Mushroom Ceviche with Sweet Potato (Vegan)

Before we moved to the Netherlands, Mr N and I travelled around Peru. For the most part, the food was nothing to write home about (apart from the cakes - but that's a blog post in itself). But there was one dish that really struck a chord with us: ceviche.

Traditionally, ceviche is raw fish, mixed with red onion and lime juice. It's a staple all over the west coast of Peru - we saw it sold everywhere from fancy restaurants to roadside stalls. It was reputedly excellent, but our vegetarianism meant that we had to forego the experience. Fortunately, our handy travel guide recommended Bircher Benner, a vegetarian restaurant in the Miraflores district, which made the dish with mushrooms instead of raw fish. Our love for the concept of mushrooms and lime juice was born.

Tonight, Mr N had his first attempt at recreating our South American experience of a mushroom ceviche. Except instead of recreating it, he decided to make a better version. I was dubious, but I have to admit that it was amazing, and the colour that was added with the sweet potato made it look ace. Definitely a winner.

Mushroom Ceviche with Sweet Potato (serves 2 people)

Ingredients
Some white mushrooms ("I just cut up as much as I thought we would want to eat." - Mr N)
1 medium-sized red onion
A few cups of spinach (Mr N: "Two handfuls...or...well, you know, some.")
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 tsp hot chilli sauce
1 tsp agave syrup
4 limes
Pinch of salt
2 handfuls green beans (Me: "How many beans?" Mr N: "I don't know.")
2 sweet potatoes
Juice of 1/2 a lemon


Method
1. Cut up the mushrooms into slices - however you like them best. Place in a bowl.
2. Dice the red onion finely and add to the mushrooms.
3. Roughly chop the spinach and add to the mushrooms and onion.
4. In a small bowl or mug, whisk the olive oil, hot sauce, agave syrup and juice of the limes, plus a pinch or so of salt.
5. Add this mixture to the mushrooms, onion and spinach, and mix.
6. Slice the sweet potatoes into slabs (Mr N cut them lengthways, into slices about 0.5cm thick). Place in a pan of boiling water and boil until cooked (15 minutes approx).
7. While the sweet potato is boiling, cut the green beans into 3-4cm pieces. Place into a sieve. When the sweet potato has about 5 minutes to go, place the sieve over the pan to steam the beans.
8. Squeeze the juice of the lemon over the beans. Some of it will go through into the pan...delicious.
9. Take the beans off the heat and stir them into the mushroom mix.
10. Drain the sweet potato.
11. Lay the sweet potato slices onto each plate. Cover with the mushroom ceviche.
12. Eet smakelijk!

Fifty Shades Of Grey

At a bar last weekend, I found myself dancing to Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines". This moment was the culmination of a month in which "Blurred Lines" entered into my life in numerous ways. I saw a video of a friend accompanying the music video with that well-known percussion instrument, the spoons. I watched a Kids React video about it. (If you've never seen Kids React: what are you even doing on this blog? YouTube it immediately.) I've heard it in cafes and on trains.

And I've heard lots and lots about it from feminists.

My feminist and equality-minded friends have had a lot to say on the subject, all negative. So when I started dancing. I couldn't help but feel guilt. Was I feeding into a societal discourse about negative social attitudes to women by engaging with the song - worse, engaging with it by being a woman dancing to it in a bar? Would my friends judge me for my actions? Was I letting down womankind?

I was, and still am, torn. The song is catchy. Yes, it's inane, repetitive, and lacking in musical integrity, but that's pop music for you. It's hard not to tap your feet to a catchy piece of music, irrespective of its subject matter. Should my feelings about the representation of women in the song and/or video genuinely affect my ability to enjoy the song on a superficial level?

Possibly the hardest part is that I don't see the song's content as standing alone in terms of media representation of women. I'm surprised by the number of people who've had strong reactions to "Blurred Lines" that have managed to laugh off "Fifty Shades of Grey" as just a junky piece of literature and no more. The idea of a 'good girl' who 'knows she wants it' is no different between the two, yet people seem to see "Fifty Shades" as a mere diversion and "Blurred Lines" as a political statement.

