30 Oct 2007: Pictures and Words (Not Necessarily Related)
It was sunny today. I worked at the kitchen table and kept up my energy with a small snack:
Just applesauce with almonds. Not worth talking about, really! But the meal that IS worth mentioning is dinner, but it's dusk by dinnertime these days. So you can click here for a picture of my dinner, but I don't want to have to see it on the main page. The yellowiness!
It was a delicious dinner, and all the more remarkable because I made it up as I went. I whipped up gram flour crepes/savoury pancakes (basically just 1/2 cup gram (chickpea) flour, 1/2 cup water, a pinch of baking soda, and seasonings), and I can't believe they came out of the pan, much less managed to look presentable. I filled them with cooked spinach and butter beans topped with vegan mushroom gravy (the rest of which I poured over the tops of the crepes. It was my first go at making a vegan gravy/sauce, and I couldn't be bothered with using a recipe, and yet -- surprisingly -- it was perfect and delicious. Very mushroomy.
I think it's Nigel Slater who talks about 'understanding' ingredients rather than following recipes. I've had my own share of cooking and flavour disasters, but all the experimenting is worth it when something like this comes out of nowhere.
And here are the pet animals:
Look at them all! They don't care about what I cook, unless some of it falls on the floor. We babysat my parents' dog from Thursday to Sunday, and although it went very well (Minnie loved it, of course, and the cats were surprisingly indifferent), we're all happy to have things back to normal. Do you have any idea how much two dogs shed?
28 Oct 2007: More Lazy Veganism
I poached some peaches this afternoon. Even though I crave different foods at different times of the year -- and, ideally, would prefer to eat what's in season -- there are some things I want to eat at the wrong time. The peaches in the stores right now aren't very good, but they're still delicious when poached.
The peaches were sweetened with a bit of honey and flavoured with cinnamon and vanilla, and I slipped the skins off after they'd cooked and diced them before bottling them up again with the cooking syrup.
I've just recently tapped the deep and rich vein of vegan foodie blogs -- I love them for the same reason I prefer vegan cookbooks. Interesting ingredients, creative recipes, etc. I didn't realize how many vegan blogs there were; regular foodie blogs don't seem to link to them very often. So many new recipes to try and pictures to be inspired by! I'm really loving VeganYumYum, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, and Don't Get Mad, Get Vegan.
The first three years I was vegetarian, I didn't eat eggs either. I think that these days, they'd be the one thing to keep me from really going vegan. There's not really any dairy I can't do without (if you think a sandwich sans cheese is boring, you're just not using your imagination) -- I only buy almond milk these days, although I do eat dairy yogurt, because I'm wary of consuming too much soy. But eggs are such a quick and tasty source of protein -- and I really did crave them when I didn't eat them.
I like tofu scramble at least as much as scrambled eggs, and I don't think it would really be much more work to eat balanced vegan meals, but. . . for the time being, I'm sticking to lazy veganism.
26 Oct 2007: In the Kitchen
I've been sneaking in and out of the kitchen today, in between designing covers for werewolf books and reading submissions on my laptop (it's a tough job).
I made some granola bars a little while ago -- super easy. I dipped the bottoms in chocolate to help them keep their shape -- good idea, but then I drizzled the left over on top, and it's just too much sweet for me. I hope I can find SOMEbody to eat them.
I had my table this way 'round the first few months I was here, but then I pivoted it so the short end was under the window on the left. But with the temperatures dropping, I'm feeling a strange sort nostalgia for the cold months of last year. So back it goes. I also made a quick vegetable soup:
I say quick because it didn't take much work, but it was actually a fairly long process, as I roasted my own tomatoes (from the garden) instead of using tinned. It was worth it, though -- both for the flavour and to get rid of some of the tomatoes on my window sill!
25 Oct 2007: In a Year
A year ago yesterday, I flew back to America, back to Minnesota. A whole year has gone by! I think I've been pretty productive, no? Bought a house, got my driving license, bought a car, adopted a dog, wrangled some health insurance, made friends, planted a garden, started dating a be-pseudonym-ed boy, adopted a cat, flew back to the UK three times, ate at a raw food restaurant, saw shooting stars. And there may very well have been other things, too!
