Voyager 2 Gets "Close" to Uranus Pumpkin-Tangelo Curry

This is my first post in almost eight months. Anybody out there?

On this day in 1986, the Voyager 2 space probe passed within 50,600 miles of Uranus, discovering the moons Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Perdita, and Puck A real diversity of names! Are all moons women? Oh wait, what's Puck doing in there? That trickster. Apparently Miranda is an exceptional lady; might even have reformed after being obliterated at some point. Uranus's rings, which are younger than the planet herself, might be the remains of a moon destroyed by violent impact or "tidal effects," which is the name for what happens when a celestial body's gravitational force is so overwhelmed by another's that the body completely disintegrates. Oh, the metaphorical possibilities! Voyager 2 sent us back some incredible photos, including this blue doozy. That pic you're looking at was snapped at least 1.6 billion miles from the planet you're dallying on. (If you'd like to get a move on, try Mars in ten years.)

Voyager 2 contains a Golden Record (as does Voyager 1, which was launched after Voyager 2 but outstripped her in the race to no place). The cover has these incredible markings that might give someone the suggestion that what's inside contains something that can be extracted through some process of transmutation. The record itself bears the title "The Sounds of Earth," as if extraterrestrials are going to be able to decode four English words in isolation. Jimmy Carter says: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours." Amen. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that selected the record's sounds and images. In addition to greetings spoken in a bunch of languages (including whale—no mention of which whales), there are songs of which the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" is not one, because EMI didn't want the material traveling anywhere that didn't have strict copyright laws in place already. (Maybe.)

Okay, so on to the recipe.

prep time: 1 hour
serves: too many

INGREDIENTS:
some rice
2 small eggplants, cubed
2 small sweet potatoes, cubed
1 can of puréed pumpkin
1 can of coconut milk
1 can of cannellini beans
2 tomatoes, sliced
1 tangelo, peeled and relieved of seeds
most of a head of garlic, sliced
nutritional yeast (optional)
oil
salt
spices (make your own blend or just use pre-mixed curry spice)
cayenne pepper

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Cook some rice. I used brown sweet rice.

2. Sauté the sweet potatoes in oil in a large pot over medium-high heat while you finishing prepping. Toss in the eggplant and tangelo for a minute or two, then add pumpkin and coconut milk. Cover and reduce to medium heat.

3. Add tomatoes, garlic, and seasonings at some point. Don't wait too long, if at all. Then sit back and let everything mingle.

Okay, and now here's Malachi, my roommate's wonderful rescue kitten!

Oh, and then here's an album I released in December. And a film review published last week.

Paradise Lost Risotto

April 27, 1667: "The blind and impoverished John Milton sells the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10." Oi vey. Read the poem here.

Used this risotto recipe. Also took K.'s advice and made risotto cakes with the leftovers (add flour and a bit of oil).

First Public School Seitan Dinner

The first US public school (and oldest school in the country), Boston Latin School, was founded on April 23, 1635. Three cheers for public education! Hang on, "the Boston Latin School was a bastion for educating the sons of the Boston elite..." Humph. The school is one of the best in the country and still requires that students study Latin. The school logo (insignia?) is of Remus and Romulus suckling at the teats of their wolf mother. Further oddity: "President George W. Bush visited Boston Latin School after signing the No Child Left Behind Act earlier that day." How droll.

I used Isa's seitan recipe for this meal, and it worked beautifully. (I used it once before and screwed it up because I was more like boiling, rather than simmering, the seitan.) Cooked the rice with a little bit of mushroom broth, steamed the broccoli rabe with some garlic, and blended up ginger, lemon juice, almond milk, and tahini for the sauce.

First Motion Picture House Ethiopian Food

Five days ago, my friend K. and I made three Ethiopian dishes. We used these recipes, roughly: (1) http://allrecipes.com/recipe/ethiopian-cabbage-dish/; (2) http://www.ethiopianrestaurant.com/recipes.html; (3) http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=1364702. I also made banana bread using this recipe, subbing spelt flour and cornmeal for the the all-purpose flour, and coconut oil and sunflower seed oil for canola (way better!): http://dairyfreecooking.about.com/od/breadsbakery/r/vegan_banana_bread_recipe.htm.

April 14 is also the day the first commercial motion picture house opened (1894, NYC). It sported ten Kinetoscopes, which were cabinets with a window for viewing films that were played by a strip of perforated film passing over a lamp with a high-speed shutter. Must have been a small theater! I wonder if there was popcorn for sale. I wonder if people hung out and talked about the films. I wonder how long the longest film they showed was. The shortest, too. I wonder how expensive each film was, and if they were priced differently depending on anticipated demand. I wonder how many workers the theater employed. I wonder who owned the theater. I wonder how long it was in business. I wonder how many children went to the theater. I wonder when the last person with a memory of the theater died.

