31 July 2012

Lucky Packet Muffcakes(!)


These big cupcakes (aka muffcakes) have been quite a hit with friends and family. They're super fun to make because you can cram all sorts of cool stuff into the batter, forget which cupcake is which and continually surprise yourself upon biting into each hidden gem.

I contemplated inserting little (inedible) ceramic trinkets into the muffcake centres but realised that this was probably a recipe for disaster, what with the inevitable (well-founded) choking lawsuits that might follow. Maybe I'll do some with toys and trinkets sticking out of the muffcakes, sort of like those awesome barbie cakes you used to get when you were young. Cause if one chokes on the toy when it's within view, well, then one is probably just dumb. And one probably deserves to choke.

Whatever you put inside tends to get moist and soft so cookies are a real treat, as is the peanut butter. I have to say however that my absolute favourite was the jelly-tots (although I assume jelly-belly beans will work just as well).

So be creative, have fun making them and do a little happy dance or head-bang. I sure did.

Ingredients:
  • 2 heaped cups flour
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/4 - 1/2 cup sugar or agave nectar
  • 1 tsp vanilla essence
  • 1/2 cup soy milk
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup water
  • 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
  • a sprinkle of cool shit *(jelly-tots, jelly-belly beans, vegan chocolate blocks, peanut butter, vegan cookies etc.)
  • 1 bag Ina Paarman icing kit *(the kits state that they contain dairy but this is only in the event that you combine the icing sugar with butter as opposed to vegan margarine)
  • 125g vegan margarine *(I use Cardin)
  • 1 tsp lemon juice *(only if using the vanilla Ina Paarman icing sugar)
  • 1/4 cup water
Pre-heat the oven to about 180 degrees celsius.

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl. Hole out the flour and add the wet ingredients. Mix.

Divy cupcake holders into a muffin tin (in order to contain the awesome big, muffcakeness of the batter) and spoon 1 tablespoon of batter into each holder.


Sprinkle cool shit into the centre of each cup and cover with a further 1 tablespoon of batter.


Place muffcakes in the oven and bake until risen and soft and spongy to the touch. Allow to cool.



When muffcakes have cooled, cream the vegan margarine in a bowl and then slowly mix in the icing sugar, water and lemon juice. Ice the muffcakes to the best of your technical ability and...

MUNCH!

29 July 2012

~belated (demonstrative) apology for that (sleep deprived) psychotic episode~




AC/DC (Neon) Night Owl


Taking Strain


My mom recently gifted me the loveliest turquoise tea pot which has a built in strainer. It makes me happy cause I've been been plugging all sorts of cool shit into it such as fresh ginger, parsley, lemons and limes, mint, cinnamon, chilli and vanilla pods. It keeps me hydrated and amused at the same time, which is always a good outcome.


 
 
I don't think that there is much that can beat tea and cupcakes on a lazy Sunday afternoon!

Cupcake from the Greenside Cafe

Merci, mamma mia!

 

Mugh (whole green moong lentils)



I was recently given the most thoughtful present by a dear friend of mine for my birthday. It was put together so beautifully that it pained me to unwrap it- I just wanted to mount in on my fireplace and stare at it. What topped it off was the fact that the ingredients were perfectly measured to accompanying recipes (copyright of my friend's mother who has graciously allowed me to share same on my blog).




It was such an interactive and tactile gift and I loved that it was a creative process from start to finish. Oh man. So damn awesome. I've enjoyed delving into the (previously intimidating) world of spices safe in the knowledge that I'm being guided by someone who knows what they're doing. I made the Mugh (whole green moong lentils) which was delicious! 

Ingredients: 
  • 1 cup whole green moong lentils
  • 1 medium onion, finely chopped
  • 1 large tomato, finely chopped (or pureed)
  • 1 tsp turmeric
  • 2 tsp cumin powder
  • 1.5 tsp chilli powder
  • pinch of salt
  • 2 tsp ground ginger
  • 2 tsp crushed garlic
  • 1 tsp lemon juice
  • 2 tsp vegetable oil
  • 2 tsp cumin seeds
  • 1 dried red chilli
  • coriander leaves for garnishing 

Wash the lentils in warm water so as to remove the starch. Soak lentils in warm water for 1-2 hours. Place lentils and the onion in a pot of boiling water and cook until the lentils are finger soft (that is, soft, but not cooked). 

