Cookies!

When I found out that Skittles were being made without gelatin, I was excited and bought about 4 packages. After going through one, however, I remembered how fake tasting they are, artificial and too sweet. Jeff and I still ate the rest of the packages, but I don't think I'm going to be going out and buying more Skittles.

I feel the same way with the vegan butterscotch chips I got a Price Chopper last month. I bought two bags, and after eating a few handfuls with ice cream I realized how fake tasting they are. They're not awful, but certainly not as good as chocolate. That said, I had one more bag and wasn't going to let them go to waste. So I decided to try out this recipe for chocolate coconut chip cookies from Everyday TV.

I halved the amount of butter, skipped the coconut, and put in the butterscotch chips instead of the chocolate chips. And they came out pretty darn good! I was worried that I wouldn't have enough cookies left to take photos of them, and about four were eaten during the photo shoot. They came out a little crispier than I like (not crunchy, but not totally chewy) but that's probably because I made them small and kept them in the oven until they looked flat. I don't know much about the physics of baking cookies, but it seems to me that whenever I leave them in too long, they get crispy, and when I take them out just before that point they're still raw in the center.

Here are the ingredients of those awful butterscotch chips:

• sugar (at least this first one is good!)
• partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil
• natural and artificial flavors
• sorbitan monostearate (emulsifier)
• soy lecithin (emulsifier)
• yellow 5 lake (read that wiki page, that stuff sounds awful! and it's being phased out in the UK)
• yellow 6 lake (as if the yellow 5 wasn't bad enough, this stuff sounds worse)
• blue 2 lake (I'm linking to this page so you can check out the complaint about stool staining, ha!)
• salt

There needs to be a healthier, natural, alternative to this. (I have been exploring some recipes for butterscotch sauce, maybe I can experiment if I get some time with hardening it into chips or chunks.)

Soy Scorecard

The Cornucopia Institute very recently published a Soy Report & Scorecard that goes into great detail about organic soy food brands. I just finished reading most of the entire PDF (I skimmed some sections), but found it to be extremely informative and also very eye-opening.

Some things I was already aware of, such as that many soy products are created using an industrial solvent called hexane. As somebody who sometimes works with dangerous solvents in a clean room, using gloves, face shields, safety goggles and ALWAYS a fume hood, it amazes me to think that solvents can make their way into my food! I would never drink (or touch, or inhale) acetone in a lab, why do I want to eat soy lecithin that was created using acetone or hexane?

Apparently there is an organic alternative to hexane production as far as soy lecithin goes. This is pretty interesting news, as I was previously unaware of such a thing. I tend to skip over products that contain soy lecithin, but if it's labeled as "organic soy lecithin" (which I have not yet seen on any labels) that means that industrial solvents were not used.

Industrial solvents are also used in the production of many food products such as energy bars and veggie burgers. The report has a listing of which brands use hexane and which don't, which is good information to have when you're out grocery shopping. I tend to skip the energy bars, which I used to eat a lot before going on my runs. I need to figure out a recipe to make my own, because they're a great, quick option if I don't have time for breakfast before a run. I used to eat Power Bars, which are not vegan, but they admit to using genetically modified food in their product. And Clif Bars, which are vegan, use hexane processed soybeans to get their isolated soy protein. I also have to wonder about how "green" a product can be when it always comes in individually wrapped plastic-foil packets.

I also found the section on Silk to be very informative. After reading Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew, I was made aware of a lot of the politics of the company, and what happened after the original company was bought out by Dean Foods. Dean Foods is also the owner of Horizon Organics, so some vegans may be wary of supporting a company that also profits off of the cow milk industry. However, they also have recently stopped purchasing as many organic soybeans, and many of their products have lost their organic label while maintaining their high price tag.

I stopped buying Silk when I started dating Jeff, because he didn't like how the company does business. I agree, I think that large businesses in general care too much about profits to be totally invested in making sustainable, vegan, healthy products. The last time I bought Silk I was aware that all of their products were organic, which at least made me feel a bit better about the company. But now I am even more steadfast in my boycott of their products, and will discourage my mom from buying me any Silk soymilk when I come home. (It's the only brand of soymilk that she knows about.)

