spaghetti seaweed slurp

Salty, salty goodness. And dead easy. My local health food store had fresh sea spaghetti in the fridge and I couldn't resist. I also had some self-control issues at the tomato stand at the farmer's market this weekend. Which led to this utterly satisfying dinner on a cold, rainy Scottish "summer" evening.

spelt or whole wheat spaghetti for 2
1 cup sea spaghetti, desalted and drained (or if you are using dried, 1 cup rehydrated)
4 ripe tomatoes
1/4 c sake
1 heaping tbs arrowroot powder
1 cup purple basil, chiffonaded
squeeze lemon juice
pepper

Cook up your spaghetti in salted water. Drain, reserving about 1/4 cup of the water. Mix the arrowroot into this. Pour the arrowroot, sake and tomatoes back into the hot pasta pot and stir. Turn the heat on and as soon as the sauce thickens, add the spaghetti and sea spaghetti back in and toss with the sauce. This should be fast enough that the tomatoes don't have time to really cook. Turn off heat. Stir in basil and lemon. Add pepper (and salt, if you're crazy) to taste. Devour.

Dancing along to: I want to be under the sea, in an octopus's garden in the shade... by the Beatles.

smoked shitake slurp

I find the farmer's market pretty exciting, generally. This is because a)I like produce and b) I am easily amused. However, there are some people whose mere presence (and they're not there every week) throws me into a tizzy. They are: the smoked shitake dude, the heritage potato guy, and the fancy tomato people. (Those aren't their official names.) This week, the smoked shitake dude was there! Oh joy! Oh yummyness!

Also, life is especially full as of late, and I haven't been cooking very involved dinners. This is quick but satisfying. I looove the combo of mushrooms, plums and smoke. It's deep and dark and mysterious and earthy. And in this particular incarnation, slurpy as well (bonus).

Saute about 3 cups of sliced smoked shitake in a splash of sake. Add a handful of chopped roasted chestnuts or a cubed cooked sweet potato (ie, you want something sweet and dense)

When the mushrooms are done, mix the sauce together in a cup and then add it to the pan:
1 tbs ume paste
1 tbs mirin
1 little dash soy sauce
1 tbs white wine (or sake)
dash lemon juice
about 1/4 cup of water to thin it out

Toss with two people worth of rice noodles. I used these fancy-pants pumpkin rice noodles, but they totally didn't taste pumpkin-like.

Variation: for extra points, leave out the water and add 1/2 cup of extra strong brewed black tea to the sauce. Jack the heat up so that the sauce reduces a bit, and proceed.

Slurp your noodles along with: Coco Rosie. Everybody wants to go to Japan.

calling in gay, and eating noodles.

This is a great idea, especially in light of the rampant homophobia that was on display in the United States, what with voting to ban gay marriage all over the place. ..*ahem* Sheesh. The way people are fighting it, you'd think we were talking about *mandatory* gay marriage... for everyone. Now, even though I've always secretly wished that homophobes were literally afraid of me (which would get me a lot more space on public transportation, and would ensure that I had a WHOLE BIKE LANE all to myself as terrified heterosexuals threw themselves out of my path in fear and panic), they aren't. Even though I know that my life is a frikin' (vegan) cakewalk compared to the lives of queers just a few years ago, so-called progressive places (like my ex-country Canada) didn't just hand over rights to queers because they like us and actually think we should have them. Nope. They had to be ordered to do so in court. And we still don't get the same treatment as everybody else. For example, how ridiculous would it be if big old queers everywhere got to vote on whether or not we thought heterosexuals should be allowed to adopt? What if we said no, and instead voted to restrict the rights of heterosexuals, but still expected them to contribute time and money and support to society, just as if they were equal? See? See how ridiculous that is? Frankly, I think it's worth throwing a bit of a temper tantrum occasionally over this. (Actually, I think it's worth a lot more than that). So my darling American readers, on December 10th, call in Gay, and if you can't (or if you work for an employer who actually gives you the same benefits as heterosexuals or is really awesome, such that you'd just be being kinda nonsensical), don't buy anything. Keep your big, fat, gay dollars (or pounds) in your pocket for the day.

