Single Ladies

Mr. RV is away for a few days. (He is sending me desparate text messages from the land of soft rock and bad Chinese food, otherwise known as a retirement community in Florida.) When I'm cooking for myself, I like to make delicate, light food. But you serve a guy a dainty salad and bruschetta for dinner and he's like, that was a good appetizer, but where is the main course?

Tonight I made sushi (and am working on tomato-chard-barley soup to go with it). Please do not laugh at my sushi. This is my first time ever making it. I highly doubt I used the proper Japanese technique, but it came out tasty regardless.

First, I julienned a bunch of stuff: scallions, carrots, baked tofu, and cream cheese (easily omitted, but I had some leftover from last week's blueberry tart).


Then I set out my mat with seaweed, brown rice seasoned with a little vinegar and sugar, and julienned stuff on top.


Next, I realized my seaweed was oriented wrong, and very carefully flipped it (and added the cream cheese).


Then, er, long story short, I huffed and puffed and rolled up the sushi, and cut it into slices.


Et voila! Next, I might try the spicy tempeh roll recipe from Veganomicon. I just didn't have the patience to steam the tempeh tonight.

I've just returned from a few days in Austin, where I stayed at at a great vegetarian B&B. Here are two breakfasts:




I loved the breakfast/diner culture in Austin, and the spicy southwestern food, like this homemade salsa sampler at the South Congress Cafe:


And you've gotta love a trailer repurposed as a cupcake stand! They even had vegan cupcakes!


I've gotta get back to the soup, but I'll close with a picture of an unexpected visitor to my office last week. In the past 6-ish months, we've had George W. Shrub, the pope, and this visitor come. Needless to say, they saved the best for last!

Gimme some sugar

A new look for the blog, and time for the first Wednesday update. First, sweet things.

1. Blueberry-cream cheese tart



I made this for Valentine's Day. I've been trying my best to limit my sugar intake and the tart only has about 1/3 cup sugar in the whole thing. The recipe is from the Greens cookbook by Deborah Madison. Her recipes come out great, but boy, are they complicated. She has meticulous notes about technique, many of which I disregard. The base of this tart was a mixture of cream cheese and sour cream with lemon and a dash of sugar. I think you could use tofu cream cheese, maybe thinned with a little soy milk, as a good substitute.

2. Rice krispie treats



By the time I remembered to take a picture of these, only two were left. As I said before, they use no refined sugar, yet the texture is exactly like traditional RK treats. The flavor is also the same, with a hint of nut butter. Here is the recipe, via my awesome nutritionist:

1 box rice krispie cereal (brown rice krispies if you can find them)
1 1/3 cups brown rice syrup, or a mixture of rice syrup and barley malt syrup
½ Cup almond, peanut, or cashew butter
1/2 Cup coarsely chopped toasted almonds
1/2 Cup chopped dried fruit

Pour cereal into large bowl, add fruit and nuts. Bring rice syrup (or barley malt syrup) and nut butter to a boil. Cook for a few minutes. Pour over cereal mixture, mix, pour into a 9x13 inch pan lined with parchment paper. Moisten hands with cold water and pat to compact.

3. My dietary journey
I started going to a nutritionist a few months ago. My goal was to take a fresh look at my dietary habits, and hopefully drop a few pounds along the way. We discovered the problems I experience are probably due to fluctuating blood sugar. I had to face the fact that my system is very sensitive to caffeine and sugar. Along the way, I:
--read The Low GI Diet by Patrick Holford. It's a great eating plan that's easy enough to do over the long term. It's also quite vegetarian-friendly.
--gave up all sugar and caffeine for two weeks. This was hard but got easier after the first few days.
--started paying more attention to signs of fluctuating blood sugar, and planned five small meals a day.
--decided to eat sweets only on Saturday.

4. Candida
My nutritionist thinks I probably have a problem with high levels of candida albicans. I have many symptoms that point to this, such as lethargy, "brain fog," recurring fungal skin infections, a nose like a bloodhound (seriously, an acute sense of smell is one of the symptoms), and mood swings. Strangely, though, I don't have the problem you'd most associate with women and yeast.

I probably got my candida levels out of whack when I lived in Africa and took an antibiotic every day for two years as an anti-malarial. Broad-spectrum antibiotic use is the most common cause of candida problems. But the other medicine available made me feel like I was going crazy and has a few class action lawsuits against it, so there you go.

If you're interested in taking a candida diagnostic questionnaire, there's one here.

The treatment for candida is a very restrictive diet. As you might guess, it does not involve a lot of desserts. I'll write up my experience with that in the next post.

Also, I'll try to get the other recipes people requested up next week. But between now and then I'm going on a mini-vacation!

Hey na, hey na, my blog is back

If you're like me, maybe you wonder briefly what happened to a blogger who's been off-air for a while. What's she up to? Is she okay? Doesn't she care about my blog-surfing fulfillment?

