99% Curry

I was going to title this "Curry for Poor People" but decided to be TIMELY instead.

This took about 45 minutes, start to finish, with cheap & frozen ingredients. I got the tofu on sale for a buck a pound. I buy onions, frozen veggies, oil and rice in bulk from Cash & Carry. Curry paste, coconut milk & garlic from the Asian grocery up the street. Probably a total of $5 or $6 for the portions of ingredients used, so about $1.25-$1.50 for a meal.

This uses the Moosewood method of cooking short grain brown rice because it makes it a million times more awesome (separate grains with a firm bite rather than a ball of mush).

Curry pastes are different so see how much the package recommends for a pound of 'meat' or veggies, and use that. You can always add more if it's not tasty/spicy enough.

Makes 4 large servings.

5 tsp olive oil, divided
1 cup short-grain brown rice (or carb of choice)
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 lb frozen tofu
1 lb frozen veggies of choice
1/4 cup favorite vegan curry paste (I used panang)
1/2 can coconut milk

1. Defrost the frozen tofu in the microwave (2 turns of 5 minutes on low/defrost should do).
   
2. Wash the rice thoroughly. Heat 1 tsp oil in a medium or large pot over high heat. Add the rice and stir constantly for 1 minute. Add 2 cups of cold water. Stir and cover. When steam escapes from the lid, turn the heat off. Set a timer for five minutes. When the timer for the rice goes off, turn the rice on simmer and set a timer for 35 minutes.
   
3. Drain the tofu package, then squeeze the excess liquid out with your hands or between two small plates (no need to be gentle with the tofu, but don't break the plates). Cube the tofu.
   
4. Heat 2 tsp oil in a large sautee pan on medium heat, then add the tofu to the sautee pan and let sit for a few minutes. Start flipping the tofu cubes over to check and see if they are turning golden brown, even lightly. If they are, start flipping the cubes over. Feel free to squash the water out. Once a few sides of the cubes are browned, set tofu aside on a plate for later.
   
5. In the same sautee pan, heat 2 tsp oil. Add onion and sautee until it starts to soften. Add garlic, sautee until fragrant. Add frozen veggies & stir. Add 1/4 cup of water, stir, and cover.
   
6. When the veggies start to boil, remove the cover and cook until veggies are softened/defrosted. Add curry paste & stir well. Add tofu, stir. Add coconut milk plus half a can of water (1/2 or 3/4 of a cup, depending on how thick your coconut milk is). Reduce heat to simmer, let cook for five to ten minutes depending on your patience.
   
7. When the rice timer goes off, turn off the heat and let it set for ten minutes. At this point, the curry and the rice should both be done. If the curry is too thin, cook for a few more minutes, uncovered. If it's too thick, add water.
   
8. NOM.
   

Bay Area Adopts Historic Climate-Change Rules

A great step forward, it sounds like. The wording makes it sound like it could be a bit subjective, so I'm curious to see how future projects will pan out. In the case of an area as densely populated and expensive as the Bay Area, it seems that smart, adaptive building combined with focused restoration projects elsewhere may be the better solution than banning all development.

Bay Area Adopts Historic Climate-Change Rules - The Bay Citizen

Reading list of the day

Sorry for the radio silence lately. Work, lovely weather, friends in town and general stress-related activities have made my internet time less productive.

Two different items about relocating to prevent future disasters, one on the East Coast post-Irene:

After the Flood: Hard choices for communities and citizens

and one about an island village in Alaska:

As waves lap at their doorsteps, Alaskan islanders take on climate polluters

Also, I have an interview at FEMA on Thursday before I fly out to Charlotte for my friend's wedding. Wish me luck!

