
Monday, October 31, 2011
Happy Halloween!

Friday, October 28, 2011
Chocolate

The day the notice came home an email and Facebook discussion started among some of the parents who were not keen to sell the chocolate and now there are quite a few kids in Toki's class who aren't selling the chocolates. Still, it has been quite hard on Toki. There is a lot of pressure for her class to 'win the prize' and yeah, I can really relate to how hard that sort of thing can be. This week felt like one of those moments when I feel like my beliefs make her life hard. It made me feel really grateful for the community we have. We are able to say to Toki, 'Yeah, some people are selling the chocolates because they believe in what they believe in and we're not selling the chocolates because we believe in what we believe in. There's plenty of room at school for everyone.' But it made the whole thing a lot easier to be able also say, 'M. isn't selling the chocolates either, or E. or M. and L.'
Political trickiness aside, we really wanted to give the school some money and Toki really likes selling. No, really, when we do the Xmas tree fundraiser every year she is right there, showing people the best trees, talking the talk - she is a born salesperson. So we are going to sell some chocolate - some vegan chocolate! Our options are huge.
Trade Aid offer an amazing fundraising scheme using their fair trade chocolate. The dark chocolate in this range is vegan and delicious, according to Brent and Toki. We probably won't be able to take advantage of this fundraising deal because its just the one of us but we may use Fairtrade Chocolate to sell.
Then there is the wonderfully stupendous Whittakers range. I am pretty sure that one day God thought, 'Hm, those vegans deserve a break, I'm going to invent Whittakers!'
Whittakers is a New Zealand family-owned company who makes its chocolate in Porirua, about a thirty minute drive from where we live. Whittakers uses Fair trade Cocoa beans and butter from the largest cooperative in Ghana called Kuapa Kokoo. Fair trade sugar comes from a cooperative in Costa Rica called CoopeAgri R.L.
And the make the following vegan chocolate blocks: Dark Ghana, Dark Chocolate, Dark Orange, Dark Cacao, Ghana Peppermint, Dark Almond, Dark Mocha, Rum and Raisin. They also make dark chocolate peanust slabs and these skinny wee bars called Sante bars.
I think what we will probably do is go to Moore Wilsons, which is a local wholesaler open to the public and buy us some Sante bars which Toki can sell to her family and then we will donate the money she makes. It won't be counted for the competition but it will help the school out and that seems like the main thing.
Image: Licensed under Creative Commons by Flickr user sapheron - thank you!
Thursday, October 27, 2011

There is something really magical about beans and grains. My understanding is that when a legume and a wholegrain are eaten together they make a pretty good protein. There are a lot of ways to combine grains and legumes: baked beans on toast, red beans and rice, edamame and soba noodles, chickpeas and rice or breads or couscous, those old school pearl barley and split pea soups. And then there's Kitchari. I usually adapt a recipe from a Hare Krishna cook book I have but I found this great recipe on Frenzied Vegan blog. I love the way she's teamed it with a spinach salad. I did notice that she says add the beans and rice and I think at that point you also add the water (the lots and lots of water, as she puts it). I also found this one on the Ayurvedic Institute website. It used ghee but I replace ghee with olive oil. I also like the idea of soaking the beans and brown rice over night. Quite a few of the Kitchari recipes I looked at use a slow cooker. I love my slow cooker. I quite liked this recipe from Planet Green but again it uses butter which I reckon you could replace with oil. I found a couple of recipes that use different grains as well. I like this quinoa and red lentil recipe from Albion Cooks.
One other thing I found out about Kitchari while I was looking around: the word means 'mixture' and one website translated it as 'mess' - I quite like that. Also, again, I thought, What a great lunch idea!
Anyway, happy Kitchari-ing.
Image: This is from my old, old, old Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking. It's a bit of a bible for me. It has some great recipes and two of them -Sambar and Swadisht dal - I use every week.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Blame it on the Boogie.

I love this recipe. I have no idea where it came from , so if it's yours please let me know. I like how it has no eggs but it doesn't use anything to replace the egg, it just kind of blazes a new trail in the muffin frontier baha. These muffins were the first baked good Toki had. They have hardly any sugar - if you don't count the molasses. I think you could easily make them sugarfree by replacing the sugar with maple syrup and the molasses with 1/2 a banana.
Oh, and speaking of baking. My friend Sarah, asked about the bread and where it sits overnight. Brent leaves the bread in a bowl on the bench overnight - not in the fridge. Our friend Keith mixes his bread on the bench directly and leaves it on the bench to rise - he covers it with a damp tea-towel. Wellington has shitty weather baha so maybe you can't leave bread on the bench overnight in warm places.
Okay here's the recipe:
1 orange (peeled and cut into quarters)
1 tbsp sugar (OR 1 tbsp maple syrup or agave)
1 cup wholemeal flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk-like substance (rice, soy, almond)
1/2 cup of oil (I tend to use canola oil for baking)
1 tsp molasses (OR 1/2 a mashed banana)
Pinch of salt (optional)
Handful of dried fruit: sultanas, cranberries, that sort of thing)
Put orange in food processor and whizz it up with molasses (OR banana) sugar (OR maple syrup or agave), then milk, then oil. Whizz. Whizz. Whizz. (But not too much - you want it fluffy but not mayonnaise).