You know what? I don't even want children. But, like the dude in that Monty Python film, I want the RIGHT to have children. I also, for the record, have no intention of getting married, and have problems with the very idea of giving special rights to couples, but if you're going to recognize couply relationships, it should be all couples. Not having (or adopting) a kid or getting married or whatever should be a choice, not a restriction placed on you because of who you happen to get nekkid with.

Here, if you need to comfort yourself, need to comfort your friends, or just need energy for more hot, out-of-wedlock queer sex... Soba noodles. Easy, yummy, and oh-so-slurpy. On the noodles: dried mushrooms, kibble (ahem, tvp), pumpkin and chard, simmered in water, soy sauce, wine and a bit of sugar. That's it. Simple. Yet extremely Gay.

queerly: I wish I was him. Bikini Kill.

Ume yum

More Japanse/Italian delights from the Scottish veg box.

Whole wheat pasta with baked veg (okra, cabbage, onions) and ume sauce: ume paste, lemon juice, maple syrup, olive oil, shiso, salt. It ain't pretty, but it is yummy. And fast. And plummy. Fast and plummy are important when you're halfway through NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo music: My baby loves a bunch of authors. from Moxy Früvous.

i wanna be a chocolate god post 7: alien appendages

You know sometimes food is good just because it reminds you of something gross. Or fun. Or both. If it tastes really good, then you know you have a winning situation. This is one such situation. This is basically a rolled version of lasagna, and the three concentric layers kind of make it look like a severed limb. Now, because of the colours, it's clearly vulcan (red bone, green blood, brown skin). Orrrr...it might just be lasagna. Vulcans are vegan, but eating them isn't. Though I seem to be a little obsessed with it (see this post).

First, find a Vulcan. Lure them into a false sense of security. Then steal their arms. This is difficult, because the average vulcan will see right through your ruse. So alternately, try this:

I batch chocolate pasta

beet filling: cooked beets, red chard stems (or more beets), okara riccotta (okara, lemon juice, maple syrup, salt, sweet miso, chickpea flour, vinegar)

chard layer: chopped chard leaves, rocket, blue Sheese, nutmeg, pepper

mushroom layer: onion, mushroom, white wine, oregano, thyme, marmite, pepper, truffle oil, flour to thicken.

Roll out the pasta dough into a ginormous rectangle on a peice of waxed paper. Lay three stripes of filling (in the order above) onto the rectangle. leaving room to seal the edges. Roll up like a giant sushi roll (making sure not to roll the paper into the thing) cursing if necessary. Cut into two. Use the paper to hoist the arms up and place them in a dutch oven. Inundate with white wine and water, drizzle with olive oil, and bake at 375 for about an hour, covered. Check periodically to make sure that the arms aren't welding themselves to the pan. Serve slices sprinkled with toasted pine nuts, cocoa nibs and pumpkin seeds, a bit of truffle/olive oil, and some parsley. We also had salad with it. On the salad was reduced balsamic vinegar with a square of dark chocolate melted into the reduction. because sometimes things really do get that decadent. Oh yes.

You can also use any of these fillings alone as ravioli filling.

Coming soon: post 8: whiskey....

indulgence with a side of kink

Ah yes, here we have some vegan deprivation. Life is so hard. *SIGH* Spaghetti and truffle. (spaghetti, truffle, olive oil). Garlicky greens with lupini beans. This is a photo I took in Florence, and this is what you get, since the ones I took here were far less pretty, though the last of the truffles were just as yummy as the first of the truffles. Plus, I didn't have actual slices of truffle to arrange on the spaghetti here. I was kinda down to crumbs.

