Whip it Up #8: Vegan Jelly Donut Cupcakes

I’m a little sad that Whip It Up is ending.  I’ve had a great time finding new vegan recipes, cooking them, photographing them, and then running to the coffee shop to post the results.  And eating them hasn’t been bad, either.  Also, there’s nothing like knowing I have at least one post a week that’s a no-brainer!

The last challenge was dessert, and I want to thank you all who made suggestions in the comments of the last post.  Specifically, thanks Mrs. Twink who saw this recipe on justJenn who got the recipe from Veganomicon.  This recipe has been around the block.  And guess what?  It’s really really good.

Vegan Jelly Donut Cupcakes

Serves a cast of 12.  (Wait for it, that will make sense later.)

My first recipe with no fresh fruit, vegetables or nuts. It's weird.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup soy milk
• 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1-1/2 cups 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour <– my final mix was a little too watery, so I added some more flour at the end.
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg <– every time I see “nutmeg” I think “Not Meg,” as in every person in the world other than Meg.
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon <– not in the original recipe, added by justJenn
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/3 cup grape jelly
• confectioner’s sugar

METHOD:

Query: does anyone preheat their oven at the beginning?  On a hot summer day, I wait until the last possible moment, even if it means the ingredients are ready before the oven.  With that in mind: preheat your oven to 350º when it feels right for you.  At some point, also place twelve cupcake wrappers in a cupcake tin.

Add the soy milk, cornstarch and vinegar to a small cup or bowl and mix until the cornstarch is dissolved and the mixture gets bubbly.  Then, in another bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, not Meg and salt.  Create a little dent in the middle of the dry ingredients.  Remix the soy milk mixture, and add it to the dent in the flour mix.  Then fold it all together.  I used a spatula to do this.  It was brilliant.

When that’s mixed to a nice consistency (I still had some flour lumps, like I always do), add the oil, sugar, and vanilla.  NOTE – the recipe on justJenn never mentions when to add the cinnamon, so I did it at this point. Mix everything together with your spatula.

Then, carefully, carefully now, fill those cupcake liners 3/4ths of the way with the mixture.  Drop spoonfuls of jelly in the middle.  justJenn suggests using the cheapest jelly you can find, so I went with Stop & Shop brand Concord Grape.  I also bought Strawberry, but I didn’t get to use it because I for some reason I thought I was going to get more than 12 cupcakes out of this recipe.  I didn’t.  Anyway, it looks like this if you’re messy like I am:

When you’re done with that, top off the cupcakes with the remaining batter.  Then put it in your oven for 21-23 minutes.  Twenty-one was fine for me.  You can’t really do a toothpick test because, hello?  They’re filled with jelly.  Afterward, you’ll get this:

Cupcakes with severe splotch problems!  In hindsight, I could have squeezed out 14 cupcakes and made use of my other tin.  But who doesn’t love a big cupcake?  I let them cool in the tin for about 10 minutes, and on a wire rack for an hour or so while I gathered my friends for the meal.  (The original recipe suggests letting them cool in a very cool place (like a basement, not a refrigerator) for 24 hours so they get crispy.)  When ready, use the sifter to dust them with powdered sugar.  It looks like this:

YUM!  But because no woman should eat 12 cupcakes on her own, no matter how much she wants to because it’s that time of the month, and she’s really annoyed that so-and-so did not call her back, but that’s fine, she has no problem being single for the rest of her life, because who needs other people when you can have cats?  And even though warm, gooey, sugary desserts fill that gaping hole in your soul, it’s only momentary, and a cupcake can’t go on a long walk on the beach with you or even help you pay your rent.  When you’re done, you’re going to regret eating all those cupcakes, even though it felt so good at the time, and the resulting fat that you might develop is really never going to bring the boys to the yard.  And where was I going?

Yes, cupcakes are meant to be shared.  So that’s why I invited over the entire cast of The Ruins.  We split a twelve-pack of Milwaukee’s Best (aka The Beast) because it is the crappiest of the crap beers and it reminds me of college, a time when eating an entire batch of cupcakes or an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s didn’t seem so out of the ordinary.

The woman at the beer store didn't even believe that I wanted to buy The Beast. I told her it was just for prop use, and bought a sixer of Guinness to save my reputation. Little did she know, I actually drank The Beast. But not as much as the Hula monkey, he's a fiend.

