30 Day Photo Meme – Day 22

Day 22- Something you cooked

"Stoner" cauliflower. That's what paul calls this. I made it up and he told me it seems like something a stoner would make. It is delicious! You lightly steam a head of cauliflower, drain it, then put it in a pot that can go on the oven, dump half a bottle of marinara sauce on it, then top it with vegan (or real) cheese. Put an oven safe lid on it and stick it in the oven at 400 for 20 minutes. Then you have this beautiful, in tact, baked cauliflower.

Day 23- Your desk or work area
Day 24- Something important to you
Day 25- Graffiti you have seen
Day 26- Something you do everyday
Day 27- Your favorite place
Day 28- A favorite piece of clothing
Day 29- Something you like
Day 30- A photo of you today

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writing in September, zine event listing, and food from my kitchen

I joined this Facebook group to challenge myself to write 15 minutes per day in September. It’s been really helpful. I expected to write for the fiction split but the muses had other things in mind. I have been compiling a zine about zine events. It has been going really well.  I have been kicking around the idea that there should be a calendar of zine events. Well, in true DIY fashion, I started one myself and attached it to this blog.

Go here and let me know what’s missing. I’ll add more when people tell me what to add.

I was also invited to the “Last Night’s Supper” group. I feel like I am posting more than other people. Maybe I have been cooking more? Here’s what I have made and forgotten to take photos of.

*Red peppers stuffed with quinoa, corn, black beans, kale, and onions. Green beans with slivered almonds, and sauteed summer squash from the garden with fresh herbs.

*House made BBQ seitan, coleslaw, and potato salad.

*whole wheat bread and strawberry/blackberry jam from fruit grown in our yard.

*multi-grain pilaf with lentils, quinoa, teff, a variety of rices topped with steamed kale, green beans and peppers with a green salad.

*roasted garden tomatoes with a sweet pepper, some olive oil, and balsamic vinegar for hours in the oven at a low temperature and made into a sauce served over spiral pasta and sauteed garden squash and greens.

*vegan perogies (potato, onion, mushroom) topped with sour cream and caramelized onions. Also with steamed corn, kale, and zucchini. I used some left over perogie dough and made tiny blackberry turnover with berries from the yard.

*Home made vegetable soup (veg, red and green lentils, split peas and alphabets) roasted beets, and store bought vegan Field Roast sage apple sausage.

Last night was pretty epic and super yummy:

* ravioli from scratch filled with tofu ricotta and topped with a coconut milk based alfredo sauce with mushrooms. And also bruschetta with fresh tomatoes from the garden.

I was asked on facebook for the recipe, and I’m horrible with recipes so I just explained what I did in this Facebook post.

tomatoes from the yard that were made into sauce!

Whole wheat bread and blackberry-strawberry jam, two great things that got great together.

Some graffiti from the guest cave. Up the witchy punx!

I really need a better name for this than “squash bake”

Right now I just finished eating some left over enchiladas  that are pretty yummy. Paul and I just got back from the grocery store and there aren’t many things that make me as happy as having a fully stocked kitchen. I even bought some cans to make some jam with the strawberries and blackberries from the yard that we have been stockpiling in the freezer.

Anyway, the other night I made a sort of casserole type thing. First I made saffron rice and placed that in the bottom of a dish.

Then I tossed some summer squash and tomatoes with olive oil and herbs and stuck them on top to look pretty.

pretty colors!

It looked pretty much the same when it was cooked.

I think I would add more liquid if I was to do it again, maybe some broth or use juicier tomatoes, maybe?

I served it with a warm bean salad with herbs and greens from the yard, some lightly steamed carrots chilled with mint from the yard, and an iceberg lettuce salad ( I know! I never eat iceburg lettuce, but my mom gave it to me) I also drank it with a really good ginger pale ale.

We STILL haven’t had any ripened tomatoes in our yard! It has been such a cloudy summer that the tomatoes don’t know what to do. We have lots of green beans and yellow squash so far and I see a nice pumpkin that is ripening. I had to cut down the skeletons of the daisies today, that’s always a hit to the end of summer. I have been making plans for moving some plants around in my yard when it cools down a little more.

 

 

Post symposium post where I don’t really talk about the symposium…

So, the symposium was over a few weeks ago. I took a much needed trip to the Riverhouse and have slowly be getting my house and life back in order. I think the symposium was a hit this year. I’ll have more to talk about later. The new space had its problems but as someone put it “it seems more like a space the symposium should be in.” The last 10 years were on a campus of a university that may have given it a stuffy, institution feel. In hindsight, I’m pretty happy with the space and the people we worked with there. We had our post symposium wrap up meeting/reward dinner at Portobello, a fancy vegan restaurant, last night. It was good to talk about things.