I also won't buy 8th Continent soymilk, which was previously owned by DuPont and now by Stremicks Heritage Foods. Stremicks also makes Rice Dream and Soy Dream, which are owned by the Hain Celestial Group. I can't tell if 8th Continent now falls under the Hain Celestial umbrella, but I have no interest in purchasing a product with such a shady history. (It was originally sold with vitamin D3, which is animal derived.)

There wasn't much about Whole Foods private label products, because they refused to participate in the Scorecard product, so I am left in the dark as to where they would fall into the spectrum of companies. When I buy soymilk, I generally buy 365 brand because it's the least expensive and also tastes good. It's also organic.

I have made my own soymilk, and once Jeff and I find a good nut grinder we will start making a lot more of our own soymilk and tofu. We have about 15 pounds of soybeans waiting for us to eat. There is also the option of buying a soymilk maker. However, I find that these are very expensive and I don't like the idea of relying on an electric gadget to make my food. In the future I hope to post about making soymilk without the use of a soymilk maker, once Jeff and I get the procedure down to a science.

I guess the takeaway from this post is to stay vigilant about the food you buy. Look into the company who produces your food, find out who they are owned by (or if they are a private company). Ask questions about the ingredients, and do a Google or Wikipedia search if you don't know what they are. Find out if you can make the food yourself instead of buying from a store. Always have an inquisitive mind, and ask questions. If we have the resources, time and money to buy good food, or to make food ourselves, we should.

Cake!

I saw a recipe for lemon raspberry cake on Vegalicious, the first vegan recipe blog I subscribed to way back in the day when I was learning vegan basics. Although the recipe was posted in early March I immediately sent it to Jeff and told him that this is the cake I would want for my 25th birthday. (Jeff and I don't buy each other gifts, instead we make each other baked goods for birthdays.)

The cake is absolutely divine. Jeff made it with limes instead of lemon, and the entire kitchen smelled like key lime pie while it was baking. The frosting was a bit thick, I like creamier frosting, but it was still delicious. I had just purchased a pastry decorator and had a hard time piping it through the nozzle, and it was my first try with the decorator. Hopefully I'll get more practice with decorating baked goods in the future. (I was also only able to take one or two photos because my parents, Jeff and I wanted to eat it instead of waiting forever for me to get a lot of shots.)

Baby Lettuce!

The bucket full of lettuce seeds out on my fire escape has grown into a bucket full of baby lettuces! Jeff and I have been eating away at these since they were wee sprouts, and now they are actually big enough to make a somewhat substantial salad.

I'm excited that they're so big. My parents are visiting tonight, and I plan on making some mushroom risotto (easily veganizable recipe courtesy of Joy of Cooking, my favorite cookbook ever), seitan and a salad including our baby lettuce, and some tomatoes and pepper. Maybe the locally grown lettuce will almost offset the fact that our rice was imported from Thailand.... Or maybe not. But home grown lettuce is really easy to grow and certainly tastes better than anything purchased in a store!!

[More Photos]

Plastic Waste (May 13-19, 2009)

I know that plastic waste may not seem to have much relevance to food, but for me it does. I don't buy much stuff, but I do buy a lot of food. Until recently, when I started reading the blog Fake Plastic Fish, I just bought whatever was cheapest in the store without giving much consideration to the overall impact of that decision. Although I have been using plastic tote bags for about 5 years, and rarely used plastic produce bags, I didn't think twice about using plastic bags to fill up on bulks at the co-op. I didn't take into any consideration if my condiments were packaged in glass or plastic bottles.

When I started to read Fake Plastic Fish, it turned on a light bulb in my brain. It made me realize that while I may complain about plastic packaging, it's ultimately my decision to purchase (or not purchase) plastic packaged items. Yes, this is much easier said than done, but I have been in the process of changing my purchasing habits over the past few months. I have a long way to go but have already made a lot of progress.

I have a list on my freezer of a lot of food items I use that are made with plastic, and while I don't have alternatives for everything yet, there are some things (like pizza dough) that are so easy to make that I instantly made the switch.

Recently, Beth from Fake Plastic Fish issued a challenge for her readers to tally up their plastic waste for one week. I have wanted to do something like this for a while, but I feel like now is the perfect time to finally get around to seeing how much plastic I go through in a week.