And, since I haven't posted a good rant in a while:
Earlier, I read an account of a friend's vacation, where she stayed in a leather-themed hotel. I got peeved that BDSM seems to almost always mean leather (though there are lovely ethical alternatives), and then dropped it, since that rant is a bit old in my head, since I don't have any interest in playing with people who want to play with me and dead skin at the same time, and since I have so much work to do that I want to curl up in a little ball and go into Deep Denial. Also, I like to pretend that nobody I know and respect would be into leather. It's a sanity thing. But then today I was listening to this as I got my dinner ready (the May 27th show), and I got to thinking about leather in the context of kink again, and since I was cooking, it's not like I could have spent that time working, right? (parents, siblings, and those of you who like yer sex AND yer vice cream vanilla should stop now...though there's nothing wrong with a little vanilla vice cream). Now, where was I? Yeah, leather. Replacing leather was the only hard part of going vegan for me. (No, I don't miss cheese.) Leather is such an obvious signal and shorthand for kink of various kinds. It gets bound up with sex in our heads and is a standard component of even the tamest toys (like harnesses). But anyway, eventually getting rid of all my leather stuff was also the point where I went from being half-assed about living in line with my ethics to actually being consistent. And since then, I've been completely flabbergasted that kinksters the world over continue to play with leather. Why? I mean, I'm not particularly surprised that most people keep eating animals, and despite my disagreement over whether or not we should use animals for our own ends, I can understand how animal exploitation is so very embedded in every aspect of life that it's hard to see. But kinksters tend to spend a lot of time talking (and hopefully thinking) about consent. I mean, one might get off inflicting or taking pain, humiliation, service or what-have-you, but any BDSM website will tell you that the difference between BDSM and abuse is consent. So, when exactly did those animals consent to being owned by us and then skinned so that we could (unnecessarily) use them? How did they agree to be in our scenes? Are our libidos really so important that we should be able to kill for them? (mine's not, but hey, i've been called strange on a number of near-nekkid occasions...) I mean, most people agree that no matter how much something turns you on, you don't get to indulge it if it hurts somebody against their will.

Getting pleasure out of hurting someone is sadism, pure and simple. If that's done in a consensual and safe way, it tends to also involve someone who is a masochist (and has the option to stop), and I think it's all good fun. If it involves killing sentient beings who clearly would rather not be tortured and then skinned, then it tends to involve someone who takes on the (involuntary) role of victim, and it's a gross abuse of power to say the least. If we're all going to go on about respect and consent, then perhaps we should respect everyone, not just those that we're legally bound to. The fact that we fetishize the skin of others to the point where we're willing to kill them for an orgasm and don't even think of it like that shows how very deeply the abuse of animals is embedded in our society. Also, it's icky dead skin. Eeeew (that's my refined and academic argument). So, bring on the pleather.

music to wear pleather and grind to: Nick Cave. Yeah. Pretty much anything by Nick Cave.

"i wanna be a chocolate god" post 3: savories

Frankly, chocolate shouldn't be limited to sweets. Despite appearances on this blog, I actually prefer using the stuff in savories when I'm not making it for presents or bake sales or whatever. So, I give you further chocolatey goodness. Chocolate pasta, chocolate chapatti, and eggplant-cocoa spread. Chocolate pasta (pasta flour + buckwheat flour + cocoa, water, olive oil, dash of vanilla salt, dash of sugar) with mole-inspired veggies (onion, celeriac, vermouth, veggie stock, toasted cumin, ground sesame seeds, smoked paprika, hot paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, coriander seeds, chopped currants, crushed peanuts, swiss chard, lime, fresh coriander, coco nibs, salt....all sprinkled with more sesame). The chapatti is actually made out of some leftover pasta dough. I ate it with garlic hummus and tomatoes. I also (in the name of science) made some chocochapayti using a more conventional recipe, and I just subbed 1/4 cup (out of 2 cups) unsweetened cocoa for the same amount of flour. That also worked. The chapatti is dangerously good with a very tomato-ey cauliflower curry. Toasty eggplant dip (used as a starter at a dinner party): eggplant toasted on a flame (oh the joys of having a gas stove!), mashed up with cocoa, tahini, coriander, cumin, plus smoked salt and lime. This could have easily been made with unsweetened melted chocolate instead of cocoa, but uh, that would have required more groceries. The dip is totally yummy and non-photogenic.


kitchen dancing to: hedwig and the angry inch

homage to the flying spaghetti monster

Spaghetti with turnip and spinach (wholewheat spaghetti with onions, garlic and turnip simmered in veg broth, a splash of white wine, nutmeg and black pepper) topped with magical tofu stuff (mashed up homemade tofu, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, mustard, salt, smoked paprika). A vegan Scottish CSA box friendly take on the more traditional Spaghetti alla zucca idea. But I had no squash and I DID have a turnip. And I just generally love spinach. This happens sometimes.

gooey goodness

Baked pasta: buckwheat pasta in roasted squash and onion, garlic, mustard, nutritional yeast, smoked paprika, nutmeg and black pepper topped with breadcrumbs/salt/sesame seeds/capers and baked. Caution: high heat capacity. Danger of tongue burning. Also, greens and soybeans with lemon and normal heat capacity.

not really a dancey night: cat power (the greatest)

vulcan ears, human rant, and the cross-species problem of time.