Sure, there are people who've been outraged at both pieces of work, but I feel that people have jumped on the bandwagon for criticising Thicke because it's easy to pull apart a 4-minute video and lyrics that consist of about 20 words repeated 10 times, rather than a full-length novel. Plus Thicke has actual boobs bobbing about (rather than just descriptions of boobs bobbing about).

On top of that, even if people felt outraged about both pieces of work, that doesn't necessarily lead them to being outraged by less popular but equally sexist books/movies/magazines/etc.. Like Microsoft, Harry Potter and Starbucks, popularity makes you an easy target. There are plenty of Mills&Boon novels, Chris Brown videos and religious texts with equally dismissive views of women being represented.

I still don't know whether I see both works as unimportant pieces of entertainment for people's diversion, or representative of deeper sexual attitudes within society. What I do know is the whole debate has been representative of the willingness of people to criticise a particular person rather than critique a widespread attitude. Robin Thicke is not the problem - and nor is EL James, or Chris Brown, or Playboy. It is the combination of these things - the fact that they are not actually one-offs - that is the true problem.

The question is how to fix it.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Reasons public transport in Den Haag is awesome:

1. There's lots of it.
     1a. There are trams, trains and buses. Many places are serviced by all three. (Mainly train stations though, since trains don't go many other places.)
     1b. I have yet to find a place in the city you can't get to using a public transport + 10 minute walk. (NOTE: this fact may suffer from selection bias.)
     1c. It comes all the time.
           1ci. During working hours, most trams come 4-5 times per hour.
           1cii. During rush hours, most buses come every 8-12 minutes.
           1ciii. Intercity trains leave about every 15 minutes. Depending on where you're going, sometimes more often.
           1civ. It starts before 6am.
           1cv. It finishes after midnight. (Not much after midnight though. So I guess it doesn't run ALL the time. You win, NYC Subway.)

2. It's cheap.
     3a. It costs €4 for me to get a fast Intercity train to Rotterdam. That's a different CITY.
     3b. It appears to be changed by the kilometre. So a return is the same as two singles. Genius.
     3c. Due to 3b, tickets all have eccentric prices like €3.21. Hilarious.

3. People use it.


Reasons public transport in Den Haag is not awesome:

1. Sometimes some annoying twat stands in the doorway with massive shopping bags while other people are trying to get on during a torrential downpour during rush hour and appears not to think to MOVE INTO THE SPACE IN FRONT OF HER.
 

Pumpkin and Feta Risotto (Vegetarian)

I've fallen off the vegan bandwagon a bit in the last few weeks. Not that I was actually on the bandwagon - sort of just following behind it and pretending like I belonged - but the last fortnight has  been much more dairy-filled than a usual 2-week period.

It was precipitated by the purchase of a pumpkin at the supermarket, which was just calling out to be made into this risotto. The feta just offsets the pumpkin so well.

Pumpkin and Feta Risotto

Ingredients

2.5 cups of rice (approximately - I measured it in the very technical units, "handfuls")
8 cups vegetable stock (again approximately - I pretty much just dissolve 2 stock cubes in 'some' water and then just add more water later on if I need it)
1 small, or half a large, onion
4 cloves garlic*
1 small pumpkin (the type I used is bright orange and about 1.5 times the size of a softball - but I have no idea what type it is since here it's just called "pompoen")
1 block of feta
A handful of basil leaves
Grated parmesan to put on top if you want extra cheesy deliciousness