While the lentils are being cooked, combine the tomato, turmeric, cumin, red chilli powder, salt, ginger, garlic and lemon juice to create a tomato mixture. When the lentils are finger soft, add the tomato mixture and allow to simmer until the tomato has dissolved and a thick gravy forms and the lentils are very soft. 

In a separate pan, heat oil and fry the cumin seeds and the dried red chilli for about 2 minutes (or until the spices start to give off an aroma). I was a bit scared of the chilli so I removed the seeds in order to tone down the heat of the dish somewhat, but if you like it hot then keep the seeds in!

Add the fried spices to the lentil gravy and allow to simmer for a further 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and garnish with coriander.



Serve with rice or naan bread or, as I did, stuff some pitas with the lentil mixture.

*NOM*


Fresh Earth Food Store


I've had a manic couple of weeks at work and woke up yesterday morning feeling completely shattered. We decided to take it easy and went to the Fresh Earth Food Store in Emmarentia to eat some good food, drink some nutrient-jam-packed smoothies and stock up on some of the amazing produce that they have at the store. Hallelujah (such-a-damn-difficult-work-to-spell) for pay-day!

The cafe at Fresh Earth isn't entirely vegan and caters predominantly for vegetarians but I've taken various willing and able meat eaters there as well. The focus is on conscious, healthy, ethical and sustainable eating and living. What's great about the place is how holistic it is- it's a restaurant (with the most incredible food), a store (with the most incredible stock), it serves as a venue for topical talks on health and hosts awesome multi-themed cooking classes.


Vegan Cheese Burger
All the food is clearly labelled (both in the store and at the Deli), the staff is well conversant with veganism (hopefully this will become the norm at most restaurants as time goes by) and it feels great supporting an establishment that has such a good vibe to it!

What is also great is that the store is slowly expanding and has recently launched its online shop, so those of us who aren't very close to the place can still stock-up on certain goods.



The dogs probably won't sniff twice at the vegan pet food but we thought we'd give it a try.
It was the first time I tried Seitan. Oh man it was so good and such a mind trip.
I checked about ten times just to make sure that it didn't have meat in.
The restaurant is really decently priced and the stock in the store ranges from affordable to crazy-expensive (given the fact that so much of the stuff is imported). If you haven't been there before, I'd definitely recommend visiting the place as you're sure to find something to meet your fancy...and feel good about the fact that there are no cruel and abusive practices underlying the running of the establishment.


