The Power of Pomegranates

Best wishes to my readers celebrating New Year
and to my readers celebrating Eid-al-Fitr.

Pomegranates have been cultivated for over 5000 years and thought to be native to Iran. They are the fruit of a small, bushy tree and generally the size of an orange with over 500 juicy seed casings (arils) in each.

Pomegranate Table Decoration Ideas

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Eggplant Rice Bowl

“Gyuu-don” in Japan is a popular beef rice bowl. Gross I know. But don’t worry! A super tastier & healthier rice bowl is ready to take it’s place as Number One!

EGGPLANT RICE BOWL!
“Nasu-don”

makes 4 bowls

2 medium Asian eggplants (or one regular large eggplant)
1 onion, chopped
1 C “dashi” (konbu, wakame, or vegetable stock)
1/4 C + 1 Tbsp soy sauce
3 Tbsp mirin (rice vinegar)
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp sugar

1/2 C water + 2 Tbsp cornstarch

Short grain rice, cooked (bout 4 cups)

Toppings:
grated ginger (the kind in the tube. or pickled ginger works well too)
scallions

1. Cut eggplants in half

2. Grill the eggplants until the skin is wrinkly and just starting to char.
Try broiling them in the oven, or on a high temp close to the heat source in your toaster oven. For a last resort, try a creme brulee torch!

3. Place them in an ice bath for 5 minutes.

4. While waiting, place dashi stock, soy sauce, vinegars, and sugar in a pan on medium heat and bring to a simmer.

5. After the ice bath, peel the eggplants and discard the skins (the smell will tempt you, but don’t eat them yet!)

6. Cut each eggplant in four long strips and then cut those in half, giving you 8 pieces.

7. Add eggplant and onion to broth. Simmer for 10 minutes.

8. Slowly pour in the cornstarch/water mixture. Stir constantly until it thickens.

9. Pour over rice. Top with scallions and ginger. Dig in! (Oh it’s so good!)

No eggplants? No worries! Use any veggies on hand with the same sauce.

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Lentil dahl with sweet veggie couscous

Oh, such a wonderful little lunch!

A veggie sandwich with homemade big bread and tofu mayo.
Sweet Couscous from the McDougall Diet online cookbook.
Lentil Dahl by Gellian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat.

Lentil dahl with vegetables

Serve the dahl on top of the rice and sprinkle with nori flakes.

I obviously used brown lentils just fine and 1 cup makes a TON. If you want lots of leftovers, go ahead and double it! I also just used veggies at hand & no nori.

Sweet Couscous
Servings: 2
Preparation Time: 5 minutes
Cooking Time: 5 minutes

Place all ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, cover and cook for 5 minutes. Let rest for 3 minutes. Top with sliced bananas, if desired.
*Original recipe calls for honey.

Oh man, this is so good! The contrasting tastes with steamed vegetables and the dahl on the side are amazing!

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Alice Newstead pierces herself for the sharks

On 3rd September, Alice Newstead pierces her skin using shark fishing hooks and suspends herself from the ceiling in a campaign to end shark finning. I feel it’s very important to post this as it is very difficult and and admirable to be willing to endure pain for the sake of others – especially so for another species. And this woman has done it, these photos should not go to waste and should be shown to as many people as possible.

Please do not support this cruel industry by buying, eating or using shark body parts. If you are getting married, please do not serve shark’s fin soup during the wedding banquet. We serve the soup to keep our face, but we have to lose our heart and conscience for our face, is it really worth it?

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Every Course is Covered!

I think I’ve made enough new things when put altogether would serve as a 10-course meal!

I was feeling a little under the weather, but Vcon’s Chickpea Noodle Soup hit the spot! I think it was so dark since I didn’t have any light miso. Cool thing about this soup – it turns into a noodle casserole the next day!

This looks like next day’s Chickpea Noodle Soup, but is actually some spaghetti recipe from an old copy of VT. It said to roast the spaghetti first in the oven before adding it to broth to cook, as it would give it a nutty taste. I didn’t notice any difference and was annoyed at the time it took to do that extra step. It’s served with some delicious potatoes from our garden that Kyle cooked up.