And that is the end of that. I’ll answer your damn questions one last time and then I’m leaving until after Labor Day.

Was the recipe easy to follow?
Yes, but… some small things were lost in translation. I had to improvised a little, but there wasn’t much more to the recipe than “add this, add that.”  I went to a national retail chain corporation that sells books (aka Smorders, which cannot legally (in my mind) be called a bookstore) and found a copy of Veganomicon to double-check the original recipe.  Then I put the book back in the wrong place.  Take that you enemy of indie bookstores!  But I digress.  The point here is that both the original recipe and the one I used were easy to follow.

Did the dish taste good?
I don’t know. I ate the cupcake, not the dish.

Would you make the dish again?
Yes. In fact maybe even again this week and try it with the strawberry jelly. I think I would also cut back on the not Meg. It’s a little overpowering. There was one disappointment, though. I thought the jelly would be more like donut jelly, oozy and separate from the cupcake. But when you bake them all together, the jelly sort of just blends in. It wasn’t bad, mind you, but if you want jelly to remain jelly, you have to add it after the fact via a hole in the pastry. In real life, dollar store dolls cannot eat cupcakes, so I brought the dozen to our Thursday night barbecue, and they were a big hit.  Tucker kept the three left over and said he would eat them for breakfast.  So, like this entire Whip It Up project, this recipe was a success!

Before I go, I want to give a special thanks to RA and Nic who put this whole shebang together, and are whizzes with the organizing.  Even if I don’t win the grand prize, you two and everyone else who finished the challenge are winners in my mind!

The Days are Just Packed

Even though I’m not in school, planning to go to school anytime soon, or have recall of any of the repressed memories of my school days, this really does feel like the last week of summer before I have to go to school. And with that in mind, because I can’t take an actual vacation, I’m contemplating taking a little internet vacation until after Labor Day. Of course, by saying that I’m pretty much guaranteeing that this is going to be the most bloggable week ever, meaning the mini-vacation is subject to change.

Lately silly bloggy things have been making me cranky, and I don’t want to not enjoy blogging, because it’s what I do for fun. I think a wee break might help that. Also, I have to take care of some housekeeping issues in the back room, like updating my blogroll for the first time in six months, and cleaning out my Google Reader, and other such things. Also, it would be great if I could maybe finally figure out how to get online in my own home so I don’t have to keep going to the coffee shop to read and write posts.  And that’s what I’ll be doing with my week.

I will of course be posting the last recipe of WIU, because the jam-filled cupcake recipe that MrsTwink suggested seems too good to pass up. So look for that, and then look for me again in September.

And in the meantime, if you’re just dying to know how I spent my weekend, let me tell you that it was non-stop since Thursday night when I went to yet another lovely barbecue. Friday (after work) was spent at the Dutchess County Fair, where I saw live animals, drank a milkshake, and managed to suppress my urge to buy a deep-fried Oreo. On Saturday, a group of us (actually, the same exact group as the vegan dinner party) drove to Lake George to play on the Adirondack Extreme Ropes Course, which was about as much fun as you can have 30 feet up in the air suspended by a harness. All I can say is thank goodness for all that swimming and the muscle strength it gave me, because it was not easy. I rewarded myself with a delicious burrito in Albany at one of Chatie’s old joints. The next morning, we all drove out to Goshen to the Harness Racing Museum for our friend’s bridal shower, which was followed by a trip to an ice cream parlor that has blue sprinkles, rumored to come out the other end in that shade the next day… (And the fact that I do not wish to report publicly on that outcome is another reason I’m taking a little vacay.) That night Birmingham and I went out to dinner to celebrate our five year anniversary of knowing each other, and the weekend wound down with a trip back to our friend’s house for all of her leftover bridal shower food.

The cover of next month's Vouge, most likely. Mouth agape is all the rage this fall.

