You might as well live*

I'm all for diversity in how we approach animal rights/vegan advocacy - to a great extent each person or group of people can be most effective doing what works for them. It isn't a one size fits all thing. Also, I can accept that it isn't all bunny-hugging and flowers and unicorns farting rainbows and crapping candyfloss** - if you let yourself dwell on the animal cruelty angle, even to the extent of motivating yourself to act or informing yourself so you can inform others, it can get downright depressing, and dealing with certain people's reactions can be demoralising and make you wonder whether you will EVER get anywhere. Trust me, I've been there, I'm not glossing over that. I feel that these are necessary disclaimers, because the other day, via a question on my Formspring,*** I came across an approach that in my view takes that latter point too far and is beyond what I can remotely get behind. The basic premise was that veganism isn't a zero-harm lifestyle, nothing is in fact, and that animal rights will never be accepted by most of the population - and hence, the best thing animal rights advocates can do is commit suicide.

That's right, commit suicide in the name of human extinction, as this is the only viable way to help animals. Now, human extinction isn't a new concept - but for the most part it's limited to not creating more humans. Controversial, sure, but at the end of the day breeding or not breeding is not such a drastic decision as deciding to no longer live.

Now, I suspect there may be other issues at play here. Certainly I have known of animal rights activists who have committed suicide, for reasons related to the ones listed above. But they weren't killing themselves 'for the animals'. Being depressed at the state of the world in general and people's treatment of animals in particular, to the point of wanting to leave the world, is not the same as dying for the animals, and I'd suspect the friends of the people concerned would realise that. I'm not going to criticise those people. At the end of the day, taking your own life is a personal decision - certainly it can have negative effects on those around you, but at the end of the day it is your business. Advocating suicide TO OTHERS as the ONLY way to help animals, however - that, I feel I can have an opinion on. And that opinion, quite frankly, is that it sucks. Pushing these ideas to a movement with a high proportion of young people (including teenagers going through the normal adolescent crap and often having to defend veganism to hostile family members and friends) and fragile people is quite frankly irresponsible. To get a bit personal for a minute, if I'd seen the website in question at 17 Veganicity might not have come to exist because I'd have been dead for a decade and not doing a whole lot for animals in that time.

And that's another thing. How does removing the animal rights advocates from the world make said world better for animals? I will admit that the vegan lifestyle isn't zero-harm, because such a thing is pretty much impossible. All you can do is minimise the harm you do. Even if we're being strictly instrumentalist, isn't it better to hang on and promote animal rights than to leave? Then there's the question of whether we should be instrumentalist about our lives - I'd argue not. If someone genuinely believes that the lives of their own species, including or especially those members who are actively trying to improve things, have no value whatsoever - there is a lot going on there and none of it pleasant.

Also, having this sort of thing around as anything other than really obvious satire does absolutely nothing for the public's perception of veganism and animal rights. Seriously - 'changing your lifestyle and promoting change to others is pointless so DIE!!!' - such a great message to send out. I can see how that would convince people to do, well, anything other than just keep on eating meat and dairy, using animal tested products, etcetera ad nauseum, because cutting these things out will have no effect. Can you read the sarcasm in that sentence? And it promotes the idea that veganism is either a sign or a cause of being unbalanced - there's enough of that anyway without animal rights advocates joining in.

I would like to believe the website I saw was satire, but unfortunately I have encountered a few people in real life promoting that sort of attitude - and was lucky not to get too far caught up in it. All I can say is, if you are having suicidal thoughts and someone tells you you should go through with it because that will do more good for animals/the environment/other people than staying alive - please get as far away from that person as soon as possible.

Fluffy-bunny posting will be resumed shortly...






*Dorothy Parker
**Probably just as well given the subsequent dilemma about whether vegans can eat the candyfloss a unicorn happily deposited on the living room floor
***Currently underused, feel free to change that

Tagine-ious!

