It is time! To be a slime!

[stunt_muppet]

I am sick.

Fiance gets colds more frequently then I do and I generally manage, through fastidious hand-washing and withholding smooches until he's stopped coughing, to dodge whatever it is he brings home. I did not manage it this time. I am now on Day 5 of being full of goop and sounding like Tom Waits and right when I keep thinking I'm beating it it rolls back on in.

Worst part was I wasn't sick enough to skip work on Thursday and Friday (though I wasn't especially productive either), but I was sick enough to miss out on an outing I had planned today.

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Fiance and I did go back to our local Renaissance Fair on Saturday, which was one of the two things I was supposed to do this weekend and which probably did not make my sinuses any better given how dusty it was. I've already been a couple of times this year and the part that I like best about Renn Faires are the artists and craftspeople selling things, so I've more or less seen everything new and made most of the purchases I can afford/have room for. Fiance is more into the dressing-up aspect of it, and I am as well, but my "costume" is a bit cobbled together and I've been hesitant to make the investment to make it more complete.

Plus, I went in costume for the opening weekend this year and that was the weekend I thought I'd lost my engagement ring and spent an hour bawling on my friends' shoulder while a crowd of other people looked for it, and I was so ashamed at being emotional and not helping to look that now I'm nervous to bring my costume back out in case anyone recognizes that I was The Crying One.

(We did eventually find the ring - someone found it in the same place we lost it and contacted the Fair lost and found and we got it back the next weekend - which of course made me even more embarrassed about having a meltdown about it. I've been drinking less at Fair after that weekend.)

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As a way to mitigate my own stress about environmental news, I've been looking at more vegetarian or low-meat recipes, and as a birthday gift my brother got me Jose Andres' Vegetables Unleashed cookbook to aid in my ventures. It's a fantastic book, full of stories and scrumptious-looking photographs, but there's the small hiccup that the average recipe in the book requires a) a grill, which I don't have, or b) two to three hours of prep time, which I rarely have. There are some that could be doable on a weekend that I'd like to try, though. And for all its elaborately-prepared recipes the book also showed me how to cook corn on the cob in the microwave, so that was a timesaver on its own.

I've also been using bok choy more in stir-fries and as a side dish (since the grocery store near me has it in stock now) and while I greatly enjoy its flavor I do not enjoy that cleaning and slicing it takes approximately a year. Am I being finicky and over-trimming it? Is that what's going on?

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I have been good about keeping hydrated and eating easy to digest things but if my throat is still gross by the end of today it may be hot toddy time.

Comments

[femchef]

Oh no!! I’m so sorry you’re sick! I hate it when risu brings home a sick - he’ll have it for maybe 2 days or so, and then I get to keep it for 2 weeks. :-/ Hot toddies ftw - though if you get bored with those, try warm chamomile steeped with lavender (if you buy it in a bunch, just take a stem and pour the hot water over the bud end with the tea and steep together) and a finger or so of gin, it helps with the stuffy sinuses if chamomile doesn’t make you sneeze. I’m glad you found your ring!

Also if you want to try some easier/beginner recipes, the Veganomicon (Isa Chandra Mowskowitz) is a pretty excellent oldie but goodie, I’ve had my copy a long time, and I still use it as a reference. The chili recipe is really good, and the pound cake and vegan pastry cream are pretty solid. There’s also a good recipe for curried carrot dip that I definitely recommend. There’s a new book out this fall titled Whole Food Cooking Everyday by Amy Chaplin that’s supposed to be pretty excellent, but I haven’t had a chance to look yet. If you want to try Israeli and Israeli inspired recipes, you might look into the series of books by Yotam Ottolenghi: Jerusalem and Plenty More are my favorites, the recipes are a bit more complex, but they’re very adaptable.
I hope you feel better soon!! ❤️

[stunt_muppet]

I'm mostly over the cold by now, but I still have a ton of residual goop and up until a few days ago had to sleep on the couch because I'd cough myself awake lying down. Beats being actually sick but it's still very annoying!

I have been meaning to get lavender! I don't have any at the moment, but my friend was kind enough to make me lavender-infused sugar. Also, among my fancy gin collection is a set of lavender-infused gin from a distillery/lavender farm about an hour from my house. I suspect neither of these will have the medicinal properties of the lavender plant itself but they do smell very nice.

And I'll have to try the gin in black tea idea, especially with the lavender gin! I've been meaning to find more warm drinks to make as the weather gets colder. As much as I like hot toddies it'd be nice to have more options.

