vegan sorbet at Picco

Last week I started a new job: I am an English instructor at a college here in Boston. I'd been applying for positions like this for a while now, and finally got this job, which is EXACTLY what I wanted. I love my colleagues, I love the school and its mission, I love the students I met during our orientation sessions--I am so happy to be starting this job! It makes doing VeganMofo kind of tricky, since it takes a lot of my time, but I'm hoping I'll be able to keep it up.

Anyway, as you may remember from my Vegan Eating in Boston post a couple years ago (which, I now notice, has since gone out of date--a few of those restaurants have closed! I'll update it again sometime soon), Picco is a a surprisingly vegan-friendly restaurant, and is home to some of my favorite ice cream since going vegan: their dark chocolate sorbet. It's so rich it tastes like ice cream, not sorbet. And the place is right around the corner from my new job! So when I received the job offer, to celebrate, I just walked around the corner, plunked down in a booth, and bought myself two scoops of sorbet: dark chocolate and strawberry.

Celebratory ice cream is the best kind of ice cream!

Today is my first day of teaching classes. Wish me luck!

fava beans

Have you ever had fresh fava beans before? I have had them in restaurants, and have had canned fava beans (which are brown), but until last month I never had them fresh. My friend Michael at the Dazed and Infused blog and I split a CSA share from Waltham Fields Community Farm, a great organization in our city, and they had pick-your-own fava beans for a while. So I decided to try them! They turned out to be more labor intensive than I'd thought.

First, you pick them and bring them home and wash them:

Clean and shiny. THEN you remove the beans from the pod (which is inedible unless it's really young):

But wait! You're not done! The beans have a thick coating that is not pleasant to eat, so you have to PEEL EACH BEAN.

Unpeeled, half-peeled, peeled. It is really hard to peel them raw, so you blanch the beans, then slit the skin, then poke each bean out. And only THEN can you actually prepare the beans.

I cooked them with some garlic, olive oil, and a splash of cooking sherry, then mashed them to top some toast (pictured below with a salad).

They're tasty beans, but I didn't think they were worth all that work! From now on I will probably only buy prepared fava beans, either at restaurants or in a can.

vegan chocolate from Bees Knees Supply Co.

Bees Knees Supply Co. is a gourmet grocery store and deli that opened up right underneath my office this summer, so I had to check them out. I never went through their deli counters, but it looks like they have some sandwiches that could be made vegan, and some snacks that already are there. Their fridges and freezers have some vegan (non-hydrogenated!) puff pastry and canned cinnamon rolls, as well as some vegan pates and such.

But the REAL reason I would go down to Bees Knees during the work day was their CAFE/CHOCOLATE BAR. They have a great selection of teas, coffee, and juice, soy milk (and possibly almond milk?) available for all drinks, and at least one freshly-made vegan chocolate of the day.

LIKE THIS LUCKY CAT CHOCOLATE! It is filled with a raw chocolate ganache. (In addition to the prettier chocolates I'm showing here, they also have raw chocolate truffles with coconut oil rolled in hemp seeds, coconut, or sometimes chia seeds.)

Look at this little chocolate mouse! He's all shimmery! They do such a nice job of making the chocolates pretty there.

This one was called a "peace mouse."

It was delicious.

Vegan Mofo Begins! ...a camping post!

It's the first day of VeganMofo, the Vegan Month of Food! In honor of Vegan Mofo, I'll be posting every day this week with some pictures of, links to, and/or recipes for delicious vegan food.

Check out VeganMofo.com for more information, or to look at blog rolls and check out events and giveaways throughout the month of September.

Just an hour ago, I got home from a weekend camping trip on Lovells Island, one of the Boston Harbor Islands. Kevin and I have been to a few of the islands on day trips, but not to Lovells, one of the more secluded islands. So we chose that one for camping!

Lovells Island was used as an outpost in the Civil War,  WWI, and WWII, then was just abandoned until the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation acquired it in the 1950s (it would otherwise have become either a landfill, a fuel outpost, or a nuclear waste depository). The ruins of Fort Standish and various gun batteries are still here, though mostly overgrown.

 ...And you're totally allowed to explore them!

 (Bear with me, pictures of food are coming soon, I just wanted to post some of the cooler things from the island!)

 

 All this hiking and exploring worked up quite an appetite!