Looking back, I’m very full of good food, kind of tired, sore in some strange places, and looking forward to uneventfully waiting out the clock until September. Talk at ya soon, and unless you are my mother, please enjoy this picture of me in a harness, suspended many feet above the ground:

Whip It Up #7: Couscous Salad with Fresh Mango

The idea of this week’s WIU was salads, and I was in a distinctively Mediterranean mood, so I pulled out an old copy of Vegetarian Times and made this concoction:

Couscous Salad With Fresh Mango

Serves one, five or six times

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 box couscous
• 2 Tbsp. Orange Juice
• 1 Tbsp. Tahini
• 1 cup plain low-fat yogurt or soft tofu (I used the tofu to keep everything vegan)
• 1/2 tsp. cumin
• pinch ground ginger
• 1 large mango, diced
• 1/2 cup chickpeas, drained and rinsed. (I just used the whole can)
• 1/4 cup golden raisins (Turned out to be only one of the mini-boxes)
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro (I used rosemary from my garden)

METHOD:

In a smallish saucepan, cook the couscous according to the package directions. I used the “optional” olive oil, FYI. While that’s cooking, get a smallish bowl and mix the tahini and orange juice until smoothish. Warning: tahini has the consistency of natural peanut butter, oil separation and all, so give yourself some extra time to stir it up. In a large bowl, whisk the yogurt or tofu. If you’re like me and you realized too late that the “soft” tofu was actually pretty damn firm, just mush it as much as you can with a fork. When you feel like you’ve got it into a nice consistency, mix in the tahini mix, cumin, and ginger, followed by the mango, chickpeas and raisins. Fluff the couscous with a fork, and add to the mixture along with the cilantro or rosemary or whatever. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

Goes well with pita, hummus and a Killian's

Was there something you wanted to ask?

Was the recipe easy to follow?
Yeah, except for some reason the way it printed out, the ingredients weren’t listed in the order that they got added, which is very annoying. I fixed that up there. Other than that, super duper easy.

Did the dish taste good?
It did, in fact. IMHO, there’s nary a thing that doesn’t taste good when fresh mango is involved. Also, this dish was again served to non-vegetarians at a barbecue, and they ate it and seemed to enjoy it, so it’s yet another cross-over hit. Of course, they also ate their cheeseburgers with aplomb, so I can’t say that I’ve converted anyone…

Would you make it again?
I think I would. The original plan was to have this with falafel and pita and eat it for lunch, but then I got sick, and the idea of eating anything that took more time to cook than Ramen was impossible. So when I’m feeling better again, I might give it another go. I’d like to see how it is with yogurt instead of tofu. I bet it’s a bit smoother.

So we’re almost done with this Whip It Up thing we’ve been doing.  Next week finishes up with desserts, and I’m thinking about trying either vegan cupcakes or carrot cake.  It’s going to be a bit of a challenge.  I’ve never made a vegan dessert before that was more complicated than “slice a mango.”  Anyone have any advice or suggestions?

The top 10 things I learned this weekend

• Two days is not enough time to be considered “time off.” If you’re planning on going out of town for a weekend in the month of August, just take Friday off.  Everyone else is doing it, so it’s not like you can reach anyone you need to anyway.
• SisterAlyson has definite ideas about music that she likes. On Friday morning, I picked up my little sister at the train station and drove her to Boston with me so she could visit her friends while I visited mine.  My iPod, which is loaded with about 600 songs was in the car, and she played DJ, which meant that she rejected most of my music for being too slow, too weird, or “good, but I don’t want to listen to that right now.”  At least she stopped and listened whenever Springsteen came on.
• The black plague started in India in the 1340’s. On Friday I met up with Nancy Pearl Wannabe, and we went to the Boston Museum of Science, a place that she’s been many a time with her middle schoolers.  We had some fun taking shadow pictures, flattening pennies, and generally making things go.  I’m no scientist, but I knew a lot of the science stuff already, because the museum is not exactly dealing with quantum physics.  But there was a display about the history of the world, and it included that little snippet about the plague, which I never though of existing before London in the 1600’s.  Now I know.
• I should have seen The Lost Boys a long time ago. It would be a damn shame if I went all the way to Boston and actually went out and saw any of it, breaking my near-perfect record of going there for short work trips, swim meets, and religious functions (in my past life…) So while NPW and I were thinking of something to do, we ended up staying in, drinking Margaritas, and watching The Lost Boys because I never had before.  When it was over, I told NPW that watching it is a lot like swimming the butterfly.  If I had just done it fifteen years ago, it would be a lot easier to deal with it now.  But wouldn’t you know it, knowledge of the movie gave me a little edge when we played Scene It later that night!  Speaking of the fly…
• Sometimes it’s better to do a half stroke than to glide in. 1/100th of a second! Crazy.

