Yesterday was one of those complicated, sad, difficult days that I can’t talk about here.  The only thing good that came of it was the feeling of connection to Husband, who as it turns out can crack me up even when I’m in distress and getting sick *and* hungry all at the same time.  I can’t say enough about how much my quality of life and happiness are increased by his presence.

Side note: we tried to go out for dinner last night, and had our first total veg flop.  We went to Nick’s Spaghetti House, which I fond memories of, but it turns out there is not a single vegeterian option on the menu!  All the pastas are meat sauced.  It was very hard to leave the delicious smelling restaurant in search of something else.  Of course the dinner we ended up having was a disappointment.

Today I might post a recipe since I’m going to be making one of my favourite soups of all time (fennel and white bean), but first I have to whip myself into a cooking frenzy because I am actually sick and my energy is poo poo.  If I end up reading on the couch all day, I guess I could post pictures of that instead.

“Vegans can eat chickens, right?  I mean, I know they’re not plants - but they’re just so boring!”

Today I have a few things to do:

-Plan meals for the week and get groceries.

-Take the “Unexpected Christmas” Erroneous Triple Shipping of Chapters books back to the Chapters store downtown.

-Settle down to take a chunk out of my new book.

-Clean up the detritus from last night’s poker game.  Speaking of which, last night I baked some chocolate chip and walnut cookies for the gang and by the end of the evening there were only three left: an unqualified success for vegan baking!  There is little I find as satisfying as the disappearance into gullets of things I have cooked.  I’m generally a little trepidatious about serving vegan foods because I worry I won’t notice if they taste of soymilk or other strange veg foods that other people aren’t used to, but it seems I don’t have to worry about those cookies.  Excellent!

-Be a lazy slug.  Yesterday I endured my final day long class with Chi-Woman and I think I’ve earned it.  Later this week I have the final evening class with her, which is also my final class with her ever and my final non-supervision class ever.  YAY!  This calls for some slugging around, yes?  Yes!

Today I have already accomplished (warning: scatological content):

-THE MOST IMPRESSIVE BOWEL MOVEMENT EVER.  I think that after two years of vegetarianism I have at last achieved poo nirvana: the Perfect Poo.  Long, full, soft, with a gentle curve - it should be bronzed.  I’m so proud.

I occurs to me that talking about baking and pooping in the same post probably violates some etiquette conventions but I have to tell you, according to my blog stats, people come here for those two topics.  So in theory this should be my most popular post ever.

Which means if you don’t like baking and poo together, you are the one with the problem.

So my dad, as I wrote recently, has rheumatoid arthritis.  He’s had it for about fifteen years, and for most of that time it’s been pretty well controlled.  He skis, he golfs, he carries out strange construction projects around his house, that kind of thing.  But over the last six months or so the gold shots he’s been on have lost effectiveness, and his rheumatologist has been experimenting with different drugs for him.  Nothing’s really working well.  Once he had a dangerous hemorrhage from the medication he was on.  And in July, he basically became crippled with this recent terrible attack.  For the first time he’s getting those characteristic twisted, enlarged joints that people with RA get.  He can’t sleep, can’t do any sports, is ground down by constant pain.

Husband and I had done a lot of research about diet and RA because some of our vegan books had mentioned a low fat vegan diet can help.  We went to the medical literature and found that there are actually quite a few studies on this question, and what it boils down to is this: many people with RA who switch to a low fat (ie, no added oils, all fat coming from whole plants themselves) vegan diet experience significant symptomatic relief.  We printed off a bunch of articles for him, and a few days later, he told me he wanted to try eating like we do.

So last week I went out to his place and spent the day cooking.  I made five big recipes of food he could freeze in meal sized portions.  We talked all day about veganism - how to plan meals, what nutritional needs must be considered, how to shop, all of that.  It was an exciting but sadenning day for me.  This was the day he couldn’t unload the grocery cart.  He had to take a nap in the afternoon.  He could barely get up and down the stairs - he had to take them one at a time like a child, placing both feet on the same step before going on to the next.

