Archive for March, 2010
Wassup?
I haven’t been steadily posting recently cos I’ve either been busy or tired. Life has been interfering with my life! So here’s a snapshot (in hindsight, it’s more like a full school photo) of what’s been happening in the house of ELV.
The house of ELV (speaking of) is being sold – we have to move elsewhere. We don’t know for sure whether they want us to see out the lease for a few more months, or leave ASAP (although they can’t force us), but already plent of debate about buy vs rent has ensued. We’ve decided to rent again for now. So the house-hunting begins. I will miss our friendly neighbour even if he does kill passionfriut vines and can’t understand most of what I say. I already miss the duck at the other neighbour’s house – I don’t know what happened to cute little Mishka. I will also miss the sounds of the chooks over the back clucking away in the mornings. *sigh* I hate moving.
My butternut pumpkin vines are growing rampantly and have already started to flower (so pretty!). If we can stay for a few more months, I may get a pumpkin or two. Otherwise, the new owner will be feasting on the fruits of my labour.
I’ve been telecommuting up a storm, which has proved more enjoyable than I anticipated. I really thought I’d miss the camraderie of the office, but due to a combination of many of my chatty friends moving to other jobs and the use of collaborative technology to talk to my remaining friends, it has been pretty cool. I get more work done and my lungs enjoy the lack of air conditioning. I’m only going into the office once this week. Think how little the impact of my transportation is this week!
I read No Impact Man‘s book. I liked it, although it did get a little preachy at times, but only momentarily, then it went back to interestingly philosophical and funnily anecdotal at the same time. It took me back to when I first started reading No Impact Man’s blog a couple of years ago. I loved it and it inspired me no end. It was nice to feel that zeal again. A note though: why was it ok to tell the world that his wife used menstrual cups, but not share what he used instead of toilet paper? I’m not one for secrecy about bodily functions anyway, although I respect his choice not to expose everything, but isn’t that a bit of a double standard? (I shan’t stir up controversy by discussing what this double standard may indicate…).
My buddy went to Singapore and all I got were these two metal ear diggers. I only got them on the proviso that I blogged about them! Yankee Elv and I have both tried them. Apparently I have pretty clean ears, so nothing much is happening for me, although I’ve heard good things from others. Yankee Elv doesn’t get dirty ears at all (we’re not sure why, perhaps something to do with a lack of inner ear hair due to deafness?). She mostly uses cotton tips to itch the ear in which she wears her hearing aid. For this purpose, she tells me, the ear digger is a poor substitute – she can’t think of anything other than a cotton tip that will do the job, as she doesn’t like the hard, scrape-y feeling of the ear digger. Can anyone think of an alternative?
I’ve been reducing the amount of soy milk I’m consuming, since I’ve increased my intake of soy yoghurt and soy cheese as I’ve struggled through my first six weeks of veganism. I’ve been supplementing my soy milk intake with oat milk, and thought I’d do a little unofficial research into which is the best. Expect an oat milk review post coming soon.
Something is eating my sweet potato leaves. I thought it was a caterpillar, but I only saw it on them once. For a while I saw these shiny little bugs about the size of large fleas, but they seemed to disappear a week or so ago. Now they’re just holey leaves. What has been munching them?
I’ve decided before we move house, I am going to take cuttings of rosemary, pink frangipanis and jade plant. All three are growing brilliantly here and I don’t want to lose them. The grapefruits aren’t in season or I’d plant some seeds – the grapefruit tree really is prolific in its bounty and produces the most enormous, spectacular, juicy fruit. Alas, I think I shan’t be around to see it this year. Does anyone know if you can grow native ginger from a cutting? I’m sure we have some of that somewhere too…
I’m looking for a copy of Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and Abundance at the library as I’ve heard it’s good. I used to read her blog, but found it too heavy for my short internet attention span. I think I will like it better in book form. Unless I know the author or have read the book already, I try to get all my books from the library. What’s the point of wasting resources and space with a bazillion books you’re only going to read once? I like the books on my shelves to be old friends.
