stew from melomeals, and a non-profit you should really know about

Two days ago, Melody over at melomeals posted a recipe for Creamy White Bean Stew with Collards. Not only did it sound delicious, but with pre-cooked beans, she claimed the recipe comes together in 30 minutes. I came home late-ish and starving on Tuesday night, so I put this claim to the test! Unlike most stews, which need a lot of cooking time to develop their flavors, this recipe really does come together in half an hour, and it is delicious, hearty, and warming (which is important, because we are in the middle of some boiler issues and won't have heat till tomorrow). I didn't have poultry seasoning, so I used a variety of herbs and spices--a pinch each of onion and garlic powders, sage, thyme, parsley. I also didn't have any "nutritional yeast base sauce" made up ahead of time (though that's a cool idea of Melody's, making a big batch of cheesy sauce to last you throughout the week. I suspect the boyfriend would eat it all in one go, though, since he's a sucker for cheesy sauces), so I added each of its parts to the stew individually. I put in 1/4 C nutritional yeast, a bit of mustard and garlic powder, and 1/2 C water when it says to add the nutritional yeast sauce. Toward the end of the cooking time I stirred a tablespoon or so of arrowroot powder into another 1/4 C water, and stirred that into the stew. It was so delicious!

I made the cornbread biscuits from Vegan Brunch to go along with it. I am a huge fan of all things that involve cornmeal, so I can't believe I'd never tried these! They are ridiculously easy to make, taking about 20 minutes from when you first get out the ingredients to when you pull them out of the oven.

The combination of the two was awesome.

As a sort of public service announcement, one of the things that makes me come home late-ish (and anxious for a quick-cooking meal like the afore-mentioned stew) each week is the volunteer work I do for a non-profit called RfBD, or Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. It is an organization that records textbooks for students with disabilities--physical or learning-related--that prevent them from reading at the pace of their peers. RfBD offers students audio files of their textbooks, allowing them to navigate their texts by page, chapter, section, etc, just as if they were working with a book. Because there are hundreds of textbooks to record for students from elementary to graduate school levels, RfBD relies heavily on volunteers to record the content of the books.

Volunteering has always been important to me, and helping people with learning differences and visual impairments is another cause in which I'm personally invested. As a volunteer, I spend 2 hours a week in a sound-proof booth, reading aloud. I was a radio kid in college, and doing this soothes the part of me that misses having a radio show. The training was easy, and if you don't feel like recording, they have other tasks for volunteers to do. RfBD (which is about to change its name, since they cater to a much wider variety of people than only those who are blind or dyslexic) has been around since at least the 1960s (possibly the 50s?), and has over 20 locations in 14 states; they also have some satellite locations in other places. I've been volunteering for them for almost 3 years now, and I intend to do so for many more. If you're looking for a way to spend some of your time (or money; they take donations) helping other people, this is a great way to do it. (Plus, if you're moderately antisocial like I am, this allows you to help people without actually spending time with people--you're in a sound-proof booth!)

Tomorrow, and every Friday this November, I'm going to run a series of entries on how to replace nightshades, since, if you are allergic to nightshades, or just ever try to avoid them, you'll know that you need a little help sometimes. Or a lot of the time. Or every time you open a cookbook. Stay tuned!

america's grocery spending habits since the 1950s

Last week, I came across a chart showing the US Department of Labor's statistics on American household food expenditure and how it's changed in relation to our income since the 1950s, and I can't stop thinking about it. Here, I'll show you:

Though of course the chart necessarily leaves off a lot of information, there is one thing it makes very clear: Americans spend less than they have before on food. Whereas in the 1950s, the average food budget expenditure was 29.7%, it is now 13.1%.

Does this surprise any of you? It really shocked me. First of all, I think over time, fewer and fewer of us Amercans grow our own food, which means that more and more of us are buying food. It didn't make sense to me at first how it could be possible, then, that we spend less money on it. But then I remembered all the cost-cutting articles and how-to guides that started popping up in 2008, when the economy staggered and fell: a large majority of the tips for saving money featured how to save money at the grocery store.

Now, I am all for fiscal responsibility. I am all for comparison shopping and educated buying decisions. What I am not for is buying the cheapest food available to me. My great grandmother used to say "What you save at the grocery store, you spend at the doctor's," and my family still goes by that rule. I don't think you have to spend a fortune on food; it is easy to eat well cheaply if you stick to whole foods and do a fair amount of cooking at home rather than buying pre-prepared packaged items. But I don't think the reason we're spending less on food now than in the 1950s is because we're buying more bulk grains and beans than our grandparents. I think it's because people are buying lower-quality groceries just to save, say, ten cents on a can of tomato sauce, and that doesn't make sense to me. That dumb "you are what you eat" cliche is scientifically true--your body uses the food you eat to build and repair cells, to maintain systems, to ensure that you function--why wouldn't you want the best fuel you can afford?

