Lazy Woman's Enchilada Sauce

I enjoy making enchiladas out of leftover rice, spinach, and beans.  I tend to do this on weeknights, when I've just gotten home from work and I'm not really in the mood to sit down and cook a huge meal.  Rather than go to the trouble of making a from-scratch enchilada sauce, sometimes I take half a jar of spaghetti sauce and modify it to make it an enchilada sauce.

This idea occurred to me when I looked at the ingredients of a jar of tomato and garlic spaghetti sauce and noticed that enchilada sauce had the same base ingredients: tomatoes, garlic, and oregano.

To transform plain ol' pasta sauce into Lazy Woman's Enchilada Sauce, add:

2 tablespoons unsweetened baker's chocolate
4-5 tablespoons cinnamon
1 tablespoon chili flakes
2 tablespoons all purpose flour (for thickening -- don't use if you plan on keeping enchiladas warm in the oven for some time)

Combine in saucepan, simmer for 4-5 minutes, pour over enchiladas, and then bake.

Apple Cinnamon Vegan Cupcakes

O-kay.  I have not abandoned this blog, although it might seem like I have.  An unusually frantic Spring* turned into a huge Summer writer's block, and now it's Labor Day Weekend and here we are.

It is fitting, then, that my latest recipe is a Spring / Summer cupcake recipe that I have modified for Fall.  So here we go....


Apple Cinnamon Vegan Cupcakes
(Inspired by the recipe for strawberry cupcakes from the book The Happy Herbivore, by Lindsay S. Nixon.)

Ingredients (makes 12)

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup applesauce
1 cup sugar
1 and 1/2 cups Vanilla flavored Almond Milk (I like Silk's Real Almond)
2 tsps lemon juice

Dust the tops with powdered sugar, or you can use a quick (non vegan) cream cheese frosting.
(I have not tried to make tofu frosting yet, trying to do so will be another post.)

Quick Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients
1/4th cup powdered sugar
1/2 of a stick of cream cheese
1 tsp vanilla

Cream together the powdered sugar, vanilla, and cream cheese until they are fully blended together.  Should frost 12.







*My grandmother got very sick and died.

Animal Liberation -- Peter Singer (eds. 1975, 1990, 2002) Part II: Factory Farming Is Horrific and You Don't Need Meat

I'm not going to talk much about the chapter of Animal Liberation that deals with factory farming, both because the frustrating way they updated the book made it a really confusing chapter to read, but also because the topic has been done to death. Factory farming is a blight on the environment, our moral fabric, and the economy, we get it.

At the end of the book, Peter Singer finds a better historical parallel for the struggle for animal rights than the Civil Rights Movement: he compares the Animal Liberation movement to the social change experienced by a Christianizing Rome.  Although he does neglect to mention that people were still being crucified well into the era of the Holy Roman Empire, the changes he does site: the fact that gladiators came to be viewed as murderers, the idea -- imported from Judaism -- that religion was supposed to give people moral guidelines to refrain from pursuing courses of interest that may damage other people, parallel the growing level of awareness that animals are not just appliances for our use, as Aristotle and Descartes would have us believe. 

I really enjoyed the Short History of Vegetarianism chapter.  It has become a cliche for the mass media to attribute all progressive social movements to the nineteen sixties, so it was doubly refreshing to read about Greek and Roman vegetarians.  There are also parallels to the modern animal activist movements: by the middle of the nineteenth century there had already been a few revolutionary thinkers who questioned the way animals were treated by human society. Voltaire protested against vivisection, the RSPCA won the battle to ban turnspit dogs from kitchens, the British Vegetarian Society was founded, and a bunch of American reformers got all freaky-deaky and vegetarian in communes in upstate New York.  We as vegetarians have a long heredity. 

Next on the Feast:  Vegan Cupcakes

Animal Liberation -- Peter Singer (eds. 1975, 1990, 2002) Part I: Lab Animals

I'm breaking up my review of Animal Liberation into two parts because I haven't finished the book yet.  I'm a fairly fast reader, but the constant descriptions of what amount to graphic torture scenes are really hard to plow through.  It's like Martyrs but with chimpanzees instead of irritatingly beautiful French women.

The edition I have is the newest -- and the fact that the book has been through three different rewrites in three different eras makes reading it a historically interesting but also incredibly schizophrenic experience.  Although Australian philosopher Peter Singer does his best to let the reader know when he has updated sections of the material, I still found myself stopping in the middle of a paragraph and thinking, "okay, now that sounds like something someone in 1975 would think, but is it really applicable in 2002's -- or today's -- different social landscape?"  Maybe it's just the English major / historian in me talking, but I really wish Singer had just annotated the 1975 text and had done with it.  I'm a big girl. I've been to high school. I can read footnotes.

The other thing that bothered me was the constant comparison of "speciesim" to racism.  I understand what Singer was trying to accomplish, and I agree with him that in light of decades of scientific evidence that animals feel pain and even, in the case of chimps, have social structures and needs similar to those of humans, it's horrific to think of them being used in often pointless (more on that later) experiments. However, it seems a little disingenuous for a white guy to go around saying, "yes -- repressing farm animals is just like repressing human beings of a different color!" Because what qualifies him to talk about the experience of being racially oppressed, anyway?

It is also beside the point, Singer's point being that animal experimentation is insufficiently evaluated by the responsible scientific authorities and largely unnecessary given our ever more sophisticated use of computer simulations.

