thanksgiving recap

I hope you all had a nice thanksgiving.


My food photography skills buckled under the pressure of thanksgiving. Here's my dinner anyway. I made Veganomicon chickpea cutlets. My dad made gravy. And my mom and I brought little tiny containers of our own private butter-free squash and mashed potatoes and Earth Balance.


Dessert! Bryanna's pumpkin pie with Cook's Illustrated's pie crust with their ridiculous 1:2 fat:flour ratio. This pie was pretty good for a first attempt at a vegan pumpkin pie. But, it makes enough filling for only a shallow pie plate so next time I would double it. Shallow pies are for sissies. Also, the brown sugar makes it very BROWN. Which is not so attractive. So white sugar next year. When serving pie to non-vegans you don't want them to assume that vegan pies are brown. The texture was pretty good though. I used 3 tablespoons of cornstarch but I would do 4 next time. I went for the low end this time due to my residual trauma from the eraser pie. Oh, then there is apple pie, and a VCTOtW gingerbread cupcake.

Some more pictures.

And now, I have harnessed the power of YouTube to allow you to share in the Thanksgiving after dinner entertainments.

First, Oscar licks the roasting pan.

Don't worry. It gets better.

Next, we go outside and feed the leftovers to the chickens.

My uncle has three kinds of chickens now. The same old red ones from last year. Then some white ones that he rescued from some people who couldn't take care of them. You can see those white ones do not yet know how to eat from a spoon. And the ones all sitting together are Araucanas, the kind that lay blue eggs and have feathers on their legs and no tails. The Araucanas were sleepy for some reason.

Finally we retire indoors to torment Oscar with the model train.

Yay. I am glad my family is the type that finds it hilarious to make the dog bark for twenty solid minutes after dinner... some people might find that annoying. Anyways, happy thanksgiving!

the demanding lifestyle of a portly dog

Poor Oscar is forced to nap on a pile of pillows. Sometimes more than three times in a single day.

MMMMMMMM

In the background, my current favorite sandwich - a big slab of grilled tofu on a baguette with sauteed onions and red peppers and a lot of fake mayonnaise. I really like the tofu + baguette + mayo combination, it reminds me of that vietnamese sandwich at the restaurant in Berkeley. The one that costs like one dollar. Except that one was fried tofu and it had cilantro. And some other stuff. Hard to remember. Am old now.

Anyways, in the foreground are these really good eggplant things that our Georgian postdoc brought to our Thanksgiving potluck. I bartered her my extra cupcakes for them. They are big slices of eggplant fried and then wrapped in a little packet with some kind of ground up walnut sauce and pomegranate seeds. They are spicy and oily and great. My mother says they look like toads. She is cranky because she is on a diet.

Now I gotta make some pies.

gingerbread cupcakes with lemony cream cheese frosting

These are my favorites by far of all the vegan cupcakes that are taking over the world that I have made so far. This is a batch-and-a-half since it's for my lab potluck and my family thanksgiving. But I had to make four big ones since I ran out of little cupcake papers.

Tomorrow: two pies. I've never made a vegan pumpkin pie before. It is for the family so it needs to be as traditional as possible. I am planning on going the cornstarch route rather than the tofu route. Is this a horrible mistake? Discuss.

isa pizza. reduced sodium.

Yesterday I made Isa Pizza from VWaV but I forgot to take a picture of it until this morning. The other thing I forgot was to add salt to the dough. Which, in case you were wondering, is not a good idea... so that was sad.

tofu + cookie

Last night I used my Emeril brand panini press to make grilled tofu for my leftover veganomicon caesar. It is very easy but it comes out kind of like a waffle fry because the lid is so heavy. Maybe I should read the instructional booklet. Maybe I should also focus the camera before taking pictures. So many regrets.


Also I made these cookies. I'm still not 100% thrilled with earth balance for cookies. It's so dense and greasy. Maybe I need to put a fake egg in there.

caesar

Veganomicon caesar salad, except plain croutons, because I was too lazy to roast a garlic.