I have to preface this list by noting that this is only household waste (nothing from work is counted, although I had a lucky week where I created no plastic waste, I have a very eco-unfriendly job). This is also waste generated by two people - Jeff and me.

Here is the tally for May 13-19, 2009:



May 13:

• Tempeh Package - I love tempeh, and as a vegan it's one of my main "meat" sources. I don't tend to like faux meats -- tofu and tempeh pretty much do it for me, and tempeh is my absolute favorite. I know this is something that I can eventually learn how to make myself, and I will, but for now I am scared off by the idea of fermenting my own soybeans. For now I will continue to buy tempeh, and it is unfortunately packaged in plastic. (Although, I do feel like I have done a little bit to help by purchasing Soy Boy tempeh, which is a great small company, and I boycott LightLife products, which are made by the Evil Empire ConAgra.)


• Scotch Brite Sponge - Jeff (who is also eager to help catalog my plastic waste) asked me if a sponge is made from plastic, and if not, could we compost it? Apparently the disgusting smell coming from my sink wasn't coming from my sink, it was coming from my sponge. Gross. I tend to use sponges over and over for several months, and it's high time I get rid of this one. I looked online and while the spongy base is made from wood pulp, the green scouring top is made from nylon fiber. In the future I will make the switch to Skoy Cloths, but in the mean time I have several more sponges that I bought over a year ago sitting in my pantry waiting to get my dishes clean. (For the record, I intend to put the spongy bottom into the compost and see what happens.)
  


• Scouring Pad - I've had this thing sitting around for ages, and I don't know why I didn't get rid of it awhile ago. It long since lost its ability to get my cast iron skillet clean (and I've since switched to a grill brush which should last much, much longer than scouring pads). It's also Scotch Brite, so it's similarly made from nylon fibers. Needless to say I won't be buying these again.

May 14:

• Tempeh - Again.


• 5 Soy Sauce Packets - I'm not sure if these are made out of plastic but I think so, and am going to include them. I usually always have tamari on hand in the fridge, but I was out, and had these soy sauce packets from take-out sushi way back when, so I used them while making fried rice.

May 15:

• Nip Guards - I'm an avid runner, and even though I wear a sports bra, it's not enough to prevent painful chafing during my long runs (>6 miles). Unfortunately I haven't found anything better than nip guards, and not only is the packaging (not present) plastic, but so are the things that the nip guards are on. I'm not sure if the nip guards themselves are plastic but I'm including them just in case.


• Tempeh - Yep, I love tempeh.


• 2 Drinking Straws & 2 Small Cups - I went back to my hometown to visit my family, and that means I went out to eat. (I almost never go out to eat when I'm home in Boston.) I meant to ask for no straw, but I forgot. This is my straw, Jeff's straw, and the mixing straw (talk about useless plastic!) from my gin and tonic. The two cups are from asking for BBQ sauce for my french fries (both me and Jeff). I thought I'd get a bottle.

May 16:

• 2 Drinking Straws - Went out to eat AGAIN and I ordered a drink and got another straw. Oops. Also, they put whipped cream on top. I get so lazy in my veganism here in Boston where I only go out to eat at vegan restaurants that I forget that "normal" restaurants put whipped cream on things like Piña Coladas. The other straw/stirrer is from Jeff's margarita. (You can't even drink through those tiny things, so it baffles the mind why they give them to you in the first place!)
  

May 17:

• 2 Plastic Windows - I came back and had a lot of mail. One piece was a solicitation from a local charity that came with a plastic window. I have mailed them back asking to be taken off of their mailing list. One was a mailing from an insurance company from when I got hit by a car door last year. I should hopefully never be getting any mail from this insurance company ever again.


• 2 Plastic Bags - I ordered two books from two separate people. I bought them used so I didn't think I'd get any plastic in the packaging. So I was surprised to find these two book sized plastic bags enveloping my books inside the bubble wrap mailers. These are books, they don't need to be housed in three layers of protection!!! I don't order books often but when I do I guess I need to ask for no plastic.