• It turns out that I’m actually kind of good at skee-ball. I was a bit nervous, going all the way to New Hampshire for Beej’s birthday, where I would meet Aaron for the first time, after this long, arduous internet flirtation we’ve had.  I knew that skee-ball was going to be involved, and the last I remember, my skee-skills were equivalent to my mini golf skills, which is to say not skillful.  But NPW, Chris and I got some practice in while we were waiting, and I scored 300 points not once, but twice!  So when Aaron and Mara finally came back from their trip to Massachusetts to put money in their car meter (how did that take such a long time?), we were all on a level playing field.  Sadly, I had to leave after only a couple of hours, but when you have that much awesomeness in one arcade (me, NPW, Chris, Aaron, Mara, Beej, Beej’s gal, Beej’s offspring, and Ted, who I didn’t realize was an actual person until I saw him in person) it’s hard to contain it.  Because they’re such great hosts, I gave my skee-ball ticket winnings to NPW and Chris so they can put it towards their dream of winning the lobster salt and pepper shakers.  You can see photo evidence of the skee ball on NPW’s blog.
• I’m still pretty great at driving cross-town. On the way back from the beach, we picked up SisterAlyson, and the two of us went to Queens via the LIE and the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen over Manhattan.  I was Jersey-bound after dropping her off, and instead of taking the FDR uptown, I decided I had enough time to drive across 57th St and take the West Side Highway to the GWB, just for old time’s sake.  I love driving cross-town (espeically in someone else’s car,) because there’s a trick to changing lanes quickly so you never get stuck behind someone who’s trying to turn uptown or downtown.  It makes for a thrilling ride, and it was good to see the city at the street level, however briefly.
• Babies are cute, and they don’t all hate me. My friends and their 6-month old son just bought a new house in Jersey, and they put out an APB for friends to help them paint and get the place ready for their move-in at the end of the month.  So I went over on Sunday to help them out.  In between edging the doorways, I went upstairs to chat with my friend and play with the baby.  That’s when I got put on babysitting duty for a few minutes, with the instructions to pick him up if he fussed.  I did it, and he even stopped fussing!  I even enjoyed it and his little baby smell, but I was totally happy to give him back and continue my edging after a short period of time.  Verdict: not ready for motherhood, not by a long shot.
• It’s very easy to hook up a Mac to my parents’ wireless router. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get my new computer or my old computer, which is now my mom’s computer, hooked up to their wireless connection.  The only success I had was when I was able to hook up their PC laptop to the wireless network, which is pointless because that computer does not having working “shift” key, and makes a scary whirring noise when it does anything.  I called The Man of Action for help, but he was MIA until I was driving home, when he was totally available, but I was exactly half way between both places of computer trouble.  By the time I got home, he was already on his way to Scotland, as always happens when I need technical help.
• My cats really, really do not get along. The Dutchess of Kickball was brave enough to potentially encounter the landlesbian in order to feed my cats for me while I was away.  But being well-fed did not stop them from fighting, as evidenced by big tufts of Lucy hair all over the bathroom and living room, adjacent to the piles of cat puke, and best of all, the big old puddle of cat pee on the loveseat where Lucy likes to hang out cower.  It took me about an hour of clean-up last night, and Lucy is not smelling so great at the moment.  I fear that there is not enough pheromone spray in the world to keep Micki from being a nut job, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I go away for a full week in September.

Whip It Up #6: Black Bean, Mushroom, and Quinoa-Stuffed Peppers

I think I’m really clever. That’s why in all my previous Whip It Up posts, instead of saying “serves 4,” I’ve been saying “serves one, four times.” That’s because most days I live and eat alone. Actually, one of my pie-in-the-sky dreams is to write a cookbook for all the single people of the world. It will include tips like: when buying broccoli, just get what you need for the recipe from the salad bar at the grocery store. No single person in the history of the world has been able to finish an entire head of broccoli before it goes bad without some serious gas issues. Hey publishers: call me.

