Where is home? | Leftovers | tangy salad | Dietary shift

Buffy feeling at home.

I've been thinking a lot this past year about what exactly makes one feel at home. Is it family? friends and community? a house? a location? All of the above? Last year we left the city where we'd lived since 1976, and moved to the city where two of our sons, our daughter-in-law and our granddaughter live. When we made the move, our youngest son came with us, so now our whole immediate family lives in the same place. This sounds great, until you remember that everyone we know (except family) and everything familiar to us, was left behind. When we were young and moved to completely new places, it was with excitement and anticipation; we made new friends easily, and settled into new experiences. Moving seems harder now that we're older. It's not as easy to meet new friends, and I'm finding getting around a larger city much harder than finding my way in our smaller town. There are people back in Wisconsin that we've known for 30 years, and we own a house there that we've been renting out. I was really happy there and I miss my old life.

Today we're headed back to our old home. We'll do some maintenance on the house, visit with friends, try to rent out the house for another year, and see how we feel about being back in our old familiar neighborhood. Do we still want to live there? Will we be anxious to return to our family? We'll be in the car for four days and then in Wisconsin about a month. I'm not sure when I'll be doing another post — hopefully by the weekend.

What are your thoughts about moving?

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Lentil burgers coming out of our ears



I really misjudged how many lentil burgers I was making the other night, and we've been eating them non-stop. How many ways are there to eat lentil burgers? You'd be surprised. My husband made an Asian-style dish with zucchini and rice noodles — and chopped up lentil burgers. It didn't look like much but it tasted great. I've been grilling them in the wok and piling them with leftover cabbage salad (see below), and when that ran out, with baby greens and tomatoes. They can be eaten with onions, mustard, ketchup, mayo or hot sauce in buns or on a plate . They can be added to spaghetti and sauce, or eaten in a roll smothered in tomato sauce like a meatball sandwich. Or they can be frozen for another day. :D

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Tangy potluck salad with cold, simmered tofu



We went to a potluck lunch last Saturday, and this is a little embarasing to admit, but I couldn't think of a single thing to bring. Honestly, I wracked my brains all day Friday, and all I could come up with was to buy the makings of a Mediterranean platter from Trader Joe's and put it together on a nice plate. But I prefer to bring a homemade dish to a potluck, and finally, as I was doing some blog maintenance, I chanced upon an old recipe that appealed to me.



I pretty much followed the recipe as written, ending up with a huge quantity of salad. I used my mandoline to julienne the carrots and finely shred the cabbage. The rest of the veggies were cut by hand.

The only thing I did differently was to add some simmered and seasoned tofu chunks. Simmering tofu for 20-30 minutes gives it a very firm, pleasant texture, and if you add your favorite seasonings to the water, the tofu will pick up the flavors. I started with extra firm tofu that I pulled apart into bite-sized pieces. I added a little rice vinegar to the water, brought it to a boil, then turned the flame down to simmer. After it was cooked I drained the tofu and tossed it with tamari, granulated garlic and a little yeast flakes. At this point I browned it in my wok to seal in the flavors, and placed it in a dish in the refrigerator to chill. Just before we left for the party, I tossed the cold tofu into the salad with the dressing. Here's a link to the recipe for tangy carrot and cabbage salad.

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So what else is new?
This seems like old news to me but I just received it from the Vegetarian Resource Group, and I wanted to pass it along. This is the kind of information that's helpful when discussing the global benefits of a vegan diet.

UN REPORT CALLS FOR GLOBAL DIETARY SHIFT AWAY FROM ANIMAL PRODUCTS

In a new report entitled Assessing the Environmental Impacts of
Consumption And Production, UNEP (United Nations Environment
Programme) calls for a global dietary shift away from animal
products in the face of these findings:

Agricultural production accounts for a staggering 70% of the
global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use, and
14% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

From the conclusions of the report:

Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase
substantially due to population growth, increasing consumption
of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to
look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial
reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial
worldwide diet change, away from animal products.


from:
VRG-NEWS: The Vegetarian Resource Group Newsletter
Volume 14, Issue 4
June/July 2010

To view VRG-NEWS on the web, visit:
[ http://www.vrg.org/vrgnews/2010jun.php

American chop suey | tangy carrot and cabbage salad

My mother grew up during difficult economic times, and money was tight in her household. I don't know exactly what her diet was like, but I do know she developed an aversion to foods she thought of as the foods one would have to eat if one were poor. She despised foods she thought of as "filler foods" which generally included things like grains or pasta. Pasta was not comfort food to her, it was something you had to eat if you couldn't afford to buy anything else. When we ate at Chinese restaurants, for example, I was told not to fill up on the steamed rice, and when she made things like meatloaf or hamburgers she never added breadcrumbs or other fillers. She added eggs and seasonings.

