Serenity in the Storm

General Exam: Day 1

Today was the first of four days of my general exams. The generals are the exams which allow you to advance to ‘candidacy’ for the PhD in our department. When/if I pass them, I will get to put a PhC after my name! In other departments, I believe this is sometimes called ABD (All But Dissertation). In any case, once I’ve gotten over this hurdle, I will be able to proceed to researching for, and then writing, my dissertation.

The generals process began with my writing a statement. In this statement, I included information about what I had accomplished so far in my academic career. The bulk of the statement is dedicated to outlining three areas of expertise within geography and how these areas inform my dissertation project. My dissertation committee is comprised of four faculty members (three geographer and one anthropologist). During the generals, each committee member provides a question relating to the content of the generals statement and the student is typically given one day per question to write. I have four committee members, which means four questions over four days. Each answer is expected to be about 10-12 pages, fully referenced.

In preparation for this massive exam experience, Eric and I spent the weekend grocery shopping, tidying the house and setting up a well-organized desk (read: kitchen table) with all the most essential books, articles, pens, paper clips, my computer (with extra monitor for easy reading of multiple documents), and of course my animal figurine friends–the armadillo is from Peru, a gift from one of my committee members for good luck and the chicken and the pig are gifts from my dad from a trip he took to Brazil:

Eric has been giving me statues of Ganesh for as long as I’ve known him, and I think we’ve even been given statues from friends and family as well. Ganesh is the ‘remover of obstacles’ and the deity of intellect and wisdom–definitely a good companion for this adventure:

So far, the desk is working out really well, with lots of space for extra books, snacks and feline visitors:

Yesterday, in final preparation for the exam, I spent the afternoon taking care of the most crucial bit–the FOOD! I might have gone a little overboard with snacks and good meal options for the week, but I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t get stressed out about what to eat. So I cut up lots of components for some meals including the Fresh Spring Roll Vermicelli Salad:

IMAG0445 — Fresh Spring Roll Vermicelli Salad

My most favorite Kale Salad:

The life-saving Raw Fruit/Nut Trail Snacks that I made this summer for our awesome hike in the Olympic Mountains:

Raw Fruit Nut Snacks — Raw Fruit/Nut Trail Snacks

I also stocked up on avocados as a special treat for the week:

And I tried making kale chips for the first time–a made-up recipe for Tamari Sesame Kale Chips:

After cutting up and putting into containers the ingredients for the salads:

I also have for the week:

grapes, black beans, hummus, tofu, tempeh, celery, carrots, 2 Lara Bars, 2 packs of Vega Whole Foods Meal Optimizer powder (never tried it, but thought it would be good for smoothies this week), frozen bananas in the freezer (for the Just Banana Frozen Dessert), oatmeal fixings, puffed kamut, puffed millet, field roast, bread, peanut butter, homemade blackberry jam, orange juice, plain almond milk yogurt, apples, bananas (not frozen), dried fruit, nuts, and some pumpkin ale, along with some other things which I’m sure I’m forgetting.

Now, what you’ve all been dying for, I know… The question for the day!!

Question 1: Feminist scholarship has emphasized the importance of intersectional analysis to reveal the overlapping workings of race, class, gender, and sexuality. How has intersectional thinking enriched the scholarship on multi-species encounters? In your answer, please discuss additional directions that intersectional animal studies scholarship should pursue.

Today I woke up at 3:30 am and started writing. I wrote for 12 hours, finishing the first question at 3:30 pm. I know it might sound crazy, but I actually had fun!

Now, off to relax and step away from the computer until tomorrow morning when I do it all over again.

Tamari Sesame Kale Chips

I like kale chips as a snack, but had never tried making them until today. Partly I was inspired by Gena at Choosing Raw, who posted a kale chip recipe this week, and partly I was inspired by our trip to the vegetable stand this weekend where organic kale was only $0.59 per bunch (we ended up with 5 bunches in the fridge!). I decided to make up my own recipe for the kale chips, as Gena’s looked delicious, but a little higher maintenance than I was ready for. Often, kale chips are made in a dehydrator, but since I don’t have a dehydrator, I made them in the oven. They are super easy and quite tasty, though I made them a bit spicy, so you may want to adjust the cayenne if you’re sensitive to heat!