I’ve been trying hard to be a good vegan, and I think I’m mostly succeeding, but I haven’t always been able to keep a cheery face on. Now, you might think that a cheery face about veganism isn’t necessary, but I think it is when you’re talking about it with non-vegans. As a vegetarian, I always present the face of ‘gosh, I am supportive of everyone’s choices, and if you want to eat meat, that’s your right – but wow, vegetarianism is easy, tasty, fun, healthy, good for the environment… wow, it’s just so great!’. Yeah, that’s quite a face. I better hope the wind doesn’t change. However, I guess I didn’t have as many people to talk with when I first went veg, as opposed to now, when all my co-workers know and ask me how it’s going. They are all very supportive, but I find it hard to publicly keep my chin up on a day when I’m really missing cheese or chocolate – especially since these things are often to be found in our office! I think they all think I’m a bit of a fringey, fanatic weirdo – in a nice way, of course. Telecommuting has helped since I’m not around those foods so much, and so has Lindt Lindor’s 70% dark chocolate (I know it’s not Fair Trade, but one step at a time)… but still, I find myself feeling guilty over my inability to be perky, sunshiny vegan at work. Breaking the dairy addiction is hard – much harder than giving up meat was! Sometimes I think it’s too hard and I’m being mean to myself (after all, isn’t life about experiences? I like my experiences to be as pleasant as I can make them). I think maybe I could just get dairy sparingly, from a nice organic farm… but then I think of the baby cows, especially the bobby calves, and their poor mamas! I think the guilt I’d feel over that would surpass any nice feelings the cheese/chocolate/ice-cream gave me. And so I stick with it. Soldier on, you know. Codral hit the nail on the head with that one.
Yankee Elv and I went to the West End markets on Saturday. We missed out on Dagwood Dogs from Ykillamoocow, to our surprise. They normally start cooking them at 10am and this week they started at 7am, bowing to popular demand. Not my demand, I like a sleep-in! I got a pumpkin/barley roll (kind of like a vegan sausage roll, but one that isn’t trying to taste like herbed, minced animal bits. It was a tasty breakfast with the home-made tamarind sauce and the homestyle lemonade we bought. Plus I had a few of Yankee Elv’s Greek honey puffs for dessert, and a vegan melting moment (passionfruit cream, from The Bakery V stall). We also tried Hibiscus juice (gorgeous, tasted similar to sweetened cranberry juice), tapenade, local honey (also not vegan, I knooooow), pineapple chunks and more juice. We were quite restrained really. We got lots of stuff, including some things I haven’t tried before (parsnips and fresh olives, like, right off the tree kind of fresh). I also got a couple of plantains, which I think I’m going to use in a curry, plus lots of our usual kinds of veges/fruits. I loved going to the counter and paying tiny amounts; I paid 75 cents for the two most enormous carrots ever. I did not like going within a five stall radius of the feral seafood stall. We mightn’t eat fish, but Yankee Elv and I both grew up around seafood and I’m sorry, but if it smells like that then you do not want to be putting it in your body. Ew. We wound up the morning with a visit to Reverse Garbage, but didn’t buy anything. It’s fun just to look and imagine.
Only two of my spring onions have lived and they are tiny – I think they drowned in their wet little corner. From one extreme to another with them! I’ll try again at the new place. I can’t tell my carrots from the weeds, so I guess the new owner will be in for a surprise eventually…
The new Clem 7 tunnel is brilliantly fast, but apparently has tonnes (literally) more pollution that was originally estimated. I don’t know that the two air sucker towers (I can’t remember what they’re called! One is Jacaranda purple and the other is Poinciana red) are doing their job.
One of the Clem 7 air sucker tower things is the colour of the flowers on the Jacaranda trees.
Motorists have been advised not to wind down their windows in the tunnel because the pollution is so bad. We found this out after we spent 25 mins in a traffic jam in there, with the windows down cos our car has no air conditioning. This is why I like buses. The tunnel was very zippy outside of peak hours though, taking about 4 mins from end to end.
