Recipe Reduction 66-64

Lime-Cumin Dressing

It's a win!  Lime juice, cumin, garlic and olive oil.  Whisk it together and it beats three-quarters of the bottled dressings on the market.

Fried Cucumber with Purple Perilla 
from the revolutionary chinese cookbook

My purple perilla had to be Thai sweet basil, a substitute. It turned out good, and definitely something to add to the permanent recipe file and make when cucumbers are in season and coming out your gills.  But--MAJOR NOTE--peel them first.  They come out crunchy, not mushy like you'd think a vegetable made primarily of water would become, but the peeling doesn't soften at all.

The technique is simple: slice them thinly (and peel first according to me!). Stir fry for a few minutes, then add a chopped red chile, garlic, soy sauce and rice vinegar.  And the parilla leaves. I chopped them but the recipe didn't say that was necessary. When it's all hot and good smelling, remove the heat and splash on a bit of sesame oil.

Sadly, I think my sesame oil has gone bad. And my toasted sesame oil as well. They don't smell right and they have an aftertaste. But I use so little of the stuff that a bottle lasts me years. I guess it's going to have to go in the refrigerator beside the olive oil. Sigh...because now before I can make a recipe, I have to get the oil out and and let it re-liquify.




Stay-In Vegetable Fried Rice 
from Vegan Without Borders

No. Just, no. She made this vegan by substituting tofu for the egg, and that made it not fried rice in my book. If I didn't eat eggs, this might be an acceptable alternative, but it still wouldn't be good.

The other issues are that (a) she didn't fry the rice, and (b) used too much soy sauce in lieu of other flavors.  Seriously, how can you call it fried rice if you don't fry the rice?  And the sauce was just soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar and a little toasted sesame oil. All good things, but the proportions were off, or something.

And one more grumble--why call it "vegetable" when the only vegetables are onion, peas, and carrots?  I added mushrooms and wish I'd thrown in some chopped squash, too.

I didn't go back and check, but I think I'm batting about 33% in favor of Vegan Without Borders recipes. Some are good, some hideous; but all can be improved.

On Aging

Forget catchy phrases like "You don't stop running because you get old--you get old because you stop running." (Walking, exercising, whatever....)

I say they've all missed the point: you get old because you stop going outside.

When I do my Thursday afternoon jog in the park, I frequently pass a couple of old guys sitting on a bench. They have a fluffy white dog underneath, and they're chatting and smoking a furtive cigarette or two. I see them in the 95-degree days of summer--they move to a shady bench--and the brisk chill of autumn.  And I suspect that the act of walking out, in sunshine and shade, to sit on that bench and talk, is doing them more good than the whiff of smoke could be doing harm.

It's sad when people are forced to stay inside, but sadder still when they choose to do so. I can understand being afraid to walk outside--you might trip, fall, break a hip and be confined to the hospital for weeks. That's a scary proposition...but consider the alternative.

Never feeling the wind in your face or the sunlight on your shoulders. Never seeing a star--or the horizon--or anything past your inner vision. Forgetting the moon's many faces. Smelling only chlorine-scenting bathwater, never rain on green grass. No longer forced to endure winter's crisp ache of ice-cold air in your nose.

Dear, sweet old people, do you ever stop to stare out your locked windows in summer, wondering why you ever dared to venture outside? Other than the grocery and the yearly doctor's visit, what's there to risk going outside for?

Just everything.

Biking the bricks...and the asphalt, gravel, river crossings...

The Road Headed West:
A 6,1000 Mile Cycling Odyssey Through North America
by Leon McCarron

Spinningly good adventure told by an Irishman cycling across America. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out things the natives overlook or ignore out of habit, and Mr. Mccaron was just outsider enough to do the job. Great job!

Other than an oddness about the ending, which I'll be considerate and not reveal to you here, I enjoyed every single page. Personalities abound--old friends, trail friends, traveling and stationary friends--they all make their appearances and enliven the journey. It's occasionally hilarious.  I highly recommend it for anyone who loves to travel and happens to be stuck in place for a while.

