Throwin' Clay

I have an amazing grandmother. The sort of grandmother whose house always smells delicious, who uses words like "davenport", who was eating tofu before you could buy it in just any grocery store and who is delightfully liberal and politically savvy. She will casually reference Deborah Madison as "little Debbie" since she just so happened to have known the Madison family while living in Davis, CA around the time my mother was born, before they moved to Berkeley.

While chatting with my grandmother last Sunday about her recent trip to Fiji for her 87th birthday, presidential candidates and the beginning pottery class Adam and I had just finished, she appropriately compared the satisfaction of pottery to making bread. I wish I could remember her words exactly, because she spoke so eloquently of what becomes of your perfectly wedged clay equal to what becomes of a well kneaded ball of dough left to rise.

Reflecting on my undergraduate education, International Environmental Studies (which has left me with a basic knowledge of of many global, environmental and social issues, and a deep, scientific understanding of almost none of them) I often wish I would have pursued an art degree instead. I am almost always thinking that I should have studied photography. Its easy to get lost in a daydream of being paid to travel and take photos...I often think I am bursting at the seams with creative energy. I lieu of yet another bachelors degree I may not use, I should just try to plan time for more creative activities. Painting, taking pictures, making prints and throwing clay.

Adam and I took a beginning wheel through Seattle Parks & Rec. We were hesitant at first, $180 seemed steep for an art class. After the first class class at the Alki Bathhouse; I think we both felt it was well worth it. As a passerby, I'd always been curious about the space at the Alki bathhouse. Its a tiny studio near the Alki Bakery. The half of the studio devoted to pottery is reminiscent of a summer camp craft house; shelves overflowing with donated glazes, a kiln, adult work drying on shelves with creations from the kids hand building class, and lovely pottery wheels. Our instructor, Janna, was patient and talented. She allowed us freedom to throw what we fancied, while demonstrating proper
techniques, often more than once for the student who missed it the first time around.

The session ran about ten weeks. We headed to Alki for class on Wednesday nights after work. Most Saturday's we spent in the studio too, working our way through fifty pounds of clay, each. Fifty pounds made me about thirty pieces of pottery including the slightly off center pieces from the beginning. Its amazing how glaze and a firing really showcases your mistakes.

Pho Love

I have an intense love for veggie Pho. More specifically, I love the veggie Pho at Pho Tran. Its filled with perfectly steamed broccoli, carrots and cabbage alongside the usual mushrooms and tofu. The flavors of cilantro, cinnamon and ginger seep through the broth, making it delicious on its own, without the addition of extra sauces (although I almost always add them anyway)

I'm curious to and make this soup at home - as its always been a challenge to find a delicious and broth based vegetarian soup that seems perfect for getting over a cold. This recipe looks like it could help to make my attempt a success. At the same time, it may be a challenge to make in small enough batches for home consumption and $4.98 is such a bargain for all those rice noodles, veggies and tofu.

Meat Guzzling Nation

I just read an amazing article my brother emailed me this morning: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler. Stop what you're doing right now and read that. If not right now, sometime in the near future.

I stopped eating meat twelve years ago. Something I had been thinking about for some time solidified when I noticed a vein in the chicken breast I was eating. Since my declaration of vegetarianism, my brother, and sister (for a period of time) followed suit. Consequently, my family started eating less meat, and my mother, concerned for our nourishment, became an amazing vegetarian cook. The range of eating habits and food origin discussions at our dinner table keep our family meals pleasantly dynamic and political - a relative visiting from out of town recently accused us of of "politicizing" dinner.

Overtime I have reached vegetarian highs and lows regarding the controversial consumption of dairy, seafood and leather goods. The intensity of my argument hitting a peak when I was taking a particular class on the subject matter, or reading an influential book. What a devout vegetarian would call lows were, to me, frustration with the alternatives on the market. Finding my own balance, I consume the occasional dairy, eggs and fish.

In my early days of vegetarianism, before sustainability was a part of my vocabulary, I took a sharpie to every product in our home, labeling them "good" if they were animal friendly and "bad" for animal testing. Lucky for me I had patient and supportive parents.