And guess what?  Four days later my dad called me - he’s had a major remission in symptoms!  Yesterday he went out for a two hour walk that included stopping at the book store and visiting friends - normal things he hasn’t been able to do because of stiffness, pain, and exhaustion.  I was elated!  And so is he - he was really afraid of what his life would become if he was this housebound, pain-ridden creature for the rest of his days.  His quality of life has increased a lot.

There’s no way to know if the diet is the reason.  In the literature, people who get benefits from this diet tend to have them pretty quickly - within a week or two.  So my dad’s experience does fit with that picture.  But it might be coincidence.  And that’s how he sees it - he doesn’t credit the diet entirely (though he’s not going off it for now).  I think what will happen is a natural A-B-A-B experiment, wherein he falls off the vegan wagon, has a resurgence of symptoms, then goes back on it and feels better.  That would increase our ability to attribute his improvements to the diet.

But in any case I don’t care what the cause of it is.  As long as he’s feeling better I’m thrilled.

Here is my stock pot, in amongst the other pots.  Notice that he towers over my former Biggest Pot (top left corner), which now looks like a mewling pipsqueak in comparison.  Life’s tough, Dispaced Pot!  Welcome to being second best!

Yesterday the stock pot helped me produce a scandalous amount of spaghetti sauce.  It was so scandalously large that I ran out of tupperwares in which to freeze it, and had to go through some rather complicated manouvers with ziploc bags supporting one another in pots to fill.  But!  Out of all that effort (and it wasn’t really that much effort, spag is easy), I came away with about ten meals for two.  I freeze them in the right amount for Husband and I to use one package to make our dinner.  Well, usually that’s the case - last night I ran out of ziplocs too so there was probably enough spag for twelve dinners but I distributed the last four servings of sauce amongst the existing containers.

I also made some great corn chili last night, but I forgot to take a picture and we ate it.  But I tell you it was delicious.  The recipe called for cream, so I created a clever work around.  Oh I am so proud of this!  I too a block of very soft tofu and processed it in my blender until it was a liquid, about the consistency of warm yogurt.  This made a perfect substitution for cream because it adds body and protein and fat and all those things that make cream-additions so good, but of course there was no cream.  The only down side is that the tofu still had a touch of that beany taste that it has (this is what comes of being made from soybeans! Hmph!), but fortunately my chili was very bold and flavourful and completely took over the taste of the tofu.

Kiss my grits, inferior pots!

Today I ate:

Cherries for breakfast.

Two big bowls of vegan pho, one around ten-thirty and one around two.

Toast and jam.

A big bowl of Chinese-style soup full of green veggies, including broccoli, spinach, peas, zucchini, and ginger.

Firm tofu, grilled, in a sauce of peanut butter, Thai red curry, ginger, soy sauce, and sugar.

And now?  Now I am going to eat a big chunk of watermelon, by digging right into a halved fruit with a melon baller (snicker).  I’m going to park my ass on the couch and watch Cracker while I do this - It’s going to be nothing but murder and melons until bed time!

I got this thought-provoking comment from my friend Puck about my somewhat vague post on food from yesterday:

Eating’s a pleasure. “Eat Food: Feel Good.” Granted “Eat Food” in this case can also end up with “get fat and unhealthy” but it can be controlled without having to resort to “Almost never Eat Food and when you do restrict your input incredibly”.

I don’t see any reward — aside from no risk of eating too much — of not enjoying yourself. Neither of us believe in some sort of finish line to life where you get rewarded for what you did in it.

You get rewarded in life *by* what you do in it. And that’s why I eat yummy food.

I had a strong reaction to this comment because of the bit about almost never eating and restricting input incredibly.  This could be a reference to either veganism or to regular eating just highly restricted - and both of these are things I have experienced.  So I thought, why not blog about it?  I do live for your comments!

In the old days, when I ate the standard North American diet, I struggled a lot with my weight.  I found it very difficult to manage my food intake so that I wasn’t overeating.  The pleasure I took from chips and burgers and fries was always tainted by a sense of guilt and shame, because I knew I was paying for that pleasure in pounds.  I never really freely enjoyed all that bad food, because I was never able to just accept and love my overweight body.  I also suspected, though at that time had done no research, that the kind of food I was eating was probably also bad for my health over the long term.  So I can only speak for myself, though I suspect others will identify: eating was not a pleasure, or at least not a pure one.