Speaking of Kyle cooking, here is his delicious salad!

Salad:
Shaved Carrots (garden)
Honey cherry tomatoes (garden)
Beefsteak tomatoes (garden)
Lebanese cucumber (garden)
2 cloves garlic (garden)
Basil (garden)

Dressing:
3 parts olive oil
1/3 part balsamic vinegar
1/3 part lemon juice
Salt-pepper-onion powder

I made VwaV’s Gigantoid PB Cookies with a few variations…one of the moms in my mom’s group has celiac issues, and the other is severly allergic to nuts! So I made these with soy nut butter (which really doesn’t taste like a nut butter at all much to my disappointment) and rice flour. There were OK, but I really do prefer the original recipe and am thankful I don’t have any allergies!

Ah, summer…time for Peach ‘Custard’ Pie! Peaches, sugar, soymilk, flour and nutmeg…delicious! I think I’ve blogged about this before!

I think this was from VwaV…these Stuffed Peppers were AWESOME! The black bean-quinoa filling is so great and can be eaten as a grain side dish, or a stuffing for squash or anything!

From a recent VT…Peanut Butter Coconut Ice Cream. Of course I added chocolate chips. I think I’ll stick with Vcon’s Ice Cream recipe since I found this one to be very ‘icy’ – and I don’t mean too cold.

I was watching Ricardo and Friends on the Food Network, and he made this cool sandwich from a loaf of hollowed out round bread. I imitated using layers of pesto, roasted veggies (eggplant, zucchini, peppers and onions), Tofurky slices and VwaV’s Tofu Ricotta. I weighed it down and kept it cold. It was delicious!

I was craving something with peanut butter again, so I made up the sauce for the Cold Udon Noodles from VwaV, but added warm noodles, coriander, red pepper, cucumber and cubed tofu that I cooked up. Yummy and easy.

How to make a fast birthday cake – take a graham pie crust, add some softened neopolitan soy ice cream and freeze for 4 hours. Spread some ganache on top and top with nuts, and re-freeze for another 4 hours minimum. Then serve! Just like Baskin Robbins! In this case, I topped with fresh strawberry slices before serving.

Another fast snack – tortilla chips tossed with sugar and cinnamon. The first time I tried it I warmed them in the oven then sprinkled with organic sugar and cinnamon. They were like Beaver Tails that I used to eat as a kid. However, they are easier to make when simply tossed in a bag with a little icing sugar and cinnamon (no photo). This time they were like waffles that we used to get an old southern Ontario amusement park.

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The more meat we eat…

…The more cows there are producing greenhouse gases.

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Veg food from a Malaysian non-veg restaurant

Last week I went to attend my cousin’s wedding in Malaysia and the non-veg restaurant made some veg dishes for us. I came to realise that at non-veg places, you can actually get to eat healthier versions of veg food, because they rarely (if any at all) use mock meat in their dishes. But the downside is, I usually don’t see a lot of protein rich veg food served in these places and creative use of veg in dishes is reduced.

Veggie and fried rice

Luo han zhai

Veg shark fin (not like the mock fin at all, just taste like thick soup with veggies)

The few days in Malaysia, I thrived mainly on unhealthy carbs… Singapore is still the better place to get veg food. I came across one of my favourite unhealthy food: putu mayam – something I have been missing for sometime. Vermicelli-like noodles + grated coconut + brown sugar. Use your hands, tear off some noodles, use it to grab some coconut and sugar. Stuff the whole chunk into your mouth and you are done. Basically, you have to eat without manners Strangely, food eaten using your hands plus the slurps and smacking of lips seem to taste much better. Putu mayam also reminds me of Tu tu kueh.