But what about cancer and AIDS research?  Well, Singer points out that we've already had decades of cancer research using lab animals, and we're still losing the war on cancer. Also? The bodies of animals may be too different from the bodies of humans to make drug testing on animals of any real use. He then gets into a much criticized and absolutely horrifying ethical gray area by suggesting the use of brain damaged humans as an alternative, but I've read and reread those pages and I think he just makes that suggestion to highlight the inhumanity of using animals in research.    

Next;  The Evils of Factory Farming and Vegetarianism: A Short Guide

Stand for Planned Parenthood -- A Break From Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Disclosure:  I have had insurance issues for years, so without Planned Parenthood I'd have a hellish time trying to obtain basic birth control. 

But these are the reasons you should be worried about proposed cuts to funding for Planned Parenthood: 

"Planned Parenthood offers family planning, H.I.V. counseling, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, cancer screening and other services as well as abortions, mainly to low-income women. Congress has long barred the use of federal money for abortion, but it provides more than $75 million a year to Planned Parenthood affiliates to support family planning for low-income women. Millions more in federal dollars are provided for sex education and, indirectly, through Medicaid and other programs." (Emphasis mine.)

STD rates are rising. 


Stand for Planned Parenhood -- sign the open letter here. 

Cafe Jaffa, Back Bay, Boston

Jeannie Berlin knows that when you've got food on your face you've had a good meal.

I think I have a slight milk allergy.  There's something about dairy products that makes me sneeze.  In the past few months, any time I have something with yogurt or cheese or even *eugh* a glass of straight milk, I sneeze loudly and embarrassingly for about the amount of time it takes me to dig my bottle of generic allergy pills out of my messenger bag.  As I did tonight at Cafe Jaffa.  So I'm writing this review in a mild OTC fog.   I'm thinking maybe obtaining a couple vegan cookbooks might be in order if my sinuses are to rest in peace.  Expect to see some vegan-oriented material in the coming weeks. 

That said, Cafe Jaffa has an excellent atmosphere -- a picturesquely battered interior, jeweled lamps and brightly painted tables, and good food for a decent price.  You will have to deal with the (to me) slightly nauseating scent of people's sizzling shish kebabs frying as they're taken to the table on metal skillets, but if you don't mind the smell of meat cooking, you will love the vegetarian friendly menu. I had an Israeli white wine --  It was nearly expensive as my meal, but interesting. Dry, with a strong hint of honey. I think you might like it.  We started off our meal with a plate of "Potato Bourekas Cafe Jaffa Style", a savory cross between a dumpling and a knish: mashed potatoes with onions and spices wrapped in a noodle-like dough (it reminded me of the dough they make lotus seed buns out of), seasoned with sesame seeds and fried.  Eric ordered the Falafel Plate with Tahini Dressing, which was fresh and well prepared if (to me -- I'm not a fan of salad) a little on the bland side.  

I had the Big Momma. My name for it, not theirs, but a name that I think is apt: a hommus, baba gannouj, and falafel sandwich.  It was delicious -- crunchy, savory, with a sweet but tart bite from the baba --  but drippy. I felt a little like a revoltingly mannered diner in a movie as I dove into my dinner slurped up hommus and baba juice and got a little bit of falafel on my nose somehow.  Mmmmm.  Always a good sign. 

We took some baklava home, and it was good, but not as good as the best baklava I have ever had, which I had in 1995 at a Greek Orthodox church's bake sale and was one of the earliest "hey, food can be stunning" experiences in my memory.  But then again, no baklava will ever measure up to that.  Cafe Jaffa comes close, though. 

Gazpacho Almodovar

Promo pic from Broken Embraces (2009)

A close relative of mine landed in the hospital, and my cat died, so that's why January has been kind of a washout for me, Feast-wise. I also spent much of January working on my New Year's resolution to improve my Spanish so that I can have actual conversations with people about subjects other than the location of the bathrooms at the Museum of Science.  Which was a useful skill once upon a time, when I worked in Visitor Services at the Museum of Science, but hasn't come in that handy since.  So far, I have a noticed an improvement in my reading and writing skills, even if conversationally I'm still firmly stuck in Me Talk Pretty One Day territory. However, I have gotten to see a lot of really good Almodovar movies by way of wanting to improve my listening skills.  

For those of you who do not know Pedro Almodovar, his biggest claim to fame in the US is that he launched the careers of Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas.  He is also a talented director in his own right, his movies are well known for mixing social commentary, Spanish culture, sympathy for the plight of women, and a large dose of good ol' fashioned sex and violence.  

I've noticed that many of his movies feature a dish I would like to call Gazpacho Almodovar, which to the best of my knowledge contains the following:

5 to 6 large ripe tomatoes

1 large cucumber

1 bulb garlic

3 tbs olive oil 

3 tbs red wine vinegar

4 chopped green and red bell peppers 

3 or 4 packages of sleeping pills 

2 1/2 cups ice water 

lemon juice 

Puree in blender.  Serve to whomever you want to bump off.  Hide body in cooler of abandoned restaurant, get mistaken for the owner, turn the whole operation into a thriving concern. Have situation go AWRY. 

From Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

My life in food: Los Angeles

I first flew into Los Angeles in December of 2006, and I found there the same glamorous, depraved desert city that has existed in the American mindscape in news and in fiction for more than a century.  I was greeted at the luggage carousel by Eric, who had come to pick me up bearing a bus pass and a bottle of water.  His hands were chapped, and I suddenly noticed the air was extremely dry and that the view out the window featured a view of palm fronds and cacti.  I lived in a foreign country for a year, but I don't think flying into Edinburgh presented nearly the level of climate and culture shock flying into Los Angeles did.

