Magic Spot Flowing

Status updates on Facebook from several friends reminded me that today is Shrove Tuesday, aka Pancake Day. Pondering the distribution of the updates, I noticed that most of them came from the UK, where I celebrated Pancake Day 2005. Prior to that, I wasn’t aware of Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day except as Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras is the more common name for the day and celebration in the US — except, notably, as part of some church traditions, whence the remaining status updates about pancakes came.

Seeing all this and recalling fond memories of Pancake Day 2005, I decided to make pancakes tonight for dessert. But while eating them, I realized it’s a strange thing for me to do. It’s isolated from its UK cultural context because I’m in the US, and I don’t belong to the religious traditions that would make it appropriate for me to do it here.

Furthermore, Pancake Day started as a way to use up extra oil and eggs, or so says Wikipedia. But I made Vegan Dad’s sweet breakfast crepes, which have only a tiny amount of oil and no egg (being vegan). They’re also really crepes, obviously, not pancakes, but the pancakes I had in the UK were really a lot more like crepes anyway, so it made sense. (I actually used silken tofu rather than the flaxseed, and it worked just as well, maybe better, so that was a happy substitution.)

I also departed from tradition in using lime instead of lemon for the flavoring liquid (lemon and sugar is the usual).

Not a traditional way to celebrate the holiday, but maybe it’ll become my traditional way of celebrating it!

This isn’t so much a recipe because I didn’t actually write down the amounts, but I thought this turned out well and it was easy.

1 tbsp olive oil
1 lb penne pasta
1 large fennel bulb, very thinly sliced
1/2 kabocha squash, peeled and cut into 1/2-1″ chunks
A couple tablespoons each soymilk, Tofutti BTCC, and TJs Cranberry Apple Butter

Start the water for the pasta and squash. Simmer the squash until nearly fork-tender. Meanwhile, saute the fennel in the oil over medium heat until tender and browning. Add pasta to the water when it’s ready.

Add the squash to the pan and continue sauteing until the squash is tender. Stir frequently to prevent sticking. Add a little salt and pepper.

When the squash is tender and everything is beginning to stick, add the soymilk, tofutti, and cranberry apple butter. Stir until well mixed and season to taste.

When the pasta is ready, drain it and mix the squash mixture with the pasta. Yum.

Clotilde’s Grated Carrots and Beets is a terrific way to try beets (raw or otherwise) if you are a little skeptical about them. But I don’t think it has a very good name; I always look for it under “Beet and Carrot Salad” before I remember that the name in English is a translation from French. Maybe it sounds more fun in French, but if someone told me “We’re having grated carrots and beets for lunch”, I wouldn’t be excited.

I have sunsets on the brain today, so I thought of a new and (imo) better name for it: Sunset Salad. It’s such a pretty meld of oranges, pinks, and reds that the name really works.

I mentioned Straus Family Creamery back in my Mt. Tam post as providing the milk that goes into Cowgirl Creamery cheese. Besides that, of course, they also make milk and other dairy products, like yogurt. Ryan very kindly brought some SFC whole-milk Eurostyle yogurt to dinner the other day as an unexpectedly awesome component of a shopping list for chickpea curry. The curry is supposed to be served with yogurt, and I didn’t have any, so I asked if he would bring some.

I usually get TJs French Village rBST-free fat-free yogurt when I do buy yogurt (which is rare these days), but let me tell you, although I like the TJs yogurt, the SFC yogurt is AMAZING. It is fresh-tasting, tangy without being sour, and rich without being overwhelming.

I <3 Straus Family Creamery. I think I’m going to have to start making the extra effort and expense of getting their dairy products when I do eat dairy. I really, really want to support them.

I’ve been doing a good bit of cooking since I got back from my Christmas trip: squash and black bean empanadas, vegan crepes with fruit, chickpea curry.

Today I decided to try something new, the recipe just before the empanadas in Veganomicon: Autumn Latkes. These are latkes made with carrot, sweet potato, and beet shreds rather than plain potato shreds. I am generally a bit of a disaster at frying things, and these vegetables do not have as much native starch as plain potatoes do, so I was quite concerned. But I made small ones and they turned out fine. They’re quite toothsome compared to plain potato latkes, which tend to get a bit fluffy in the middle as the heat makes them fall apart and bind. They’re also sweet and flavorful. Definitely a great way to try beets if you, like me, are a tad ambivalent about their flavor.

