Vegan Kindle

I have been a voracious reader all my life. I spent every flashlight battery in the house reading under the covers. I begged to be allowed to read at the dining room table. I've read thousands of pages on buses, as the passenger in cars, on trains, on planes. Even a college class where we read ALL of Solzhenitsyn in one ten-week period could not destroy my love for the written word. If I'm awake, if my eyes are open, I'm often as not scanning my surroundings for something to read.

About ten years ago, I did a product test for Microsoft. I can't remember what their e-reader was called, or even whether or not it was a physical object when I did the test. But I remember that my opinions about e-books at that time were largely negative. No, no, no; I preferred paper. No, there is something special about holding a book. No, I can't read on a screen. And so on.

Somewhere along the way, my thinking changed. For one thing, once Amazon's Kindle landed in the hands of actual readers, their enthusiasm was infectious. Also, E Ink is pretty freaking cool.
And I'm a long-time Amazon customer whose experiences with the company have been nearly always positive, and their commitment to the e-book format frankly gave me more hope for its future than, well, Microsoft could. So I decided to spend my birthday cash on a Kindle 2.

One of the things I was curious about, but resisted the urge to explore fully until my Kindle actually arrived, was how many vegan cookbooks are available for the Kindle. It's a little nervewracking to think of using an expensive electronic device in the kitchen, where I routinely spill water, and, um, occasionally set off the smoke alarm. And maybe splatter things a bit. But my kitchen is home to our washer and dryer, and that's where I set up my conventional cookbooks, and they have been safe from harm. But even more appealing than cooking from a cookbook in e-book form is the prospect of menu-planning in whatever moments I can steal during the course of the day. I usually plan menus by flipping through my cookbooks, and coming up with a week or so's worth of compatible dishes. I do frequently throw a stack of cookbooks in the passenger seat of my car, or into my bicycle's pannier, but how much more convenient could it be to have a library of cookbooks available on my Kindle? With the capacity for annotating recipes?

It's not a complete library, but there are some great titles available in the Kindle Store. My one criticism so far is that the book samples for several titles I checked out did not include any recipes. I think that including at least a few would give potential buyers a better feel for an author's recipe-writing style, for how simple or complicated they like to make things, and to what sorts of ingredients they rely on. The other drawback might be that photos are, and will be for the foreseeable future, black and white. I don't mind that so much. The portability issue carries the day!

Crack.

I know, that's terrible. But it's what we call one of our favorite dishes, one we've been loving well before I was vegan and my husband was wandering in that direction.

(In our household, I've been vegetarian since 1988 (? - I think), and vegan since sometime this summer; my husband has been vegetarian since 1995; and the 10 year-old kid has been vegetarian since birth.)

The bonus is that it is super-duper easy and cooks quickly. If you put on some rice about half an hour before you want to eat, you can easily whip this up during the last 10 minutes of the rice's cooking time. (I think short grain brown rice is best.)

The recipe for African Pineapple Peanut Stew is here.

More cheatin' pre-blogging!

And there are no pictures here, because a) it's night time, and dark, and b) seriously, even the most heavenly soup doesn't look that great in the slow cooker.

But holy cow, the slow cooker is a miracle.

I decided to make the Split Pea Soup from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's The Vegan Table for tonight's dinner. It's Sunday (remember, I'm a cheating pre-blogger), and it's my only day off this week, and I knew we were going to see a movie at six. So this morning, I chopped everything for the soup, threw the veggies, the split peas, and the herbs in some water, and then refrigerated it until I was ready to start the cooking at around one.

My only mods to the recipe were that I added about 1/3 cup of nutritional yeast at the end of the cooking time, plus about 1T of Earth Balance margarine. It took about 6 hours in my slow cooker, which I boost when cooking legumes by putting it in rice cooker mode for a bit before starting the slow cooking. The liquids come to a boil, and then are hot enough to simmer for awhile before settling down for a true slow cook.

I all but refuse to see movies anywhere but our local theatre, and since it is in easy walking distance, we always walk unless there is a downpour. Tonight, we were at the tail end of a warm afternoon when we walked there, but it was right brisk when we came home--having hot soup waiting at home was perfect.

