Link of the day: vegetarian opportunity

Kathy Freston at Huffington Post

Excerpt:

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;

● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;

● 70 million gallons of gas--enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;

● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;

● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;

● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?

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Still Cooking Thai - the Asian grocery store where I live.

I know, I know - I've neglected my blog(s). Quick update to my little adventure of learning to cook Thai (vegan Thai) and yes we are still eating pretty much strictly Thai. I won't add the latest recipes to this post, but I will be adding them to the blog shortly. It's been a month now - my - a month has passed since I began converting us to vegetarian. I've been cooking vegan Thai recipes for a month now. Thai cooking is not meat free, and I have been using the vegan Thai recipes at Vegweb. No sense adjusting to Thai food with meat only to remove the meat later, so this is what we now know to be Thai cooking - the vegan way. (No, it wasn't my plan to go vegan religiously; vegetarian yes, but not vegan, so this is more the convenience that Vegweb offers in providing recipes from people who are vegans!)

Update 1) I made Spring Rolls, which are NOT egg rolls, although I wound up also making egg rolls because initially I had purchased the wrong kind of wraps. So egg rolls are egg rolls and the wraps include a combination of flour and eggs and the recipes for the fillings vary, but essentially you wind up cooking the little dumplings in hot oil. I wondered as I was dipping them into the basket of cooking oil how this isn't much different than french fries or fried chicken parts.
And yes they were good, tasty and I enjoyed the egg rolls, but I digress.

Spring rolls are not cooked. The wraps are actually tapioca based and flat like a tortilla. To make the spring rolls, the basic recipe is a use of a mix of vegetables (carrots, onions, bean threads, cooked tofu, mint or cilantro) wrapped in a lettuce leaf or two, then the whole thing is wrapped in the tapioca based shell. The shell is set into water for a few minutes to soften, then removed and kept softened between two clean, wet dish towels. Whle still soft, the vegetable combination of ingredients are wrapped into the shell in a kind of burrito fashion.

It's quite 'artsy' when finished, the green lettuce shows through the transparent shell. The taste is fresh and the mint or cilantro add to that sense of 'freshness'. The Spring Rolls can then be dipped into a peanut sauce and it's a quite lovely eating experience. When I sent these along with Sweetie for his lunch, he came home and reported there was a lot of ooohh la la- ing from his work buddies and I think Sweetie was kind of impressed that his wife had sent along a 'specialty' for his lunch.

Update 2) The Asian grocery store where I shop. Obviously I have made many more vegan Thai dishes since I last blogged, and the Spring Rolls get special mention because they were a labor of love and 'art'. So I have been back to the Asian grocery store for the second time now to replace some ingredients and get some new ingredients. It is still a bit of a time consuming experience as I continue to learn the various ingredients. I spend a lot of time reading what lables I can that are in English, and asking about labels that are in Asian languages with no English anywhere. It is a pleasant experience.

The Asian grocery store called Ping's Market also has a 'restaraunt' area and a limited menu of items that the store owner cooks and serves. I had the Pad Thai noodles and Spring Rolls in my first shopping trip which inspired me to actually make Spring Rolls at home. In my second shopping trip, my granddaughter (15 yr old Emo kid - by her own description of herself) was with me. I shared the 'lunch' experience with her and she was Not impressed - more like 'ugh', but it's okay, because someday when she is 35 or 48 she will remember this lunch experience with her grandmother.

The store owners are quite elderly and a younger woman, one of their daughters, was there the first time I went and again this second time. I asked her if they had the dvd that was playing on the tv the last time I was there - it was a series of Thai dancers and singers. I wanted my granddaughter to see the dancing. She went to see about the dvd, and came back with one (I don't think it was the one I wanted to see, but that is okay) which she put in. I began asking some questions and that generated conversation with her. She shared with me that her parents were, in fact, refugees, having left Laos at the time of Vietnam war, to Thailand, where they remained in refugee camp for 5 yrs. Then they crossed over as one of the many 'boat people' to America on a sponsorship by the many churches that were sponsoring Asians at that time.