19 July 2012

Frog Princess

On a recent bright and early winter’s morning I went to our local supermarket, awash with the excited anticipation of buying some AWESOME baking materials and goods. I was combing the isles of the supermarket, compiling a mental shortlist of goods I would buy (everything I needed + everything I wanted everything I couldn’t afford) when I happened upon the fruit section and decided to stock up for our morning smoothies.
I hovered over the massive selection of loose bananas, trying to find the most pristine bunch. As I zoned in to pick my chosen bunch I felt something cold moving against my finger and assumed that it must have been a piece of open, broken fruit. When I looked down however, I saw a pale albino-like creature moving in between the bananas, frantically trying to cram itself into the smallest and most inconspicuous space. It took me about five seconds to realise that it wasn’t some sort of albino cockroach or broken fruit or Gollum but rather an eensy-teensy tiny frog which had (in the light of our wonderful culture of mass consumerism) been inadvertently transported from the “tropical” banana farms of Kwazulu-Natal to this artificially lighted shopping centre.
My first thought was “ah fuck man” followed by “oh poor little thing” followed by “oh shit man, why do these things always happen to me” followed by “okay, get it together, this is operation froggie rescue RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW bitches!” followed by “oh shit but it’s sort of brightly coloured, what if it’s one of those poisonous tropical frogs from the Amazon” followed by “ok it can’t be poisonous because your finger hasn’t fallen off yet” followed by “at least it’s not operation bigass-spider rescue” finally followed by “get it together, you are the chosen one and it is YOUR immediate goal in life to save this frog’s life!”
But HOW. Did it constitute stealing if you “took” a frog that had been on the shop’s produce? Did the frog somehow also become a tradable commodity by virtue of its association with the bananas? Could I steal this frog? Could I steal a packet to put the frog in? Why was this so difficult?! Where was my Roman-Dutch Law of property when I needed it?! Why couldn’t I remember the law of acquisition?!?! Why couldn’t I just whip out a can of anarchy when I needed to?!?! Forcing my moral dilemma aside, I managed to grab and loosen the one banana to which the poor frog was clinging for dear life and ever so slowly inserted le petit frog into the plastic bag, and then, for fear that froggie would asphyxiate, inconspicuously tried to inflate the packet with air.
I then proceeded to have my one banana weighed. I approached Mr weigher-man and kindly informed him to be careful as I intended buying the banana and the frog which was on the banana. I then waited for what seemed like an interminable amount of time while Mr weigher-man either tried to calculate what the surcharge for the frog would be or wondered as to when the shop has started selling frogs (and for what purpose). I then rephrased my request and stated that I wanted him to weigh the banana and ignore the frog. He then snapped into action and I was off. I stumbled around in a stupor with my R2,50 banana and frog and considered whether I could still do my much-longed-for baking shopping. However, given the urgency of froggie’s situation, his probable dehydration and the fact that I was terrified of squashing him, I decided against it and proceeded towards the check-out…only to realise upon reaching the check-out that I had a whopping 5 cents on me.
D’accord: proceed to collect one can of dog-food to compliment my one banana (and one frog) so that I can use my debit card. Proceed to request that Ms checkout-lady be gentle as there is a frog on my banana. Proceed to console shitfitting checkout-lady that the frog is not going to hurt her, that she’s not cursed and that I’d simply like to purchase my banana avec le petit frog. Proceed to jog out of the shop with gaping mouths staring after me.
I finally made it home and put froggie on his banana on leaves in a tea carton with some water. I then stressed over froggie and his potential injuries for the next hour (and came to the welcome conclusion that I shouldn’t ever have kids because I’d definitely suffer from Munchausen by Proxy).
After a strategic session with tookey, we decided that the best way forward would be to take froggie to the lake by our local park and release him there. We’d already come up with this plan of action several years ago when a much bigger froggie travelled the whole distance from Magaliesburg to Johannesburg in my (very squashed) shoe.
I said good-bye to froggie on his banana at the edge of the lake amongst some reeds and I really hope that he survives, given the change in his environment and his travelling ordeal.
If froggie does survive, I hope that he meets our froggie from Magaliesburg, that they serenade each other with lovely froggie *ribbits* , that they make froggie babies together, that they start a new froggie race and make happy froggie memories together. And catch ------< flies. Or eat fruit.  

13 July 2012

BLOC.Party*in my pants*

Mary Fitzgerald Square, 5 October 2012.
My brain might just melt in anticipation(!)


Not a Crime

When I was in law school I used to have an Eastern European lecturer who looked exactly (but exactly) like Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello, sans the pimping moustache. I had classes with him for two years and would while away the hours day-dreaming about his whipping a guitar out from underneath the podium, unbuttoning his shirt and going all gypsy-punk-rock on the students' collective ass. Oh man, I was so in awe, I could barely string a sentence together in front of him and his fictional moustache. I think he thought I was retarded *sigh*.













tu
me
manques
aujourd'hui












09 July 2012

Olive² Spaghetti and Raw Fennel Salad with Pistachio-Parsley Pesto


I was in a foul mood when I started preparing this food, but by the time we sat down to eat it I was doing a happy-dance. I’ve told Ric the next time I snap at him or get moody he should tell me to go cook something…bare-foot in the kitchen (although I guess we’ll see how well that suggestion pans out).
Anyway, fennel makes me happy- it’s my new favourite ingredient since it’s so versatile. It’s also so fresh and crunchy and ever-so-slightly liquoricey that it makes even carb-laden meals feel light and healthy. And what carb-laden meal would be complete without the lovely tangy and salty combination of calamata and green olives. And it will all make you feel happy, so that also helps.