Ground almonds for texture = GENIUS.

maple cupcakes

I made the Maple Cupcakes with Creamy Maple Icing and Sugared Walnuts from VCTOtW. Except I left out the maple extract because I didn't have any because, uh, I don't really like maple that much... Anyway, at first I was worried because the major ingredient in the icing is powdered soy milk, with which I had recently had a bad experience (GOOD WORK JEMNIFER!).

Look how white it is! Why is it so white? Ah, remember when I used to think fake milk was weird for NOT being white? Anyway, it has a weird moist powdery texture and it smells like tofu and it is REALLY GROSS in coffee. Maybe the vanilla flavor version would be ok in coffee. I am not going to spend $10.99 to find out though. HOWEVER, it does make a nice fluffy icing as long as you let it sit until all the chunks dissolve, because otherwise they stick to your teeth in a creepy way.

allegany

I never get tired of this:

Yeah, anyway, yesterday I went with my mother and her friend and Oscar to Allegany state park. There is snow there. Which would be great if I were impatient for snow. Which I am not.

This is the little road to the stone tower.


Picnic! Roasted eggplant, tomato, and basil sandwich; beets; tomato-rice soup with roasted garlic and navy beans from Veganomicon. I used one can of diced tomatoes and one of those Muir Glen fire-roasted crushed tomatoes, because they didn't have plain crushed tomatoes in the natural foods aka the everything-is-one-dollar-more-expensive-here section of the grocery store and I was too lazy to walk the quarter mile to the regular tomato sauce section. Anyway, that worked out. Usually those fire-roasted tomatoes take over everything but they are good here.


Oscar likes to run around.

chocolate peanut butter highs and lows

So, I had my first unsalvageable vegan cooking failure.

The peanut butter pie from VWaV... why lord is there so much agar? Maybe it's because I had flakes instead of powder. But it calls for 3 tablespoons, and I used two, because I know from my previous weird fascination with agar jellies that that is a crazy amount of agar. Anyways, after I boiled it I still knew that was going to be way too much but then it was so fun or something to pour it into the blender that I dumped it all in.. and then it set into this horrible gelatinous brick that has the same texture as a cold, wet pencil eraser except a little more chalky. Also contributing to the disgustingness is probably the fact that my grocery store only has firm silken-tofu-in-a-box in the "LITE" form. It makes no sense to me. But anyway. I threw the whole thing out, but it was not that sad, because the pre-made crust I used tasted kind of like cardboard dust mixed with the floor sweepings from the cocoa factory.

In better news...

These are chocolate peanut butter shells and they are great. If you use the weird "special dark" cocoa that I have, then the outside tastes like an Oreo. Someone saw me eating one at work and said that it looked "not home-made," which in knitting is a huge compliment so maybe that is a compliment in vegan baking also. (I overbaked half of these a little though so don't do that. Take them out as soon as they start to crack on top and they will be much better. Also put in more filling than you think is reasonable.)

I had to make a very difficult decision on Friday, so tell me what you would have done. It was especially hard because the decision involved coffee and therefore had to be made BEFORE having coffee.

The choices are:
Silk, the faux cream of choice, except that it has been in the refrigerator for a very, very long time and the sides are suspiciously bloated.
Weird, powdered soy "beverage" mix which is apparently made from ground-up tofu and I only bought in order to make the supernatural agave icing from VCTOtW.
Unopened rice milk, but then what am I going to do with the rest of that rice milk once it's open? Also rice milk = ick.

BAGELZ

This is a Martha Stewart recipe and after this I am completely convinced that none of Martha's baking recipes are tested as written. There are always weird problems, like the description of what is supposed to be happening is never accurate, she always makes you use about three times as many bowls as makes sense, and the filling:pastry ratios are usually way off. This time Martha wants you to proof your yeast by just adding it to warm water. Now, I am not a yeast biologist, but I think you need to add some sugar to get your yeast to foam. Oh wait, I am a yeast biologist. Anyway, then she wants you to bake the bagels on parchment paper at 500 degrees. Martha, at what temperature does paper ignite? 450! Why do you want to set off all our smoke alarms? Also she calls for 1.5 tablespoons of salt. Where is my half-tablespoon measuring spoon? (They are on the verge of too salty so I think 1T would be adequate.)