I’ve just remembered I haven’t hung out the wet sheets and blankets I washed, which made me think of the clothes line, which made me remember that all potential new houses must have a place for an under-the-house line. The list of requirements seems to be mounting.
And I have also realised that I’ve written a tonne! Clearly I needed a post like this. I started on the oat milk review yesterday and it just seemed to drag and things kept distracting me… sometimes I guess you need to just let it all flow out higgledy-piggledy.
Speaking of pigs (well, piggledy, close enough) – look!
It's Edgar Alan Pig from Edgar's Mission! He's so cute!
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Newsflash: Cow-vision?
Today’s WTF is…. cow-vision from Russia! (Click the link to read the article.)
Cow-vision? Really?
Aside from the Tantalus-like torture of it, I’d be interested to know how much those tvs add to the farmer’s electricity bill, and if s/he (zie?) thinks it’s worth it. I was just telling my parents how much more plasma tvs cost, now they just bought their first one. So I just wonder…
The poor cows!
Friday Feast: Oatmeal Cookie Bars
Here comes the latest recipe… it’s a cross between a slice, a cookie and a granola bar – it’s Oatmeal Cookie Bars! I’ve just veganised these tasty treats, which wasn’t too hard. They’ve come out a little more crumbly than their non-vegan versions, but that could also be because I used gluten-free flour and baked them about ten minutes longer than usual (I momentarily forgot they were in the oven).
Regardless of any mishap, they’re still super tasty. Eat them fresh from the oven (be careful you don’t burn your mouth on the cranberries, which seem to get to a scalding temperature), cold the next day, or re-heated in the microwave. I used to eat these with ice-cream in my non-vegan days (as if they were so long ago!), so if you’re into vegan ice-cream, that could be a winner too. I’m going to try them with this new vegan cream I bought last week… I hope it’s good!
Oatmeal Cookie Bars
A slice of Oatmeal Cookie Bar, half crumbled on the plate. Look at the cranberries and that chunk of vegan white chocolate - yum!
Ingredients:
- 230g (0.5lb or 2 sticks) vegan margarine (I use Nuttelex)
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup white sugar (I used LoGIcane – a low GI version of cane sugar)
- Egg substitute, equivalent to 2 eggs (I used Orgran Egg Replacer)
- 1 tsp vanilla essence (imitation is ok)
- 1/2 cups plain (aka all purpose) flour (I used 1/2 cup each of wholemeal spelt, barley and Orgran’s gluten-free flours)
- 1 tsp bi-carb soda (aka baking soda)
- 1/2 tsp salt – optional
- 1 tsp cinnamon – optional
- 3 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup sultanas or dried cranberries (I used the latter this time, but sometimes I do half and half)
- 1 cup vegan chocolate chips (I used 1/2 cup each of Sweet Williams chocolate chips and chopped Sweet Williams white chocolate)
- 1/2 cup to 1 cup of desiccated coconut
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F).
- Beat margarine and sugars until creamy (it’s ok to do this by hand).
- Add eggs and vanilla and beat well (still ok by hand..).
- In a separate bowl, combine flour(s), bi-carb soda, cinnamon and salt.
- Mix the aforementioned dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.
- Add oats, sultanas/dried cranberries, chocolate chips and desiccated coconut, and mix well.
- Press into a greased baking tray or dish (I use a square pyrex dish) and bake for 30-35mins*.
*You can also use this recipe for cookies, rather than cookie bars – if so, shape into cookies, place on a tray and bake for 10 to 12 mins.
Friday Feast: Rosemary Butternut Pumpkin with Couscous
Another belated Friday Feast… this is a recipe Yankee Elv has made before, with butter. Yesterday she cooked it up for me vegan-style. Basically the only thing that changed from her previous version was using Nuttelex (vegan margarine) instead of butter. It tasted the same to me… gorgeously soft, savoury-sweet goodness. Perfect rainy-day eating, which is good, because we’re about to hit our third straight week of rain (by which I mean, days during which it has rained, not a constant monsoonal bucketing down – this is Australia, after all).
