...but we would....we would just buy more expensive ketchup to go with it, say the Barenaked Ladies.
I'll raise your fancy ketchup and see you two cups of cashews to multiply the cost of "Kraft dinner" eightfold.
My friend and former California running buddy (who finished a half-marathon at the Wild Animal Park and is to be commended!) Jessica Antoniades found this recipe for a cashew-based faux cheese sauce in a back issue of the cookbook put out by the Pacific Beach Food Coop (or some other such name...I probably have it entirely wrong, since I never visited it myself, sadly). It called for a few ingredients that are in a faux alfredo I saw in another cookbook and thought a mashup might be in order, but I have a strict cooking pact with my hubs that I will not fiddle with a recipe until I try it *as written* and I tried this one as written today. It came out fairly well, but it will need tinkering.
In the interest of this post's longevity, we will call this Vegan Mac With Pantry Staples because most people probably have a lot of this stuff in the cupboard already, if they cook much.
Here is what the recipe (as written in the coop cookbook) calls for:
WARNING: CONTAINS NUTS. (With the saucy title of this post and the recipe, the inclusion of nuts thing isn't super clear so there it is in all caps.)
3 cups macaroni (cooked al dente, however your pasta box directs you)
1 large red bell pepper (I'll admit: I didn't have one, so I left it out; I imagine it would have mellowed the pickley tang of the next ingredient...
1.5 tsp turmeric (the great panacea which has the added benefit of naturally turning this confection Super Cheez Whiz orangey yellow)
2 cups cashews (Trader Joes has a bag of Raw Cashew Bits and Pieces that is two cups precisely, to make this simple)
2.25 cups water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tbsp sunflower oil (I only had sunflower seeds on hand, so I used those)
1 teaspoon onion power (not something I have around so I just threw in a quarter of a small onion)
1.5 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
(Hubs might be a tad disappointed with all the substitutions)
For topping if you choose to bake in the oven: 2 cups breadcrumbs
If you are going to bake this up, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. You can cook your macaroni while the over preheats.
Whiz everything but the pasta in a blender. We have a fairly large blender, and it filled the whole thing; the volume of the sauce is about 1 quart. I turned on the blender and busied myself with other things; you want to give it time to get smooth.
When the pasta is done, drain it. Combine the sauce with the pasta in an 8x8' baking dish, cover an bake for 45 minutes. Uncover and top with breadcrumbs and bake for 5 more minutes.
I made the sauce and poured it directly on raw julienned zuchini "noodles" and warmed it in the microwave and it was great. I think the red pepper would have added more depth to the flavor. I want to experiment putting some nutritional yeast flakes in, too; they have a cheezy flavor sans fromage. Expect that as part of my next tinkering.
If you try this, post and tell me how it turned out!
Monday, June 25, 2012
My Apologies to Jesus, My Accountabilabuddy
Dear Jesus,
I know you know I have been coming over to one of your branch locations in Natick lately. At my uncle's funeral, I connected the dots and found the man who was wearing the glow necklace, talking to my dad about my grandfather's death. It's a great story, but it's a little off-topic at the moment. I've been at his church for the past several weeks, in case you were worried I was signing in to the wrong homeroom.
Back to focus. First of all, I must confess that I have sinned against you, as we say we at mass together "by what [I] have done and by what [I] have left undone." I have left this project undone. I am truly sorry, and I humbly repent, but I also MUST explain.
You see, we moved back home to Massachusetts, and that was quite an undertaking. I won't get into the gory details. You are omniscient. You have license to see these things as you want to see them. You must have been as bored as an editor who watches installed camera footage for a lesser-scripted reality TV show, much as you love every sheep in your flock. You know it was a lot of shuffling boxes and getting dirty and yelling at movers for various transgressions (which I asked for you to forgive at the time; I hope those applications are moving through the absolution review process swiftly but one couldn't actually pick up the stuff and the other wouldn't let me check my inventory-I think it was fairly righteous anger).
Anyway, since Easter was mostly synched to pagan holidays as a way of making the conversion process more natural (if the history I have been told is to be believed), I was hoping I could get a do-over and devote the NEXT 40 days to the project.
I have a recipe some friends are interested in seeing, and I am going to send them here to find it and we can renew our commitment.
What do you say?
Much Love,
Abby
P.S. I am reading Living Biblically for One Year right now and really learning a lot from it about the origins of our traditions. Faaacinating.
I know you know I have been coming over to one of your branch locations in Natick lately. At my uncle's funeral, I connected the dots and found the man who was wearing the glow necklace, talking to my dad about my grandfather's death. It's a great story, but it's a little off-topic at the moment. I've been at his church for the past several weeks, in case you were worried I was signing in to the wrong homeroom.
