Music and Veganism

Well, I’ve decided to take a break of an undetermined length of time.  I’m pretty over food blogging, and I never feel like taking pictures of my food anymore.  I stopped caring, so why would anyone else?

I’ve decided to start actually blogging on CharlotteLittlehales.com, and that blog will not be about food, but instead about music– mine, and other peoples.  And maybe some random other things, too.

I’m currently recording my album, so I will update about that and whatever other music things are happening.  That includes the other bands I’m in… and also my friends’ music.

Phil doesn’t want me to end this blog completely, so I’m leaving it open.  Maybe I’ll be back someday!  Who knows?

http://www.charlottelittlehales.com will be updated soon if you’re interested.

I don’t usually make resolutions for the New Year, because I feel like they will fail.  And besides, all the things I do want to resolve to do this year should just be done because I need to do them, not because they are a “New Year resolution”.

So I thought of a kind of good one that I think could really help my life out, and it’s something I’ve never done before:

Write out a To Do list every morning while I’m eating breakfast.

I doubt it will actually happen every morning, but I’d like to try.

Anyone else have any good ones?

BTW, I’ll be posting about the rest of my San Diego trip soon.  I haven’t had a chance to upload the photos!

I haven’t taken a single picture since getting to San Diego on Friday.  Some things worth noting, however, include: 1. by Saturday morning all flights leaving Philadelphia were cancelled because 2. Philadelphia got 23 inches of snow, and 3. Saturday in SD was over 70 dgerees and sunny.  Awesome!

Anyways, no pictures, but I wanted to share some of the great food we’ve had so far.  First was the obligatory trip to Pokez (947 E St. San Diego, CA). Pokez has terrible service, but a great selection of veg’n Mexican food (and omni), and it’s really decently priced.  I always get a burrito but this time I sprung for the vegan potato flautas.  Damn, that was so much food.  It was great, but I don’t know if I can ever handle that much deep-fried flour tortilla again!

The next day we were all craving pho, so we hit up Phuong Trang (4170 Convoy St., San Diego, CA) because it had some veg’n selections.  I was expecting to get my favorite Vietnamese dish, which is the tofu bun dish.  Well, lo and behold, they had vegan pho!  That is a very rare find, as most Vienamese soups, even if “vegetable” are made with beef broth.  I’ve only had pho one other time in my life, and this was better.  For fish eaters, Phil got the seafood pho and said it was also the best he’d ever had, because they actually used good pieces of fish as opposed to the cheapest (I have to admit that concept is really gross to me).

Last night we tried out Ranchos Cocina (1830 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., San Diego, CA).  It was a really cute restuarant with a lot of veg’n options.  The same people actually run another restaurant and an all-vegan market in North Park.  The service was good and the vibe is great.  It’s a little pricier than Pokez, but it’s worth it for their ginormous menu, and there are some interesting things on there– I tried mole for the first time in my life!

Phil’s mom, Nancy, also made a delicious vegetable stew from the Moosewood Cookbook.  I forget what it was called, but it was awesome!  It had eggplant, squash, tomatoes… and what else?  I don’t know, but it sure was tasty.

We will be hitting up some other places this week.  We’re also having a BBQ tomorrow night, and a mostly-vegan Christmas dinner, so I’ll try to get pictures of those.

[Twenty points for whoever can name the song that quote's in.  Don't know what the points are good for yet.  Maybe some cookies.]

Look, this is kind of hard for me, so I’m just gonna say it: I’m starting to think caffeine is really, really evil.

As some of you know, I stopped drinking coffee in August.  August 27th, to be more specific, and although I’ll indulge in a mug’o decaf when vegan brunching, I haven’t had any coffee since.  I don’t really miss it.  But it was very, very hard to quit, and I did miss it for a while after that.  And some people may laugh that I just said “it was very, very hard to quit”, but that’s why I don’t do drugs.  We all need to know our limits!

Since quitting I drank yerba mate semi regularly (but tried not to drink it everyday, or ever in the morning, worried that I would renew my addiction), occasionally had an iced tea or a very rare hot tea.  Some people believe yerba mate does not contain caffeine.  Reasons to support this claim include the “fact” that it doesn’t give you the jitters, will not make you crash, and that caffeine sensitive individuals are able to to drink it without the symptoms they get from caffeinated drinks.  Other people say this is crap– that yerba mate does contain caffeine, in fact it contains about the same amount as tea but you somehow are able to absorb it better, so you actually end up more caffeinated.  I agree.  I’m no doctor or scientist, but it did give me the jitters and it did make me crash.  It was pretty much like drinking coffee.