During the early years of raising a family, my parents didn't have much money. My mother ran the household on a strict and tight no-frills budget. I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes from my cousins (which I loved, by the way). However, the one thing my mother wouldn't compromise on was her idea of what we should eat. My mother trimmed corners in other areas in order to put meat on the table nearly every night. We had good cuts of meat every evening that my father was home for dinner, and chicken, hamburgers or occasionally fish when he wasn't. My mother favored eye roast, steak, pot roast, chops and such — no spaghetti on our plates. There also was always a fresh salad, and sometimes frozen or canned vegetables. (I didn't even know fresh vegetables existed.) She seldom spent food budget money on soft drinks, chips or other junk food, saving it all for the good stuff. Lucky me, right?

Naturally, all I wanted was noodles, and for that I had to turn to my father. My father was not much of a home-arts kind of guy (this is an understatement in the extreme) but there were a few things he would cook if hounded enough. He could make pizza from scratch (learned from owning an Italian restaurant), grilled chickpeas (learned from his mother), and American chop suey (learned when he was a cook in the army). American chop suey was a mix of ground beef, tomato sauce and macaroni that I believed was something only my father made, and I loved it, though my mother wouldn't touch the stuff. I recently had my memory jolted by a post on Mitten Machen in which Mary provided a description and veganized recipe using tempeh, for this homey dish. What a shock! Naturally, I had to make it as soon as possible, and although I only had linguine instead of the small pasta traditionally used in the recipe, it was fabulously delicious. (Both Mary and I used quinoa pasta for this dish. Ancient Harvest Quinoa pasta has become my husband's and my favorite pasta, and we use it for most of our pasta recipes.) You can see the American chop suey in the photo at the top of this post, and you should visit Mary's blog and make some! Thanks, Mary.

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As I've been mentioning lately, we've had a bit of company, and our last guest, my brother, left Monday morning. On Sunday evening our son and d-i-l hosted a dinner for the family, and prepared some wonderful food.



Our d-i-l made Jamaican red bean stew (from Robin Robertson's "Quick Fix Vegetarian") in the slow cooker she found at our last Goodwill excursion. It was really great — spicy, fragrant and filling.



Our son made his excellent version of long beans and tofu. And I brought a salad. I hadn't actually planned to post a recipe so I didn't measure anything, but the salad turned out so well I wanted to share it. It was both beautiful and delicious, and I've reconstructed it as best I can, estimating when I didn't know exact amounts. It's the kind of recipe where a little more or less of one ingredient or another won't make or break the dish — lots of room for improvisation and customizing to your taste!



Tangy carrot and cabbage salad serves 10

• 3 to 4 large carrots, peeled and coarsely grated
• 1/2 small purple cabbage, core removed, finely shredded
• 2 to 3 green onions, cut fine
• 1/2 to 1 small cucumber, sliced into thin spears (opt. but refreshing)
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
  
• 5 to 8 ounces mixed baby salad greens
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• zest and juice from 1 lemon
• 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
• 1 to 3 teaspoons umeboshi vinegar (to taste)
• 1 to 3 teaspoons agave syrup or other sweetener (to taste)
  
• fresh ground black pepper and salt (if needed)
  

1. One to two hours ahead, prepare the carrots, cabbage, onions and cucumbers. (The cabbage should be halved lengthwise, leaving you with two identical halves. You will only need one half.) Place the carrots, cabbage, green onions, cranberries and cucumbers into a large bowl and combine.
2. Make a dressing from the oil, lemon juice and zest, mustard, vinegar and agave. Mix until smooth, then mix the dressing into the vegetables. Marinate in the refrigerator for 1 to 2 hours.
3. Just before serving, add a few grinds of black pepper to the slaw mix and stir in. Taste for seasonings and adjust if necessary.
4. Add the fresh salad greens to the bowl and carefully but thoroughly mix the salad together.