Homework

“Kentucky Colonel” mint from the garden.  So sweet and full-bodied, but not sharp.  Phenomenal in salads, gorgeous in mojitos and iced tea.

Cha Thai (Thai tea), brewed strong, served mixed 3:1 with soymilk and stevia to taste.

Standing in the garden eating lipstick peppers pulled straight off the plants.  My reward for weeding and watering.

Cucumber salads of various sorts.  Mostly very simple, salted, drained cukes + herbs + acid + a tiny amount of flavorful oil.

Sweetcorn fritters: cut fresh sweet corn off the cob, combine with 1 egg per 2 ears of corn, a splosh of milk or soymilk, a small sloshette of olive oil, some minced onion, minced herbs if you want them.  Add just enough allpurpose flour to bind it slightly, a scant quarter cup per egg used ought to do it, and a little salt, pepper, and maybe cumin and cayenne depending on the herbs situation.  Fry them up in good oil in a heavy skillet until crispy around the edges.

Socca.  You do need a new addiction, trust me.

Very tiny eggplants from the garden, halved lengthwise and stir-fried with garlic and fermented black beans.

Scrambled eggs with nam pla and sweet chili-garlic paste stirred into the eggs before cooking.  Possibly also incorporating a handful of roughly chopped cilantro, or basil.

The knockout street-food vendor videos from Thailand courtesy of Importfood.com.

Good news!  I’m writing a new, improved, wholly rewritten and updated version of my first book, Big Big Love, the first and still the only book about sex for people who are fat and for the people who love and desire them.

(Don’t start with me about how fat people don’t have sex.  Just because you personally don’t like to imagine a particular type of someone having sex doesn’t mean they don’t.  To wit, your grandma. Enough said.)

The original came out in 2000, and has been out of print for a while.  I’m writing the new one for Ten Speed Press, and it’ll be out sometime in 2011.

As I did with the original, I’ve written an extensive survey for this one, in order to collect as much information as I can from the folks who know best about fat and sexuality — namely, the people who deal with it every day.

If you are part of the target demographic for this book, that is, if you identify yourself as being fat, thick, hefty, plump, zaftig, stocky, roly-poly, rotund, Junoesque, amply-proportioned, or whatever… or if you are romantically/sexually interested in folks who are…. get yourself on over to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BBL2010survey and tell me all about it.  Your anonymity is assured, as are my profoundest thanks.

And do feel free to pass it on!
Sorry I’ve been so lacking in blog content.  I’ve needed a little time to grow back after turning in Straight to the publishers and while getting everything up to speed with the Big Big Love project.  There’ll be some garden pics and other goodies soon, I promise.

My Belovedary and I went out and did the circuit of our favorite Asian markets for lunch today.  I needed some downtime before I went stark raving book-bonkers, and I’ve been missing the Belovedary due to spending so much time lately going stark raving book-bonkers.  He had the day off, so away we went.

The dragonfruit were splendid.  I’ve never seen such beautiful ones for sale in this country.  That’s why I bought three.  What a treat!  The cherimoya is very nearly ripe.  It’s one of the Belovedary’s favorites.

I also got myself these, one of my all-time favorite Sichuanese treats: fried peanuts with chiles, Sichuan pepper, and salt.  I make them at home sometimes, but I have to confess that there’s something to be said for not having to go to the trouble of frying up peanuts when you want a snack.

We bought some other things… red yeast rice, spicy tofu snacks, a big sack of dry Salvadoran red beans, a big bag of dried guajillo chiles, ginger, that sort of thing.  We had a good time.

And so we go back to work.

For cream-style soups, don’t just dump in soy milk willy-nilly.  The texture suffers.  A better bet is to use soymilk that’s diluted by about half with broth, and thicken as desired either with a roux, or with breadcrumbs, a handful of rice, or some peeled potato — with these last three,  just simmer until the starch disintegrates.

For casseroles, the vegan cream-style soup-in-a-boxes are not bad for the most part.  I’m not always keen on the soups as soups, but if you want a nondairy tuna noodle hotdish, vegan cream of mushroom soup is totally the way to go.

