Here's just a list...

Now here's just a list, of some stuff.

Actually, this is from going through and trying to clean up my January 2012 photos. I need to either do a better job of labeling/foldering them, or take fewer. It can take hours to go through and process them when you get behind the 8 ball.

We made Oaxacan chili chocolate cookies (as well as a couple other kinds of cookies) for all of our building staff at Xmas. These had a little heat to them that took a couple seconds to kick in, and were either loved or hated: the building manager loved them; the maintenance engineer had to get his kids to eat them. J and I both thought they were delicious.

I can't remember, or tell, from the image whether these were chives, or fresh basil. Either way it was tasty. 

J loves my flash fried brussels sprouts with garlic, so they are making a repeat appearance on this blog. (Just search for "brussels" in the search box. Even I was a little surprised at how many times brussels sprouts have shown up. Possibly second only to tofu and onions.) 

Sometimes I get a hair up my ass and do things like buy #10 cans of pinto beans and garbanzo beans. Then have to use them. Top portion, clockwise from left: pinto bean chipotle hummus, roasted red pepper hummus, UltraGarlic(tm) hummus; then in larger bottom container is a sushi tofu salad with a pinto bean patty on top.

This is a pretty classic food porn picture from my kitchen: onions, and tofu. Yum.

This is those same onions, fancified a little with fresh ginger.

Nothing too strange about wanting to get the last little bits of olive oil out of your container, is there? 

So why, then, would it be strange with shampoo, even if it requires duct tape? 

Stuffed mushrooms. 

A shockingly tasty vegan airplane breakfast on a Delta flight ATL-SFO. (Love the free upgrades on cross country flights!) 

Lemon zest is photogenic.

Random balcony panorama

I made this one on January 7, but don't think I ever got around to posting it. That's a storm rolling in from the southwest, but we only got around a quarter inch of rain that day.

FOOD PORN, Kentucky style!

No, we're not talking Kentucky Fried Chicken on a vegan food porn blog. 

And to be honest, the food itself wasn't particularly unique to Kentucky, aside from being limited to grocery stores so sparse they made Grocery Outlet look like Whole Foods.

I was cooking for between six and fifteen people hungry from walking all day, which partially explains the vast amounts of food being consumed.

L has a small farm in Lexington where he grows garlic. This didn't show up until midway through the walk, but we still got plenty of use out of it.

 Breakfast potatoes with peppers -- one of two batches cooked.

Raisin bread toast, made with freshly baked bread that JB brought from Cincinnati.

A slightly elaborate dinner salad, made with ingredients on hand: fresh lettuce that a walker brought from Lexington, tomatoes, black beans left over from a previous dinner, olives that a walker inadvertently took from a church kitchen thinking they were ours (oops!). And in the background right is a fresh jalapeño, garlic, and olive oil relish. C'mon: relish isn't just the cut up green pickle stuff you buy at the supermarket!

Eggs 'n taters. Here's where I out myself: while the walk was entirely ovo-lacto vegetarian, yes, I did occasionally cook non-vegan food for the walkers. No, I didn't taste or eat it, and got compliments for this: being able to cook good food without tasting it. Please don't call the vegan police. (And no need to call the health department, either: I cooked the eggs way more than shown above...)

 Much garlic bread was made, much garlic bread was consumed.

 

What would a food porn post be without a mostly gratuitous shot of ONIONS?

 Leftovers here of lentil stew, fresh coleslaw, etc.

This is how you make a lot of pasta for a lot of people. Those cans of cheapass pasta sauce forming the bottom of the food pyramid? $0.50 each. The only cheaper food we ate was the excellent produce we pulled out of a dumpster in Prestonsburg.

One of the church kitchens I cooked in was super small and had, literally, one station that could be used for prep. So piles of stuff had to go everywhere. This was prepping for pasta, and flash-fried collard greens with garlic.

A shot of the mostly unadulterated cheapass pasta sauce, and ONIONS!

A shot of the now much tastier pasta sauce, brimming with vegetables and kidney beans. 

My lunch one day on the walk: the delicious freshly baked bread, this one with anise (?) in it, a ton of peanut butter, and some dumpstered banana.

Doing prep the night before for breakfast: peppers and ONIONS!

I have no idea what I was prepping this for. Maybe the lentil stew?

More still not cooked egg. The caramelized onions and garlic were for potatoes.

I wanted to feed people festively for the Superbowl, and the grocery store didn't sell refried beans (or tortillas.) So I bought some pinto beans, and, well, refried them. This was for the six layer dip.