Although it was much warmer in Los Angeles than in New England, the cold was surprisingly pervasive -- perhaps because there wasn't as much call for central heating in LA.  There were fast food restaurants everywhere in LA, some of them chains that had long since shuttered their doors in New England: Little Caesars, Arby's, Sizzler.  There also seemed to be an inordinate number of donut shops around.  We went to a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese place for lunch, it was a fast food place, and for some reason shared store space with a donut shop.  The food was bland, but I hadn't eaten since five that morning, so I devoured it rapidly.  When we went back outside, I noticed the roaches skittering down the sidewalk in a la de dah fashion. There were Christmas lights everywhere, looking rather forlorn in the glaring sun. I was on Mars.

The next day, we postponed our plans to go straight into Hollywood to checkout the vintage shops* in favor of stopping in a little dive on Vine to get burritos.  I tried to order in my clumsy Spanish, but ended up merely pointing at a sign and nodding.  Bean and rice burrito with hot pickled carrots.  Si, me gustarlo.  We sat at a chipped formica table and looked out into the parking lot.  A homeless man was taking a pee on a cactus.

The thing that would intrigue me about California most was the seemingly infinite variety of Mexican food.  The first time I tried cactus was on a later visit, in 2008, in a cafe on Olvera street called La Luz del Dia.  I had a veggie enchilada and a cactus salad.  It tasted like a really succulent pickle.  It burst on my tongue when I gently sucked on it and cooled my mouth down from its encounter with the enchiladas' habenero fire.  I loved it, but I loved it more the way it was cooked during my one and only visit to a Oaxacan restaurant: Guelaguetza in Koreatown. I had the Nopal Zapoteco sin bif.  It did not taste like pickle this time, more like a fresh green pepper, grilled and simmered in cinnamon and mole sauce and Oaxacan string cheese: it was absolutely gorgeous.

I experienced other culinary adventures during the time I was in LA:  I had a "Northeastern Style" pizza while laughing ironically.  (It wasn't bad, but pizza really doesn't taste the same in California as it does on this coast.)  I got to eat a surprisingly satisfying vegetable curry at a Japanese-owned fast food chain, Yoshinoya. Sadly, I could not find anyone to sell me corn-on-a-stick, although I tried mightily hard. I had a ginblossom at Musso and Franks, the way Buster and Mabel and Roscoe, those crazy kids in the crazy Twenties, might have done.

Not all our food experiences were gourmet. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches outside the Autry Museum of the American West, sitting in our rental car as a coyote looked on.  I fell completely in love with the coffee sold at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.  Once in a while, I'd sit in Winchell's with the city's homeless and have a donut and fresh orange juice while everyone around me had complicated conversations with invisible people.  I grabbed a box of granola bars at a dollar store and at them in the courtyard of LACMA just so I wouldn't have to leave the museum for lunch and therefore spend less time at an exhibit of German Expressionist painters.

Los Angeles is probably the most exciting city I've ever been in. I don't know if I ever want to live there, but I miss it so.


*LA has the best vintage shops I've ever been in.  They've got everything: shoes, wigs, bakelite baubles.  And they have so much of it -- I think all the wardrobe vaults in Hollywood must sell their stuff to these shops.

My life in food: College

Nota Bene:  My absence from this blog was inadvertent -- this past Christmas shall forever be known as "The Christmas of the Flu from Hell", because it blasted through me and most of the people I knew right in time for the holidays.  This year -- let's try something different.

I was 19 before I realized that what I had considered the daily chore of eating dinner was actually a communal ritual.  When I moved out of my folks' house the first time, I was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.  I had planned on attending college as a commuter student, but I during Freshman year I landed a job that, broken into chunks and done between classes,  kept me on campus twelve hours a day, and I was also subject to wild attacks of academic ambition* that progressively began to keep me on campus even longer than that. I've never liked driving very much anyway, so it was easy to decide that living on campus was a much better option for me.

After I unpacked my little red Malibu and furnished my side of the dorm room with the essentials - little white TV/VCR (this was in 2001), big bulky computer, Andy Warhol drawing of a cat, a spider plant - I went to the communal bathroom down the hall and threw up. 

My roommate arrived later.  She came in the room with her best friend and boyfriend, all speaking rapid Vietnamese and bearing mysterious parcels.  I could smell barbecued meat wafting from the quad, and I decided they needed privacy, so after I introduced myself I hurried out of the room in search of salad with a quick, tight smile. 

There was no salad, and I didn't think to bring snacks with me to school, so I decided to just be hungry.  I went back to my dorm... to discover an entire illegal kitchen set up! I had visions of the room burning down around us, but I almost didn't care.  It smelled so good -- spicy and sharp.  My stomach growled, but I didn't feel like going out in search of more food.  I sat down at my desk and prepared to distract myself from hunger by reading the newest Buffy review on Television Without Pity. 

I heard a voice behind me.  "Mary," said my room mate, "would you like to try some Vietnamese food?" She handed me a bowl of congee laced with thick streaks of pepper.  It was the best bowl of rice I'd ever tasted. 