I'm guessing that some folk out there like to imagine that, as an outreach-y sort of vegan, I make a habit of inviting non-vegan friends over and berating them about their choices over three courses of raw tofu and twigs. And some of these folk will encounter just such a setup for the first half hour or so of being in the house, because there is a lot of fun to be had in confirming prejudices.* For the less judgemental type, i.e. most of my friends and pretty much anyone I would voluntarily opt to spend the evening with, I'm more likely to dish up some tasty food, answer questions on veganism if they come up, and defer heavier conversations on the topic to an arena where there isn't alcohol.**

Anyway, this brings me to last night's dinner. This is a pretty massive quantity of tagine - dinner for three last night, lunch for two later today, and two margarine tubs full just went in the freezer.

Olive oil
2 medium red onions, chopped small
5 medium garlic cloves, crushed
3 large sweet potatoes, chopped large
1 large carrot, chopped large
450g pre-soaked dried apricots
2 x 240g tins of chickpeas, drained
1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
1 x 500g carton passata (the tomatoes and passata are probably interchangeable, your mileage may vary about whether you like chunks of tomato or not)
1 x medium aubergine, roasted in segements with salt and olive oil then chopped a bit smaller. (optional)
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground coriander
1tsp tumeric

Heat the olive oil in a pan. Turn the heat down to medium before it gets too crackly. Cook the onions and garlic for a bit, then add sweet potatoes, carrot, apricots, chickpeas, aubergine and spices. Stir around for a bit until the spices are evenly distributed. Turn the heat up and add the passata and tomatoes. You may also need to add some water. When it starts bubbling, turn the heat down and stick the pan lid on. Simmer for an hour or so. (Perfect if you're having guests and want something you can leave while getting yourself ready!) Serve with couscous and flatbreads, or pittas if you want bread without washing a mixing bowl.




*I should come clean and admit to never having done this. And sadly I've now exposed it as a prank so can't do it to anyone who might have read my blog.
**And probably not lunchtime in the canteen. Environments where food is a major factor aren't the best place to have vegan/non-vegan dialogue, as when people are eating they tend to be easily put on the defensive about what they are eating.

Flatbreads

Yesterday I made a bit of a snap decision to go to a Scottish Vegans potluck hosted by this lady. That left me with the morning to make something. Once I'd decided that, choosing what to make was the easy part - we have a colleague coming to dinner this evening and I was going to make tagine and flatbreads, so I ended up doing the flatbreads a day early. (Which also makes today more relaxed since I've already got a stack of bread and no mixing bowl to wash today - that's my least favourite part of making bread, it ruins my nails and almost always means throwing out a kitchen sponge afterwards! Anyone fancy a bit of washing up in exchange for bread?)

Since this is something I haven't made before, I had to do a bit of 'net searching to find an initial recipe. Luckily they all seem to be basically vegan, so no need for substitutions. Here's the basic recipe - one of Allegra McEvedy's for the food geeks out there. I had wanted spicy bread, so adapted the recipe a bit by adding a heaped tablespoon of tumeric, the same of dried coriander leaves and a couple of sprinklings of cinnamon. I should also admit that I used a sachet of fast action yeast - I've never got the hang of the other sort, which is sad and something I want to remedy when I have the time and energy. But the recipe does work if you 'cheat'!.

The Grasshopper has Landed

New post up at Vegan Grasshopper - The Joy of Pot! On the uses of a decent-sized stockpot in making veganism easy.

Chocolate/cherry/chilli cupcakes

I wasn't sure these qualified as bloggable, but since they went down pretty well at last night's potluck (apart from inadvertantly poisoning a friend with a chilli allergy I didn't know he had - sorry again!) here's the story.

I used this recipe as a base, but since it is for a large cake with none of the ingredients listed in the post title some adapting had to be done.

First change: I used double quantity, because I wanted enough cakes for the potluck and to have some to eat at home.
Second change: adding chocolate. I replaced an ounce of flour per quantity with cocoa powder, i.e. 16oz flour and 2oz cocoa.
Third change: adding chilli. I put in two teaspoons of cayenne pepper, one per quantity. Halve this if you want a milder kick. Leave it out if you just want chocolate and cherries. Anyway, the chilli went in with the dry ingredients.
Fourth change: adding cherries. I put six tablespoons of cherry conserve (posh jam) in with the custard.
Fifth change: baking time. Cupcakes would be incinerated in the time the recipe suggests - I got them out of the oven after 20 minutes.

