Brownies and back to school

Hello, fair interwebs! After a long summer hiatus from blogging, I am back and will be updating more frequently. The year is off to a really good start. For one thing, my school's dining hall, which has always been really vegan-friendly, now has one station that's entirely vegan and serves things like hazelnut pesto pasta and mock beef fajitas. I like being well-fed. And beyond food-related, it's just good to be back. Most of my classes are creative writing and it's good to have all my friends around again. And I have an internship with a reproductive rights organization and my roommate and I are going to have a radio show through the school...busy but good. Anyway, I've been meaning to post this recipe for a while. Over the summer I was staying at some friends' house for a week or so and wanted to bake something really awesome to thank them. After being frustrated that most of Vegweb's brownie recipes called for weird ingredients like tofu (okay, I understand that tofu is a very versatile food, but it should never go in baked goods. That just seems weird to me, and I wouldn't want anything I made to ever be able to be called 'tofu cookies'. Why. Ugh.) I finally found this recipe and modified it based on what ingredients were in the house. The result: amazing. When they came out of the oven, only two other people were in the house, but we ate about half the pan within an hour. Yum. The secret: self-rising flour! Halfway through measuring out the flour, I ran out, and self-rising was the only other option. I was worried they would explode in the pan, but they became incredibly light and fluffy, which works surprisingly well in a brownie.

Fluffy Brownies

  1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup self-rising flour    1/2 c. sugar
    1/2 cup brown sugar
    3/4 cup cocoa
    1 teaspoon baking powder
    1/2 teaspoon salt
    1/2 cup vegan semi-sweet chocolate chips
    1 teaspoon vanilla
    1/2 cup vegetable oil
    1 1/2 cups water


Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine wet ingredients in one bowl, dry ingredients in another, and add the wet to the dry. Stir well, pour into greased 9 x 13 pan, and bake for 20-25 minutes.

Rep. Jared Polis rewards veg school lunches

Usually when my local paper mentions the v-word, it's either talking about someone I know or something that's been done in KC's small-but-fervent activist population or meaning to poke fun at liberals, picky eaters, etc. But the other day it cropped up in the news section! What? There was a news brief similar to this article and I am so excited about it. Colorado rep Jared Polis introduced a bill back in March that increases vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches and rewards schools that offer such meals to at least 2/3 of its students. Polis isn't a vegan, but he's doing this for the obvious reasons - childhood obesity and its accompanying health problems are skyrocketing. I'm not optimistic about its passage, but the fact that it's even been introduced is telling. It's interesting how much of an impact the fact that Polis isn't vegan is having on the way the media is talking about this. Every article I've read on this is generally positive and coming at it from an entirely reasonable, health-based angle. I feel like that wouldn't be the case if Dennis Kucinich (who is vegan) were this bill's creator. Being vegan in itself makes (some) non-vegans skeptical of you, your motives, your legitimacy. You're "one of those." You're not an individual who happens to be vegan, just a vegan. A friend of mine, if he ever has to call a restaurant or company to ask about vegan options/products or lack thereof, pretends he's someone considering going vegan, just asking for future reference. He does this to show that there are people in the world who are considering going vegan, that vegans aren't a special breed of people destined from birth to be wackos. This is why all the articles about Polis' bill are so positive and focused on health: Polis sees that plant foods are healthy, which is all well and good, but isn't one of those crazies who only eats those things. I think I'm going to write more about this later, it just says so much about so many things. But regardless of all that other stuff, this is exciting! If nothing else, even if it doesn't get passed, I think it could pave the way for better regulations about what's in school meals. We shall see!

sweet chile tofu

my roommate and i are addicted to sweet chile sauce. At our dining hall, it seems they have something Asian at nearly every meal, which is where our addiction started, but we have discovered that it's good on everything from pizza to sandwiches. As such, she bought a bottle of the stuff the other week and we marinated tofu in it. Because we live such Busy College Lives it ended up marinating for....several days. Oh well! The result was delicious and so simple I feel it's almost overkill to actually post the recipe, but..