Pour this runny mixture over the dry ingredients and lightly stir. (Sometimes, like tonight, the mixture is quite dry, so I mixed in a bit more milk-ness or add some yoghurt if I have it on-hand, I guess you could also use orange juice).
Put into greased muffin tins.
You could place a piece of glazed ginger on the top if you wanted.
Cook at 200 degrees Celsius for 12-15 minutes.
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Friday, October 21, 2011
JustineJoeKeithBrent Bread

Last night, Brent dictated his bread recipe to me. So I've put that below here. Just as some backgorund. One of the things I eat as part of my Ayurvedic doodad is daily-made wholemeal bread. So for about three years we have baked bread most days. To start off with we used a bread-maker, which was good, but we couldn't quite get the hang of it and most of the bread we made was a bit blurg. Then our friend Justine gave us the most amazing recipe for bread which we pretty much used every day. At that stage I was home most days so I would mix and knead the bread in the morning and the bread would be ready to bake at lunchtime. Then I started working and going to school so we started mixing and kneading the bread at night and putting it in the fridge to rise slowly over night - then we could bake it in the morning (this was our friend Joe's idea he's a biologist and another amazing cook). This worked pretty well but then we had a bit of revelation thanks to another friend of ours who is an amazing baker and breadmaker. We asked Keith to teach us how to make bread so ours and another family got together one weekend at Kaith's place, the kids played, and he taught us everything he knew about breadmaking - which was heaps. So the recipe that appears below is the final incarnation of Justine's recipe through Joe's suggestions with Keith's advice and Brent's experience. This is a really simple bread, it isn't a loaf we make it flat and put oil and herbs on it before we bake it, so it is sort of a bastardised foccaccia. I am pretty sure it would work as a loaf but I love the oil - baha. We still make other breads sometimes - bagels, cornbread, manoush - but this is the one we make for the everyday.
We still buy store-bought bread. We had a go at making all our own bread but it was just too much for us. If you're interested in bread I've found some the information on the Real Bread Campaign website really helpful. I heard an interview with one of the founders of this campaign and it was a bit scary but the website seems a lot less daunting.
Okay, so here is the recipe. The science behind it is that you let time do your kneading - which sounds like a self-help book which I will write as soon as I finish 'I Meant to Bake!'.
JUSTINEJOEKEITHBRENTBREAD
2 tsp sugar
1/2 cup hot tap water
Add 3 cups whole meal flour
1 tbls olive oil
About a tsp of salt
Mix it together so that everything is well mised. This mixture will be way runnier than a regular bread mixture - there is no way you could knead it.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Spring!
On Sunday we had a great day at a friends 6th birthday party. It was a really sunny day. One of those ones that reaches into the evening and makes me want to stay out. By the time we looked at the time it was nearly six o'clock so we decided to go into town for dinner. Toki's favourite place to go for dinner is Midnight Espresso a cafe on Cuba Street. She really likes the cakes and other sweet things they do. We also like Midnight Espresso. Recently I was asked to talk about my favourite place to eat in Wellington and I chose Midnight. It was pretty exciting for me to talk about veganism but also a bit scary. Everytime I say I'm vegan I instantly question 'how vegan?' - has any leather snuck into my wardrobe, did I read that last label right, did the restaurant think 'vegan-enough' when the recommended what I should eat. And the prospect of saying I'm vegan in a semi-public way was really scary. It is always scary to stand up and say, I believe in this. I guess what I aim for is trying my best.
Anyway, we went to Midnight and ordered some nachos. They make the best vegan nachos I've tasted in Wellington: beans, humus, aioli, olives, whole jalepenos and salsa. Mmmmmm. Toki was pretty tired by the time we got there and she had eaten quite a few vegan cupcakes so a peaceful sitting down dinner looked less and less likely - she finds Midnight really exciting, there is pinball and space invaders and loud music. So we asked if we could take our nachos over to the playground outside the architecture school. The playground is relatively new but it is fantastic. There is also a basketball hoop which gets heaps of use from students coming out for some fresh air and a run around. I love the way the architecture school, which also trains town-planners and landscapers has such a great area outside it. Architecture and design students work really hard and the space is such a great place for them to come mid-assignment. Three students arrived while we were having dinner and began to play basketball. Toki really wanted to play with them but didn't quite have the bottle to go and ask. Brent and I were nervous to ask as well. We laughed about how we kept saying to her, 'Just go and ask them, they'll be happy to let you play,' but both of us were a bit nervous to ask. Finally, Brent went over and asked and of course they were thrilled to give Toki a couple of shots. Boy, it was a nice night. It reminded me that summer will come, and maybe it be perfect weather but there will be some nice days and eating outside rocks.
My friend Helen Lehndorf said I could use some of her Flickr images and I chose these ones because they are from her garden and sometimes when it is cold and wet I look at them because they look so bright and sunny. Helen is an amazing photographer. Thanks Helen!
