Magic Spot Flowing

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…

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.

House Democrats have some vertebrae left in their spine, at least, having refused to rubber-stamp telecom immunity. Good for them, even if the whole issue of warrantless wiretapping in general is still a mess. If you’re less lazy than me, you could write to your House rep congratulating or reproving them, but I’m going to go rest now.

I’m still coughing over here, but less so, and whatever nasty little bug is causing my illness has now diversified into sinus crud, but I felt like cooking today (VeganYumYum‘s Hot and Sour Cabbage Soup — tasty, easy, and sinus-clearing!) and should be back at work tomorrow, so life is returning to normal.

The promised post with tan food bentos! Very exciting, I know.

Soup bowl: Gravy
Main bowl: Mashed potatoes
Large bowl: Chickpea cutlet
Small bowl: Chocolate chip cookie

This is probably the most tan bento. The chickpea cutlets are from Veganomicon. They’re made with chickpeas, wheat gluten flour, and some tasty seasoning. The lemon zest makes them super-cool. The cookie recipe was from Vegan with a Vengeance, though they got a little overcooked. It’s almost like a kid’s school lunch, except totally vegan and much tastier since it’s all made from real food.

Soup bowl: Peerless Pureed Cauliflower soup (veganized)
Main bowl: TJs three-seed sourdough (probably to dip in soup)
Large bowl: Apple
Small bowl: Macadamia Nut Blondie

The soup is from Almost Vegetarian, but I veganized it by using soymilk instead of milk/cream and replacing the egg yolk with a potato (both are thickeners in this context). It was really good that way; I probably never would have noticed the difference had I not been the one making it. The Macadamia Nut Blondie is from Vegan with a Vengeance. It’s like a brownie, but not chocolate. And incredibly rich from the macadamias. Very big hit at cookie parties and work birthday celebration!

Soup bowl: Roasted Bell Pepper Soup
Main bowl: TJs whole-wheat pita (for hummus)
Large bowl: Kasha varnishkes
Small bowl: Hummus

This hummus was homemade to be more like the TJs kind, as an experiment. I put more water and tahini in than normal. It probably still needed more tahini and more garlic, but it’s good. I’m still eating the leftovers this week.

The Roasted Bell Pepper Soup is also from Almost Vegetarian, but it’s vegan with no alteration. And tasty and easy, as long as you have the bell peppers roasted already. It’s just a mirepoix, plus bell peppers, a potato, and broth. I put more bell peppers in than called for because otherwise you taste the potato and celery too much.

And the non-tan bentos:

Soup bowl: Mashed sweet potatoes
Main bowl: TJs whole-wheat pita
Large bowl: Sauteed greens and caramelized onions
Small bowl: Falafel

The falafel are homemade from the VwaV recipe. I liked it, but it could have used more kick and less liquid. I prefer the recipe from my British Tasty Vegetarian book. The greens and onions were a good mix.

Soup bowl: Lentil stew
Main bowl: Pineapple-cashew-quinoa stir-fry
Large bowl: Apple
Small bowl: Pineapple right-side-up cupcake

This was leftovers from the Valentine’s Day celebration. The theme was supposed to be cashews, but the original cupcakes we inteded to make (Cashew-Cardamon) required soymilk powder for the cashew butter icing, which I couldn’t find, so we went with pineapple as a theme. The PCQ stir-fry, from Veganomicon, was innovative and tasty, with basil and mint among the ingredients. The pineapple cupcakes, from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, were lightly sweet and tropical. The lentil stew is an old recipe of my mom’s and kind of got thrown in there a bit.

All bentos in this post are totally vegan. Yay!

It’s apparently been about six months since I posted any bentos, but I’ve either been lazy about lunch or lazy about photographing it, because I only found five that I haven’t posted. And three of them are not at all photogenic and consist almost entirely of food in varying shades of brown. Lunch doesn’t always have to look good to be tasty.

One of the foods in question is Kasha Varnishkes, which I’ve now made twice using the recipe from Yellow Rose Recipes. I was dubious about it the first time, and I’m still dubious about it now. It’s pasta (bowtie, varnishkes) and buckwheat (kasha), with slightly-browned onions. It strikes me as the kind of thing you love if you love kasha, or if you ate kasha varnishkes growing up when you were picky and hardly ate anything that wasn’t brown, so now even though you eat other things it tastes like comfort to you. I find it bland and a little weird from the buckwheat. On the other hand, it is good comfort food. I’ve been hungry today (riding 15 miles will do that to you) and didn’t have a lot for dinner, so I found myself craving more food, and I went straight for it, ignoring the hummus and Thai curry that are also in the fridge.

