Happy Labor Day!

No, I haven't been cooking this week, eating all my leftovers, and I'm probably not going to be cooking this weekend because I'm going to the Taking Action for Animals Conference, sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States. My boyfriend got us tickets as a birthday gift--woot! The coolest thing is Nellie McKay will be performing Sunday night and Patrick McDonnell, who draws the "Mutts" comic strip will also be present. My boyfriend wants to get stuff autographed by McDonnell. Rory Freeman, who co-authored Skinny Bitch, a pro-vegan book disguised as a diet book. The language is occasionally salty, but they get the message across. If any of you all are going, I'll be the short, plump gal with the large black Matt & Nat purse.

I also am very happy because I got a new job. I will be working at a nonprofit in Arlington, Virginia, that engages in social entrepreneurship. I'll be part of the transcription department, typing letters and other documentation. When I first heard about the company two months ago, I knew it was an organization I'd love to work for. My new schedule will be Sunday through Thursday, which does have its advantages. I start on September 11th, and -- whoa! my primaries are the next day! I'll just have to vote after work.

That week, I'm also going to Albany and Boston. My boyfriend's mom lives in Albany, and we're going to drive to Boston for a festival and to go on a whale watch. I believe that it is perfectly acceptable, as it is a way of observing these magnificent creatures in their habitat. I absolutely refuse to go to marine parks where animals are confined in too-small spaces and forced to do idiotic tricks to amuse the patrons. I loathe circuses where animals are captured showing the lives of animals on film, provided the camera operators do not disturb the animals they are filming. It provides far more information than an animal in a cage at a zoo can.

To recap: whale watch, yes; documentary, yes; marine park, no; animal circus, no; zoos, no.

Lunch!

The local Whole Foods offers several classes and demos a month, one of which is geared towards vegan food. The class is so popular that they have to offer it twice a month. Some people are vegans looking for new recipes, others are omnis interested in eating healthier. I go because I'm always looking for new recipes. Adn this week, I got several. One of my favorites was an Asian tofu salad. This is a pretty simple recipe that can be done partially cooked or not cooked at all, although I'm not keen on the idea of eating uncooked tofu.

Anyway, it's really, really simple. Take one block of firm or extra-firm tofu (I use firm because it has a higher percentage RDA of calcium) and 1/3 cup sliced mushrooms (the recipe called for shiitake, but all I had on hand were some creminis) and saute in sesame oil. For the dressing mix 1 large clove of garlic, chopped; 2 tablespoons of grated ginger; 1/2 teaspoon of chili paste (or to taste); 2 tablespoons of soy sauce; 2 tablespoons of rice vinegar; and half a tablespoon of sesame oil. When the tofu and mushrooms are done cooking, throw in 1 chopped bell pepper, 4 chopped scallions and fresh parsley. You can serve it over greens, with rice crackers or in a pita, but I decided to serve with rice noodles. It was almost as good as in the demo and a very simple and tasty lunch.

I get recipes from all over--VegWeb, RecipeZaar, demos like this, from fellow veg*ans, and one day, I'm going to have to compile them all into an easier format than random pieces of paper that get lost too easily. I also need to get a new timer as the one I've had just stopped working :(.

Secrets for perfect seitan

When I was an omnivore, I was sort of a meat-and-potatoes gal. Now, I'm a tofu/tempeh/seitan-and-potatoes/grains gal. I'm trying, really trying, to eat more veggies. I swear.

However, I believe I have perfected a technique to making seitan. Oh. You're not still buying it are you? Unless a recipe calls for the "chicken style" wheat meat (which I haven't perfected), make your own. It's cheaper, and you can decide the shape in which you make it. If you want "chops" or "wings," you really can't do that with the $5-an-eight-ounce-package store-bought stuff. Plus, this will eliminate the spongy texture some people get wtih seitan.

First, you want to start off with Vital Wheat Gluten or high-gluten flour. You can make seitan from whole wheat flour, but that takes a lot of flour and a lot of water, and you may as well save yourself some time. I use the Arrowhead Mills brand, but if you find another brand, whatever works for you, use it:

First, mix all the ingredients for your broth in a sauce pan or large pot. I use a five-quart saucepan, which is a little small, but it works for me. You can use vegetable broth, a recipe in a cookbook, or make up your own, but do NOT use just plain water. Let your broth sit in the pot while you mix the ingredients for your gluten. Most recipe books or your package of gluten should have the right proportions for making the dough. Use those.