The recipe in question is one of my favourites, precisely because it is so plain - it can be adapted all sorts of ways and still work, or it can be dished up plain with icing, which is what I did for my boy's last birthday. (Making it was easy enough, getting it from one county to another was more perilous...)

Big basic balti

It's all go chez Duck at the moment, we both have stinking colds and, just to make it more fun, an appointment that means going out around the time I'd normally start to cook and coming home just after we normally start to eat. So I decided that a nice balti (literal translation - bucket, refers to slinging anything to hand in a cooking pot with random spices, or any curry that doesn't have a proper name) would be the thing. It can sit around while we're out, so the vegetables can absorb the spices - curry generally is the one thing I've found that benefits from being left hanging around.

So here goes;
-Sunflower oil
-Two large onions
-Cumin seeds
-Half a dozen garlic cloves
-Six medium potatoes
-Four large carrots
-A handful of green fine beans
-A tin of chickpeas
-Dashes of coriander powder, tumeric, ginger, cayenne pepper (SMALL dash) and paprika

Cook the onion and garlic in the oil until they soften
Add the cumin seeds and cook until they crackle
Chop and stir in all the veg, then the chickpeas, then add the spices
Add water until everything is covered, simmer until the veg is soft. Then leave standing for ages if the need takes you! I'm hoping this will do for tomorrow's lunch as well...

Help, there's a vegan coming for dinner!

Interesting and generally positive article about cooking for vegan dinner guests.

(Thanks Mylene)

Meat-free Mondays

Meat-free Monday didn't really have much impact on me, as my days had all been meat-free days for quite some time when it was invented. It was most recently brought into my consciousness by Vegansaurus' Meatless Monday Unicorn, a sarky character who demonstrates that booze, narcotics and a slightly evil sense of humour can be vegan. I like. My feelings about meat-free Mondays are a bit more complicated, and I waver between thinking it is a pretty ace idea to wondering whether it can achieve more than making people eat cheese and eggs for one day and meat the other six.

The good:
-It brings veg*n issues to people's attention
-It reduces overall meat consumption
-It can be made vegan rather than just meatless, depending on who takes the initiative and supplies the recipes. So if nothing else it is a useful thing for vegans to get involved with.
-It can showcase how great vegan food is, inspiring those who already have niggling doubts about eating animals to go vegan
-It can be used as a forum to promote veganism, if done in the right way

The bad:
-Many workplaces and so on will just go with the cheese omlette option, so from an animal rights perspective it isn't a whole lot better than the usual fare
-If the food provided is bad, it will skew people's perceptions and put them further off being vegetarian or vegan
-It diverts energy away from vegan campaigning
-It is often promoted in a way that posits it as an end-point, so people will see it as 'enough' and not feel inspired to go further

So I guess the answer here is that it depends on how meat-free Monday is gone about, who takes the initiative and how much leeway that person has if they're starting from the right point. But it's still a bit of a thorny one.

What do you think?

Too Vegan To Function

No, not me, although I would find that description amusing if it came from someone I wasn't too annoyed with otherwise. I was randomly flicking through people's links (because just occasionally I take a night off from kicking arse and do aimless web-surfing for a bit) and came across Too Vegan To Function, a gem of a blog with detailed advice on being vegan in a variety of situations. It hasn't been updated for a while, but that doesn't diminish what is there.

Chilli beanburgers

We often end up having burger-based meals, just out of convenience, so today I thought I'd have a(nother) go at making my own - mainly for variety but also because I feel that they are healthier because I can monitor what goes in them. So here goes:

Half a mug of white rice, boiled in a lot of water for half an hour or so.
1 standard tin red kidney beans
2 small onions, chopped finely
Half a red pepper, chopped finely
2 teaspoons potato flour - probably optional but I think it helps a lot with the binding.
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 a teaspoon each of cayenne pepper and cumin

Saute the onions and pepper in a small sunflower oil until they soften.
Mix the rice, beans and spices together and mash with the potato masher. (all high-tech around here!)
Stir the pepper and onions in, make sure it is thoroughly mixed.
Leave it all to cool (unless you'd already left the rice for a bit!) then shape into six patties. Bake for 30-40 minutes, turning at least once.

I like this recipe because it uses cheap, basic ingredients that can be bought and stored easily. (At a pinch the onions and peppers could be left out, but they do make it a lot nicer) It does involve a lot more prep than whipping store-bought burgers from freezer to oven, but the beauty of it is you can make extra burgers to freeze for another time.

