Paper Fruit

For a few months now I’ve been more fitness-concious. I haven’t talked about it here because (1) I apparently, like, never blog anymore, (2) I am typically quite self-conscious about matters body-related, and (3) generally, with stuff about diet and exercise. . . what is there to talk about that’s interesting to others? But then I got to thinking about it. I’m doing some fun things, utilizing some neat tools, and seriously: losing weight and exercising every day has honestly done every single thing fitness folks claim. My general mood has improved, my energy level and self-confidence have increased, and after an initial “unnnngh this suuuuuucks” period of adjustment, I really look forward to exercising, cooking healthy stuff, and eating reasonable portions of said “healthy stuff.” Plus it has been pretty important to me of late, and this is my friggin blog. Nobody reads it anyways! Hilarious. Anyways, here goes. . .

The Story so Far!

Diet:

I’ve been counting calories via SparkPeople and cooking out of low-fat/low-cal cookbooks such as Appetite for Reduction.

I resisted counting calories for a looooong time, for a number of reasons. When I finally decided to give it a try, I went into it with the expectation of finding it annoying, boring, or obsession-making. Thankfully, it’s actually been quite interesting, fun, and helpful! Since starting this practice, I’ve traveled twice and not been able to track as vigilantly, and I’ve actually missed tracking, because it’s a, I dunno, “centering practice” or some such yoga-sounding thing. It makes me mindful of what I put into my body, and that in and of itself is helpful. It’s so easy for me to mindlessly snack, especially at night, so holding myself accountable has been very important.

I’ve talked here and elsewhere about Appetite for Reduction, so I won’t go on too much about it. I know this sounds ridiculous and impossible, but. . . I lost 8-9 lbs before I even started this whole endeavor just cooking dinner out of this book every night—not tracking my whole day, not putting in the time exercising, just using the book. It’s great: the recipes are tasty and varied, and now that I’m tracking calories, it’s so helpful to have the calorie count, like, there so I don’t have to bother with calculating it myself. And though I’ve been a longtime “fuck you, salad” sort of vegan, there are salads in there that don’t annoy me.

Exercise:

Yoga, walking, and occasionally hiking helped me lose a ton of weight, and without much fuss at all. I’ve now (more below) added in more intense exercise and some weight training, but I did that because I wanted to, not because I plateaued or anything. I’ve steadily dropped pounds simply making sure to just be more active every single day, and yeah, it’s awesome for my mood and my general mental health.

Moving Forward!

The next eight weeks I’ll be doing Sandra Wickham‘s Virtual Boot Camp. Basically, she’s designed a personalized cardiovascular and strength-training series for me (and the other participants!) based around what I’m interested in doing for health. It includes some weight lifting and a whole lotta of cardio, since I’m still interested in losing weight. I’ll be eating the same way—high nutrient-density, low calorie—but the boot camp thing means I’ll be doing intense activity 6 out of 7 days of the week. Whew! The first day I went for a long hike, then today, I did my first strength-training: shoulders and chest, and man I already feel it. Jesus. I think tomorrow, for x-training purposes (the x makes it seem more fitness-related, doesn’t it?), I’ll be biking after an early-morning airport run (Jesse and Raech are Florida-bound!).

More later as I have more to talk about, but if this is at all interesting, I’ll be Tweeting about things more frequently than I blog, I’m sure. Yes, I’m now on Twitter due to peer pressure, and my “handle” or “moniker” or whatever it’s called on Twitter is @molly_the_tanz, and I’ll be “hashtagging” the whole thing as #vbc. Huzzah!

x-posted to my LJ

This month’s Films of High Adventure is up. Have you ever heard of the cinematic masterpiece Yor: The Hunter From the Future? Well, neither had I until Jesse made me watch it a few years ago, and then we re-watched it for the purposes of journalism. Enjoy!