I love any recipe that allows me to use goodies from my garden (few that they are), and for this one we snip sprigs of fresh rosemary off the bush near the letterbox!
The rosemary bush at our front fence smells so good, I'm always happy to check the mail! I think I will take a cutting when we eventually move out.
Yankee Elv created this recipe based on The Pioneer Woman‘s recipe for Sweet-Roasted Rosemary Acorn Squash Wedges.
Rosemary Butternut Pumpkin with Couscous
Rosemary butternut pumpkin and onions, with couscous and infused oil (margarine).
Ingredients:
- 1 butternut pumpkin (aka butternut squash), roughly chopped
- 2 red onions, roughly chopped
- Olive oil (not a huge amount)
- Salt to taste
- 8 tabs vegan margarine (that is, 115g, 0.25lb or 1 stick)
- ½ cup brown sugar (lightly packed)
- 2 tabs fresh rosemary (minced)
Rosemary butternut pumpkin and onion over couscous.
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).
- Place the pumpkin pieces in a baking dish, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt. Roast for 15 to 20 minutes.
- While the pumpkin is roasting, mix the margarine, brown sugar, salt and rosemary into a paste.
- Remove the pumpkin from the oven and add the onion. Gently toss to combine.
- Add dollops of the paste to the vegetables.
- Return the dish to the oven for approximately 30 minutes, roasting until the vegetables are tender and caramelised.
Note: Halfway through roasting, your paste will have become a sauce. It is recommended that you brush or spoon the sauce over the top of the vegetables at this point, then continue roasting until they are ready. - Serve over couscous*, drizzling more sauce over the top.
*Cook the couscous with a bit of salt for an even more obvious contrast between savoury and sweet. Super yum!
Look at the texture of the onion - yum!
This recipe will leave you with lots of sweet rosemary, onion and pumpkin infused oil (melted margarine). Don’t throw it out! Keep it and use it on other vegetables, spread it on crusty bread or use it as a base for another dish.
Rosemary roasted butternut pumpkin in the baking dish, with lots of leftover melted margarine.
This post was entered into the Grow Your Own roundup, created by Andrea’s Recipes and hosted for March 2010 by House of Annie.
Newsflash: Kitty Litter Not Created Equal
Our cats are outside cats (bring on the calls of those who want to get nasty about how cats don’t belong outside, but I’m telling you up front that I’m too tired to get into a debate). However, Old Fatso is too old to jump out the window at night if he wants to do his business, and Diva is too much of a princess to go outside if it’s rainy and her fur might get wet. So we have a litter tray that gets used occasionally, at night and on rainy days. It’s more like a suite really, their own little room – it is enclosed and has a door flap. It took a long time to find the right one, and they like it. They also like the litter we normally use, which is this grey, rocky sort of stuff. El cheapo brand, you know.
We decided to try buying this biodegradable kind for a change, to be nicer to the environment. We discussed adding it to the compost bin (although I’ve since vetoed that idea cos I think I’ll use the compost on my vege patch and the nitrogen from cat waste isn’t good for edibles). Ultimately, we thought it would be better.
Well, it’s not; for two reasons.
1. It reeks. The stench is something like four-day old instant chicken noodle soup. None of us even like fresh homemade chicken noodle soup, so you can imagine how much we love this.
2. The cats hate it. Diva, in fact, hates it to the point where she decided to dig up my bathroom pot plant (fortunately devoid of plants for the time being; I was thinking about trying some mint in there again) and pee in there instead. Nice. Have a look at the evidence.
The makeshift litter box. Oh, how delightful.
Diva is completely unperturbed by her actions – in fact, she did it again the next day.
Unperturbed kitteh is unperturbed.
The moral of the story? Not all things eco-friendly are good – it pays to try some different options. Also… if your cats hates the new litter you bought, change it on the first day… don’t leave it for a second day…
Blogging helps prevent brain death
Here’s a Dilbert comic I read last week, from Daily Dilbert (I receive it via RSS). I love Dilbert. I think there is an <insert my company’s name here> insider who works with the artist. I swear it’s like my worklife is just right there sometimes.
