Magic Spot Flowing

1/4 lb TJs whole wheat pasta (cooked) +
First fresh pesto of the season (so fresh it was still bright green when I put it on) +
small grind each of parmesan and black pepper +
Alexis
=
Happiness

Basil, how I love thee.

As of today, I’m literally and officially certified Road I proficient by the League of American Bicyclists! I have a piece of paper that says so. I passed with flying colors.

I’m glad I took the class, because since then my road positioning has gotten more appropriately assertive, and I’m feeling more comfortable on the road because I know some evasive maneuvers.

On another subject: cooking. I haven’t been cooking a lot lately for various reasons (it’s been hot, I’ve been busy and away from the farmer’s market) but tonight I made something tasty and not very difficult. I’m going to do my best to recall exactly what I did, but as usual it’s not a very exact process. It tastes a lot like a chinese restaurant dish except light and fresh.

Spicy Eggplant in Brown Sauce
Vegetable oil
1 yellow onion
4 small Japanese eggplants
6 small or medium cloves of garlic
1-2 tbsp basil (6-10 leaves), chiffonaded
Soy sauce (~1/4 cup)
Mirin (~3 tbsp)
Water (~3 tbsp)
Corn starch (1/2-1 tbsp)
1/2 tbsp chili-garlic sauce (or to taste, but this is meant to be spicy*)

Chop the onion, and cut the eggplants into half-rounds about 1/4″ thick. Saute the onion in a tablespoon or two of oil over medium heat, stirring frequently, until browning and translucent. Add the eggplant and continue sauteing until the eggplant is mostly soft. Add the garlic and saute a few minutes until eggplant is done. Add a little soy sauce and/or mirin if necessary to deglaze the pan and keep everything from burning.

Add the basil and stir, then add the soy sauce, mirin, water, corn starch, and chili-garlic sauce. Stir, and bring to a simmer. Simmer 30 sec – 1 min or until the sauce thickens, then turn off the heat.

Serve with whatever you like with spicy Chinese-style dishes. I used rice noodles.

Yum.

*Not as in burns your mouth off, but as in, packing the heat. Whatever that means to you. Just don’t get between me and my chili garlic sauce.**

**It occurs to me that this should be spelled chile garlic sauce, because it’s made with chiles, not chili, but I always see it spelled chili garlic sauce (734K GHits to 465K GHits, and most of the ones for the latter are the same as the former), so, whatever.

My Spanish is, to say the least, rusty. At one time in my life I could do literary analysis in Spanish and probably knew more technical poetry terms in Spanish than in English. These days it’s pretty much limited to “Hi, how are you?” (“Hola, como estás?” for those who didn’t just translate that in their heads.) Okay, not really, I can still say a variety of things and read and write pretty fluently, but my vocabulary and fluency has really dropped off because it’s not refreshed regularly.

So when I saw Isa’s post on vegan food blogs in Spanish, I was like, awesome! Vegan food from other cuisines, plus the opportunity to refresh my Spanish with language that people actually use, rather than arcane items like sinécdoque (a word I learned first in Spanish V AP and only later in English). And the linguistics geek in me (who am I kidding, the linguistics geek that IS me) jumped for joy at the chance to learn about recipe register in another language.

I like CreatiVegan particularly because the recipes are given in English and Spanish. The English translations are a little rough but all the more charming and linguistically interesting for it (also much better than I could do translating my recipes into Spanish). I love the look of the Rollitos de berenjena con verduras [Little Eggplant rolls with vegetables] in Gastronomia Vegana — very creative, I’ve never thought of using eggplant as a tortilla replacement. And El Delantal Verde [The Green Apron] is just pretty!

By the way, Google Translate thinks that the Tarta fria de yogur (which looks lovely) should be called “Tartan cold yogurt”. I think Google might be confused about what country we’re in…

I saw an example in the wild world of vegan blogging today of what Language Log calls WTF coordination (aka syllepsis):

With a dough hook and the mixer running, add remaining flour and knead another 5 minutes.

If this sentence doesn’t strike you as strange, note that “a dough hook” and “the mixer running” are two different types of attachments to “with”, one a straightforward noun and the other a more complex phrase. Perhaps this is another case of recipe-register creating telegraphic constructions that are easy to WTF.

The linked Language Log posts explain the complexities of grammaticality judgment in cases like these. In fact, it’s the toughness of the judgments that gave these their fond name: you’re not a prescriptivist ruling them out on some theoretical grounds. But you hear them and go “WTF, that’s not grammatical”, so you’re not being a pure descripitivist either by assuming that anything anyone produces is grammatical. And then you find it’s hard to explain why some examples sound terrible (like “The sun makes you hot and sneeze”) and others sound okay or even clever.

I rather like this grammatical WTF; it can be elegant or amusing when used well, and I think Country Living magazine (the recipe’s original source) used it well.