Pages from finishing Michael Pollan's The Omnivores Dilemma and am feeling wary about eating store bought eggs labeled as free range . Never before have I felt more compelled to buy as locally as possible, grow what I can and try to know as much as possible about my food. Each book published about our food system seems to deliver a new aspect of transparency, and awareness seems to be the first step towards progress.

Bringing it back to the article, I found the following points to be particularly interesting (disturbing, alarming, etc...) :

• According the the Brazilian government, 1,250 square miles of rain forest were cleared for grazing and cropland in the five month period between September 2007 and January 2008
• The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.)
• At about 5 percent of the world's population, we "process" (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world's total
• According to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world's greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
• Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens
• According to the EPA, agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation's rivers and streams
• Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year
• Mark Bittman, who wrote this, is not a vegetarian
  

Granola

I spent four years traveling between the states and Costa Rica between 2003 and 2007. Thirteen trips to be exact. Now, doing the math, it seems that during those four years, adding up the time that I was in country, I spent about two years of my life there. About one year of that time as a volunteer and student at a place called Rancho Mastatal. Every day at the ranch felt amazing and magical. Sometimes it was; watching bright green and black poison dart frogs on the buttresses of trees in the forest, leaping from a waterfall, walking barefoot in the red, tropical soil, prepping bamboo for building or cooking for a group of forty in the tiny kitchen (which has since been renovated -- I hear its downright "posh" these days!) Whatever the adventure may be, it was drastically different from my life as I knew it.

I come from a family of amazing cooks, so I am not going to go so far as to say that I learned to cook at the ranch, but I definitely honed my skills there. Cooking in a rural village in the tropics is both exciting and challenging. The availability of new, fresh ingredients is a treat to your senses. A neighbor stops by to sell eggs, oranges, cheese or milk to make yogurt. The vegetable truck comes once a week and baskets are filled with fresh produce and carried into the house. Everything else was either grown in the vegetable garden, or found locally around town.

One of the items on the weekly cooking agenda was always granola. Homemade granola is (in my opinion) far more delicious than its store bought rival. You have complete control over the amount of oil, sugar and addition of extras you'd like to put in there. I'm a fan of adding dried fruits (golden or regular raisins, apricots, cranberries, bananas, apples), nuts (almonds, walnuts or both) and sometimes coconut or ginger for a more interesting granola. At the ranch, granola with such fancy additions was a bit of a time suck (but well worth it) since adding coconut meant hunting down a ripe coconut, cracking it open, getting the meat out of the shell, and then chopping it into granola-sized pieces. Not that it wouldn't be enjoyable (for the sake of nostalgia) to buy a whole coconut at the store and prep it the Costa Rica way, I don't have that much time on my hands, so I've opted for the store bought flaked and unsweetened variety.

This is what I used:

3 C rolled oats
3/4 C chopped walnuts
3/4 C chopped almonds
3/4 C dried coconut flakes
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t salt
1/4 C canola oil
1/3 C honey
1 t molasses
1/2 C chopped dried apricots
1/2 C raisins
1/8 C finely chopped crystallized ginger

This is how I used it:

1. Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees F. Lightly grease a large baking sheet and set aside.
2. Combine oats, walnuts, almonds, coconut flakes and salt in a large bowl.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, honey and vanilla. Pour onto oat mixture and mix well with your hands, ensuring that everything is well coated.
4. Spread on the baking sheet in an even layer and bake for 20-30 minutes or until golden, stirring every 10 minutes. Pay close attention while the granola is in the oven, as it quickly turns from perfect to burnt.
5. After the granola has cooled, add the dried fruit.
6. Store in an airtight container.

If you choose to, you can add the fruit to the granola in step two, but adding it at the end results in a nice, crunchy but chewy granola.

Namaste and Emerald City Salad

"The divine spark within me honors, respects and acknowledges the divine spark within you"

Mondays and Wednesdays are hot yoga days. I am a firm believer that sweating through 90 minutes of Bikram yoga twice a week is pretty damn good for you. Supposedly, the practice burns from 600 to 1000 calories a session, uses every muscle, joint and organ in your body and releases toxins, most of which through your skin, the body's largest eliminating organ. What's not to love?

It is absolutely necessary to come to class well hydrated, and continue to hydrate for a few after while your body is still detoxifying. We try to keep dinner on yoga nights relatively light and healthy - no one wants to eat heavy food after a 90 minute detox workout.