I think this blog is my parallel career. Thanks for reading, and helping me stave off brain death.
Uh oh… I think my brain heard me…
Spotlight: Natural Pest Control
Bugs are good. Really, they are. In compost, in nature, everywhere. It’s all cyclical, folks. Food web, circle of life – you know what I mean. However, they can be annoying, spread disease (think mosquitoes), painful, poisonous (think spiders), messy and generally a pain in the butt. I don’t think it’s an abnormal thing to not be particularly fond of them. However, I do think it’s not ideal to blitz them into oblivion with intensive pest control. It’s good to keep a balance. We spend so much time trying to avoid bugs in so many ways – how about some of the natural ways?
In the Elven household, we live in harmony with bugs by:
- Sharing our house with geckos (they eat lots of bugs, but sadly our most common geckos are non-natives – even so, Yankee Elv loves them)
- Letting lots of spiders live in our yard – mostly golden orb weavers (but not in the house, not in the house!)
A female golden orb weaver spider living outside our kitchen window. She moved along herself before we had to move her - she was preventing us from opening the window - but now she's back with her cronies over the front flower bed.
- Stopping the cats from terrorising the local lizards, including blue-tongue lizards (they also eat lots of bugs)
A very pissy adolescent blue-tongue lizard bravely showing us his big, scary tongue. Pou had been trying to toy with him, but he was having none of it! We rehomed him under a bush.
- Keeping all the windows open without screens during the day (only some of our windows are screened, so if we screen those that are and still keep the screenless windows open, bugs come in but can’t get out again – if you keep them all unscreened, they fly in one window and out the other)
- Shutting all screenless windows and closing the screens on all screened windows at dusk (keeps out the mozzies, moths and Christmas beetles)
- Keeping the interior lights off unless you’re using them (bugs are attracted to light)
- Wiping kitchen benches meticulously after food preparation and rinsing all dishes after eating to keep off the ants (I’m still working on this one with Mr Teeny-bop)
- Keeping all food in sealed containers or jars to remove temptation for the ants
- Avoiding leaving still water lying around (mosquito breeding ground)
- Keeping the lid on the garbage bin and kitchen compost containers to discourage flies
- Using a cat food bowl with a moat to prevent ant swarms
- Keeping pet food in sealed containers in the cupboard to prevent ants from gorging.
Our one concession to ‘unnatural’ pest control is flea treatment for the dog and cats – they are miserable without it.
This seems to mostly do the trick (although these darned red ants keep coming and trying to live in my bamboo plant). We really don’t have a bug problem – if you don’t count the critters in the compost, and the cicadas that are loud enough for even Yankee Elv to hear!
Do you have any other natural pest control tips?
Blue-tongue lizards are quite cute when they stop hissing and poking out their tongues. This guy is still pretty mad though - he is all puffed up and flattened out.
[As an interesting aside, golden orb weaver webs are currently being studied in the hopes that something similar can be used in medicine to make things like sutures. The golden webs are so strong and flexible they are able to entangle small birds, although the spiders are not bird-eaters. At the moment, we have a golden orb weaver's web holding up a tendril of the passionfruit vine.]
A passionfruit vine tendril held up by the web of a golden orb weaver spider.
Look closely and you can see the golden web!
Friday Feast: Vegan French Toast
Yankee Elv has made me vegan French toast before, but this is the best one so far. She got it from the vegancooking community on Livejournal, which is a fantastic resource for recipes as well as general advice. It’s from this Fronch Toast and Eggplant Parmasean post. It was super tasty, and not soggy like the last recipe we tried, although that may have been partially because the toast sat in a low oven for 15 minutes, staying warm while the non-vegan French toast was cooked for Mr Teeny-bop. We ate our French toast for dinner, with maple-flavoured syrup and agave nectar. Nom!