My new lotion (Alaffia Shea Butter Lotion) smells like Tofutti Cuties. The official scent is Vanilla Mocha, so it fits, but it’s a little odd for lotion to smell like a vegan dessert. I preferred my previous Tangerine Ginger, though what I’d really like is the Lavender Mint. Hmm, maybe I should mix the Dr. Bronner’s lavender and peppermint soaps to see if it’s a good combo…

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
–Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This beautiful expression reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad a while back about spending and saving money. We both enjoy watching money accumulate, and tend not to buy things, even though we can afford them. We were talking about what luxury means, and how it can be easy to become jaded by what once seemed a luxury, unless you make a conscious effort to avoid that.

When I was a kid, my stocking always had an orange in the toe, and although I understood it was tradition, I never really knew why. I just figured that it was supposed to balance out the candy.

The quotation comes after a description of Kingsolver’s daughter Lily eating one of the tangerines they bought for the winter holidays after an eight-month hiatus on citrus, which isn’t grown in their local area and wasn’t in the high season anywhere nearby until then. Eating locally, citrus returned to being the luxury it was in the time when it became a tradition to have it in the Christmas stocking. It once would have been as treasured as the candy, maybe more so. But with the trend in shipping everything everywhere, it became an everyday thing. I don’t think I knew where oranges came from until after I was an adult, much less that they have a season.

Since I’ve been buying most of my produce at the farmer’s market, I’ve been incidentally eliminating a number of things that aren’t in season now, or aren’t grown at all near here — like bananas, also once a daily or weekly part of my diet, also once fruits that I didn’t recognize as denizens of a faraway place, possessed of their own season.

Bananas that cost a rainforest, refrigerator-trucked soymilk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path, giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. –AVM p. 225

There’s something worthwhile about making sure that our ideas of everyday and luxury items, or everyday and luxury behaviors, don’t get too out of whack. The more we see as everyday, the less we have to get excited about on special occasions, the less excited we can get, and the more boring life seems. Or we keep seeking out greater and greater thrills, until our consumption and behavior become extreme. I’m happy to put limits on my everyday choices, both food and otherwise, if it means I gain more pleasure on the occasions that I allow myself to step outside those limits. And if it means the world will still have some resources available for all of us down the line.

This is a difficult line of reasoning, though, because where do we draw the line? Every day of my life is profligate luxury compared to some, yet very moderate compared to others. I don’t eat only beans and rice and live in a hut without running water; I don’t live in a multi-bedroom house, drive a Hummer, and wear diamonds.

What are we called on to do? This question is not academic in these early days of serious thinking about climate change and fossil fuel limits. McKibben raises the same question in Deep Economy: what are we all called on to do? We obviously have to give a great deal up, because right now our country of 5% of the world’s population is using 25% of its resources, but those in other countries want some of the benefits we’ve gotten from our cheap-fuel economy. Where in the middle do we meet? For now, I’m going to I hope it’s someplace where all of us choose some moderation, and we all also enjoy a few luxuries. And I’m going to keep looking for the place on the the scale where I feel like I’m doing the right thing by myself and the world.

I made two recipes from Vegan with a Vengeance this week as planned: orange-glazed beets and sweet potatoes with five-spice and watercress.

Both are good. Beets I’m ambivalent about. Not to put too fine a point on it, they taste a bit like dirt to me. A nicer way of putting it would be to say they have an earthy flavor. But I wanted to give them a chance. The orange glaze is sweet but not too sweet, and mellows them out a bit. Not bad. If I wanted to eat beets regularly I’d probably include this recipe in my repertoire, and given the nutritional profile and cheapness of beets, I probably should. No B12 though — damn!

The sweet potatoes I can rave about unreservedly — the five-spice combines nicely with them, the garlic adds a bit of savoriness, and the watercress a topping of freshness. This is listed as a brunch dish but could really be any meal. You could substitute other light, fresh-flavored greens (arugula and similar), but spinach would be too, well, spinachy, in my opinion.

Both recipes are easy and quick, with most of the work devoted to peeeling and cutting the vegetables and stripping the stems from the watercress; a little more prep for the other ingredients and you stick them in a skillet and cook them 10-20 minutes, and you’re set.

By and large, a double success on this one.

After getting some info from the 2WG guys I decided to go with ordering that bag. I hope it’ll work well; I did see some mixed reviews on the good old Internet, mainly that it was not durable enough, especially zippers. We’ll see. I’m pretty good to my equipment. They’ll take it back after 30 days for any reason and up to a year for defects, so I figured I couldn’t lose (much).

The questions I asked were:

Is it easy and quick to get on and off the bike?
Will my lunch jar fit in (measurements given)?

The answers were yes, and yes, according to them. The attachment process is top hooks for the rack plus two bottom rings and securing straps (velcro). I was charmed to hear that apparently the guy who answered my email won a wager that a 5-year-old could do it herself after a demo. I’m smarter than a 5-year-old — I hope!

