Chinese Fish

"Environmental problems plaguing seafood would appear to be a bad omen for the industry. But with fish stocks in the oceans steadily declining and global demand for seafood soaring, farmed seafood, or aquaculture, is the future. And no country does more of it than China, which produced about 115 billion pounds of seafood last year."

In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters, NYTimes, December 15th 2007

Red Lentils and Homemade Seitan

I've been gone for a bit - last week there was an Anthropology
conference in DC that I attended, and now it's finals - but seeing as my dad sent me a new camera as an early Xmas present, I have to post on last night's dinner. Red lentils, Indian style, over sticky rice with some homemade seitan, straight of Isa's Vegan With a Vengeance (and also on the Post Punk Kitchen website). The seitan was surprisingly easy, and considering that it was my first time, came out perfectly. The lentils were a breeze - cumin seeds cooked in hot earthbalance followed by half a red onion, minced hot pepper, clove of minced garlic, lentils, then add water, bring to a boil, add salt to taste plus any of the following: garam masala, more cumin, allspice, ginger, and a squeeze of lime. So good. So easy.

Thankysgiving

After working a double with nary a good tip and suffering from a cat-allergy-induced cold for the past few days, including and perhaps at its apex during Thanksgiving dinner, I have been less than interested in doing anything other than lay in bed and wheeze. However, this has not been possible. Yesterday was spent getting out of town and touring historic Donaldsonville. Historic Donaldsonville! Home to America's first African-American mayor, Pierre Landry, and to America's first caesarean-section (performed on a slave, no mention of whether she survived or not...). Walking past an old grocers called "Shaheen's" I noticed a plaque written in both Arabic and English. My heart skipped a beat! Lebanese immigrants. Also, Donaldsonville had a considerable Jewish immigrant population, the synagogue now an Ace Hardware (does Hebrew still hum in the woodwork? Do the mice still squeak shalom?). Lunch at a so-called "African-Creole-Cajun" restaurant-gallery which turned out to be mostly 'Classy Cajun,' vegetarianism being something freakish, or so I was led to assume, and the gallery bit being a showcase for quaint glass crosses and paintings of dogs in gardens. We toured Laura Plantation afterwards, an old Creole place facing the Mississippi, lovely, gardens heavy with oranges, tangerines, satsumas and persimmons. They were selling all the citrus in the gift shop; I asked about the persimmons and the woman behind the counter had no idea what I was talking about. She said "help yourself" and so I did. I love the persimmons sweet permissiveness.

Thanksgiving was the day before, and quite fine. We had a few friends over, no big deal, but invented a new tradition in which we stuff random objects into a ceramic unicorn bust with the hopes of removing them in the year to come. I invented the 'screwhound' for breakfast (though unlikely to have been the first to do so), vodka with grapefruit and orange juice. We played Star Wars monopoly (Dan besting both me and Beau) before cooking, once again missing the opening day at the track for the fifth, or is it sixth, year. On the menu:
Star anise and satsuma-cooked cornish hens, or something like that.
Mushroom stuffing
Apple and onion stuffing brought by Steph
Red onion, cranberry, and tangerine salad, also by Steph
and the best thing she brought, lemon nut cookies (ridiculous)
(and my additions) Mashed potatoes a la Joy of Cooking
Roasted fennel with olives and garlic
Brussel sprout hash with caramelized shallots
Pumpkin and Marscapone Pie
and caramel cake with coconut milk instead of dairy.

As for the eats today: 1 sandwich and a persimmon for breakfast, Reginelli's breadsticks with artichoke hearts and green olives, and penne marinara and fake sausage, and a persimmon, for dinner.

Mashrubaat Ruhheyya

That is how you saw 'alcoholic beverages' in Arabic. And that is what this house is evidently full of.

Today I ate:
1. Breakfast consisted of a "Ham" and "mayonnaise" sandwich with spinach and some old tomatoes.
2. I had the same for lunch, sans tomatoes, they were gross. Then I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dessert.
3. For dinner we went to Kyoto for sushi, and I must say, that rocked my world.

Post-dinner the other night, Dan and I were sitting on the couch watching the dogs lick peanut butter off the ends of their noses, he drinking a chocolate milk and me finishing some wine, and talking about how nice it is to be grown up. It's awesome, awesome, to be able to do whatever you want, and I think we lose sight of that. Maybe I will have another glass of wine! Maybe I WILL eat peanut butter and jelly on crackers! Maybe I will do all of these things, at the same time, laying in bed, watching He-Man on dvd! I won't list any of the other things that can happen (so to keep this family friendly), but man, I'm thankful for all of it.

A New Project

While planning my Thankgiving menu yesterday, I found the menu from last year's Thanksgiving. It seemed like a sort of artifact in the study of my own life. I felt inspired. I think that I'm going to start a new and interesting, well, hopefully interesting little project. I want to make a list of everything that I eat every day. I see bargraphs and pie charts in my future.

So, today.
For breakfast I had a sandwich made of whole wheat bread, veganaise, Lightlife fake ham, and spinach. For what I guess I could call lunch I had a small cup of coffee (and I never, ever, drink coffee, I'm not sure what possessed me to buy it, aside from tremendous lethargy I suppose) and an oatmeal raisin cookie. I went home two hours later and ate delicioso Milagro corn tortilla chips (which were in actuality the tiny little crumbly remnants of much larger chips that had gone the way of the passenger pigeon days ago) with veganaise on them, then some rolled up fake ham, dipped in veganaise, sprinkled in chips.
In two hours I'm going over to my friend Casey's house for a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner, so I'll just have to update the rest of the list later.

UPDATE: excellent spread! Broccoli and cheddar melt, green bean casserole, tofu in an apricot and balsamic vinaigrette glaze with sliced vegetables, mashed potatoes, stuffing (into which I suspect a piece of meat had been secreted), eggnog, rolls. And I even met a kid who had biked down here from Wisconsin and was sleeping on rooftops in frightening neighborhoods.

New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival

Yesterday was the first annual New Orleans Po-Boy Fest on Oak St., currently the site of some very interesting regenerative spirit. Upon arriving to find throngs, literally throngs of people stuffing the streets, children getting lost and dogs being stepped on, we were somewhat terrified and had to temporarily abandon ship for a predictably-awesome lunch at Lebanon's.
Highlights - some guy's boxer yowled after getting a toe crunched. A woman walking by with her two little sons said "Oh dearie! Poor pup just got stepped on! Why dontcha' give him a little kiss!" Her son, about eye level with the dog, gave him a nice wet one on his rump. She says "There, now it's all better." That warmed the cockles of my heart, as did the 2nd line that erupted right before the Iguanas hit the stage. Standing there watching that red and white tassled umbrella fly up and down while cheeks ballooned behind brass instruments, and everyone dancing, young and old, black and white, face-tattooed and yuppie alike, I swear a goddamned tear came to my eye. A friend of mine is in town after moving away last January, and he's currently planning on moving back home. In some ways, I'm seeing the experience through his eyes, and in some ways it's me seeing the future, a reluctant but perhaps necessary return to Washington D.C., a real job, school and all of this behind me. I reassure myself by saying that inevitably I will come back, but I think the point is, how can I leave in the first place?

Wish I Could Go To San-Fran

Expanding the Frontiers of the Vegetarian Plate, NY Times, 11-18-07.