She relayed to me a tad bit of a story her mother tells her. Since she was already born, and her parents were escpaping with her when she was but a baby, her mother explained how desperate survival was for everyone. Mother explained that had baby made sounds or noise, the others accompanying them would have felt compelled to drown both mother and baby. I felt empathy for how terrifying that must have been for the mother. I am not a stranger to these kinds of stories, as in our little remote community several families that are refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have settled here. The region where we live has a sparse population of people and only a few communities among a county full of trees, wetlands, mudflats, rivers, sloughs which all feed into or out of the Willapa Bay, which meets up with the Pacific Ocean. A bit of a quiet life for war-torn refugees. I spent 16 years as a case manager with our State social services programs, so I have had my share of interviewing and helping refugee families over the years, including here where we now live.

What was intriguing to me about the story as the daughter told it is that the daughter relates more to her life in America than her life as an infant and child in the refugee camps. As Daughter shares the story with me, it seems to come across in a tone that implies the story seems a bit unreal to the Daughter. I am reminded again that now that I am into those mid-elderly years of 55, how important passing along the heritage stories are to not only my childrens' generation but their childrens' generation. I don't know what my 15 yr old granddaughter will remember about the lunch, but I hope when she is herself an adult and past the 'teen' dramas, she will remember the Daughter's story.

How fortunate I am that Ping's Market exists in the small town communities that have so little in the way of choices to offer. It wouldn't exist here in this remote location except that some of the refugee Asian families chose to move here and remain here. I live in a fishing village, population of a mere few hundred. Nearby towns have population of a few thousand, but nothing of the size that warrants the 'shopping mall', 'strip mall', 'box stores' type businesses. Nor would I like to see these communities catch up with 'progress' enough to desire or want to attract such businesses.

posted by Lietta Ruger

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Three Soups, A big batch of Granola, and Eggplant Chips. What a day in the kitchen!

Three Soups Tonight!

New batch of Granola.

Eggplant Chips.


I got busy and made three different soups tonight to go with the big batch of rice I made yesterday. I also wanted to be sure that Sweetie would have 'leftovers' for the rest of the weekend and to take to work on Monday.

If we had a bigger refridgerator, I'd do the weekend making up meals ahead, but there is no way with the two of us we could get it all eaten. And I'm not real sure it's a good idea to be freezing the Thai food. While I'm sure it is entirely freezable, we are enjoying the taste of it cooked fresh with fresh ingredients. How does tofu freeze up after it's been cooked anyway? I suppose it does, but I'm not ready to find out yet.


And that is not all I made tonight. I made up another big batch of granola - the 5 cups of rolled oats recipe so we have our granola now for another week. For the granola, I combine two recipes, mixing and matching the ingredients as the mood strikes me and based on the ingredients we have on hand. Right now, we have a lot of ingredients for granola, so we are getting the 'deluxe' model.

Oh, remember the story of the Eggplant? Well, Sweetie can't say anything to me about another eggplant going to waste cause I cooked it up tonight - using a recipe called Eggplant Chips. They were quite tasty, not really chips, too soft but very tasty.

I talked to both my daughters this weekend. Daughter 1 - the Vegan Daughter has been doing some creative work with her blog, Veganville, and figured out how to have a 3 column blog, using Blogger. I want one too. She gave me the link for the tutorial and I made an 'experimental' blog to play around with and sure enough got it into 3 columns.

Daughter 2 - and she told me she has weekly cooking classes with some other women who are teaching each other how to cook 'ethnic' cuisines. Daughter 2 is learning how to cook Japanese and Phillipine foods. I was excited to learn that and asked her if she would blog her newly learned recipes. She said she would, so I am looking forward to seeing what she does with her newly learned skills. I figure with both daughters trying new foods and recipes and giving them ratings, then I can just borrow from their experience. And when they want to borrow from my experience, well, they can find recipes at this blog. Why do I keep saying that this is not a recipe/cooking blog when so far that is the majority of what I have put on this blog? Well, because right now I'm in the fever pitch of our project of converting to vegetarian, so that is where a lot of my attention is going right now.