Maybe It's Time to Start Listening to Tom Low

This is an excellent article on New Urbanism's take on sprawl, with a bonus of being about my hometown of Charlotte:

Maybe It's Time to Start Listening to Tom Low - Charlotte Magazine - July 2011 - Charlotte, NC

The firm they refer to, DPZ, and its co-founder, Andres Duany, are the reason why I'm a planner. Six years ago I went to the US Green Building Council's GreenBuild Expo in Atlanta, GA. Ayako and I met up there to look for environmentally-friendly product design jobs, but the expo floor was filled was stalls hawking bamboo flooring and high-efficiency HVAC systems--nothing for high-style consumer product designers.

So, we spent most of our time attending lectures. I continually found myself drawn to urban planning topics. I vaguely remembered learning about planning senior year at CMU, when PennFutures protested the building of a tolled highway by offering an alternative project that boulevarded existing street networks (sound familiar, Seattle?). Ayako, and her then-boyfriend Ryan, went to mostly different lectures, and thus I found myself sitting alone in the back of a large auditorium listening to Andres Duany talk about New Urbanism.

He explained the basic tenets of New Urbanism and how they sought to imitate, and update, old town centers. Then he compared the functions of those centers - open space, gathering places, entertainment - to the specialized rooms being offered in Texas McMansions built on the outskirts of town. Massive homes, 5,000 square feet and more, with personal theater rooms and sun-filled breakfast nooks that resembled outdoor cafes. Huge lawns, in the desert, in the middle of nowhere.

Meanwhile, he says, the owners of these homes will be stuck in traffic for over an hour to get back into the city for work or services, where they will pass by movie theaters, parks and outdoor cafes. Then an hour through terrifying, stressful, frustrating traffic to arrive home cranky, missing two full hours of time with their kids, for the privilege of having a private movie theater, huge lawn and cafe that they don't have time to use.

"The lifestyle of the American middle class is the number one thing ruining the environment," he stated baldly*. It was like a light switch went on in my head. I don't know that he's 100% right, but he's close enough. I lived that life, I know those people. He's right, I said. If I want to do something for the environment, designing environmentally-friendly products that will be purchased once is next to useless if the people buying them are living in 5000 square foot homes with gigantic lawns in the middle of a desert. The real opportunity for change, for helping people and the environment, is in where and how people live their everyday lives. Those are the effects that add up, because it's not just millions of products, it's millions of people doing the same thing, over and over again, every day of their lives.

Sitting in the back of that auditorium I felt my perception shift, and feelings of joy and determination filled me. I had been saying for years that I didn't want to go back to school until I knew what I wanted to do. Until then, it was Starbucks and fruitless applications to design firms where, deep down, I didn't really want to work. School is difficult, expensive and worthless if you don't believe in what you're doing. Now, I knew. I felt sure. As he wrapped up his lecture, my mind was whirring, planning out the next few years of my life.

Now, six years later, I have a master's degree in Urban Planning. I've written a thesis on the relationship between dense development and the ability of natural systems to adapt to climate change. I have three years of planning experience. And it's all because of a single 90-minute lecture by Andres Duany.

*This is not an exact quote - it was six years ago.

Weed control

I just spent almost two hours pulling various weeds - mostly vines - out of the 3-foot walkway between our house and the neighbor's fence. Wondering if there were any easier control methods, a quick googling led me to King County's noxious weed photo identification page. Here's what I have in my backyard:

-bindweed. HATE THIS STUFF. I think it might be hedge rather than field, luckily.
-Rush Skeletonweed. Sounds badass; isn't.
-bittersweet nightshade. Also sounds badass; kind of is.
-English ivy. Hate this stuff, too.
-Herb Robert. Actually I like this stuff. One of its nicknames is "Death come quickly", which is badass. In Washington it's called Stinky Bob because it smells like burning tires when you crush the leaves. Still kinda badass, but in a dive bar sort of way.
-Nipplewort. Heh. Hehehe.

Sorry for anyone who's actually reading this. This is mostly just to keep track of things I have.

Can Underground Water Cool City Houses?

Reading List!