That year, I learned to eat.  Vietnamese food, with its Buddhist roots, is exceptionally kind to vegetarians.  I learned just how good a bowl of steaming lemongrass pho tastes in the middle of an interminable New England winter.  I also learned about the delights of curried tofu, cucumbers pickled in hot pepper sauce and served  on rice, and the value of a good boiled duck egg after a long day of being an admin assistant.  I started to cultivate resteraunts:  the Viet Thai near the library was good for avocado shakes, the best tofu curry was at Pho Da Lat, the Battambang Market had the best deals on fresh veggies and little treats like almond Pocky and lychee jellies.  

That was the first year I'd ever celebrated Lunar New Year, sitting on the floor listening to Vietnamese oldies and eating oranges and playing mah jong.  I've made quite a few Asian friends since then, and I've had some pretty fun Lunar New Years (including a particularly crazy one spent at a Lez Zeppelin concert), but I think that first one remains my favorite.  

I also learned about the thrill of minor rule-breaking:  how to cook noodle and bok choy on a hot plate, how to angle the fan so the food smells went out the window, how to wash a rice cooker in a tiny dorm sink.  Hey, some roommates share the thrill of drinking under age, but even when I'm a badass I'm just trying to learn.

My roommate and her friend changed so much about the way I see and think about food:  the careful preperation beforehand, the friendly rituals of chopping and dicing, sharing one's day while working to provide food for a group.  My mom is a spectacular cook, but she used cooking to relax after a stressful day of teaching.  It was her alone time, and more power to her because she didn't really have all that much. However, it wasn't until I became a partner-in-hotplating that I realized what cooking meant to other people: something that could be shared and bonded over.  I think that was the true legacy of my year of eating Vietnamese food.  

*I was extremely prone to taking subjects I had a lot of interest in but very little natural ability for, such as physics and Japanese. I expanded my horizons, and tended to lose ten pounds a semester in sheer anxiety. 

Vegetarian Book Review: James McWilliams -- Just Food

courtesy of amazon.com

I've spent the past week and a half doing three things: drafting a review on a vegetarian restaurant that was wonderful to eat at but could not "pop" as an article, reading a book (Wild Swans) about the various horrors of being caught up in several huge historical movements one after the other, and reading another book, Just Food, on sustainable eating for the next century.   These are activities that are unlike only on the surface:  vegetarian restaurants are by their nature political beasts, and even though they serve an absolutely killer linguine with Gorgonzola-and-squash sauce they have to be considered as a statement on more than simple culinary pleasures. (As they themselves acknowledge through their policy of donating money from various dishes and substitution requests to selected charities.) Wild Swans contained so many descriptions of various famines that I found myself raiding the kitchen repeatedly.  (Books about hunger do that to me, I must've spent endless sums of money on snacks when I read The Carpenters: The Untold Story.  I think that was when I discovered Dunkin' Donuts pumpkin muffins.  But I digress....)  

Just Food caught my eye because I'm a historian, and I'm interested in ethical eating.  These are two things I share in common with the author, James McWilliams.  Unfortunately, the book would be stronger if he spent more time talking about history or food.  Instead, he talks endlessly about crop yields and food miles.*  These are important subjects, but a too-rapid change in tone from an amusing and refreshingly honest first chapter's spiel on the first world hypocrisy of the organic movement and how farmer's markets cater to yuppies. 

This book answers the question "is obsessing about sustainability a self absorption of the privileged world?" with a yes, but with a corollary: an assertion that such obsession is our duty, as privilege brings responsibility.  However, our near-total inability to really look at the facts (eg: that we need to radically change our diet or we're all going to wind up starving) is probably going to mean our doom. This is an issue which really hits home if one has been reading a book in which the heroine/author starves during the Cultural Revolution because Chairman Mao had absolutely no grip on the basic precepts of agriculture or economics. Unfortunately it also triggers one to think about how much more gripping and visceral the book about starving on a commune was, and how the book about starving on a commune got me to really appreciate that day's lunch of leftover veggie curry and rice. It also got me humming "Holiday in Cambodia" and more soberly thinking about how quickly society can go completely insane, but sadly, it didn't really get me all that interested the following numerous pages of statistics on global rice yields. 

I think Just Food is an important book, and I'm not just saying that because he condemns meat eating as a completely unsustainable practice.  It brings to light many pious hypocrisies -- on both sides -- that need to be exposed.  However, it suffers from telling too much and showing too little.  Keeping genetically modified crops out of sub-Saharan Africa might be a humanitarian disaster, but he doesn't talk about the people involved, he just talks about GM corn's resistance to the corn-borer. 

*Which, much like the terms "free range" and "organic" is a buzzword that tells you next to nothing about a food product's carbon footprint.  

Presidential Turkey Pardon

I've had a full week of trying to keep up with my day job, attending to relatives, and volunteering.  This is more a mini-rantlet than a full blown post.  Happy Thanksgiving!

You know, I think even if I ate meat, I'd find the Presidential Turkey Pardon a bit sick.  I mean, by its very nature, it acknowledges turkeys as condemned, and what have they done?  Nothing.  Abe Lincoln pardoned Union deserters in the Civil War.  He called them his "legs cases", and opined that if the Almighty God gave a man frightened legs there was nothing to stop his running away on them.*

Now that's sweet and a bit folksy.  The Turkey Pardon?  A show trial by comparison.


*Sarah Vowell -- Assassination Vacation 

Thanksgiving

    Freedom From Want (1943) -- Norman Rockwell

 part of  his series on the Four Freedoms

                                     Not a lot of people partook in a real life scene like this in 1943.

  

“We were the first in doing good to the English and the English the first in doing wrong.”