Spicy lentil and vegetable bake

This was part of the Sunday roast we just had, and I thought it up to finish the dhal that was left over from our lunchtime curry extravaganza. (Three curries that I'd made extra quantities of last night, plus dhal and rice, plus samosas, bhajis and poppadums - I don't fill up easily but this meal managed it!) I should warn you that it makes last week's cupcakes look like miracles of structural integrity - not a good one to make if you want something to tip out onto a plate and slice neatly! It is, however, a good thing if you like lentils and vegetables and want some protein as part of a roast dinner. ;)

Ingredients
-Half a milk pan* of some 'plain' dhal - ie without any added veg, just lentils and spices - the instructions for which can be found here.
-Two red onions, chopped
-Half a large courgette, chopped
-Two sticks of celery, chopped
-Two cloves of garlic, smashed up with the back of a spoon

Saute the veg and garlic on medium heat in sunflower oil. When cooked, mix with the lentils. Pour into a loaf tin - I used a silicone one that matches my cupcake trays, but whatever floats your boat. Bake in the oven at 200C for about half an hour. I put some Tofutti cheese slices on top for the last five minutes it was in the oven. This is totally optional but it did take things one more degree of seperation from the curry we had before.

This made decent portions for two people, when served with roast potatoes and mashed root veg.



*I'm well aware of the irony, but that's what the smallest saucepans tend to be sold as, and it's a useful guide since I didn't weigh or measure the dhal in any other way. Sorry, too busy getting dinner in the oven. :P

On noses and tails

Thanks (I think) to a member of my uni's vegan/vegetarian group, my attention was brought to this article on an environmentalist website. (Warning: gross dead animal pics and slaughter talk) The subject is nose-to-tail eating, the uber-carnist practice of making 'use' of the whole dead animal instead of the more culturally acceptable bits.

You know what? I think that IF people are going to eat meat, they should do it this way. IF you're going to eat an animal's arse cheek, maybe the rectum shouldn't squick you out as much. IF you want to eat a dead animal, then maybe you should be up for doing the killing and butchering rather than paying for someone else to do it. The ifs are all there. My issue with this article and others like it is that I don't give these ifs much credence.

This article in particular glosses over a lot. If we leave aside the dubious comment about hunter-gatherer societies - who may, according to some scientists, have been more about the foraging than the hunting when it comes to day-to-day eating - there's still a fair bit to go on. For example, 'many of us environmentally conscious consumers need or crave animal protein'. 'Need' is a bit strong, for a start. And let's conflate need with cravings, while we're about it, and elevate the latter to the level of the former. This means we don't have to be even vaguely critical about giving in to these cravings - because, after all, they're a need. And that, ducklings and grasshoppers, is the only justification given by the article for eating meat in the first place.

Let's switch focus here. The problem isn't that meat-eaters are being too fussy about which bits they eat - the problem is that animals and animal derivatives are still considered part of a normal diet at all. Finding newer and possibly yuckier loopholes is not a solution.

Mylene, Miss Manners and vegan visitors

After making my post on helping out your vegan friends, I've started to notice other vegan bloggers commenting on this issue.

Mylene at My Face Is On Fire has made several good posts on the topic:
Communication!
What Would Miss Manners Say?
Reinforcing Misconceptions: When Non-Vegans Weigh In On Being Vegan

Each post is a little goldmine of suggestions for vegans and non-vegans alike on handling potentially awkward situations!

Erzatsz lunch

We're at the stage of kind of needing to go grocery shopping, but having enough food in the house to make it not worth the effort. What we lack, however, is ingredients which obviously fit together and provide an equally obvious meal. Instead, today's meal came from a selection of somewhat random items, all of which need to be used up. It tasted good, anyway!

Cauliflower cheese
Half a cauliflower - cut into smallish pieces, place in a greased dish, bake for the time it takes to make the sauce.
The sauce is the slightly faffy bit. Melt a couple of tablespoons of margarine - start on a high temperature but turn down when it actually starts to melt, otherwise it'll separate instead. Take the melted margarine off the heat and stir in three or four tbsp of cornflour until you have a smooth paste. Slowly stir in soy milk until you have a liquid with no lumps. Put back on a high heat and stir constantly until it thickens. Add grated cheezly - I think I had a little under half a block. Stir until that melts.
Pour the sauce over the cauliflower, sprinkle peppers and tomato on top if you feel like it. Bake for half an hour or so, until brown on top.

