Christmas Eve hors d'oeuvres

My family tradition is a dinner of hors d'oeuvres on Christmas Eve. All the rich, heavy, trashy things you have to moderate at parties are suddenly unlimited and in excess. It's a great celebration and it keeps you full until late the next morning when either the cinnamon rolls or breakfast casserole are done.

The past several years I've been making vegan equivalents of a few dips so I can have something, as the usual offerings are heavy on the meat, cheese and sour cream. My standards are: 1) hot cheeze dip: Follow-your-heart cheddar mixed with half a can of Rotel (chopped tomatoes + jalapenos/green chiles) and melted on the stove, to be eaten with tortilla chips; and 2) onion dip: instant onion soup/dip mix with a container of sour supreme. I'm usually fighting for a corner of the kitchen and begging for rides to the 'hippie' store so my options are generally limited.

This is the first year ever I haven't been with my family for Christmas, so to keep me from getting too sad about it I decided to host my own Christmas Eve hors d'oeuvres party with friends.

It was a great success! As the only vegan I was only concerned with feeding myself, and everyone else was welcome to bring their favorites. Friends brought veggie plates, fruit plates, cheese plates, crackers, spiced nuts, walnut spread, baguettes, cookies, beer, wine and bourbon to spike the rice nog. It ended up being an impressive spread and a lot of fun, as we sat down to watch Die Hard and munched on Chex Mix.

Grace made My New Roots' Warm Cabbage Salad (the goat cheese was in a bowl on the side). It was delicious and I'm having the leftovers alongside some wonton-wrapper-perogi and caramelized onions for dinner this week.

In addition to all of the above, I made a hot spinach artichoke spread/dip. I tend to make variations on this often, usually without the dip mix and cream cheeze, but added both for the special occasion. Half a can of coconut milk instead of the cashew cream will still add a nice creamy, smooth consistency without actually tasting of coconut.

Hot Spinach Artichoke Dip/Spread

• 1/4 cup raw cashews
  
• 2 garlic cloves
  
• 1 can cannellini beans (white beans), drained & rinsed
  
• 1 tsp miso paste mixed into 2 Tbsp water
  
• 1 tsp lemon juice
  
• 1 package Simply Organic spinach dip mix
  
• 1 tsp basil flakes
  
• 1 can artichoke hearts, drained
  
• 1 cup frozen chopped spinach, thawed & squeezed (optional)
  
• black pepper
  
• 1 package Tofutti Cream Cheeze
  
• 2 Tbsp nutritional yeast (optional)

1. Soak the cashews in enough warm water to cover them, at least 30 mins but several hours/overnight is better.
   
2. Preheat the oven to 350F. Put cashews and the soaking water, plus garlic cloves, in food processor and liquefy until it resembles (stinky) heavy cream. This may take 5-10 minutes of processing and pauses to scrape the sides and the paste off the bottom. A little 'grit' is fine.
   
3. Add beans, miso and juice and process. Add water as needed to thin enough for beans to process (hummus consistency).
   
4. Add dip mix, basil flakes, artichoke hearts, and thawed/squeezed spinach. Process until mixed.
   
5. Add the cream cheeze, nutritional yeast, and black pepper to taste. Puree until smooth. If the mixture is too thick for the processor, dribble in water.
   
6. Pour dip into a shallow baking dish (oval or 8x8") and bake until the edges begin to brown, about 20 minutes.
   

Vegan Gluten Free Chex Mix

• 1/2 cup of margarine
  
• 4 1/2 tsp of Worcestershire sauce (see recipe below)
  
• 1 1/4 tsp of season salt
  
• 2 2/3 cup of Rice Chex
  
• 2 2/3 cup of Corn Chex
  
• 2 2/3 cup of Honey Nut Chex
  
• 1 cup salted mixed nuts

1. Preheat oven to 250F.
   
2. Pour the cereals and nuts into a clean paper grocery bag, fold over the top and shake well until mixed.
   
3. In a large baking pan (8x13 is usually tight, a roasting pan is great), melt the margarine either in the preheating oven or on two stove burners on low heat.
   