— Metacom/King Phillip (Wampanoag)

                                   
I like Thanksgiving.  But I feel kind of weird about it.  I enjoy the fact that it's a relatively low key holiday that involves eating spaghetti with squash-and-pesto-sauce (recipe below), stuffed peppers (recipe below), and exploded apples (recipe also below) and getting to see my relatives, but not much else. The vegetarian me is turned off by the sudden surplus of visions of anthropomorphic turkeys just dying to be eaten.  The historian in me just can't stop thinking about smallpox, or about how "Days of Thanksgiving" were common in 17th century England, however they were companions to "Days of Humiliation and Mourning."   We kept the fun part.  Whatever happened to the latter? I mean, okay, there's some helping out at homeless shelters and charities, but on the whole, it seems to be just a runup to more Christmas partying.  I think the nation could use a good day of voluntary humiliation and mourning once in awhile.  Hopefully, it would give us some perspective.  

Thanksgiving: Girl Praying (1943) -- Norman Rockwell

The less popular Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting, possibly because it's something of a downer. 

I haven't even started talking about how Thanksgiving is often used to gloss over some of the less savory chapters of our national history, like, oh, our systematic near-extermination of several entire civilizations.

                                                      Courtesy of amazon.com

But this is a food blog, you say?  Well, the personal is often political.  Especially when the blog is about vegetarian food.  There isn't that big a step from writing about Thanksgiving to writing about the politics of food to a broader discussion of all the topics (genocide, representation, environmentalism, the myth of American exceptionalism) brought up by writing about Thanksgiving and the politics of food.  


Spaghetti with Squash Sauce


1 medium butternut squash, baked at 425 until brown and soft
2 tablespoons pesto sauce 
(I like Classico, but you can use whatever -- the original recipe called for fresh garlic and basil but I can't afford that this week, however I always have a jar of pesto around) 
salt and pepper to taste
3 pinches nutmeg
3 cups water
1 package of spaghetti

Combine ingredients in spaghetti pot, cook for three hours until mixture turns from orange to golden brown, let sit another hour.  Boil the spaghetti according to the directions on the package.  Pour sauce over the spaghetti and serve while still hot. 


Stuffed Peppers


5 large Cubanelle peppers
4 eggs
1 large package of onion and sage stuffing
2 cups milk
1/4th cup cilantro or parsley 
1/4th cup Romano cheese
pepper, curry powder, and salt to taste


Combine onion and sage stuffing, cheese, eggs, milk, and spices (cilantro et al) in large mixing bowl.  Wash hands carefully and mix mixture by hand.  (Keep some paper towels nearby so you don't contaminate the entire kitchen with egg.) Wash your hands carefully again.  Clean and deseed the Cubanelles, then cut them in half legnthwise and stuff them with the stuffing mixture.  Place them on a cookie sheet and bake them in the oven for an hour.  




Exploded Apples 


Core two apples all the way through and stuff the inside with raisins, cinnamon, and maple syrup.  Put in microwave safe bowl, put the bowl in a microwave, cover with a paper towel, and cook on high for 2-3 minutes.  They won't blow up over the whole microwave, but they will puff up and ooze quite satisfyingly. 

The Traveling Vegetarian

"My son was a vegetarian before he went to Morocco, and found that being a vegetarian was really difficult there.  He isn't a vegetarian anymore."

"What's the polite way to survive through a meat eater's wedding?"

"I'd like to be a vegetarian, but the food's too expensive."

Don't scoff--after thirteen years of traveling as a vegetarian, I have learned the following:

1.  If you're going somewhere and you're not sure there's going to be anything you can eat, either eat a bowl of cereal before you leave or take something that can be stuffed in a purse or otherwise covertly consumed.  (Granola bars are the vegetarian's best friend, especially at weddings and other functions where the set menu might not have a vegetarian option.)

2.  If you're traveling to another city / country, do some ground research before you go. If you're a relatively mainstream vegetarian, travel books and Zagat are good sources to consult.  (Zagat recommends some surprisingly inexpensive places sometimes, although you do have to do your homework and double check prices if you're on a budget.)  Of general interest travel books, I find that Rough Guide usually has the best food guide when it comes to trying to find vegetarian friendly places to eat.  If your vegetarianism is more of a general lifestyle than a diet, there are vegetarian resource groups that can help you find either a good place for lunch, a  vegetarian cafe in an occult bookshop, or the best vegan ashram in the state.  It's all good.

3.  Bagels, bagels, bagels. I'm not a huge fan of chain stores, but honestly, if I had become a vegetarian before places like Dunkin' Donuts had started serving bagels, I don't know how long I would have stayed vegetarian. Filling, tasty, cheap, good for any meal, they are probably my ideal fast food.  Mmmmm...carbs.

4.  This one is probably very Northeast-urban-US specific, but: pizza slices are also a (lacto)vegetarian's best chance at a quick, inexpensive lunch. An LA equivalent would probably be that corn-on-a-stick guy.

 5.  Delis at such enlightened chain grocery stores such as the awesome Publix (Florida and Georgia), Stop and Shop (New England), Hannaford (Maine, New Hampshire, North and Central Massachusetts),
Shaws (New England)/Albertsons (the rest of the country), Vons (California), Sainsburys (UK), and Tescos (Europe), have vegetarian options and are cheaper than their Trader Joe's/Whole Foods equivalent.
Anti Vegetarian Hall of Shame: Market Basket (Massachusetts/New Hampshire), Ralph's (California).

