preraphaelitepunk.com

Just a quick note as I’m getting ready to carpool to Rebecca’s wedding: “Father’s Day” seemed like the weakest of the Eccleston episodes so far. Time bacteria — sterilizing the wound in time? Surely a more apt comparison would’ve been time maggots eating away the dead or contaminated time, or time white blood cells, no? I think of bacteria as a contaminant, not as something that cleans a wound. Also, I completely missed how the time bacteria ate the Tardis innards, and no clue at all why the Tardis key suddenly developed a mystical connection to the Tardis itself. And since when did the Time Lords of old ever really get involved in things, policing the borders and enforcing rules and whatnot? I just remember them swanning around on Gallifrey being snooty, and occasionally putting the Doctor on trial for meddling. Oh, and wearing garbage bags on their heads.

Maybe I missed something vital. I’ll have to watch it again and see whether it makes more sense.

On the up side, I am liking Rose a bit better now. She’s still not particularly good at thinking ahead about consequences (duh), but she means well and does have empathy for others, which counts for a lot.

I cannot freakin’ believe how obstreperous page layout is in WordPress 2! I type everything in, click “Save and Continue Editing” to check the layout, make fixes, click S&CE again, and things I did not touch at all have changed!

I hate this. If I could go back to version 1.5 or whatever I had before, I would. Grrr. I hate that it tries to second-guess me, and autoformats things and is just generally too fussy. It used to be reliable but not very swanky; now it’s trying to be all Microsoft Word and do everything for you — and, like Microsoft Word, it gets it wrong about half the time, and screws new things up while you’re fixing the things it screwed up last time. Why the hell does it mess with hard returns like that? What did they do to screw up what used to be really good software?

Ah, screw it. My site host offers some other blogging software, I think; I may have to check out the other options. [Insert string of expletives of your choice here.]

I decided against going berry-picking this weekend, for several reasons. The weather has been blustery and threatening rain most of today, though as I type this a ray of preposterously bright light is just breaking through and making the leaves on the trees outside my window glow all green and eerie. More importantly, all the pick-your-own-produce farms seem, unaccountably, to have located themselves in the outlying rural areas around the city; I might’ve be wrong, but I didn’t find a single one located inside the Perimeter. The thought of facing a drive of an hour or more to get out of the city and into the countryside was just too exhausting. Maybe next time I visit my parents, I can convince them to make an expedition to the farm near them; they can drive, then. I’ll sit in the back seat and nap. :D

Still, I needed to get out of the flat, having been plagued by Nigel-related anxiety dreams* last night and still feeling somewhat out of sorts. To make myself feel better, I went to Sevananda and, I must admit, went a little nuts. Mostly the items I bought are staples (tahini, chickpeas, eggplant, lemon juice), but there were a few novelties I couldn’t resist. For one thing, Sevananda’s store-baked goods are generally vegan, and it just makes me so geekily happy to face an entire deli case full of stuff I can eat, it’s hard not to buy at least one thing. (A walnut-and-chocolate-chip brownie, this time.) Also on the sweets theme, I noticed a new brand of vegan frozen dessert, Temptation:

Between the cute little devil and the “100% Vegan” right there on the front, I had to try it. It’s been hard to find a really good prefab vanilla vegan ice cream; even the stuff I make at home doesn’t withstand storage very well, though when it’s freshly frozen it’s really quite good. (There is no possible way I could eat an entire quart of ice cream at one sitting; maybe the solution is to ask people over to help eat the stuff when it’s made, but then the question arises: Where will they sit in my . . . cozy little studio? Hmm. Quandaries everywhere.) I’ll let you know if this one does the trick.Demonstrating an awesome inability to learn from experience, I also picked up a teeny potted organic parsely plant. Past attempts to grow herbs indoors have led to scraggly sage, moldy rosemary, and suicidal basil. I do my best, but I think most herbs seem to prefer outdoor conditions. Let’s hope little Percy the Parsley fares better.