Images Creative Commons licensed by Flickr user stripy sock studio
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Hiding variety
Yesterday I was singing the praises of variety but I thought last night about how hard it can be to get that variety into a diet. Last year, we watched the movie Food Inc. Which was terrifying. The thing I found really hard to take, as a person who eats what doctors call a 'limited diet', was the lack of variety in a lot of the foods on supermarket shelves. The film included a shot of a supermarket aisle which was full of different products but when you looked closely all these distinct products were made from the same two ingredients: soy and corn.
So I was thinking about how our family spend a lot of time hiding ingredients in food. Especially for Toki but also for ourselves because I find it hard to eat a whole plate of sunflower seeds or almonds or to face a pot of quinoa or amaranth. As I mentioned before, Saturday at our house is pancake day, but what I failed to mention is that what we actually have, usually, are hotcakes made from a recipe from May All be Feed. The recipe includes: wholemeal flour, sunflower seeds, poppy seeds, orange rind, rolled oats and no sugar (so I don't waste the orange I also replace the water needed for this recipe with orange juice). I love this recipe because it hides so much stuff in a small thing which tastes great with maple syrup. On the mornings we don't have hotcakes I make the Banana pancakes from How it All Vegan (the first vegan cookbook I bought on the recommendation of my good friend Sarah) or we make blueberry pancakes or buckwheat. So yeah, I thought I would take some of the things I listed yesterday and talk about where we hide them.
Almonds - I smash these up and put them in almost anything - baha. Muffins, stir-fries. When Toki was first eating we used to soak almonds over night and make them into milk the next morning. They are really nice soaked.
Amaranth - I put this in bread a lot and nobody notices
Bran flakes - Brent makes some really nice bran muffins
Buckwheat groats - I grind these up and make flour. Then - Buckwheat pancakes!
Bulk Olive oil - we use a lot of oil in our baking.
Cashews - Again stir-fries, muffin, muesli - YUM!
Chai seeds - I replace poppy seeds with these often.
Coconut - Sambal! Also, coconut is the trickiest sweetener I know. Toki has a mean sweet tooth but she really loves chopped up banana with lemon juice squeezed on it and coconut sprinkled over the top. Coconut and cinnamon also make it possible for me to miss out processed sugars in a lot of other things she likes like pancakes, muffins and muesli.
Linseeds - I worship at the feet of linseeds, they are such a great source of those EPAs and Omega oils that we don't get from fish. I grind these suckers up with sunflower seeds and almonds and sprinkle them on just about everything - Marmite, LSA and lettuce sandwich anyone? Smoothie with LSA? The oils are always best fresh so having whole linseeds suits me cause I can grind as I need (can you tell how much I love the small bullt-type food processor we have on our bench?) Linseeds make an excellent egg replacer for cooking so they can be hidden in all sorts of cakes and biscuits. One of my favourite recipes is chili and onion cornbread which I use linseeds in as an egg replacer. All hail the mighty linseed!
Quinoa - I've also put quinoa in bread. I've never tried putting ancient grains in other baking but it would probably be great.
Rice milk - Toki really like soy milk and she really doesn't like rice milk. I kept buying it she kept not drinking it. Then my friend said, why don't I do half and half soy milk? She said with her daughter she started with more like 3/4 to 1/4 and then she slowly pushed up the amount of rice milk. It worked really well. It's a bit of a faff having too boxes open at the same time but yeah, it really works.
Rolled oats - I often grind rolled oats into flour and replace some of the wheat flour in recipes. I also have a great recipe for biscuits which have rolled oats as there sticky ingredient. Also, Helen Lehndorf's amazing slice! Look dried dates AND rolled oats!
Sunflower seeds - Again these are awesome in just about anything. I was just remembering how we used to make a lot of scroggin-type snacks for Toki when she was young and she used to sit for ages picking out the things she wanted to eat in order - scroggin as hand-eye co-ordinator.
Sushi Nori - I love this stuff. I often throw it into soups at the last minute and it goes yum. We also make sushi with it. Sushi and summer rolls are a great way to hide things.
So yeah, happy hiding! Oh and Helen Heath put up a delicious curry recipe yesterday - oh yum! I tell you there is a poets do vegan food book waiting to be written. Thank you Helens!Tuesday, October 18, 2011
In our food cupboard
Almonds
Amaranth
Arrowroot
Barley
Bran flakes
Brown rice
Buckwheat groats
Bulk Baking powder
Bulk Basmati rice
Bulk Canola oil
Bulk Cumin
Bulk Dill
Bulk Marmite
Bulk Olive oil
Bulk Wholemeal flour
Cashews
Chai seeds
Cocoa
Coconut
Coffee
Corn chips
Corn crackers
Cornflakes
Cornmeal
Cream of Tartar
Custard powder
Dried Black eyed beans
Dried Brown lentils
Dried Chickpeas
Dried Mung beans
Dried pasta – spaghetti & penne
Dried Pinto beans
Dried Red split lentils
Dried Split green peas
Dried Split yellow peas
Evening Primrose
Gluten Flour
Gluten-free pasta
Hazel nuts
Hundreds & Thousands
Ice cream cones
Icing sugar
Iron supplement
Jelly Beans
Lasagna strips
Linseeds
Mapo Tofu sachet
Onions
Orgram Dinosaur Cookies
Pic’s Peanut Butter
Popcorn
Quinoa
Rice bubbles
Rice milk
Rolled oats
Saladas
Soba noodles
Soy chunks
Soy Milk
Sugar
Sunflower seeds
Sushi Nori
Sushi rice
Vanilla essence
Vermicelli
Vitamin B12 spots
Vitamin C
Wheatgerm
Monday, October 17, 2011
The continuing stoooory ... linky-link-link
Yahoo.