Once you have the flour and water in the bowl, turn on the burner to heat up your broth. Stir the flour and water until it makes a dough, then dump onto a cutting board. Knead the dough--and you don't have to do the typical kneading, you can punch and prod and squeeze--until the water is coming close to boiling. Now, I typically make a double batch, using the whole box of gluten flour, so I separate the blob into two pieces and sort of shape them.

Once the broth comes to a boil, gently lower the dough blobs into the pot, lower to a simmer, cover, and cook for 50 minutes. You can, if you like, check the seitan every few minutes, but I usually don't. As I have warned you previously, it will expand greatly, so do not freak out. I use a smaller pot to keep the expansion under control and because the broth is deeper when I use a smaller pot rather than my pasta-boiling pot.

After the seitan is done, gently remove it from the pot and place into storage containers. Store the seitan with the cooking liquid. I usually place one container in the freezer and the other in the fridge. I have discovered that seitan is best if you do not use it the same day you make it. The texture will be chewier and not spongy, the bane of any seitan cook. The seitan will last up to a week in your fridge and longer in your freezer.

Now, that you know how to make a great seitan, get cookin'!

Orange you glad you're vegan?

I found a recipe for a sesame seitan on a Web site called Speed Vegan and made a couple minor changes. When I'm battering seitan for frying, I never mix the liquid and dry ingredients; I dip the seitan pieces in the liquid, then in the flour mixture. Her recipe called for agave nectar, but I used orange juice and tamari instead. I also left out the garlic--shocker, I know, considering I'm practically garlic queen. I also added sesame seeds to the flour mixture instead of just sprinkling them over the finished pieces of seitan. I'm thinking that I should make extra sauce to go with it to pour over the pieces when I'm done, but I'll let you all know (maybe) when I'm done.

I belong to the local Vegan Meetup, and this Saturday, we're meeting at someone's home to share cooking secrets. In discussions with the organizer, I decided to have a class on making rockin' seitan. The only thing that bothers me is I like to wait a few days before cooking my seitan, which just won't be an option here. And the organizer has never made seitan, and the recipe her S.O. uses relies on making raw seitan dough and cooking it. A local vegan soul food place makes them, so I know they're good, but most seitan recipes require simmering them. So everyone will be my taste testers for the pomegranate seitan recipe I'm working on. I haven't decided what I'll do with my recipes when I perfect them, but I'll let you know where you can see them when I do.

Here's a repeat

I decided to make the pineapple tempeh again, only this time, I had more than enough frozen pineapple for the recipe. I like some of the recipes on VegWeb, but a lot of the recipes do not list the ingredients in the order used. It's weird to see pineapple listed first, but it's not added until the very end of the recipe. I made a very simple garlic quinoa recipe I found on Recipezaar.com. It's quinoa, onion, garlic, and carrot. I may add some seasoning next time--when a recipe calls for salt and pepper, I forget to add it half the time.

I also had a very simple salad with a bagged lettuce mix and the last of the cherry tomatoes. I love the convenience of bagged lettuce mixes. Open bag, pull out however much lettuce you want, dump in a bowl with other salad fixings (for me, it was a handful or so of cherry tomatoes), pour dressing over it, and eat. My favorite dressing, when I'm too lazy to make my own, is Annie's Natural's Shiitake and Sesame Vinaigrette.

A lot, but not all of Annie's Naturals products are vegan, so check the labels or check out the Web site.

A strange-ish think happened to me a couple of weeks ago. My boyfriend and I were eating at a local leftie restaurant/bookstore which has a pretty decent vegan menu, including desserts. Now, finding an omni restaurant that has vegan desserts beyond a fruit plate is awesome enough, but the fact that they have good vegan desserts is really cool. My boyfriend got a vegan brownie with ice cream, and I got a vegan parfait. The parfait was vegan yogurt (vanilla?) with granola. I loved both desserts--when we're out dining, we always try each other's meals--and decided that fruit yogurt with granola would be a good dessert. So last week, I went to a local natural foods store and got some Whole Soy & Company soy yogurts. I wasn't crazy about the raspberry, but the cherry and blueberry flavors blew me away. I stir in a little--well, maybe more than a little--Hemp Plus Granola because hemp (and flax and walnuts) is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids. And I need the crunch.

When I went to Whole Foods earlier this week, I was blown away at the selection of mammal milk yogurts--cow, goat and sheep milk--and the mediocre selection of soy yogurts. Like, why can't I have lemon soy yogurt (well, Silk has key lime, so I'll try that). One company that does both cow and soy yogurts made a chocolate soy yogurt, but I figured that would not do for breakfast. I'll have to go back to the tiny natural foods store to see what other flavors of Whole Soy they have. The ingredients list the healthy bacteria that are in yogurt. And the Whole Soy label says they're vegan--woohoo!

