Digital Alterity

I love barbecue sauce in a fashion most unholy. When I visit Sonny’s, I want to just screw a rubber nipple on top of the sweet barbecue sauce and suckle until it’s all gone. Since becoming a vegan, I’ve been striving to formulate a proper conduit for barbecue sauce, and with this recipe, I finally hit the jackpot.

Ingredients

• Sonny’s Sweet BBQ sauce (or other vegan BBQ sauce of your choice)
• 227g (8 oz) tempeh
• 30-45 ml of canola oil

Procedure

1. Cut tempeh into about eight roughly equal strips.
2. Add oil a heavy sautee pan over medium-high heat. Cast iron works beautifully.
3. Pan fry tempeh strips for 3-4 minutes. If you see smoke, the pan is too hot. Burning will ensue.
4. Flip tempeh strips and sautee the opposite side for an additional 3-4 minutes.
5. Remove tempeh strips from the hot oil and allow them to rest on a paper towel or paper shopping bag for 1-2 minutes. After this brief rest, the strips should have a nice brown and crispy exterior. Your kitchen will smell sexy.
6. Place tempeh strips in a small pot or sauce pan and completely cover them with barbecue sauce.
7. Cover and heat barbecue and tempeh mixture over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes.
8. Remove from heat and allow to sit for 5 minutes before serving.

Thoughts on Sides

I would serve this up with either oven-baked fries, rice, or couscous. I bet some vegan macaroni and “cheese” would kick ass too.

Before becoming vegan, I used to make tuna salad, chicken salad, and egg salad fairly frequently. It was always a popular but absurdly simple dish here in the Haskell abode, and I finally got around to making a decent replacement. I chose tempeh rather than any mock meat because I like how it doesn’t really taste like meat while still tasting delicious.

Ingredients

• 227 g (8 oz) tempeh
• 1 block of firm water-packed tofu
• 100 g (about 7 tablespoons) Vegenaise
• 30 g (about 2 tablespoons) Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard
• 5 g (about a teaspoon) Tony Chachere’s Cajun Seasoning
• Black pepper, to taste

Procedure

1. Drain and press water out of tofu (optional).
2. Cut tempeh into roughly evenly sized pieces.
3. Steam tempeh on the stove for about 5-7 minutes (until soft enough to crumble).
4. Crumble steamed tempeh into a large mixing bowl.
5. Grab hand-sized chunks of tofu and squeeze between your fingers to get a texture not unlike crumbled hardboiled eggs or ricotta cheese. Add tofu mash to mixing bowl.
6. Add Vegenaise, mustard, pepper, and cajun seasoning to mixing bowl.
7. Mix ingredients with a spoon until the mixture is more or less uniform.
8. Taste and add any extra salt or seasoning that you desire. Now is the time to tweak.
9. Serve on bread or pitas.

Isa from the Post Punk Kitchen never seems to let me down. Every recipe or even basic idea for a recipe that I have taken from her and shamelessly used and/or abused has been nothing short of extraordinary. Quite frankly her book, Vegan with a Vengeance, is the first book I look to when I need ideas of what to cook when I’m not feeling particularly creative.

What makes her book different? Isa writes for people who are already vegan. I admit that when I first became vegan I found all the general advice and descriptions of veganism inevitably in the introduction for a vegan cookbook to be helpful and informative. After reading the same information a dozen times, however, I’ve found that it’s much less helpful the more often I hear it. I already know how to substitute eggs. I’ve already bookmarked sites with that information on the Internet, and I already have a handful of books on my shelf explaining my options. There’s officially no need for this in new cookbooks.

Isa strikes just the right balance between being informative and being entertaining. Any cookbook can just list recipes. Make me care about your book by making it unique. Isa allows her voice to come through in the interstitial blurbs and recipe introductions. It made me read the book in the first place, and it encouraged me to actually try the recipes (something I almost never do verbatim).

If you’re a vegan, you need this book. If you know a vegan and you want to cook something that he’ll love, you can’t go wrong with any recipe in the book. I can’t fathom a reason why this book isn’t on everyone’s shelf.

Technorati Tags: Food, Cooking, Vegetarian, Vegan, Post Punk Kitchen

Every restaurant should have vegan spicy sauce (Vegenaise and Sriracha chili sauce mixed together) as a base condiment. Any savory dish in the world is improved by it. It makes an excellent sandwich garnish. It, of course, tops veggie sushi beautifully. Tonight, I dipped day-old cheeseless pizza in it to make an exciting dinner that took no real work to prepare.

