Saturday, January 31, 2004

Pirate party tonight! Why are parties so much more fun when you get to dress up? Here's my vegan biscuit recipe to go with our pirate stew.

vegan biscuits

Ingredients:
• 2 cups flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon nutritional yeast flakes
• 1/3 cup margarine, softened
• 3/4 cup soy or rice milk
Directions:
In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, nutritional yeast flakes and salt together.
With a fork, blend in margarine until mixture is crumbly. Stir in "milk" until well blended.
Drop biscuit-size spoonfuls of dough onto a lightly greased baking sheet.
Bake at 450-degrees for 10 to 12 mins. until golden brown. Serve hot.
Serves: 15 biscuits
Preparation time: 10 mins.

I haven't made these yet, but the website i got them off of says they are very yummy.

Erica pirate party quote: "This is what I want to do forever. Just dress up and eat stuff."

Thursday, January 29, 2004

Today I feel crazy, like driving-somewhere-far-far-away-for-no-reason crazy, or maybe just spend-the-night-contemplating-life crazy. Maybe that seems contradictory, but I guess that's what makes it crazy, right? I feel confined by life, but at the same time ridiculously happy about where and who I am and everything that's been happening lately. I am a walking contradiction today, aren't I?

This brownie recipe is frankly amazing. It is super easy, too. I'm making these for my next quartet rehearsal at my house, yummm...

Vegan Brownies

You need:
2 1/3 cups flour
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegan margarine
2/3 cups cocoa powder
2 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Mix 1/3 cup flour with the water in a saucepan; stir constantly on medium heat until it's thicker and boiling or almost boiling. Let it cool. Melt the margarine and stir in the cocoa powder. Beat the sugar, salt, and vanilla in with the flour/water mixture, then add the cocoa mixture too and stir well. Mix the flour and baking powder and mix it all together. Bake in a 9" by 13" pan at 350 for 20-25 minutes. I think I usually grease the pan on general principles, but to each her or his own. You can add things like cherries, raisins, or crushed-up candy canes (I've never tried, but the recipe says that it's good), but even alone they are awesome. I usually sprinkle powdered sugar on top while they're still hot. Seriously, these are wonderful. I can't wait to try them again...

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Ahhh, it's late at night (er, early morning) and I am not sleepy at all but am meeting a friend for an early breakfast tomorrow. This seems to be always the case with me; I am sleepy when I need to be alert and alert when I sincerely wish to be sleepy. At any rate, another recipe for your enjoyment. I hear Bianca made the curry stuff recently and liked it, so that validates the whole "blog experience" for me. Yay Bianca! This is one of Meredith and Erica's favorites, and it's super simple.

Aubergine and Chick Pea Ragout
You need:
1 eggplant
1/2 cup olive oil (or more, if you need it; i usually just dump a bunch in)
2 cans of garbanzo beans
2 cans (12-14 oz) or 1 can (28 oz) of crushed tomatoes
some dried mint to taste (at least 1 tsp)
as required salt (sea or other) and ground pepper
1 onion, if you so desire

Cube the eggplant and coarsely chop the onion. Sautee in the olive oil until
everything is soft and you can easily poke a fork through the pieces of
eggplant. Add everything else and cook over low heat for half an hour. Serve
hot or at room temp (it's a Greek dish, and traditionally served at room temp)
with rice, couscous, pasta, or crusty good bread.
Note: I usually make this without onions, but it doesn't seem to make much
difference in the taste one way or the other.


Friday, January 23, 2004

Due to a lack of anything interesting that I'm willing to talk about on the internet, here's another recipe. The wine makes an amazing amount of difference.

Tomato-Garlic Soup
You need:
Tomato broth (I used this to use up half a box, but you can make more)
2-3 cloves garlic (or more, if you’re a garlic fiend like erica)
some red wine
basil
cayenne pepper
some olive oil

Put the tomato broth in a pot. Press or finely chop the garlic. Sauté the garlic in the olive oil for a minute or two, then add some cayenne pepper and basil. Dump this mixture into the tomato broth after a few minutes. Pour in some wine, not a whole lot but maybe ¼ to ½ a cup. Turn the heat on; I brought mine to a slight boil, but I think just heating up is okay. I don’t know at what point the alcohol leaves, which is why I brought it to a slight boil. I didn’t feel tipsy, so I guess it worked or there wasn’t enough wine to bother me. I suggest serving it with brown toast. It can be quite spicy if you put in lots of garlic and cayenne, so watch out! You can also add potatoes or other vegetables, just cook til soft.