But as long as you ignore most of the instructions, these bagels are great. Dense, bagelly, with an excellent chewy/crispy crust. I was skeptical that they would be that much better than store bagels, but they really are much better, and not that much work since you can make the kitchenaid do the kneading for you.

blueberry reign of terror

Our postdoc went blueberry picking last weekend and she didn't realize how sour they were until she got home with ten pounds of them. Now every day she brings more of them in and tries to make us eat them. I made some into the sunny blueberry corn muffins from vegan with a vengeance. They would be better except I only had coarse cornmeal. So now instead of everyone being forced to eat sour berries, they will be forced to eat gritty muffins. With sour berries inside. Happy Friday!

bees

Last Sunday the weather was nice for a change so I took that opportunity to install my screen bottom board. The screen bottom board is mostly for mite control (normally the mites fall off the bees and land on the regular bottom board, where they can just climb right back on, but with the screen they fall through and are trapped) but also for ventilation so that things do not get too moist and moldy in the winter. My bees don't have mites but if they do get a mite I want it to fall through a screen, dammit.

Anyway, the goldenrod nectar flow was on and the bees were very busy, lots of traffic going in and out of the entrance. It's good when they're busy because then they pay less attention to stinging.


Here is some dark nectar the bees have collected... could it be buckwheat???

The bees are raising some drones. Drones are male bees and they are only around towards the end of summer; they grow up in larger cells from unfertilized eggs. Here is some drone comb that the bees built in the space between their top and bottom levels, it ripped open when I took the top super off so you can see the pupating drones:


Here is a drone, all grown up, he is that guy in the middle with the big eyes:

Drones are funny. They have no stings so you can molest them all you want. They are helpless and rely on the workers to be fed. They don't get up until afternoon and then they just go out and look for chicks. They also tend to clean their eyeballs with their forelegs a lot, which makes them look like vain men smoothing their hair.


The first whole bee on the left is a baby who just hatched out of her cell - her fur is all damp and matted. Isn't she cute? Also you can see some foragers with orange pollen on their legs, they are looking for a cell to unload it into. It was crazy how much pollen the bees were bringing in, and the whole hive was busy and excited and rushing around, it was pretty neat.

Overall I am worried about my bees making it through the winter. They seem to be raising a ton of brood instead of storing up honey. They do have several frames of pollen stored, so that is good. (They use pollen to feed the baby bees and they will need it in the spring to get the colony built up again... assuming they are still alive...) They are supposed to have 60-70 lbs of honey to get through winter and they do not have that much at all, and they have frames and frames and frames of brood. I need to go back through and count up exactly what they have, but it's not good. It might be a problem that I have been feeding them light syrup (5 lbs of sugar in a gallon), which apparently stimulates brood-rearing more than heavy syrup (10 lbs in a gallon) which they are more likely to store. So today I made heavy syrup which is even more of a pain in the ass than making light syrup and I have to see if I can get corn syrup from the restaurant supply store, since I think I am going to have to feed them constantly for as long as I can into the cold weather. And trust that they are going to stop making more hungry bees and start making honey.

What they are trying to do is build up high numbers of foragers for fall nectar flow, but that is almost over and I think they are confused because I started them so late. Anyway I spent a lot of time reading (doom-laden) things on the internet and agonizing about what I should do (add a super? queen excluder? switch the top and bottom hive bodies? put all the old brood in the top and put a queen excluder in so that the queen will stop laying goddamn eggs in the empty cells and they can put nectar in there?) but I think I am just going to constantly feed heavy syrup and trust that the bees are not stupid and will figure out what to do... at least that is what I am going to do until the end of the month at which time I might freak out and do something else... like move them into my basement for the winter?

Also I bought a super fancy hive wrap insulation layer.


Who is a very handsome dog?

Virtual Oscar Walking

bees

I finally got a veil so I am no longer beekeeping like a fool.


Although I still wear shorts and a t-shirt and sandals so maybe I am only marginally less foolish. Here I have just puffed some smoke between the two boxes and am about to lift off the second story.


Lifting out the second frame.