• 2 Chopstick Wrappers - I go to Grasshopper's buffet every month. Sometimes I remember to bring my own chopsticks. Sometimes I forget and use their chopsticks, which are packaged in plastic. Grasshopper is currently the only place I've been to in the Boston area that has plastic (instead of paper) chopstick wrappers. Genki Ya on Harvard Ave is the only place I know of that has reusable chopsticks. (One of the wrappers is missing from the photo, it's probably in my pants pocket somewhere.)

May 18:

• Plastic Wine Thingy - I love wine, and it seems that the cheap wine tends to have real corks. However, this one also had a stupid plastic thingy around the cork, that I thought was foil when I bought it. It's hard to tell what you're going get, sometimes it's foil, sometimes the cork is cork, and sometimes there's foil around a screw top.


• Ice Cream Lid Seal - One thing I can't live without is delicious vegan ice cream, and Trader Joe's Soy Creamy Black Cherry Chocolate Chip is about as good as it gets. When I first bought this ice cream I'm pretty sure they didn't have plastic seals, but now they do. I'm not sure this is something I could give up, even though there is plastic involved.


• Pasta Box Window - Why do these windows exist? People already know what pasta looks like, and on the off chance they don't, like 99% of all other products out there the company could just put a photo of pasta on the cardboard box. Jeff has a pasta maker, so we will definitely start to make our own pasta. At least the windows on boxes are better than the plastic bags of pasta they sell at Whole Foods.


• Corner of Plastic Package - I just wrote a detailed post about my stance on food products, and then I went and bought vegan butterscotch chips at Price Chopper when I was back home this past weekend. They are definitely not food by any real definition, but sometimes a vegan just misses eating butterscotch! I'll figure out a recipe for the stuff but in the mean time I'm going to make some mean cookies.

May 19:

• Plastic Baggie - This is from a razor Jeff just bought. Yes, the razor was packed with plastic and had packing peanuts (not sure if they are starch or polystyrene) but this is going to prevent the future consumption of plastic disposable razors. I will probably also use it, so that will be less plastic razors used by two people!

Conclusion:
While this isn't a lot of stuff, this is certainly a lot of stuff that I could live without. I do think that it reflects an outlier week, in that I went home and that accounted for a lot of waste (6 straws and 2 plastic cups out of 30 total items), but I can't just make excuses. I have learned to be more vigilant about packaging in online orders (I made an order for some personal care products yesterday and asked for them not to be packaged in plastic), I have learned to be more vigilant about asking not for straws (although I normally eat out three times a month, and neither place I eat out at uses straws).

I have also continued to make some lifestyle changes. Jeff purchased a real razor. I bought a grill brush for my cast iron skillet (it's plastic, but better and more robust than sponges). I recently purchased cloth sanitary napkins and am excited not to have to purchase any more of those awful plastic ones from CVS.

And there are some things I still have to learn. Making tempeh would probably cut my normal plastic waste by half. Learning how to make large batches of pasta for consumption over the course of a few weeks or months would also lead to less plastic from the pasta containers. Maybe if I ever learn how to make soy ice cream, I can reduce my plastic tally even further!

One final thing is to note that I don't think that any of the stuff in this tally is recyclable here in Boston. I will probably put the two plastic cups (labeled as #6, polystyrene) in the bin, but everything else is not specified on Boston's recycling website, and I know they don't recycle plastic bags. So unfortunately they will go out with my trash, which is, sadly, in a large plastic bag (I will switch to paper bags in the future).

Great Michael Pollan Article

I just came across a great interview between Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Michael Pollan on Alternet this morning.

The two books that made the biggest impact on the way I eat are Tom Robbin's The Food Revolution and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. (His book The Omnivore's Dilemma was also great but didn't really change the way I ate.)

Michael Pollan's main thesis in In Defense of Food is that people shouldn't eat too much food, they should eat mostly plants, and they should eat only things that actually are food. In other words, don't eat food products. He goes on to define food products, and basically they're the product of industrialized food. High fructose corn syrup (and many other corn products made cheap by corn subsidies) is a big indication of processed food. As are many other chemicals.