This is a bit of a rant, and I'll stop myself from expanding on it, but it shocks me that at a time when we have more expendable income than ever, we spend so much less of it on what I consider to be one of the most important parts of our lives. I know it's a matter or priorities, and I can't expect everyone to have the same priorities as me. I would rather not get new clothes than not have cashews for a month. But it's not like I drop mad cash in the grocery store; I buy dried beans instead of canned and many more bulk than packaged items to keep costs down while shopping. It's just that I consider groceries to be one of the most important expenditures in my budget. Not only for the nutrition aspect, but because I enjoy food, and I want to continue to enjoy the way I cook and eat.

What about you guys? Did this chart surprise you? How do you try to cut costs at the grocery store? Do you cut costs in other parts of your budget, like I do, to ensure you get the food you like/want/need, or is food one of the first things to slash when it comes time to tighten your belts?

the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay: macaroni and cheese

I love food and I love to read. As a result, the first week of each month, I'll combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is too new to be a classic, as Michael Chabon published it in 2000. However, it received a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and, like Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, it is one of those realist novels that I think will go down in history as Very Important Texts from the Turn of the 21st Century. (Isn't it strange to think that someday people might take an English class with that title--as a historical, and not contemporary, literature class?) Because it's new, I guess this will be more of a review than anything else, because I don't want to risk the boyfriend reading any spoilers here (I'm making him read it next).

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay begins just before WWII, and focuses on a young Czech man, Joe Kavalier, whose family and friends help him escape the country. He comes to America and, with his cousin Sam Clay, creates the Escapist, a comic-book superhero who can escape any situation and frees innocents from oppression. The Escapist becomes as famous as Superman, and the book deals with the men's lives throughout the rise and fall of the Escapist.

Chabon, the author, does a brilliant job of visiting and revisiting themes, playing them out in new ways and in old ways, creating these intricate patterns of his characters' lives that we know are contrived, but we want to believe. Amazing things happen to characters--and we believe them because we want to. Reading The Amazing Kavalire and Clay gives you the same kind of thrill as reading a comic book. Its structure is like a superhero comic. What's more, it's like one of the comics the characters create: Joe himself is a deeply flawed, but strong, inspiring, handsome and kind character, an orphan in a new land, who escapes every situation he can, and his cousin is like the stock comic-book sidekick: small, eager, quick on his feet, tagging along on the more dynamic people's adventures. Even Rosa, the main love interest, could be a female superhero: she's strong, firm, always knows what to do, has a crazy dreamy powerful artistic persona, and then a normal, mousy daytime look. And all the while, the book is actually "just" about the ins and outs of growing up, discovering one's identity, and living in the shadow of war. These themes are stirring in themselves, but one of the reasons I find this novel so amazing is because it doesn't use any real gimmicks, but it takes a sort of amalgamation of an WWII-era bildungsroman and sturm und drang and makes it read like a comic book. Does this make any sense? I don't want to spoil the wonderful narrative and dizzying (in a good way) story arcs in case you haven't read it, so I won't cite many specifics, but this realist novel is as lurid and action-packed as any early Superman comic book.

The biggest theme of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, if you didn't already catch it from the name of the superhero the men invent, is escapism. Through the characters' actions, the book explores what escape means, what a person can and can't escape from, and how different kinds of people understand escaping. There is a nice moment about 3/4 of the way through the book where Joe reads a comic book and thinks that the reason people attack comic books--the fact that they provide escape--is exactly the reason he finds them comforting. There is not much else in this book that Joe finds comforting... except Macaroni and Cheese!

Okay, that's sort of a stretch. But there is a scene in the book where Joe, needing comfort for multiple reasons, eats a prodigious amount of macaroni and cheese that Rosa had made. Rosa, who cooks to comfort and to nourish people around her throughout the book, is at this point dissatisfied with her life--and the fact that this stands out so much from the exotic foods she had been proud to make earlier in the book. "Macaroni and cheese. It seemed, as a dish, to exist at the very center of her sense of embarrassment over her life," but she makes it, knowing that it will comfort and nourish her family. Because I think almost anyone would agree that, as unglamorous or exotic as it may seem, macaroni and cheese is a comfort food.

