It’s perishable, they said.
It’s refrigerate only, they said.
What about some nice Nasoya*, they said.
You have to accept all risks of shipment, they said.
RISKS ACCEPTED.
In the name of science, I needed to consume a significant enough sample to ensure quality of the rest of the jar. Science says like a quarter of a cup. If this is my last blog post, you’ll know where to start the investigation.
*No. Nosoya. Grossoya.
I found a pusher. A source. An answer to my pleas.
Thanks to a steady stream of runners, this is the first time in Frankie’s whole life that we haven’t had Vegenaise in the fridge. I don’t want to count, but I think it’s like a jar a month. Nevertheless! I’m out. And the supply wagon don’t show up again until July.
Finally.
Somebody who will ship! I assumed all risks of course, because anything worth having is worth the risk — and talk about customer service? They answered all my emails with actual answers typed by an actual human. I felt so close to them I almost made a “But Nasoya tastes like tears and hand lotion” joke.
I didn’t. I try to keep my condiment-ordering professional.
Oh, look! It’s like GOOP for normals. (Based on the true story of this weekend.)
Make
This grocery-store tea, which even if we can’t read all the words on the packet, we have decided the nubby brown lumps are ginger because it is fantastically spicy, especially if you leave two bags sweltering at the bottom of your huntin’ company hot-cold mug.
Go
Absolutely nowhere due to stunningly dreadful meteorological conditions and also deadlines.
Do
Make sure you forsake all two years of strict 4-H Sewing training by letting the spear side of the family do all of the crafting.
Get
Window shop High-Low frocks on the boutiquery known as “Forever 21” and decide that perhaps the “Cat Muscle Tee” is too much for us.
Be
Confident and serene in the knowledge that we will never achieve avocado toast because we can’t manage to buy, ripen, and consume the suckers while they’re still edible. Settle for beans on toast instead.
LIFESTYLE.
It’s my Vegisevenersary! What started as a 30-day challenge in 2006, is long enough ago to have an itch. It’s also long enough ago that it’s worth updating those facts and figures that answer the big question:
WHY ARE YOU VEGAN?
- “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,” — Ecologist David Pimentel, Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
- The amount of fossil fuel energy required to make ONE quarter-pound hamburger could power a microwave for 18 minutes.
- Not just vegetarian — vegan. Egg yolks cause the same heart-attack-causing intestinal bacteria as red meat.
- Up to 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States go to healthy food animals. There is “a definitive link between the routine, non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in food animal production and the crisis of antibiotic resistance in humans.” — USDA, FDA, CDC.
- Eliminating the consumption of meat is the best dietary method of reducing your water consumption footprint. Not to mention, “Red meat such as beef and lamb is responsible for 10 to 40 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as common vegetables and grains.”
- Factory farms employ fewer people than similarly-sized conventional livestock production facilities, buy feed and supplies from outside the local area, and tank property values.
- It reduces national healthcare costs. Cancer. Cholesterol. Obesity. Diabetes. “Appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” — ADA
Feeding more people, keeping them healthier, allowing antibiotics to work when we actually need them, saving jobs, air, water, money…
That’s better than berry good. That’s terrific.
It takes six years of French lessons to be able to confidently say, “Crêpes like ‘steps,’ not crêpes like ‘grapes.’”
No one covered the over/under on eating them in Deutschland, however. I must have been absent that day.
According to this survey, vegans are now 1% of the US population.
One Percent. Sound familiar?
That means there are more vegans than there are Americans serving in the military.
It also means that if you include vegetarians, 9 million US adults don’t have to worry about what My Little Pony meat is where. If you’re going to eat a cow, why is a horse all of a sudden so objectionable? Is it because you feel tricked? After all, horse meat is in baby food in Italy — though I suppose since that label has the right picture, it’s all okay.
It’s been just shy of seven years since I’ve eaten meat — even while being part of the vegan One Percent while serving in the less-than-one-percent-Army — and it’s gotten to the point where when I see someone talking or posting about eating meat, the only thought that occurs to me is:
“Really? We’re still doing that?”
(If you’re in the growing percent that isn’t, I made you some fun words on pictures. Bon app-etite!)
Uh. George Clooney is modeling for Turkish pizza boxes now.
Just in case you’re keeping score at home.
There should be a word for finding a recipe you want to make, and then what you actually fix because you have lemons in the house instead of oranges. “Lemons into lemonade” won’t cut it because a) aphorism; and b) cake.
Someday I will make Orange Creamsicle Cupcakes. Today is not that day. Today we “Semi-Homemade” ™ ® ❄ a Maple Lemon Cake which is only close in the sense of “Oh hey, BIRTHDAY.” (Happy, happy, Mom, Mom!)
The important thing to note in this “recipe,” is that by using a mix, you have more time to decorate. Did you know frosting comes in like a hair mousse container now? Upgrade.
Now then, what to do with all these de-zested lemons…
Oh. Lemonade.
Lined up as Book #1… It’s promised to be like Nickel and Dimed, and there’s nothing like some good food politics to chew on.
However. It’s the beginning of the second month. And I’ve read not a grown-up book yet. We might acknowledge that given most of my reading involves Lilly’s purse, that the “25 Book Challenge” might be a figurative term, and just hope to get as far as I can this year.
“Oh honey, you baked.” (Tricia, are you behind this?)
Nope, we No-Baked, which of course yields a batch of highly-photogenic oat piles — and also kind of delicious cookies. Cookie blobs.
In the “manage protein without too much soy” quest, I got protein powder, forgetting, as I always do, that I don’t really like, nor have the multi-ingredient, appliance-dirtying yen to make smoothies. What else can you do with the stuff? Cue search for “baking something marginally palatable with protein powder.”
Or rather, “No-Bake Chocolate-Oatmeal Protein Cookies.”
We varied the recipe slightly — 1 cup of real sugar, because the idea of that much Splenda makes my insides rust, two spoonfuls of margarine to keep it vegan, vanilla protein powder because that’s what I have, and a handful of shoko müsli thrown in to keep it legit.
They’re pretty good, even if the flavor profile is mostly just “sweet.” They’re also close enough to breakfast foods to make a dangerous game of rationalization.
But most importantly, pronouns chosen carefully, these cookies represent the first extracurricular project we’ve managed so far. The first thing outside of the eating, cleaning, exercising circle of survival. We took on an extra project, not during nap time, and did okay. She was even almost, mildly, if you squint your eyes, interested in my narration of the amounts needed and why we weren’t dirtying up measuring spoons when guessing is good enough.
She had no interest in licking the spoon, however. Yet.
Baby steps.