Cookbook Review: Quick and Easy Vegan Slow Cooking (Carla Kelly)

Two and a half weeks ago, someone from The Experiment (a publisher) emailed me to see if I wanted a review copy of Carla Kelly's new cookbook, Quick and Easy Vegan Slow Cooking. Super flattering and exciting! In case you couldn't discern from the cute dotted outline on the cover, the titular slow cooking refers specifically to cooking with a slow cooker. I don't own and have never used a slow cooker. I'm not sure I've ever even eaten a meal prepared in a slow cooker. Luckily, QEVSC includes a nice introductory section on slow cookers, as well as sections on the ingredients and techniques used in the book. Very amateur-friendly, which I appreciate. The back matter includes two indices, one of recipes by cooking time (capped off with those 10 hours and over!) and one of recipes by allergen / ingredient. Pretty gluten free- and soy free-friendly. I also enjoyed the acknowledgements, both for the list of names of recipe testers (& their favorite recipes), and for these sentences: "My dad for behind-the-scenes proofreading and pedantically changing the words (which I often then changed back). My mum for keeping my dad able to do so!" Nothing like backhanded gratitude in print! (I might very well be that dad in another several decades…)

As for the recipes, I didn't test any. I wasn't about to adapt a slow cooker recipe for the stovetop. But I read through some of them, and they look good. If I had a slow cooker I'd definitely use this book. If you are a vegan who owns a slow cooker, this book would make dinner preparation mindlessly easy (two thumbs up). That said, from what I can tell the recipes all follow the same basic sequence: 1. prepare the ingredients; 2. put them in the slow cooker in the correct order, if they cook differently; and 3. wait. Which got me thinking that almost all the recipes I post here follow a sequence that goes something like: 1. prepare the ingredients; 2. put them in a pot or pan in the correct order, if they cook differently; and 3. stir &/or season. Not too tough if you already know what kinds of foods you like to eat (or have foods slowly going bad in your refrigerator / on your counter top). 

Anyway, I recommend this book (in faith) for new vegans, vegans new to cooking, and cooks new to slow cookers. I also recommend checking out Carla Kelly's blog, The Year of the Vegan.

Heaven's Gate Soup and Shrooms

On March 26, 1997, thirty-nine bodies were found in a rented mansion in California. Marshall Applewhite and 38 members of his UFO-themed spiritual evolution cult had committed carefully planned ritual suicide in three groups, with cyanide, arsenic, and plastic bags. They were trying to board a spaceship in order to escape a soon-to-be-recycled Earth. What a strange place to be.

This is a good recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1 1/4 c. Jacob's cattle beans

1/2 bundle kale leaves, chopped with stems

1/2 bundle watercress, chopped

5 c. water + at least 1 c. water

miso

cumin

coriander

cayenne

couple handfuls Baby Bella mushrooms, sliced

1/2 red onion, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

DIRECTIONS

1. Bring water and beans to boil and reduce to a simmer.

2. After 30 minutes, add kale and seasoning.

3. After another 30 minutes, add watercress.

4. Saute mushrooms with onion in oil over medium heat. Toss in garlic for a few minutes at the end.

Special cookbook review coming soon!

McMartin Preschool Ritual Satanic Abuse Trial Tacos

On March 22, 1984, teachers and administrators at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, CA were charged with sexual abuse of children, as well as various bizarre things like "flying through the air." Well, that probably wasn't a formal charge, but it was nonetheless claimed by a mother of one of the kids that one of the teachers, Ray Buckey, could fly. Incredible, yet not incredible, that the most expensive criminal trial in US history began with the unbelievable allegations of one woman, Judy Johnson, who suffered from acute paranoid schizophrenia and who died from complications of chronic alcoholism before the preliminary hearing concluded. The whole thing is really confusing and sad. Ray Buckey spent five years in prison without ever being convicted. Hard to imagine how angry and mangled I'd be if that happened to me. Imagine too, how hard it must be for young black men in this country to resist the inheritance of rage due them after years trapped in a racist, oppressive judicial system. Not sure why that turn happened. I intended to stay on track and make a couple of quips about Satanism.

The taco on the left is by far superior to the taco on the right. I had no idea how to cook cactus; I still have no idea.

INGREDIENTS

tortillas

6 oz. Baby Bella mushrooms, sliced

1/2 bundle watercress, chopped

1 cactus "leaf," scraped and chopped

cumin

coriander

1/2 green cabbage, sliced

4 red potatoes, peeled and cubed

nutritional yeast

DIRECTIONS

1. Boil potatoes and cabbage in a pot until tender.

2. Saute mushrooms, watercress, and cactus until the cactus is no longer slimy. Season with cumin and coriander and salt.

3. Serve with salsa or hot sauce.