Cute little bees! The white stuff on the frame is capped honey. The yellow caps have baby bees underneath, pupating; the more brownish ones are older and will emerge soon. If you look at the bottom towards the left you can sort of see some uncapped brood - it is like a big grub curled up there in the cell.

day 23 for bees

My bees are doing quite well and have drawn out eight of the frames in their hive and have a lot of capped brood (which means the first baby bees will be born in the next week). I rewarded them with a second story.

Also my buckwheat is coming up and some is on its second set of leaves.

See all that green stuff. Well all the green stuff that is not grass or weeds is buckwheat. Good job buckwheat. Buckwheat makes very dark honey. It is the cool thing in beekeeping to like pale honey, like basswood, but I think it is sissy. It is unlikely that the bees will have any extra honey for me this year because they will need to keep it for the winter, but it is good practice for next year.

bee week #1

This morning I harassed my beehive for real for the first time. I had to switch the unpainted hive body for the painted one. Also I had to make sure that the queen got out of her little cage and was laying eggs.

This is where my bees live. I am not one hundred percent pleased with the location, which I picked out in a hurry, thinking I could move it later. Then I realized I can only move it at night otherwise all the bees out foraging will not be able to find their way home. So I guess I will just live with it. (It would be better if it got more morning sun to make sure that the bees wake up nice and early.)

Here are some of my little darlings at the entrance. They will get to have a larger entrance once there are more of them. Sometimes other bees try to rob them or else wasps and things try to come in. This way the entrance is small enough that they can defend it.

The bees are doing a good job and have built a lot of comb. Also some of the cells have pollen, so I know they are actually going out and working and not just filling the cells with Wegmans sugar. See, they start with just a flat sheet of foundation in each frame and they have to build the cells out of wax, you can see some foundation in the lower right corner, it is yellow with wires through it. Here is some screwy comb they have built where the queen cage was. See, if there is more than 3/8" of space between the frames they fill it up with their own comb and the little wooden box with the queen inside was between this frame and the next one, so there was too much space. I had to take this chunk off, which was slightly nerve-wracking, because I am still beekeeping without a veil. This is not because I am a tough guy (although clearly I am a tough guy) but because it was backordered, so I cancelled it, and then I lost my debit card so now I can't order anything until I get a new one. Anyway, the bees are nice and I am not afraid of them, but pulling apart big chunks of their house while they have the potential to fly up and sting me on the eyeball is still not that fun.

Also the queen was still in her cage. They ate a hole through the queen candy but not a big enough hole for the queen to squeeze her fat ass through. So I had to let her out and there was an exciting moment where she ran around on top of the frames and acted like she might fly away before she went down into the hive. But now I think everything is fine and she better get to work and lay some damn eggs.

What clever little bees.

My uncle plowed this field for me. Now he has to disc it. I don't know what that means because although I am highly fascinated by farming, I know very little about it. Anyway then I am going to plant buckwheat for my bees. The middle of July is apparently the proper time for planting buckwheat, luckily. Then in late August he will plow it under and I will plant red clover, which grows in the fall, and then comes back and blooms in the spring. Then my little bees will be happy, assuming they are still alive in the spring. The hive is way back in the trees at the very very end of fields in the picture. So everyone who is asking me about my grandparents neighbors being upset about the bees, see? Don't worry. The backyard is very large.

how not to get started in beekeeping

A couple weeks ago I remembered that I like bees, and my grandparents said I could keep some in their backyard. But it turns out that if you want to have bees, you are supposed to order them in January and then they are delivered in May and if you don't get them started by the end of May then there is all kinds of doom and they will not be ready in time for winter and will all die horrible deaths etc etc etc. But I ordered some bees anyways, because I am impatient and did not want to wait 11 months to have bees, and I think maybe if I feed them all summer and hope for a mild autumn they might squeeze through the winter, despite this nursery rhyme. And also I ordered a hive. And a feeder and a smoker. But then I never heard back from the place that was supposed to ship my bees, so I assumed they were disreputable, because really no one ships package bees after May because it is too hot and etc, and my bees were never coming, and I gave up, and decided I would order some in January like I was supposed to. So I put the hive together but only this much:



And I was using it as a coffee table. See I didn't paint it or anything. And I didn't put the frames together. And the shipping on my veil and smoker and feeder was delayed but eh.