Last night I made Suki Yaki (Japanese). I really enjoy suki yaki - it's one of my favorite Japanese meals. The recipe I used last night though left something to be desired. Either it was me, the chef, or the recipe, but that was not one of the better suki yaki meals I've had, either that I've prepared or on those rare occasions when we eat out. I'm not going to include the recipe here as I won't likely use it again. Maybe there wasn't enough sake in the liquid mixture - maybe too much daikon radish. I know I like to add extra ingredients like bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, mushrooms, bean sprouts, even if the recipe doesn't call for them.

Okay, so Sweetie tried all three soups tonight. How clever he is and you can see that in the photo. He found one of our old compartmentalized lunch containers, and it worked so handily for him to try one of each of the three soups. It looked so pretty, I made him wait while I took a photo. I sampled each of the soups and rather knew what I thought, so it was interesting to hear his ratings of the three soups.

Tofu/Pineapple Soup

2-1/4 cups soup base (1395 mg sodium)
1/2 cup (125 g) canned crushe'd pineapple, unsweetened
7/8 cups (212 g) canned diced tomatoes (385 mg sodium)
1 lb (454 g) tofu, bite sized pieces fried
1-1/8 cups (267 g) water
1-3/4 cups (210 g) diced Vietnamese celery (regular celery also works)
1-1/2 tablespoon (24 g) soy sauce (1140 mg sodium)

Directions:

1. Fry the tofu.
2. Place the: soup base, pineapple, tomatoes, tofu and water in a pot. Simmer, covered, for 10 minutes.
3. Add the celery and soy sauce. Bring to a simmer. Turn off burner.
We usually eat this soup with rice. Serves: 6 Preparation time: 45 minutes


(We both really like this soup. It has a sweet but tangy taste to it. These are not ingredients I would have likely thought to mix. But now that I think of it, tomatoes and pineapple do go on pizza, so maybe they are compatible. I used a vegetable broth soup base. A thank you shout out to Kyo for providing the recipe at VegWeb.com)



Sweet Potato Curry with Sticky Rice

1 can coconut milk
1 tablespoon Thai red curry paste
2 small or 1 big sweet potato cubed
1 chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, chopped
any other root vegetables, chopped
soy or vegan fish sauce (to taste)
cooking oil
2 cups uncooked sticky rice (also called sweet or glutinous rice)

Directions:

This is a super easy and super yummy recipe.

Curry:
Warm up some cooking oil in a pot, cook onion until softened. Add garlic and curry and stir for 2 minutes. Throw in the rest of the vegetables and stir until coated. Add the coconut milk and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the vegetables are cooked to your liking. I like my vegetables really soft so I cook them for a long time. Season with soy/vegan fish sauce.

Serve with rice.

Sticky Rice:
The rice should be rinsed and soaked for at least an hour before cooking. Boil a pot/wok with some water, just enough that it won't touch the bamboo steamer. Place the rice in a cheesecloth, or on top of some lettuce leaves so they don't fall through the steamer. Place the steamer in the wok/on the pot and steam for about 10 minutes. If you don't own a bamboo steamer, get one. Just for the rice, it's worth it!

Serves: 4 Preparation time: 30 minutes


(We gave this one a thumbs up. It's got that very Thai taste to it with using the red curry paste. Using the curry paste together with the sweet taste of the coconut milk was something new for us. And using in combination with sweet potato. I would make this recipe again. Although, I really prefer the taste of sweet potatoes cooked in more Western style, so while I would make this recipe again, I would more likely make another of the Thai with noodles recipes before I would this one. Only because I would use sweet potatoes in a different way. Sweetie liked the soup - gave it a thumbs up )

posted by Lietta Ruger

Curried Red Lentil Soup with Sweet Potatoes and Greens

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup chopped red onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
6 cups water
1 1/2 cups dried red lentils, rinsed and sorted
2 large or 3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
2 teaspoons good-quality curry powder, more or less to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
6 to 8 ounces Swiss chard or spinach
juice of 1 lemon or lime
salt to taste

Directions:

Both nourishing and sublimely satisfying, this thick soup incorporates fall's first sweet potatoes with seasonal greens. Red lentils, which cook to a warm golden color, are available in natural food stores and ethnic groceries. Serve with Chapatis or a store-bought flatbread.

