Summer fun!

Published on June 4, 2009 in food, hippie shit and pictures. 12 Comments Tags: .

I love summer so hard.  Eventually I will start bitching about the heat and refusing to leave the house unless there’s a pre-air conditioned car waiting for me, but even the hottest part of summer beats the crap out of winter.  Things are happening in the summer months.  Plants are growing and vegetables are ripening.  The riding lawn mower comes out of retirement.  My freckles start sprouting (freckle pride, represent!).  The dogs will actually stay outside for more than five minutes at a time.  Oh, and grilling because the preferred method of cooking.

I don’t eat frozen meat analogs very often, but when I do it’s usually a boca burger.  They remind me of the hamburgers we used to get in the cafeteria in junior high, probably because those things didn’t have a lick of meat in them either!  Also, this is one of the last pictures taken with my 50mm lens before I bounced my camera off of the bed and it broke in two.  Pour one out and hope that its replacement arrives post haste.

I started off this year by making a list on 43things.com…of 43 things I wanted to accomplish this year (big shock).  A lot of them went south when I found out my mother-in-law had breast cancer (like having a movie night every Sunday, hard for Brian and I to do when we weren’t in the same state!), but I have gotten a handful of the goals accomplished already.

A big one was to join a CSA.  There are plenty of CSA’s located in Nashville, but I could only find one that delivers to Clarksville.  I opted for a half share, and for this particular CSA that means a pick up every other week, not a half-box every week.  My first pick up was the day before I came home, so Brian went and picked up my ‘box of green crap’.  I was pretty excited to come home and see it!

I had already eaten half of the strawberries at this point.  There’s also radishes, onions, two english cucumbers, kale, collards, swiss chard, and that bag is an assortment of lettuces.  I’m not the biggest fan of leafy greens outside of spinach, but i’m eating them!  The first thing I made was a salad.  Way to perpetuate the vegan sterotype, Katie.

The dressing was made by me, with oregano from my garden (which I will take pictures of when it grows a little more).  I ate two bowls for dinner and went to bed a very happy person.  Don’t worry, I had a large pancake brunch with guests so I was not lacking in the ‘real’ food department that day.

I don’t think i’ve ever been so proud of a sandwich.  The tempeh bacon was left over from the previous days brunch, the lettuce was from the CSA box, I biked to get the tomatoes (as mentioned in my previous post, this involves hills and crazy assholes almost hitting me), and I made the bread myself rather than wait for my husband to get home so I could go buy vegan bread (there’s no vegan bread at the Kroger I got tomatoes from).  I don’t have any Veganaise so I used more of the dressing I made.  I don’t think there’s even been a sandwich in the history of sandwiches that tasted as wonderful.

One of the other things on my list was to put up a clothes line.  Just because.  I doubt it’ll make a big impact on our electric bill, but Brian and I have been trying to shave off as much from our monthly expenses as possible.  We got rid of our satellite dish, which costs as much (slightly more, even) as our car insurance, so that’s a big one.  We can’t even get local stations which sucks, but there’s hulu and uh, unscrupulous methods for watching my favorite shows. Also we have more dvds and video games than you can shake a stick at, so even if I wanted to park my ass on the couch for five hours every night, I have lots of stuff to keep me entertained.  Tangent.

Line dried clothes do end up stiff as hell, but I bring them inside and put them in the dryer with a dryer sheet for 20 minutes on low heat, and that softens them and gets all of the cat hair off (which you can see on all of the black stuff in the photo.)  But i’m sure that’s still saving a lot more electricity than drying them for an hour on normal/high heat.  It’s also less noisy so I can take afternoon naps in peace!

Bike rides and high fives.

Published on June 4, 2009 in biking. 2 Comments

I’ve been trying my hand at biking lately.  I spent the past month in Illinois, taking care of my mother-in-law while she beats the shit out of breast cancer.  Except that she is one tough broad, so she doesn’t need much caring.  So mostly I was stuck in a small town outside of my much larger home town, without a car.  So I started taking her bike out, and eventually realized that there was a bike trail two blocks from her house.  And it went all the way to Springfield!  The first time I went, I trucked it all the way to the end and back, nearly eighteen miles, with barely a break.  The second time I went I brought my camera and took it a little easier, stopping to take pictures of interesting points.

The trail ends in the gigantic chain store shopping area, behind Old Navy and next to a car wash.  There’s no place to sit down and I doubt they’d let me walk my bike through the car wash, so the second time I opted to just stop at this park about a half mile from the end.