Is biking really the best way to experience a country?  He thinks so--or at least he thought so at the time. But his rather excellent blog https://www.leonmccarron.com/journal talks about walking a lot, so maybe he changed his mind. In this book he's comparing biking to driving, and biking, of course, wins. He gets to experience the rolling hills, the rain, the heat, the look and feel of the country in a way that an automobile traveler never can. There's a lot of difference between cruising with rolled-up windows at seventy miles per hour and pedaling all day over broken terrain. Seventy miles is a whole day--and a fast day at that. But what about walking? Or running, or horseback riding?

On a bike you're restricted to paved roads or at least have a strong preference for them. (Excepting the occasional river crossing when the bridge is out--exciting scene!) On a bike you spend a lot of time looking straight ahead or down at the road, watching for rocks, gravel, and misplaced curbs. When you're breezing along at ten miles per hour, are you going to freeze in place when a fox is glimpsed in the forest edge? Are you even going to glimpse of the fox? What about the bugs and lizards and odd arrangements of limbs of a dead oak tree in the field?

Don't get me wrong--I'd love to bike across the country. But there's a lot to be said for walking.

I'm going to spend the rest of the day reading his blog. But I might take a walk first.

Sadness--joy--sadness--love that cannot be lost

The Hour of Land:
A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

by Terry Tempest Williams

If you have a wanderlust and liking for natural places, don't read this. It will scratch the itch and make you cry. Effigy Mounds National Monument--previously unknown to me--has now been added to my 'places to go' list. But I don't think I'll be lucky enough to get from the experience what she describes,

Suddenly, with a white oak as my witness, the energy of the woods shifts.  In the clearing--is the bird. I stopped to see the winged effigy in its entirety. Falcon enters my mind--swift and stealth. What if the wind I have been hearing is the memory of flight? This bird, made of earth, glimmers as light dances on the leaves, and I want to touch her body, a garden. But I don't. Restraint is its own prayer. 

The fact that a red-headed woodpecker, now iridescent in sunshine, flies down  from an oak branch to where the raptor's heart would be, only makes the moment more miraculous. 

For the rest of the afternoon, I walk the effigy's wings into motion.  They say her wingspan is more than two hundred feet. For me, her wings span time, where the whispering of holy wisdom can be heard. 

Great Bird, above the great river, what would you have us know?

If I were writing the shortlist for greatest author of all time, she'd be on it without question. But so much of this book is very hard to read, so hard, so painfully gut-wretchingly hard, I cringe every time I have to turn it on (audiobook, read by the author). She writes of America's National Parks and such, and she writes from the hearts. From the soul, even--but not her soul, the soul of the great places themselves.

And it's a soul that has been badly stressed. I read a book about sustainable agriculture one, and it implied that long-term sustainable agriculture was never going to happen. People get old, people retire and die, and the farm goes to another one with a slightly different vision from the original. Sooner or later--he argues--it will end up in the direction of a person who decides to make it produce "just a little more." Greed is inevitable; all efforts to preserve a way of life are inevitably doomed.

I refuse to believe that is true and continually search out examples to the contrary, Amazon.com's purchase of Whole Foods nonwithstanding. I know there are farmers in Europe who hold onto a way of life so zealously that they would boycott anyone selling cheese with the preferred brand but an altered method. Probably stone him. For farming, the picture may not be as bleak as it seems.

But for the National Parks, I'm not so sure. Once a scenic vista is interrupted by oil rigs, eroded strip mines, or wind farms, how long will it be before mankind gets tired of looking at his own ugly shit and tears them down?  The government changes every eight years, or even sooner, and eventually one will be elected who allows federal land--our land--to be used for development even though it's immediately adjacent to a national treasure.  All it takes is a well-placed campaign contribution from Big Oil, and our national heritage, our beauty, our soul, is tarnished. When traveling those parks we must learn to look inward, not outward. We must deny  our eyes from looking over the edges, for fear we might see what our National Greed has done.

None of this is directly taken from her book, but the feeling is there. If your heart is tender, read the book anyway and skip the painful parts. Read it for the walks through Teddy Roosevelt Grasslands with her father, for her venture to Big Bend in winter, for her travels to Gettysburg and Effigy Mounds and Alcatraz Island, and for her family's adventure in Yosemite during a massive wildfire.