Thank you.
And also, awesome recipe for Za'atar Spiced Spaghetti Squash.
A post I didn't plan which I think is quite apparent.

Most winters, I move out of my canvas sneakers and into synthetic boots. The winter before last I lucked on a beautiful pair at the tip shop in Happy Valley. They were awesome and I loved them. This year, they fell apart. I don't know if it's true, but vegan shoes seem way less robust than leather shoes. I kept meaning to get a new pair of boots this year but I just never got round to it, so I wore my Converse all winter and they were okay. But I had cold feet pretty much all winter and they are not the most waterproof but they did okay. So know that it's summer I have three pairs of converse all with holes in their soles. I should get them re-soled but it costs slightly more than it would to buy a new pair of converse - which is of course, well-worth it for the planet and workers' rights but man, I find it really hard to do. What I usually do is plug them up with shoe-gu for a couple of months and then buy new shoes.
Whenever I think about shoes I think about the early 90s and how Vans were first available in New Zealand. I am pretty sure people were getting them sent from America but I remember my first pair of Vans and how much I loved them.
There are quite a few vegan shoes available in New Zealand now. Oddly, Number One Shoe warehouse has heaps - I guess because maybe vinyl is cheaper than leather. Hmm. But it's really hard to find locally made or fair-trade vegan shoes. Trade Aid used to do an awesome Chuck-Taylor-esque boot but they don't stock it any more. Safe has a small but groovy range of vegan shoes. And I guess now you can get almost anything online - how great if Herbivore!
Okay, so, this was not about food, I have been trying to work out a way of bending this back into food somehow, erm, how about this, here's a picture of some vegan food pyramid:
And here's a recipe for vegan haggis - no honestly. Try and fit that in your food pyramid!
Image:
Chuck Taylor Creative Commons licensed by Flickr user Virginia Lin Photography
Food Pyramid Creative Commons licensed by Flickr user glue&glitter
Thank you again for CC licensing your picture!
Friday, October 14, 2011
Cheeeeese!

Despite my love affair with cheese it caused me a lot of problems. I suffered really badly from migraines as a kid and when I didn't eat histamine-rich food: chocolate, cheese - my migraines stayed away. I also have this memory of always having a sore stomach and feeling slightly ill. But there was no way I could imagine giving up cheese. Then I read an article and it kind of changed my life. I think my friend Sarah gave it to me and it was called something like 'The Sexual Politics of Eating Meat'. I found this on Amazon and maybe it was a chapter from this book. Anyway, it changed the way I looked at dairy and eggs forever. In those days we had quite a few vegan friends, there wa sa bit of animal rights action going on and a few of our friends were straight-edge punks. I thought I'd avoided veganism, I felt okay about the dairy and egg industry and felt really good about being a vegetarian and then I read this thing. It kept talking about our 'sister cows and hens' which at first I thought was dumb but then some how, as I read it, it made perfect sense. So at some stage I stopped eating animal products and the hardest to give up, the one I would look at and dream about and sniff at, was cheese. The main tastes that left my diet as I restricted it more and more were fat and salt and cheese just fits that bill perfectly. I missed it so much.
Someone, I think it was someone on a Vegan Freak podcast said, 'People shouldn't try vegan cheese for at least four years after going vegan.' And I reckon that is so true. I don't think vegan cheese tastes much like dairy cheese. I reckon it's true that the longer you can stay away from it after going vegan the better. I think I've pretty much forgotten what real cheese tastes like, so vegan cheese is great. I don't eat that much of it. For years, it was cost-restrictive, we just didn't have enough money to buy it but now we can probably afford it I'm sort of out of the habit of buying it. Toki isn't that keen on it and yeah, I feel like I can take it or leave it. It is nice every now and then sprnkled on nachos or on a pizza but yeah, strangely we just don't have it much any more. What I think might have happened is that I lost my love of real cheese at some stage. Real cheese smells really unappealing to me now. One of the things that first turned me vegetarian was I heard someone say that being vegetarian can change the way you think and yeah, I wonder if it changes the way you smell as well and your appetite?
What I much prefer to the commercial vegan cheeses are a few recipes I have which I makes at home. For instance, we make like a vegan parmessan out of toasted sesame seeds, salt and nutritional yeast. I whizz all the ingredients up in out bullet food processor and it is really nice sprinkled on italian style lentils and pasta. I also make this really strange cashew nut erm spread maybe? It's got red capiscum, cashews, nutritional yeast, miso, tahini and some other stuff in it and again I whizz all the ingredients up and it's done. It's great for dollapping onto pizza and cooks really nicely. I also have a great recipe for macaroni-no-cheese which makes a sauce with pumpkin, nutritional yeast (seeing the pattern) and miso. It is a really nice winter meal with crusty bread. Yeah, I think most of these recipes come from a book by John Robbins called May all be Fed: A diet for a new world. I find John Robbins really interesting. He's been writing about veganism for a long time and with a passion and certainty that I find really admirable. His books are really interesting and May all be Fed has some great recipes in it.