I have been known to take Tupperware containers of vegan spicy sauce with me to Subway to garnish my veggie delight subs. This stuff will change your life.

Technorati Tags: Food, Vegetarian, Vegan, Vegenaise, Sriracha

It’s inevitable. There you are with a tub of vegan margarine from the fridge in one hand and a recipe requesting a portion of it in terms of volume in the other hand. Do you attempt to pack your ingredient into the measuring cup? Do you melt the ingredient (if meltable) and then use the volumetric method?

Friends, there is a better way. It’s called a metric kitchen scale. You can pick up a really nice digital model from the nearest big box corporate store that sells kitchenware for about forty dollars. You can get a crappy one for significantly less than that. I assure you that the metric part is key, however, so don’t just get a scale with Imperial measure in ounces.

The real trick lies in watching the government-mandated serving size listing on the package. In most cases, even when it gives the Imperial serving size in terms of volume (teaspoons, cups, etc.), the metric listing is nearly always in terms of grams unless you’re dealing with a liquid measure. Just calculate how many grams you need and measure out that amount using your handy scale.

As an example, my brown sugar lists a serving size as 1 teaspoon or 4 grams. A quick answer from Google tells me that there are 48 (American) teaspoons in an (American) cup. Seeing that I need 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar for a recipe, I break out the calculator and determine that I need about 144 g of brown sugar.

3/4 of 1 cup = 36 teaspoons
36 teaspoons * 4 g/teaspoon = 144 g

The really fun part is that the mass of the food in question doesn’t vary with temperature. 144 g of melted margarine is the same amount of margarine as 144 g of refrigerated margarine. You get consistent results with less variation.

Technorati Tags: Math, Metric System (SI Units), Cooking, Baking, Measurement

Shortly after I became vegetarian but before I went vegan, I found myself in a barbecue restaurant with my entire family. While most folks were quietly accepting of my new and strange dietary habits, my brother upon hearing that I wasn’t eating meat anymore simply declared with neither lead-in nor subsequent explanation, “I believe in beef.”

I have decided to formulate his system of belief into The Cattleman’s Creed so that others may unite under one catholic, universal, and ruminant faith.

Full Text of the Creed

I believe in beef, seared cattle meat
from every grill on heaven and earth.

I believe in steak, beef’s purest form, Lord of meats.
It was marbled through feeding of rich grain
and cut to ensure even doneness.
It aged within the fridge,
was dried, salted, and was crusted.

It descended into the grill.
With an internal temperature of 145, it rose again;
It ascended to the dinner plate.
It is seated at the right hand of the baked potato,
and it will be served without steak sauce.

I believe in prime rib,
the economical hamburger grind,
the stewing of chuck,
the braising of shoulder steaks,
the roasting of top round,
and flavor outstanding. Amen.

Technorati Tags: Humor, Beef

I’ve been up to an awful lot in the past few weeks, and I’ve been posting about precious little of it as I scramble to stay on top of everything. In the interest of clearing the decks, to get on with writing about the present rather than past, I offer this ChangeLog entry.

Apartment News

On the day that we got the keys to our current apartment, we were notified that the complex had been bought by a real estate company based in Orlando. A few months after that, we were told that the complex was being converted into condos. We knew we were going to have to move when our annual lease was up. Given the fact that our lease is up on June 30, we went ahead and made our final decision over the weekend.

We’re going to be moving back to the southwest side of Gainesville at In the Pines. We’ll be getting about the same usable space as our current apartment for about the same price. We’ll be just a hair farther from campus, but not enough of a difference to matter.

We’re currently looking at moving on the weekend of June 23, and I need to examine our budget/finances to investigate the possibility of hiring movers. The actual process of moving will be much easier this time since we pared down so much crap when we moved last year. Also our level of organization is much higher.

Food Processing

After wanting one for my whole life, I finally got around to getting a food processor courtesy of some birthday money and some cash I had saved up. Amazon had the food processor I wanted, a machine with a retail sticker price of $300 or so, discounted down to $179. 700 Watt motor. 12-cup capacity. Ability to cater to my fantasies of a being a TV chef with a cooking show.

