living room screaming and jumping as I did when I won in 2005 because that time I had an actual beginning-to-end mini-novel. This one “ended” in the middle of the first love scene, which is to say: it didn’t actually end.

I am, however, experiencing a different kind of excitement as this is my best romance yet. Because I work so part-time, I was able to put quality hours into the text and dialogue. I don’t need to edit so much as flesh out the text in the form of historical details of 18th century England and finish the book.

I don’t know how it ends, beyond the obvious: the characters get over their past wounds and trust issues, marry, and live happily ever after.

I wanted to take a break over Thanksgiving to eat, drink, walk, watch movies and pleasure read, but it seemed unwise to step back when the momentum was going strong. So my nose has been in books. I feel like I’m in college again, snacking and drinking Blue Sky colas—my face and neck breaking out, my neck hurting from hunching over a laptop and textbooks.

From Aileen Ribeiro’s Dress in Eighteenth Century Europe 1715-1789, it has come to my attention that not having my hero wear a wig would be the equivalent of an American teenager not wearing a baseball cap.

I’ve started learning about the Seven Years’ War between the British and the French in America because my hero has come back from serving in the disastrous battle at the Monongahela River (July 9, 1755), where two thirds of the British army was slaughtered by France’s Indians.

It is interesting that the French understood the importance of making allies of the natives while the British treated them “no better than dogs.” When the Indians willing to serve with the British asked if they would then be left in peace to live off the land as they had for generations in the Ohio Country, General Braddock said the British would inherit the land. When asked if they’d at least be allowed to hunt and subsist off the land, Braddock said no savage would inherit the land. They promptly left and joined the French. Braddock ended up perishing in his ill-fated attempt to capture the French Fort Duquesne.

In my research I have come to respect French Enlightenment writer, Voltaire. One of the library books I checked out, A Few Acres of Snow, was named after a comment he made at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Voltaire wrote: “These two nations have gone to war over a few acres of snow in Canada, and, in it they have spent a great deal more than Canada is worth.”

I became a friend of Voltaire’s for life when I read his thoughts on vegetarianism saying: The public has renounced all intelligence in daring to regard animals as anything other than animated machines. He candidly writes that our fellow creatures have the same principals of life, feeling, industry and memory. Human speech alone is wanting in them. “If they had it, should we dare to kill and eat them?”

Like every romance I’ve written, my hero and heroine don’t eat meat. It’s all very subtle while staying within the bounds of historical accuracy. Some things are simply beyond me. (I don’t think pleather Hessians existed in the 18th century.)

This time, I didn’t want to be as subtle when it came to my heroine helping the hero of the story plan a dinner menu back in London. I hit jack-pot Thanksgiving evening when I found an online copy of Apres Moi, Le Dessert Volume II: A French 18th Century Vegetarian Model Meal by Jim Chevallier. Now I can plan a historically accurate full-course dinner service for my marquee to serve to his MPs. (If you scroll down to the introduction of Apres Moi, it mentions that in France, an officially Catholic country, eating meat was forbidden on Fridays and lent. Kind of like Meatless Monday, except it was Meat-Free Friday.)

The plan is to finish before Christmas so I can give myself the gift of getting this thing done.

NPR Names 10 Best Cookbooks of the Year

And yes, thank goodness, one of them is vegan! (See NPR's 10 Best.) Actually they all look fabulous, especially Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, not to mention Asian Dumplings, Stir, and Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking.

The round-up starts with Michael Pollan’s lament, earlier this year, that cooking has become a spectator sport. NPR’s T. Susan Chang responds, not if these cookbooks have anything to do with it.

Interestingly, the vegan book on the list is one I’d never heard of, nor any buzz about: Clean Foods. The title refers to the connection between shit and meat and pus and milk.

My personal pick of the year is Tal Ronnen’s The Conscious Cook. Yesterday, for Thanksgiving lunch, I made the pine-nut-and-basil seared gardein “chicken” with lobster mushroom beurre blanc, braised kale, and roasted fingerling potatoes. I am quite certain my mouth orgasmed.

Seb, who has never been the foodie I am, went into a semi-trance. We couldn’t manage conversation beyond the moans of unadulterated food pleasure. I love vegan food and the vegan life, but I had no idea plant food could be elevated to this level.