One of my favorite dishes

I decided to make my favorite tofu dish for dinner, as I've got the blahs today. This is the Lemon Tofu with Capers. I finished off my cooked bulgur and had a few mushrooms on the side. There are no words to describe just how delicious this tofu is. It's almost cool enough for me to turn on my oven, and if it stays below 85 (oh, please, oh, please), I may just make some veggie ribs or cookies.

My boyfriend and I went to AR 2006, the animal rights conference sponsored by FARM (Farm Animal Reform Movement). We mostly checked out the exhibitors. A company called Roads End makes a product they call Chreese, a vegan cheesy sauce mix. They made these gooey grilled "cheese" sandwiches that were wonderful. Also there was a company called Temptation who makes soy ice cream. I got the vanilla, chocolate and strawberry (huge cones with three scoops were $4--what a deal!) and liked the chocolate best--a rich, definitive chocolatey flavor. I'm hoping that a Washington, DC, area retailer starts carrying them. Guess I'll have to beg and plead the local Whole Foods.

An online vegan retailer, Vegan Essentials, had new marshmallows from a company called Sweet & Sara. They were so delicious, I bought a small packet in chocolate, which were also delicious. They also had some new makeup from Beauty Without Cruelty and another line of cosmetics whose name I don't recall. I am a cosmetic junkie, but I decided not to go too bonkers. I also found a fantastic dark chocolate caramel bar, which I did get, as it's been way too long since I had good caramel. It's one of the few things I miss about being vegan.

After that, we ended up going to Pizzeria Paradiso in Dupont Circle with an acquaintance we ran into at the conference and another couple who'd been there. There are several places in the area that provide Follow Your Heart soy cheese as an option. Ella's Wood-Fired has good food, but their portions are very small. I appreciate that Ella's doesn't charge extra for soy cheese, as Pizzeria Paradiso does. However, PP's servings are much larger--they have two sizes--and they seem to be a little more veg-friendly. I was disappointed in the salad--for five bucks, give me more than some lettuce that had a passing acquaintance with the promised balsamic vinaigrette and olive oil dressing.

I have said in the past that I avoid reality shows like the plague. The closest thing to a reality show I watch is Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days," which airs on FX. I feel that this is more educational than entertainment, so it doesn't fall into the garbage reality that I so loathe. The premise of the show is a person tries on a different life for a month. The last episode featured an atheist woman who went to stay with a family of Christians. And perhaps the last acceptable group against whom it is acceptable to discriminate are atheists and agnostics. It seemed the Christian wife was trying to understand her guest, while the husband could not accept it. Finally, she pointed out that her belief, or lack thereof, felt right to her and that if she tried to be anything else, it would be dishonest, and the husband understood it. I identify as agnostic and get very nervous around the ultrareligious, perhaps because of I fear they are trying to strip away my rights. And of course, there will never be an atheist or agnostic president--much less politician--which has us behind Chile in that regard.

But the most disturbing feature on the show was a piece on a Christian theme park in Orlando. According to the show, they have stagings of the crucifixion every day. People were literally in tears as the actor playing Jesus was put up on the cross. And I have to wonder why they focus so much on his death and not so much on his life. I remembered Barbara Ehrenreich's tart observation in Nickel and Dimed, where she observed that they kill him over and over so they can shut him up and ignore what they said.

I grew up Jewish, so JC was never a part of my life, but from my limited understanding, he'd be a little freaked out, if not downright angry, at his so-called followers. I try to live a fairly good life because it's the right thing to do, and I don't need a higher power telling me that or fear of what will happen after I die forcing me to toe a very narrow line. And inherent in my religion is the notion that what you do is far more important than what you believe, making agnosticism and secular humanism very Jewish.

Tomatoes!

One of my coworkers does a lot of homey stuff, including grow tomatoes. Last week, she gave me a little baggie of grape tomatoes (well, they're smaller than cherry, but plumper than grape). I threw together a salad with some lettuce mix and a handful of the tomatoes and some Annie's Shiitake & Sesame Vinaigrette, my favorite bottled dressing, and had the last of the leftover topping. The tomatoes were absolutely delicious! I didn't take any pictures because it wouldn't have made a nice picture--sorry. I've had a rough couple of weeks at work, and I haven't felt much like cooking either.