I was going to do the bento post on Friday but the pics aren’t on this computer, so it’ll have to wait. I’ve been cooking better lately, so maybe really tasty bentos will be making a more regular appearance soon.

For probably only the second time ever (the first time was the chickpea broccoli casserole, coincidentally), I’m not really happy with a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. The Chickpea-Hijiki Salad Sandwiches (and also, I must say, I am not amused by calling them sammiches — it’s not cute, it’s annoying) are … odd. The concept of the salad is that you add hijiki to chickpeas and standard cold protein salad ingredients (mayonnaise, vegetables) to get a taste and consistency approximating tuna salad. And I like tuna salad. So I bought some hijiki a while back and have been meaning to make this.

But. Although I think it’s probably about as similar as it can get, chickpeas and hijiki are not tuna. The hijiki is black strands of sea vegetable that look disturbingly like worms, and chickpeas are much firmer than tuna (especially homecooked ones rather than canned — I meant to food-process them instead of just mashing by hand, to make up for this, but I decided not to food-process at 11pm in order to not annoy my neighbors). The fishy taste is too much (for my fish-not-loving self anyway) when you get hijiki by itself, and not enough when it’s not in the bite. I also had to put in a bit of mustard to counter the Nayonnaise taste — again, I don’t think this is Isa’s fault since she actually recommends Vegannaise, which I’ve heard is better-tasting, and I could have used soy yogurt instead.

Also, the vegetables are minced onion and carrot, and I’m used to my tuna salad having celery, apples, and pickles. Maybe I should try this again with more resemblance to the tuna salad I actually like — and perhaps food process the combination of chickpeas and hijiki to reduce the worm factor.

At any rate, it’s one worth giving a try to see if you like the combo, and if you aren’t enthralled, see what happens if you change it up a bit. The recipe gets good reviews when I google for it, and a number of suggestions to try other sea vegetables like arame or nori. Though I have to suspect that a good number of these people are vegans who don’t really remember what tuna tastes like. I last ate it only about two years ago, so I’m pretty sure I remember and I’m pretty sure that while this is not far off, it’s Not Really Tuna.

I’m the last person you’d think would claim to need to work on my food intake. I cook for myself and eat mostly whole foods (in spite of my obsession with chocolate mint cookies). But I feel like I haven’t really been pushing myself to eat sensibly, on the excuse that given that I buy from the farmer’s market and eat vegetarian, how could I possibly go wrong?

Well, for one thing, I could forget that since I’m effectively vegan about 95% of the time I need to be conscious about getting enough B12. Yep, I’m fine with iron (and cholesterol and blood sugar and all that, of course), but the B12 is more complicated.

According to my doctor I have low serum levels of B12. I did some research and found that this doesn’t necessarily mean I have a deficiency, since B12 is stored for a while in the body before being depleted, but it does mean I need to eat more of it. B12 comes from microorganisms and is the only thing you can’t get from an actual food on a vegan diet. The organisms use animals as hosts, so you get it through animal products if you’re ovo-lacto or omni. You can get it from nutritional yeast, fortified foods (mostly soy milk or cereals), or supplements. My doctor’s advice about supplements was somewhat misleading — it’s apparently possible to take small doses, which can be absorbed effectively, rather than larger doses that aren’t absorbed well; she recommended the latter. You can take 500 micrograms and absorb 1%, or 5 micrograms and absorb 30-50%, which is most of what you need for a day (2.4 micrograms is the RDA). Jack Norris has a good site about vegan nutrition.

I also realized that I’m just not being very conscious about how I’m eating. I’m eating random things for breakfast, eating too many snacks, and not having proper meals. I’m not thinking about eating dark green vegetables or remembering to put flaxseeds in my oatmeal, which is a pretty much 100% easy way to get omega-3s & 6s. I’m not big on eating to nutritional claims, since I already eat a varied, mostly healthy diet, but I want to be more conscious and more organized, and pay attention to what my body wants to eat. So I’m doing a food diary thing again, and I’m going to work on B12 and other important nutrients (calcium) and also just enjoying my food more and eating less crap.