I dieted for years, and dieting did feel like starving.  I had to really cut back to see any progress, which was depressing as hell and impossible to maintain.  So I can see why making the changes required to maintain a healthily low weight feels so impossible and like such a deprivation. Like frogs in a pot, I think we get blinded to the reality around us, which is that we have created an environment of plenty and therefore artificial need.  This, I believe, is the source of much of the difficulty with dieting.  Losing five pounds wouldn’t be hard if we weren’t so thoroughly accustomed to eating chips and fries and doughnuts and chocolate bars all the time.  We have come to accept this kind of eating as the normal set point; now even a whole foods carnivorous diet would seem extreme.

The problem is that the pleasure we derive from food has become associated with the worst kinds of food - deep fried, heavily salted, prepackaged, full of high fructose corn syrup.  We’ve lost our taste for regular old food, fresh from the ground or the animal.  Giving up these bad foods is experienced as an intolerable punishment - we feel entitled to the bad food, and enter an endless cycle of eating, feeling guilty, gaining weight, trying to lose it, failing, experiencing hopelessness, and returning to the bad food.  We have become slaves to our conveniences.  “Eat food: Feel good” has become a trap.

Here is the best part of being a vegan: I eat like a hog and can lose weight.  In addition to eating only plants, I really work to keep my fat intake down to around ten percent of calories.  This means in practice that I get my fats almost exclusively from the plants themselves, not from added oils.  This also means that my food is not very calorie dense compared to the normal diet.  So I eat all the time.  I usually have four proper meals every day, and I snack on fruit and veggies throughout the day.  I never feel deprived.  I never go hungry.

The irony is that now that I have restricted my diet, I finally have the freedom I craved to truly, purely enjoy food.  I don’t worry about my weight at all now.  So when I sit down to a meal, there’s nothing on my mind except whether to have my salad before or after the main course.  The guilt is gone and the lard is going.  This is what it is to truly enjoy food in an environment of plenty.  Puck, I eat yummy food too!

But of course I pay a price.  I can’t just eat anything at all.  I can’t have an ice cream sandwich, for example, which is surely one of summer’s chief joys.  The question is, Is this a real deprivation?  It might be, if I were constantly hungry and frustrated with being a vegan.  But my belly is always full, and who cares about ice cream sandwiches when there are fresh fruit smoothies?  The more I relax into this lifestyle, the less it feels like a chore or a deprivation.  It’s becoming more and more normal to me, and along with this normalcy comes comfort and pleasure.  It hasn’t always been easy, as I said yesterday.  I’m going against a lifetime of eating differently than I do now, and there are things I miss a lot.  But it gets easier, and now I’m in a pretty good place with veganism.

So to Puck I would say I do enjoy myself, thoroughly, full-bellied-ly.  My relationship to food is no longer conflicted.  Will I be rewarded for this lifestyle within my lifespan?  Only time will tell, but assuming I fall within two standard deviations of the norm, epidemiological data says I have a great chance of avoiding heart attacks, obesity, and certain cancers, and diabetes.  It’s just a matter of deciding if it’s worth it to you (anyone).

I’m sure there is also a way to eat a carnivorous diet that doesn’t involve a sense of deprivation or weight gain, but alas, I never discovered it.  Of course I was never able to kick the junk food habit, which surely contributed.  I doubt deprivation is the necessary state for meat eaters who want to stay trim, though avoiding deprivation from hunger probably requires abandoning junk food almost entirely.  I don’t think I would advocate anything so strict as almost never eat and when you do restrict incredibly - there must be some middle ground between overeating and undereating that allows people to feel full, to purely enjoy food, and provide for all nutritional needs.  I mean besides veganism. 

I’m all achy and sore from the gym yesterday.  Lordy!  Everything aches!

I may reward myself with one of those new Starbucks smoothies, called Vanillos or Vivillos or Vananas or something.  I had the mango one yesterday (they can make it with soy milk instead of cow’s) and it was delicious!  As good as home made, only I don’t have to wash the blender!

