Vegan MoFo: Food is pretty

Vegan MoFo 2010: Food in bar form

Did anyone else find particular resonance when Homer Simpson was going to climb that mountain and bought a kitchen gadget (that looked a little too much like a sausage grinder for comfort) that made food into bars. He dumped a plate of spaghetti and meatballs into it, and I laughed with the comfort of knowing that if I could, I might do that too.

I eat a lot of food in bar form because of a (likely perceived) lack of time to cook. I'd like to point out a couple bars you might not have heard of, though.



I just noticed Skout bars in the school canteen and the local crunchy food stores. They're locally made (Portland, OR represent!) and are like Clif bars in texture, but have an ingredient list more akin to a Larabar. They're date and grain (usually oat) based, sweetened with apple juice concentrate. They're pretty tasty, and don't have that greasiness that Larabars sometimes have.



Full disclosure: I know the founder of this company from back home. The Core Method replacement bars are HEAVY. Since I bike to hell and back, I'm okay with eating one of these hyper-caloric, mostly raw monsters, but I wouldn't recommend it as a snack for less active folks. It's decidedly a meal replacement. The raw cashew and cacao is good, I'm less crazy about the raisin one. ONLY the Defender bars are vegan. The Warrior bars contain whey. (Disappointing considering Corey, the founder, was the first vegan I ever met - I think he's well off the wagon.) In Portland, I've only found them at Whole Foods, but that suggests they're widely available.

Vegan MoFo: I'm a slacker edition

To be fair, I'm in law school, and it's robbed me of my cooking time. Even before I joined these hallowed halls of stress and arrogance, though, I was a pretty lousy blogger. to that end, some introductory, beginning-of-MoFo remarks about my eating habits which will explain my blogging habits.

I have class Monday - Friday, and it's across town. Riding my bike from my North Portland abode to Lewis and Clark takes an hour and five minutes each way. Needless to say, I am a bottomless pit.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are my long-haul days. I am on campus from 8-8, and get home a little after 9pm. These evenings, I do not cook anything more involved than miso or a handful of almonds.

At least once a week, usually Tuesday, I spend the night at my girlfriend's. She is also vegan, and she's an amazing cook. More often than not, she cooks on Tuesdays when I straggle in from class, tired and dazed.

Weekends and Mondays (when I get out of class at noon) are heavy cooking days because I tend to cook for the week then. Mondays are also the days on which I receive my CSA. Woo!

Anyway, I just made a tomatillo salsa that I'm pretty proud of - it's just roasted tomatilloes, a ton of cilantro, raw garlic, and raw jalapeño all blended together.

I do not have any chips for this salsa. That needs to change.

"no diggity" is stuck in my head

in fact, i think no diggity was in my dream.

done signed up for VeganMoFo 2010. this means i'll blog more. hopefully, there will be a ripple of not only increased blog productivity, but increased all-around productivity.

to that end, i have homework.

For years, I was convinced that I would write for a living. I mean, really write, man. Words with grace and dignity and brawn. Words that will kick your ass and make you want more. Words like the ones I read while hunkered for the night or while sprawled in a lawn chair. Necessary words. Honest words. Urgent words.

No dice. It turns out I'll write for a living, and the words will be necessary, honest, and urgent in a very different way than I could have anticipated even two years ago. They'll also be dense and dry, and I will have to labor to work my favorite words into my pleadings (not poems) and memos (not memoirs). The rules of style and citation that I can barely keep straight now will be what Strunk and White was to me when this blog got started.

But when I reflect on all the collected years of ambitions to Really Write, I come back to something that a judge told a roomful of young legal hotshots and a few tag-alongs like me yesterday: Words are your craft. He followed this statement with a screed on why it's necessary to polish writing skills, why typos are the super-poisoned kiss of death in federal courts, and why he hates cliches. I was checked out a that point because "words are your craft" is something I've heard before from creative writing mentors/professors and from my editors at newspapers too.

And words are my craft. (Notice that I began my sentence with a conjunction - it's not ignorance of the fine and revered rules of grammar, it's a device to get attention! Enough meta, though. You know I know how to write.) Words have never been my craft in any particular way, though, so signing my style away to the legal gods shakes me up a little. Going lawyer is a commitment to a writing style, among other things, that I'm not quite prepared to accept. I don't really have a choice, though. My emails are already shorter, more direct. My longhand letters lack the long, ponderous sentences they once had. That just might be a good thing.

Still, the effect of but one year of legal writing is not one of minced words per se, but ground words. Pureed words. They're made to be consumed and absorbed quickly. This, they say, is the big difference between legal writing and every other style of writing. I'm not sure there really is a huge difference. Simple writing will always rock, and simple writing will always be my goal.

Same suit, second verse

I will wear my only suit three days in a row this week.

pardon the whining

finals really, really suck. one of the many reasons is this: finals are not just the period immediately preceding finals and the finals themselves. law school finals encompass a period of weeks, if not months, during which every single thought ends with "I really should be studying right now."

food food food

In the ground: garlic (almost a foot tall!), a few onions, spinach and peas planted just this weekend.
After last frost: Carrots (in between our garlic grid - it's gonna be a delicious plaid), arugula, cilantro, strawbblies, zucchini, some kinda summer squash, kale, beets, pole beans, and maybe some cabbage if I can come up with a humane way to battle the slugs.
Later: tomatoes, jalapenos, tomatillers, basil, and whatever else we forgot.

As I announced to the world via facebook last month, I've gone vegan. Like, getting rid of leather shoes, haven't had cheese in a month, full-on. It's super, and I really enjoy not oppressing other beings as best I can. To that end, while I fully intend to post recipes I concoct and garden shenanigans, I plan to leave the vegangelical leanings aside. There are many, many blogs that are way more well-researched and well-written that can preach the benefits of veganism. That's not my goal with Champ of the Semi.

Illness Drink:
Ample splash lemon juice
Teeny squidge maple syrup
1/2 tsp cayenne
As much fresh ginger root as can be foraged in my present mess of a kitchen
Hot water

Combine ingredients. Drink while wishing your nose would just f'ing drain already.

where there's smoke, there's burnout

Some way, some how, I have to spend a certain number of hours on this exercise in masochism I'm told is law school. When that certain number of hours is not met because, say, I want to see my girlfriend and friends and maybe cook a nice meal or two, nights get late and mornings get earlier.

I didn't realize that last night was Daylight Savings Time, and I'm still lamenting the loss of that hour. Talk about a need for perspective - I'm fussing over an hour of my life that I spent sleeping curled up against M (or didn't spend at all - DST gets a little metaphysical for my taste) instead of poring over my Con Law.

If I had a time traveling DeLorean, I'd just bop ahead to next week: Spring fuckin Break.

What happened?

roughly chronologically:

Girlfriend.
Bike accident.
Work.
Garden.
Backpacking trip.
Law school.
Winter.
Holidays in AK with above girlfriend.
Summer job secured.
Veganism.

No promises on further, better posting. Still and all, I could use the outlet here. More to come, in messy bursts.