Image: Vegan Cheese (Portland, Oregon) CC licensed by Flickr user Todd Mecklem http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddmecklem/5719718221/ Thank you Todd for CC licensing this picture.
PS: I'm pretty sure every vegan in the world wants to live in Portland, Oregon teehee. I do anyway.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Birthday Crackles

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

'She'd still be unhappy if she had a cat,’ I say.
Then we talk about what it is, exactly, giving her goldfish would teach her about ownership, about animals and about rights. We're vegan so it’s complicated. It’s more complicated than usual because it looks like I’m becoming a Buddhist. Not on purpose but by degrees – a little reading here, a little meditation there until eventually, and now, on our bed after sex, I’m wanting to reduce the suffering of all sentient beings and can’t believe in individualised self existence any more. I’m trying to hide all this so I temper it and at length the conversation comes to the place where you say, 'So fish?' raising your arm in a lying down, sideways, let's-shake-on-it gesture and I shake your hand.
'Let's not mention it until she whinges about it again,' I say.
'Is that how we play it?' you say.
'Not "whinges",' I say, 'I didn't mean "whinges"'. Sometimes I say things just for the effect of them – so nobody thinks I care about anything too much – as much as I do. So I appear unphased and like everything I say is off-hand, coming from an easily intelligent mind. 'Not "whinges".'
The simple rule is that the first goldfish needs 20 gallons of water and every goldfish after that needs 10 gallons each. I don't know what a gallon is. On the way to the supermarket, in a tunnel, my daughter tells me she wants to be a big sister. I say I understand. She starts to cry and talk about how much she wishes I was pregnant. I say she sounds sad and I understand how sad it is and how her father and I don’t think we can look after any more children. Through the crying, she says, ‘Why can’t we have a dog?’ I think about the gallons and gallons of water and say, in an off-hand way, ‘Oh, it’s complicated – owning animals – it isn’t very vegan. What about the animal’s brothers and sisters?’ It’s the lowest blow. As we arrive at the supermarket she’s crying for all the animals who don’t have brothers and sisters because of the people who want pets.
My younger brother and I weren’t allowed pets until, at some point, we were given two goldfish in a small round bowl. Goldfish are the only pet fish that can live in cold water. Round bowls are no good for goldfish; gasses don’t escape and there is no way of getting 30 gallons of water into them. Our goldfish died a lot. We sank tiny shell-shaped things that would bubble to the bottom in the stones and oxygen weed. I expected that if I called my fish Gretel my brother would call his Hansel but they ended up being Peter and Gretel – over and over again. We ate fish every Thursday night and my grandmother opened small salty tins of sardines and tuna for our lunch. We never ate Peter and Gretel. Someone from down South sent us whitebait one year and we ate that: heads, fins, tails, bones – in an omelette.
Our daughter likes to go into the attic. We get the ladder and she climbs up onto our flat roof and we walk to the attic window and open it and she climbs in. It’s always warm and cramped and close. There are boxes. While we’re up there we move the boxes, checking in each one to make sure we really need what’s in them still. Paper is heavy. While we are up there she tells me about electricity and how the roof stays up and the chimney. The floor of the attic is broken into by the glass skylights that let light into the back part of our lounge. We tell our daughter to be careful not to stand on these. She is careful. She is smart and healthy.
At the supermarket, while I’m at the bulk bins buying, pulses and nuts and dried fruit, I often lose her. She’s usually standing beside the plastic boxes that are filled with ice and dead, whole fish. She’s usually put on the latex gloves the supermarket supplies and is gently pushing an eye or opening a fin or a tail. When she sees me, she usually stops and says, ‘Poor fishy’ to me. She could stand there all day. She looks at the live mussels. The water sprays start and, sensing my impatience, she says, ‘Poor mussels.’ I tell her about a friend of ours who came with people from his temple and bought mussels and let them go into the sea down the road from the supermarket. She asks, Should we buy some mussels? I say it’s complicated that if we buy mussels the supermarket will get more mussels and then more mussels will be here, trapped. ‘It’s capitalism,’ I say, ‘there’s no care in it.’ Tallulah takes off the gloves reluctantly and we go and buy tofu and bread, me reading the labels while she looks at the brightly coloured soft drinks, singing to them, ‘Poison, poison, poison.’
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
My lunch
For lunch I eat tofu, salad and freshly-made wholewheat bread. But I've found that for me to stick to this way of eating I need heaps of freedom around how I eat these three things. Yesterday, I had marinated tofu and today I'm having tofu cream cheese which I whipped up this morning. My salads vary heaps depending on what is in season. I've been doing a pretty good line in spinach salads lately, because lettuce has been really expensive. My main aim with salads is always to get as many different colours in them as possible. I usually have wholewheat bread which Brent sets going the night before and we bake as we have breakfast but some days I might have Chapati or Morroccan daily bread or bagels. I've even been known to make scones when I've left it to the last minute. I also don't always stick with wheat. My practitioner said I can use any grain - quinoa and barley are my go to grains and I am loving the Scarlet Barley recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Appetite for Reduction.