 This was our campsite. We did have a fire in the grill at one point, but we didn't do any cooking this time around.

These St. Dalfour "Gourmet on the Go" meals were awesome camp food! There are 4 different types, but only 3 are vegan, and only 2 are nightshade free: Couscous with Veggies, and Three Bean with Sweet Corn (the 3-bean one is also gluten free). We packed two of each, and alternated the ones we ate for dinner one day and lunch the next. This was the first time we'd tried them, and they're really good for canned meals! They come with a packet of "gourmet culinary sauce," which is basically oil, vinegar, and pineapple juice (kind of weird, but not bad).

Our second dinner was the spinach dal Tasty Bite (for Kevin, obviously) and New Harvest Kitchen's teriyaki mix (for both of us) over kelp noodles; no heating or prep required! This was the first time I had the New Harvest Kitchen stuff; it's a little pricy ~$8 a pack, but I ate less than half and was REALLY FULL. It's soy based (I think the little soy nuggets are supposed to resemble beef chunks?) and gluten free.  Pretty salty on its own, but it would be good with a bunch of veggies added.

Breakfasts were apples and Clif Bars, but I was too sleepy to remember to take pictures in the mornings.

We hung our garbage from a tree branch and jokingly called it our "bunny bag" instead of bear bag. (Lovells was, for a while, a rabbit run, and when later abandoned, was covered in rabbits. The hawk population increased in the last few years... so bunnies are fewer and farther between now.) There are no bears on the island, but there are some rats, so we figured our garbage shouldn't just be lying around.

That concludes my first entry of VeganMofo!  I'll see you all tomorrow with more posts about vegan food... and I'll leave you now with a few shots of the view from our campsite--the Boston skyline!

bat house

I wanted a bat house almost as soon as we bought our (human) house. I love bats. I used to love seeing them swing low over the lake to catch bugs when I lived in upstate NY. And they need houses! Many species of bats are experiencing dwindling populations as their habitats become disturbed or eliminated because of human land development. A little brown bat (the kind that live in bat houses) are great for bug control: they can eat more than 1000 bugs a night! They eat mosquitoes, wasps, moths, gnats, beetles, and midges, all insects I'd love to be rid of. Waltham has an especially large mosquito population, which makes hanging out on our porch after dusk way less enjoyable than it could be. Annnnd since bat houses are set up to be ideal living situations for bats, bats are less likely to move into a human house or barn if there is a bat house nearby. (Fewer than 0.5% of bats contract rabies, by the way, so we weren't worried about that.) If you want to find more about bats, bat conservation, or cute pictures of bats, I recommend checking out Bat Conservation International's website. They also list many certified vendors of bat houses, including the vendor we chose: Habitat for Bats!

Their little bat emblem is a nice touch.

 You can make your own bat house (Bat Conservation International has specific guidelines and directions), but I chose to buy ours because we would have had to buy all of the materials anyway, and if you don't get the specifications right, you could actually injure the bats you're trying to house. Since I have few to no building skills, so I opted for the labor- and pain-free route.

The ideal location for a bat house is a tall (10-15 feet) pole or side of a building that gets a lot of sun. (Bats like warmth! That's why, if you live in a colder area, the bat house has to be a dark color.) You should be near a wooded area, but not too close, and you want to be within 1/4 miles of a body of water. We get a lot of sun and are fairly close to woods, but we're actually 3/4 miles away from the Charles River. I initially wanted to put the bat house on the side of our house, but didn't want to wash bat droppings off the siding on a regular basis, so we decided on a tree in our back yard. Trees are normally not ideal locations for bat houses because they tend to be shady AND bat predators (like owls) can perch on branches nearby, but this particular tree doesn't have any overhanging branches and is far enough away from other branches that we decided it would do. I wanted to drill right into the tree to mount the house, but Kevin was concerned about the health of the tree. so he spent some time online looking up other ways and devised a bungee-cord mount with the help of some online forums.

We borrowed an extension ladder from our neighbor (thanks, Michael!). Kevin held the ladder steady (not an easy job-the soil was still really soft in the back yard from all my earth-moving) while I put up the house. There was a lot of nut- and bolt-dropping from the ladder because I am clumsy. But when we were done:

We had a mounted bat house!