The original version of this recipe came from the Post Punk Kitchen, and called for chickpea flour instead of gluten-free plain flour, to give it an ‘eggier’ taste. We didn’t have any on hand though. We can’t get soy creamer in Australia, so instead of doing half a cup each of soy creamer and soy (or rice) milk as the recipe called for, Yankee Elv just used a whole cup of soy milk. I was sure we had cornflour in the cupboard (called cornstarch in the USA), but when we looked in the pantry there was none. We used custard powder instead.. it’s just yellow-tinted, vanilla-flavoured cornflour anyway, and it worked just as well. Besides, we have heaps of it and it needs to be used!
The French toast was also cooked it in Nuttelex (vegan margarine) in the pan, instead of oil – which, in my opinion, was a better idea; the oil would have given it a funny taste, I think.
Vegan French Toast
Tasty vegan French toast!
Ingredients:
- 6 slices of bread (we used slices from a small, reasonably dense loaf of sourdough)
- 2 tab cornflour (aka cornstarch; we used custard powder)
- 1 cup soy milk (or other non-dairy milk)
- 1/4 cup gluten-free plain flour (or chickpea flour, or regular plain [all-purpose] flour)
- cinnamon to taste (Yankee Elv just shakes some on top of the mixture, dips the bread in, then adds some more – that way each slice gets a decent amount of cinnamon)
- Nuttelex (vegan margarine) – enough to lightly grease the pan
Method:
- Mix the soy milk and cornflour in a wide, shallow bowl or container until cornflour is dissolved.
- Mix in the gluten-free plain flour until it is mostly absorbed (some lumps are ok), then sprinkle in some cinnamon.
- Melt the nuttelex in a pan over medium heat.
- In batches, or one at a time depending on the size of your pan, soak the bread slices in the mixture and transfer to the pan. Sprinkle some cinnamon on top of the mixture before soaking each slice.
- Cook each side for about 2 minutes; if they are not brown enough when you flip them over, heat for 1 to 2 more minutes on each side. They should be golden brown with flecks of dark brown.
- Serve immediately, or keep them in a low oven for a brief time before serving, if required.
Spinning Yarn
In my dream house/farm, I’m going to have sheep and other animals that have been rescued from farms that aren’t very nice to their animals. I want to give them happy homes!
It’s my understanding that you want to shear sheep though, even if they are just pets, because in sub-tropical Queensland especially, it’s just too hot in summer for all that wool. That makes sense – we have to shave poor Loodle in summer cos it’s too hot for him too!
So if I’m going to have this abundance of wool, I think I’m going to learn how to spin my own yarn. I’ve been interested in it for a while, but I read this post on Living Naturally in Louisiana and it inspired me! I’m too busy at the moment to try on a handspindle, and our place is too small to have a spinning wheel, so it will have to wait, but I’m anticipatorily excited! (Yes, I know anticipatorily is not a word, but it gets my point across. Why should Shakespeare be the only one who is allowed to make up words that aren’t nouns?)
Homespun yarn with a beautiful spinning wheel. The yarn always seems to be intensely coloured when it's homespun. Photo courtesy of Screw Bronze! blog (link at the end of the post).
I love the idea of having local, eco-friendly yarn though – from happy sheep. I don’t buy wool yarn now because I don’t want to support an industry that isn’t animal-friendly, but I’m not happy buying acrylics either (they’re made from petrochemicals), cottons use so much water and maize takes corn out of the food web. That pretty much leaves me with bamboo and soy (leftovers from making soy products), which are both pretty expensive and often not locally produced. Sometimes I pick up used yarn, unravel a jumper or succumb to some pretty cotton, but I can’t wait til I can make my own pretty yarn from my happy pet sheep. Then I can reduce my dependence on those other kinds of yarn (although if I start making my own soy milk, I wonder if I could make my own soy yarn… and maybe grow some hemp and make a blended fibre…)
Plus I’ll be able to try some of those felting patterns I’ve seen (only animal fibre can be felted).
*Photo courtesy of this post at Screw Bronze!
Tobacco: an alternative perspective.
I think this advertisement (I presume it’s a mock-up, not real) speaks for itself. I guess I never really thought about smoking that way… even so, I’m sure not going to take it up!
Well, that's another way of looking at things.
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