Don't worry, these are vegan. No actual vulcans were de-eared in the making of this dinner. It's just that while I was making the pasta shapes, they kept on coming out pointy and making me think of Spock. Chocolate orichietti (leftover pasta dough from the ravioli in an earlier post) on simmered, multicoloured yumminess (parsnip, onion, garlic, basil, marmite, splash of white wine, kidney beans, spinach). Simmer the veg in very little liquid on low-ish heat. This makes the parsnip all sweet and intense. The whole mess is sprinkled lovingly with pumpkin seeds and sea salt.

Now for the rant: no time.

A lame-ass justification that I often hear from omnivores as they scarf their lunches is that being vegan would take too much time. I feel compelled to rant about this. As a matter of courtesy, the rant will be followed with actual things that I do to make time to be vegan, because I don't actually spend all my time cooking and eating. I have a job, I have hobbies, and friends even. And no personal cook or anything! Shocking! All that and vegan too!

First off, let's just think about the following statement: I do not have time to live ethically. Because that's what "I don't have time to be vegan" is saying. So, I'm only going to say this once: IF SOMETHING IS IMPORTANT, YOU DAMN WELL MAKE TIME. Yes, I just shouted that, because it's so important that it warrants shouting. I think living as ethically as possible is important. It takes time. Finding that time takes a certain amount of organization and planning, but failing to find that time is simply not an option, because acting unethically is, well, unethical.

Here's an analogous situation. Imagine, for a moment that you are a man. And heterosexual. And have a girlfriend/wife. Now, you (and probably she) also have a job, hobbies and friends. This means that you don't really have time to do the housework or cook or do groceries. In that case, are you justified in saying "She should do it all for me. It's sad, really, that I have to exploit women in order to have enough time to go about my incredibly important life, but since my own personal life is soooooo much more important than hers, she'll just have to suck it up. Oh well. Too bad. She'll just have to give up her hobbies, job, or friends." ? I think we can all agree that the answer here is that you find time to split the work, even if it means that it cuts into your hobbies a wee little bit, or means you have to rearrange your schedule a bit, or that you have to learn to plan better. The life of a man isn't worth more than the life of a woman (well, in theory... the practice of this is a whole other rant). While this may be painfully obvious to many of us, the idea that we have the right to exploit others because we are too important to make time to wipe our own asses is a fairly prevalent one. Fear not, gentle reader: it is possible (indeed, easy) to find real time to wipe our own metaphorical asses!

Ahem. With veganism, I think it's much the same. My disorganization, or my desire to chill out/read a novel/work more etc. does not justify me killing (or outsourcing the killing of) someone else, even if that someone else is a cow. My scheduling conflicts and desire to write a novel while running a lab while maintaining a relationship are not the cow's problems, and certainly not her fault. So why should she be punished for it? In much the same way that I don't think that I would be justified in kidnapping a child and making it into my indentured servant so that I can have more time to do... whatever, I don't think that I would be justified in using animals for my own convenience (or taste). My convenience and taste are not more important than anothers right to exist. Or, as a high school history teacher was fond of saying: your rights end where somebody else's begin. Just because I have the physical or legal power to control or kill someone (like with a child, or a cow), it doesn't make controlling or killing them right.

So, what do I do about it? Well, first off, I admit that cooking food takes time. I make sure that if I'm going to have a busy week that I get lots of stuff pre-cooked on the weekend. I make big batches of lentils or beans. For lunch, I eat a lot of humongous salads (with beans) and bread or baked potato. This takes about 10 minutes to make in the morning, and I can nuke a spud while I eat breakfast. It would honestly take me about the same amount of time to wait in line at the cafeteria at work. If I'm traveling or trying to get settled somewhere, I admit that I'm going to have to eat whatever I can find that's vegan and somewhat good for me, and make sure that I have the money to do that. See some helpful travel tips in Vegan Freak. Basically, I plan in advance. I use happy cow a lot.