Can Underground Water Cool City Houses? | This Big City

Vegan Southern-style meal, and why factory meat is terrible for everyone

This article covers a lot of ground about why people go vegetarian, or why spending more money on quality meat is important: How the meat industry turned abuse into a business model | Grist

I've said multiple times that I don't expect most people to go vegetarian, let alone vegan. What I would like to see is people buy better meat, less often. Spend the same amount of money, eat less meat, have that meat be delicious and healthy (for the animals, the workers, the environment, and you).

I figure the least I can do is offer some yum meatless meals for those who feel lost at the concept. Here's what I made the other night. It'd be perfect for a True Blood watching party, as it's vaguely Southern-style food.

Vegan Southern Greens

2 tsp cooking oil
1 medium onion, coarse chopped
1 TBSP minced garlic
2 LBS of washed, chopped greens (Collard, mustard or turnip greens, spinach, kale - any mixture works. Trader Joe's sells a big bag of Southern Greens that's perfect - use 2 in this recipe)
3/4 cup vegetable broth (sub water or wine, just add more salt)
2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
2 TBSP rice vinegar (sub: red or white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar)
salt & pepper to taste
Tabasco sauce to taste (optional)
2 tsp sesame oil, to finish (sub liquid smoke or smoked salt/paprika)

1. Heat oil in your biggest stew pot or wok on medium-high heat. Add onions & sauté until partially translucent.
   
2. Add garlic & sauté until fragrant.
   
3. Start adding handfuls of greens and mixing top-to-bottom. As they cook down, add more greens until they're all in the pot.
   
4. Add the broth and bring to a boil. Stir greens in broth until they're fully wilted (they should reduce by 80% or more).
   
5. Add the red pepper, vinegar, salt, pepper & Tabasco & stir.
   
6. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook uncovered for 30+ minutes, until the greens are tender but not falling apart.
   
7. Taste & add any extra seasonings as needed. Turn off the heat and stir in the sesame oil.
   

Serve with a slotted spoon. They'll be soupy, so either serve with something to soak up the broth or strain it for the next time you make rice or soup. While the greens were simmering, I made a box of Zatarain's Dirty Rice (Jambalaya would work) and in place of meat, drained, washed and mixed in a can of black beans and a can of black-eyed peas (sub kidney, garbanzo or white beans). I feel ok about using Zatarain's once in a while, because they're a New Orleans-based company and there's not too many sketch ingredients as processed food goes, but if you want you can make your own from scratch - I don't like TVP so I would still sub in beans.

Serve side by side with some limeade, sweet tea, bourbon or a mint julep and watch you some "vamperrs".

The Self-Sustaining, Solar-Powered Emergency Shelter

The Self-Sustaining, Solar-Powered Emergency Shelter: We’re Going to Need It - Environment - GOOD

YES.

Dutch-influenced New Orleans Water Management

I do agree with the style that the Dutch have taken, in terms of using natural systems to their best advantage (they are cheaper, durable and scalable in the long run, whereas most manmade infrastructure can be costly to maintain and even more difficult to upgrade). I'm not sure how easily and quickly they'll be able to implement it, based on the typical response to government in the area, with good reason.

The Dutch approach partially depends on cooperative agreement and large scale land-use changes. If they're able to couch their solutions by taking an urban design approach (i.e. canals or parks) they may have a better shot. Perhaps New Orleans citizens are more willing to try new and different things, since the old ways failed spectacularly. Or perhaps they're still gunshy. I could understand either, and the architects and planners should be prepared for both concerns, if they're using a combination of those approaches. I hope they're able to make the choices they want to, and they're able to communicate their intentions clearly and not in engineer-speak.

Architecture Firm Waggonner & Ball Tapped for New Orleans Water Management Project | News | Architectural Record

“The Daily Rind”, a Better Way to Plan the Day

Possible scheduling solution, which I desperately need:

“The Daily Rind”, a Better Way to Plan the Day — A. King in Society via Lifehacker.