In my case, it was a matter of equal parts busy-ness and lazyness. I last wrote in early November. We bought a house around that time and moved in late November. A bunch of home projects (including blood-pressure-raising interactions with Ikea) and running a household of two people and one demanding cat has kept me busier than usual. I've been taking pictures and notes for blog entries, but keeping the blog current has been low on my priority list.

However, I enjoy blogging and I definitely enjoy reading other blogs. As I mentioned earlier, I came to the conclusion that being vegan isn't the right thing for me. About half my meals are vegan but I'm concentrating now on a low glycemic index diet. I have very delicate blood sugar and it seems to be helping. More on that later. Some of the recipes/pictures I'll be posting are not vegan, but if possible I'll include vegan substitutions.

Here is a montage, if you will, of food-related highlights of the past 3 months. I think from here on out I'll try to blog on Wednesdays, starting with this Wednesday.

1. Couscous and a minor celebrity
I'm a big fan of Couscous restaurant in Richmond. Pictured below is their amazing "mock chicken" tagine. I am weeping with longing for it now. (I live about 1.5 hours drive from Richmond.)


While we were there, the woman in the Room Store commercials walked in! This is probably only of interest to local people, but in the (oft-broadcast) commercials, she's pixielike and so perky you want to stuff her in a credenza. At Couscous, though, she looked hip and fun. I wanted to send her over a drink, but chickened out. (Our waitress confirmed that it was her, though.)


2. Another couscous dinner
Made this lovely vegan dish this week. Flanking the couscous are "tofu steaks" by Helen's Kitchen, which I highly recommend.


3. More new dishes
My nutritionist (another topic I'll revisit) came up with two great snack ideas for me. One is brown rice balls with umeboshi plums, wrapped in seaweed, and the other was rice krispie treats made without refined sugar. Believe it or not, they taste almost exactly the same as the sugar-packed ones. I'll post those recipes later if anyone's interested.

4. An offer you can't refuse
This is actually what prompted me to blog today: reading about an initiative by Anti records to donate money to an animal society for every blog who posts the video to a Neko Case song. Sadly, the offer expired February 3. But check out the details anyway. It's a great idea.

Barbara brings it

We spent the day at the Green Festival, which I look forward to more keenly than Christmas. The festival was huge and mobbed; a good sign. This year, I was impressed by the growth of the home and building material sections. Some of my favorite booths were:
--Kallari chocolate (I have been a fan of this stuff since I discovered them at the Green Festival two years ago. With great difficulty, I tracked down a supplier and now I order this chocolate in bulk by mail. It is the best that I have ever had, and believe me, the sample size of my unscientific study is large!)
--Organic Comfort Zone, where we bought two pillows. I wish we could afford one of their beds, sigh.
--The Animal Welfare Approved booth. This nonprofit certifies that animal products originate from animals that have been raised humanely. It's kind of like the Organic certification, except that farmers do not have to pay for it. It's funded by an anonymous donor (here is my guess as to the donor's identity). That strikes me as a great idea because it seems to remove pressure to "pass" the farm. My feelings about this certification in general are mixed because it seems to condone eating meat as long as the animal was raised humanely. However, I know that most people eat meat, and this could be an important step in "humanizing" animals, which may lead to decreased animal product consumption. Your thoughts?

We saw two great speakers at the festival: Barbara Ehrenreich and Mr. RV's personal guru, Seth Goldman of Honest Tea. (One of our most contentious marital issues is Mr. RV's addiction to Honest Tea and my position that "You can make those for 15 cents each! Paying two bucks a bottle is ridiculous!") Barbara delivered a great speech, speaking about the need to remember green concerns in the midst of our economic upheaval. One point struck me in particular: she said that she notices a movement of "eco-puritanism," which tells people to give up pleasurable things, like car trips and hamburgers (to use her examples). She said that this is not going to work because few people will voluntarily deny themselves habitual pleasures. Instead, we should find a way to express that "less stuff does not have to equal less pleasure." Sometimes I scoff at the green movement for all of the hundreds of unnecessary products labeled as green. Basically, I think that instead of buying a new set of recycled glass dinnerware, you should just use the plates you already have, or pick up some at a thrift store. But I can see how green versions of certain luxuries can stop people from feeling deprived and encourage them to research "going green" a little more.

By the way, check out Barbara's hilarious blog post on the Socialist Conspiracy. An excerpt:

"So we decided to suspend our usual work of standing on street corners and hissing, "Hey, how'd you like to live in a workers' paradise?” Instead of building socialism, one worker at a time, we would focus on destroying capitalism, hedge fund by hedge fund.

First, we selected a cadre of crusty punks from the streets of Seattle, stripped off their Che t-shirts, suited them up in Armani's and wingtips, and introduced them to the concepts of derivatives and dental floss. Then we shipped them to Wall Street with firm instructions: Make as much money as you can, as fast as you can, and as soon as the money starts rolling in, send it out to make more money by whatever dodgy means you can find – subprime loans, credit default swaps, pyramid schemes – anything goes. And oh yes: Spend your own earnings in the most flamboyantly gross ways you can think of -- $10,000 martinis, fountains of champagne – so as to fan the flames of class resentment."