 This was nachos before baking them.

 And nachos after baking them, along with the six layer dip.

The six layer dip you've heard so much about: from bottom, refried pinto beans, cheese, raw onions, tomatoes, sour cream, and green onions. Yuckola. But people really liked it.

And this was the main dish for the Pooperbowl: stir fried brown rice with veggies. The rice was a leftover, gussied up with broccoli, cherry tomatoes, onions, garlic, and soy sauce.

I lost a dollar bet on the Pooperbowl, because I gave D the line of 3 and took the Patriots. I didn't really care about the game, but we were all going to watch it, so the bet at least made it interesting. Yet another reason to hate Tom Brady.

Kryptonite update

Alright, loogit: I'm not one to plug commercial companies. In the 688 posts in this blog to date, I'm not sure I've directly plugged any. (Sharp-eyed readers are welcome to correct this via comment, email, or writing it on the back of a $100 bill.)

But I gotta give it up to Kryptonite: they did right by their lifetime guarantee. As detailed in this lengthy post, I had some serious trouble with a Kryptonite combo U-lock. About three weeks ago I sent the broken down, 10+ year old lock back to them, with a print-out of the email response from the company website asking about warranty protection for a lock I had no receipt for. Today, poof: a brand new lock showed up in the mail (well, the UPS.)

Good on ya, Kryptonite. I'll buy from you in the future. No, I didn't get any additional incentive to post this, aside from the replacement lock.

I left part of the address unredacted for fun: I live on Peachtree St, not Beachtree St. But it got here all the same. Good thing there aren't any Beachtree Streets in Atlanta, unlike the 90+ streets that have some variant of "Peachtree" in their name.

Fancypantsy Steakhouse* Valentines Day Dinner

Look, just 'cause we don't do gifts doesn't mean I can't make J a fancypantsy steakhouse* dinner for Valentines Day.

(*Vegan, of course.)

Here are the plates. Clockwise, from the top of the lower plate: grilled marinated tofu "steaks", "creamed" spinach, caramelized onions, and in the center, fresh tomato salad with organic julienned basil from our herb garden. And a dessert wine. Yeah, for dinner: we're sophisticated like that. (Which is clearly further shown in the bottom of the image, by J dressing up for dinner in her very fancypantsy painting scrubs.)

We apparently liked the food. This is after seconds for both of us.

I have to say I didn't like the creamed spinach as much as some past recipes I've made, but it was still pretty good, and J liked it. It was a little sweet for me from the soy milk (I used plain, but next time will go get some unsweetened.)

And here are another couple random things I've been making lately. On the right is a big ol' jar of homemade sauerkraut, which turned out delicious. And on the left, cayenne infused olive oil, with cayenne peppers from my friend L's farm in Kentucky.

Here is some of the sauerkraut plated, along with a tempeh breakfast wrap, the likes of which TSA is so concerned about. We initially feared it would taste strongly of anise, which the mason jar a friend gave us smelled heavily of, but it's actually just a tiny little hint. J's sister A (ummm, let's make her A3) liked it, and a little more biased, I think it's fantastic.

I'm going to continue experimenting with fermenting foods, in part using a recent purchased book I'm very excited about: Wild fermentation: the flavor, nutrition, and craft of live-culture foods, by Sandor Katz. I'd really like to make the red miso on p.60, but am not at all sure I have the patience (or pantry space) to wait out a full year of fermentation. For comparison, the sauerkraut fermented in the mason jar on the counter for about three weeks before I liked the flavor well enough to put it in the fridge.

Window project

We have this bigass walk-in closet that is kinda like a tomb. A month or two ago, I swapped out the light fixtures in the closet and the dining room area, who made more clear that there really isn't much light in there. 

Fortunately,  with a little detective work, I determined that on the other side of the mostly unnecessary sheetrock wall, there is window glass, covered with a heat resistant film. Perfect.

So I started cutting stuff. (First the wall, with a jigsaw and drywall saw.)

And in one of those "The World is GREAT!" coincidences, as I was literally taking my bike out through the loading dock to go to Home Despot to buy wood to box the windows out, someone had left a dismantled bookshelf on the dock. You know, one of the $40 cheapies from Target, pressboard and weird proprietary screw systems. PERFECT!

So I cut the crap out of that, turning it into various 8" wide pieces, and boxed in the windows.