When I left the UK, I was confident that I was making the right choice, but I wasn't expecting to like it so much. Minneapolis really is an amazing city -- there's so much going on here, and it's infinitely more accessible than it would be in London.
I ran to the supermarket yesterday, and instead of heading home when I was finished, I decided instead to walk around Lake Harriet. I admired the changing trees and the blue, blue water as I drove halfway around first Calhoun and then Harriet, thinking about the past year. I was reflecting on all the time I spent by the lakes this summer, and how that's coming to an end now that it's getting colder. Wrapped up with thoughts of relocation, I had a sudden pang of panic -- a feeling that I was losing everything I'd discovered this past year. But no. I'm here and staying; after all, who knows what I could accomplish in two years?
23 Oct 2007: Autumn All the Way
One thing I've always believed that Minnesota has over the UK is sunny days -- particularly in winter. It may get to a thousand below and occasionally dump immovable mountains of snow around here, but at least you can enjoy blazing hot sun streaming through a window, even in the middle of January. It might not be the dead of winter yet (or even close), but we're starting to get into the groove of cold-air-bright-sunshine. Yes!
I had two thoroughly brown bananas in the freezer, and I was feeling pretty torn about how to use them. Banana bread is just so predictable, no? I wanted banana scones, but I don't really go in for all the butter/fat that scones require. So instead I made banana bread in little pyrex dishes, so they would feel more bun-like. I tweaked this recipe -- omitting the walnuts, substituting two Tbsp of oil with two Tbsp of yogurt instead, and adding my second banana at the very end, only slightly mashed, so it remained chunky. I mixed until juuuuust combined, and they came out wonderfully light and moist. There. Bananas out of the way.
I think I finally picked the chard plants bare yesterday. I read somewhere that you can keep chard going over the winter; that it actually likes the cold. I suspect this means 'cold' as in '40F', not sub-zero. I cooked these leaves as I usually do, and it was only when I was eating them that I realized they'd have been better raw, like baby spinach. Live and learn.
The sky! So full of blue! That's the back of my little house there, along with the ash tree that has lost almost all its leaves already. I don't know why the tree gave in so easily -- I've still got tomatoes going strong, and nothing can stop the broccoli from producing. Now there's a plant I wish I would keep over winter -- they've been such hard workers.
And this is from the early evening, just as the last sunlight was hitting the neighbour's tree. They've still got leaves! I've decided that I'm going to give over almost half my backyard to the vegetable garden next year. I want to have proper rows of plants. I didn't like the thought that this year was going to be something of a trial, that there might be a lot of waste -- but I did learn quite a few things.
Next year, no cherry tomatoes. The variety I planted grew and produced like mad, but they were sour and of no interest to me. I think I'll have four slicing tomato plants next year -- two red heirloom varieties, maybe a fun stripey heirloom, and something more standard, as the heirlooms seemed prone to rot.
Four broccoli plants seemed like the right number, and although the two zucchini plants drove me crazy during their peak, I think I'll keep that the same and make a bigger effort to grate and freeze the excess. I'll only have one red pepper plant, but I definitely want to try a few varieties of hot peppers next year. Lots of chard and kale -- maybe even lettuce. I didn't do potatoes this year, though I wanted to, so they're definitely on the list. More squash. Onions, garlic, various roots.
This past spring, I was really hesitant to drop the necessary money on all the vegetable plants, but now I know what the return is. After all, I think I spent $3.99 on the four-pack of broccoli, and I didn't once have to buy it from the store from about mid-June to mid-October. Four months of free(ish) broccoli! And you can't beat a plant-to-plate time of under ten minutes.
20 Oct 2007: Living Room Update
The living room seems to be an on-going project. Things went wrong early on, when it somehow wound up with a dark red, green, and brown colour scheme. Totally not me. But it's looking better these days:
I brought the little white chair in from the porch -- it was nice out there, but I really like having it inside. I'm planning on using the leftover fabric from when I hemmed up the curtains to make a slipcover for the footstool. The two smaller pictures are from Sasek's This Is London; I scanned in my favourite pages and printed them out.