Thank you for the book recommendations! I'm especially intrigued by the idea of the vegan poundcake recipe that actually tastes good, haha. I've had more vegan baked goods over the past few months since some of my coworkers are vegan and bring in cookies or brownies, and I've been pleasantly surprised by most of them! They tend to have a texture a bit like carrot cake or cornbread, but I like both of those things, so it works out.

I'd love to try the Israeli cookbook too! One of the things I tried making on my new recipe adventures was falafel. Unfortunately I kind of leaped into it without realizing I didn't have the equipment to deep-fry anything, so I ended up using my Dutch over as a deep fryer and having to clean carbonized oil off of it for days. Plus, no oil thermometer, which means the oil got too hot and the bigger falafel balls didn't cook all the way through, and because the oil probably burned I couldn't save it for another time and I ended up having to take it to the county recycling to throw it out instead. It tasted okay but if I make it again I'm definitely just making little pancake-shaped falafels in an inch of oil instead of trying to impromptu deep-fry.

[femchef]

You ought to look into getting an air fryer - we’ve had one for a couple of years now and it’s the best gadget risu’s ever brought home. They’re inexpensive (ours is just a small one, about 30$) and you don’t have to mess with fry oil. Some things might need a light spray of oil before they go in, but for the most part you don’t really need any. They’re also great for normal, non-fried stuff (think perfect boiled eggs with no water, it’s really cool), and crisping up leftover fries from take out. It’s easy to clean too because you literally just stick the basket tray in the dishwasher. It’s literally THE thing that gets used most in our kitchen, though that might be because I don’t want to have a microwave - but 10/10 recommend, and I don’t say that about gadgets a lot.

Between the air fryer and the sous vide (which I also super recommend), we almost never use the oven or stove, waaaaaaay less mess all around to clean up.

Honestly, if you can find it one of the best cake books for vegan baking is called “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World”. It’s also by Isa Chandra Mowskowitz (and also way old), but all the recipes are excellent! In general, with vegan cake baking the best thing I’ve ever learned is that 1) you can replace eggs with a tablespoon of vegetable oil per egg and 2) for any recipe that calls for milk/buttermilk, measure an equal amount of soy milk into a container and whisk in a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to it for every 8 ounces of liquid; allow it to set for five to ten minutes to curdle and then add it to the recipe, it works very well (and is basically vegan buttermilk). If you look for it, you might be able to find a used copy, but I think that book might be out of print.

[stunt_muppet]

Up until this moment when I looked it up I had heard multiple people sing the praises of the air fryer but no idea what one actually did. The image I had of one in my head was basically a popcorn machine and I wasn't sure how that would work.

I also assumed that they'd be expensive, so I'm glad to hear that they're not! A lot of the recipes in the Jose Andres cookbook call for frying so being able to do that without days of cleanup would open up my horizons a lot. I'll have to bring it up to Terry and see what kind he'd want!

(Plus we were just looking for stuff we could put on a wedding registry since we have most of what we need - mixers, toaster oven, Instant Pot, stuff like that. An air fryer would be exactly the kind of thing we could ask for!)

I knew that adding vinegar to regular milk would make buttermilk, but I didn't know you could do that with non-dairy milks! I also had no idea that you could swap out vegetable oil for eggs - I knew about swapping it for butter, but I figured you'd need more protein to actually substitute for eggs. That was why you had people using aquafaba as an egg substitute, because the beans gave it protein. But according to the Test Kitchen (since I only am just reading the details now) aquafaba doesn't actually have that much protein? So much more research to do!

[femchef]

For the most part, eggs in baking are used as binders for the other ingredients. Now, the reason that works is because of the proteins that the eggs are made up of (because they set up when the water is evaporated, etc), but!!! That protein in and of itself isn’t essential to the action of being a binder in the case of baked goods (generally), just the goopeyness, and there are several good replacements - oil is merely the quickest to hand in most kitchens. Chia seeds soaked in hot water for an hour or so are an eggcellent (sorry couldn’t resist) replacement as well (you should google the amounts, I don’t know them off the top of my head, though I can confirm it works), and there is a vegan powdered egg replacement you can purchase at the grocery store specifically for baking, though I think it really only works well for cookies, imo. Mashed banana is another good binder, so are zucchini, carrots, and a few fruit juices and fatty liquids like coconut milk or blended cashew (which is why banana bread and carrot cake, etc., are such easy recipes to make vegan friendly).
The bottom line is that there are so many interesting options!

[femchef]

Also bean water is a way better replacement for egg white - in fact, you can make a pretty decent replacement for meringue with the water from a can of chickpeas. Much as I dislike aquafaba in general, it’s not bad.