I also spotted a single, solitary, slightly battered copy of Bust magazine, which has been mentioned several times on Sarah Kramer’s blog but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen in the actual, if you’ll excuse the expression, flesh. Into the basket it went. I rather like it: punk rock yoga, a brief history of the bullet bra, a hilarious article on public bathroom behavior, blurbs on politics, even a meditation on Target worship and whether that can be reconciled with their policy of allowing their pharmacists to refuse to fill Plan B prescriptions on ethical/religious grounds. (Excerpt: “Most Wal-Marts won’t even carry emergency contraception. But it’s easy to be righteously indignant when the store in question is a grim, fluorescent-lit labyrinth. . . . If Wal-Mart were a celebrity, it wouldn’t be anyone we’d give a shit about, other than to laugh at its outfit. Target, however, is a different story, since we actually want to shop there.”) Plus music reviews, book reviews, movie reviews, craft ideas (e.g., making a planter out of an orphaned roller skate). It seems quite cool, albeit hard to find around here, so I decided to take the Amazon gift certificate I was going to use for Eat to Live and a couple of other things, until I wound up cancelling the order because it was taking so ridiculously long to ship, and put it instead into a subscription to Bust. Maybe I’ll even recycle a couple of old t-shirts into a tiered skirt while I’m waiting, using the instructions on pages 40 to 42.

*** ***

* Two dachshund-sized dogs would repeatedly attack Nigel, who was also about dachshund-sized in the dream. They’d play tug-of-war using him as the rope, until his head popped off, and then they’d run away. That was okay, because as long as I acted quickly I could screw his head back on his spine and he’d be all right, as long as more than five minutes didn’t elapse. After five minutes, he’d suffer irreversible brain damage and then die. Then one of the dachshunds decided to run away with Nigel’s body and hide it, so I was running around carrying my dog’s head and frantically searching for his body all over this weird garden on a college campus, knowing I’d never be able to find it and reconnect his head before the five minutes went past.

Don’t ask me. The only thing I can think is that some part of my subconsious was horrified by the PetsMart commercial with the dachshund and his creepily huge toy dog (currently Commercial 1 here).

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Finished!

Originally uploaded by moria.

What do you know — we’re shipping to the printer by our deadline (and about a week before the printer’s own deadline).

It’s almost scary. o.O

• Where to Find Pick Your Own Farms in the Atlanta Area
  Time for my annual “I want to go pick berries” compulsion. (This is why.) Anyone interested in coming? I’m thinking strawberries from Adams Farm in Fayetteville.
  (tags: atlanta berries fruits farms pickyourown)

There are times, as a chunky vegan, you feel as if you might be letting the side down a bit with your extra volume. I mean, granted that veganism is not (for me) about health per se but about being healthy while minimizing the cruelty involved in your maintenance; granted also that switching to entirely plant-based foods had the unintended but welcome side effect of shedding, and keeping off, quite a fair amount of weight. That being said, though my weight has been pretty stable for about a year without any real effort on my part, I could certainly stand to pare it down a bit more. Well, more than a bit, strictly speaking. We won’t go into numbers, exactly.

I’ve been sort of half-heartedly trying to follow the Eat to Live plan the past couple of weeks, a process made more difficult by the fact that the copy of the book I ordered hasn’t yet arrived. As I understand it, though, the basic idea is to eat lots of vegetables (both raw and cooked), fruit, beans, and modest amounts of flaxseed, raw nuts, tofu, and, presumably, seitan; starches and other comparatively “low nutritional bang for your caloric buck” foods are restricted. (As I said, I don’t have the book yet, and my understanding comes only from one lunchtime browse of Sarah’s copy. If I’m wrong, please be gentle with your corrections.) It’s definitely vegan-friendly, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Anything that really limits starches is a bit of a problem for me, though. I love veg, fruit, beans, and whatnot, but if I can’t have a big scoop of quinoa or kasha, or a round of whole-wheat pita bread, I will lose what little grip I have on sanity.

I was doing pretty well today, actually — orange for breakfast, lunch of pinto beans and broccoli with a little corn thrown in (and dressed with a limited-oil version of Mo Kelly’s Salad Dressing from The Garden of Vegan), tofu and roasted eggplant and zucchini for dinner. Then, catastrophe: I broke down and made corn-and-basil muffins.

And they were good. [Insert demonic laughter here.]

When the book finally arrives, I’ll give it a more thorough read and find out whether it’s something I really can adapt to, or if I’ll go crazy without access to pita. We’ll see; I’m a lifelong pita addict, so it might be tough.