Expect much hummus.

GTD in IT

My department is putting on a mini-conference here at UF, and I’m currently slated to give a presentation tentatively titled “Getting Work Done in IT”. In my presentation, I’m outlining an approach to IT management that integrates a lot of the GTD work of David Allen and the activity around lifehacks originally popularized by Danny O’Brien into a loosely organized swarm approach to IT work. My presentation focusses on the department and enterprise rather than the individual, and you can of course expect an article or two on Bactroid.net once the presentation is given. Initial screenings of preliminary material have been well received within my office.

Vegan Sushi

I made spicy tempeh sushi from the PPK tonight, and it was effing amazing. I used Sriracha chili sauce in lieu of chili oil because I wanted actual vegan spicy sauce much like you would get on tuna at a sushi restaurant. The whole gestalt even tasted fishy without the need to kill any animals.

I declare the vegan sushi to be an overwhelming success. Even my resident flexitarian agrees.

Recently Completed Projects

• Turn in forms for In the Pines lease
• Determine when we can switch cell providers
• Pay DP water bill
• Pay Cathy for dinner
• Make vegan sushi
• Teach ARM-CONTBR to only pull in records where RUID is null
• Find a new apartment in Gainesville
• Review June NP
• Clean camera lens
• Read ghost stories online
• Move top PAPA notes to bottom field
• Update PAPA with outstanding ARMS issues
• Vacuum living room with Roomba
• Vacuum hall and kitchen with Roomba
• Create report of HTML links for Jay
• Create strategic planning mailing list
• Organize iCal by contexts
• Season wok
• Notify Allyson of Verizon contract end date
• Hang quantity and quality affirmation in work cube
• Create EAGLE Wikipedia entry
• Print pictures of Allyson’s birthday presents
• Share notes from Vicki’s team with Strategic Planning committee
• Make chili for Cinco de Mayo
• Buy VeganLife multivitamin
• Enter time into myUFL
• Put new parking decal in car
• Put new tag registration on/in car
• Read May Shoot
• Post about Freddy Adu
• Send Allyson possible birthday ideas
• Get new tag registration
• Make Knorr spinach dip in a vegan fashion
• Make polenta
• Phase out WebDAV shares
• Backup hard drive
• Archive LVV video
• Post Wolves season analysis
• Post CL about Johnny Cash illustration
• Buy Allyson birthday presents
• Change Favorites pages on DA Wiki
• Delete extra LVV video
• Buy whole wheat pastry flour
• Make correction to strategic process for Vicki’s team
• Get more deodorant
• Pick up Allyson’s pills
• Send Johnny Cash illustration to Raue Center for publication
• Shop for weekend food
• Order Wolves clearance shirt
• Post instructions for when backups fail
• Balance Quicken
• Enter Best Buy World Cup sweepstakes
• Tell Dave about Choices billboard
• Reconnect video adapter to Betsy’s student computer
• Create jump keys for/access to ARMS pages
• Set up kudos Gmail label to forward praise/thanks to
• Post ChangeLog about getting involved
• Present video at LVV
• Create a Joga account
• Pay bills
• Pay Verizon bill
• Shred MBNA documents
• Put dose of Advantage on Tux
• Enroll Mac Mini in Applecare
• Pick up FedEx package
• Get more Advantage for Tux

Technorati Tags: Productivity, GTD, Lists, Cooking, Vegetarian, Vegan, Moving, Sushi

While watching the True Grits episode of Good Eats, I got a hankering to make some grits/polenta. Forsaking chicken broth and dairy, I marched into my kitchen and started yet another delicious vegan experiment—a savory polenta that will make you swear that heaven is a place on earth. Do you know what that’s worth?