Nick Mamatas is a smart dude, and he has written a book called Starve Better. From the Apex page: “Starve Better is a no-nonsense survival guide by a professional writer who knows how to use small press publications and writing for everyone from corporate clients to friends and neighbors to keep himself out of the soup kitchen line.” Good stuff, and needed—I’ll be picking up a copy! You can read the thoughtful introduction here.

Last night I made some awesome food, and I wanted to share the recipe! It’s Ethiopian-inspired, and was totally rad. It tastes really rich, but this is a low-fat, high-nutrient meal. You could definitely hit up your local Ethiopian place to get some injera to scoop, but I was too lazy for that last night, and this meal is perfectly good without! Also, this is good for busy people because it’s a crock pot dish, and the only active cooking when you get home is cubing the sweet potatoes and roasting them for half an hour. Plus, your house will smell insanely delicious when you come home in the evenings. WIN!

Ethiopian Yellow Split Pea Stew with Roasted Sweet Potatoes (serves 4 hungry people)

Put the following in a crock pot (except spinach), stir well, and let cook on low all day:

• 1 c. yellow split peas
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 2 shallots, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 3 roma tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 1/2 tsp berebere
• 1/4 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp. fenugreek
• 1/8 tsp. black cumin
• 1 “chicken” bullion cube
• 2 cups water
• 8 oz fresh baby spinach

45 minutes before you want to eat, prepare the sweet potatoes:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Peel 3 lbs sweet potatoes (I used garnet yams), then cube into 3/4 inch cubes and throw in a bowl. Toss sweet potatoes with the following:

• 1 1/2 tbs. olive oil
• 1 tbs. agave nectar
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3/4 tsp. berebere

Roast for 35 minutes, tossing after 15. They will get all caramel-y and delicious. When the taters have about 8 minutes left to roast, dump the spinach into the crock pot and stir in. Let cook until it is wilted and tender.

To serve, put sweet potatoes in the bottom of a shallow bowl, and ladle the lentils and spinach over top. Eat like crazy!

x-posted to my LJ

I sold a story to Crossed Genres! Many thanks to the editorial team over there. I’ll post about the inspiration for “The Red Terror of Rose Hall” when the publication gets closer, since it came out of some unusual places.

I recently watched a completely fantastic movie, The Draughtsman’s Contract. Wowza-bo-bowza and holy fucking shit. I really cannot recommend this film enough—doubly so for anyone who thought Dangerous Liaisons would have been so000 much better were it about English people being horrible to one another instead of the French. What? Is it news to anyone that I’m an unrepentant Anglophile? Anyways, it features fops, more fops, foppery, wigs, a soundtrack by Michael Nyman (the guy who did the soundtrack for Ravenous), more fops, and people being unrepentantly terrible to one another for dubious reasons. Also fops. If for some reason you need more convincing, here’s the first scene. Tell me that’s not wonderful.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Appetite for Reduction is out! I tested for this cookbook thus may vouch for its awesomeness.

Thanksgiving came and went with food and relaxation and me learning to (at long last) play Magic: The Gathering. Wow, it’s fun! Also, I made really excellent pumpkin pie, and have put that recipe at the bottom of the post.

Things with Lightspeed and Fantasy have been going really well! There are some great stories coming out at both venues during December, so make sure to keep checking on Mondays and Tuesdays for delightfulness! Or, alternatively, why not buy the ebook version of Lightspeed and be the cool kid who’s read everything before everyone else?

As you may have noticed, Films of High Adventure is on hiatus. It’s temporary! But we’ll still have a December installment up at Fantasy.

OK. Time for noms!