The lunch jar would fit in a shoe pocket (what I thought, but I wanted confirmation). They also suggested they could custom-make one that would fit the lunch jar on top (in the area where you can stuff a few extra things), but I don’t think it’s necessary nor is it ideal to have the jar on its side. Still, I thought it was very thoughtful of them to suggest it. I’m looking forward to trying the bag out on the rack I ordered from Nashbar (a Blackburn EX-1) and finally being a proper cargo-carrying commuter.

I found something interesting on BoingBoing today. I don’t usually repost stuff that I see elsewhere, but this one intrigued me. A German site bought 100 different packaged food products, photographed the image of the food on the packaging, and compared it to the actual food (the linked site isn’t the original, but it’s easier to see what they were doing in the setup at the link).

I think we all know that what we see on the package isn’t that likely to be what we get — after all, the photos of food in fast-food restaurants always set you up for disappointment with the real thing. But what surprised me was how consistent the differences are.

1) The color is enhanced so that things look brighter and warmer.
2) If there’s an especially yummy part of something (it has raisins, or a caramel or cream or mint filling, or meat inside of a pastry) the yummy part is shown in high detail and larger than in reality.
3) The form is always portrayed as symmetrical and unvarying, where the real food might have varying amounts of dark and light pastry, or an uneven swirl of chocolate on top. If there are layers, the layers are shown thicker and more even than they actually are.
4) The texture is enhanced. Rice is separated instead of gluey, noodles curl pleasingly, rice pudding is thick and lumpy instead of a smooth gunky cream.
5) If the food comes with sauce, there’s much more sauce in the real food than in the picture, where the sauce is usually used decoratively and sparingly.
6) If the food comes with vegetables or meat along with noodles, rice, bread, broth, or sauce, the pieces of vegetables or meat on the packaging are larger, brighter, and more plentiful than in the real item. (Where are the fleischballen in the real Kartoffelsnack? Look at that tiny meatball on the right!)
7) If the food is presented nicely on a plate, it’s usually either in separate compartments or all mushed together. Any decorations on the package (parsely, onion curls) are definitely not in the real food.

Candy and simple snacks are usually more accurately presented than soups and entrees. For example, the Wasa cracker sandwiches, pistachio nuts, and the Corny Milsch bar, among others, look a lot like the real things, plus the standard color balance and texture enhancement.

Some of them look just terrible. The green beans look awful on the package and even more awful in reality, and the dull white block of noodles in the very first picture, accompanied by meat swimming in sauce, just looks dull and nasty. Several that look like they have texture and substance on the package (Currybrustensalat, Eiersalat, Herringsalat, Fleischsalat, and Krabbensalat, along with the “spaghetti carbonara” and “pizzeria salami” — whatever that is!) are just textureless junk in tons of sauce. The Herringsalat, being pink in reality, is especially nasty. Maybe Germans just don’t understand that salad should not be drowning in sauce…

I read a lot of food blogs, and my choices of what to read sometimes seem eclectic even to me. I like blogs with pictures and recipes. All pics and no recipes means you get a sure drop from my list, and no pictures is a bit boring and makes it hard to visualize the food. (This is why I don’t food blog — my pictures of food are terrible. I haven’t picked up on presentation for the most part yet, despite my bentos.) But lots of chattiness and posts on technique or food-related items (and even the occasional personal life tidbit) is fine too. It doesn’t matter whether I can eat all the recipes (that is, not all the blogs I read are vegetarian), as long as they’re presented in an interesting way.

But one thing I don’t like is food blogs that preach to you. There are two blogs I’ve rejected on that basis — one is Fatfree Vegan Kitchen and another, which I found through Vegan Dad, is Happy Herbivore. They both have lots of good recipes, but I find the fat-freeness weird because it often results in them remaking what to me are perfectly good recipes, and in some cases not in ways that make sense to me. And then there’s the attitude (more from the latter than the former, but it comes through in FFVK too).

THIS IS A FOOD JOURNAL of what two health conscious athletic vegans eat each day. Our diet is high in fiber, full of protein and low in fat. We rarely use oils, we avoid processed foods and we try to eat raw foods when possible. Refined carbs, nutritionally dense food or anything “hydrogenated” is out of the question!

I don’t know what’s so wrong with nutritionally dense foods — I mean, nutritionally dense sounds good to me, because it means lots of nutrients in the food, right?

And overall I just find the “my/our diet is better than YOUR diet” overtones really irritating. If they want to eat that way, that’s awesome for them, but I can do without the preachiness. Is it so bad to put shortening in pie crust, if otherwise you replace it with a half cup of sugar? Who’s to say fat is better or worse than sugar? Oh right — they are! And that’s why I don’t read preachy food blogs. Getting constantly assaulted by descriptions of fat as “unnecessary bad” stuff that we are “spared” from just doesn’t make reading fun.