The recipe lists the quantities (2 cups of beets, 1 cup each of the orange vegetables) but also gives numbers of vegetable required. I’m glad it included the quantities, because I apparently have a funny idea of what an “average size beet” is. Three of them are supposed to make two cups of shredded material. I had two beets: one that appeared “normal” to me, and one that was ginormous. Dave kindly dubbed them the Beet of Doom and the Harbinger of the Apocalypse. The Harbinger alone made 2 1/2 cups of shredded material. I have no idea what I’m going to do with the Beet of Doom, but I can say that the latkes don’t seem to have been suffered from their high content of Harbinging.

Isa’s recipe says to serve them hot, but although I tasted a few, I’m planning to eat them as leftovers, just reheating them in the toaster oven. I made her Roasted Applesauce from Vegan with a Vengeance to go with them, and added green beans for a healthful side. I’m looking forward to lunch tomorrow! I’ll try to post a photo, since I haven’t done that in a while.

I haven’t generally been extremely hopeful about Obama as president as far as “Change” goes — my feelings tend more to the “intelligent, self-reflective, moderately liberal guy? okay, that sounds pretty good” sort — but I am fairly disappointed that he’s appointing a Secretary of Energy who thinks the problems are on the supply side and can be solved by technology, and a Secretary of Agriculture who thinks that…surprise…the problems can be solved by technology (bio, in this case). Technology is terrific, but we’re facing some pretty major problems, and I would like to see the new administration thinking about new, not old, ways to solve them.

It’s good that Chu is a scientist! Really! But…it’s not that good that he thinks that if only we can make more energy, it’s not important that we’re using so much.

And it’s really not good that Vilsack loves ethanol and Monsanto.

Edit: And.

Sigh.

Many things are excellent additions to mashed potatoes, but vanilla-flavored soy creamer is not among them, especially not when you want to put them on top of a lentil-vegetable base and make vegetarian shepherd’s pie.

(Be quiet. I was out of soymilk.)

Keebler Fudge Shoppe Grasshopper Cookies: The all-year Thin Mints!

They have a slightly artificial taste that the Thin Mints don’t have, but otherwise are extremely similar. Yum!

Back in August, training for Waves to Wine, I did a ride with J & C which ended with trip to Berkeley Bowl and the Berkeley Marina.

C & I looked at cheese while we were in Berkeley Bowl and saw Mt. Tam, which was a contestant in the Tomato Nation NCheeseAA (it made it to the final “fourmage”). The contest was the first time I’d heard of it, and Berkeley Bowl was the first place I saw it. It’s like Brie on crack — soft cheese, white rind. Triple cream. Mmmmm.

But it was $20 for a small wheel, so we decided it should be a treat for after W2W. Since then I think C has had it already herself (direct from the Creamery), but I hadn’t. Yesterday I finally picked some up at the Cowgirl Creamery shop in the Ferry Building, and today I ate half of it after getting home from donating blood (along with slices of a green apple).

Uhh….yeah. It’s the Best Cheese Ever. A robust but not overpowering flavor, slightly tangy, soft, rich, organic and vegetarian, and the milk comes from a farm where the cows are treated humanely and attention is given to sustainability and land management. This is a cheese I can get totally behind.*

A 10-oz round cost me $14, which is a hell of a lot for just any cheese, but doesn’t seem like that much for a piece of pure heaven in cheesy form.

*When I first became vegetarian I ate a lot of cheese — I’ve always liked cheese, so it was pretty much last on my list of things I wanted to worry about giving up. But over time I’ve worked on eating less of it because most cheese is produced under similar conditions to most meat, so to be consistent with my reasons for giving up meat, I would need to give up any cheese with similar production methods as well.

I don’t think I’ll ever give up cheese totally except for properly-produced stuff (for me, it’s just too hard), but I’ve greatly reduced my consumption of it and other dairy products, and tend to skew toward small amounts of high-qualty cheese. Finding a cheese that meets my criteria for production, like Mt. Tam, is very exciting. Finding out that it’s heaven on a plate is even more exciting.

…or maybe the zeroth. :)

My boss added a 5th law of PMing today:
5. If you think you just received everything you need to move forward, chances are good you’re wrong.

A moment ago, I was sitting, carefully removing pumpkin puree from my hand blender with a finger, and wondering how many other people like (plain) pumpkin enough to eat puree off an implement. This is fairly flavorful pumpkin — I’ve definitely had pumpkin that’s bland enough I wouldn’t eat it plain — but I suspect the desire to eat any kind of pumpkin plain is not that great in most people. Add sugar and spice and all that’s nice and it’s a different story, of course.

In other news, I’m getting comment-spammed so badly that I basically can’t take the time to find any new “good” commenters out of the mess. So if you’ve left a comment recently and not seen it show up, sorry, it went in the dustbin along with the hundreds of spam comments. Mail me if you need to get approved.