Back to focus. First of all, I must confess that I have sinned against you, as we say we at mass together "by what [I] have done and by what [I] have left undone." I have left this project undone. I am truly sorry, and I humbly repent, but I also MUST explain.
You see, we moved back home to Massachusetts, and that was quite an undertaking. I won't get into the gory details. You are omniscient. You have license to see these things as you want to see them. You must have been as bored as an editor who watches installed camera footage for a lesser-scripted reality TV show, much as you love every sheep in your flock. You know it was a lot of shuffling boxes and getting dirty and yelling at movers for various transgressions (which I asked for you to forgive at the time; I hope those applications are moving through the absolution review process swiftly but one couldn't actually pick up the stuff and the other wouldn't let me check my inventory-I think it was fairly righteous anger).
Anyway, since Easter was mostly synched to pagan holidays as a way of making the conversion process more natural (if the history I have been told is to be believed), I was hoping I could get a do-over and devote the NEXT 40 days to the project.
I have a recipe some friends are interested in seeing, and I am going to send them here to find it and we can renew our commitment.
What do you say?
Much Love,
Abby
P.S. I am reading Living Biblically for One Year right now and really learning a lot from it about the origins of our traditions. Faaacinating.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Perpetual Green Onions
For $2, I picked up some good-looking organic scallions at the grocery store (not a hip farmer's market, but I was in a hurry). I already had one bunch of scallions that I had tried to cultivate based on an idea I saw on Pintrest and now cannot find that link to provide it here. The directions instructed to stick the scallions in water and leave them alone to regenerate themselves.
They did...for a while. I had to post back on the Pintrest post to learn how to perk my original bunch back up since they faded from a robust dark green to a still-sprouting-but-sickly yellow. This latest bunch replaces one that flavored 10 meals (which quite reasonably my husband threw away to make room for these new ones). For today's post, I am taking it's inaurgural portrait, today, leap day 2012. Here it is!
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Oh Oscar!
I did a BUNCH of projects this weekend that I could write up and that would be instructable to flesh out this blog entry, but since this is my first week at this, I would like to effect some Sunday story time and save those projects to be written up this week.
It's Oscar night, and normally, I don't care, but tonight, we went to an Oscar party at an amazing house in LaMesa that felt just like Hollywood with the miserable narrow winding roads and impossible parking and all...but San Diegans have clearly thought some things through and made those BMW-commerical-look-at-the-amazing-handling stretches one way. The view was incredible. The show was fun, I laughed out loud four times in a room with 30 people it who were not laughing. Apparently, I am not the life of the party, but I am proud of myself for having the confidence to crack up all alone (with backing from Joe). In all fairness, these are movie people and there was a very subtle joke just for the Breaking Bad fans in the room and I guess we two were the only ones.
Instead of nattering on about a project or the awards show, for posterity, I want to recount what I know about my grandfather and grandmother, whom I have never met. Dewy-eyed aunts, uncles, and cousins who knew them passed down stories about them at summer gatherings when it was dark outside and the bottles were nearly empty and I fought to endure the persistent mosquitoes in the Berkshires or in Maine to hold on for one more vignette. From them I learned my "Grampa Timmy" died in a boating accident when my father was just 16 years old and that picture of my dad talking to a bald older gentleman wearing a glow stick crown around his tanned scalp was a time when the story was retold. My grandmother passed away in her 60's of breast cancer during a time when cancer was an affliction that it was impolite to discuss. They left behind drawings, paintings, and stories that give little windows to who they were. I have collected as many of them as I can. Each one is small and the details are fragile, open to exaggeration and editing from telling and retelling and also as time goes by.
I'll start with a little one.
My grandmother came from good stock in the Washington D.C. area. Her father (like mine, who was her son) was a banker. He wore starched shirts and dressed conservatively and acted prudently (and yet for some reason also kept a pet monkey in the house...I have seen a photo, but I don't know all the details). Her mother was a Mayflower descendant who, legend has it, had a pair of pomeranians who would walk under her skirts with her and jump out at people. Though this sounds like an exaggeration, the house was generally regarded as a wildlife sanctuary.
My grandfather was the son of a pair of German doctors in Rothenburg ob der Tauber who left him an orphan in his teens during the early 1900's (as I understand). He came to live in New York City with his Uncle Robert and Aunt Edna. I know little more, except that when he returned from his service in World War I, he pursued a dream to follow the artistic footsteps of Paul Gaugin and explore the Marquesas Islands. During his time in the Marquesas Islands, he picked up the name "Timmy" which I know from the way my Japanese instructors pronounced my maiden name was probably a corruption on the pronunciation of our shared last name: Schmidt.
