oscar and yeast

Last night I had a dream that Oscar was being swallowed by a giant snake. I had a little knife and I was trying to decide how I should hack open the snake to get Oscar out. Luckily I was having this dream in the 7 minutes of snooze alarm time so I woke up before I had to do any cutting. I love Oscar. Look at his little tail!


I do not love nutritional yeast. One of my most disgusting memories of my vegan roommate from five years ago was the horrible boxed macaroni-and-yeast he ate all the time. But I thought maybe I was at a level of veganism where I might be able to try again with the pasta/nutritional yeast combo. It is like Level 8 or something. Right above the ability to actually enjoy soy ice cream. Anyway, I would probably like this better if I hadn't tasted the sauce beforehand. Or hadn't smelled it. There is some subtle tone in the smell of nutritional yeast that I cannot handle at all. Anyway, for one bite I would think this was the most delicious thing ever, and then the next bite would make me feel ill. Maybe it's that it looks cheesey and I forget it's not cheese. So, it was a very complex experience which I will attempt again in a year or two. (It's mac daddy from Veganomicon and I fully endorse the recipe, if you like nutritional yeast.)

crumby cranberry squares

Mmmm. Cranberries. Based on this recipe, except with earth balance instead of butter, and made in a 9x13 pan instead of 7x10 (7x10? wtf?) because otherwise they are too thick. And the baking times reduced a little bit.

backyard food chain

Do you see the lump on the fence? That's the hawk that eats the little birds that come to the bird feeder. Well, they used to come to the bird feeder.

variations on a theme

I figured out that if I open up my Emeril Brand Panini Press so it is flat, I can grill tofu without making it into a waffle fry. Italian-style-ish grilled tofu, Roasted Tomato Couscous with Capers from Veganomicon, brussels sprouts.


Smokey tempeh, Lazy Person Baked Beans, Sauteed Collards, all from Veganomicon. In case you can't tell I am too lazy to go find the book so I just made up the names of the things. They might be right. Also mashed sweet potatoes.

cold weather kayaking

Today I went kayaking even though I usually do not kayak in winter because I am a sissy. At first we planned to go to Buckhorn, which is a swamp on Grand Island, but there was a problem.

Which is, that it was frozen solid.

So we went to Tonawanda Creek.



Here's two unrelated pictures of food so that I don't get kicked out of veganmofo.

Lentil soup, from this recipe, but with vegetable stock (duh) and some bay leaves and red wine added. In the background, pillsbury crescent rolls, the best accidentally vegan food ever. Overnight the soup thickened up so that now it is a big pot of lentils. I seem to generally have that problem with soup. And, portabella mushroom salad with spicy mustard dressing from Veganomicon. My mother declared this The Best Salad Ever. With sweet potato french fries.

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