Being vegan also helped me to recognize the disgusting ingredients that are in foods these days. As a beginner label reader, I at first only looked for ingredients that would make me re-shelf the product, whey, casein, milk, butter, gelatin, lard, etc. But after reading Michael Pollan's books, I became a more avid label reader. Why should I eat something that contains Polysorbate 60 (an ingredient in Cool Whip and Twinkies)?? I even try to limit my consumption of Soy Lecithin, which is prevalent in more foods than you would think, because it's made using hexane, an industrial solvent.

(Not to mention, many foods that use cheap corn (or soy) products are probably using genetically modified corn (or soybeans), and I hope to write a post about that in the future.)

Back to the article. It's a really great overview of Michael Pollan's arguments about how the food system really affects us in ways that may not be immediately apparent. A large part of the health crisis is likely related to food (and another large part in industries creating all of these toxic chemicals in the first place, and being totally unregulated, but that's another rant for another day).

It amazes me to think of how much effort went into mandating companies to put ingredient labels and nutrition information onto foods, and how much of an enlightening thing that can be for consumers if we only LOOK at it. But so many people have bought into the idea that we don't have enough time to read labels, or cook healthy food, that people don't read the labels, or don't care what the ingredients are. We've been sold on the idea that we can live better through science that we may be wary of giving a critical eye to what's in our food. For me, it's scary to think that I ate so many food products for so much of my life, but ignorance isn't bliss. Read the labels, and start eating real food!

Garlic Shoots

One thing I really love to do (although not more than eating) is reading. I can easily go through 10 or 15 books in a month, and I started saving oodles of money when I made the switch from bookstores to my local library (or three local libraries, to be more precise). I read a lot of nonfiction, and one subject that I read a lot about is food. I'm interested in the industrial food complex, and how to avoid it as much as possible. This includes being vegan, eating as much organic produce as I can afford, avoiding food products (read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food for more information on food products), and trying to grow as much food as I can indoors.

It's amazing how simple it can be to grow some things indoors. I have north facing windows, a tiny apartment, and until recently had quite the black thumb, but I have still managed to produce quite the little indoor garden. However I didn't know until last summer that it was possible to grow a few veggies with little to no effort involved.

The first thing I learned how to grow was scallions. This is real simple: take the bottom part (with the root attached) and either plant it in a small pot, or stick it in a jar of water. They'll grow really big, and you can just cut the top off when you're ready and eat it. It'll grow back. I'm not sure if there's a limit to how often it'll grow back, but it's certainly better than going to the store to buy more!

The second thing I learned was in an awesome resource, Urban Homestead. It was a short paragraph on growing garlic. Similarly to the scallions, you simply plant the garlic clove in some dirt and prune and eat the shoots. I had my first garlic shoots yesterday and they were simply delicious. They are very garlicky, without going through the effort of peeling and chopping up a whole clove.

I've also planted an onion (it was sprouting an awful lot in my fridge), but I have no idea yet if the shoots are edible. But it looks cool and hasn't died (yet), so I'll keep it going for as long as I can. Also indoors I have some peppers sprouting (thai, ho chi minh and habañero) as well as some seeds just planted (red, green and jalapeños). On my fire escape is a bucket full of lettuce plants that are somewhere between a sprout and baby lettuce. They're still delicious (just slightly spicy) in a salad.

I've probably sunk about 20$ into the whole deal, mostly the lettuce seeds (which were 7.50$ at Whole Foods) and also including potting soil. But if the pepper plants grow to produce actual peppers, I'm sure this is money I'll easily be saving by not going grocery shopping as often. Also, it's cool to grow your own food!

Banana Split Cupcakes

What to do when there is a pile of ripe bananas sitting in your fruit bowl? I decided to make something different than the old standard banana bread. As I'm always up for frosted baked goods, I decided to rip open Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and see what it had to offer.

Never one to simply follow a recipe as is (and because I couldn't find any pineapple preserves), I opted for cherry preserves instead. I don't think I've ever had a banana split with pineapples, and there's nothing more quintessentially banana split-like than the cherry on top! I also used chocolate chips instead of grated chocolate. They reminded me of the banana chocolate chip cupcakes they sell at the local coffee shoppe that I used to snack on before going vegan.