My grandmother met this charming Timmy Schmidt in the 1920's at a party in New York after he returned from his fairly unproductive painting sojourn to the Marquesas and Tahiti. I don't know how much time elapsed, but they agreed to marry.
Another family legend has it that to obtain the marriage license, my grandparents presented themselves to the City of New York using their legal names, Marian Bradford Olds and Oscar Friedrich Schmidt. Upon learning her groom's true name, my horrified grandmother cried: "Oscar? Oscar is the name of a *seal*! Why, if I had known your name was Oscar, I never would have agreed to marry you!" However, she had already agreed and so they did.
This happened before there was an Academy Awards (though just barely) and I wonder if she would have reacted differently if she could have thought of my grandfather as a statuesque man, made of gold instead of the circus seal from popular cinema.
I'd like to thank the Academy...perhaps over time they changed her mind somewhat that Oscar is not such a bad name after all.
It's Oscar night, and normally, I don't care, but tonight, we went to an Oscar party at an amazing house in LaMesa that felt just like Hollywood with the miserable narrow winding roads and impossible parking and all...but San Diegans have clearly thought some things through and made those BMW-commerical-look-at-the-amazing-handling stretches one way. The view was incredible. The show was fun, I laughed out loud four times in a room with 30 people it who were not laughing. Apparently, I am not the life of the party, but I am proud of myself for having the confidence to crack up all alone (with backing from Joe). In all fairness, these are movie people and there was a very subtle joke just for the Breaking Bad fans in the room and I guess we two were the only ones.
Instead of nattering on about a project or the awards show, for posterity, I want to recount what I know about my grandfather and grandmother, whom I have never met. Dewy-eyed aunts, uncles, and cousins who knew them passed down stories about them at summer gatherings when it was dark outside and the bottles were nearly empty and I fought to endure the persistent mosquitoes in the Berkshires or in Maine to hold on for one more vignette. From them I learned my "Grampa Timmy" died in a boating accident when my father was just 16 years old and that picture of my dad talking to a bald older gentleman wearing a glow stick crown around his tanned scalp was a time when the story was retold. My grandmother passed away in her 60's of breast cancer during a time when cancer was an affliction that it was impolite to discuss. They left behind drawings, paintings, and stories that give little windows to who they were. I have collected as many of them as I can. Each one is small and the details are fragile, open to exaggeration and editing from telling and retelling and also as time goes by.
I'll start with a little one.
My grandmother came from good stock in the Washington D.C. area. Her father (like mine, who was her son) was a banker. He wore starched shirts and dressed conservatively and acted prudently (and yet for some reason also kept a pet monkey in the house...I have seen a photo, but I don't know all the details). Her mother was a Mayflower descendant who, legend has it, had a pair of pomeranians who would walk under her skirts with her and jump out at people. Though this sounds like an exaggeration, the house was generally regarded as a wildlife sanctuary.
My grandfather was the son of a pair of German doctors in Rothenburg ob der Tauber who left him an orphan in his teens during the early 1900's (as I understand). He came to live in New York City with his Uncle Robert and Aunt Edna. I know little more, except that when he returned from his service in World War I, he pursued a dream to follow the artistic footsteps of Paul Gaugin and explore the Marquesas Islands. During his time in the Marquesas Islands, he picked up the name "Timmy" which I know from the way my Japanese instructors pronounced my maiden name was probably a corruption on the pronunciation of our shared last name: Schmidt.
My grandmother met this charming Timmy Schmidt in the 1920's at a party in New York after he returned from his fairly unproductive painting sojourn to the Marquesas and Tahiti. I don't know how much time elapsed, but they agreed to marry.
Another family legend has it that to obtain the marriage license, my grandparents presented themselves to the City of New York using their legal names, Marian Bradford Olds and Oscar Friedrich Schmidt. Upon learning her groom's true name, my horrified grandmother cried: "Oscar? Oscar is the name of a *seal*! Why, if I had known your name was Oscar, I never would have agreed to marry you!" However, she had already agreed and so they did.
This happened before there was an Academy Awards (though just barely) and I wonder if she would have reacted differently if she could have thought of my grandfather as a statuesque man, made of gold instead of the circus seal from popular cinema.