I have tried several variations on vegan macaroni and cheese, but I wasn't keen on many of them, esepcially since a surprising number call for grated vegan cheese. I'm not big on packaged vegan cheese, since it's often very salty and rarely all that healthy. I found a VegWeb recipe for the "Best Vegan Mac and Cheese in the entire world" that was pretty close to what I had in mind, but I have made several changes. First, that recipe uses a strange amount of pasta: 1.5 pounds, when most pasta comes in 1-pound packages. Second, the amount of oil and salt is too much, even for me. And I can't have paprika. So, I present to you my version. It can be gluten-free if you use non-gluten noodles, and is very delicious with broccoli on the side.

This picture features some reheated leftovers with broccoli, because I am too impatient to eat it whenever I take it out of the oven to take any pictures, but I think even the leftovers look tasty...

Comforting Baked Macaroni and Cheese
This makes at least six very generous servings.

1 pound macaroni
1 C unsweetened, unflavored nondairy milk
1 C nutritional yeast
1/4 C (4 Tbsp) Earth Balance or canola oil (EB is best!)
3/4 C water
3 Tbsp tamari/soy sauce
1/4 of a 14-oz block of tofu (that's the normal, packed-in-water, from-the-fridge kind)
1-2 tsp garlic powder (depends on how much you like garlic)
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp miso (white miso is best), or 1/2 tsp salt, or just a little more tamari
1/4 tsp black pepper (or more)
1 tsp mustard, optional but nice
bread crumbs (optional, for topping. About 1/2 C should do)

Preheat the over to 375. Boil the macaroni as directed by the bag it comes in. Al dente is better than mushy.

Combine all of the other ingredients, except the bread crumbs, in a blender. Blend until smooth. It should be thicker than soymilk in texture, about the texture of coconut milk. If not, add a little more water and blend. Taste it and blend in more garlic, tamari, or pepper if you want.

Pour the pasta in a 9x13 glass pan, or in a large casserole dish. (In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Rosa uses a "white Corning casserole with [a] blue flower on the side," if you want to be authentic). Over top of that, pour the cheesy mixture, and stir well. Depending on the size of your dish, it may not quite cover the pasta; that's okay. Just make sure all the noodles have gotten wet as you stir. Smooth the mixture semi-flat with the back of a spoon or spatula, then sprinkle bread crumbs over the top.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until most of the liquid has been absorbed. Allow to cool for a couple minutes before serving.

You can refrigerate leftovers for 3-4 days. Add a little water to the bottom of the pan when you reheat it. You can also freeze leftovers and they'll keep for aaaaaages.

today is basically the greatest day

November 1 of each year is World Vegan Day--so happy World Vegan Day! It is also, coincidentally but importantly, the first day of the VEGAN MONTH OF FOOD! Happy Vegan Mofo, everyone!

Though this is the fourth year of Vegan Mofo, it is the first year I've been able to participate. I have not been super consistent in my posting in the past, but this month, I'm planning on posting a blog entry every day.

November 1 is also the Day of the Dead, which, as I discussed a couple years ago, is my perfect holiday. I'm not of Mexican descent, nor do I live anywhere near Mexico, but I think the Day of the Dead is a really great holiday, whose aesthetics and meaning I respect and adore. Anyway, you can go back to that entry to see my recipes for Dead Bread (Pan de Muerto) and Tamale casserole, and for dessert, you can stay here for:

Mexican Hot Chocolate!

If I had had the wherewithal (ie, marzipan or marshmallows), I'd've sculpted a little skull to float on top.

Mexican hot chocolate, if you haven't had it, is a little spicier and a lot thicker than what we Americans associate with hot chocolate. As a general rule, when making it at home, use 1 oz chocolate per 1 cup liquid per serving; the rest is to taste.

A traditional recipe should look something like this. It serves two but is easy to reduce or scale up for different amounts of people.

2 oz unsweetened chocolate (chopped roughly)
2 C nondairy milk
2 Tbsp sugar
1 cinnamon stick
pinch nutmeg (optional)
1/2 tsp vanilla

In a small pan, combine all of the ingredients except the vanilla over low heat. Stir constantly, until all the chocolate has melted and the liquid is smooth. Remove from heat, remove cinnamon stick, and stir in the vanilla. Pour into two cups and serve.

You can adapt this recipe in a number of ways. If you don't have baking chocolate, replace each ounce with 1/4 cup of chocolate chips, and leave out the sugar. If you don't want any spices getting in the way of your chocolate fix, leave out the cinnamon and nutmeg, or use a tiny bit of powdered cinnamon for just a small amount. You can also add small punches of cayenne, cloves, and/or allspice.