I was sort of bummed not to have a pastry bag. One day I'd like to make my cupcakes look professionally frosted, but for now I made do with a butter knife. Maybe I'll ask for a pastry bag for my birthday. But I topped them off with Sprinkelz and a maraschino cherry. Sprinkelz are awesome, they're totally hippie, without any of the crappy high-fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oils that your standard sprinkle will be loaded with. I found them at the Honest Weight Food Co-op (I seriously can't express my love for that place enough) and stocked up enough to get me through the periods of time when I can't make it home to fill up. But I have found them at the local co-op, Harvest, just not in bulk. (I think the individual boxes you can buy may have a plastic liner inside, which is a big reason I opt to buy in bulk.)

This was also my first attempt at taking nice photographs of food. I generally take atrocious photos of food. My excuse is that the lighting in my apartment is awful, so I may as well not even try. The thing is, I'm a generally good photographer when the photos I'm shooting are outdoors or in a really well-lit indoor area. But I'm not so good at macros or poorly lit situations. I just borrowed a copy of Digital Food Photography from the Boston Public Library, and while it's not an awesome book, it at least inspired me to break out my tripod and see what I could do with just the overhead light in my kitchen.

Over the next few months I hope to improve my food photography skills. It'll be a great excuse for me to build some reflectors and play with props, maybe even check out Good Will or local thrift stores for some neat dishes to photograph with. And, of course, when I move to my new place in September I'll have plenty of south facing windows to give me a good dose of natural light. No excuses!

Flour!!

Jeff and I purchased a 50 pound sack of all-purpose flour the other day at Honest Weight Food Co-op in Albany, NY. I love HWFC, they're leaps and bounds ahead of Harvest (Cambridge, MA co-op) in terms of what they stock, how much they stock, the bulk section, and awesome staff members. I always try to make it over to HWFC every time I visit my parents in the Capital District, NY.

Jeff just mixed up 6 batches of pizza dough to freeze. It lasts forever frozen, and whenever we feel like making a pizza we can just unfreeze the dough in the morning. Pizza is a great easy meal to make, you only need pizza dough, some sauce and whatever your favorite vegan cheese is. (I prefer Vegan Gourmet's mozzarella.) Toppings are optional, but you can use whatever veggies are sitting around in the fridge.

In other news, we bought a bunch of seed packets at HWFC as well (three kinds of peppers and lemon mint) and also bought two 4-5 gallon buckets for 50c each. (Have I mentioned how much I love HWFC?!) We're soaking the pepper seeds tonight and will plant them tomorrow. (When they get big enough they'll go into the buckets.) I'm excited to have some peppers to eat within a few months. I just hope enough sunlight gets into my apartment. Having a north-facing window can be rough, currently I only have plants that are suitable for low light. (Except for my Super Basil which has held on through me forgetting to water them for several days and not getting any direct sun between roughly October and two weeks ago.)

I'm excited to start all of these new projects. Cooking and baking is always enjoyable, and planting our own veggies will just make it even better. There's nothing like plucking a veggie off of a plant and eating it as fresh as it can possibly get. This will also be an experiment in how well the plants can do indoors. Hopefully when we move we'll have a place with more sun, but maybe for now we can breed them to be as hardy as possible.

Looks like we'll be eating a lot of pepper pizza in a few months!

Horchata

Jeff and I bought some horchata a few months ago and probably drank the half gallon in a single evening, it was that good. Later on I found this recipe for horchata online, and filed it away for later use.

This morning I decided that a snowy Sunday was the perfect time to test it out. I drained the rice, dumped it into my stainless steel pot with 2 quarts of water and let it all sit for three hours. Boiled it, simmered it, let it sit. After pureeing it, it has turned into a gelatinous glob of milky, ricey water, something that looks more like a science experiment than food. To say that it's "filtering" through the cheesecloth would be an exaggeration. It just sits upon the cheesecloth, mocking me for following the instructions on the recipe so precisely.

Jeff decided to add some more water, and I guess we'll see how that goes. We've coaxed almost a pitcher-full through the cheesecloth in about an hour's time, and after mixing it thoroughly once it's finally done draining, we'll season it with vanilla and sugar and add any more water as necessary. I only hope this stuff tastes really good to make up for all the effort!

In other news, I finally got around to reading The Book of Tofu today. I'll post a review later.