Method

1. Cut the pumpkin into 1cm squares. Put in a microwave-safe bowl with 1.5 cups of water and microwave for 5 minutes. Stir and microwave for 3 minutes. Repeat and continue until the pumpkin is cooked. (You can do other things while this is happening.)
2. Dice the onion and cut the garlic into small pieces.
3. Heat some oil in a pan over medium heat.
4. Add the rice to the pan. Cook for 2-3 minutes.
5. Add the garlic and onion. Stir for 1 minute.
6. Add the stock, a little at a time (maybe 3/4 to 1 cup each pour). Each time, mix it in with the rice and wait until the liquid has absorbed. You will need to continue stirring as rice is notoriously sticky.
7. Once all the stock is used up, add the pumpkin. If the rice still isn't cooked, you can add the water that the pumpkin was cooked in too (hopefully you will because it's a waste to throw it away and it's delicious).
8. Add more water and continue absorption if still required, until rice is cooked. Remove pan from heat.
9. Cut feta into small cubes, and the basil into rough pieces, and mix in with the risotto. If it's hot enough the feta will start to melt a bit (OHMIGOD).
10. Serve.

As I've been writing this I've been thinking how delicious it would be with pine nuts too. Watch this space.

* This week I discovered fresh garlic. Amazing! I probably sound like some of those kids who thinks that tomatoes somehow grow in a can, but I genuinely had never thought about how garlic looked when it came out of the ground. If I had, I guess I might have worked it out. But I did't, and IT IS A REVELATION. Fresh garlic smells amazing, is easy to cut, and just somehow seems deliciouser. It's like a culinary Russell Brand. Only obviously that is a really poor metaphor, but I love Russell, so what the hell. I'm running with it.

The Language of Thought

Since we've lived here we've had quite a few friends come to stay. One conversation that always comes up is about language.

"So, how are you guys going, having to speak Dutch?"

The embarrassing truth is that living in The Netherlands - or, at least in the south-western part that includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag - can sometimes feel a bit like living in a part of the UK that just happens to have an odd accent. (In fairness, this also describes a lot of actual parts if the UK.) If people hear you speak English or hear you speak bad Dutch, or if you just don't look like you know what you are doing, they will speak to you in English. As if it's just natural to swap between two languages without hesitation or confusion.

When my friend Jo came to stay with us, she said how woefully inadequate she had felt travelling around Europe with a mere one language under her belt. It's true. Most Europeans learn at least three languages at school on top of their own. It is a continual failure of all English -speaking school systems that I know of that languages are not more of a requirement. Sure, in the US everyone learns Spanish, and in New Zealand you are supposed to learn another language at intermediate school, but experience tells me that people from English -speaking countries are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to communicating in other languages.

Take me, for example. After 5 years of French at high school, I travelled to France. On my first night I had to call my hostel. I dutifully started the transaction in French. After ten hesitant words on my part, the woman on the other end said rather brusquely, "Just tell me in English." Five years and I couldn't even explain that my train was running late and ask for the closing hours.

Ironically, if you ask any Dutch person if they speak English, they will inevitably give you one of two answers - 'a little bit' or 'my English is not so good'. I'm not quite sure what incredible orator they hold their language skills up against, but every Dutch person over the age of 14 speaks English to a level I can only dream about for speaking Dutch. Case in point: the second week we were here, we went shopping. In one aisle, a little old lady - 80 at least - said something to Mr N.

"Sorry, I don't speak Dutch," he said apologetically.
"Oh," said the lady. "I was just asking if you could pass me those biscuits from the top shelf."

The fact that someone who was probably born in an era when women were unlikely to attend university - or even finish high school - felt both comfortable and confident about swapping languages in a supermarket to ask a strange young man for help in his own language is amazing to me. And the fact is that everywhere you go here it's the same. Supermarket checkout operators speak English. Early childhood teachers speak English. Businessmen speak English. Even homeless people speak English. I'm not kidding.

Not even a week later, we were in a Chinese supermarket in town. As we came up to the counter, the checkout operator was speaking to someone - presumably a manager or the like - in Chinese. As we approached, she greeted us in Dutch and asked a question. We stammered out that we didn't speak Dutch, and she asked us the question again in English. I was taken aback. Within the space of a minute this girl has shown her ability to speak three languages to a level that she was confident using in front of others. I've since discovered that, apart from new immigrants, almost all immigrants here speak both Dutch and English, plus of course their home language. It is impressive to a high degree. Not that anyone can speak multiple languages, but that almost everyone here can.