Little brown bats migrate to our area in late May/early June, so starting in June, I went back to the bat house every now and then to peek up inside-but never saw any bats. FOr a while I didn't seen any bats in it or flying around in the evenings, so I've been afraid we didn't have any bats. But 2 weeks ago, when I went to water my garden (which is near the bat house), I noticed there were BAT DROPPINGS at the base of the tree! And last week I saw a bat circling our driveway. SO WE HAVE BATS! (Or at least one bat.) Hooray! Hopefully now that they know it's there, more and more bats will migrate to the house each year. And someday I will sit out on my porch at dusk and not get eaten alive by mosquitoes!

ongoing project: my front yard

I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging, no less because VEGAN MOFO is in September this year! Since I'll be posting about food every day of that month, I'm writing about the house this month. I meant to be updating all summer.. but it turns out that the first year of being a first-time homeowner is really time consuming! July's post was and the next couple posts will be about some of the projects that have been taking up so much of my time (which would otherwise have been spent blogging, I'm sure).

First, here is the home my husband and I bought a little over a year ago:

It was a partially flipped house built in 1910. I say "partially" because it seems like the flippers did the minimum amount of work they could do while still getting away with calling the home "flipped." But that was okay with us--we were both okay with the "fix-me-up" nature of some of our house.

I'll show you some inside shots in a later entry, but the real projects that have been sucking up my time are outdoors. Did you notice my front yard in the picture above? And how by "yard" I mean "dirt?" Here's another view:

 

When we moved in, the only green in the front of our house was a few patches of crabgrass. (Which, true to crabgrass's nature, soon became "a jungle of crabgrass.") I put down grass seed and am still slowly trying to choke out weeds.

The slope of the front of our lawn is a difficult angle to mow, so I decided to turn the worst of it--the edges-- into flowerbeds. First I had to get rid of what was already there. I bought some black plastic sheeting. (Specifically I bought "landscape fabric," but any black plastic sheeting will do.) Because it is black plastic, it not only blocks the weeds underneath from getting any light, but it absorbs light, making the ground underneath it super hot, killing the weeds and (hopefully) their seeds. I laid it down along the edges of the lawn. It comes with flimsy plastic stakes, but I knew they wouldn't do the job for the many months I intended to leave them there, so I also just weighed down the plastic every few feet with pavers.

The green on the lawn in this picture is all crabgrass.

I did this in October of last year and warned our neighbors that it would look ugly for many more months, but it was in an attempt to make it look pretty in the future.

This past April, I rolled back the plastic, which had done a good job killing the weeds! I used a digging fork to turn the soil, mixing in some compost as I went. In retrospect, I should really have used some stronger tools (like my hoe axe!) and done a better job of really mixing up the soil, but I didn't know that at the time.

The picture above shows freshly-turned dirt on the bottom left side, and the paler row of not-yet-turned soil. Please ignore my thumb in the corner (oops). The picture below shows the fully turned bed:

One bold robin, one of the first robins of the season, LOVED ME for turning all the soil, and followed me around the yard like an excited dog. All I had to do was turn my back, and when I'd turn around, there he'd be. He was sort of my yard work mascot this spring, as every time I did a new project, he'd be watching me and eating any worm I might unearth.

I then planted flower seeds. many of which died. Our front lawn gets full sun all day, every day, and we had an incredibly dry spring. I had picked all drought-resistant varieties, but despite daily watering, I couldn't keep the flower beds moist enough for little seeds to thrive--poor things! I replanted a few weeks ago, and some of the flowers are finally coming in, but it's a slow process. I've learned my lesson for next year: I'll have to start my plants indoors.

This is still a work in progress. It's not as pretty as it will be next year, but it's a start. I'll keep you posted!

spring 2013 project: my back yard

(AKA, DIY yard terracing! Whoo!)

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to Waltham, our city/suburb, was that I wanted to be able to have a house and outdoor space of our own. I wanted a garden and a yard where our future kids could play. We couldn't get that in the middle of Cambridge or Boston. The lot we ended up with is relatively small, but the front is big enough for some flower beds, and the back yard had a small green space and the edge of a rocky hill. It looked spacious enough when we had first seen our place in late winter, but when the back yard started to fill in with weeds and poison ivy come spring, I realized we actually had very little useable outdoor space.

(You can see larger versions of these picture by clicking on them.)

That lush green jungle is primarily just rocks, broken glass, a large dead tree, and poison ivy. Definitely not useable.

