My adorable husband just skyped me this. I had to share and remember:
<?php $things_i_love_in_priority = array(array(Thing => 'Nessa', ThingPronoun => 'You!!')); //TODO: remove so Nessa doesn't know her competition... //'Cadbury honeycomb ice cream (in cone)', 'puppies'); echo 'I love '.$things_i_love_in_priority[0]['ThingPronoun']; unset($things_i_love_in_priority); ?>
Its a programming thing. And its adorable.
I am a vegetarian. I’ve just past my 6 year mark, and still love it like I first did. I won’t judge you based on your own food preferences. Well maybe I will identify with you just that little bit more if you ride on the herbivorous train. I will identify with you because I know you know. You will identify with me because you know that I know.
I know you know what it’s like to be instantly hated/judged because of something you don’t do.
YOU DON’T EAT MEAT!? WHATS WRONG WITH YOU?!
I’ve always found it a personal thing. It’s something I do, and random stranger it doesn’t effect you. It does effect my friends and family, but if you are just associated with me via a some random happenstance or you are friends with one of my friends, my choices do not effect you. THEY DO NOT EFFECT YOU.
Sorry I think I needed to say that in all caps.
I guess I could be considered a tree-hugging hippy, as I consciously make decisions based on the environmental outcome. I grow some vegetables and then eat them, I feed my dogs vegetable scraps, I pay extra for the carbon offset when flying and we only have 1 car. I do not eat meat because of the environmental concerns I have about it. But you say tree-hugging hippy like its a bad thing.
I know there are pro’s and con’s out there about all different sorts of eating habits. I know the pro list for why not to be a vegetarian and why to be a vegetarian are both similarly weighted. I just have personal beliefs that lead me to sit here, on the vege side, surrounded by brussel sprouts wearing tie-dye. (Okay so that is a slight exaggeration, I don’t own tie-dyed anything.)
It’s just when you meet me, and find out about this one part of my being, it shouldn’t offend you. It shouldn’t make you either yell at me, roll your eyes at me or go into a tirade of why its BAD MMMMKAY.
I gotta tell you it isn’t BAD MMKAY. It’s actually quite good. When I’ve had health concerns and gone to the doctors and they have discovered I was a vegetarian, I’ve been asked to have blood tests. And I was okay with that because I was curious anyway. I have better than average iron levels and other such stuff that defines my health based on nutrition. I did my research. I made a valid decision for me. I brought books, and I read them, and I know how to mix my proteins and take care of myself through food.
You can do anything halfheartedly and fail. It’s easy. But this was a big decision for me because I knew it would take extra effort, and if you knew me you would know I only put extra effort into things that I really feel something about. This was one of those things. I spoke about it with my then boyfriend, now husband and said – hey I’m gonna do this big life altering thing, how does that sit with you? He was okay with it. I didn’t ask him to do it or make the change with me. I did mention that I wouldn’t cook meat anymore, but he could add salami to his food after it was prepared. And we went on.
So we had to figure out tofu, and beans and other such things. Hell I still feel like I am figuring out tofu. I had to give up my husbands amazing cheesecakes and I had to make other such changes around me. We had to suddenly find new restaurants, as many that we previously visited weren’t available to me anymore, unless I just wanted a bowl of fries. I had to start reading menus before deciding where we were going (so if you don’t have a menu on the net somewhere I probably won’t ever visit your place of business).
It was a big fucking decision that I made. And I went into it with a I’m gonna try this and do it right and if it doesn’t work out then that is okay. But it did work out. I STILL to this day love every second of it. I appreciate my life just that little bit more. It is a sense of accomplishment for me. But I won’t ever push it on you. When you ask me ‘WHAT YOU DON’T EAT MEAT!?!’ so goddamn aggressively I won’t respond with ‘WHAT YOU EAT MEAT?!?’ in the same tone. I won’t judge you when you order food at the same table as me and it contains meat. It’s your choice, just like vegetarianism is for me.
It’s really about tolerance. So just step of my grill, as I don’t cook meat on it anymore.
I love potato salad. I can’t buy store brought potato salad anymore because they all have onion in them. And while its nice and convenient and also potato salad, I find its heavy on the dressing and a little bland. So I came up with my own recipe.
You need a stack of herbs, I use a bunch of parsley and a bunch of chives. I also have two secret ingredients. The first is a jar of perinaise which you can get from the super markets these days, if not from a local Nandos restaurant. The second is chilli baby cucumbers. Both add some spice to this dish, but not too much! If you can’t get either or aren’t a chilli freak like me, then use plain! You will also need 400g of sour cream, 2 kgs of baby potatoes and two medium sized sweet potatoes. Clean the potatoes (but leave the skin on) and boil until they are soft. Sometimes if the baby potatoes are really small they will cook faster than the sweet potato so I take them out and leave the sweet potato in for longer.
Take the chives, lay them out and slice into little pieces. I find it quite an easy herb to slice.
Get your parsley and remove all the leaves from the major stalks. I leave some of the finer stalks in, but I’m a rebel. Mince it up nice and finely. Add both herbs to a large bowl. This recipe makes LOTS its a party food, not a food for two.
Grab 200g of the pickles and dice them small. I tend to slice them length ways first, into halves or quarters depending on their size, then line them up and dice them into neat little cubes.
Add them to your bowl with the herbs, add your sour cream and jar of mayo. I couldn’t get perinaise when I was making this particular batch so I added cayenne pepper instead. I actually added a little too much, and it was one spicy potato salad. That is your dressing, mix it up.