Time to brush up on my French.

The Painted House

Despite my interest in reusing and recycling, I've never gotten into re-creating. My tendency has been to buy fully-formed things secondhand. Partly this has been due to lack of tools (no sewing machine to turn a granny dress into a cocktail one; no circular saw to trim the tacky bits off wooden furniture) and partly to do with lack of necessity (who needs to saw the tacky bits off a secondhand table when you already have a perfectly serviceable one already in your house?).

But then I saw these.

The timing was right. We were in a new house with no furniture. I knew I would have an income that could stretch to tools and paint and sewing machines*. And there they were, sitting in a skip below my balcony, tempting me. After an awkward conversation with the builder who was disposing of them (I say 'conversation', but since I don't speak Dutch and he didn't speak English, I mainly gestured and smiled) I bundled my new possessions up two flights of narrow, awkward Dutch stairs and into our empty living room.

10 weeks later - only 9 weeks after I told Mr N that I was going to do it - I finally started painting them. I first translated the instructions, which amounted to something like, "Mix the paint behind use. Two coats may have been necessity. To use terpentine to wash the paint brush." Which seemed to me to be easy enough. After all, my mother and father almost singlehandedly redecorated both of my childhood houses. Painting shelves would be a cinch.

I can tell you now, from experience, that high gloss acrylic paint does not paint nicely over other high gloss acrylic paint. I spent at least half the time trying to use just the right amount of pressure to get the paint on to the shelves, without wiping off half of it with the same stroke. The fact that the base colours were white and blue served only to make it more obvious that the paint was not gliding on in a smooth, thick coat as I had imagined. I ended up putting on coats that were far too thick, which ended up creating slow, thing dribbles of paint at random places across the surface.

Furthermore, the thick coats meant that my can of paint that was supposed to cover 10 square metres ended up being only just enough to paint both sets of shelves (estimated total surface area: <5 sq m) once over.

Nor did I consider the fact that painting into the corner of a set of triangular shelves would prove to be difficult and leave me with paint all over my arms (yes, I know know I should have started with the corners; it seems obvious NOW).

And finally, I didn't even contemplate the fact that something being "touch dry" did not necessarily mean it was able to be picked up and carried somewhere without ruining the paint job, so I ended up leaving the two of them outside for the night and hoping like hell that it wouldn't rain. (After a sleepless night I remembered the paint was suitable for both indoor and outdoor use, so it probably would have been fine anyway).

The next day I surveyed my handiwork. Yesterday I had been proud of my achievements. The cold hard light of a new day threw every imperfection into sharp relief. Smooth paint strokes had dried into the textures of modern art. Previously opaque surfaces shone through with glitters of blue and white, taunting my home handymanesque pride.

The shelves are now sitting in the bedroom, where they have been for the last two weeks, waiting for me to buy a new can of paint and complete the job. In the meantime I took a picture with a crappy camera to make them look more awesome (and because I didn't have a better camera). Updates to follow, if I can dust of my ego.

(*obviously not for this project specifically)

Quinoa and Green Bean Salad (Vegan)

Sometimes you walk into the kitchen and think, "I have so many ingredients but none of them really go together." Tonight was one of those nights. I dream of being the kind of chef that walks into the kitchen and considers this a challenge. I walk into the kitchen and consider this a night to eat out.

But tonight I persevered, and ended up creating something awesome, if I do say so myself. I would love to say that it's a great dish for the day before a grocery shop, but it really requires you to come to the end of the week and be left with some pretty specific ingredients in your cupboard. I suggest planning ahead, or using this recipe the one time in five years that the universe aligns and you're left with the ingredients below.