Finally, a quick plug for a chocolate company I really love. A much easier way of making Mexican Hot Chocolate is to simply buy chocolate intened for Mexican Hot Chocolate, like Taza's Chocolate Mexicano discs.

Taza is a small chocolate company located about a mile from my house, where they roast and grind the chocolate and make it into bars right on the premises. They buy organic sugar and their organic chocolate comes directly from farmers in Latin America, ensuring fair prices and high quality in their products. Also, all of their products are vegan. They sell candy bars, cocoa nibs, and other tasty prducts, but sometimes I just eat the Chocolate Mexicano discs straight. (They come 2 to a pack, so it's like they expect that.)

just in time for Halloween: creepiest island ever

I just found out about La Isla de las Munecas (the Island of the Dolls), and I can't believe I have't heard of it before today. In case you haven't heard of it either, let me share some information about this awesomely creepy place!

La Isla de las Munecas is an island on a lake near Mexico City. Its former resident, a hermit named Julian Santana, collected dolls and doll parts, altered them to make them creepier (as if old dolls weren't creepy enough!), and placed them all over the island. Some hang from trees, some sit on chairs, some crawl in the rafters, some lie on the ground and peek out of flowerbeds.

I've been reading about this island all morning. Julian Santana had a prodigious garden, and people would come to the island to trade dolls for his produce, so he could keep adding to his work. A young girl had drowned there years before, and Santana himself drowned there in 2001, plus the place looks creepy, so people think it must be haunted. Apparently it's been on one of those ghost-hunting TV shows!

You can see a lot more pictures, which are all amazing, and read more about Julian and about superstitions associated with the island, on these sites:

http://www.everywheremag.com/places/5452/page1

http://jacqui.instablogs.com/entry/don-julian-and-his-island-of-dolls/

http://blog.turisuna.com/la-isla-de-la-munecas-haunted-island-which-is-filled-with-creepy-dolls

Let me know if you find more authoritative information on the island; it's hard to come by.

I think the island and the concept are really cool and interesting. I like the aesthetics of most creepy things, so I am a little biased, but I say this is art. Maybe they just do it to add to the creepiness and not to talk down a man's 50 years of work, but almost all of the articles I read articles about la Isla de las Munecas make Julian Santana's work seem like the result of a mentally unbalanced man living alone--no one refers to him as an artist. But if Julian Santana had done this in a studio in Brooklyn or in San Francisco's Mission district, galleries would be beating down his door to get him to do installations for them.

And I would totally want to see said installations, like I totally want to see La Isla de las Munecas someday. In the meantime, if I'm ever looking for ideas for Halloween parties or haunted houses, I know whence to draw inspiration!

So what do you think? Is La Isla de las Munecas cool? Scary? Art? Would you go there?

new layout!

Ta da! What do you all think? I'm madly in love with this new layout. The header image came from some tulips I loved at the Boston Public Garden (I included a pic of them in this post in 2008), and the color scheme, while arguably not as "me" as the former black-and-bright-green ordeal, is friendlier on the eyes.

For my reference as much as yours (I have a bad memory and a tendency to memorialize ugly things past), here's a screenshot of the old color scheme:

I am incredibly proud of figuring out the proper CSS to add, center, resize, and not mess up my header image. I have been fighting with CSS a lot at work lately, and am finally starting to feel like I have a vague idea of how to make things go the way I want.

This morning, thinking how unsure I was about switching layouts, I realized that despite claiming not to like change, I change all the time, and I roll with it pretty well. I just don't like liminal areas--I don't like when things are in the process of changing. So I went all out and got all the major stuff over with today. There will be a couple more minor renovations over the next month or so, but now I've gone through the biggest change, and I feel good.

How do you all deal with change? Does that apply to transient things like website layouts? And most importantly, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY NEW LAYOUT?!

beurre blanc, vegan mofo, and site revamping

Before I went vegan, I hadn't tried a lot of foods. I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York, where availability of fancy and/or ethnically diverse foods was limited to the "ethnic" section of the grocery store--which had taco shells, a few kinds of hot sauce, and couscous. Oh, and maybe some artisan olive oil. Going vegan made me think about food, and definitely made me cook more (my mother was, at first, at a loss as to what to make for me to eat). The more confident a cook I become, the more challenges I end up wanting to take. "What other cool techniques can I try?" I ask myself. "What other non-vegan things can I veganize?"

The more experimental I get in cooking, the more recipes I look at that I wouldn't've considered before. Last spring I read countless brisket recipes to develop my own seitan brisket (more on that in another entry); I poured over recipes for chicken cordon bleu to get my vegan cordon bleu up to par. SO when Francis Lam published a recipe for beurre blanc on salon.com, I ate up that recipe with gusto.