6. An off the cuff list of vegetarian friendly chain stores: Au Bon Pain (great pumpkin soup and spinach croissants, but expensive), Starbucks (decent vegetarian sandwich options, also kind of expensive), Caffe Nero (UK -- great ploughman's sandwiches), Pret a Manger (UK -- good selection of cold curried veggies, I've never been to the one in Chicago).  Actually, I find British fast food places in general to be a good deal more vegetarian friendly than American ones, although in the five years since I've been back from the UK we've made significant strides in catching up.

7.  Asian food, unless you're in the middle of the absolute boonies, is usually the best type of food to try to find if you would like to eat a big meal.  Due to religious, historical, and socioeconomic issues, much of Asian cuisine is traditionally meatless.  Even in places where it is relatively hard to get meat free food (Nashua, New Hampshire springs to mind), there will usually be a couple of Chinese places offering veggie fried rice or veggie lo mein.

Remember: in vegetarianism as in life, a little preparation now can save you from an empty stomach later.

Cafe Asia, New Downtown, Washington DC

"Who could imagine / that they would freak out / in Washington DC..." 

Eric and I had a fabulous time at the Rally to Restore Sanity on Saturday, and although my resulting good feelings and faith that the American people don't want our governing bodies to act like partisan jackasses has been completely obliterated* by this afternoon's announcement that the GOP basically doesn't plan on actually trying to govern so much as paralyze the government, I did have a very nice time in DC, and got to eat a very nice post-rally dinner at Cafe Asia, one of the few affordable places  in the area that had managed to stay open after the rally.

Now, full disclosure, I had managed to have an egg and cheese sandwich for breakfast, but the closest to food I got for about eight or nine hours after that was dining on cheesy crackers and Kudos on the National Mall.  Anything would have been manna after that, but I was impressed by the way the food at Cafe Asia managed to take Asian standards (fried tofu with sweet soy sauce, yellow tofu curry, and spicy Malaysian-style noodle), and give them a homestyle quality.  The decor was hip neon and concrete, but the fried Nippon tofu was sweet and fried-doughy enough to comfort the far from home and politics-stressed soul.  The undercurrent of soba in the soy sauce on the tofu whetted the appetite, while the two curries we ordered filled our bellies and warmed us up on a chilly October night.  Eric's curry was a standard vegetable curry, that initially tasted mild and comforting but had a nice gathering burn to the pepper fire.  Mine was done in soup-form, so the taste of the coconut milk was much more noticeable, as was the snap of the pepper fire. (I had to order two beers just to stop my mouth from burning, and I eat spicy food like it's about to be declared illegal.)

We were still a little hungry, so we ordered dessert: fried bananas and ice cream for me and a brownie a la mode for Eric.  I grew up on fried plantains served with claret sauce at Christmas, so the comparatively austere taste of bananas and honey came as a bit of a shock, however the vanilla ice cream more than made up for the comparative lack of sweetness.  I have Eric's word that his brownie was appropriately chocolately, however I didn't get a chance to sample some myself, as I was full to bursting at the time.

After dinner, we walked down the National Mall and back to Union Station, making plans for another trip to Washington DC.  Next time, we'll do the sight seeing we couldn't do last week because we were sharing the Mall with half a million people. And if we have time, we'll also come back to Cafe Asia.  

*Yes, I am a liberal, but my frustration with the election is more motivated by my growing conviction that the two party system is completely detrimental to the sane running of the country, and thus has got to go, than it is with the fact that the Democrats didn't win. 

Inauthentic Yet Still Delicious Oaxacan-Style Chili

I'm going off to Washington to attend The Rally to Restore Sanity at the end of next week, so I did my cleaning and my cooking in one burst today.  I even found the time to cook something I haven't cooked in a long time: chili.

It's been so cold lately that my thoughts cannot help but turn to a climate a little less brutal (well, in the winter) than that of New England.  That, and I have a friend in Arizona and she's been bragging that it doesn't get that cold there. It is cold here. Humph. I love fall in New England, but the gradual loss of daylight and the ability to stay outdoors for long periods makes me miss the days when I could escape the gathering gloom by flying out to LA to meet my boyfriend (who lived there for a few years) and then going to Guelaguetza for some Nopal Zapoteco sin la carne and a cafe de olla. (I like the Northeast, but it's somewhat wanting when it comes to places that serve cactus.  Sigh.)

So to cheer myself up, I searched my cookbooks for some chili to get some ideas, and then I made up this chili with those two lovely Mexican cooking standbys: cinnamon and chocolate.

1 small onion

3 bell peppers, chopped (I used green and red.)

3 large tomatoes

1 can stewed tomatoes or tomato paste (in emergencies, plain bottled pasta sauce will also suffice.)

1 bag of fake beef (I prefer Morningstar Farms), if you do not live in the US, you can get fake lamb -- that's actually probably closer to the original dish -- if you don't like fake beef, add an extra 2 cans of beans

4 tablespoons cinnamon (adjust for your tastes)

2 tablespoons UNSWEETENED chocolate

2 tablespoons cilantro

hot sauce to taste (I used my old standby, siracha sauce, however Texas Pete's Hot Sauce or Cajun Chef are also good)

Fry the peppers and onions in vegetable oil in a big soup pot, stirring occasionally.  Add the cinnamon when the vegetables get soft.  When the vegetables begin to brown, add the chopped tomatoes, the can of stewed tomatoes, and the fake meat.  Stir in the chocolate and cilantro.  Simmer for an hour.  I like to serve it with a side of rice, as that kills the pepper fire.  Serves four.