Quinoa and Green Bean Salad (serves 3-4 medium-portion eaters as a meal)

Ingredients
1.5 cups quinoa (I used red and white, but go crazy)
3 cups vegetable stock (I used bouillon cubes)
1 teaspoon dried rosemary
1-2 cloves of garlic
200g fresh green beans/runner beans (I think - can't remember how much we bought and I just used what we had)
2 capsicums/bell peppers (I used green and orange)
300-400g jar of edamame beans (if they don't come in jars in your part of the world, I assume fresh or frozen would be fine, but since I've never prepared either of those you're on your own)
3 spring onions/scallions
0.25 cups grapeseed oil (probably you could substitute this for olive oil, I just happened to have grapeseed and decided to be a bit posh even though I have no idea of the properties of oils except that they're oily)
0.25 cups olive oil
0.25 cups red wine vinegar
Juice of 1 lime (approx 2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon dried coriander (at least that's what I think it was - I'm sure that's what I bought but it smelt suspiciously like parsley)
Ground black pepper to taste

Method

1. Wash the quinoa in a sieve. It says this stops it tasting bitter. I've never noticed, but I'll say it in case you do.
2. Squash and roughly chop the garlic.
3. Put the quinoa, vegetable stock, rosemary and garlic in a pot and boil for 20 minutes. I find 20 minutes exactly is a good amount of time to boil for to absorb all the liquid, but mind it after about 15 and keep stirring as it can get a bit sticky at the bottom as the liquid level gets low.
4. Put the cooked quinoa into your serving bowl. The bowl will need to be about 3 times as large as the volume of quinoa you've made.
5. Fill the pot with water and put on the stove to boil. You don't need to wash the pot, it'll be fine.
6. While waiting for the water to boil, cut the runner beans into 3-4cm pieces.
7. Put the beans into the boiling water to blanch/cook slightly. How long for? Til you've finished cutting up the capsicums (see step 8). That's all I can tell you. How long is a piece of string?
8. Cut up the capsicums/bell peppers into 3-4cm long strips. Put the peppers in with the quinoa.
9. Drain the green beans and put in with the quinoa.
10. Drain any wash the edamame (or, if you have real, fresh edamame, do whatever you need to do with it to make it ready - I have no idea) and put in with the quinoa.
11. Cut the spring onions into small rounds and put in with the quinoa.
12. Mix the oils, vinegar and lime juice in a cup or small bowl. Tip into the quinoa.
13. Add coriander (or is it parsley?).
14. Grind in some black pepper - about 6-7 twists for me but I guess it depends on the size of your pepper shaker and your love of peppercorns.
15. Mix all ingredients together and serve.

I was trying to do some other work around the house, so the quinoa cooked while I pottered. Then, once it was done, I started doing the prep on the other ingredients. This order of events happened to be practical, and I'm sure you could prep while the quinoa was cooking. But I did find that having the quinoa cooling while I prepared meant that by the end the quinoa was warm but not hot, which was a nice temperature at which to eat it.

Enjoy! Feedback welcome.

The Shipping News

Today I read a post about Buy Nothing New Month. The idea is that you buy nothing new for a month, as a way to "reduce your carbon footprint" and "make an ecological choice". Goodness knows who makes these decisions, but apparently October is Buy Nothing New Month 2013. Whoop-dee-doo.

Sure, any effort to reduce the amount of new stuff in the world is great. But it reminds me if just how ingrained people's buying habits are. Having lived for so long with a secondhand mentality, I forget the amount of shopping that your average citizen actually does each month, and the degree to which people just assume that they need to buy new things when there are secondhand options available.

Before we moved over here, Mr N and I were travelling for three months. Not knowing whether we would actually land jobs, we brought with us only what could be carried in our backpacks - no shipping coming along later, no second suitcases filled with essentials. Arriving in a new country meant starting almost from scratch.

When we wrote to real estate agents looking for a house, many of them laughed at the idea of us furnishing our own house. "A furnished house only costs an extra 100-200 Euros a month!"/"You don't have any furniture? Then you'll need furnished."/"It costs a lot to buy furniture here you know." And then once we got the apartment, all we heard was, "Well, IKEA's going to do well this weekend, isn't it?"