On the way back from the park is basically an alley between two streets.  Some people have gardens, but this is the only one that was really worth stopping and taking a picture of. After this, the bike path goes along a main road and past a Sonic, which is nice because you can stop and sit at their covered tables and relax a bit.  It’s bad because Somic smells like funnel cake and depression.

Most of the bike path is smooth, flat, and tree lined so you get a light breeze.  But then you get to the part where they’re doing construction on the overpass and it’s a bit of a pain.  A bumpy, crotch numbing, dusty pain.  And hell no I did not get off of my bike and walk through a cloud of dust.

This is fairly close to the beginning, at this point my labia are pretty much begging me to let them take a break and the wind is going the wrong way.  So I stopped at a bench and took this picture, the trail used to be a railroad.  Now it’s situated between a lake and a creek, with the new Amtrak rail on the other side of the creek.  Then I heard shouting and realized that I was in the perfect setting for an axe murderer movie, and despite protests from my crotch, jumped back on the bike and headed home.

And now that i’m back in Tennessee, i’m trying to keep up with biking, but it’s a lot harder here.  Not just because I don’t have easy access to a bike trail, but because, well…this is what Clarksville looks like:

It’s hilly, there are no sidewalks which I know I shouldn’t be riding on anyway, but everyone here zips around like there’s no one on the road but them.  So I actually rode these streets today to get comics, and I road through the grass down the street on the right.  It’s kind of fun to zip down hills, but that’s overshadowed by the fact that i’m constantly praying that some asshole in his sweet tricked out ride doesn’t come roaring over the hill and mow me over.

So while i’m very happy to be at home with my husband and animals (and garden and Xbox and all of that other material crap), I really miss that bike trail.  Smooth, cool, and I could wear my headphones because I didn’t have to worry about diving out of the way of a car if I heard it coming up behind me.

The Gluten Free Experiment.

Published on May 5, 2009 in food, gluten free, holidays and pictures. 9 Comments

So over two months ago (shuddup), I posted that I was going gluten free and sugar free for Lent (sugar free was changed to low sugar because I used agave a few times and apparently bbq chips have sugar).  I did very well, the only time I messed up was when I bought a raw dessert from Whole Foods and realized later that one of the ingredients was water that was filtered through wheat.  And I lost eight pounds!

And then I got my hands on some gluten free pasta and that was all shot to hell.

I didn’t buy a ton of fancy flours, or gluten free soy sauce because I wasn’t planning on keeping up with it (and I already have a monster jug of dark soy sauce that is taking me forever to get through).  So I didn’t eat a ton of interesting stuff, but I do have a few pictures to share.

Brown rice pudding, I was experiencing sugar withdrawls and PMSing.  The rough recipe was:

2 c leftover brown rice
~2 c non-dairy milk of your pleasing  (I used unsweetened almond milk)
big squirt of agave
several big dashes of cinammon
cap full of vanilla
handful of cranberries

Throw in a pot, bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer until most of the liquid is absorbed, don’t forget to stir.

A burrito bowl from Qdoba in Nashville (my podunk town doesn’t have one).  Trying to eat vegan in a small town is hard enough, throw in gluten free and my only in-town option was the indian restaurant.  We don’t eat out a lot anyway, but one place can get old pretty fast.

Right around the time that Lent started, Cosmo’s had a sale where you bought three logs of Teese and got one for free.  They have four flavors of which i’ve only tried one, so I decided to give it a go.

My first combo is brown rice pasta with cheddar teese and broccoli.  I didn’t find the cheddar to be much different from the mozzarella flavor in macaroni, and I don’t remember what the mozzarella tastes like straight up (the mozzarella tube I bought is still in the fridge, waiting for pizza).

Next, I tried the melty cheddar, on more broccoli (i’ve been on a broccoli kick lately).  This is the kind where you just melt it and it’s all sauced up and ready to go.  I put some in a bowl in the microwave.  It smelled god awful, I couldn’t even get Brian to try it.  I put it on the steamed broccoli, and I think they balanced eachother out because it wasn’t bad.

The next day, I decided to use the rest of the melty stuff on some quinoa pasta.  I tried to eat it as is, but ended up doctoring it with some salt and pepper and nooch.  It tastes like Velveeta or cheese whiz which is good if you miss that sort of thing, but I really don’t.  I also tried the naco Teese and it’s about the same but with jalapenos.  It was okay, but didn’t really fill in any sort of craving so for me, i’ll stick to the solid Teese for the occasional pizza.