Oven Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Sauce for Wheat Pasta

There was recently a sale on store brand ground wheat pasta at the local Shaws, so Eric and I bought home a few boxes of it.  Now, I've had Pastene ground wheat pasta, and couldn't really tell the difference in texture or flavor.  With Shaws brand, you can -- it's much rougher and the flavor's a bit sweeter.  This isn't a bad thing, although it does disqualify this pasta from having store bought sauce poured over it.  (Store bought sauce is far too sweet for this type of wheat pasta, and I find that the pureed tomato makes the noodles feel a bit slimy.)

However, if you want to get all fancy and start flinging  around the word "artesian" when you invite people over, these are the noodles and this is the sauce for you: a chunky, smoky sauce with a vague tinge of pesto resting on a bed of rustic wheat pasta.

Word to the wise: this was made in the oven in my apartment, so if you don't have a forty year old, rather eccentric oven, you might want to keep an eye on this sauce, or cook it at a slightly lower temperature.

3 red peppers, diced
1/2 cup Romano cheese
2 tomatoes, diced
4 cloves garlic, diced
pesto sauce and/or fresh basil leaves to your taste
pepper to your taste
olive oil

Combine the diced vegetables, cheese, and spices in a ceramic pie plate large enough to accommodate them.  Preheat the oven for 350 degrees for ten minutes. Put the mixture in the oven and bake for an hour at 350 degrees or until the vegetables have browned and are soft enough to shove a fork through.

Recipe Aid: Help My Aloo Palak

Last night, I experimented with combining elements of various Aloo Palak (creamed spinach and potato curry) recipes I have read over the years, and my experiments have yielded this dish.  All in all, I'm pretty happy with it, but it needs a something little extra.  Je ne sais quoi.  Do you have any ideas?

Basic Aloo Palak 

1 cup strained Greek yogurt
1 cup water or milk
1 cube frozen chopped spinach
6 diced Yukon Gold potatoes
3 tablespoons garlic
3 tablespoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons ginger
curry powder to taste (I like my curry strong so I used at slightly less than 1/4 cup, which sounds like a lot, but potatoes, yogurt, and spinach tend toward the bland otherwise)

Sauté garlic, cinnamon, ginger and curry powder in large saucepan.   Add the frozen cube of spinach and let it thaw and soak in the spices.  Add the potatoes and simmer for half an hour.  Serve on a bed of rice.
Serves 4.

Add-ins and Vegetarian Cheats

I had a friend over on Thursday night.  We all met up at the apartment right after work and Eric and I didn't want to waste any time hiding in the kitchen.  So we did what foodie blogs say not to do and served stir fried vegetables with store-bought Golden Curry*.  We didn't even serve it Japanese-style: as a thick curry and vegetable gravy with rice on the side.  Instead Eric prepared the curry with a mixture of sesame oil, fresh chopped broccoli and onions, and then added soba noodles to the mix and simmered the whole thing until the noodles picked up the curry "gravy".   It was delicious.

Sometimes, when it's been a hard day at the office and you just want to focus on the company you have over, or even just zonk out to some old horror movie on  some obscure cable channel** while you sit in the dark alone in the house, nothing is better than just throwing some vegetables and seasoning into a pre-made sauce and slopping that sauce over some rice or noodles.  

Here are my two favorite types of pre-made sauce: 

Alfredo Sauce with Peas and Carrots 

(NB: peas and carrots and pasta or rice also go well with Discount Blue Eyed Curry, which you can make from scratch.) 

1 jar of alfredo sauce, any brand will do

1/4th cup milk 

2 diced carrots

2 cups of peas 

(frozen will do for either of these vegetables)

2 tbs of olive oil

3tbs curry powder

2 tbs Herbes de Provence 

2 cloves of garlic

Sauté the garlic, curry, and Herbes de Provence in the olive oil until they brown slightly.  Turn down the heat on the stove.  Gently stir in the milk and jar of alfredo sauce.  Add the vegetables and simmer for about ten to twenty minutes.  (You want the vegetables to pick up the flavor of the sauce.) Serve over a heavy type of noodle that can hold its own against a rich sauce: fettuccine or linguine or penne would be my choices. 

Store Bought  Tomato Sauce Alla Veggie Bologonese 

1 jar plain tomato sauce OR one can tomato paste

2 fresh tomatoes

1 diced pepper

1 can of beans (I know, I know!  Look, I keep meaning to try Anna Thomas's advice for cooking dried beans but then I go shopping and always forget to buy a packet of dried beans.) 

2 tbs curry powder

1 clove garlic

1 tbs olive oil

Again, sauté the curry powder and the clove of garlic in the olive oil until brown.  Then add the jar of tomato sauce, the peppers, the beans, and then the tomatoes.  Simmer ten to twenty minutes, depending on the kind of effect you want: if you want a great mid summer dish with crisp, incredibly fresh veggies, the less time you cook it the better.   

*A type of Japanese curry that was introduced to Japan by the British in the 19th century. I've had Japanese curry before, and before I started researching this blog I was convinced that it had come to Japan from India via some ancient trade route.  As a fan of both the East and the West, I get a kick out of the fact that the Japanese once considered curry to be a Western dish.  The world of culture is so wonderfully odd.  Heh. 