In honor of my bi-weekly detox day, I'm having one of my absolute favorites, Emerald City Salad for lunch. This gem of a salad came from PCC, a local co-op in the Seattle area. According to their website, the recipe was originally submitted by a deli customer and contained cheese, and they altered it to make it vegan. I've made the salad several times and am still working to get it just right (read: exactly how it tastes at PCC) but all attempts have been delicious and nutritious. The salad is easy to prepare and makes quite a bit. It can be eaten alone, or added to burritos or wraps. "I like a little crunch to my burrito" -Adam


To make the Emerald City Salad you will need:

Kale
Chard (I like to use rainbow)
Parsley
A fennel bulb
Red Bell Pepper
Yellow Bell Pepper
About 1 C wild rice

Olive Oil
Minced Garlic
Lemon juice
Salt and Pepper


To Assemble:

Bring 2 C. water to a boil and add the wild rice. Bring to a boil again, lower the heat and allow to simmer, covered for about an hour or until all of the water has been absorbed.

Finely chop the kale, parsley and chard into a large bowl. Chop the peppers and fennel and set aside.

Make a dressing using the minced garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice.

I like to allow my rice to cool a bit, but not completely so that it wilts the greens a tiny bit. Then add the peppers, fennel and dress. Add salt, pepper and more lemon juice if necessary to taste.

Buen Provecho!

Vegan Lasagna and Pineapple (Rightside Up) (Cup)Cake(s)

Last night Emmy and I prepped the vegan lasagna recipe - with our own addition of zucchini and spinach added to the layers (who doesn't want to up their vegetable intake?!) then took Lucy for a run around greenlake. Not our best run ever, Lucy's leash skills were atrocious. Half the time she spent pulling us around the lake and the other half yanking us to her distractions on either side of the path. Embarrassing, really, but only because her lack of least etiquette is our fault. When we came home I had just enough time to make the batter for the Pineapple Rightside Up Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (we are on a quest to try all the cupcakes in this gem of a book - the recipes are fairly small, so we don't feel too guilty) while Emmy sauteed some kale and chard to have with our lasagna.

The vegan lasagna was excellent. The addition of fennel to the sauce was new to me, but gave it an interesting flavor. The tofu was perfect as a substitute for ricotta, without mimicking ricotta (which I love when I choose to eat it) or being too tofu based. We used raw zucchini and it came out perfect - just firm enough without being undercooked. I am definitely an advocate of Cherie's recipes - I've made a few and they have all come out amazing. My favorite so far has been her Vegan Indian, it was incredible. A hit with all members of our household and our dinner guest, the lovely, MegV.

The pineapple cupcakes were delicious - as everything from the book has been so far. Emmy voted the pumpkin chocolate chip the winner, while I favor the Mexican hot chocolate. Gus came home from class too late for me to get his vote, and Adam has escaped to Lopez for the week, we'll see if there are any around for him to try come Friday...

To My Hetero Life Partner Emmy

This entry...and maybe all entries from here on out, is in honor of Emmy and our new obsession, the food blog. Knowing that I have a bit of, ahem, downtime during my workday, Emmy sent me links two food blogs she has been reading over the past few weeks. They have alerted her to the shame spiral that is what a busy lady's eating can become, and inspired her meal plan to ensure that we aren't eating take out 3 nights a week. Although not immediately impressed by the bloggers, perhaps due to the precedence set by my friend Cherie. Here I am, not even a week later, completely absorbed into the world of food blogs. Checking up on what they are eating, posting, and linking. Its fascinating, really.


I'm not going to call this a food blog - I'd rather think of it as suggestions, reviews, etc...we'll see what comes of it.

Last night we made chickpea tacos (from Happy Herbivore, although Vegan in Vancouver sounded just as good to me, and doesn't require packaged taco seasoning) dressed with arugala, salsa and avocado. The tacos were accompanied by roast asparagus and a huge salad. The chickpeas make an amazing taco - baked, they have a great texture and were just spicy enough.

Tonight I am trying out the vegan lasagna from Cherie's blog (I really appreciate that it does not require the use of fake cheese) and might make up some carrot cupcakes from this book I adore: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

Maybe if I'm feeling ambitious I"ll post some pictures, or let you know if I decide to go for a run.