Summer 2011 and onward

Mr. EV and Buffy taking a driving break at the Columbia River Basin.

I've been distracted. From weeks of thinking my elderly dog was dying to multiple house problems in Madison, to SUN and extremely warm weather, to moving, I've been distracted, and just couldn't seem to focus the time and energy needed to write this blog. I'm still distracted, but missing the vegan blog community and my blog, so I'm giving the blog another shot.


Are we there yet? This trip is making me tired.

My dog survived the summer and the road trip to and from Madison, Wis., to Seattle, and though she's 19, she's doing well.


This is what a hail-damaged roof with defective shingles looks like.

The Madison house got a new roof, and eight feet of new pipe under the concrete basement floor (plus a new floor over the pipe). I never thought we'd see the end of the dirt and mud tracking up the basement steps, and I couldn't believe the mountain of rubble piled on the basement floor. We were pretty stressed out during the period while all this was occurring (no water in the kitchen, no clear end in sight, scheduling headaches, etc.) but no point in complaining now. At least the new tenants won't have to worry about the drain baking up and flooding the basement. Been there done that.





That's a pretty short description of three months worth of time, and it doesn't mention all the good times of enjoying summer in the Midwest — seeing friends being the most important — great meals, shopping at the Pink Poodle with my next door neighbor, etc. etc. Even though I wasn't blogging, I was still taking lots of pictures, and I'll share them from time to time in future posts.


Laloofa is in the middle.

I would like to mention one special event on our way back to Seattle. I had a blogger meetup with Laloofa (Mehitable Days) in Sheridan Wyo.



She's just as delightful in person as she is on her blog, and I wish we lived closer to each other so we could get together often. We shared a breakfast in the park with Mr. EasyVegan, Laloofa's friend Robin, and Buffy.





This pic of me and Mr. EV was taken by Laloofa. He's wearing his "stand with Wisconsin" t-shirt, because heaven knows, we do!





Here are two more images from our return trip to Seattle. They are from the Columbia River Basin in Eastern Washington.

We're in our new house in Seattle now (built in 1912, so not exactly new), and we're on our way to getting it furnished. The house is small — only two bedrooms and one bath plus an attic room, and we're doing a lot of craigslist and consignment shop shopping. (We rent out our Madison house to visiting academics, furnished, so we're pretty much starting from scratch here as far as furniture goes.) The mattress came from a store, the rugs are new, and the sofa has been ordered, but nearly everything else is recycled, 'cause that's the way we like it.


A slightly demented Miss E finds a new use for the built-in bookcase that will eventually house some playthings for her to use when she visits.

We're looking at a craigslist bookcase this evening, and I hope we like it — and, more importantly, can carry it! — because it would really be great to be able to unpack the cookbooks. :) Mostly we like the house, but although I consider myself pretty observant, I'm amazed on a daily basis to discover things I hadn't noticed when we were looking at the house to buy. And I'm not talking about good things. Sigh.

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Recipe testing, again
This is a food blog so I should post something food-related, and as I'm testing recipes for a new slow-cooker cookbook by Robin Robertson, I'll share a few photos of some of the recipes I've tried so far:


Potatoes with tomatoes and butter beans


Creamy polenta with mushroom ragú


Braised Manchurian-style cauliflower


Yosenabe

I recommend keeping this cookbook on your radar because based on what I've tasted, it's going to be a good one.

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Tidbits
If I'd posted this back in July when I'd first read about it, it would be news. Now it's old news. Any Lost fans out there? Jorge Garcia ("Hugo") is now a vegan. Here's a link to his blog.

Meatless vs. local (from the Vegetarians of Washington newsletter)
It turns out that what's in your grocery bag may matter even more than how far it traveled to get there when it comes to climate change.

A new study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University has just concluded that going meatless has a much bigger impact on global warming than going local with your food choices. 83% of the average U.S. household's carbon footprint for food comes from growing and producing it, and this is where meat is particularly harmful. Transporting the food to the point of purchase only accounts for 11%. In fact, the researchers found that going meatless for just one day had a greater impact than going entirely local for a whole week. This is in line with the UN report that said that raising livestock caused more global warming than all the cars, buses, trucks, trains, planes, boats and ships in the world put together.

Spam I am
I know all bloggers get spammed, but every once in a while I get one so weird I just want to share (minus the spam link). This particular spammer wants to send you to a page about car roof racks, but with translation this remarkable, the message has become rather obscure. I'm glad Blogger does such a remarkable job of flagging and removing spam that my readers never see it, unless, of course, I choose to share. :) Here it is:

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Vida Vegan Con
In just two days I'm headed to Portland for Vida Vegan Con, and am pretty excited. Mr. EV is going too, and we're taking the train, so even getting there and back should be fun. Is anyone reading this going? I want to meet you!

Back in Seattle again | Bathroom dog | Beeen eating | Blueberries in the rain

Here you can see our 17-year-old dog, Buffy, checking out the most enormous motel bathroom I've ever seen. It was so big it had a telephone, sauna and hot tub. (Just kidding about the sauna and hot tub.) But it was big and it did have a telephone. It was in Fargo, North Dakota on our first night of the four-day drive from Madison to Seattle, and Buffy gave it the once over before settling onto one of the beds.