The Recipe

5-6 cups kale, cleaned and torn into bite-sized pieces

2 tablespoon low-sodium tamari

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1/8 teaspoon cayenne (or to taste)

Preheat oven to 350 F. In a small bowl, combine all ingredients (except kale). Mix the sauce around. In a large mixing bowl, combine the kale and the sauce and stir well until all kale pieces are coated with the seasoning sauce:

Spread kale evenly on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes. In the middle of baking, use a spatula to fluff the kale so that it cooks evenly.

The edges will brown, but you don’t want them to burn, so watch them carefully. The kale should be crispy. Remove from oven and enjoy!

If you don’t eat them all in one sitting, store in an airtight container. You can certainly play around with the seasonings. I was thinking after I made them that some sesame seeds added to the mix would have been good. You could also do a cumin-coriander version, or a curried version, or a sweet cinnamon version or….? Any ideas?

Week in Review: Arrival of Fall

This week really has felt like fall in Seattle. The leaves are definitely turning. The days are mixed with foggy rain and crisp sunny weather. We’ve spent the weekend doing some last minute studying and preparation of the house for my qualifying exams, which I am starting on Tuesday! Yikes! (More about the exams tomorrow).

Monday October 24th 2011: The week started with a lovely walk around Greenlake on a crisp day with changing leaves–the Walk for Farm Animals!

Tuesday October 25th 2011: I wrote a rather gushing post about my delight at receiving my VegNews in the mailbox. Such a fun publication!

Wednesday October 26th 2011: A warm, filling meal ready in minutes– Field Roast and Kale.

Thursday October 27th 2011: Will Potter is coming to Portland OR on November 10th to give a talk. Author of Green is the New Red, he is really interesting journalist–not to be missed if you’re in the area!

Friday October 28th 2011: Maizy and I spent Friday morning making some carrot-peanut butter cookies for dogs. She has been enjoying them all weekend and I think we were both happy with how they turned out.

Saturday October 29th 2011: A halloween post…Vegan-friendly halloween candy list. Happy Halloween. We got some pumpkins at the vegetable stand yesterday and put them on our front stoop. Oh, and $0.59 per bunch for organic kale at the vegetable stand. We now have 5 bunches in the fridge. I bet you can guess what I’m going to be eating this week!

Hope you all had a lovely and restful weekend! Anyone do anything especially fun?

Halloween!

Halloween is happening in just two days! If you are handing out halloween candy this year, I wanted to share a list of vegan-friendly halloween candy (I’m making no claims about the other ethics involved–many of them are produced or owned by large corporations, and where does that sugar come from anyway? Who produces it?). Anyway, VegNews put together this list. I can’t wait to go to the vegetable stand post-halloween and buy a bunch of pumpkins on discount to cook up! This year, we’re not planning anything for halloween–though I would like to carve a pumpkin if I can find the time. A couple of years ago, I spent weeks before halloween sewing a patchwork dress in order to be Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I even got white tights and a tight white long-sleeved shirt and sewed black stiches on them to imitate her pale, stitched up skin. I had gotten together a Jack Skellington mask and outfit for Eric, so we could coordinate. Then, about an hour before we were scheduled to go to this costume party, we both got the overwhelming urge to stay home. One of these days, I’m going to wear that costume!! Yesterday, I tried making a vegan salted caramel, and was very excited to post about it in the halloween/ autumn spirit, but it was kind of a flop. It did not set up the way I was hoping and ended up being quite gooey–though it tasted great. I will work on the recipe and post it when I’ve perfected it.

What do you do to celebrate halloween? Have you carved pumpkins? Are you dressing up?