When your potatoes are done and cool enough for you to handle. If your like me you can do this right out of the pot, but I have ceramic fingers apparently. I leave the skins on the potatoes, I really like the flavour and extra texture not to mention that it is good for u. I peeled the sweet potato in this instance as I cooked it a little too long and it was just falling off instead of sticking to the potato itself. You cut the potatoes at this stage. Into the size that you prefer, I like mine quite chunky.
Add the potatoes to your mixed dressing. and Stir. Stir quite gently if your potatoes are quite soft. Mix until it is all coated. I add my potatoes warm as they tend to suck up a bit of the dressing. By the time it is ready (I usually make it the night before) it has soaked up most of the dressing. Try not to just eat it with your fingers at this point. Its actually quite hard, and while trying to stop myself I also have to try to stop my husband too. Share this with many many people.
I adore food blogs. It wasn’t really a far step in my evolution as a person and cook. When I was little, read 3, I used to be read to at night. My favourite bedtime story? Decorated Cake cooking and instruction book. It would have been something similar to this book at Amazon, except of the time. I used to get my mother to read me the ingredients and instructions and stare at cakes that were rainbows, or a doll with a full skirted dress that was cake(!!!!). As I grew I would watch ANY cooking show on TV or any movie such as one of my all time best movies ever, Eat Drink Man Woman, that had food preparation, presentation and eating.
When the internet came around, here were awesome food blogs. But not only that you can find food blogs that are exactly your interest. I would have to say that 1/4 of the blogs I read are vegan, 1/4 vegetarian and 1/2 omnivore. I love to know what is going on in peoples lives with food. I love to read and experience their own either childhood cooking stories or successes or disasters in the kitchen, be it for a fancy party or just a failed experiment at home.
I also used to love Serious Eats. A cooking ‘zine that was all about food and produce and would have multiple updates a day. That was until this April Fools article titled: Grass Fed: The Case for Veggie Burgers. The things I hate about this article are:
So from that point on I had decided that I did not want to go back there. Obviously everyone was having a hearty laugh in their offices about vegetarians. I doubt at the time that there were any vegetarians on staff, and if they were I doubt they could and would speak up about it due to overwhelming peer pressure or ‘aimed’ jokes by the ominvores.
But I love food blogs, and reading about produce and finding generally cool stuff to read. I adore the Seriously Asian, and Nasty Bits columns by Chichi Wang. They remind me of some fantastic neighbours I had as a child, who used to stew chicken feet, and the divine smells it would bring wafting over the fence. They even gave us some every now and again. It was fantastic. So I went back. First cautiously testing the vegetarian friendly waters, to see if I was going to be so obviously insulted again because I don’t eat meat. And we were fine, and have been fine right up until today.
Up until this article titled: Healthy & Delicious: Herb-Scalloped Potatoes. It starts off with the following paragraph:
I have to be honest. I tried three recipes from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Veganomicon this week, hoping to find at least one killer Thanksgiving dish from its highly regarded vegan lineup. The first was inedible. The second involved too much prep work for mediocre results. The third was Herb-Scalloped Potatoes, which, with some slight seasoning tweaks, could be a home run.
The first part that really gets to me about this paragraph is the assumption that, ‘I want something healthy and delicious as a side dish, so lets go vegan! That’s super healthy right?’. I have a news flash for you Kristen Swensson Sturt that cookbook (which is on my shelf of cookbooks, which I SQUEEEEEE’D when I saw it in Borders) is highly regarded among the vegetarian and vegan community because it is fantastic, the recipes are ranged and it fits right into our choice of way of life. To be harm free to animals. I would also rate it a 5 stars like all of the commenters at Amazon.
You coming into it, looking for some healthy recipes and casually flicking through something you would put next to the roasted bird on your table is not exactly the attitude you should have going into such an iconic cookbook. It’s a bit against the whole beginning of the book actually, but I’m guessing you skipped reading that part, and went right to the sides, wondering where you could add bacon.
Vegetarian and vegan food takes a bit of practice and definitely takes preparation. So your choice of three recipes with the first being inedible, is of course your own opinion and I am doubting that the multitude of others who have made whatever recipe you didn’t like (did it have chickpeas? Do you know why we eat chickpeas?) is more than edible and down right nomable to most of us in the V grouping.
Vegan and Vegetarian cooking is something I think you grow into. Yes you can dabble, and trust me my wonderful family and friends dabble for me to mixed results. You learn about specific ingredients and their powers in both sweet and savoury dishes. You learn to add specific proteins when and where you can, and you also have to deal with the textual limitations that strictly vegetarian and vegans are limited to. People like myself who have been cooking vegetarian for over 5 years now get really good with the ingredients we have access too, and can cook the same thing as an omnivore but better.
I guess you could think of it the following way: I would cook a SHIT STEAK. Because where is my practice? I definitely haven’t cooked meat like that in over 5 years, and I have no real memory on how long, juiciness, texture, cuts of meat etc. I could do it, but it wouldn’t be great.
So that is just a summary on why I think your sides did not work out for you.
Later in the article the recipe chosen is spelled out, and of course there is a substitution of soy milk for regular milk. And I’m sure regular milk was used.
So Serious Eats, I am over you. I am removing my bookmark and never bothering with your pages again. I think your food elitism against vegetarians and vegans has to go, but I know it won’t Ive been reading you for too long, and know the types you have at your magazine. If there are any vegetarians and vegans on staff, fight on and maybe stop this bullshit and speak out, I know it would be hard in that toxic meat filled environment.