Molly’s Vegan Pumpkin Pie

I wanted to take advantage of the pie pumpkins at the farmer’s market this year. I’ve never made pumpkin pie from scratch, and felt it was High Time. It ended up being something of an emotional roller coaster. It began with feeling smugly domestic as I put the pumpkin in the oven to roast, panicking when it didn’t taste particularly great, getting friends on the internet to calm me the hell down by reminding me that pumpkins are not delicatas and need sugar before tasting good (thanks, Erin, and everyone on the PPK!), risking ruining pie by making up my own recipe, and then feeling as triumphant as an objectivist setting her oil wells aflame as I bit into a perfect slice. Well, not quite perfect. It was a tad overbaked, but I think 5 minutes fewer in the oven would have produced The Perfect Pie.

There are as many vegan pumpkin pie recipes as there are vegans, and the unique challenges involving making the perfect pie are heatedly discussed every holiday season on vegan message boards. The main issue is that unlike say, a chocolate mousse pie, tofu in the batter can often give the finished pie a tofu-y taste, and while I’m pretty inured to tofu-taste, something about pumpkin pie really brings out the bean. And yet! Adding a different binder in the form of soaked cashews really makes the tofu invisible in this version, for real. I baked it in the morning and by 5 or 6 at night it had completely set up and sliced beautifully. It did crack, as you’ll see below, but not much, and wasn’t at all watery.

My only caveat here is that I live at high altitude and thus I upped the oven temperature and baking time. I’m pretty sure that those below 5k feet could get away with an oven temperature of 350 and the standard 50 minutes to an hour baketime!

Ingredients:

2 cups home dry-roasted pumpkin (see instructions below)

¼ c cashews

¾ c silken tofu (water-packed, NOT vacuum-packed)

2/3 c natural sugar plus more by the tablespoon if you want it sweeter after you make up the batter

1 inch fresh ginger, grated

1 ¼ tsp real Ceylon cinnamon (ooooohhhhh)

mace and nutmeg and cardamom to taste

Instructions:

Dry roast the pumpkin the night before. I roasted it at 350 for about 90 minutes, all told. Before roasting, I prepped it by cutting it into thirds, scooping out all the guts and seeds, and putting it on a baking sheet (sprayed) w/cut sides down. When it was super-soft I took it out let it cool. It was perfect and didn’t need to be strained. It also tasted completely filthy so don’t worry if you try it and it’s horrid.

After finishing the roasting bung 1/4 cup of cashews in a bowl w/enough room to cover them with three inches of water. Let sit over night.

For the batter, drain and wash the cashews, then whiz them in a food processor until they’re thoroughly whizzed. Add the tofu until it’s puree. Add pumpkin and sugar. Blend until looks like pumpkin pie batter and you can see absolutely no tofu chunks or cashew grains. This will require scraping the bowl using a rubber spatula to get everything that’s settled to the bottom to incorporate. Add spices and ginger. Taste, adjust sugar. I added about two tablespoons I think but I would add a full quarter cup next year depending on how sweet the pumpkin is.

Then all you do is pour the batter into a pre-made crust and bake at 350 or 375 for 50-60 minutes! Woo! Let cool until totally cool.

So, yay! Pumpkin pie! Stuff! Woo!

High altitude baking kind of sucks to get used to. You have to do a bunch of stuff to recipes, like adjusting baking powder, flour, liquids, temperature, baking time, ugh ugh ugh. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on what is the fail-safe formula. None of them work all the time.

I can’t offer a fail-safe formula, but I can offer this high altitude cornbread recipe. It’s the one I use either for just baking up a batch to go alongside whatever, or I spread it evenly on top of some chili to make a baked chili pie.

I based this off the Post Punk Kitchen’s cornbread recipe, which has never ever done me wrong. It’s the one I use allatimes, but I like my cornbread full of corn and cilantro and other stuff so you can see the differences. Also, as I said, this is only for high altitude baking! If you like the sound of my flavor alterations, do those but use the PPK recipe for baking powder, cooking times, etc.