Sweet Chile Tofu
One block extra-firm tofu
Around half a bottle of sweet chile sauce
A little oil for cooking

Press the water out of the tofu and cut into bite-size pieces. Put in a bowl or a flat baking-style dish and pour over enough sweet chile sauce to cover. Marinate for at least an hour. Coat a saute pan in a few tsp. or so of oil and heat on medium. Cook the tofu until it's golden-brown and crispy. Feel free to pour the leftover sauce from marinating over the tofu as you're cooking it, but be warned that if you use too much in cooking you will get little black chunks of cooked sauce because it won't all be able to be on the tofu, so save a little for serving. EAT. Serves 2-3.


it has been sauced.


my happy tofu friends

Also, do any Portland people know of local tofu? Surely some exists. The tofu local to my hometown was always so much better and firmer than any big brand.

vegan in college

I am alive! The last month has been ridiculous. Papers, finals, I won’t bore you. If I could get academic credit for cuddling and blogging and eating fried pies (Whiffies. Nom. Come to Portland.) I would have graduated by now. But I made it through the first semester of college alive! I’m surprised it took me a whole semester, but I do believe a vegan college student is required to post about her experience of things. I am lucky enough to go to a college with a really vegan-friendly dining hall (hint: liberal arts colleges on the coasts). The dining hall has different stations and there’s always at least one that has a good vegan option, marked by a big green circle.
There’s a salad bar, fresh fruit, a soymilk dispenser, cereal, and even nutritional yeast for your cheesy B12 delight. It’s so nice never ever having to worry about being provided for. I get asked surprisingly often if I would go to a school that didn’t have vegan options. I can’t imagine going to a school and not even being able to eat – or at least not being able to go to the dining hall with my friends like everyone else. My school has vegan theme day sometimes! Last one was macaroni with cashew cheese, housemade seitan “ribs”, corn salad, berry cobbler, and deliciousness.
Yes, I do love my school. If you’re going or thinking about going to a larger/public/less liberal school, they might not have cashew cheese but you can still survive. Peta2 does a yearly contest for the most vegetarian-friendly college, and while I’m sure it’s not exhaustive, a lot of the winners are state schools, so you never know.

Beyond the dining hall, though, I still eat well. I have been called ‘the hall Mormon’ before because of how much damn food I keep stocked. Sometimes I’m out on weekends and get back after dinner has been served, wake up too late for breakfast, plus I just like to cook and eat. I am on the floor of my dorm that has the biggest kitchen in the building, which is nice. It’s amazing how much stuff you really need to have a fully stocked kitchen…I read recipes and think “Wow, I don’t have a casserole dish or curry powder or aluminum foil or cream of tartar. Um.”

Here’s what I’ve got (bear in mind that this is the end of the semester and my mother has been plying me with care packages, so the ratio of junk to actual nutrients is a little distorted):


Apple sauce, dried cranberries, popcorn, noodle bowls/coconut rice, ramen (naturally), oatmeal, graham crackers, cashew crunch, chips, recently veganized Skittles hiding by the cookies and Dandies marshmallows hiding next to the granola bars.
Earth Balance in the fridge, peanut butter, chickpeas, rice, pasta and baking supplies in the kitchen cupboard. I try to have ingredients for a few simple, satisfying, not horribly unhealthy meals – e.g. rice with a simple peanut sauce, pasta with Earth Balance, nutritional yeast, and garlic, a Boca patty with green beans, peanut butter sandwich, etc. I feel like I’m going to be cooking a LOT during winter break. “You mean we have turmeric? And I didn’t have to pay for it? MULTIPLE SPOONS?!?”
I know I’m in college because last week I ate ice cream with a knife.

sometimes you just have to laugh

Highlights from the first few weeks of college:

"You tell Japanese people not to whale-hunt and they're like, ha ha, what? They don't get it. It would be like someone telling us that killing cows is wrong!"

"Eating vegan desserts gives you irregular bowel movements. Unless you're already vegan."

"*speech about how you need to eat meat to survive*"
Me: "I haven't eaten meat or any other animal product in four years and I'm alive.."
"Do you take a vitamin?"
"Well, yes, but -"
"That's why you're alive."

No matter where you are or how long you've been veg*n, you're going to come into contact with stupid people. Sometimes you need to educate them, but sometimes it just won't be worth your trouble. Laugh. Loudly. And be glad you have a brain.