• ThinkGeek :: Star Wars Bobble Heads
  Oh, wow. They’ve also got Monty Python & the Holy Grail mini bobbles.
  (tags: toys geek cool starwars montypython)

• Food Ingredients First: Nutrition, Ingredients and Foods Online - Newsmaker
  Reason #7384 the U.K. rocks: even better labeling of food suitable for vegans and vegetarians. (Via Food Fight and VP.)
  (tags: uk britain vegan vegetarian food labeling)

Please forgive the slack blogging of late; the pollen has been wreaking havoc with my allergies, and I keep getting incapacitated by sinus headaches, ear-clogging and -popping unpleasantness, and other seasonal fun associated with breathing air that is little more than pollen soup at the moment. Drinking licorice root tea seems to be helping, though, and certainly tastes good. It’s also cheaper than OTC decongestants, and you don’t have to worry about whether the manufacturer is using nonvegan fillers.

In between headaches, I’ve been playing around with from-scratch seitan recipes. Nothing too groundbreaking, but I thought I’d record my findings. They are surely not news to the experienced seitan cook, I’m sure, but they may be somewhat helpful for someone else who’s still rather new to gluteny goodness, and at the very least it’ll make it less likely that I’ll forget what I’ve learned:

* Don’t bother using the food processor to knead your gluten. I did that the first few times, and it works, but it’s hardly worth the effort of cleaning out the processor work bowl afterward. Doing it by hand takes hardly any more preparation time at all, and saves on cleanup. (Also, processor-kneaded gluten is all weird-looking and lumpy, and the gluten is so rubbery it’s impossible to smooth out the bumps. Hand-kneaded gluten is much smoother and easier to mold.)

* Instead of adding herbs, garlic, nutritional yeast, etc., to the actual gluten (a la Vegan with a Vengeance), I’ve gotten to where I prefer simply adding them to the broth, and just mixing half gluten flour and half water to make the dough (a la La Dolce Vegan).[1] This makes a somewhat squishy dough at first, but it soon firms up nicely. I don’t know whether this approach affects the ultimate nutritional content, or how, though. Both approaches seem to yield equally good results; I just find the throw-it-in-the-broth approach a bit easier.

* Using a slow cooker for the simmering works nicely, but I think I’ll reserve this for weekend cooking, when I’m likely to be around to check the consistency periodically, instead of doing it during the week. The batch I made yesterday came out of the fridge about 7:00 in the morning and cooked until I got home about 6:00 in the evening, and resembles nothing more than a sponge. A yummy sponge, but not quite the consistency I’d been wanting. (Seriously, it squishes. Definitely overcooked.) I do like using the slow cooker on weekends, though, because the lower, consistent heat makes it easier to make dense, resilient seitan. Four to five hours seems to be quite long enough, though if you have a fancy-schmancy slow cooker with multiple temperature settings, you might be able to get away with a workday-long simmer without ending up with SpongeBob SeitanPants.

On a completely irrelevant note, I find it rather annoying that McAfee doesn’t let you renew your Internet protection suite while you’re using Firefox. Good thing I hadn’t gotten around to uninstalling IE yet. . . . Let’s just hope that the new installation, and upgrading from v. 7 to v. 8, doesn’t play silly buggers with my setup.

On a second irrelevant note, WordPress v. 2 seems to enjoy randomly removing visual space between paragraphs. I try to fix it when I spot it, but this may lead to inadvertent spamming of RSS feeds. My apologies if this happens, and also for any improperly-squeezed-together paragraphs I’ve missed.

[1] My two favorite vegan cookbooks — nay, favorite cookbooks, full stop.

• Tom Delay resigns. on Flickr (book_slut73)
  Tagging Delay’s photo with “scary dye job” is pretty funny. I hadn’t known about the “Bash Bush, Invite Your Friends” group, either.
  (tags: delay resignation flickr book_slut73)
• Sword2SkyVegan.net
  I’ve been trying to cut down, but S2SV looks RSS-worthy. Info on veg*n-friendly restaurants, grocery reviews, books, and misc. life goodies. Engagingly written, too.
  (tags: blog vegan vegetarian resources)