I thought I'd give you a link for some great bread recipes. They come from a Hare Krishna sight. Hare Krisha's in my experience love dairy products almost as much as they love and worship the cow. I used to go out with a devotee and I spent a lot of time at temple and man, it is a hard place to be vegan. One of the interesting things about Krishna milk is that they only take the fore-milk of the animal leaving the aft-milk for the calves. Anyway, what I do if replace any butter or ghee with oil or margarine and any cow's milk with soy milk.
PS: I spoke to Brent this morning and he said he will do a guest post next week about how to make the famous 'bread that Brent makes'.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Sunday Lunch

There are two markets in central Wellington on a Sunday and on Saturday morning there is one in Newtown, about half and hours walk from town, and another in Thorndon, which is about twenty minutes walk from where we live. I also understand there are similar markets in Poritua, the Hutt and Kapiti Coast. We are so luck!
We eat heaps of fruit and vegetables. I have juice every morning then fruit. Toki usually has a couple of pieces of fruit before she goes to school and in her lunch box she usually has fruit or maybe a carrot or some broccoli. For lunch I have a salad and we often have one cooked starchy vegetable (potatoes, pumpkin, kumara) for dinner and another salad. For dinner we also have dahl, and usually in the dahl there is eggplant and spinach and some other vegetable. Then Toki usually has a piece of fruit while we read her stories.
The market is the cheapest way for us to buy our food but also the produce is really fresh. The market has a great atmosphere, we often bump into people we know there. Toki has been going since she was a baby in a front-pack and some of the stall-owners know her by name. As well as out fruit and veg we get locally made tofu there, which is yum. Toki likes to shop at the market and often Brent gives her some cash and she chooses some of her own fruit and veggies. She likes trying new stuff and often comes home with things I've never seen before. Thank you Google! People often say veganism must really lack variety but it astounds me that after a long time I am still finding new vegetable and fruit and new ways of cooking the ones I already knew about.
Sunday lunch yesterday was; marinated and grilled tofu, an astounding salad, avocados, tomatoes, bread made by Brent, sunshine and a discussion about a tree house.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Vegan-Friendly Friends

My friend Helen Lehndorf is an amazing poet, she also writes beautiful fiction and non-fiction. In December, her book of poetry The Comforter is coming out on the wonderful Seraph Press.
Helen is a great friend to the vegan baha. She's even done a special Vegan Month of Food post on her Helen Lehndorf blog. It includes a delicious Fruity Bars recipe. They look very yum.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Library Meals

I'm writing this from the Victoria University Architecture and Design library. I reckon academic libraries are one of the best things about being a student. I love libraries almost more than anything else. When I feel sad about the way we treat each other, I think about libraries. When I was 14 years old I heard The Police sing about Nabokov and I went to the St Heliers Bay library and got out Lolita.
When I was at Otago University I got a job in the Medical and Dental libraries. It is still one of my happiest work memories. The Medical library was busy, the materials were amazing and the students were awesome. My favourite shift was late night. The library was open until about 11 o'clock I think and I would often work late with Elvira. She was a third year medical student and as the library got less and less busy, eventually we would be the only staff on. One of our jobs would be to go and 'pick interloans' which meant finding the journals and books on the shelves which people from other universities had ordered articles from. We could come back and report what we had seen on our travels: a pizza being eaten up near epidemiology, people making out in the stacks behind opthamology, people asleep in the warm. Elivira and I became firm friends.
We always had a dinner break on late night. One at a time we'd go into the staffroom, heat up our dinner and eat it reading whatever magazines were in there. Elvira always had really nice food and one night I asked her about it and she wrote out a recipe for one of her favourite curries. I've still got it on the piece of paper she wrote it on in the soft lead pencil we used to keep at the issues desk. I love making it because it reminds me of Elvira and the library and people kissing in opthamology.
I usually put chickpeas in Elvira's curry. Dry pulses require a bit of a rhythm to your day. What I normally do is put them in water to soak before I go to bed the night before I make this curry. Does that sound like a faff? I can never tell, I'm sure it did the first time someone told me they did it. Anyway, it doesn't seem like too much trouble now, although, yeah, I can see how it takes some planning. A friend of mine cooks all her beans for the week on the weekend and then freezes them or puts them in her fridge - I'm not always that organised. Anyway, if I wake up to soaked chickpeas I put them in the slow cooker with a bay leaf and yeah, let them cook until dinner time. I love my slow cooker. It used to be my aunt's. It's a very old-school one and it works really well for cooking pulses. I really like cooking my own pulses rather than buying canned ones mainly because of the salt. My heart has never been in great shape, I smoked for years and I have really low blood-pressure, so, I try and minimise salt any chance I get and canned food is one things I try to avoid. Anyway, however you get your chickpeas, you have them and now you can make:
2 tbsp oil
1 large onion
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp garlic
1 tbsp ginger
4 tomatoes
1 tsp turmeric powder
(Elvira wrote '1 tbsp chili (or none)'. I have never been game enough to put this much chili into it - I think she was joking)
1 tsp salt (or as much as you want)
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp garam masala
Optional: 10 peppercorns, 2 cardamon pods
600 grams chickpeas
Enough water to cover everything.