I also shelled out seventeen bucks for cherries yesterday, and am just revelling in them.  Dark, sweet little orbs: How I love them!  I think cherries are my favourite fruit.  So when summer comes and I am presented with the option of purchasing them at shamefully high rates, I do.  I’d fill the tub with them if I could (afford it, that is).  Today I am eating only cherries for breakfast, which should have interesting repercussions for my digestive tract.  I will, as always, keep you posted.

By the way, I have been enjoying the conversation about homlessness, which all started because someone asked me to write about it.  It is extremely flattering to have strangers solicit my opinion as though it matters - which of course it doesn’t, outside this tiny blog.  At this stage in my life I have managed to accrue exactly zero power and influence.  But the point is, if you, loyal reader, have questions or topics you would be interested to have me address, do ask.  I live but to serve.

Or something.

p.s. - the landlord said no to cat.  Humbug!

I haven’t talked about veganism for a while, and though I have already thoroughly baited Puck with my post on Wikipedia, I woke up sassy today so why not?  Let’s talk about plants, yes?

I am finally settling into comfortable veganism.  Up until recently it’s felt a lot like work.  The worst part is when we eat out, and the best we can do is a salad (no-cheese-no-egg-dressing-on-the-side-please).  I have a tendency to feel ripped off, like I’m missing out on things.  Which in one sense I absolutely am: I’m missing out on pizza and ice cream and enormous wedges of lasagna.  Sometimes I even feel sulky about it, when I am in the grip of hunger and the thought of a bowl of lettuce is just so inadequate.

But then there’s the other side of things.  I lose out on certain things in the short term, but gain others in the long term.  Healthy arteries, a safe weight, reduced risk of a variety of cancers, reduced environmental demand for my food, reduced cruelty.  (Though I never seem to stop finding animal products in surprising places, like toothpaste.)  Mainly we eat at home now, because when we eat here, I can make big, filling, nutritious meals.  There is no sense of being ripped off.  And it’s cheaper.

I try to keep things in perspective.  Society’s permissive attitude toward food (eat anything you want, anywhere, at any time) is a ridiculous standard against which to measure my veganism.  It’s not that veganism is wildly restrictive and unreasonable,  just that the rest of us have made it normal to be wildly gluttonous.  Have you noticed that?  People whip out food at any time they are required to hold still for more than five minutes.  Business meetings, lectures, riding the bus, shopping.  Everywhere you look people are stuffing their faces, and it’s with on the go style food, meaning junk.  I don’t remember this being the case when I was younger.  As a kid, food came at regular and predictable times: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner.  We ate at the table.  If we were out and got hungry, we held on until we made it home.  I remember this as normal for everyone I knew.

It’s like we’re afraid to be hungry (we here means society).  We can’t smoke now, so we need something else to put in the hole.  “Hole” here being literal (mouth) and metaphoric (existential emtpiness).  Food is comfort.  A good breast, if I may use a little Kleinian psychoanalysis.

Maybe I’ve been suffering from the lack of breast, which is just my reality, but since going vegan I’m no longer in a position to hide it by stuffing myself with restaurant and 7-11 purchased munchies when I go about my day.  Perhaps I’ve been in a process of dealing with the lack of instant gratification/breast, so that now I’m pretty cool with my salad, knowing there’s something better at home.

Perhaps this doesn’t make any sense.

Be amazed, gentle readers: I have concocted a vegan pho that tastes great!  This is the culmination of two years of experimentation, and I’m so pleased I could just pop.  Giving up pho was one of the tougher sacrifices to veganism, and it remains a chief temptation when I’m hungry and anywhere on the east side of the city.  For those not in the know, pho is Vietnamese beef noodle soup - it’s glorious and wonderful and I’d marry it if I didn’t already have Husband.  So how did I do it, when pho is all about the beef broth and I don’t eat cows?  The answer is simple.  To borrow a phrase from marketing, I have taken advantage of better living through chemistry.

I bought this at Safeway.  McCormick’s also makes faux chicken broth and a vegetable broth which I assume is real.  I’m not sure if you can read the tiny writing under “Beef” but what it says is: “style:” beef style.  But does it taste any good?  Well, as a former meat eater, I have to tell you that plain and naked as a clear broth, no.  It’s not quite right, if you know what I mean.  Beef style, not beef.  There is also a certain undeniable chemical taste that gets in the way of truly fooling yourself into thinking you’re drinking the aftereffects of boiling cow meat and bones.  Do recall I didn’t quit meat eating for aesthetic reasons!