Ingredients for Olive² Spaghetti (serves 2)
  • 1/2 - 2/3 pack spaghetti
  • 1 cup halved green olives
  • 1 cup halved black calamata olives
  • 1 cup breadcrumbs
  • 1/2 cup water  
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/2 cup parsley
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • juice of 1/2 - 1 lemon (optional)
Boil the spaghetti al dente, drain and place in large bowl.
Add the breadcrumbs, water and olive oil to the spaghetti and mix (the water and olive oil stop the breadcrumbs from drying the spaghetti out too much).
Add the olives, parsley, salt and pepper and mix.
Drizzle with lemon juice and a bit more olive oil.

Ingredients for Raw Fennel Salad
  • 4 (large) or 6 (medium) fennel bulbs
  • 1 cup shelled pistachio nuts
  • 3/4 cups olive oil
  • 1/3 cup parsley
  • 1tsp dried thyme (or 1 tbsp fresh thyme)
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Lemon juice / balsamic vinegar (optional)

Cut the bottom and stems off from the fennel so you are left with the bulbs (you can keep the fennel sprigs for later use in a pasta or soup or for baking with some tofu). Halve the bulbs and slice.
In a blender combine the pistachios, parsley, thyme, salt and pepper. Turn the blender on and slowly add the olive oil until the mixture achieves a pesto-like consistency.  
Pour the pistachio pesto onto the fennel and mix. Drizzle with some lemon juice or balsamic vinegar.

*EAT*

05 July 2012

Chanson du Jour

I've been in two-minds about posting this song because the music-video is pretty graphic and somewhat disturbing but the song is oh so awesome...so the latter won out over the former. If you can withstand the nighmarish hentai-ness of it and focus on the music then it's worth a (WTF-value) watch, otherwise maybe just listen and don't look. Other-other-wise, this might just be your kind of thing, in which case, I've made your day.




Mr Wilde

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.”

02 July 2012

Green living

The Busy Trap - Tim Kreider

I received a link to a wonderful NY Times article today from a friend of mine, Ms Lovely, and thought it was worth sharing. I think most of us who live in the concrete jungle will be able to relate to (if not necessarily agree with) some, if not all, of what is said.


"If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs  who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s  make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I  Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy."

Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.



01 July 2012

*No Bones* Pasta Bolognese


I had quite a lot of vegetables in the fridge which were going to spoil if they weren't used soon, so I made a quick bolognese sauce with them. There isn't really a closed list of vegetables which you use for this sauce so its a nifty tasty way of cleaning out your fridge. The leftover sauce can also be used towards making yummy fajitas the next day...just buy tortillas and you're sorted.


Ingredients:
  • oil for frying
  • 1 onion
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 2 chopped leeks
  • 3 courgettes (chopped or grated)
  • 1 large tomato, chopped
  • 1 yellow pepper, chopped
  • 1 cup mushrooms
  • 2 carrots (chopped or grated) 
  • 1 can tomato puree
  • 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
  • 1 tbsp sugar 
  • 2 tsp italian herbs
  • pasta of your choice
  • 1 cup red or port wine 
  • 1 tbsp worcester sauce
  • 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
  • 1 packed Fry's vegetarian mince
  • pasta of your choice

Heat oil in a pan and fry the onion, garlic and leeks until browned. Add the chopped courgettes, tomato, pepper, mushrooms and carrots and fry until soft. 

Pour the tomato puree into a bowl and add the sugar and apple cider vinegar in order to offset the slight acidity that you tend to get with canned tomato goods.

Pour the tomato puree, wine, worcester sauce and balsamic vinegar over the vegetables and add the mince. Stir-in the herbs, bring to a boil and simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring occassionaly. 

In a separate pot, bring water, salt and a bit of oil to the boil and add the pasta of your choice. Boil pasta until al dente.

Dish up and garnish with some vegan parmesan cheese.

>NOM<
  

the politics of co-habitation