You can also add vegetables
Fry the onion, garlic and ginger in a heavy bottomed pot.
Then add the tomatoes and spices and a bit of water if you need it and cook these on high for 3 minutes. Simmer for 10 minutes - you might need to keep adding water and it's a good idea to stay close for stirring.
Add chickpeas and vegetables and enough water to cover everything cover and boil for 15 minutes. Then remove the lid so the curry can thicken - if you like it thick.
This is good with rice or bread or potatoes and it's great if you're working late night.
Photo: Opthamology case study: Eye with severe peacock-ism. CC licensed by Quinn Dombrowski (Flickr user: quinn.anya)
Thursday, October 6, 2011
One cake well
I really liked the idea of baking one cake well. I am pretty sure that when I did my MA I did exactly the same thing. I have one great vegan cake recipe and it seems to work for most audiences. My mother first made it when I went vegan. The story is that she got it off a woman that lived in the same old-age home as my grandmother. There are heaps of variations of it around and most of them come from around the time of rationing in the Second World War. There are some really good vegan baking recipes from the Second World War. The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre published the War Economy Recipe Book written by 'Housewife' for the 'benefit of those who desire to economise, or for those who unfortunately, owing to a shortage of supplies, cannot secure the sufficient ingredients to do their usual baking'. It has some great recipes for things like: Tripoli Biscuits, American Fingers, Cairo Nutties, Victory Gems and Allied Cake.
Anyway, here is the Adam family version of a wartime vegan chocolate cake. We use this cake for a lot of things by the way. I've put it in muffin trays and cupcake tins, I've served it warm with sauce and ice cream as a pudding and last Christmas, we made it a couple of days before and used it instead of sponge in a triffle.
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
1 1/2 cups of flour (I've used wholemeal flour but if its a special occasion I'll use white flour or a mixture of both. Oddly chapati flour works quite well. Oh trap I fell into once, if you're using self-raising flour, you don't need the baking powder)
2 tbsp cocoa (I usually use carob powder)
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup dry sweetener (if I use brown sugar the cake isn't quite so smooth - but it's still great)
1 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1 tbsp vinegar
5 tbsp oil
1 cup cold water
In a large bowl sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add sweetener, vanilla, vinegar, oil and water and mix together gently until 'just mixed'. Pour into a lightly oiled cake pan (I find it works best in a ring tin) and bake for 45-50 minutes. Test with a knife to see if done. When cooled ice and serve.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
You might be right.
By Pip Adam
‘We’re vegan.’ He says it, kind of waving his hand to indicate he means all of us: me, him and the baby. ‘We don’t have any animal products.’ They smile. We sent an email earlier. Before we got here – to Samoa – we sent an email to the hotel to check we could eat something. The person we sent it to sent it to the maître-d’, who sent it to the chef, who sent it back to the person we sent it to, who sent it back to us, saying ‘This should be fine. Not a problem.’ The manager, the person we sent it to originally, forgot to delete the messages underneath his. He had forwarded our email to the maître-d’ with a message saying ‘Get a load of this *grin*.’ The maître-d’ forwarded our email and the manager’s message to the chef saying ‘Sorry – this is bound to be a pain in the arse.’
We feel bad before we get there. We take silver packs of soy protein and vegetarian luncheon sausage. I feel like a spaceman. Everyone we know who was vegan is freegan now. People say we care more about animals than people. I watch a documentary showing someone killing baby cats – kittens. One of the last vegans I know says she can’t watch it. She says vegans should be exempt from watching it. Someone else says that’s shit, if she expects other people to watch it she should watch it herself. I hate cats. I watch about ten seconds more of the documentary and I can’t watch it. They poison some dogs with cyanide. The dogs look like frightened children. I don’t particularly like children either. When I meet people I try to wait as long as possible before I tell them – about the vegan thing. Most people don’t like children particularly – or cats.
We go for a drive. We rent a car, pack up our vegetarian luncheon sausage and some white, bouncy bread and we go for a drive. There are dogs everywhere. I send an email home, saying ‘We’re having a great time; there are dogs everywhere in Samoa.’ A lot of the dogs have bits missing: ears, eyes, legs. On Savai’i, while we’re waiting for the ferry, a group of them surround us like a 1980’s horror movie. The baby teases them from her car seat. She shows them her vegetarian luncheon sausage and they growl. We say, ‘Don’t worry the dogs.’ They look like they have rabies. Neither of us have seen a dog with rabies, but we agree these dogs look like they have rabies. We wind up the windows and drive somewhere else to wait for the ferry.