Then I bought some caffeine and stimulant-free tea, and stopped drinking yerba mate.  I started getting headaches but I didn’t connect them, since I believed myself to have already kicked my caffeine addiction.  I thought maybe my headaches were caused by eye strain or sinuses.  Not really thinking about it, I eliminated all caffeine from my life because I feel good without it.  The exception was that I decided to have an energy drink called Function: Alternative Energy twice a week (on my hard days at work) because it’s not caffeine based, although there is caffeine in it, and it also contains some vitamins and minerals including B12.

And wouldn’t you know it– just that little bit of caffeine and I’m already having headaches on the days I don’t drink it.  Are these caffeine headaches?  And if they are, how many of the headaches in my life were caused by caffeine withdrawl?  I’ve been drinking coffee regularly since I was fifteen.

Furthermore, how many other people are affected by caffeine withdrawl without even knowing it?  I generally don’t use painkillers for headaches unless they are very bad, but the average person pops one for the slightest headache.  So how many tablets of tylonol have been popped because someone hadn’t gotten their coffee yet?  And I’m not talking about cranky, I NEED MY COFFEE NOW! people, I mean someone who has an occasional cup– twice a week.

Maybe I’m crazy.  But I think caffeine needs to go away completely from my life.  I do love those energy drinks.  I will try to phase them out next week, while relaxing in SAN DIEGO!  Which is exciting in and of itself.

I’m just curious: does anyone else in the world successfully go grocery shopping only once a week?  Every time I go shopping, without fail, I think I’m getting enough groceries for a week and it only lasts about four days.  Maybe it’s because I don’t plan out meals anymore– I need to get back into that.  I picked out all those Vegetarian Times recipes and then I just stopped.  Lame!  I’ll start doing that again.

First off, I finished 7 days of raw, and the last two days were awesome but I ran out of food and didn’t feel like spending another $50 on groceries.  But it was good!  I recommend that everyone gives it a try.  Since ending it I haven’t been eating great, but I have consciously been eating more fruit (I bought another big bag of oranges and have one or two a day in addition to my daily apple).  I always tried to include either a salad or steamed green veggies with both lunch and dinner, but sometimes I’d let the lunch salad slide, so I’ve been better about it.

But it make me think about food & my body a little.  Although I know I’m not fat, I do think my ideal body weight is about five pounds less than I am now– because that weight is the weight I’ve stayed at for about five years, until the last 12 months or so.  I eat really well.  Probably better than about 85% this country.  I made that statistic up, but I bet it’s right.  So what’s changed?  Well, the obvious answer would have to be exercise.  I started running in September, but once the cold weather hit, I lost my steam.  I need to start hitting the gym before work (btw, my gym is 24 hours and right next door to my work.  I have NO excuse).  And I have an Achilles heel:  snacking!  I come home from work at either 2 or 3 PM, sit down to relax, and eat about four snacks.  I also tend to snack on bakery goods throughout the day– a muffin, a bagel, a cookie– but that habit was pretty successfully nipped in the bud during raw week, so that’s good news.  So… what’s your “Achilles heel” in the quest to live a healthy life? Does that even make sense?

Anyways, enough about that.  Let’s talk about cottages.  If you know me in real life, you may know that my favorite dish is shepherd’s pie.  I make it lot during the winter and I’ve blogged about it before.  I almost always make it different, and I rarely follow a recipe.  I’ve made it with tempeh, tofu, seitan, mushrooms and lentils before.  Today I decided to use beans leftover from when we’d cooked beans to make chili with earlier this week.

Today’s meal was inspired by a conversation with some coworkers today.  One of them began talking about shepherd’s pie, and the other didn’t know what it was.  So the first, M, described it being made with lamb.  It got us talking about what it’s called when made with beef, and for the life of me, I could not remember the name, “Cottage Pie”.  We also wondered what you would call a pie made without meat at all.  When I got home I looked up shepherd’s pie on Wikipedia and noticed that some people believe the use of Shepherd’s pie for a pie made with lamb and Cottage pie for one made with beef is a more modern tendancy, since the term “Shepherd’s pie” didn’t appear until the late 19th century and “Cottage pie” had been around for about 100 years prior.  Cottage pie was just a general term for a pie made with leftover roasted meat and a potato crust, usually made by poor people who, surprise, lived in cottages.

Well, I decided that cottage pie doesn’t need meat in it, because it’s name doesn’t suggest any animals the way shepherd’s pie does.  It can have beans instead.  Or lentils, or tempeh, or whatever.  But you should try the gravy I made, cause it was tasty.

Charlotte’s Cottage Pie

Serves 3-4

Ingredients:

Potatoes:

• 3 russet potatoes
• 3 garlic cloves
• 2 Tbsp. Earth balance or olive oil
• 1/2 c. unsweetened non-dairy milk of choice
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• ground black pepper to taste

Filling and gravy:

• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• 1 tsp. fresh thyme
• 2 Tbsp. flour
• 3/4 c. water
• 1 1/2 Tbsp. tamari
• 1 tsp. balsamic vinegar
• liquid smoke
• 2 1/2 cups plain cooked beans or lentils, or 1 package crumbled tempeh, or the equivalent of whatever you want to use in lieu of meat
• 1/4 cup frozen peas
• 1/4 cup frozen corn

Okay.  Peel and cube potatoes, and peel the garlic.  Cook them all together until tender.  Drain them.  Mash them with Earth Balance and slowly add the non-dairy milk until desired consistency is reached.  Add salt and pepper to taste, set aside.