Carrot-Peanut Butter Treats for Dogs

It’s been a while since I posted the ‘dehydrated yam treats for dogs’ recipe and I thought I would spice up Maizy’s food repertoire with a new kind of treat. I just used what I had in the house and improvised and they turned out pretty nicely!

I wanted to make a cookie-type treat without using wheat. Wheat is a common allergen for dogs (like it is for people) and I didn’t want to risk setting off Maizy’s skin troubles. This recipe uses oat flour instead. If you know that the canine in your life is not sensitive to wheat, feel free to use wheat flour. If you want to use oat flour and don’t want to buy it, you can always grind up regular oats in the food processor.

Note: Use unsalted peanut butter. We tend to buy fresh-ground peanut butter in bulk made from only fresh-ground unsalted peanuts. Apparently peanuts often contain a type of mold that is not healthy for us to eat. If you get the freshly ground butter, it decreases the chances of getting moldy peanuts, since the hopper is clear and you can see the peanuts inside! Also, you can substitute the carrot for pureed pumpkin, butternut squash or sweet potato.

The Recipe:

Makes about 3 dozen treats

3 mid-sized carrots, or 1/2 cup pureed pumpkin, butternut squash or sweet potato

1/3 cup unsalted peanut butter (no additives)

1 cup oat flour

4 Tbls ground flax seed

4 Tbls nutritional yeast

1/3-1/2 cup water

Preheat oven to 350 F. Chop the carrots into chunks. Heat a small pot of water and boil carrots until soft when pierced with a fork (about 15 minutes or so) [Note: if you are using already cooked pumpkin, butternut, or sweet potato, skip this step!]:

When the carrots are cooked, drain the water and toss the carrots in a large mixing bowl. Mash with a fork until they are a soft, mushy paste:

Add the peanut butter and stir to combine. Add the flour, flax, and nutritional yeast and mix together with fork. Add water gradually (you may not need the full 1/2 cup or you may need a little more). Make sure the mixture is fully mixed (the peanut butter has a tendency to clump). It should be the consistency of cookie dough. When you’ve achieved this consistency, roll the dough into small balls (about 1″ diameter) and place on a greased (use vegetable oil) or nonstick baking sheet:

Your hands will be messy after this. Feel free to let your canine friend(s) lick the dough off your hands:

IMAG1437 — Maizy is a good kitchen helper

Next, using a fork, press the dough into flat cookies, just like you would when making peanut butter cookies for humans. Like so:

IMAG1443 — flatten the dough into cookie shapes

When the oven is preheated, send the cookies to oven to be baked:

Bake for 25-30 minutes. Remove from pan and cool on a cooling rack:

Let the cookies/treats cool completely before letting any one sample them. When they’re cool, dig in:

Notice the blurriness of Maizy’s tail in the background of that photo. She was very excited to try them. She ate 5 (yikes!) and now she is taking a nap curled up on the couch. Store the treats in a dry container in the fridge. They should definitely last about a week or so. Happy friday!

Will Potter in Portland, OR

GitNR — Potter's latest book, Green is the New Red

I had the pleasure of going with Eric and my dad earlier this year to hear Will Potter speak at the lovely Elliott Bay Bookstore on Capital Hill in Seattle. The event at Elliott Bay was intimate and Potter was intelligent, thought-provoking and politically on point. Potter is a journalist whose latest book, Green is the New Red, explores the way environmental activism (including animal rights activism) has been branded in federal legislation and in popular media discourse as ‘eco-terrorism’. Questioning this distinction and the broader implications of treating these forms of activism as terrorism, Potter is doing critical work to challenge what threatens to be the status quo if concerned citizens don’t stand against our right to peacefully oppose the injustices with which we (humans, animals and the environment) are confronted. These issues are timely, in particular, in light of the current Occupy Movement and the growing pressure for the voice of the people to be heard.