I am pre-blogging, and it is my birthday. Now, I like pie, apple pie, specifically, far better than birthday cake anyway, but when you combine the first crop of apples from our tree in about five years* and Vegan MoFo, you get a homemade vegan apple pie.

I used the pie crust recipe from Veganomicon, but since I can't follow directions to the letter ever, really, I used Earth Balance stick margarine instead of vegan shortening, and instead of cutting it into the flour mixture by hand, I processed it in the food processor. It could have been a little flakier, perhaps, but it had a nice flavor and held together well. (I even got the first piece of pie out of the pan intact.)

I don't have the faintest idea what variety our apples are, but they are small, dry, cooking apples. I used the Apple Pie recipe (p100) from The Joy of Vegan Baking, but I substituted the Streusel Topping (p84) for the top crust. I also substituted Apple Pie Spice from Penzey's for the spices specified.

The result was a very firm textured, tasty pie. And as a special birthday treat, The Pickiest Vegetarian Kid in All the Land agreed to try some. And he liked it! The good news: he liked it! The bad news: now we have to share the pie!



*We used to have an apple tree that was about 100 years old, per our neighbor who grew up in the neighborhood. One afternoon about five years ago, I was in my office upstairs when I heard an odd crash. The tree had collapsed, and had done so into a driveway we don't park in. Nothing and no one was hurt. Eventually, suckers started coming up from the old stump, and we let them come, to see what would happen. This year, for the first time, apples!

HomeGROWN

I was browsing my new copy of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's fabulous Vegan Brunch when I paged upon the vegan sausage recipes. I'm not a huge fan of meat analogs EXCEPT for 1) bacon (fakin) and 2) sausage. Love the other fake white meat. Do not love: the price of purchasing the commercial versions or the slightly scary ingredient lists.

So while I was skeptical, I decided to give it a try. And holy cow (pig?), the recipe worked. VeganDad has Isa's basic recipe posted here; I used navy beans, and a slightly different array of spices. Not only did the recipe produce the desired results, I got to use one of my favorite appliances in a new way. I have a combination rice cooker/slow cooker/steamer, which worked like a dream for the 40 minute steaming period.

So now we have vegan sausages. What to do with them? The answer in my book is usually this: saute them with potatoes and greens. And guess what? Not only did I make the sausages, I grew the potatoes and the greens. There may even have been homemade vegan lemon poppyseed muffins to go along with this breakfast-for-dinner affair. Because I don't know what got into me.

Vegan MoFo III

In which my listless web browsing one night led me here.

Now here's the deal: I have now been vegetarian for longer than I was an omnivore. (And I was an unenthusiastic meat-eater even then.) For those playing along, that's 21 years, roughly. I stopped eating meat one day when I was cutting up a chicken breast for a stir-fry...and I knew I just couldn't do it again. Ever. I read Diet for a Small Planet, and its basic arguments--that people can be fed more efficiently via a plant-based diet and that a vegetarian diet is nutritionally sound--made TOTAL sense to me. (They still do.) I'm an animal-lover, too, and I think our food choices affect the health of our planet.

But until fairly recently, I didn't make the leap from vegetarianism to veganism. Even though I understood that factory farming of dairy and eggs involved animal cruelty, and the processes of factory farming are an environmental nightmare. I kept inching toward being vegan, especially when I'd get frustrated by my allergies and asthmatic tendencies, which are made worse when I eat dairy. I'd start avoiding dairy, and start feeling better. Huh.

And then a few months ago, I decided IT WAS TIME. As with the chicken breasts, it was pretty much an "okay, we're done here" moment. All of the cookbooks I've bought in the last year have been vegan. I cook from them all the time; it finally hit me that it wouldn't be that hard to only cook from them. We don't eat out much any way, and if we have to eat out less, c'est la vie.

I've wanted to get back to writing again, and Vegan MoFo will give me some structure in that. I love September too much to wish it away, but once October arrives, let the mad vegan blogging begin!

my bike is a supermodel

but also charmingly utilitarian. I just took this photo because it kind of cracked me up. By the time I reached my driveway, I was tooling along with a hat and pair of mittens in the handlebar bag, plus two pennies I found in the street; my coffee cup; a small tote bag containing a knitting project, three catalogs I got in the mail yesterday, and my lunchbox; mail from today; my bike lock; and a loaf of bread. Amazingly, the bread didn't really get scrunched--I just fastened the cargo net between two slices in the middle of the loaf.