I'd like to thank the Academy...perhaps over time they changed her mind somewhat that Oscar is not such a bad name after all.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Hips Lie: Stick Shift Lesson...Cancelled
So my big step towards expanding my horizons today was meant to be my very first professional stick shift driving lesson, but the instructor called this morning and said the magic car had been rear-ended and we will have to wait until next week. Stay tuned. I will be posting ample warning of my next foray (and in the meantime, the good people who work Sundays at the Burnham Institute needn't worry I will be practicing in their cul-de-sac any longer--they can get in to cure cancer in peace!)
With time to spend in the morning and the realization that jogging back and forth to spin class would be 12 miles roundtrip (starting from a cold 3 miles per week as I am), I decided to jog up to my first Zumba instead. I had done a couple step explanation tutorials on YouTube, but I had never taken the leap to observing or participating in a class until this morning.
I am not a well-coordinated dancer, and thankfully, instructor Luiz (probably not his real name to protect his innocence) said this was fitness, not a dance class (giving us participants license to make ourselves foolish freely). However, during the first song, our arm choreography was clearly the Macarena, a known dance. The *music* wasn't as familiar or as reasonably paced as it was when Al Gore tried it. You remember how it went (read this to the beat...if you need to look up the tune, I think the band is Los Del Rios): one alligator put-your-arm-out-alligator put the other arm out and pause and-another-alligator, flip one over shake your hips flip the other arm alligator...hey! Macarena! I think you then put them on your hips. We appeared to skip some steps in class today, possibly in part because we whizzed through them so fast.
I knew already that remembering all the variety of moves for the benefit of this post would be nearly impossible so I jotted some choice ones down during the water break. Here is what I could recall before I had to concentrate harder on not smacking into the former back-up dancers for the Miami Sound Machine that surrounded me on every side (except the back--two doughy men were behind me):
Following the macarena, we danced to Nancy Sinatra's Boots Are Made For Walking. I was encouraged that a Rat Packer's daughter joined the soundtrack so I wouldn't feel so hopelessly rigid in the hips. I could dance to this, but I couldn't quite figure the legs out, which were important, as they shape the boots and play an active roll in the boots’ movement. The next song was sponsored by the letter "j" I know from my limited Spanish--they said "hota" an awful lot. If there is a Spanish homophone for the letter J, I don't know it. My Spanish phonics is at the second grade level and my Spanish vocabulary is smaller than my dog's vocabulary. We moved into a Bollywood number, which made me wonder about the size of the craft services tables for the massive Indian music video choruses. This was tough work! I have even more respect for these dancers, and I completely understand why they are all skinny. Next on the play list: a non-fire-safety–related techno song about stopping, dropping, and rolling. I could drop it, so I was getting into it. The water break happened, and after that, the pace slowed down to a beat the kids on Jersey Shore might beat up and there was a lot of twirling to the back of the room or the side, which made me conscious of being the line leader intermittently. I was only self-conscious to keep going because I thought, somewhere in that room, there MUST have been someone as lost as I, and if she saw me spinning in the wrong direction happily, she might stay and do the same. Confidence burns calories! We just have to keep moving.
Friday, February 24, 2012
What is a craft idiot?
Craft idiot: a person who knows so much about one thing, s/he knows virtually nothing about anything else.
I uttered something that sounded like “craft idiot” under my breath and a neighbor giggled in the elevator and said he was going to run home and register it as a domain name. Well, he didn’t. I thought about what I wanted to write about in my 40 day blogging challenge to myself, and I realized: I wanted to chronicle the little craft projects I often do that don’t get to see the light of day. I generally don’t get much coaching, and I often don’t have a background in the skills needed for the projects I pick…which would make me a “craft idiot” of another kind. The more I attempt, the less idiotic I will be and the less of a Marxist “craft idiot” as well. I take requests. Feel free to post a project you would like me to attempt and write up.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Mardi Gras Skittles Rum
Though it won't be useful for this Mardi Gras (since it's over and all), this may be useful for an upcoming adult party that warrants colored beverages, as Skittles come in so many colors.
Backstory: I don't really drink, so I haven't tasted this myself, but I decided to try this Pintrest project for three reasons: (a) the IT guy at work had to put up with a lot of help requests from me because my Excel was acting up (and he DOES drink, as it sort of goes with the territory of dealing with unrealistic requests on impossible deadlines and flared tempers over the crippling effect computers can have when they don't work), (b) I was out of cookie dough to make him cookies (the wholesome, consumable thank you note) and (c) very large bags of Skittles were available in the subsidized vending machine in the breakroom at work.
Assortments will vary, but I ended up with 90 purple, 114 yellow, and 118 green. Not an exacting scientist, I put each color into its own glass and covered the candies with 250ml of otherwise-unflavored rum (for those who aren't interested in doing too much math, just split a normal size rum bottle in threes).