We are already scheduling a meeting for next year on September 18th at the IPRC.

Other than that, Portland is starting to feel like autumn, even thought it is pretty warm this week. I haven’t spent enough time in my yard but I did take some photos:

Despite Paul taunting the artichokes with how he is going to eat them, a few of them managed to go to thistle.

We have a small bit of invasive blackberries at the back corner of the yard. We didn't trim it back enough this year so we should have a good harvest. We usually get enought for a black berry pie made with my great-grandmother's crust recipe. This was the first bowl full and I just clean them and throw them into the freezer until there is enough for pie. maybe I'll make jam this year?

 

We used to have a lot more calendula in the yard. I have planted other things and now they are disappearing. I'll have to fix that.

Paul may have been taunting the artichokes about eating them, but I'm showering the hops with praise and a glimpse at their glorious future in my home brewed beer!

 

fairy wand peeking through my front fence. I think I'm finally going to transplate some daiy lillies there. They are miserable under the cedar tree, even though they get a lot of sunlight.

veg garden from the porch. It only gets afternoon sun.

 

Veg garden from another corner

Trailing pumpkin that only has one pumpkin growing.

 

Sunflowers in the veg garden!

 

Sunflowers on the porch.

OJ hanging out under the pation table and next to the hops.

 

He is a silly kitten.

I had some food pictures I was gonna post but I’ll post those tomorrow. I made saffron rice and baked it with herbed squash and tomatoes over it. It was super yummy. I also gathered up my squash flowers and, after giz got all the ants out,  stuffed them with cashew cheeze and lightly friend them with a sort of fresh herb tempura batter. They were really good!

vegan food photos

My first adventure with puff pastry! I made a creamy mushroom stuff for the middle.

pastie dough made with vodka rules!

pasties with mushroom gravy

More handmade vegan sausages with red bell pepper sauce

tofu scrambled with biscuits and gravy.

Creamy mushroom stuff with onions, thyme and a bit of vegan creamer or even vegan sour cream! Good as a sauce or a filling for puff pastry or ravioli or whatever.

tofu ricotta type filling with spinach, onions, those frozen cubes of basil a bit of lemon juice and the glorious vegenaise. This stuff is a great filling for lasagna, ravioli or tossed in with pasta shells and throw some maranara on top.

I’m horrible at following, writing or looking at recipes. I need to get better at that for the cook zine I’m working on.

vegan “rabbit” stew? yes please!

My housemate Dan is rad and a good cook. He’s not vegan, he’s an omnivore, but he took an alpine rabbit stew and made it vegan! (WARNING: there is a rabbit carcass. If this would be gross or offensive do not click!) It turned out awesome!

So, while Paul kneaded some bread dough and I made seitan from scratch Dan went out in the cold and the rain to find juniper berries. Wow, what are we some sort of hippie house?

Anyway, Dan documents his Alpine Rabbit Stew on his blog here. Including our happy faces eating it up. There are no seitan carcasses, I promise!

Updates from a busy week

It has been a busy week. I finished two huge button orders and many Etsy orders for coffee and catalog button designs. I have realized that my office is inefficient and I’ll have to mend that in the future. The weather in Portland has been unusually cold. I guess its not so much the cold that is weird but the dryness. We haven’t had rain in what seems like weeks. It’s been this stagnant cold like Utah in winter where it is so cold and dry you get nose bleeds. It is tricky because you look outside and it is all bright and sunny but below freezing. Oh well, it has been a good excuse to wear my cloaks when I got outside!

Well, I didn’t record or video my zine reading. I do have this picture that A.M. took

Me reading a zine outloud.

Paul played two songs and I read a few pieces from my new zine. It was sort of intense a times when we would look at eachother while he was singing about me and I was reading about it. I wondered if it made people feel uncomfortable. After the reading my housemate Maggie said as much. She said that she could see people feeling uncomfortable because of the intimateness of it… but in a good way. I guess the idea that we could do something that made people feel is a good thing. At any rate, I’ve been too busy to send out copies to distros and what not. I need to do that next week. Speaking of distros, what happened to them? There are like only 4 zine distros now. It sort of sucks.

So, when I haven’t been working I have been cooking and sleeping and letting the cats entertain me. I harvested one stalk of Brussel sprouts.I love how alien they look!