Now preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  In a skillet, heat the oil for the gravy over medium heat.  Add the onions, carrots and thyme and cook for about 7 minutes, until the onions are transluscent.  Add the flour and stir until it everything’s evenly coated in the flour.  Now, slowly add the water a little bt at a time– pour some in, stir until mixed, add more, stir, etc.  Keep doing this until the water is gone and you have a whitish gravy.  Lower the heat.  Add the tamari and liquid smoke (however much smoke you want)– stir.  Add the balsamic vinegar– stir.  You may need to add more water if it’s super thick still, but the aim is to have no lumps of flour left.  Finally, add the beans or whatever, mix well, and remove from heat.  It should look like this:

In a casserole dish, layer the gravy mixture in first.  Spread the peas and corn on top.  Finally spread in the mashed potatoes.  Pack it down and poke some holes in the taters.  Stick in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.

Serve with a light salad (ours was toasted walnuts, baby romaine and orange!  yum!) or steamed greens.

I also made this quilt for my nephew.  It’s super cute!

Raw day 5.

The presents I ordered via the interet have already started arriving– whoopee!  I got three separate packages today.  Now I get to wrap them and then twiddle my thumbs until next Saturday.  That is when I can drive to my hometown to distribute said presents to my family, since Phil and I are spending xmas with his family this year.

Okay, so today was day five, and I have to admit that this whole raw thing is growing on me.  I feel good.  I’m not having horrible cravings.  I’m enjoying my food and I’ve been branching out a little more.  After day one, I immediately changed my “20 day” goal to 7 days, but I think I’ll just ride this out as long as I can last up to 20 days.  The big setback is the cost of this diet.  So far I’ve kept it reasonably close to what we normally spend on groceries, and I think I can do better.  I know, I know– if you are a raw foodist, you are thinking, “Spend a little more on groceries and you’ll spend a lot less on medical bills”, which may or may not be true.  But that’s very hard to rationalize right now when I simply don’t have the money to spend.

Anywho, breakfast was juice and fruit as usual.  I splurged on some avocados before I left work to use for lunch I was fantasizing about.

Lunch was a makeshift guac with zucchini and carrot sticks, the marinated kale I mentioned yesterday and some of the sprouted quinoa.  In answer to my mom who asked what the benefits of eating sprouted quinoa are, supposedly quinoa sprouts reduce fat in the bloodstream, cleanse the arteries and are even higher in vitamins and minerals than cooked quinoa.  Sprouts are often billed as being the most nutrient-rich food there is, so I guess sprouted anything is good (well, I think some sprouts are inedible, but… whatever).  As for the kale, I had never thought of kale as being a green you would eat raw, but it was really good!  I used Denise’s Vinaigrette from From Sad To Raw.  Sorry for the not great pictures.

For dinner I used the rest of the kale (don’t worry, there was enough marinade left for another batch) to make a yummy salad bowl.  This included more quinoa sprouts, corn, red bell peppers, some pumpkin and sunflower seeds and portabello mushrooms.  Very delicious.

One significant thing I’ve noticed is that I eat much slower.  It took me so long to eat my dinner, and if it had been a sandwich or the veggie burger I made Phil (more on that in a sec) I would have scarfed it down in two or three minutes.  Instead I ate and digested over the course of about 30 minutes.  Another thing I noticed is how far that quinoa goes.  I sprouted about 3/4 cup dry, which when cooked, I could have eaten in one meal (but probably wouldn’t have, that’s a lot of quinoa).  Instead, even though it’s not all puffed up and it looks like less, it has lasted me through four meals and I still have enough left for tomorrow’s lunch.

Alright, alright, I’ll stop raving about this diet– I did complain a whole lot the first three days, after all.  I don’t want to seem like a hypocrit!

Oh, yeah, real quick: the veggie burger.  This summer I made a batch of Lindsay/Happy Herbivore’s Mushroom Burgers from her Backyard Vegan e-Cookbook, and I froze what we didn’t eat.  We’ve been eating them ever since and everytime I cook one I think, I have to post about these!  Because they’re sooo good.  Tonight I made the last one for Phil, and I have finally remembered to tell everyone just how good these are.  The texture came out the best tonight.  I baked it, frozen, for 15 minutes, then browned it in a non-stick skillet.  I can’t wait for Lindsay’s cookbook…

Okay, that’s it.  Whew!

raw day 4.