The weather, thank goodness, has cooled down considerably. It's amazing what even 5 degrees and slightly lower humidity can do. I can actually turn on my oven, if I am so inclined, without thinking I'm going to die. I think. The air quality has improved vastly as well.

As a resident of Washington, D.C., I don't have representation in Congress, but I do keep my eye on races around the country. So I was very happy when Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman. Senator Lieberman may have voted the Democratic position more often than not, but his hug-almost-smooch with Dubya and his pro-war stance hurt him greatly. Yes, he's admitted that the war has been bungled (ya think?), but there are people who now think the war was a mistake. Sadly, Lieberman has decided to run as an independent, while most incumbents kicked out in the primaries do support the party winner. What a spoilsport. What's more important, Senator: your career or the good of the party?

Ooh, puckery pomegranate

So I was looking for a way to cook my seitan, and I also wanted to use some pomegranate molasses that's been sitting around my fridge for a while since I got it for a recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance. So I found a recipe for a dish called fessenjen (like many Middle Eastern dishes, it has a million spellings). This one called for waterfowl, but of course, I used seitan and adapted the instructions a bit. The recipe had ingredients in both Imperial and Metric measurements, driving me nuts because how do I measure 75 grams of walnuts? I just threw a couple handfuls in the pan. Foolishly, I did not add sugar, and boy, was it TART. In case nobody told you, or you've never drunk pomegranate juice, it is a tart fruit. And since pomegranate molasses is really concentrated pomegranate juice, the tartness is increased. But pomegranates are chock full of antioxidants, so buy the juice, but not by Pom Wonderful, since they test on animals.

Anyway, I served my tartalicious seitan with some leftover bulgur couscous and veggies that I made earlier this week, but left off the pesto, as it would have seriously clashed with the pommy flavor. It was a truly lovely Friday night dinner. Next time, I'm adding a pinch of sugar to the sauce when I cook it.


Now, if you're wondering where to pick up pomegranate molasses, I got mine at the local Whole Foods. I also found recipes for making your own, which amounts to simmering pomegranate juice to thicken it to a syrup, which is entirely up to you. Middle Eastern stores, I'm told, also sell it. I have to find ethnic grocers here in DC, hope there are labels in English and see if they have decent prices. Pomegranate molasses can be used, I've read, measure for measure in place of blackstrap. Hmmm....

Tofreaky

Today it got up to 100 degrees. Excuse me while I scream. Luckily while I was cooking my dinner, I heard and felt the sort of wind that indicates a bit of rain is coming, and we did get some rain, although I was hoping for more. Tomorrow and the weekend are supposed to be about 10 degrees cooler than this week was, for which I am extremely grateful.

Tonight I found a recipe on Recipezaar for Orange Lacquered Tofu. It was pretty good, but what it is with tons of Braggs/tamari/soy sauce and only a small amount of the flavoring? Someone explain it to me. You use too much Braggs, and you get a very salty dish. The proportion was 1/4 C of braggs and 2 tablespoons of orange juice. Wha?? I added some ginger and bottled orange peel, which didn't help matters. I think next time, I'll use far more juice and far less Braggs and see how it turns out. My tofu was, however, nice and crispy -- almost too crispy. I had meant to cook it yesterday, but got a call from a friend while I was pressing it, so I put it in a container and let it sit in the fridge for a day. I'm not going to do that again, as I think it's the cooking method (just let it sit in the pan for 5 minutes on each side) and the sesame oil I used.

I've been avoiding saying anything about Mel Gibson, but the man needs help. He's sicker than Ann Coulter, and that's saying a lot. I can believe he was drunk when he spewed his sickness all over the LAPD, but that doesn't excuse anything. And all too frequently left out of most reports is that he called a female cop "sugar tits," which ought to add misogyny to the mix. His dad is even crazier--a Holocaust denier. And Gibson was likely stone cold sober when he said that his father never lied to him after someone asked him about it. And presumably he was also stone cold sober when he said his wife was going to hell because she belonged to a different sect than he. The guy needs two months of detox in Alaska in the winter and a Thorazine pump.

And here's a question. A lot of religious folk are upset about violence in modern movies. And I won't disagree that movies today are more violent than movies when I was a kid. But if violence bothers them, why were they all fired up to go see The Passion of the Christ, which I understand (I never saw it) was brutally violent? Is it okay because it's a biblical interpretation? Does one get carte blanche to do anything as long as it's under the guise of telling a biblical story? As an agnostic, I have to admit that I intensely dislike the hypocrisy I see in most religious practice, so I have no answers there.