For those of you who, like me (well, before I read that recipe, and then read Julia Child's anecdote about learning to make it), don't know what beurre blanc is, it is a butter sauce. "Beurre Blanc" means "white butter." If that sounds overly simple, that's because it is. It's butter, white wine or vinegar, vinegar, shallots, and maybe some lemon juice and pepper and salt if you feel like it. It's very simple in ingredients, but complicated in taste. And not just in taste--if you read Lam's article, you'd be under the impression that it's really hard to make. While the article does say how delicious it is, it makes it sound almost too intimidating.

I am here to tell you that if you are vegan, you can disregard the "intimidation" and "difficult" aspects. Earth Balance margarine is apparently a lot more forgiving than butter. Also, while I don't really have that much of a problem eating fatty foods, I do have a bit of a problem using so much margarine for one recipe (it's pricy!). So I have tried Lam's recipe twice with half the recommended amount of butter, and it was great. Never having had a non-vegan beurre blanc sauce, I imagine it's supposed to be thicker, but for a beurre blanc with half the fat, a thinner sauce is totally worth it.

Beurre blanc is great poured over greens, baked tofu, vegan cordon bleu, or just over bread. It's a chunky (well, you can strain it, but I don't) beigeish sauce, so it's not very photogenic, but trust me, this is AWESOME. Much more than the sum of its parts.
This recipe will easily serve 8, more if you're not so generous with your servings as I am.

Vegan Beurre Blanc

1 medium shallot (or 1/4 C of an onion), diced small
1 C dry white wine*
3 Tbsp vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar, but white wine vinegar would be good, too)
2 sticks Earth Balance of other vegan "butter" (if you use the tubs instead of the sticks, that's 16 Tbsp or 1 C, but save yourself some work and get the sticks for this!)
Lemon juice
Salt and/or pepper if you want

In a medium-to-small saucepan, combine the wine, vinegar, and shallots, and bring to a boil. Boil this down until almost all the liquid is gone; you want to cook it down until there are 2 tablespoons of liquid left. Stir occasionally to make sure the sides aren't burny.

In the meantime, take the earth balance out of the fridge and divide it into chunks that are approximately tablespoon size. (They can be a little bigger if you want to sace yourself on time.)

When the liquid on the stove has cooked down to just 2 Tbsps' worth, turn the heat down to low whisk in 2-3 Tbsp of the butter. Whisk well, until the sauce is a consistent texture. Once the butter is incorporated, keep adding 2-3 Tbsps of the butter at a time and whisking till emulsified. Once all the butter is worked in, you're done! Taste-test: it will be delicious, but if it feels a little greasy, add a tsp of lemon juice at a time until the flavors are balanced. If it seems to acidic (it probably won't), you can whisk in a little more butter.

It is ready to serve! Enjoy! It is especially good on beets, tofu, and bread...
The Beurre Blanc won't really keepy as a sauce; once it cools to room temperature, it separates a bit and and thickens. Store leftovers in a small container and use as a flavored butter (stir with a fork or knife before spreading), or as the base to sauteed pastas or veggies later.

*-Note: We never have white wine lying around, so as a general rule to replace 1 C white wine in cooking, I use 3/4 C water, 2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar, 1 Tbsp agave or other sweetener, and 1 Tbsp vodka or clear rum (optional; it cooks out but still lends a bit of an "alcohol was here" taste to a dish).

Now that the recipe's out of of the way, I have two more things:

First, the Vegan Month of Food is coming up in November. If you are unfamiliar with it, VeganMoFo is a month where vegan bloggers try to post every day. I've never participated in it before because of my inability to post even once a week with regularity, but this November, I'm up to the challenge! Check out more info on VeganMoFo (and sign up to participate) at the VeganMoFo headquarters.

Second, hopefully before November, I'm planning to revamp this blog. I think one of the reasons I don't post here as much is that I don't always enjoy writing about food (gasp!)... but I do really enjoy writing. So definitely for VeganMoFo but probably beyond, I'm looking to expand my content a little to around-the-house and around-Boston topics. And I'd like to include a little more about me--I realized recently that, beyond what I eat/don't eat, I don't really write much about who I am in this blog. And this layout could use a bit of a makeover.

Writing that made me curious: Bloggers, do you ever get tired of your content? What do you do to refresh or revamp your writing style or presentation? How do you strike the balance the personal and the impersonal? Readers without blogs, do you like learning more about the people behind the blogs you read? What do you think is a good balance of "about the author" and actual content in entries? What's the difference?