To keep shopping time down, I get a vegetable box delivered every week, and make grocery lists of non veg box items as I run out of them, and if I find myself missing an ingredient, I usually just deal with that, rather than running out to the store. But to be honest, I love veg. shopping, and have been known to spend vast amounts of time chatting with the veg. store dude, or the owners of stalls at the farmer's market. But I only go to the supermarket two times a month or so. With a list.

Most cookbooks have time saving tips, and almost every vegan cookbook that I've recently laid hands on has an "easy" or "fast" section (check out pretty much anything by Sarah Kramer, or Dino Sarma's book). These cookbooks are full of great suggestions if you're a novice cook and don't have the foggiest idea of how to go about cooking dinner on weeknights.

Also, I see cooking as something that I do to unwind, to spend time by myself or with friends, to do something creative, and to have fun with my senses. In other words, cooking is only a waste of time if you decide that it is. Frankly, I don't see the point of living a life that I don't enjoy, and it seems to me that the obvious places to look for pleasure are in the things that I get to do every day, like eating quiet breakfasts, the bike ride to work, work itself, coffee with colleagues, running in city parks, chatting with the veg. shop owner, showering with nice soap, and cooking. All of these are things that I "have to" do, either for work, food, or excercise. They make up a lot of my life. Why the heck would I spend that much of my life wasting time?

Being vegan does take more planning than the alternative of exploiting animals and the environment. It also takes a little more time. But really, we're talking about a few hours a week when you're learning, and a few extra minutes a day once you get into the swing of things. I think that the marginal extra time and effort are a laughable "sacrifice" to make in order to avoid stealing lives and resources that don't belong to us in the first place.

ravioli

I love feeding people. Love it. Partly because it gives me an excuse to make fancier food than I otherwise would, and partly because there is just something immensely satisfying about taking the time to cook for your friends. Plus, having a bunch of people all cozy in my kitchen with good food and good conversation is pretty much my idea of heaven.

Sometimes I make pasta. I wanted something mole-like, but not just mole sauce on something. I wanted several components of a dish to come together to make something savory, chocolatey, spicy and complex. So I decided to take many of the components of mole and make them into pasta filling, and then wrap them in chocolate pasta, and then cover that with a very plain tomato sauce. For the chocolate pasta, I use the method here, and subed in 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder for 1/4 cup of the flour. Ravioli fillings: baked turnip, onion, garlic and quince with toasted cumin and coriander, plus cinnamon, nutmeg, a bit of smoked paprika, chopped jalapenos, salt, black pepper and ground almonds. Served with baby tomatoes simmered in white wine. Sauvingnon blanc works really well here, because it has a faint capsicum taste that compliments the jalapenos and chocolate very well, and it doesn't make everything sicky-sweet, which is a concern here because you have the sweetness of the roast veg plus cocoa, so you want things to approach being sweet while not actually getting there. This is a savory dish, but just barely. I love making stuff like this. It makes me feel like a culinary tease.

The ravioli have a lot going on, so the side was just kale and chickpeas cooked in veg broth with lots and lots of garlic and some salt.

The starters for this were: lentil pate or veg haggis, depending on who you ask (puy lentils, walnuts, sauteed onions, marmite, sage, salt, lots of black pepper), corn tortillas and muticoloured pepper wedges for scooping up the pate, and three kinds of olives (stuffed with almonds, stuffed with chillies and kalamata).

Dessert: date cake with two kinds of ice cream (in previous post)

drag gnocchi

Even drag kings need dinner. Gnocchi (frozen from a previous adventure), a bunch of fresh stuff just barely heated in broth and balsamic: garlic, olives, capers, tomatoes, more cilantro than you can shake a stick at, and some poor lost half avocado that was wandering around the fridge. I was going to have a little side salad of sprouts, but I might have accidentally eaten them while I was cooking.