We paid landscapers to remove the worst of the brush last fall; I had gotten a bad case of poison ivy last summer (I used to be immune! but no longer) and didn't want to mess with it again. We were then hoping to have the landscapers terrace the backyard a little, but when we got the estimate for the work, it was about $10,000. We could definitely not afford that! I decided to try working on it myself. (After paying a professional to take down the dead tree. I knew I couldn't do that myself.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I have never landscaped or done anything close to it. Mowing our lawn last summer was the first time I'd ever mowed. The only "garden" I've ever grown was the pots of herbs I grew on the fire escape of our last place. But I am not one to let inexperience stop me! Have you ever heard the silly kids' joke, "How do you make a statue of an elephant?" The answer is "Take a block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." This was the approach I decided to take with the backyard. I would chip away everything that didn't look like "my" back yard.

I got started in late March/early April, after the snow had melted but before anything could grow. I wasn't sure what I would do yet, but I knew that the first step was to clear away all of the leaves, sticks, and branches so I could get an idea of the land I had to work with.

Partially cleared. Unfortunately I didn't take many "before" pictures. This was the worst part of the project. There were decades' worth of leaves to rake away, wrapped around decades' worth of rotting branches and garbage. More than half of the yard was covered in winter creeper, an annoying, invasive vine that kept getting caught in the rake and making my job even harder. I had to pull out all the vines and runners and roots, some of which turned out to be poison ivy roots. I couldn't tell at the time because it was too early for the poison ivy to grow leaves, so it blended in with the winter creeper runners. After my first rash of this season cropped up, I started wearing long sleeves, arm warmers, and my work gloves, and washing myself and all of my clothing obsessively after each time outside. There was also a huge amount of broken glass throughout the yard, which I removed shard by shard.

While I did find a couple 3-4 hour chunks of time on weekends, the vast majority of this work was done between when I got home from work and when the sun set, which was about an hour a day in April. And because of social life stuff, I couldn't be home before dark every day. So it took me the whole month to clear the back yard, one hour at a time.

All cleared. Now that I had an idea of the shape of things, I could sort of envision how best to make it useable space. I imagined two distinct levels: one larger, even one on the bottom, where someday I'd have a garden, a seating area, and a bird bath. The other, upper level would be smaller, left sort of wild, with trees and eventually flowers. I would make a path between the two terraced levels.

I didn't know how exactly that would work, but I liked the idea. Online searches for the best way to level one's land mostly gave me answers like "rent a tractor" or "hire a landscaper," so I was on my own. I did find that for small leveling jobs, people used what a bunch of sites called a "grub hoe" and a dirt rake. I could have gone to the hardware store for these, but first I went to my dad. He had an extra dirt rake (this is the best part about being from a really rural area: of course my dad had an extra dirt rake) and while he only had one grub hoe, he gave it to me because he "never wants to have a reason to use it again." (This did not bode well for how laborious the work ahead of me would be.)

What I call a grub hoe, on the left, is also called a grubbing hoe or hoe axe. It has a hoe on one end and an axe head on the other. You use it to hack at the ground to dig and loosen up the dirt you want to move. It belonged to my grandfather, who was a farmer. It was really exciting and sort of sappily symbolic to me that I would use the same tool he used on the land where I grew up to improve my own home and land. The dirt rake, on the right, is what you use to move the loosened dirt around. These were my buddies for weeks of work and remain my favorite yard work tools.

Again, I could only put in about an hour a day of work, and even then only a few days a week, but I hacked at and raked the ground, pulling out winter creeper, poison ivy, and locust tree shoots as I found them. (I am proud to say that I seem to have eliminated the first two, but those darn locusts are still my enemy.)

The finished version! At least, as finished as it's going to get this year. I sprinkled some grass seed around just to have something growing out there, and other plants have sprouted up. I also planted a garden! A real one! That wild rabbits love! The bottom area is mostly leveled and larger, with plenty of space for our garden (which will hopefully be twice as big next year). Someday we'll put a bird bath and a seating area back there, too. The top area isn't quite as leveled as I had hoped it would be, but there are so many roots from our trees and the trees on our neighbors' property that it was really difficult to move the earth around. It is flatter now though, so it's easier to walk on, and I made a little path between the layers on the right side.

It's getting overgrown, but I just can't spend much more time on it this year.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm so happy with how far it's come!