Fun fact: Skittles are gelatin-free! The inner part of a Skittle is made of what works out to palm oil, so vegan friends who miss candy, Skittles may be an option! I don't know if the whole project is vegan because I just assume that rum doesn't involve meat or dairy.
The verdict: the Skittle rum was "good but strong" and both colleagues who sampled it (and are hoarding it away from others?) said it was delicious diluted with bubbly lemon-lime soda.
Rating this project:
Time: about an hour total hands on time: 20 minutes upfront to sort Skittles by color and put them in glasses with rum, 30-40 minutes carefully straining out the not-gelatin-but-certainly-not-desirable from the booze.
Difficulty: other than the draining, this was easy, passive and effective. It does require some special equipment (a metal sieve).
Overall, I would do this again for a party where color is important. These would make for fun Skittles-tinis: chill and pour, no shaker required.
Backstory: I don't really drink, so I haven't tasted this myself, but I decided to try this Pintrest project for three reasons: (a) the IT guy at work had to put up with a lot of help requests from me because my Excel was acting up (and he DOES drink, as it sort of goes with the territory of dealing with unrealistic requests on impossible deadlines and flared tempers over the crippling effect computers can have when they don't work), (b) I was out of cookie dough to make him cookies (the wholesome, consumable thank you note) and (c) very large bags of Skittles were available in the subsidized vending machine in the breakroom at work.
The particulars:
I puchased 5 "share" sized bags of Skittles and sorted them by color. I reserved the red and orange flavors since they allegedly taste like cough syrup, they are my husband's favorite, I thought I could use them for Valentine's Day (but didn't), and those aren't Mardi Gras colors anyway. They were delicious as movie snacks.
Assortments will vary, but I ended up with 90 purple, 114 yellow, and 118 green. Not an exacting scientist, I put each color into its own glass and covered the candies with 250ml of otherwise-unflavored rum (for those who aren't interested in doing too much math, just split a normal size rum bottle in threes).
You can see the cloud of the candy shell dissolving from the yellow ones already. A brief stir shortly after combining the candy and alcohol will release a cloud of color that would have been fun to photograph artistically, but I am not that handy with my camera yet. In lieu an etherial shot of swirling color, below is what the candies looked like after just a few minutes...the green ones had been shaken a little bit.
The rest of the "work" is mostly waiting. Give the Skittles at least one day, better TWO days to dissolve, shaking them every now and again to break up the clumps of Skittle mass. They WILL dissolve completely. There is no perishability to be concerned about, so you can leave these strewn about the house (though they are probably best kept together and explained a little to anyone you may happen to live with, in my limited experience) and not in the fridge.
Focusing: we must keep in mind the chewy center. As much as we love the chewy center, the chewy center includes an ingredient that just won’t dissolve, and this part needs to be filtered away. Per the suggestion of another online person giving a tutorial on the topic, paper towels work well for this task. In my opinion, they were not stellar, but the issue is more what needs to be accomplished than the means by which one does it: there is fat floating in there and fat clogs the pores of any filter. The particles aren’t big enough to be caught by a regular strainer, so a towel or coffee filter *is* required. I took a metal sieve, lined it with a doubled-up paper towel and poured in about half of a given color and busied myself with something else to do while it drained. When nothing else wanted to come out, I twisted the top of the paper towel and squeezed it out. Messy but effective. I went through about 6 paper towels.
Once I got to my last color, I tried what I will call a “Chicken Stock Solution”: I put it the unstrained mixture in the freezer for an hour (figuring the fat would congeal at the top and could be skimmed off, as you would do with fat on chicken stock) and tried filtering again. This worked even worse than before. Yes, the fat molecules clustered together and floated on the surface, but I could not pour around those clusters, and I created an even faster way to clog the filter right off the bat. Don’t try THAT at home.
I don't know why I took so many pictures of the beginning of the process and none of the end, but that would have been cooler if I had used some fancy bottle in which to present them. Instead, I just handed over the glasses to the IT guy, red lids and all.The verdict: the Skittle rum was "good but strong" and both colleagues who sampled it (and are hoarding it away from others?) said it was delicious diluted with bubbly lemon-lime soda.
Rating this project:
Time: about an hour total hands on time: 20 minutes upfront to sort Skittles by color and put them in glasses with rum, 30-40 minutes carefully straining out the not-gelatin-but-certainly-not-desirable from the booze.
Difficulty: other than the draining, this was easy, passive and effective. It does require some special equipment (a metal sieve).
Overall, I would do this again for a party where color is important. These would make for fun Skittles-tinis: chill and pour, no shaker required.
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