By the way maybe you have heard of me mentioning my grandma’s village in Malaysia… I took a few pictures and here’s one

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Stevia, Splenda, and Other Sweet Things

I’m asked about sugar alternatives so frequently that I figured I should just write a post about the topic. I have no personal experience with using stevia or artificial sweeteners. My husband and I don’t care for them at all. My husband has a very strong dislike of stevia in particular. So I’ve never used it in my ice cream recipes.

However, a little Internet research has led me to believe that you could probably substitute 1 teaspoon of pure stevia (no fillers to bulk up the powder) per cup of sugar in my ice cream recipes. I think that Splenda can be substituted cup for cup (1 cup sugar = 1 cup Splenda). Of course, there are many other sugar alternatives out there, but with a little experimentation, you can probably find something that works for you.

I’d love to hear your comments about what you discover. It will help other readers, too, because I have no plans to abandon my evaporated cane juice (or whatever you want to call it).

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Carnival Against Vivisection

Even before I saw Pattrice’s post calling on us to write about vivisection, the topic was in my mind. Lately I’ve been having terrible nightmares about vivisection. In these vivid dreams I’d find animals I know and love strapped into horrible machines or shut sick in tiny cages in labs, and always for some reason I couldn’t free them, I couldn’t get them out. I’d wake up in a sweat and check on everyone to make sure they were all ok.

Vivisection as a topic wasn’t one I really understood or even thought about when I first became vegetarian, but five years later I found myself working as a researcher at an animal group, in their anti-vivisection department. It was a crash course in the truly unimaginable. The sickest, weirdest, most heinous, most painful things you could never dream up, someone out there is doing them to animals and being paid by the government to do so.

I quickly learned that all the regulations out there which we believe protect animals, like the animal welfare act, or internal review committees at universities, these things protect the researchers but not the animals. I read report after report where the reviewers expressed concern about excessive pain in the animals, but rubber stamped it anyway.

Another thing I learned, which was quite shocking to me, was that drug companies would conduct experiments on many different types of animals but bury any results negative to the drug. Since species differ, many species could take a certain drug with no ill effect, and we know that animal experiments don’t reliably predict side effects in humans. However, if you are using animal experiments to try to prove your products safe, it’s amazing to me that they would know some animals had birth defects, some animals had convulsions, some died, and they just didn’t publish those results and only used the experiments where the animals were fine.

At this very same time one of my closest friends since childhood earned her PhD in biochemistry. She does not experiment on animals incidentally. Her line of work began with an interest in protecting plant crops from fungal disease. But she, as a capital-S Scientist, always defended “basic research” to me. She thought that people should be able to cut open the brains of cats while they were still alive for no other reason than seeing what would happen. She felt research got corrupted when it had a pre-determined goal.

This same friend also told me how she would pursue grants from the government emphasizing how her own basic research might one day cure disease, though in actuality she told me there was really no connection. It was a game they had to play to get funding for their work.

I’m going to drift away from that story line to go back to something Pattrice said, she connected vivisection to child abuse. To many this might be a shocking comparison, but there are so many ways in which it rings true. It is the complete destructive domination of the smaller, weaker being by the bigger stronger one. It is a complete betrayal of trust in the animal who is tame, trusting of people, forced to cooperate in their own use and disposal. And on another level, as someone who has survived abuse, I get a flash of that cold eye, that someone even in doing terrible things, is somehow observing, measuring pain, fascinated with watching and studying their damage on another being.

And there you are, helpless, and all your existence is pain, and you don’t even comprehend why or how, or that there is anything else in the entire world. Amazingly, somewhere in the world, someone is experimenting on animals to try to develop a drug that will make children forget incidents of sexual abuse, or at least make those memories less vivid. Because it’s not about owning your own body, owning your own life, owning your own memories, and finding your own peace, it’s about developing, marketing and selling for profit a pill that someone can swallow to presumably avoid the hard work of living and healing. A pill so you don’t have to go to the therapist. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want any child to hurt or suffer, I just don’t believe a pill fixes that.