This was my lunch from yesterday--simple coleslaw with radish slices, potatoes and chickpeas roasted with nutritional yeast, some almonds and corn nuts (left over from the bike ride with the kid), and some baby carrots with a Vegannaise dip. The kid and I both use Laptop Lunches bento boxes, which are the most awesome lunch boxes evah. They make it super easy to pack a varied lunch, and we generate no lunchtime waste. (I carry a bandana as a napkin, and I'm quite certain the kid uses his clothing.) Plus the plastic boxes ride around in lead-free insulated cases which have room for a small water bottle (which comes with the kit). I usually freeze the water bottle, and then don't worry about refrigerating my lunch.

The "out like a lamb" part never happened.

I left the house (in the car) amidst yet more snow. (Aside: the Californian spouse did remarkably little complaining when it was snowing *on his birthday* last week.) At lunchtime, I decided that it was warm enough to ride back to work. Warm enough, yes, but by the end of the afternoon, not dry enough. At all. Which didn't alter the necessity of riding home, so I walked through the front door soaking wet. My husband dryly noted, "That didn't work out as well as it could have, did it?"

For me, 90% of getting dinner on the table is a loose meal plan. I usually shop by sketching out five or six meals, plus extra salad fixings and easy lunch-type things. I don't designate any specific order for making them, though logistics come into play. (For example, all postal employees are tired by the end of your average Monday. Complicated dinners do not follow.) Since I just did the shopping last night, I had a fresh selection of meal plans to choose from. I decided to make the soba noodles with green beans and almonds from Vegan Express. Wow--easy. A quick sauce based on hoisin; toast some almonds; slice some scallions; cook the noodles, green beans, and in this case, the added edamame together, and dinner's ready.

tempeh fries with wild rice and veggies

In the interest of moving that snow photo down in the queue, this is what I made for dinner tonight. Tempeh Fries with Horseradish Mayonnaise from Vegan Express , served with wild rice mix, steamed broccoli, raw red pepper slices, and radish halves. Yes, I like arranging vegetables on my cobalt blue Fiestaware.

It did stop snowing, and today was brisk and sunny. If you were inside, it looked beautiful outside. If you were outside (and I was) you tried to ignore the fact that you were being buffeted about by a mighty cold wind.

remember when?

This weekend, temperatures were in the upper 60s, and on Saturday, at least, we had sunny blue skies. TODAY IT SNOWED. Not much, but please, please, stop it. This photo was taken on February 1st, and what you can't really tell is that the roof of our porch is at least ten feet off the ground. I took this shot from our driveway, and you also can't really tell that there is a path shoveled up to the steps. The piles of snow were so high at a couple of times during the season that I could barely hoist the shovel high enough to get the newly shoveled snow on top of them. My last electric bill noted that the average daily temperature for the billing period was eight degrees lower than last year. And I don't recall last year being especially balmy.

I did not ride my bike today, as the wind was blowing so hard that the entire flagpole at work was swaying. Also, did I mention it snowed?

I discovered today that Erik Marcus blogged my photo of the Coconut Pineapple Noodles. (Leftovers of which I finally finished at lunchtime today.) One of those things that makes you realize that we are all just regular people, even if some of us totally know who others of us are...

food, and how to get it home.

Nava Atlas is one of my favorite cookbook authors. In February, I picked up a copy of her newest book, Vegan Express. Her flavor range has changed a little with this book, but the emphasis is still on combining relatively modest numbers of whole, fresh ingredients. A couple of nights ago I made the Coconut Pineapple Noodles with a few modifications. I added some tofu, used fewer scallions, and added some steamed broccoli and shredded raw red cabbage to the plate. Making it again, I think I would add a little soy sauce, just to deepen the flavor a little...

This is one of the Nashbar grocery panniers I found on eBay. Due to my work schedule this week, I've only managed a short test ride with these on the bikes, but one of them held my small messenger bag, some mail, and a package containing two pairs of jeans. I'm sure eventually I will find out what happens when you misgauge the width of the bike when they're opened and full, but the first ride was uneventful. They also came with a bright yellow rain hood--which looks like a shower cap, so you can protect whatever is in the open compartment if it rains.