The worst part about this diet is that because I have what I like to call “sensitive blood sugar”, I have been waking up shaky, weak, nauseous, and generally not wanting to start my day.  Then I drink some juice and life slowly starts to feel OK.

I think I’d have to say that yesterday was the hardest day so far.  Today was very managable, because I took enough food to work and I discovered kombucha is raw– it was a good pick me up (and very expensive, but i justified it as being the price of a draught beer at a bar, which i won’t be indulging in this week!) at the end of the day.  Today the end of the day was 12, since I started at 4.  Yesterday, on the other hand, I did not have enough food and my day was difficult and overall it just sucked.  I had some cooked quinoa for lunch– which is something I told myself I may do on my harder work days– and talked to a coworker I’d never met before who has done a couple of raw detoxes in the past.  She condoned my cooked quinoa and encouraged me to keep on keepin’ on, saying that it’s worth it in the end.  When I got home I just sort of napped and watched Season 1 of SNL until I made dinner and then went to sleep.  Too lazy to blog, and my food was a clone of what I ate the day before anyway.

I’ve been having juice and fruit every morning for breakfast.  For lunch today, I got a little creative and added some quinoa I had sprouted over night to my salad.

And for dinner, I got very creative and made a sprouted quinoa salad with no greens.  Good, I was getting burnt out on salad greens and baby spinach.  This was surprisingly filling and had to be eaten in two sittings an hour apart.  It has: red bell pepper, zucchini, corn (i heard frozen corn was raw but i think it may be blanched– does this count?), carrots, tomatoes, fresh mint, quinoa of course, and cashews.  The dressing is a vinegraitte that Phil made yesterday which also may not be totally raw because it has mustard in it (real mustard, not that yellow stuff) and I don’t know the rules about that yet.

I have some kale marinating in the fridge for lunch tomorrow and I’m trying– somewhat unsuccessfully– to sprout chickpeas!

As a side note, I haven’t weighed myself since the day after Thanksgiving and I don’t have a scale here, so I have no idea if I’ve lost any weighed.  I sort of assume I have– and I’d like to lose about 5 lbs– but that’s not why I’m doing this.  I’ll have to wait until I brave the gym to get a weigh in!

raw day #2

Today was a little rough, I must admit.  And by ‘a little’ I mean ‘really’.  But I’m going to keep on going, at least until all the food I bought runs out.  I went to BJ’s today and loaded up on fruit.  Yum!  If it doesn’t last the rest of the week then I’m afraid I can’t afford this diet, so I’ll have to figure something else out.  Anyways, better make this quick as I need to fold laundry and make tomorrow’s juice before bed!

Breakfast was juice made from 1 apple, 2 carrots, 1/2 c. cranberries.  So yum!  I also ate grapes, my last banana and cashews.

Lunch was a boring old salad and another juice made from 1 orange, 1 apple, some kale, and I think that’s it.  It was great!  I also discovered that I really just like a simple dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper on my salads.

I snacked on strawberries and cashews pretty much all day.

Dinner was another big salad, followed by another apple.  Yes, a lot of variance, I know.

I’ve also been drinking tea throughout the day.

I will probably eat some cooked quinoa with lunch tomorrow, as my day will be very physical and I’m not sure I’m ready to stay raw through it.  But we will see!

Yesterday morning Phil found that one of our car windows had been tagged with a paint pen.  We’ve (he) already cleaned it off, but it’s still a bummer.  Then, while putting my bike outside when I got home from work today, I realized his bike was gone (i.e stolen).  Someone climbed over our six foot fence and hoisted his bike out– not an easy feat!  I filed a police report, but it’s long gone, and we’re both pretty creeped out with the idea of a theifing stranger climbing into our very private, practically inaccessible backyard.

Anyway, in other news, I started a “20 day” raw cleanse today.  “20 day” is in quotations because I would be shocked with myself if I actually make it 20 days.  But I will try!  Today went well enough.  I didn’t have camera batteries until this afternoon but I’ll talk about what I had anyway.

Breakfast: 1 apple, 1 banana and juice made from 2 carrots, 1 celery stalk, 1/2 c. cranberries and 1 apple.

Lunch: Salad, raw seeds and nuts and 1 banana.

Snack: Grapes!

Dinner: “Pasta” with pesto and a salad.  I got a little creative and made some zucchini “pasta” with some raw spinach pesto.

It was meh.  I’m not crazy about the texture of raw zucchini and since I had made Phil real speghetti I spent the whole meal wishing I was eating real noodles.

And another banana after dinner.

So far, I’m not hungry– just not satisfied.  I am full of cravings.  Particularly for bread and other cooked carbs (peas and corn included). Bananas are really good for satisfying this craving, but I’ve already had 3 today!  I guess I just need to overcome these cravings– they are a good reason to be doing this on their own.

I’ll try to post every day about how it’s going!