Ingredients

• 30 ml of extra virgin olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 15 g of chopped, minced, or smashed garlic (about 1 tablespoon)
• 120 g of coarse grind whole grain corn meal (about 1 cup)
• 1 liter of water with 25 g of Better Than Bullion vegetable base mixed in(1) (about 4 cups of water with about 4 teaspoons of vegetable base)
• 30 g of vegan margarine (about 3 tablespoons)
• Black pepper (to taste)
• 50 g nutritional yeast flakes

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 175 C (350 F).
2. Heat olive oil over medium heat.
3. When oil is warm, begin sweating onions slowly.
4. When onions are starting to get tender, add in your garlic and sweat for another 1-2 minutes. Your kitchen will start to smell sexy.
5. Add your water/stock mixture, and turn stove heat to high.
6. When mixture boils, remove from heat and slowly whisk in your cornmeal(2).
7. Cover pot with a tight fitting lid and put into your oven.
8. Bake for 35 minutes or so, stopping to stir the mixture about every five minutes or so.
9. When you remove the polenta from the oven, add in your margarine and some black pepper. (About 10 grinds from my pepper mill made me very happy.)
10. Slowly stir in your nutritional yeast. Pour a bit in and fully incorporate it before adding more. I worked in about four stages. Your mixture will thicken as you add the yeast.
11. Serve immediately with fresh steamed vegetables of your choice on the side.

Footnotes

1. Alternately, you can substitute vegetable broth here.
2. Be mindful of Alton Brown’s advice to pour slowly. If you dump the cornmeal in quickly, you’re going to get lumps.

Many people live in under the false impression that vegans are picky eaters who have to plot out meals for weeks in advance or risk starvation. This misconception is almost certainly born out of the fact that we have to refuse verboten snacks that our well-meaning and warm-hearted omnivorous loved ones offer to us. In actuality, anyone who has been a vegan more than a month or so probably has some favorite vegan treats to reach for when your day has been crappy, your stomach is grumpy, and you (inevitably) have to fart from all the fibrous vegetables you’ve been eating. With the aim of educating my readers and further putting myself on exhibition to the Internet at large, here are some of my favorite little vegan delights:

• Bacos and Vegenaise on whole grain toast. The first time I made this Allyson turned up her nose at it. I made her take a bite and instantly converted her to the saving knowledge of savory snack perfection. Vegenaise is actually—honest to God—better than real mayonnaise. I kid you not. The Bacos add a nice smoky bacony flavor without killing any piglets. Even if you’re not vegan, give this snack a try. In fact, if you know me in meatspace, just ask me to make one for you.
• Luna bars. Luna bars are my addiction of choice. Imagine a sweet granola-like bar in host of wonderful flavors like chai, peanut butter cookie, and chocolate pecan pie. They provide me with enough vitamins that I could live for quite a long time if theses were my only food source. If the Christ crackers at Communion were Luna bars, I would convert to Catholicism right now.
• Vegenaise and Sriracha chili sauce. Individually these two condiments already rule the world, but together they merge into the vegan Voltron of condiments—the vegan spicy sauce. That’s right, the spicy sauce you get on your spicy tuna rolls is nothing more than Sriracha mixed with mayo. And since Vegenaise is better than mayo, vegan spicy sauce is so amazing that you’ll need to smoke a cigarette after consuming it. What do I eat it on? Effing everything. I have been known to take plastic containers of it with me to Subway. I have dipped carrots in it. A better question would be what wouldn’t I eat this on?
• Starbucks soy no-whip valencia mocha. Do you like those chocolate oranges? Well, imagine one of those in liquid form. I don’t care if Starbucks is the devil. The devil makes a deliciously sexy vegan beverage that I would gleefully suckle through a rubber nipple.

Technorati Tags: Food, Vegetarian, Vegan

On Saturday, I made Alton Brown’s split pea burgers from Good Eats, and I have been absolutely blown away by the result. I used red bell pepper as my pepper of choice, and the only substitution I made was matzo meal for bread crumbs since all of the available bread crumbs from my local grocery store contained whey.

The end result is delicious with just a really light hint of Indian cuisine from the cumin and coriander. I suspect that the burgers would be really good if they had a crispier crust on the outside, and I have half a mind to try broiling them in my oven in an attempt to realize that vision. When I took the mixture off the stove, I would have been happy to just eat it with a spoon instead of pulsing it to make a burger texture.

As just a tip, don’t heat up your burgers until you’re ready to eat them. The burger mixture keeps remarkably well in the fridge. Just cook up the patty in a frying pan when you want one. Next time I might even try freezing some patties for future use.

If you think you don’t like vegan food, if you think you don’t like peas, try this recipe immediately. It’s a truly amazing and tasty way to get some nutrients in your body with relatively few calories. We have been eating these every day since I made them.

Technorati Tags: Food, Cooking, Vegetarian, Vegan, Good Eats, Alton Brown