But sometimes, a body just wants to share some good cooking with some other people. So because this week’s theme was “appetizers” and one rarely eats an appetizer alone (unless you count the crackers I nosh on immediately when I get home from work to tide me over for the three minutes until the Ramen is done) I invited some friends over to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

I took this recipe from the fantastic Vegan With a Vengeance cookbook, which created some confusion with my friends, who thought that the whole meal was going to be punk rock themed. It sort of was. Because it’s hard to justify a dinner party with just some stuffed peppers, I also made Polenta with sun-dried tomatoes, and served it to my meat-eating friends

Black Bean, Mushroom, Quinoa-Stuffed Peppers

Serves 2 vegetarians and 3 omnivores

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 medium-size onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 cups finely chopped mushrooms
• 1 tbsp. chile powder
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 (15-oz) can tomato sauce (I used 2 8oz cans, which was better.)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup quinoa
• 5 peppers that will stand up on their own, tops cut off and seeds emptied
• 1 (15-oz) can black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 tsp. pure maple syrup
• fresh cilantro for garnish

METHOD:

Sauté the onion in the oil for about 5 minutes, or until it starts to get clear. Add the mushrooms and garlic and cook for another 2-3 minutes, until the mushrooms get soft. Add the chile powder, salt, 1 cup of tomato sauce, water and quinoa and simmer for another 20 minutes. <—- I did this the day before, and kept it in the fridge, which both saved time before the party and kept my kitchen from getting too hot on the day of. Next, boil a stockpot of water and add the peppers. Boil for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, add the black beans and maple syrup to the quinoa mixture. When the peppers are done, arrange them in a baking dish <— note, I would line the baking dish with foil, as my brand new one is now permanently stained. Fill the peppers with the quinoa mixture and top with the remaining tomato sauce. Cook at 350° for 15 minutes. Top with cilantro, or some other herb, which I totally forgot to do.

So, what else do you want to know?

Was the recipe easy to follow?
Oh, totally. And there was lots of stuff I was able to do ahead of time, so when I knew the people were coming at 7:30, I just popped everything in the oven at 7:15. Breezy!

Did the dish taste good?
Yes! And don’t just take my word for it… The Dutchess of Kickball declared it so, as did her man Teach, who hates mushrooms and peppers, but ate it all anyway. Okay, maybe he left some pepper behind, but still. And his bro enjoyed it, and I don’t think he’s ever been given a proper vegan meal in his life, and Chatie, despite not being a pepper fan, ate the whole of the stuffed part. Everyone was very full at the end of the meal.  So success.

Would you make the dish again?
Hells to the yes. This was my favorite WIU recipe so far, and it pleased a group of people. I don’t think I’d even do anything differently in the preparation. I only wish I had a bigger dining room table so I could invite over my whole crew. Flick & Tucker, it’s your turn next!

Left to Right: Teach, Product Placement, Dutchess, Chatie, lil bro

Bonus after the jump:

I gots the fever

I really should have signed up to get cable before these Olympics.  But instead I’ve been visiting friends, or trying to watch videos online here and there.  I love all the events, particularly the obscure ones like badminton and judo.  But swimming is by far and away my favorite, especially since I’ve been swimming competitively and I can kind of compare what I do to what they do.  And by compare, I mean, I’m often saying, “that is exactly twice as fast as I swim!”

That’s why this is my favorite video of all time:

And just for some context, that video is from the 2000 Sydney Games, when the Olympic committee decided that they would give developing countries “wild card” slots so that they could send athletes to represent their countries, even if they didn’t have Olympic times.  This video is of Eric “The Eel” Mousammbani, who eight months after learning to swim, and never swimming in an Olympic-sized pool before, swam his 100 meters in 1:52.72, nearly drowning towards the end.  For reference, I swam the 100 meters in 1:31.08 the last time I swam in a 50 meter pool.  You can read more about it on Mental Floss.  (His swim, not mine.)

I bet most of those Olympic swimmers couldn’t swim at those speeds and stay afloat.  And that’s what makes swimming slowly so special.

There was something so pleasant about that place

Nice to see the world kept spinning yesterday when I decided I just didn’t want to write a blog post.  No particular reason for that, really.  I started one, I didn’t like it, so I just stopped.  It was nice to be free from the anxiety I have all day long when I’m constantly checking for new comments on a post, hoping that there are new nice ones, and no anonymous mean ones that got through my filter somehow.