The big window. I'm not sure if you can see Beany on the bottom shelf there, but she usually sits up top, keeping an eye on the local wildlife outside. And yes, the television is actually on in this photo! My cold and jetlagginess sent me to bed pretty early last night, which meant I woke up very early this morning, so I've been watching cooking shows. Man, American celeb chefs are annoying, aren't they? So loud.
And the other window -- I just ironed and hemmed these curtains this morning. I wonder if this is a sign that I'm on the mend: I've not just been sitting in front of the television (=impossible); I've been hemming curtains, making rolls/buns from scratch, and mixing up some veggie sloppy joe filling for lunch. I am very busy and important, after all -- no time to be sick!
18 Oct 2007: Home Again and Happy
You might not have noticed I was out of the country, what with the fact that I totally forgot to mention it and the irregularity of posts even when I'm safe at home. But rest assured that my absence didn't go unnoticed by everybody:
No, the cats haven't learned fancy lettering. I think the best part was that I knew exactly where these flowers came from; if you know the giver, you might be able to guess too. Traveling around the world used to be more exciting when I had fewer boys and pets to miss while I was away.
I flew to the UK the Sunday before last, got in that Monday morning, and on Tuesday I was back on a plane, this time to Frankfurt. The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of the largest international book fairs, and before you start in with your envy and excited remarks, it's nothing like the book fairs you used to go to in your school gymnasium. This year was pretty good, though: deals were done; German comics were bought; entirely too much food was et.
And speaking of food, there was no shortage of delightful things to consume, but it was so far from what I'm used to eating that it's left me feeling pretty miserable. I started getting a cold a couple of days ago, and I'm putting it down to the drop in my daily intake of iron and vitamin C while I was away. See, at home, I eat mostly green veg and fruit -- apparently other people do not eat this way, particularly people who run restaurants.
So even though I felt very bedraggled this morning, I made my way to the supermarket to stock up on perishables. Kale has never looked so tasty. I even bought a crown of broccoli, since I thought my plants had all bloomed (if you've never grown broccoli, the florets turn into little yellow flowers if left on the plant). I double checked when I got back, and of course there were about three servings of edible florets on the plants. Home-grown broccoli in the middle of October -- nothing strange about that.
Despite having had some really nice times while I was away, I've never been so happy to get back home. That's a good sign, though. Me and Minnesota are pals (I'll remember I said that when I'm cursing the winter).
01 Oct 2007: More About Food
How far can you make a bag of free bread go? S and I took a grab bag of day old bread from French Meadow, right before they closed for the night, and it turns out that it can go pretty far. Saturday morning we had french toast from thick slices of ciabatta (with homemade maple-apple sauce and almonds -- delicious!), for lunch we had baguette sandwiches; there was peanut butter toast on Sunday, and this morning I managed to work the last bit into my breakfast:
Because it's only been in the last year that I've really got into cooking meals, I'm still fascinated by the way my tastes change with the seasons. I think when you live on a diet of boxed or ready meals, the seasons sort of come and go without making any difference, but that's not so when you're standing in front of a stove.
Last winter and spring were all about big batches of soup to last the week and full plates that held a variety of foods. Over the summer, I simplified, and I ate a lot of sandwiches and wraps and veggie burgers -- paired with a lot of fruit smoothies.
But this is what I've been craving lately:
Tempeh, mushrooms, zucchini, and black beans, with cooked kale and chard. And mashed (white) sweet potatoes. The photo's not great, due to steam and a cloudy day, but it basically amounts to a hot salad. I swear I could eat this once a day, every day, for at least a few weeks. Change out the sweet potatoes for any other starch, but the greens and the protein are magic together. And, of course, it's ridiculously easy to throw together.
I bought chard from the supermarket for the first time in months -- the garden is slowing down. I've actually suddenly got quite a few tomatoes sitting on my window sill, along with a red pepper; I think roast tomato soup might be on the menu tomorrow. One of my butternut squashes mysteriously disappeared last week (mischievous animal or mischievous child?), so I'm keeping a close eye on the other two that are thisclose to being ready to pick. Because squashes are definitely autumn eating.