I forgot to take a photo of what I made to eat with it because I didn’t have high expectations but it was super good. A multirice blend with sauteed sprouts and onion on top and a vegan cheesy sauce. I should have taken a photo of the tiny silly sporuts in a bowl. They weren’t very big and were comically small but tasted super delicious. I also forgot to take a photo of the most awesomist shepard’s pie I have ever made. Oh well.

Oj still has his come thing on his head. I guess it is called The Elizabethan. it flops both ways and he has been wearing it face down. He gets his stitches out today and then gets to go outside again. He’s been a little brat. I caught him jumping up on the record player while a record was playing! I yelled at him in something close to a “mom voice” and tossed him in the basement for a few hours.

Not a happy cat

Paul has a new toy. M found this in the trash and gave it to Paul. He has been sitting on the floor all Schroder from the Peanuts style playing it in the dining roo. He is super annoyed that the air organ is out of tune. I think it is sort of funny how annoyed he is by it!

It's sort of like a flat electric accordian since it has those buttons on the left for chords. Also, check out the awesome wood floors that paul and I refinished ourselves!

Jess came over a few nights ago and we made a lentil soup, seitan steaks with mushroom gravy and stuffed acorn squash with mulled wine. It was a cold night and we wanted to warm up and eat wintery foods. Paul isn’t a fan of squash so I stuffed it with sweet things like apples, brown sugar, cranberries and almonds. It was like dessert for me!

The mulled wine was the best I have ever made. I even included a vanilla bean in it.

After Jess left Maggie and I geeked out with the cat and a cheeseburger she had drawn. She put a little pocket of catnip in the back and we teased OJ makin lolcat cheezburger jokes.

and saying "Can Haz?" a lot.

I have two more button orders to get to but since mail won’t go out until Monday I think I’ll finish them up tomorrow and head to the Farmer’s market to meet James and get some yummy food!

Yup, my phone was stolen but cooking in my kitchen has been great.

If you call me I more than likely won’t answer my phone. That’s just how it is and it’s not because I see who calls and decide not to pick it up. I just have a tendency to leave it around the house, in the kitchen, in my bag, at the bottle of my panniers, on the coffee table in the livingroom, in the pocket of the pants I wore yesterday, etc. Sometimes I won’t even look for it for a day and lose it in the house only to find it when I make Paul call it so I can listen for the vibration since I hardly even have the ringer up.

Well, this happened Friday night. I went around the house listening for my phone that I can usually find and then I gave up. Yesterday morning I checked my online billing only to find that there were some weird calls that I can’t remember and some data usage and text messages. They were all 1 minute or 2 and nothing was outside my plan. I had to run and errand for my sister and scrambled to find out how to suspend my phone and deal with it later.

I wracked my brain to figure out how they hell my cell phone got stolen when I hadn’t even left the house! My sister came over Thursday and I had it then. The only thing I can think of is that I left it on  my porch and someone swiped it from there. jerks! To make matters worse my PayPal debit card went missing a few days before that. Stupid Mercury retrograde ruining everything!

On the brighter side I have been making kick ass food since redoing my kitchen except I keeping forgetting to take pictures of it. We have been feasting on tamales and zucchini bread for the past few days. The tamales have two fillings both have a base of onions and peppers from the yard mixed with coriander. One has tvp mixed with taco seasoning and the other has black beans, tomatillo salsa, cuban oregano and beet tops. They were both really hot but super tasty!

I also made a really great lentil soup. My lentil soups always seem to taste better the second day. I also made a layered pasta bake with tomato sauce on the bottom, a mixture of crumbled tofu, vegenaise, chopped spinach and bow tie pasta with a vegan nutritional yeast cheese sauce on top. I ate almost half the pan myself! I utilized the abundance of tomatoes in our yard but picking a bunch of romas, chopping them in half and putting a bit of olive oil, salt, peper, parsley and oregano on them and broiling them. Then I made some penne, chopped some kalamata olives and mixed them with pine nuts, a bit of olive oil and spices. When the penne was done I mixed up the olive mixture and the broiled mushy tomatoes and poured it all on top like a sauce.

Jess and I had a vegan food and wine pairing night and on the way home from buying ingredients I decided to pick up fallen fruits to make a crumble. I can’t believe how many people have fruit trees and just let the fruit fall and rot! So much so that there are even organizations that help get people and fruit together like Urban Edibles. There are even maps and tips about ethics. I just grabbed a pears and apples that had fallen on the sidewalk on my way home and mixed them with blackberries from my back yard and a tiny bit of sugar.

While waiting for Jess to get off work Paul and I sliced some olive cibatta , lightly heated some olive oil with garlic in it, dropped it in a bowl, poured some balsamic in it and dipped the bread.