Tapas potatoes
Cut three or four smallish potatoes into little chunks. Mix in a couple of crushed garlic cloves, large sprinkling of paprika, small sprinkling of cayenne pepper. Douse in olive oil, place in oven at 200C for 50 mins.

Flavored couscous
Half-fill a bowl with couscous. Add coriander and mint, squeeze on the juice of half a lemon or lime. Fill the bowl with boiling water and leave to stand for 10mins or so.

Cupcaking and scale fail

Today I used my friend Chrissy's carrot cake recipe - linked from here as 'Carrot cake large', which downloads as a word document - to make cupcakes. It makes 48, in case anyone was wondering. The recipe can be halved or quartered, but I needed that many cakes!

It made me miss Chrissy. She and I worked more events together than I can count, ran a bakery together at the Big Green Gathering one year, and worked together on the school dinner project. (I still have nightmares about the WISP nutritional analysis software, but the food prep bit was fun)

I also realised very quickly that I am out of the habit of doing an inventory before I start - meaning I'm low on nice sugar (you'll see the really aggravating bit about that in a minute!) and sunflower oil. Nevermind. I have plenty of cake and that's a good thing.

The most annoying, aggravating, want-to-throw-the-whole-lot-through-a-window bit of the process involved the needle getting stuck on my rather cheap and crappy scales. (It's only quite recently that I've owned scales, and I rarely use them even now, so these will usually do) I put in waaaay more sugar than intended and had to scoop some out and segregate it from the main supply - no way to I want to risk getting flour in my tea! I probably didn't get quite enough out, sorry if you're at the potluck tomorrow and go home with toothache. Blame the scales...

What the cupcakes have in sugar, they lack in structural integrity - several have disintegrated in the process of getting them out of the tray. Of course I HAVE to eat those ones rather than inflicting them on anyone else!

A quick note: the recipe is for a large cake cooked in an ex-army mess tin, so the listed baking time is loooong. Cupcakes will be incinerated if left for that long - I think mine got 25-30 minutes. Maybe a few minutes longer would have stopped them falling apart, but they certainly don't need an hour.

Milk in strange places

Today when I went to the supermarket I thought I'd get a treat for my rescue calf.* He's been such a good boy putting up with life in an upper floor flat while we try to find another home for him - he's even learned to use the toilet like a big boy so we don't have to deal with cow pies all over the floor. I'm not convinced that his music tastes are entirely healthy - Cows With Guns has been playing on continuous loop all day, but hey, he's nearly a teenager and he has some demons to exorcise from his early life.**

So back to my shopping trip. I was browsing the aisles wondering what I could get for Che,*** when my eyes lit upon a packet of salt-and-pepper cashew nuts. Yes, I thought, that'll make a nice change. How lovely that they have his natural staple food in...

You guessed it - for some reason, beyond my comprehension since nobody is likely to feed the product to a baby calf, Tesco have decided it is a great idea to put milk powder and milk sugar in all their flavoured cashew nuts. Annoying...



*In case anyone out there doesn't get satire, I am neither keeping a calf in my flat nor advocating that others do so.
**The point behind this satire is that calves, especially those of the male variety, are treated like crap by the dairy industry. That's one of many reasons to be vegan rather than vegetarian.
***Listen to the song already

Vegans, oppression, food and whine

It doesn't seem unusual these days to hear 'vegans say they're an oppressed group but they aren't' repeated as part of some anti-vegan mantra. Maybe it's just that the vegans I hang out with these days are sensible types, but I haven't *actually* heard that many vegans pleading oppression - but then I suspect that the critics either know whiner vegans than I do, or have more overactive imaginations on the subject, or maybe both. I can accept that whiny vegans exist. Anyone can be vegan, anyone can be whiny, accepting that there can be some crossover doesn't mean admitting to any causal element or even a widespread correlation. I can also imagine that some people's attitudes might induce whininess in any vegans in the surrounding area!