While I was away from the Internet, not much happened in the real world.  I went grocery shopping, got a little further in the Douglas Adams book, and watched the movie “The Kite Runner.”  Which was as always,  not as good as the book, but still pretty good, and made me want to go to Afghanistan, in 1978.  Afghanistan today?  Not so much.

The other thing that happened was the incident that made me decide I need to move.  The landlesbian has always been a funny presence in my life, saying eccentric things and being generally difficult to deal with.  But in the end, I live peacefully in this ramshackle cottage with a great backyard, and she’s usually pretty quiet and sticks to her own half of the property.  Additionally, there are six blissful winter months where she lives at her place in the city.

But then a few weeks ago, she deteriorated quickly, and I don’t just mean that she’s calling me “Isabel Archer,” because that made the vaguest sense.  I mean that I come home to find her ranting and raving in the backyard, yelling about the patriarchy, religion, Connecticut, whatever.  The point is that what she’s yelling about isn’t logical and she’s moved into the house next door to me (which has been vacant since my awesome neighbors moved two months ago), and according to the waterlesbian, she’s planning on staying for the entire winter.

The day in question, I came home for lunch, and she was blocking my path, yelling about something.  I told her, “I can’t talk to you when you’re yelling at me, landlesbian” and as I tried to walk by her, she grabbed my shoulder and turned me around and kept yelling.  I got inside after that, but I was shaking.

Directly afterwards, I went to talk to the waterlesbian. (and for the record, no one is really certain what her relationship to the landlesbian is.  She lives on the farm sometimes, but her home address is in another part of the state, and sometime she’s gone for long periods of time.)  She responded quickly to that, and told the landlesbian not do do that anymore and to apologize to me.  The whole thing felt a lot like dealing with an unruly preschooler.  It made me feel sad on top of being scared and shaken.

At the first chance I had, I started looking for a new place.  I did just sign a lease for another year at the cottage, but considering how quickly she’s gotten this bad, I don’t see her getting better, and I think I need to get out.

She is at least coherent enough to cash my rent check.  Damn it.  I was kind of hoping she’d lose that, like the time she left her set of keys in my door when she was replacing the smoke detector.  Those spare keys are still in my possession…

In the meantime, I’m parking my car near the side of the house, and sneaking in the front door in the hopes that she’s in the backyard and won’t notice me.  I try to leave for swimming before 6am, not go home for lunch, to the gym after work, and maybe I’ll go to the coffee shop or somewhere else after the gym.  There are rare occasions when I really want to make dinner or I absolutely need to have a nap after work, and I feel like I’m taking a huge chance of running into her while she’s in a state.  At least I’m going to be gone all this weekend, but I tell you, I wouldn’t be surprised if I came home to find that my home had been burned to the ground.  Saddened, but not surprised.

Anyone know any good one bedroom places five minutes from my work with at least 20 acres of backyard and no landlesbians to speak of?  And in the meantime, does anyone have good advice on how to deal with a legitimately crazy person?

Cat in a box

There’s got to be some phrase, probably in French, to describe what happens when one learns a new word, phrase, or concept and then sees said word, phrase or concept everywhere one goes.  For instance, my mother learned the alternate definition of the word “cougar” and then she heard it everywhere, and subsequently found a way to work it into every sentence she could.

In my case, after a lifetime of not knowing what it was, I had a weekend of being confronted with Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment.  (I know, who hasn’t been confronted with it at some point?)  It all started last week, when those of you who follow me religiously on Twitter already know, I saw an article on Cracked.com called Five Scientific Theories that Will Make Your Head Explode.  All of them are really cool, even for those of us who have only a passing interest in physics.  The third one on the list is called the “Copenhagen Interpretation” which is some heavy duty quantum physics, but boils down to the fact that electrons always do exactly what they’re supposed to do, until you watch them.  At that point, their actions become entirely erratic and unpredictable, but for the fact that they always make a bunch of people in lab coats nuts.

Schrodinger’s cat (aside: I think that “Schrodinger” is the funnest name to say this side of “Dostoefsky.”) is a real-life, sadistic example of how viewing things changes them.  The theory, which like so many gymnasts reaching for the high bar at the last minute, I just barely have a grasp of, starts off by sealing a cat in a box with a vial of poison gas.  Said vial poison gas has a 50/50 chance of exploding, but the sadistic conductor of the experiment will not know if that’s happened or not.  Meanwhile, Mr. Meow is in the box in a state of either dead or alive.  Which is to say simultaneously dead and alive, because the results cannot be known until the observer opens the box, and until that time, the existence of the cat is just a probability wave.