Anyway, Jess and I had been thinking about this meal for awhile: Red and yellow peppers stuffed with quinoa, pine nuts, tomatoes and herbs plus roasted vegetables, marinated tempeh and a tofu cream sauce. There were two bottle of wine but really, they were insignificant compared to how great the meal was.

3 different kinds of potatoes, squash, corn, yams, beets, onions, herbs from the garden and a bit of my secret ingredient that always makes roasted veggies better. This is my perfect fall dish, my comfort food.

What you can't see is that I also added slices of avacado to the side with cabernet finishing salt.

The tempeh was marinated in something that I’ll never be able to recreate but it was good. The sauce tied everything together and it can also probably never be recreated. It went something like this: silken tofu in a food processor, olive oil, cayenne pepper, parsley, lemon juice. We all sort of sat around Rhapsodizing about the food that we didn’t pay much attention to the wine. Oh well. I remember I liked the first bottle we drank better than the one we had with the meal.

Lots of good cooking days almost makes up for having my phone stolen. I ordered a new phone but won’t have it until next week. It has always been better to e-mail me anyway. I can also chatted 9or video chatted!) with on Google and Skyped as alexwrekk.

Time to get out of bed and get to work. I have and IPRC shift this evening and the cats seem to be sleeping on their back which usually means rain.

infused vodka, asparagus and more garden shots

I have always wanted to infuse vodka…. but I’m not really a hard alcohol drinker so buying mass quantities of vodka is never really first on my mind. But, Paul got a deal on some good vodka while I was gone so I came home to find a glass jug of vodka sitting on top of my fridge. I thought that this must be my chance! I roasted some coffee and cracked it but didn’t grind it, pulled some strawberries out of the freezer and picked some mint from the yard and this is what I got:

hand roasted Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Strawberries from our yard last year and mint from this year.

I let the coffee steep for 2 days, the mint for 5 and I’m going to take the strawberries out after 7. The coffee vodka smells amazing! Now I jsut need to figure out what to make with these!

Paul and I went to the Farmer’s market on Wednesday and picked up some asparagus and other things. The other night I made some spinach pesto pasta and topped it off with asparagus, onions, grape tomatoes, and olives cookined in red wine. It was yummy!

Spinach Pesto and Asparagus

I have also been working in my yard… as usual. Yesterday I decided that I don’ want any grass anymore and started removing some by my front door. Paul thinks it is just an excuse for me to buy mroe plants. Maybe he is right but working in the yard keeps me sane and we all like a sane me.

I bought a few more veggie starts and so far this is what is in the veggie garden: Carrots, chard, spinach, lettuce, beets, purple cabbage, celery, brussel sprouts, broccoli, about 3 different kinds of beans, 2 different tomatoes, pumpkin, zucchini, yellow squash, strawberries, eggplant, and corn. I also planted flowers in the middle of the garden because I think they will look nice so there are climbing nasturtiums crawling up some old artichoke stalks, sweetpeas and sunflowers. I think once everything starts growing well I’ll have a very pretty garden. I’ll take more photos when things take off!

I’m excited that  I came back just in time to see my irises in bloom. I’m really going to have to clean them out and trade them off in the Autumn thought because they are getting unruly again.

wisteria off my porch. It is a bit faded but still pretty

artichoke. Paul likes to talk to it and tell it how much he will enjoy eating it. It is sort of weird and also very cute.

first of many foxglove blooms! I love foxglove.

Cascade hops!

blooming sage. It has taken over the lavender plant that grows next to it.

little white moss flowers. There is moss growing between chunks of concrete that is my back patio. I love the tiny flowers they have.

Paul and I are taking off to the riverhouse tonight after my IPRC shift. I’m really looking forward to getting away for a few days. I need it.

Funeral Potatoes, record organization, playing bike mechanic…

So, I veganazied Funeral Potatoes the other night. Funeral Potatoes is a Mormon casserole that I guess they make for funerals. My friend Mox taught me out to make them but they are dairy overload lots of sour cream, cheese, milk and cream of mushroom soup. ugh. Not to mention the corn flakes on top which just sort of makes casseroles creepy.

I got to portabella mushroom soup, a half tub of better than cream cheese, a red onion, some vegan mozzerella and a ton of frozen hashbrowns. I get a certain perverse pleasure in veganizing things sometimes. It didn’t taste the greatest and let’s be honest? How can you really photograph a casserole and make it look awesome? But it was edible and filling.

hooray for casseroles.... and stuff.no, really horray for casseroles and stuff