In fact, we spent the weekend glorying in our luck that the local kringloop (secondhand store) was having a 50% off all furniture sale. We picked up 2 couches, a coffee table, a big wardrobe and a set of nesting tables for €120 including shipping. The next day we picked up a secondhand table and chairs for €30 from another store. Since then we have amassed a collection of cutlery, crockery, storage containers, saucepans, a set of frames, a clothes rack, a kettle, a heater and various other kitchen accoutrements, all for under €150 total.

I'm not saying that it's a perfect system. There are certain things that it's better to buy new - knives, for example, are very rarely of good quality once they arrive in a thrift shop. Ditto duvets sheets and non-stick cookware. But the cost - environmental, social and financial - of these things is nothing compared to buying a whole house's worth of stuff.

The one thing that I do feel a little strange about buying new was the bed. We saw plenty of secondhand stores with beds, but the difficulty of trying to find a bedframe, and then find a mattress to fit that wasn't disgusting, proved to be all a bit much. Coupled with the fact that we really needed something to sleep on, we gave in and bought it new.

In hindsight, the lack of fear that I might be sleeping on a pile of rat droppings covered in old vomit probably justifies it though.

Worm Farm/Vermicompost

Moving into our place here has been a big change. It's the first time in my life I've ever lived in apartment. New Zealand just doesn't have apartment living. I mean, apartments exists, and people do live in them, but it's not that common. Most people - even students - live in detached houses. I have lived my whole life with a separate laundry room, a garage, and a back yard.

So moving into an apartment has required some lifestyle changes. Washing my woollens in a bucket in the bathroom, for example. Storing my tools in my living room cupboard. These kinds of things I can reconcile myself to. But not having a garden is a whole other story all together. I just can't help but ask incredulous questions of other apartment dwellers. So you're telling me that if I want to grow vegetables I have to rent an allotment, some distance from my house? And then I have to take all my gardening tools on a tram, and then bring them, and my dirty self, home again on the tram when it's over? And once I harvest anything I grow, I have to cart that back on the tram too? And where do I compost?

The last one has been the biggest sticking point. I'm happy not to garden. I did garden at my last house, but not passionately, and not well. However, I did compost. Everything. And every dripping, smelly rubbish bag that I have carted out of this apartment in the last six weeks has only made it more upsetting that my days of garden ownership are stuck in New Zealand.

So I decided to make a worm farm.

Vermicomposting is something I've never done, but the joys of the internet is that all the instructions you need for anything is just twenty websites with conflicting suggestions away. I duly researched my options and planned out my new system. And this weekend I put it in to action.

It didn't go entirely smoothly, I have to confess. I got my two plastic stacking boxes home, and discovered that I had no implement with which to make drainage holes. I ended up carving holes into it with our new kitchen knife. (Mr N still doesn't know this.) Pleased with myself (but worried about the resulting efficacy of the knife) I prepared the box with ripped up newspaper and the remains of the soil from our flagging basil plant. I proudly opened my package of worms (it still seems weird to me that you can post a bag of worms to someone) and introduced them to their new habitat.

The next morning, there were 15 worms, slumbering away in a dessicated death, strewn across the living room floor, and 100 or so trying to clamber out the airholes of my bin.

What had I done? Not one of the conflicting ideas from vermicomposting websites had even suggested the possibility of renegade worms. Back to the internet I went, only to discover that when they say "add a few handfuls of soil to your bin before introducing the worms", what they do not mean is "put in some soil that is full of chemical fertiliser that your worms will hate". The basil plant leftovers had apparently been a poor choice of soil - at least, that was the only explanation I could find for their sudden desire to hang out by my TV.

