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.