My friend, the bio-chemist, is experiencing some chinks in her scientific armor. She said she thinks it’s wrong to force animals to smoke so the tobacco companies can try to disprove what we all know that smoking is bad for you and everyone should quit right now.

But it’s worse than that. We can and do find life-saving cures and information from studying our own population and our own genes. However, we continue to experiment on animals to seek cures to diseases we already know how to prevent. Most lung cancer is caused by smoking, other cases are caused by other environmental factors/exposures, and the remaining ones have a genetic origin. But people don’t stop smoking so we torture mice, and cats, and dogs, and monkeys and on and on. We know that exercise, low-fat diets, and preferably veganism will prevent the majority of non-congenital heart disease. But we want to eat burgers and fries coated in trans-fats so we torture animals.

I’m going to die some day. It might be a lot sooner than I’d like. I can’t prevent every risk in the world. I can’t know what I can’t know, like what day not to go downtown, or when I should call in sick instead of getting in my car. I don’t know how much time I have, but I want that time to count somehow.

Vivisection is so mixed up in our lives. Because of US law any medications we take were tested on animals at some time. Most were developed from human-based leads, looking at populations, isolating and concentrating substances from herbal remedies, etc. Many “new” drugs are found when someone is taking something for another reason but finds it also relieves another condition, and then the scientists scramble to find out why and exactly what ingredient does what. But it’s almost impossible to actually see all the vivisection around us and also nearly impossible to get away from it.

Edit: Sorry, I meant to add that conclusion that we can choose to buy products that were not tested on animals obviously. Even when we avoid prescription medications, buy the bunny-hugger toothpaste and cleanser, our tax dollars still fund vivisection. I’m not usually one to suggest legislative solutions to animal issues, but in the case of vivisection working to reform laws that require animal testing (but weirdly enough no human cell culture testing) would be a good start.

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Omni Dinner Pleasers #2

Another successful dinner party where omnis eat delicious vegan food without even realizing it!
Hopefully this will be many in a continuing series that will inspire you when you need to impress!

Menu:
Mexican Herb Biscuits
Salad with sesame dressing
Taco Casserole
Mexican Rice
Flan

I started with a spin on the two big winners (biscuits & croutons) of the last Omni Dinner series.

*Appetizer*

Mexican Herb Biscuits (Ronin Recipe)
I altered the spices to include oregano, garlic, cumin, and paprika.
Awesome.

*Salad*

Fresh salad with croutons
Lettuce with avocado, tomato, onion, homemade sesame dressing (Ronin Recipe) and homemade garlic-rosemary croutons.
Croutons:
Bread, olive oil, garlic powder, rosemary
Lightly rub bread with oil, shake on garlic powder and rosemary. Rub into the bread. Cut into squares, place in toaster oven oil side up. Toast until light brown.

*Main 1*

Taco Casserole (Ronin Recipe)

I cannot tell you how many times I have made this for all sorts of occasions, and it always goes down so well. It really is a staple in my recipe repertoire because it is so EASY and FLEXIBLE!
This time I used kidney beans, onion, peppers, stewed tomatoes, and corn plus one packet of taco seasoning and some hot sauce (baked in 2 small pans).
Served on the side:
Salsa, Avocados, Onions, Tomatoes, Lettuce, and hot sauce of course!

*Main 2*
Mexican Rice
(not pictured)

Prepare and start cooking rice as you normally would. Half way through the cooking process, stir in:
Stewed tomatoes, mince onion, garlic powder, salt, dash of paprika, dash of turmeric, and mixed chopped vegetables (corn, carrot, peas…). Add more spice as desired.
Finish cooking as usual. Give it a good stir before you serve. MMMM!

*Dessert*
Flan

A.K.A.: Creme Caramel or Custard.

Vegan box mixes of flan are actually fairly easy to find. Try checking the Latin food section (Goya brand is vegan). Just follow the box directions and use soymilk!

Here is a recipe for Vegan Caramel Flan by VegCooking Blog. I have not tried this to know how good it is.

Sit back and enjoy the compliments!

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