Fortunately I work in a building with a large outdoor area, so today I went and took a few handfuls of compost from the pile out the back and cycled home with it in a brown paper bag to appease my new pets. It remains to be seen whether this is the real cause of their hatred or whether they simply prefer fake wooden laminate to newspaper shreddings and soil.

All things considered, it hasn't gone that badly, and I'm hopeful that this is just a glitch on the way to a fully functioning and awesome vermicompost. More updates to follow. Provided I don't get eaten alive by vengeful worms in my sleep.

Butter Chicken/Chickpeas (Vegan)

For a long time I've been making a vegetarian variation on Butter Chicken: Butter Chickpeas. It's full of cream and butter, which makes it delicious...but not particularly vegan. So now that we live in a comparative land of plenty for vegetarian products, I thought I'd play around with a few other ingredients. Tonight was the first test of the new recipe, and it was rad. So here we go:

Vegan Butter Chicken (feeds 2-3)

Ingredients

1 medium-sized yellow onion
3-5 cloves of garlic
4 teaspoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons cooking oil
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons garam masala
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon paprika
3-4 tablespoons tomato paste
2 medium-sized tomatoes
1 cup vegetable stock (I use stock/boullion cubes, but I'm sure packet or homemade stock would be fine)
Vegetarian chicken pieces (as many as you like - depends on whether you want your meal with a high sauce:meat ratio, or if you're all about the fake chicken)
3/4 cup of plain soy yoghurt (or thereabouts)
Rice for everyone!

Method (takes 45 mins-1 hour if you have nothing prepared in advance)

1. Dice the onion into small pieces.
2. Mince the garlic, or, if you're living in a new country and you don't have anything other than a knife to prepare things, cut up some garlic into really, really small pieces.
3. Repeat number 2, but with the ginger.
4. Put the onion, garlic and ginger into a pan with the cooking oil and cook over medium heat until the onion has softened.
5. Add all the spices. Cook for 3-4 more minutes until things smell super-delicious.
6. Mix in the tomato paste and vegetable stock. I suggest doing the stock first as it seems the paste tends to stick if you put it in without extra water.
7. Turn down the heat to medium-low. Leave to simmer.
8. While waiting, dice the tomatoes finely. Add to pan.
9. Add fake chicken pieces.
10. Leave to simmer for at least 20 minutes. Check on it during this time to see if it needs more water. Alternatively, add an extra 3/4 cup of water at the start and leave it to simmer down to a thicker consistency. To be honest I'm not great with simmering times as I often get distracted doing other things (YouTube, sex, reading online comics) so I just use guesswork and additional water until I'm ready to eat.
11. Prepare the rice. Depending on the way you cook rice, you'll need to time the completion of this step with the end of the simmering stage. Don't panic if you forget. Just add a bit more water to the sauce-and-fake-chicken and leave it a-simmering until your rice is done.
12. A few minutes before the rice is done, mix the yoghurt into the sauce-and-fake-chicken (there should be a better word for this). You may wish to turn up the heat slightly as the yoghurt will cool down the meal significantly and can take a few minutes to heat up. Today I used soy yoghurt that had been in the fridge 10 days instead of the recommended 5. I don't kniw if this helped or not.
13. Serve and feel proud of your achievements.

Next time I'll refine and post a photo. Until then, let me know if you try it. I'm up for improvements if you have any.

East of Eden

In Auckland, New Zealand (my home town), there is a great cafe called Revel. They are very much in the mode of "socially conscious business", and I once got into a conversation with the owner and manager, Jeff, about why he chooses to use fair trade and free range products.

His answer: "Once you know that a better option exists, it's hard to choose the worse option."

This rang so true for me, as my path to becoming vegetarian was very much directed by my choosing to seek out information on meat production. Initially I just took in the information and continued eating meat, justifying my choice by saying I "wasn't ready", that I would do it "when I moved out of home", that I didn't know how to cook vegetarian food. In reality, I just liked the taste of meat, and couldn't really imagine parting with it. (I also liked the fact that my mum cooked for me - yes, most nights until I was 24 - and was too damned lazy to cook my own separate meals.)