I bought a package of Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Pancake Mix, and they did taste ‘different’, but were still good.  They didn’t reheat so well the next day, but if I had to I would use the mix again.  I used agave and that was the most sugar I had consumed in weeks, so I got a headache.

I wasn’t very adventurous during my gluten-free Lent experiment, but I did try out dumpings.  The smaller ones are just rice flour, and the bigger ones are chickpea and rice flour.  I just used my regular recipe and subbed for the regular flour, about 2/3rds chickpea and 1/3rd rice.  I made tiny batchesto play with and then made veggie stew with more chickpea/rice dumplings.  The only real difference between those and my regular dumplings was that they got really dense and chewy after sitting in the fridge overnight, whereas my wheat dumplings are usually fine.

When we go to Whole Foods, it’s usually to buy staples like Veganaise, or Tofurkey slices for Brian’s lunch.  Usually I just glance over the deli items as we’re walking by, but I saw this grilled pineapple salad and had to grab it.  It was a small container, but it was also less than two bucks so I figured it was worth a try.  The herbs are cilantro, which I know makes some people gag, but I am not one of those people.  So I was inspired to buy my own pineapple and grill it!

I put the cut up pineapple in a bag with some oil, balsamic vinegar, and cilantro and let it sit for a bit.  Also, more broccoli!  I was trying to figure out what else I could grill since it seems a waste to only grill a few things, and I had broccoli.  I just rubbed some oil on those.  And if you’re curious, it taste like grilled broccoli.

By the time we actually ate it was pretty dark, so this is from the next day.  We also grilled tofu, since I didn’t have wheat free soy sauce marinading was a little hard, so I went with pesto.  I ended up making REALLY garlicky pesto, but after it was grilled it had a very subtle flavor.  Not totally bland or anything, just if I do this again i’m going to take extra pesto out to the grill for a second coating.  Also, you’ll note the lack of grill marks on the pineapple, because my husband and I have a different definition of ‘done’ when it comes to grilling.

Then a few days later, it was time to drive to mom’s for Easter.  My friend had a passover party the night before and I was encouraged to break Lent a day early, but I stuck with it.  Mainly because I had ordered a stash of chocolate to rip into the following morning.  At midnight I was at Perkins eating hash browns so I did use ketchup - I love ketchup so much so not using it was kind of a big deal for me.

I woke up on Easter morning and decided to start light, with a cup of yogurt.  And i’m sorry, I have to say it, that coconut milk yogurt is totally overrated.  I thought it was too sweet and not a great texture, and god is it expensive.  I’ll take soy yogurt and all of the gayness and other crap that comes alone with it.  So I ate that, then shortly before lunch I had one of the peanut butter cups (in the gold wrapper).  Then after a lunch of pasta, I ate the Sweet & Sara smore pie.  Oh my god.  So heavenly.  I thought for sure i’d feel sick after that, but I didn’t.

Now I realize that you’re probably eyeing that box of chocolate eggs and wondering when i’m going to talk about them.  I ate one that night, the raspberry truffle.  I’m not nuts about raspberry so I just thought ‘yay chocolate’.  Then the next day I split the coffee caramel with my mother-in-law, cause I don’t like coffee.  I saved the other three until we got home.  My favorites were definitely the nut butter ones.

When we got home I did go a little nuts on sugar, because I was in my own house where I can eat pretty much everything.  I tried to eat a Ginger-O and almost died.  Then I baked some cookies and ate a ton of dough and almost died.  So I decided to stay away from baking for a bit.  Since it was warmer I pulled the iced tea machine down for the summer and started making pitcher after pitcher of green/mint tea, but with far less sugar than I normally would.  Also, the commissary no longer sells Silk soy yogurt and Kroger only has Whole Soy Co. (which tastes like chalk, yuck), so overall my sugar intake has gone down.

The only negative change I noticed during Lent was that, apparently gluten makes me poop.  I did not take a dump for three days at one point.  On Easter day, I pooped three times!  I don’t know if that’s just me or what, but that’s good to know.  If i’m ever constipated i’ll just eat some seitan.  The positive side was that I lost eight pounds.  And then I got gluten free pasta and I neither gained nor lost weight.  And, as it is when you give anything up for awhile, I appreciated it more when I got it back.  A lot of people told me that they thought giving up stuff is dumb, but I say it builds character and puts hair on your chest (don’t worry, I waxed it off).  I might do Lent again next year, but i’ll probably give up something different, or just sugar instead of the two things together.