Will Potter will be speaking at Pacific University in Portland, OR in a couple of weeks. For those in or around the Portland area, I would highly recommend it. He is a great speaker who needs to be heard! He also has a website/blog with interesting info and updates, which I enjoy following. Details below are directly from Pacific University’s website:

Award-winning journalist and author Will Potter will deliver Pacific University’s sixth annual In Your Face Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in Marsh Hall’s Taylor Auditorium on the Forest Grove campus.

Potter’s talk is titled Green is the New Red: How Corporations Turned Environmentalists into ‘Eco-Terrorists.’

Admission is free and a light reception will follow.

Potter’s latest book, Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, looks at the use of anti-terrorism resources to target environmentalists and animal rights activists.

He examines how the word ‘eco-terrorist’ is used to push a political agenda, instill fear, intimidate and silence dissent, creating a “Green Scare” not unlike the “Red Scare” against Communists that preceded it.

Potter is an expert on the nexus between environmentalism and terrorism. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, and Vermont Law Review. He has also testified before the U.S. Congress about his environmental reporting.

The lecture is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Student Senate (CASSS) and the Department of Politics and Government.

Previous “In Your Face” lecturers include Christian Parenti, Robin Hahnel, Dave Zirin, Judy Giles, and Heather Rogers.

Field Roast and Kale

I suppose you can tell by now that I am a huge fan of kale. We always have at least two bunches of kale in fridge at all times and I throw it in everything. Looking back at the non-dessert recipes I’ve posted, they almost all include kale. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a way to fit kale into some dessert recipes too! Any ideas?

I generally try to limit my consumption of meat substitutes, both because they are generally very processed and because I am generally not a fan. Field Roast may be the one exception–all of the ingredients are recognizable. I don’t use it in dishes frequently, but there is one dish I like to make that hits the spot–‘field roast and kale’. This emerged as a desperation lunch one day when I realized that literally the only thing in the fridge to eat was field roast and kale. I was so hungry and just chopped everything up, threw it in a pan, steamed it up and was eating 5 minutes later. One good thing about field roast is the protein content. If you’re feeling at all protein-deprived, one field roast sausage has between 21 and 26 grams of protein (depending on the flavor you buy). You’d have to eat 4-5 eggs to get that same amount of protein. And field roast, of course, doesn’t have any cholesterol. Plus, they’re made right here in Seattle, so it’s supporting a local company.

Usually I make this dish with either the ‘apple-sage’ or the ‘italian’ field roast, but this time I noticed that there was a new flavor at the grocery store–‘frankfurters’:

The Recipe

Serves 1

2 cups kale, chopped

1 field roast sausage (flavor of your choice)

garlic powder

salt & pepper

water

Chop up the kale and field roast.

Put the kale and field roast in a large pan with a splash of water (just enough to lightly cover the bottom of the pan). Add a sprinkle of garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste. Cover and let steam for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. I like to cook the kale only slightly and heat the field roast just enough to warm it all the way through. If you like your kale more cooked, simply cook it longer.

This meal has lots of vitamins and protein and is so easy to make and satisfying to eat. What are your go-to meals that are packed with nutrients (raw or cooked)?

Any ideas for incorporating kale into desserts?