** Tis the season. 

Chang's House, Brighton, Boston MA

All attempts to blog last week were derailed last week by a mixture of my own laziness, Netflix suddenly finally sending me Max Headroom after jerking me around for a month by promising there was no wait... until they were about to send it, at which point it became totally unavailable and no I'm not still bitter, and actual misfortune. (In the form of my car kicking the bucket in a truly stunning manner.  Expect even more subway-friendly restaurant reviews for at least the next couple of weeks.)

During this little intersession, it was my great delight to be able to eat at Chang's House, which is fast becoming my go-to local Chinese take out restaurant.  Chang's House is unique in that their vegetarian menu consists extensively of fake beef and fake chicken entrees.  This is good for people who are trying to "convert" to vegetarianism, or people who simply want to cut some fat from their diet.  However, they really didn't do anything for me.  (Disclosure:  one of the reasons I stopped eating meat was because I didn't like the taste, and I tend to find even meat analogues a bit too much like the real thing -- if they're good quality.) The meat-analogue entree we ordered was a disappointment. The General Gau's "chicken", little balls of gluten done up like dim sum chicken balls, had a wonderful sauce but the fake chicken itself was dry and there was barely enough sauce to moisten both the "chicken" and the wonderfully fluffy jasmine rice they served it with.  

My advice is to stick to the tofu dishes, as they offer a wonderful and selection of really tasty tofu entrees.  My particular favorites are the crispy sesame tofu (fried tofu served covered in sesame seeds and sweet and sour sauce, a delightful appetizer if you order it alone, but also good with rice), and the spicy curry tofu.  Unlike the crispy sesame tofu, the spicy curry tofu is a full meal.  The spicy curry tofu (triangles of fried tofu drenched in yellow curry sauce) is cooked with some nicely steamed vegetables, and the overall pepper fire is moderated somewhat by the aforementioned fluffy jasmine rice.

All in all, Chang's House offers up an excellent vegetarian meal at a good price.  They are also one of the few Boston-area restaurants that stays open until one in the morning.  When I moved to Brighton, one of my tiny niggling worries was that I wouldn't find a Chinese place to replace Rose's, but Chang's House is a great substitute. 

Vegetarian Book Review: Jonathan Safran Foer -- Eating Animals

Thanks to the entry for Eating Animals on wikipedia. 

I was really not expecting to like this book, I hated Everything Is Illuminated, and I was expecting something similarly tragic-cutesy.  Well, I got the cutesy, but I was more moved by the book than I expected to be.  Vegetarianism is a loaded topic, and Safran Foer does nothing to make it less loaded. In fact, the critical reception from the New York Times to the Onion AV Club seemed to agree that Jonathan Safran Foer is way too upset about this whole cruelty-to-animals thing, and should aim his compassion at a more appropriate  -- read human -- recipient.

I can't help but think there's something terribly reductive about that line of thinking.  Why is it a waste of ethical energy to wonder if there might be something a wee bit queasy in having some animals as friends and eating some for dinner?  Did I just miss some sort of mainstream-America memo because I'm Catholic and therefore am culturally conditioned to question the ethics of my pleasures?* Why is it considered too "crunchy granola" and over privileged to be concerned that our taste for hamburgers and hot dogs might be inflicting great pain on creatures who have been proven to feel great pain?  When did it become okay to ignore an ethical quandary because a. there were more horrible things going on in the world and b. because it presented an inconvenient truth?

In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of the book is how Safran Foer illustrates how human suffering and animal suffering often flourish in the same environment: much of the book is spent discussing the damage done to employees of meat packing plants who work for low wages, are subject to hideous on the job injuries,** or the people living around the plant who have to deal with festering pools of shit, as well as how the atrocities present within the meat packing plants affect plant employee quality of life and family time. Aren't these people important? Shouldn't someone be concerned about them? Shouldn't we be ashamed that our craving for cheap chicken and hamburger leads these people to be worked like mules? (And isn't that an interesting way to put it?)

These meat packing plants knowingly hire sadists. Shouldn't we be worried about the correlation between animal abuse and pathological behavior?   For all we know, they could be incubating the next Robert Pickton.

Eating Animals is not a one-sided book.  Safran Foer alternates his writing with the writings of others involved in the factory farming issue. Not just the PETA people, but also the factory farmers, humane slaughter advocates, and vegan slaughterhouse designers who think meat is a necessary evil.  This is not a book that is hellbent on getting people not to eat meat, instead it is a study of all the ways we try to rationalize eating meat, the cultural taboos we put up to make eating meat acceptable, and why the modern factory farm is such a nightmare that all traditional meat eating versus vegetarianism arguments wilt before the agricultrual-industrial complex.  (In which ovo-lacto vegetarians like myself are totally complicit.)

Safran Foer's observations about the ethics of meat eating have been made before, and not just by animal rights activists: Anthony Bourdain (no friend of vegetarianism) discussed the ethical difficulties inherent in killing his dinner in A Cook's Tour, Julie Powell (a butcher) confronted the reality of killing a lobster in her kitchen, David Foster Wallace had very little fun at a Maine lobster fest in Consider the Lobster.  I was a meat-eater once upon a time.  Do I not have the same credibility as those who still eat meat?


*I've always wondered if my ability to give up meat in some way stemmed from the fact that I grew up in a culture where giving up something you desire to accomplish a greater moral good is highly esteemed.

** There's one story about death by pig shit that will probably give me sporadic nightmares for the rest of my life.  And no, I'm not over reacting.