Heat the oil in a soup pot. Add the onion and garlic and saute over medium heat until golden, about 10 minutes. Add the water, followed by the lentils, sweet potatoes, and seasonings. Bring to a rapid simmer, then lower the heat. Cover and simmer gently until the lentils are mushy and the potatoes are done, about 20 to 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, wash the greens, remove stems and midribs, then slice into narrow shreds. Stir into the soup along with the lemon juice. If the soup is too thick, adjust the consistency with a small amount of water.

Continue to simmer gently until the greens are just done, about 5 minutes for spinach and 10 to 15 minutes for chard. Season with salt. Serve at once, or if time allows, let the soup stand off the heat for an hour or two. Heat through before serving.

(We didn't care much for this one. It was not a Thai recipe. It was from a vegetarian recipe and while it was hardy enough, flavorful enough, it has the 'vegetarian' food quality to it. I'm just not ready to adjust my palette yet to what I consider to be somewhat bland tasting vegetarian recipes. It was a nice touch using sweet potato, and the lemon spiced up the flavor, but I'm not that fond of lentils, so it's hard to get around the fact that the soup has the taste of lentils. I would not likely use the recipe again, but I might in those early winter months. Sweetie didn't care much for the taste either).



Very Easy and Addictive Eggplant "Chips"

1 good eggplant, preferably organic
1-2 tablespoons olive oil (**less works fine too)
tamari to taste (about 1-2 tablespoons)
granulated garlic, to taste (about 1/2 teaspoon)

Directions:

This recipe is ridiculously easy, but I practically make a meal out of it every week. Everyone else seems to love it, too.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pour the olive oil on the cookie sheet, along with the tamari and garlic. Swoosh the cookie sheet around to mix.
Slice eggplant into about 1/4" thick rounds. Place eggplant slices on cookie sheet. Turn each slice over to coat both sides. Bake for about 10 minutes on each side. (Turn over when browned on the bottom). They are done when they look caramelized on each side.

I pretty much eat this all to myself, along with a salad and maybe some bread or something. I am not sure why I love them so much, but I hope you will too!!

**For a lower fat version, you can just use a teaspoon or so of oil, and make up the rest of the liquid with a veggie broth. This works fine too. OR, you can use an oil spray and coat each side that way. (I have a reusable Misto sprayer that I refill with olive oil). Serves: 1 (if you are me) Preparation time: 5 minutes, plus bake time

( Have to give a thanks shout out to quintess for sharing this recipe. It wa good, very tasty and I will gladly make it again. Nifty use for eggplant and it baked up quickly. I don't know if I followed the recipe correctly in baking it, because what I got was not crunchy chips, but they were cooked and tasty. So woo hoo for this recipe, great snack and one I can eat all by myself whenever I want. Since I just love the shape and color of eggplant, I can pick one up at the grocery store any time now and know exactly what I want to do with it!)

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Is food actual real food any more? Diets, Vegetarian, Vegan, and is food even 'natural' food any more?

How courteous, a thank you from a 'new friend' - Lighter Footstep. I added as a link and Chris Baskind from Lighter Footstep took the time to comment at this blog and give a thank you for the link. I appreciate the net courtesy.

Well, so far this blog is shaping up to be predominantly recipes. I don't intend for it to remain as such, and will be getting around to 'rounding it out', otherwise it will default to another 'themed' blog and I already have too many of those. I don't want this one to default to food and recipes, but I do need a place to contain the food and recipes, and I like blogger's new label that permits categorizing the blog entries. Eventually, perhaps using the labels, I can transport the recipe collection into a more useable format. But for now, while Sweetie and I make the switch to a more healthy diet, not quite ready to be strictly vegetarian and not ready to go the whole distance as my daughter has done with vegan, we are making a purposefully more slow transition, leaving some white meat in our diet.