Let's get one thing clear, I don't see vegans in general as an oppressed group. This is not to deny that many vegans are on the receiving end of oppressive behaviour at an individual level - intolerance, food sabotage, even physical threat and assault, connected to their veganism, I've been there a number of times. Of course the stakes are raised if you're also an activist. However, not being able to get a decent choice of food when eating out is not being oppressed. Your colleague or roommate forgetting you don't take milk in your coffee isn't oppression, unless s/he persistently puts milk in there on purpose - and you have the option of not accepting that person's offer of a drink if that's the case! Being followed around by the police outside of a protest situation, getting your emails read and your phone tapped *is* oppressive - but a risk you take when getting involved in certain types of activism. (getting that response for merely being a vegan would certainly be oppression, but it is also highly unlikely - although some in the government might like it to happen, I doubt they could afford to put it into practice!)

On the other hand, I don't think vegans in general *are* more focussed on their own 'oppression' (in the form of not having enough choice in a cafe, people forgetting they take their coffee black, etc) than on that of the animals.

However, there is a 'third' hand there, because vegans are just so damn badass that we can grow extra limbs when necessary.* ;) And on that hand, vegans tend to want there to be more vegans - from an animal rights perspective, that has to be a good thing. One way to ensure that more people become vegan is to make veganism easier to do, and lobbying for more and better choices of food - especially in work and college canteens, but also in resturants and cafes - is one way to do that. As a fairly seasoned vegan, if I go in a cafe and can't eat anything I will be put off that cafe. A newer and less sure vegan might be put off veganism.

There's nothing wrong, then, with making an issue of the lack of vegan choices in a cafe. It's best to do this in a polite, friendly way, especially if the people concerned seem interested. (sometimes there's no point and all you can do is drink your black coffee, eat your apple and plain crisps and write it off to experience) Offering recipes is good, especially if we're talking cake. (Veggies have a selection of vegan recipes, including cakes, designed for mass catering.) On the other hand, acting like a whiny martyr suffering for a cause** is likely to put people off veganism before they investigate the wider world. At least find existing vegan friends to complain to rather than the newbie you're supposed to be helping to make the change! If you genuinely feel like that, you may be an ex-vegan in the making, which is *not* a good way to be for you or for the animals - get some new recipes and a bit of perspective before you put yourself off...


*I wish I had this ability, it would make straining a large pan of pasta or stirring multiple curries so much easier...
**I've probably done my fair share of this, the excuse being that I was a teenager the first time I went vegan and didn't know better. Now is probably a good time to apologise to anyone who was on the receiving end!

More housekeeping

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Impure puttanesca

Since the name 'puttanesca' has certain interesting connotations, I don't feel too bad about messing with its purity. The traditional recipe involves anchovies, so a true purist would throw their hands up in horror at what I just made. That's their problem. ;) If you want a vegan puttanesca that hasn't been messed with quite so much, try this. It was the recipe I had in mind when buying the olives and capers the other day, but when I came to make it tonight I couldn't resist the allure of vegetables that need using up. And impurity turned out to taste good...

-Three mushrooms
-Two smallish red peppers
-A few green (French?) beans
-Two or three cloves of garlic, crushed
-A dozen or so olives, cut in half
-Two teaspoons of capers
-A standard tin of tomatoes
-Olive oil
-Chilli flakes
-Cayenne pepper
-Paprika

Heat the olive oil on high (it should cover the bottom of the pan) and add the chilli flakes. Turn it down.
Cook the mushrooms in olive oil over a medium heat. (I NEVER EVER want to bite into a raw mushroom in any situation that has an alternative other than starvation - hence the mushrooms always go in first!) Mushrooms can be a bit absorbent, add extra oil if necessary.
Add the peppers and green beans, then the garlic, olives and capers. It's fine, nay great, if some of the liquid from these things gets in.
Stir in the tomatoes, a small amount of cayenne pepper (half a teaspoon or so) and a larger (maybe a teaspoon) amount of paprika. Rinse out the tomato can with clean cold water and add that to the contents of the pan.
Simmer for 40 minutes or so. If it seems a bit too runny add tomato puree to thicken.

This made four servings (two each for two people) with a decent quantity of fusilli.

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