Weird, huh?  And even weirder, for various reasons, is that last night I was reading a Douglas Adams book for the first time in my life.  Specifically, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, in which said detective is charged with the task of finding the cat from Schrodinger’s experiment, after it goes completely missing from the box.  But that’s all part of the theory, you know.  The cat can be alive or dead, or it can completely disappear, because technically anything can happen at any time.  But maybe I’ll find out more when I’m able to finish the book later this week.

In the meantime, I’m looking for my own sealed box and vial of poison, and it’s going to have Micki’s name on it.  It’s been almost two months since Lucy came to live with us, and she is not ready to cede an iota of her territory.  The penultimate straw was a cat fight instigated by Micki on the kitchen table on Sunday morning that resulted in breaking a full glass of orange juice on top of the aforementioned book I’m reading, which is out of print and on loan from a friend.  (Note to friend, if you have become a blog reader and are reading this: the book is fine, it turns out that hardcovers from 1987 have a protective coating that does not allow penetration by orange juice.)  Sadly, the same cannot be said for my kitchen floor, which is still sticky after a mopping.

The last straw was when I decided that Micki was maybe feeling stressed about the fact that I shut her out of the upstairs since I she threw up on my bed three times in a row, after a 16 year history of only throwing up on hardwood.  Since I haven’t seen her be sick in weeks, I figured she had nothing left in her system, and she’d appreciate having the extra space.  So I opened the door, and Lucy and I spent some QT together on the downstairs couch reading and cuddling.  When I went upstairs a few hours later, there it was: cat puke all over the bedspread.  This is obviously a revenge tactic of sorts, but I’m telling you, I see no other option than a sealed box and a vial of poison.

It’s not entirely cruel, she does have a 50/50 shot…

Guest post, the first part, but this is me writing

I have a confession. I’m not a big fan of guest posts. I know that they’re a staple of our blog world, but I have to be honest, I rarely click through to them, especially when my RSS reader is feeling overburdened (which is most of the time.) I already read too many blogs, all the voices, stories and lives I’m following add up to too much noise as it is.

I’m also not a fan of guest posting myself, because damn, it’s hard enough to decide what to write on this blog. But last week when Erikka asked me to guest post on her blog, I agreed immediately because she employed the phrase, “you’re one of my favorite blog writers.” That’s when my ego knocked down my high and mighty guest post stance.

But I want to do something a little different than a regular guest post. Inspired by recent Blogshare and Choose Your Own Blogventure adventures, I’m starting the post on this website and finishing it on Erikka’s. That way my readers have to go there and her readers have to come here if they want the whole story. No guest post skipping for you! Muh-a-hahaha…

Worried that I wouldn’t know what to write about, I asked Erikka for a topic, and she suggested “taboos and guilty pleasures.” The phrase “guilty pleasure” always makes me think of bad movies, and you know that I’m happy to tell you all about those. And since I already covered self-pleasure earlier this week, I’m not going to go there again until at least next week. When I think of the word “taboo” it conjures up the cultural anthropology class I took in college where we learned that incest was the one universal taboo, and I really don’t want to talk about that. It also makes me think of family fun and board games at Christmastime, but I don’t think that’s worthy of a guest post.

So what is both taboo on this blog and a guilty pleasure? I don’t talk about work here, but that’s for reasons of self-preservation, and besides, as much as I love my job, I don’t consider it a “guilty pleasure.” I have no problem talking about my ardent disbelief in invisible sky daddies, politics, the gas that I pass, or even the fact that I think peeing in the shower is practical, time-saving and sound environmental policy.

I was wracking my brain last night while driving home, trying to think of something that is just not talked about in this open and free blogging world that we live in, where we divulge every last whim and secret. What can you reveal in a place where you kiss, tell, fart and burp proudly all while posting bad pictures of yourself? And as I was thinking and driving, I started to get that little itch that I get sometimes, and a neuron fired in my brain, causing my right hand to leave the steering wheel and reach towards my head…

To find out more, go here.