Recipe Reduction Time Again, 67-66.

Vegan Pumpkin Bread Pudding
by Susan Hoisin

Wow, oh wow. My bread was too soft and I didn't have apple cider for the sauce, but still this was gorgeous. And rich, too, with no more fat that that found in a cup of almond-coconut milk. I think the little bit of cooked pumpkin fooled my taste buds into thinking it was full of eggs and cream.

Find it here: https://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2013/11/vegan-pumpkin-bread-pudding.html  and you, too, can join Team Pudding!

Broiled Lemon-Honey Arctic Char with Citrus Sauce
By Alexandra Stafford

If it's okay to substitute ingredients and still say you made a recipe, then I made this recipe. I didn't actually have any Arctic Char, but I substituted farmed white fish and it was really good, so shoot me.  I'm going to add her citrus topping to my ongoing list of things you can put on top of fish before baking it into awesomeness. Or broiling it, as she did.  Since the fish didn't actually brown, and neither did the topping, I don't see much difference between baking versus broiling, except baking is easier.  I'd have to try it to be sure, and I will.

Sadly, despite spending hours Sunday afternoon in the kitchen, I only made three recipes. easy ones, too. To finish on time I need to do four recipes each week.

Recipe Reduction #68

Roasted Vegetable Avocado Garden Wraps

I think I've hit a winner AND a do-over. The idea of roasting veggies, glueing them together with mashed avocado, and rolling them in wraps, well, that's not all that original, right?  I should have been able to think of that for myself. But her clever idea is to slow-roast the veggies in a glass dish, so they take on the sweetness of roasted vegetables but not the crisp, browned edges. And they're softer, too.

I'll definitely do this again and substitute more interesting vegetables than the onion+bell pepper+cauliflower she uses. Squash, for instance, or carrots or mushrooms. I've nothing against cauliflower, but it's bland and doesn't roll up very well.

Her take on spices is dreadful--paprika, garlic powder, and oregano. Paprika doesn't do anything for vegetables. Why not cumin and fresh cilantro, or basil? Doesn't she know that in addition to improving any vegetable it comes in contact with, basil can be chewed and applied to an insect sting to draw out the venom and ease the pain? It is reputed to help with rattlesnake bites, too. 
Eat More Basil!

Almost Great YA except for the violence

A List of Cages

by Robin Roe

[spoiler alert here, but since no one who reads this would ever read that, I'll go ahead]

Unsettling, upsetting, and magnificent. I wish I hadn't read it, but I wish a lot of other people would. It's all about the saving power of friendship--shoot, call it love. It's not an easy thing to be a friend, says the cliche, and I dare to repeat it. When you have a happy home, plenty to eat, and a gang of buddies who have your back, why would you need to reach out to someone who has none of these? Why waste time, risk boredom, and being bummed out by a kid with obvious problems? It's so much easier just to look down at your phone and pass him by.

Her Adam character is especially heroic--I want to hug him. I want to hug almost everybody. Good writing, Ms. Roe!

By the way, has anyone ever written a "social work success story"? Some one has to have, but lately everything I've been reading about foster care or social work has been a lot more bad than good. I need to seek out some success stories because this stuff is getting me down.

I was griping lately about Content Warnings. In general, they're stupid. I would never expect a teacher in a classroom to warn people that he was going to discuss disagreeable material. If he's a grade-school teacher he should keep it age appropriate, that's all--it's his job. For announcers on the radio, content warnings might make sense, because you never know who might be listening. Movies have warnings--ratings and keywords like 'fantasy violence'; music has 'Parental advisory' labels. But what should we have for books?

Nothing, I think. I don't know. But parts of the bad stuff here were pretty graphic, and I wonder if she could have told the story equally well with a little less detail. If the book had gone on another twenty or so chapters to describe the healing process, then the detail might have been helpful in understanding what the rescuers had to deal with. On its own, it was voyeristic, almost sensational. Maybe she was trying to get kids' attention--look! If you see a kid who might have problems at home, it may not be something as simple as a parent who gets drunk and slaps them around from time to time. It might be a whole lot worse.