VegNews in the Mailbox

Remember when we used to actually get mail in the mailbox that we actually cared about? The art of writing letters on paper and having them delivered to loved ones by the U.S. Postal Service has quickly been replaced by more immediate communication–email, texting, the telephone. I love a good letter in the mailbox and I keep a little stash of stationary, sealing wax, and a seal for special communications. But in general, I bring in the mail each day from our rusty little mailbox with little enthusiasm and sometimes I don’t even bother to thumb through the stack of junk before tossing it on yesterday’s junk mail and bills. This mail-apathy is delightfully interrupted when VegNews arrives! Published only every two months, the wait time in between the issues is agonizingly long, but so worth it. VegNews is a vegan magazine dedicated to reporting on all things vegan–news, books, films, politics, recipes, restaurants, travel, health–an all-around delight for any vegan, vegetarian or person interested in learning about a vegan lifestyle. When I see that VegNews sticking out of the mail box, my heart skips a beat. Honestly. I savor it and ration it and only let myself read a couple of pages at a time. Sometimes I can make it last a week that way before I settle into waiting for the next issue. I save all the past VegNews issues I’ve gotten and have a nice stack for rainy days. When my sister was visiting this summer, we were talking about Baltimore (where she lives) and I suddenly remembered that VegNews had done a feature on Baltimore a while back and I scurried to my pile of magazines and actually found the article for her to read. VegNews has a website with lots of great information, too. Check it out for yourself. A mentor/friend of mine gave me a subscription several years ago at a time when I didn’t know very many vegans and was just starting to shift to a vegan lifestyle, and I was feeling quite isolated. VegNews really helped me through that time because they are devoted to making veganism fun and provide a kind of community dedicated to being kinder to animals, the planet, and each other. What can be better than that?

Do you read VegNews as religiously as I do? What are your thoughts?

Walk for Farm Animals

After a couple of months of fundraising for Farm Sanctuary’s Walk for Farm Animals, yesterday was finally the day to walk! The fundraising period is open till next week, but the walk is complete! Eric, Maizy and I set out first thing Sunday morning to head up to Greenlake where the walk was being held. Our eagerness to get out the door and be at the walk on time meant that we got there almost an hour early. We walked around and Eric got a large cup of coffee at a nearby coffee shop. The three of us were walking as part of Team Blitzen (Blitzen was one of three calves rescued from a stockyard) and I made a sign so we could hopefully meet up with our other teammates (whom I had yet to meet):

We only ended up meeting up with two of the other team members, but they were both very nice and I really enjoyed talking with them as we walked around Greenlake. Many people at the walk seemed like-minded in their love of animals and their commitment to vegan/vegetarian lifestyles. One of the walkers was holding a large poster advertising the film Earthlings, which you can watch online for free. A lovely bunch:

IMAG1362 — Seattle Walk for Farm Animals

I also finally got to meet Eric’s co-worker David and his wife Holly (a reader of this blog!) and their family–including their dog, Sam. There were so many dogs at the walk and Maizy was a little excited to get walking!

Even dogs who had trouble getting around were able to participate in the walk:

It was a beautiful fall day to walk around Greenlake with the leaves changing and that crisp fall air.

I’m so glad to have participated in the walk and to have raised some funds for the amazing work Farm Sanctuary does. Thank you to all of you lovely readers who donated to the walk!! If you haven’t donated and you would like to, the fundraising period closes on October 30. You can click here to reach my fundraising page. Happy Monday! Until tomorrow…

Week in Review: Vegan Food and Political Action

This week I recapped my wonderful trip to New York City. After returning from my trip, I spent this week playing catch-up on my school work and home responsibilities. It’s crazy how I can be gone for only four days and still get so behind on so many things!

Monday October 17th: Recap of Day 1 in New York. Delicious vegan eats, lace hats, and good friends! Awesome chili and cornbread!

Tuesday October 18th: Day 2 in New York. All about the NYU Animal Studies: Changing the Subject? conference.

Wednesday October 19th: Recap of Days 3 and 4 in New York. More great eats and the story of Dick Hughes and Vietnam, and the effects of Agent Orange.

Thursday October 20th: The upsetting news of the ~50 animals shot and killed in Ohio this week. Something we should all take action on to change legislation around ‘exotic animals’.

Friday October 21st: Inspired by the chanterelles at the vegetable stand this week, I posted a recipe for mushroom and kale risotto. Yum!

This morning I am off to do the Walk for Farm Animals finally! I’ve been fundraising for a couple of months and I’ve raised $900 so far. The fundraising period ends next week (October 30), but the walk is today. Eric, Maizy and I will be walking in honor of all of the farmed animals who suffer so much for humans’ use of them and for those who have found sanctuary from suffering. Happy Sunday everyone!