Victor(y) is sweet

Time flies, huh? I'm sure I'm not the only blogger who was moved to write today after a long absence. I watched Obama win at a friend's house in DC last night. When we'd finished cheering, we heard a great noise coming from outside. Turns out the noise was the beginning of a massive street party. We actually didn't know where the core of it was, but we saw plenty of ecstatic, honkin', whoopin' and hollerin' people on our way home. I've never seen anything like it, except on New Year's Eve, but this went on for hours instead of minutes.

What's up with the pig? I saw it in the window of an antique shop a few weeks ago and have had my eye on it since. Mr. RV and I decided that if Obama won, the pig was coming home with us. Today I picked him up. His name? Victor, of course.

We're moving in a few weeks and I haven't had much time to blog these days. Also, while I still seek out vegan recipes, many things I make are not vegan. I'm working with a nutritionist to try and get my blood sugar issues under control and ruling out dairy, fish and eggs just makes it ten times harder for me. I'll probably only write about vegan food, which is still a great interest of mine, but I needed to say that in the interest of full disclosure. I'll also be going on a yeast-eradicating diet in January, which will be the topic of another post. Taking antibiotics every day for two years as an antimalarial really messed up my system in ways that I am just now beginning to grasp. Until my next post, here are a few pictures from our honeymoon in Bermuda:

Tofu strudel (delicious!)


The best Mussaman curry I've ever had. Yes, that is a whole cinnamon stick in there:


One of the locals:

Catching up

Well, we're off to sail the high seas just hours from now. I'm sure cruise ship food will be an adventure in itself. One of our wedding presents was a new camera so I'm eager to put it to the test. I also gave Mr. RV a teeny video camera as a wedding present, so maybe some videos will eventually find their way onto this site. Meanwhile, here are a few dishes I photographed but didn't get a chance to blog about while the wedding planning was in high gear.

A tasty midsummer bulghur salad. I wanted to do something different from tabouli. This has grapes, pecans, cucumbers, red onions, and red peppers. I think the dressing was a simple lemon juice/olive oil vinaigrette.



Roasted vegetable napoleons. I made these for dinner with a friend after seeing their deliciousness on Vegan Yum Yum. They were very time-consuming to make, but came out very flavorful. The stuff sticking them together is a variation on baba ghanouj. The paste didn't turn out too great. I would make these again, but I'd slice the veggies more thickly and I'd probably use a silken tofu concoction between the layers. Don't they look like some kind of space colony in this picture?



I've got to get packing, literally!

My descent into respectability

Readers, are you out there? I am back, at least for this week. Our wedding is a wrap and the honeymoon starts on Saturday. The wedding was truly perfect, despite being married in the second worst storm (the remnants of Hurricane Hanna) to hit this area in at least the past 6 years. I’ve put a few pictures of me and HS* up but will replace them with pictures of just me in a few days, since HS is a bit wary of Internet-posted photos. The quality of the pictures should improve when I replace them, since these are just snaps taken by tipsy people, not the real photos from our pro photog friend.

Here are some ecologically-friendly aspects of our wedding:
--We had it in a neighborhood that is extremely walkable and well-served by public transportation.
--The location for both the ceremony and the luncheon was America’s first certified organic restaurant. Of course, vegan alternatives were available for all courses!


(Non-vegan risotto; vegan version did not have parmesan thingy on top)

--About 90% of our wedding-related expenditures went to independent businesses.
--We did away with many of the wedding trappings that we didn’t care about. There was no wedding cake, nor special ceremonial wedding cake knife with its own corsage. I made the centerpieces for about $100 total. Needless to say, there was no bouquet toss or garter removal. There was a classical guitarist instead of a DJ, and the only dancing was a conga line to “White Wedding” for our exit.


(Classy friends, cheap centerpieces)

--I hope to be able to wear my wedding dress again, and I asked my two bridesmaids to buy any dress that they would wear again.
--We kept the guest list to 50 people (fewer guests=less travel and less emissions).
--We didn’t register, because we really have everything that we need for our new place.
--Our rings are recycled gold.
--No limousines were deployed. (I had hoped to make our exit on a tandem bicycle, but the rain definitely prevented that from happening.)

We knew we wanted to do things our way for the wedding, and not follow the path of “traditional” weddings. (I put that in quotes since I think the traditional American wedding is really cake and punch in a church rec room or the bride’s parents’ house, not the 40K affairs now called traditional.) It was difficult to swim against the Wedding Industrial Complex current at times, but we are both extremely happy we stuck to our guns and had the small, nonreligious, intimate wedding that we desired.

Hopefully I’ll have the chance to blog again before we leave for the honeymoon. I’ve got a few pictures and many health-related thoughts to share.

*HS will now be known as Mr. RV.


(At the afterparty)