We're back in Seattle, now, but I was reminded of the photo this morning, when we failed to take Buffy outside in time for her morning pee, and she went into the bathroom and peed on the floor. "Bad dog," you're probably thinking, but think again. She COULD have peed in the bed or on the wall-to-wall carpet in the bedroom. But no, she jumped off the bed, went into the bathroom and peed on the floor. Granted, she didn't use the toilet and she did pee on the bath mat, but still. Pretty weird, right?

This post will finish up our summer trip photos before moving on to life and food in Seattle. We took a more northerly route for our return trip, and after Wisconsin and Minnesota, we hit North Dakota, and headed for Fargo. I can't remember what we ate in Fargo — no photos — which is probably not a good sign for what the food was like, but the scenery was cool.

The above photos were taken as we passed through the North Dakota Badlands.

In Montana, somewhere near Billings, we took a detour to view Pompey's Pillar. We couldn't actually enter the fee-required area of the park and walk to the pillar, because dogs weren't allowed, and I wasn't about to leave Buffy alone in a kennel area that the guide said was available someplace in the park. So we gazed upon it from a distance, and walked around in the free parts of the park. Had we been able to view the butte up close, we would have been able to see Native American petroglyphs, as well as the carved signature of William Clark.

William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, climbed the butte, and etched his name and date of visit into the sandstone rock face on July 25, 1806. This is the only piece of tangible, still existing evidence, of Lewis and Clark's journey along this route, now known as The Lewis and Clark Historic Trail, which passes through 11 states. The purpose of the expedition, called the Corps of Discovery, was to search for a water route from the plains of the Midwest to the Pacific Ocean.

The 150 foot high butte was named by Clark after Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, whom Clark had nicknamed Pompy. Pompy was the infant son of Sacagewea, the Shoshoni woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on the expedition, providing invaluable help to the explorers. Pompey translates to "little chief," in Shoshoni. In 1814, the rock was renamed Pompey's Pillar by Nicolas Biddle, who published an account of the expedition.

Above are two photos I took from the car window as we traveled through Montana; it's so beautiful there. Our second night was spent in Miles City, where we had greasy Chinese food, requiring the use of paper towels before we could eat.

On our third night we stayed in Missoula, and were looking forward to eating at a vegan Indian restaurant we'd read about on Happy Cow. Although still listed in the 2010 phone directory, unfortunately, when we got to the restaurant, it was gone, and in its place was a Mexican eatery. We ended up getting make-your-own salads from the The Good Food Store, and they were pretty tasty — probably a healthier option, too, but I was disappointed. Actually, I was in a really bad mood.

On our last day we entered Eastern Washington and stopped at one of my favorite places to stretch and take photos — the Columbia River Basin.

I still feel squeamish when I think about the boy of about 12 whom I observed scrambling on the high, jagged cliffs, with a straight drop to the river. He was accompanied by his two teen-aged sisters, one of whom finally said, "do you realize you're on the edge of a cliff?" before leaving him and returning to the trail. The boy was wearing flip flops. And where was his mother? She was fiddling with her camera from a nice safe place.

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Home again
Once back in Seattle, it was pretty hard to get back into a routine of cooking after so much eating out. It was not just too hard to do the cooking, it was nearly impossible to even think of anything to cook.

In situations like this, I often opt for a brothy bowl of noodles, mushrooms, tofu, kale, potatoes, and carrots.

My husband whipped up a big bowl of my favorite chickpea salad, that I ate for lunch several days in a row.

My son cooked a delicious lunch of broccoli and gyoza. He used a bag of frozen vegan gyoza from Trader Joe's.

We bought a gorgeous bunch of Chinese spinach at the farmers market yesterday, and made lentil soup with rice and spinach.

It was even better today for lunch when I added leftover corn cut from the cob, and avocado slices.

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Picking blueberries in the rain

If someone had invited me to go blueberry picking on a rainy day last year, I probably would have declined. I associate picking fruit with sunshine and warm days. But after a year in rain city, I must have adapted slightly, because yes, I did go blueberry picking in the rain. I didn't have an umbrella, but I did wear a rain jacket. Blueberry picking is tedious because the berries are so darn small. It takes forever to accumulate a reasonable amount in the bucket. My hands were wet and cold by the time we left, and my bucket was a sad, empty thing. I managed to freeze two quarts, but that was far less than I'd hoped. Maybe if the sun shines again, I'll go back to Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm in Bellevue. It seems to be in a public park, which I can't quite figure out.

You can see there were lots of ripe berries on the bushes, but picking them is slow going because of their small size. It seemed that no matter how much I picked, the bucket remained nearly empty. I had visions of picking a supply for the winter, but that would have required more hours and patience than I could manage. We used to easily pick 30 pounds or more of strawberries, and I didn't realize how different it was to pick blueberries.

Blueberries have the highest antioxidant capacity of all fruits and are recognized for their positive effects on heart health, lowering cholesterol and strengthening the immune system. They have also been studied for their ability to reduce stomach fat. Besides their health benefits, they're delicious additions to smoothies, breakfast cereal, muffins, cobblers and other desserts, as well as a low-calorie (80 calories per cup) snack eaten out-of-hand.

The farm uses "organic practices" whatever that is, and from the looks of things, they don't use slug pesticides. There was a slug convention taking place in the fields, and Pacific NW slugs are impressive.

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You can win a case of four new Larabar flavors by visiting Katy's blog. And who wouldn't want a case of those? I do!