Martha Stewart’s Vegetarian Thanksgiving

Martha Stewart's vegetarian show rocked my week. First she had on the director of Food, Inc., then chef Jeremy Fox, and ended with Jonathan Safran Foer. I lucked out with Jeremy Fox. Last week I purchased brussels sprouts (never cooked with them!) because they called out to me. Now I have a recipe to make thanks to Fox.

Martha repeatedly used the word “torture” to describe what happens on factory farms, which supply 99% of our meat, milk, and eggs.

Nearly all foods found in supermarkets and restaurants are factory farmed regardless of whether it’s labeled natural, organic, free-range, or cage-free. (Cage-free still means debeaking and crowding hens and chickens into windowless sheds--they're just not in cages and they end up in the same slaughterhouses.) You can find your nearest local farmer by typing your zipcode into either link I have to the left under “Eat Local” (in addition to eating mostly or all vegan).

She told Jonathan Safran Foer that she will be celebrating a vegetarian Thanksgiving this year and told the audience they would agree with everything in his new book Eating Animals.

Martha also said our healthcare crisis won’t be solved until we change the way we eat: focusing on plant foods.

I want to be in one of these audiences! Free movies and books! Martha asked everyone to please watch Food, Inc. and read Eating Animals and pass them on to all their friends. Food, Inc. is now out on DVD. Make sure to watch it and to read Eating Animals, which should be available at most libraries. Our ecological future depends on you and your ability to get the word out. Factory farms are the planet’s number one polluter and source of green house gases. Al Gore has finally come out and said factory farming must be stopped.

It starts on your plate.

And it continues by spreading the word.

Thank you.

This One’s For the Birds

First three pictures from summer of 2008 at Animal Acres in Acton, Calif. where Seb and I tented in a chicken pen for two weeks during a permaculture design course. The chickens liked to follow us around in the morning and rub up against our legs.

This morning I finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s brilliant new novel: Eating Animals. The book was both timely and fitting given it ends on a note about Thanksgiving.

Foer writes that: “Today’s turkeys are natural insectivores fed a grossly unnatural diet, which can include “meat, sawdust, leather tannery by-products,” and other things whose mention, while widely documented, would probably push your belief too far. Given their vulnerability to disease, turkeys are perhaps the worst fit of any animal for the factory model. So they are given more antibiotics than any other farmed animals. Which encourages antibiotic resistance. Which makes these indispensable drugs less effective for humans. In a perfectly direct way, the turkeys on our tables are making it harder to cure human illness.”

Foer asks what turkeys have to do with Thanksgiving and notes that half a century before Plymouth, early American settlers celebrated Thanksgiving with the Timucua Indians and dined on bean soup.

Even if we make believe that the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving and were eating turkey, they wouldn’t recognize the Frankenbirds we’ve genetically developed today as anything they ever raised or dined on.

“At the center of our Thanksgiving tables is an animal that never breathed fresh air or saw the sky until it was packed away for slaughter. At the end of our forks is an animal that was incapable of reproducing sexually. In our bellies is an animal with antibiotics in its belly.”

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected.

Because consumers “might notice that their chickens don’t taste quite right—how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste?” the birds are injected with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we’ve come to think of as a chicken look, smell, and taste.

A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as “natural”, are “ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.”

Contamination occurs further during the removal of birds’ heads, feet, and guts, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds’ body cavities.

Even if the bird managed to make it through the processes relatively clean, they all end up in the same refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are cooled. The tanks have been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around.

“By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you’re practically assuring cross-contamination. While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue the outmoded use of water-chilling. It’s not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as “fecal soup”). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate the opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of additional weight in poultry products.”

US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid.

Birds are not included in the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (nor pigs or fish, in fact, cows have the best protection in place, though it is rarely reinforced). They have been genetically engineered to grow so fast, they can no longer fly and can barely walk. Toenails, beaks, and wings are regularly clipped or seared off.

Frank Reese, the only USDA approved heritage poultry farmer in the US, writes a beautiful essay in Eating Animals. It is clear he loves the turkeys he raises and is working on a mobile slaughterhouse so processing can be done the way he wants—not hung live and dragged through electrical baths. Reese says if people can’t pay for turkeys to be raised and killed right then they shouldn’t eat turkey at all. Towards the end of his essay he asks: How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?

“It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.”