Thanks to RealAge, I do have a shopping list and I will post it. Essentially though, it is pretty much unlimited fruits and vegetables, and a focus on 'daily minerals and vitamins. I'm so looking forward to our trip to the city and a food co-op or health food store to do our food shopping. However, when I converted us to the Dr. Ornish diet some years back, it required completely altering the pantry and buying food products I never heard of or used before. So I had a well stocked pantry with the ingredients such as wheatberries, oat bran, wheat germ, whole grain flour, basamati rice, polenta and on and on. That was six years ago, and I still have many of those pantry items left over. I'm quite sure their shelf life was not intended to be six years.

Why do I still have, after six years? The Ornish diet lasted for us six months, and then Sweetie had an extreme gout attack, and I mean extreme. We mistakenly surmised that the change in diet had aggravated the underlying condition that brings on his gout attacks, and I gave up on the Ornish diet, feeling guilty for subjecting Sweetie to the pain he was experiencing with gout attack. As it turns out, he had been seeing a PA who had prescribed his medicie to prevent the gout attacks, but the regimen wasn't working for him. He saw a new Dr who had begun a practice in our small town region, who referred him out to a Specialist. Once the inflammation episode resolved itself (and it took many weeks to resolve), the new medicine regimen has been working out quite well for four years now. And, Sweetie seems to believe that he is in tune enough now with his predisposed gout condition to know what kinds of diet adjustments he can and cannot make, which accounts for why we want to transition slowly and watch for cause and effect.

I'm not taken to trying diets or different diet du jour programs. I carefully read the Dr Ornish diet which makes claims of being able to reverse heart disease and then proceeds to show how that is done, how the body absorbs food and reacts and impact on heart. It made sense to me, still does and is a diet that is right in there with the healthy food diets. It does require a change in cooking habits though, and I'm pleased to have caused myself to get into the discipline of learning to cook less sugar, butter, salt, meat, fats.

I am not inclined to return to his diet or any other diet regimen at this time. Between the diet wars and claims, I'm more interested now in a tailored transition for our needs, our ages and our lifestyles. Many of the cooking techniques required by the Ornish diet have stayed with me, and I'm grateful for making myself go through that transition. It will be easier now as we transition again. However, with my daughter doing the full vegan thing, and gracefully, I might add, as she has not become an activist lecturing us on the ills of eating animal products, but it certainly has raised my awareness. I'd like to get to less animal products in our diet over time.

When I think of getting back to the land, I tend to think of farming, growing one's own food, having the functioning cow, chickens, a pig, etc. and being able to raise and butcher. Not to worry, it's only imagery as I doubt I'd have the heart to slaughter, butcher and dress out any animal. I point out my imagery though, to show that I tend to think in a different time era - before commercialized dairies, slaughterhouses, chicken farms, hybridized seeds, terminator seeds, patented seeds - Montsano, cloned seeds, and such like corporate giants taking over the food industry. I have no
wish to assist the corporations, and I also recognize that my singular efforts are but a drop in the bucket as the corporate food giants take over and assimilate us into buying and eating un-natural food. But I will get there eventually, and meanwhile, I applaud my daughter for already getting there and making the committment to not grow her children (another generation) into going along with popular food consumerism.

posted by Lietta Ruger

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Wastin away ... out here in Veganville

Lookin for my lost table salt ....
some people say that there's a woooommmaannn to blame ,
but I know ..... it's my own damn fault.



If you lack courage don't go to RealAge.com
You'll be sorry ... but maybe healthier.

Lietta found it and told me.
I went there, completed the questionnaire,
and found out I'm a lot older than my calendar says I am.

So tomorrow's the first day of the rest of my life eating 4 oz or less red meat.

Last month it was my teeth.
This month it's dang near all my red meat.
Next month?
Who knows?

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