Then I got some corner molding from the Despot, cut it up, primed it.

Then spent MANY hours on a ladder framing in the windows. Which is not a non-trivial project, at least to make it look good. And it looks pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.

I also re-learned that mitering corner molding on the correct angle is a more complicated task than you might think.

Now I just need to paint it, but that's kind of a massive project of removing everything from the walk-in closet, and either taping or removing the shelving system. Ugh.

The whole project made me very glad that when we moved into a one bed, one bath condo, I kept the compound miter saw, table saw, air compressor, nail gun, laser level, and all the handtools that made this project possible.

I'm so glad J and I don't buy presents for one another out of obligation on stupid corporate Hallmark Holidaze. (We get one another gifts whenever we think the other would like something.)

Yay for XKCD: 

I know, I've had a distinct lack of blogging. I was walking through rural Kentucky. More soon, maybe, if I find my camera. Ahem.

A journey of a hundred miles:

is about to begin. Walking through rural Kentucky for ten days, with lovely people, bringing attention to the horrors of mountaintop removal mining.

Super excited. More soon.

Saccaminnow bound

Okay, at the airport, and once again thinking the annual 50k miles I spend on Sky Club access is worth every penny. If nothing else, dear readers, it provides free wifi for me to blog. I know, tantalizing, right?

First: the TSA Pre Check program is pretty damn nice: to be able to walk through security without taking out my stupid 3-1-1 compliant toiletries, leave my shoes on, leave my laptop in my bag. OH, WAIT: that's what it was before all of this ridiculous security theatre. Okay, neeeeeext...

 The Atlanta airport has a pretty nice Atlanta history installation going in in the pedestrian walkway between the B and C terminals. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of history museums, and this stuff is pretty solid. That said, it sort of pretty paints some of the uglier parts of Atlanta history, e.g., highlighting the 1996 Olympics without mentioning Christian Right terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph's bombing in Centennial Olympic Park that killed two and injured 111, and doesn't bother to even mention a formative part of Atlanta history, the 1906 Atlanta Race Riots.

But actually, one of my main gripes is that it puts an ellipsis my favorite part of my favorite Atlanta quote:

The complete quote: 

South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.

 -- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 5: Of The Wings of Atlanta

In other news, here is what an angle grinder and set of cheap bolt cutters can do with a little time an initiative. No, I'm not a bike thief. But my plane is about to take off, so more later.

mapleoatmealeggsandwich

File this emailed coupon under "Absolutely Fucking Opposite of Food Porn".

No, I don't think they're being ironic, or facetious. Some genius actually thinks that (a) this is a food product that (b) is going to sell.

Seriously: who eats this crap?

Not that impressive, but: FOOD PORN!

Okay, they don't look that impressive, but these stuffed tofu steaks were pretty damn tasty:

 

 I mean, they started out as this:

Well, actually, they started out with this: ONIONS, broccoli stem, and fresh jalapeno, stuffed in the slit tofu steaks:

Pan fried, braised with a sauce of tamari, chili garlic, and sesame oil, then baked for about an hour. Delicious.


And here is some other random food porn, since I was on a stress-reduction cooking binge last night:

$1 @ a time. Or $5.

My little holiday season project was to give at least $1 to everyone who asked me for money in San Francisco and the East Bay. I didn't keep track, but since i was mostly staying with A & R in the Tenderloin, it wasn't an inexpensive undertaking, and I'd estimate out of pocket around $45.
This was in part inspired by A, the first morning i was in SF, giving a guy selling Street Sense in the Civic Center BART station $10. We had just heard the overhead announcement "Attention BART Police, attention BART Police, panhandler on the platform, panhandler on the platform!" Except it was a little more shrill than text can capture. Then this guy shambled up, and could barely articulate the offer to buy Street Sense for $1. Without going in to too much detail, the guy had clearly had a very rough time of it.
A gave him $10 as i was going to my wallet, and said something like "What kind of a heartless motherfucker do you have to be to kick that guy out?" Indeed. So i decided i would give money to everyone who asked me on this trip.
Walking toward the BART station this morning to head to SFO, i found a folded $5 bill laying on the sidewalk in front of the Great American Music Hall, possibly from last night's Primus show.
The next guy who asked, half a block later, had a fairly big ask: "a couple bucks to get me something to eat?" He got the $5, and thanked me all the way down the block. It felt great, as did every other one of the 40+ gives.
Happy New Year! May all of yours be bountiful, gratifying, and unpredictable.