So while this broth is great in places where broth itself is not the star (as a simmering liquid for veggies, or a boost to a chili, etc.), it really can’t cut it for pho.  Without a little help.  Let’s help it, shall we?

Begin with 10 cups of water and 5.5 cubes of the fake beef broth in a pot.  According to the good people at McCormick’s we should only have five cubes for that volume of water, but I find it just wasn’t quite enough.  Another half cube is perfect.

After consulting my little library of cook books, I decided to add also 1 generous tablespoon of tamari, and here’s the genius part: the stems of 10 or 12 mushrooms.  I used creminis.  Sounds simple but I tell you, the addition of these two ingredients goes miles towards hiding the unpleasant parts of the broth flavour while adding their own deliciousess.  They are also in keeping with traditional pho recipes.  And the mushroom caps?  They will take the place of the beef in the final soup.  No waste!

I already put the stems in the pot when I took this picture.  Hang on to those caps for now.

Get the pot to a good simmer and make sure the cubes are all dissolved.  They are bound with a little oil and in my opinion this helps with the simulation effect, since pho itself inevitably has some of the fat from the beef in it.  Now we have some things to add to the broth.  Here they are:

One onion, peeled and quartered.  You should use a white one, which I actually did, but since I only bought one I had to use a ringer for the after-the-fact picture.

2 or 3 whole cloves, crushed (use a heavy pot or measuring cup and squash the cloves against your cutting board)

A 2 inch piece of fresh ginger, sliced into 8 or 10 rings.  No need to peel.

2 teaspoons sugar

A 2 inch piece of cinnamon, broken up into pieces the same way you did the cloves

A scant teaspoon of anise seeds, also crushed

Now you just let it all simmer together for twenty or so minutes with the lid on.  So easy!  So pho-like!  So vegan!  There’s just one final addition to the broth: a teaspoon of peppercorns, crushed, added for only a minute at the end of the 20 minutes.  If you cook pepper for a long time it becomes bitter and that’s yucky, so always add pepper at the end of your cooking.  When the pepper is done, strain the broth through a seive and toss out the solid matter.  What you are left with is gloriously dark, rich pho broth that is beefy and tastes like fresh, not chemical:

Pretend my stove is clean.

At this point you’ll add the mushroom caps chopped up any way you like (I think slices look nice and they cook fast too) to the broth, which you can leave simmering gently while you prepare the noodles (though you must balance your desire for cooked mushrooms with your desire to protect the pepper from bittering.  It’s a judgment call.).  Use rice  noodles, which will have instructions on the package, and will be simple boil in water affairs.  And then all we have left is assembly.

In large bowls, put a generous helping of noodles (strained) into the bottom.  Pour broth over to cover the noodles.  Put bowls on table and enjoy the smells.  Provide the following as garnishes, which your appreciative family or guests will add according to their tastes:

Fresh basil

Bean sprouts

Green onion sliced on an angle

Sriracha sauce (called hot cock sauce in this house)

Hoisin sauce

Wedges of lime

Personally, I don’t like too much sweet in my savoury so I go light on the hoisin (though I go heavy on the hot sauce!).  But I won’t judge you if you’re like Husband and want everything to be sweet.  Make sure you provide enough of the veggies so people can really pile ‘em on - go nuts, it’s vegan.  Eat with a combination of chop sticks and a big spoon so you can get noodles and broth in every bite!

And what happened to our friend the beef style broth?  Through the alchemy of the additions during broth making, and the sauces you add at the table, it has been magically transformed into something that tastes fresh and homemade and beefy, but is entirely vegetable in nature.  Okay, vegetable and chemical.  We’re not perfect here.

Edit: It’s best if you only use 2 or 3 of the mushroom caps to finish the soup, otherwise the broth tastes too much like mushrooms, hiding the beefiness.

Edit 2: Husband would like me to tell you it’s called hot cock sauce because there is a rooster on it and it’s spicy, not because of anything indecent.  He would also like me to stop writing about my bowel movements, which I won’t, but I will (hereby) formally register his complaint.