Whip It Up #5: RAW Italian-Style Zucchini Pasta Pesto

I must be cruising for a bruising. I’m already doing all my WIU recipes as vegan, despite the fact that I’m the cheesiest cheese eater this side of ‘Sconnie. But this week, the challenge topic was “fresh produce” and I decided to pull out the raw food cookbook I bought during the week my friend Creature inspired me to eat only raw food. (I don’t think I even lasted the week, actually.) Until now, there’s been very little in this cookbook that’s appealed to me, and a lot of stuff that I can’t make without shelling out for a dehydrator, which like so many vegetarian/vegan/raw foodstuffs and equipment, sounds unappetizing.

For those of you not in the know, a raw food diet means you only eat foods that have not been heated above 115°F, in the belief that above that temperature, vital enzymes are destroyed. You can be raw without being vegan, although they often go hand in hand, as raw meat-eaters are rare in the human population.

The purpose of this recipe is to use only fresh vegetables and herbs and make them resemble something that’s like a normal pasta dish. A cold pasta dish. It sort of works.

Raw Italian-Style Zucchini Pasta Pesto

serves one, twice
Ingredients:

All the ingredients

• 1 bunch fresh basil leaves, washed and dried
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup pine nuts
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1/4 cup sea salt <— This was a highly unfortunate misprint! I think they meant 1/4 TEASPOON salt.
• 2 medium zucchini, cut into thin strips to resemble spaghetti
• 8-10 mushrooms, chopped
• 4-6 sun-dried tomatoes, soaked until soft and cut into thin strips

METHOD:
Cut the zucchini into your strips that resemble pasta. If you don’t use a mechanical julienning tool to do this, cutting two zucchini should take about as long as it takes to watch one episode of season two of “The Wire.” When you’re done with the zucchini, soak your sun-dried tomatoes in some water and set aside. While that’s soaking, add the basil, olive oil, pine nuts, garlic and salt into a food processor. Process. (I had a funny feeling that 1/4 of a cup of salt was too much, so I cut back to 1/8 of a cup, which was also TOO MUCH! I probably wouldn’t have even done that if it hadn’t been for the fact that last week I discovered my 1/4 cup measuring cup had a little notch inside it for measuring 1/8 of a cup, and I wondered when or if I’d ever be able to use that.)

When the processing is done, take your zucchini strips and put them in a stockpot full of water. Heat them on low, which will warm them to just above room temperature, and should also help them get softer.

While they’re heating, chop the mushrooms and the tomatoes. When the zucchini is at a temperature and softness you like, pull them out of the water and put them on a plate. You don’t need to drain them throughly, because it’s best if the zucchini is still a little wet. Top with the mushrooms, tomatoes and pesto sauce.

That's Australian for "not cooked."

Because raw food has a tendency to feel un-fulfilling (unless you’re masticating properly), serve with a 40 of Foster’s. That should fill you right up.  A mango for dessert is so delicious, it will almost make you think you can live raw for the rest of your life.  Until you wake up the next morning craving scrambled eggs.

I hear you have some questions for me…

Was the recipe easy to follow?
Yes, but thank goodness I was smarter than the recipe, and didn’t add 1/4 cup of salt! Sadly, I wasn’t smart enough to just mix the pesto and add salt to my taste. I suppose I figured that the salt was going to be really helpful in the absence of heat, and there was a reason there was so much of it. Other than that, the only mildly difficult thing was cutting all that zucchini.

Did the dish taste good?
The salt, have I mentioned there was too much of it? I actually couldn’t finish my helping because it was eating Lot’s wife with a chaser of the Atlantic Ocean. Other than that, the bites that weren’t smothered in salty pesto were actually pretty good! I honestly cannot say that strips of zucchini have the same deliciousness as real pasta, but they stood in better than I expected. The mix of garlic, basil and sun-dried tomatoes is so tasty, it moves along even the rawest of meals.

Would you make it again?
Perhaps. I’d like to taste it without the salt snafu. One thing that would hold me back is the fact that the cutting of the zucchini took so long and kind of hurt my hand. Also, I love pasta, and I’d never be able to give it up. Also, despite the fact that I think fresh veggies are good for people, I don’t subscribe to the theory that cooking food “destroys all valuable enzymes.” But if my friend Creature were ever to come visit for the night, this would without a doubt be on the menu.