For dinner we eat palusami and taro chips. We stay in a fale on Savai’i and eat curry and rice. We eat more palusami. Palusami quickly becomes our favourite food. I have my photo taken outside the Marlon Brando fale. We meet Aggie Grey’s granddaughter – she dances for us. There is fire every night: fire-dancing, fire-twirling, and jumping from the top of a palm tree into the swimming pool holding fire. We eat more palusami and lots of star fruit. We see pawpaw growing on trees. Anywhere else I’ve been I hate pawpaw, but I can eat it in Samoa with pleasure. Everywhere we go it rains – big, fat, warm rain. I had a different holiday in mind. I thought it would be sunny all the time and I would be lounging by the pool, getting brown, but it rains and often isn’t swimming weather. We try to go snorkelling. We take the baby out a wee way, and I see a fish and panic and don’t go snorkelling any more. I think of Jaws and Piranha and Piranha 2, where they could fly. I don’t like fish. I don’t like animals where I can’t see them – where they can creep up on me. On the way to the snorkelling beach we see a dead dog – stiff, with its legs up. We agree someone will come for it. On the way home it’s still there, only fatter. It’ll burst if the sun stays out. It’s in a ditch.
They have a huge banquet that night, and Aggie Grey’s grand-daughter dances again. There’s fish everywhere, raw fish marinated in coconut milk and fresh limes. I think about the fish that were there while we were snorkelling – how sneaking up on someone and frightening them isn’t a nice thing to do. There are shellfish. Shellfish are like vegetables to me. ‘No central nervous system,’ I say to the baby. I order palusami and a vegetarian pizza with no cheese and can they check there is no butter or milk in the pizza base. The waiter smiles. I feel elite in the worst way. We all eat palusami and taro chips.The baby gets some of it in her hair and tries to feed the rest of it to a cat that lives in the hotel. The pizza has parmesan on it, so I order some more palusami. The parmesan is a test, an accident or a misunderstanding. I leave the pizza untouched hoping that someone will eat it in the kitchen. Waste, food miles, hypocrisy, reliance on capitalism, elitism – someone mentions one of these things to me most days. In New Zealand the doctor says ‘restricted diet’ a couple of times and I figure sooner or later someone is going to take the baby off us. The Plunket Nurse says, ‘Just a glass of milk a day would do it.’ I think about a million cows in pain and all the rivers drowned in shit and say, ‘Yeah, that would do it.’ I start lying to the Plunket Nurse. I say, ‘Yeah,’ when she says, ‘Is she having any meat?’ The baby has never seen meat. I stop going to see the Plunket Nurse. Someone asks me if I’ve ever given the baby a choice to eat meat. While we’re in Samoa the baby eats pigeon shit and some weird fluffy plant. I say, ‘Yeah, nah, I haven’t done that.’ I say I see their point, but I don’t, not really. I pretend to cooperate. I say, ‘You might be right.’ It’s my secret way of not getting into a fight when I don’t agree with someone. The nutritionist at the hospital tells me I have to go back to Plunket. I say ‘Okay’ but I might as well have said, ‘You might be right.’ The baby and I walk back through the hospital car park, there’s a cold and dry wind. ‘It’s warm enough in Samoa to grow beans and wet enough to grow rice,’ I tell her. ‘That’s a perfect protein – pulses and grain.’ If I could catch a wild pig with my bare hands and kill it with my bare hands and eat it raw I probably would.
One overcast day in Samoa we go to Robert Louis Stevenson’s estate. There are fireplaces in most of the rooms. We walk up the hill in Roman sandals to the memorial. Black lizards move as we walk close to them. At first I think I’m seeing things, from the lack of protein and iron, and the humidity, and the long walk uphill, but then we see them and they join us and the baby laughs and tries to catch them with her bare hands.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Monday Night Dinner

It's a really good book. I particularly like it because it was written and published in Australia so all the ingredients are really easy to get here in Aotearoa. One of my favourite recipes is 'Golden Masala'. It's made with yellow split peas, spices, tomatoes, spinach and grated apple.
I'm a big fan of split peas. They are quite quick cooking and cook down to a really nice mushy consistency. Although they cook better after they've been soaked for an hour or so, they can be cooked from dry as well. They're pretty economical too. I just bought 500g for $2.88 from Moore Wilson's. I reckon 500g will do us about two meals. I get them a wee bit cheaper when I shop at the Indian bulk supermarkets in Petone and Newtown. I buy lots of dried pulses in bulk because they last and are so good to have in the cupboard.
While the Masala is cooking I'm boiling some new potatoes that Brent got from our local fruit and veg shop a few days ago. I'm going to make a warm potato salad with them - because it's really miserable weather today, last week I would have made a cold potato salad and we would have eaten it on the deck - you should have been here last week! I'm basically going to throw the cooked potatoes in a bowl mix up a dressing, chop some coriander, parsley and spring onions into it and mix it up.
We're also having a salad. We are always on a mission to get as many colours as possible into our meals. Which, as spring arrives, is getting a wee bit easier - boy, we eat a lot of red cabbage and beetroot in the winter. I feel bad diss-ing my good friend beetroot. Man, it is super veg! The anthocyanadins, the blood building, the Vitamin C, calcium, phosphorus and iron - the humble beetroot takes a lot of beating - baha. This year my friend Jo helped me get more out of them. I had, shamefully, always thrown out the green parts of the beetroot. Jo mentioned she had cooked beet greens for dinner and I asked how she did that. It's a lot easier than I thought - you just cut them like spinach and chuck them it. And they're delicious! Which brings me back to the Golden Masala, which I often make with beet greens instead of spinach.
Hope everyone else is warm and dry tonight and having a hearty dinner.