But I began to realise that I was feeling what my Stage 1 psychology paper had informed me was 'cognitive dissonance'.  My actions were at odds with my thoughts. The more I read and watched, the more I realised that I couldn't eat something when I knew that there was a "better" (read: less cruel, more ethical) choice available. Even though it was tempting to consider only the gustatory pleasure - I still miss the taste of meat immensely - I simply couldn't justify overlooking the moral aspects of meat production that I found so inhumane.

But now I am up against a new ethics-enjoyment disparity: dairy products.

The longer I've been vegetarian, the stronger I feel in my choice to become one. Every bit of new information I come across only serves to back up my decision to cut meat from my diet. But it has also brought me into contact with literature about veganism, which has taken me down the same path as my initial forays into vegetarian literature: a sense of guilt, a want to change, a feeling that my current actions are supporting something that is morally questionable.

However, unlike vegetarianism, I am writing this from the midst of my vegan transition turmoil: without the benefit of hindsight, without the strength that you find in having committed to something, and without the sureness of purpose that comes with defining oneself as a 'vegetarian' or 'vegan' (or, for that matter, anything else). I want to be vegan, and I really feel that all the evidence points in that direction, but (and I feel sick and pathetic saying it, but I can't help but know the truth) I still love cheese, and sour cream, and using butter in my baking, and meringues. The pleasure of cooking with these ingredients and the taste of these foods is so, so hard to give up, and I can't fully imagine a life without them; not yet, anyway.

I thought that moving to a new country would be a way to break free from the "well, that's the way I've always done it" mentality, but instead it allows for guilt-reducing justifications: "I don't know what the word for 'vegan' is in Dutch"/"I don't know which stores sell agar-agar/soy yoghurt/vegan cheese"/"I'm too nervous to use my still meagre language skills to ask for help"/"I don't know any other vegans".

And worst of all: what is conjured up in your head when you think of Holland? You might be forgiven for thinking first of tulips, bikes and marajuana (all quite correct). But if tourist shops are anything to go by, IT IS ALL ABOUT CHEESE. I am not kidding. There is cheese everywhere in this country. Mini cheeses. Maxi cheeses. Specialist cheese shops. Cheeses that are names after entire towns (thanks Gouda and Edam). And I love cheese. I love it. I love that it goes with so many meals, and that it comes in so many types, and that it tastes so delicious on a slice of fresh bread...and halloumi. Oh halloumi. Oh...just...let's not even go there.

And so, here I am, struggling again with cognitive dissonance, with hedonism vs. morality, and with whether I really want to admit this to Teh Internets in a way that allows for critique and criticism. But I figure that other people must be fighting the same internal battles as me, and it doesn't hurt to share.

Waiting for Godot

Welcome, as yet non-existent reader.

This is new for both of us, you and me. Here I am, in a new city, living in a new apartment, writing a new blog. You have discovered this new blog, with not-so-new-but-hopefully-interestingly-presented-content, and now have a new reason to get up in the morning. All the new stuff.

Actually, I wish I were that fascinating, that people would get up in the morning simply to read about how I tried and failed to cook a four-layer trifle cake or construct an ecologically sound argument for plastic containers, but I suspect that the life of an almost-30, environmentalist vegetarian expat in The Netherlands living with her husband in a nice apartment and pretending to know a out music may lack sufficient excitement and suspense to make people desperate to catch up on this blog over their morning coffee. Still, you never know. People find The Alchemist compelling, so there's just no accounting for taste.

You may wonder why someone who is writing her first blog post to the adult equivalent of an imaginary friend would even bother to start a blog. The answer is 1 part self-aggrandisement, 1 part travel diary, and 1 part desperate desire to be part of a club of sweet-ass bloggers from around the world that make the internet a better place.

So there you have it. The beginnings of 's-Veganhage: A blog (hopefully) about moving to The Netherlands, trying to be a vegan, and an undying love for The Datsuns.