High Altitude Savory Cornbread

2 c cornmeal

1 c flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/3 c canola oil

2 tbs hot sauce like cholula

2 tsp apple cider vinegar

½ tsp salt

2 c non-dairy milk (I like either soy, almond, or hemp)

3/4 c corn kernels, drained

1/2 c cilantro, chopped

1/2 green onions, chopped

Directions

Preheat oven to 375. Spray the bottom of a 9×13 baking pan with non-stick cooking spray.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the non-dairy milk and the vinegar and set aside.

In a large bowl, sift together the dry ingredients (cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt).

Add the oil and hot sauce to the ACV/milk mixture. Wisk with a wire wisk or a fork until it is foamy and bubbly.

Pour the wet ingredient into the dry and mix together  until just barely mixed using a large wooden spoon or a firm spatula. Fold in the corn, cilantro, and green onions.

Pour batter into the prepared baking pan and bake 35 minutes (always check at 35, but depending on the weather and all that stuff, you may need to give it 5-10 minutes more), until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Slice into squares and serve warm or store in an airtight container.

I haven’t posted about food-related stuff for a while, so let’s get down to it. First, I want to give a shout-out (the “big ups corner” spot for the week) to Divvies, a company I just discovered because they had a big basket of their cookies at Whole Foods. They are completely awesome! I tried the choco-chip cookies, but I’mma try others next time I go back, to be sure. I really like their slogan: “made to share!” Friendly, and much appreciated I’m sure by anyone in an office or at a party who’s vegan or has egg, dairy, or peanut allergies. They make cookies, candy (chocolates, jawbreakers, and gummy stars, to name a few), and cupcakes. Check ’em out!

As for me, I haven’t been cooking as much variety as of late– mostly I just do rice and tofu and veggies for dinner these days– but I did make a kick-ass pizza the other night, with the cashew goat cheese I made during VeganMoFo, thinly sliced pears, black pepper, and some seitan browned with some shallots, and that was fucking delicious. That said, I actually bothered to document a food experiment last night (!) that eclipsed pretty much anything I’ve made of late. I got the base recipe here, after doing an internet search for seitan satay, but I modified it and used a different methodology, which I’ve outlined below:

Seitan Satay

1 large shallot or two small, peeled and cut into chunks

4 garlic cloves, ends cut off, maybe halved if you care to

2 tsp canola oil

Equivalent of 4 tsp ginger, peeled and cut into chunks

4 Tbs tamari

The juice of two limes

2 Tbs toasted sesame oil

4 Tbs agave nectar

2 Tbs siracha or other asian chili sauce (I use the kind with the rooster on it)

24 oz seitan, cut or torn into chunks (I used 2 boxes of the WestSoy kind from the supermarket)

Preheat oven to 45o degrees F. Take all ingredients except for seitan and throw into a blender, blend until smoothish. Put your seitan in a 9×13 baking dish (lasagna-style) in a single layer, then pour the slurm over everything. It will look like this:

At this point, let the seitan marinate for about 30-45 minutes as you make your rice (I used jasmine), and then bake it for about 15 minutes in the marinade– what I mean is just throw the whole thing in the oven and let it go. While it’s baking, make your vegetable. I made some green beans sauteed with minced garlic (about a teaspoon), 3 cloves of pressed garlic, toasted sesame oil, and salt and pepper:

Pull out the seitan, it should be bubbly and the exposed parts of the seitan should be browned and luscious. I plated everything together, rice, seitan on top, green beans off to the side, and for extra deliciousness I put some cilantro leaves on top, and I also added two condiments: a lime wedge for squeezing, and some peanut sauce out of a jar for adding a touch of peanutty sweetness. OMG.

I really can’t say enough about how utterly delicious this was– I struck gold with the original recipe (the marinade is delicious on its own) and the saucy-method pleased my curry-loving self. So today, wanting a redux of those flavors, I used my brand new To-Go Ware lunchbox and packed myself a feast. Layer one, rice and seitan:

Layer two, green beans. I used the dressing cup to hold my cilantro:

Ready go go:

And speaking of, it’s lunchtime! Posting all this has made me hungry.