Thursday, January 08, 2004

So, I've been cooking a lot over break. I'm vegan, so cooking is really really important, because otherwise all I ever end up eating is salads. Anyway, I've started typing up my recipes (both ones I've made up and particularly good ones from cookbooks), and am going to post them here every once in a while for anyone who cares. Here goes with the first recipe, which I just made up tonight (hence the lack of name).


Curry-like stuff
You need:
1 can peas
1 can garbanzo beans
some spinach, (maybe around a cup crushed), preferably crushed in a mortar and pestle or ground up in a food processor or blender
1 cup dried lentils
spices (curry powder, ground cumin, turmeric, ground coriander, ground ginger, cayenne pepper and sea salt)

Cook the lentils until soft (use 3 cups of water and a little salt, bring to a boil and then simmer about 30 minutes, or just to taste).
Put the cooked lentils, can of peas, can of garbanzo beans, and crushed spinach in a large pot. Stir well.
Put two cups of this mixture in a blender with 1 cup of water. Blend well. Return this mixture to the pot and stir well.
Add spices to taste. I suggest being careful not to overspice, especially with the turmeric, cumin, ginger and cayenne pepper. I actually only added a dash of the last two. Be careful, stir and taste before adding more of anything. Stir well.
Heat everything up over medium heat for 10 minutes or so, however long feels good to you.
I suggest serving over couscous (made with lots of butter or butter substitute) and mixing in some vegan sour cream (or real sour cream, if that’s the way you go). It would probably also be good with that garlic-spiced yogurt stuff, but I didn’t have any plain soy yogurt and so didn’t try it.

Friday, January 02, 2004

bell hooks
You are bell hooks (no capital letters)! You were
one of the first black wymyn to discuss in
public spaces the differences between being a
black womyn and being a black man or a white
womyn. You are the mother of intersectionality
and you couldn't care less about identity
politics. Thanks for making feminism accessible
and calling the white, middle class wymyn on
their bullshit!


Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


I love bell hooks! She was the first theorist I ever read, and totally changed me forever.
It's been good times since finals ended. I went to Flagstaff for Christmas and saw my family, which is always nice (at least for a few days), and basically have just hung out other than that. I had a brief obsession with Gone With the Wind that was inspired with my friend Anna, and now I'm reading Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, which is good and a fast read. I went and ate dinner at Tucson's notorious Yankee Doodle Italian Cuisine, a truly bizarre place; it's half bar, half restaurant, and the decor includes pictures of George Washington and pasted up stickers of cartoon characters on the windows.
New Years was fun and somewhat embarassing at times. Anna and I went to FLagstaff to see the pinecone drop. Every year, they drop a giant pinecone-like object off the roof of a hotel downtown at midnight, and everybody gets drunk and cheers like mad. Anna and I bought two bottles of wine, a really bad cabernet sauvignon and a bottle of organic white zinfindel, to drink beforehand. We intended to drink all of the first and part of the second so we could leave some for my dad, but instead we drank all of both and stumbled downtown for the festivities. As we were walking, at one point I keeled over on a church lawn and lay on my back for a minute or two, which Anna found way too funny. We finally got downtown, watched the pinecone drop, and headed home because it was very cold and we were rather drunk.
The next morning, we walked to Macy's to meet friends for lunch and coffee. I found a bottle of ibuprofen and a pen that had fallen out of my bag on the church lawn during my laying-down session the night before, provoking more laughs from Anna. We met the friends, walked around for a few hours, and went home to eat again and hit the road. There, we discovered that we had not drunk our organic wine as we had thought; instead, we had downed an entire bottle of my dad's wine. It's rather embarassing to be noticably drunk in front of my family, and that mistake kind of added insult to injury. Ouch!
But New Year's was fun. Yay for the pinecone!