4. Mix sauce and salt into margarine and stir.
   
5. Pour cereal/nut mix into baking dish and mix with the margarine, flipping and stirring to coat as much as possible.
   
6. Bake for 60 minutes, stirring every 10 or 15 minutes.
   
7. Store in paper grocery bag in the freezer.
   

Vegan Gluten Free Worcestershire Sauce
adapted from this recipe

• 6 Tablespoons water
  
• 4 Tablespoons wheat-free tamari or soy sauce
  
• 2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
  
• 4 TBSP of regular molasses + 1 TBSP water (or 6 TBSP brown rice syrup)
  
• 1 teaspoon blackstrap molasses
  
• 1/4 tsp tamarind paste (optional)
  
• 1 teaspoon powdered ginger
  
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
  
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
  
• a pinch of onion powder
  
• a pinch of powdered cloves or pumpkin pie spice

1. Pour all ingredients in a jar with a tight lid and shake well until mixed. Store in fridge and use measure-for-measure to sub for regular Worcestershire sauce, or add a little extra of this. Shake well before using.

Happy Festivus!

I like to have tea with cats in Japan because I'm shy

Perhaps I should move to Japan after all. Cat cafés? Fantastic idea. Maybe animal shelters should coordinate with cafés and feature their pets. Or something. I don't now how it would work here.

I'd rather go to a cat café than a "family friendly" one.

Meow Meow Meow | VICE: "United States" 'via Blog this'

Wild Rice Pilaf (Hunger Games)

So I'm in this Book Club that my friend Grace started. It's all girls and we have had some pretty excellent discussions, both about books and Big Important Things. Mostly I joined to get me reading again, which in a sort of post-traumatic way I stopped doing after grad school.

ANYHOO we've been doing potluck book discussions and since the Hunger Games, as you can infer from the title, deals a LOT with food, it was themed around the hearty foraged foods in the book. The party was a feast - leek and potato soup, two hearty veggie stews with mushrooms, root veggies, kale, peas, carrots, etc. Several rounds of goat cheese, some wrapped in herbs, with crackers. Venison meatballs (these last two, I did not partake, obvs). Homemade tomato jam, homemade berry jam on fresh home-baked wheat bread, red cabbage and apple slaw, wild greens salad with edible flowers, caramel corn with pepitas, and mulled wine. My contribution was wild rice pilaf - I tried to base it off of one recipe but I kind of messed it up and didn't have some of the ingredients, so I added a bunch of white jasmine rice that I made just in case and it came out perfectly.

I'm also going for low salt due to my blood pressure so you might need to add more salt, especially if you use no-salt broth or water.

3/4 cup (6 oz) wild rice
4 scallions
1 tablespoon oil
2 cups or more broth (I used imitation chicken flavoring + water)
1 cup white jasmine rice
2 cups frozen baby peas
8 mushrooms (6 large, 8 med or 12 small)
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon celery salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup chopped or sliced almonds, toasted (see step 4)

Directions

1. Wash the rice thoroughly, changing the water several times. Cut off the green parts of the scallions and set aside. Chop the white part of the scallions fine.
   
2. Heat oil in a large saucepan. Add the minced white scallion and saute until tender. Add the rice and two cups broth. Bring to a boil, stir once and reduce the heat. Cover tightly and cook over low heat until the rice is tender and the liquid is absorbed, about thirty-five minutes. If necessary add more broth as the rice cooks. (Note - it took me about 45 minutes for the rice to cook, so leave extra time).
   
3. In a separate pot, prepare jasmine rice according to directions (usually: rinse rice, boil 1 1/2 cups of water, add rice and stir, bring to a boil, reduce heat & cover, simmer 10-15 minutes, let sit off heat for 5-10 minutes).
   
4. Meanwhile, slice the almonds and lightly toast them. Cut the green scallion stems diagonally into two-inch lengths. Cut the mushrooms into thin slices.
   
5. Five minutes before the wild rice is done, heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the scallion stems, peas, mushrooms, and almonds and saute only until the mushrooms are tender and peas are hot.
   
6. Transfer both of the cooked rices and vegetable mixture to a casserole. Add salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle with toasted almonds. Mix lightly and keep hot for serving in a very low oven.
   

The next book club selection is a local Seattle food blogger (she owns Delancey -fancy pizza- and is known on the 'net as Orangette): A Homemade Life. It includes several recipes, but I'll be hosting it the day after Thanksgiving so we'll just have leftovers. Simplicity!

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".