crack the plates

Yowzah–today I was thrilled to learn that I actually have some happy, regular readers who are interested in what I have to say! Because I haven’t been picked up by google (yet?) and don’t get a ton of comments, I tend to think that this is just an exercise for myself–to see (especially in VeganMoFo) if I have what it takes discipline-wise to keep a blog. How refreshing and encouraging it is to hear, either through the grapevine or directly, that I’m reaching folks! So whether you’re an occasional reader, a frequent reader, a non-commenter or an avid one, thanks! The thought that you’re there gives blogging zest.

On the flip-side, it makes me feel guilty about not having blogged in a couple days. (Not that you’re out there chewing off your fingers waiting for something new to read, but it does add a measure of responsibility, knowing you’re there.) The disappointing truth is that there wasn’t much extraordinary coming out of our kitchen this weekend. Saturday and Sunday were rather glum because of work we did towards recovering the stolen bike. (It seems very unlikely that we will recover it, but we did the flyer/walking around the neighborhood/talking to the neighborrhood-alliance President thing anyway.) We ate a lot of pre-packaged food: a Kashi pizza, heat-and-eat dumplings, and more veggie patties of various stripes than I care to mention. Sunday I made raspberry muffins for a Process Theology conversation group–muffins, my culinary summit for Sunday. :-/

Tonight, though, was book club! Each month a group a small group of friends gathers for a pot-luck and conversation (with tons of unrelated gossip) around a featured piece of lit. Because October is my favorite month, I claimed it months ago. We read in common Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Since I’m too tired to write my own description, here’s a link to the associated wikipedia page. Basically, Ray interweves a story of South Georgia land, its plants (long-leaf pine & wiregrass) and its creatures (assorted) that is centuries older than she and her people are (the ecological narrative) with her own memoir of growing up in on this radically-altered landscape; specifically, in a junkyard with fundamentalist parents. It is a beautiful story that can be difficult to bear at moments, especially if you have bipolar disorder in your family; nonetheless, as I noted at book club tonight, it was not the tragic moments that coaxed tears from my eyes, but the soaring ones that stole my heart and infused it with rapture.

Appropriately, the theme of the food was “that which evokes your childhood/homeland.” I made my momma’s sweet tea–

• 8 tea bags steeped briefly,
• squeezed and poured over nearly two cups of sugar that waits in the bottom of the gallon jug
• then topped off with water

Sinfully sweet. I also served some good ol’ deep-southern buttermilk cornbread, cooked in the skillet with drippings from my vegan gravy; cabbage a la mamma–

• slice off a half of a big cabbage; core it; cut into bite-sized pieces
• put a little water in your pan
• add some eBal (Earth Balance), salt and white pepper
• add cabbage, stir well; steam til the cabbage is delectable mush!

and finally, a pot of Grit collards. The collards were the only thing that weren’t really like my mom’s at all, because when she makes collards she doesn’t have much “pot likker” (pot liquor; the juice from the cooked collards that lots of folks like to sop up with savoury cornbread). I use a recipe from Athens Georgia’s famous vegetarian restaurant, the Grit, which always renders a ton of tasty pot likker. It went especially well with tonight’s cornbread.

I was grateful that B brought mashed potatoes, H, a gorgeous blueberry cobbler, J, a lentil bake, E, a mashed carrot-and-potato dish that seemed to be infused with dill and chives, and K, a perfectly-pureed pumpkin soup. We ate like queens and gossipped like songbirds. Looking forward to next month!

This just in: the katzerole Unix in a box:

First, the most important news: our katze Unix seems to be doing much better today than she has since the fleabath incident Sunday night. (Worrisomely, she’d put her appetite on hold and would mew loudly every time we touched her). She’s in fine furry form tonight, though, and is currently sitting in my lap encumbering my typing. And oh, how soft and flea-free her tortoiseshell fur is! (Alas, we’ll still be heading to the V-E-T in the morning.)

Tonight’s dinner was generously provided by friends N & J in celebration of Nate’s upcoming birthday. As a special surprise, they prepared some sushi–Nate’s favorite–with avocado, carrot, and cucumber. (I brought over the materials to make a quick miso–red miso paste by Westbrae, cellophane noodles from Jungle Jim’s, japanese-style firm tofu, two cloves of garlic sliced thin and some kombu kelp.) Observe the taller N coach the shorter one on the wily ways of sushi:

Those are taller N’s in the foreground (second picture). Little N…well, let’s just say he could do with a little more larnin’:

But hey, who am I to judge? I didn’t even try! On that note…

In the interest of full disclosure (because this blog ought not be about my triumphs only, but about my royal struggles too), I will admit that I f-ed up not one but TWO desserts tonight. I fail so comprehensibly so infrequently that it is quite marvellous that I was able to do it twice in one evening. Still, I admit: I ruined some rice pudding by using short-grain BROWN rice and not cooking it through; mere minutes after wiping the apron of this masterpiece, I whipped up some chocolate pudding that didn’t set because my arrowroot was so expired it had completely lost its potency. Oops?

Le sigh.

Hope you’ll check out tomorrow’s update on cooking for Peace Forum: butternut squash soup that isn’t (DUN DUN DUN) …pureed!!! Better yet, just come have lunch! Tomorrow’s talk: “One Hill at a Time: Supporting Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance at Al Tuwani.”

Too little time + not much of a taste for anything made lunch look anything but promising today. Until, that is, I happened upon an 8 oz container of Tofutti creme cheeze in our totally underused dairy drawer. Set to expire at the end of this month, I started to brainstorm…& recalled a lovely sandwich I used to eat on lunchbreaks & special occasions while working at Alon’s: “the Tuscany.” To make it, the line-cook slathers about three ounces of high-quality herbed goat cheese on either side of a ciabatta mini loaf, alternates layers of marinated roasted eggplant with sun-dried tomatoes, and tops it with fistfuls of arugula. Pretty charming, eh? So so unvegan.

My answer was an herbed creme cheeze of my own made of Tofutti and generous piches of ground garlic, organic basil, marjoram, & thyme from Frontier, a splash of Santa Cruz organic lemon juice and a little salt and white pepper. Whip this briefly with your hand mixer and then slather it on some delicious hearth-made bread (in our case, the last of Zingerman’s farm). Add some reconstituted sun-dried tomato pieces a dear friend kindly brought you back from Atlanta, where they’re available at a reasonable price, and then stuff some organic arugula on that mess. Ta-da, ta-die-for:

For dinner I made a simple take on a pad thai, based off of Isa’s recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance. As with the kale and tofu I made yesterday, the idea is basically to balance the flavor–here, you’ve got some tamarind concentrate (sweet, bitter), tamari (salty, pungent), unrefined sugar (sweet), and sambal oelek (spicy!). I sauteed the tofu with a lot of garlic, onion, and red peppers and japanese eggplant from the Saturday morning farmer’s market, see?:

And as a bonus, here’s a picture of the wickida Unixera protesting our closed-door policy:

Seriously, she just got a fleabath.

Love!