And then on Saturday at 8:33am I got a call from the post office that I should come get my bees. My bees! They came in a box like this, through the mail, they are from Georgia:



So the post office in South Buffalo is not really accustomed to having a huge buzzing box of three pounds of bees. The post office man said, "I don't like bees" when I signed for my bees.

Then we had to come home and superfast nail all the frames together and install the beeswax foundation and paint the bottom board and try to make a feeder out of a mayonnaise jar since my feeder is not coming until today. And also I didn't have a hive tool or a veil. So I installed my bees in a t-shirt and flip-flops with a butter knife for a hive tool. Although I cheated, because I was supposed to shake them all out of their mailing box, but I got scared on account of not having a veil, so just took the lid off, took the queen out (she is in a separate little box inside the big box), took the cork off of her cage and stuck her in the hive (the hole is plugged with this solid sugar candy stuff, so the bees eat through it after a while, but they will stay with the queen, so this way she doesn't get out until they are used to living in their hive, otherwise they might all fly away and live somewhere else), and then I just put the whole box with the lid off into the second story of the hive. I didn't get stung, but if I had shaken them out there would have been tons of bees flying around in the air, and it is a little unnerving since I haven't worked with bees since the summer of '00 and I never, ever did anything without a veil, and you must remain calm when working with the bees, because if you start to freak out that there are so many bees flying around then you get clumsy, and then once you get stung once there is an alarm pheromone issue and everything goes to hell.

The bad news is that I have to go get the mailing box out today, and the bees are going to be in a worse mood than they were in when they first got here, because now they think they have to defend their hive maybe. And I have to install their real feeder. And I am not supposed to mess with them too much or they freak out and reject the queen because they will think it is her fault. Also I have to finish painting the outer cover and the hive bodies, although that might wait until next week so that I don't molest them too much. Oh and also I noticed that there were ants crawling around a lot last night so I have to lift the hive up onto cinder blocks and sprinkle cinnamon all around it.

Also the bees might be cranky today because it is overcast and windy. The bees like nice weather. I hope UPS brings my veil.

a story about how I bought a couch today

I hate when people post materialistic blog entries about things they buy, but this is the most exciting thing that has happened to me since... hmm, yeah, it's been a while. And I am trying to keep the blog energy on high for 2006.

Anyway, I have been very impatient to get a couch. Sitting on the floor with Oscar all the time was starting to have a negative effect on my self-esteem. So this was the big weekend. Yesterday I made my parents go to three separate furniture stores and look at many, many couches and weigh their various virtures and shortcomings. Then I made the couch salesman talk to me forever about microsuede. And finally, I decided on a couch. And then we came home, and measured the doorway. For various geometrical reasons, the couch has to stand on its end to get through the entryway, and the couch (which happened to be the smallest couch at the store) was 83 inches long. And the doorway is 80 inches. How I was filled with despair, because no couch would ever fit, and apparently that is why the people who lived here before had to use ropes to hoist their couch up over the balcony, and why it had to be sawed apart to get it out.

But then! The glorious light of IKEA shone down upon me! For you see, IKEA sells couches that come in four big boxes. Oh IKEA. So smart.

Sadly, I don't live 20 minutes from IKEA anymore. Now going to IKEA is a major expedition which involves driving for over an hour and crossing an international border. It also involves: buying many things without considering volume issues because if we have a pickup truck and everything is in a flat box, how could it not fit?; spending 45 minutes rearranging twelve giant heavy boxes so they stick out as little as possible and strapping them down in such a way that it is obvious that girls who don't really know how to tie appropriate knots did it; and worrying the whole way home about (1) the Mikael Corner Desk Unit slipping out and causing a massive laminated particle board highway disaster (2) getting into trouble at the border for driving with improperly secured IKEA products. As well as various other delightful things involving receipts, taxes, duty, and whatnot.

But anyway!

It was all worth it for you, Lund Bjuv.



Oh, right, also I had to put it together. But actually it wasn't that bad. Who but IKEA could make a couch that comes in four giant boxes?


Oscar wants to sit on Lund Bjuv.
I don't think so, Oscar. Lund Bjuv does not even have all his cushion covers on yet.

Anyway, my life feels much more complete now.