You can approximate a “cheese sauce” without dairy by making a “roux” of margarine or oil and nutritional yeast, then adding (unsweetened, unflavored!) soy milk or other milk substitute until it is the thickness you want.  Season with mustard, nutmeg, sauteed or roasted garlic, caramelized onions, black pepper, etc.  It’s not cheese, but it’s not bad, and you can get pretty close to a mac and cheese mouthfeel with it if you tinker around some.  It’s a good thing to have in your hip pocket for those times when comfort food is not optional.

Nutritional yeast is also your answer to cheese-flavored snack foods: mix about a half cup of nutritional yeast with a couple tablespoons of garlic powder and onion powder, some sweet paprika, some ground Aleppo pepper if you like a little heat, a little ground celery seed, and salt to taste.  Sprinkle over popcorn or roasted cauliflower or whatever else you like.  It’s an outstanding popcorn topping and may help you forget cheesey poofs and Smartfood.

News Flash: The Creamy Salad Dressing of your Dreams Has Always Been Dairy-Free.  Hollyhock Dressing is made as follows… 1 cup olive oil + 1/3 cup water + 1/3 cup cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar + 1/3 cup regular soy sauce + 1 cup nutritional yeast + whiz in blender until creamy and smooth = OMGdelicious.  Up the ante by adding as much fresh raw or roasted garlic as you think you might enjoy.  Me, I will often use an entire bulb of garlic for a batch of this stuff, but of course it depends on how hot the garlic is.  This dressing is also outrageously good with potatoes, and other veggies, especially roasted ones.  And it’s orgasmic with fresh tomatoes.

Pizza is still good without cheese.  Adding lots of high-flavor ingredients, like chopped pickled peppers, anchovies (if you eat fish), olives, onions, roasted garlic, and the like makes it work even better.  My favorite pizza, made by my local Egyptian pizzeria, is called the Dahb, and consists of their chewy, wheaty, out-of-this-world crust topped with roasted marinated eggplant slices, chopped red slightly hot pickled peppers, black olives, sliced garlic, and chopped sun-dried tomatoes.  It’s toe-curlingly good.

In Italy, cheese is not sprinkled over every damn pasta dish in the world like we tend to do here.  My advice is to make sure your sauce stands on its own, buy or make really good fresh pasta, and enjoy it like they do in the old country.  We’re almost at pasta puttanesca season…

Pesto without cheese is fantastic.  I make it with pecans, basil, garlic, oil, and salt, and it’s divine.  Also, you can make other pestos.   Pesto di noci — walnuts, parsley, marjoram, garlic — is trad Ligurian voluptuousness and well worth your time.

Oh, and even though I probably didn’t need to mention it: most Southeast Asian cuisines don’t cook with milk, traditionally.  There are occasional exceptions, but for the most part, you can eat your way through Chinese (esp. southern), Japanese, Thai, Malay, Cambodian, Myanmarese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotian, Indonesian, and other cuisines of the region without a hitch.  The dairy tends to come in when you get into the steppes and herding territory: Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan.

Indian food is tricky; Indian food that is not Traditional Indian Restaurant Outside Of India menu food is easier and there are vastly more options if you cook it yourself than if you’re depending on a restaurant to do it for you.  Do note that tofu will sub for paneer in most applications, and that coconut milk will do nicely for dairy milk in many cases.  Southern Indian coconut milk payasam — a near relative of the rice pudding called kheer — will make you very happy indeed.

Baking without dairy can be a challenge.  Milk is not tricky, butter is not particularly tough.  But sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk, and other cultured products can be hard to approximate.  (You can just forget about cheese.)

Of these, buttermilk is the easiest.  You can sour soy milk in the same way that you would sour cow milk to make faux-buttermilk, by adding about a teaspoon of white or cider vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk.  Use an unsweetened, unflavored soy milk.

Sometimes I will make a richer “buttermilk” by combining equal parts unsweetened, unflavored soy yogurt and soy milk, then adding a teaspoon of lemon juice.  I use this in my vegan black chocolate layer cake, and in my non-vegan buttermilk cornbread, and it works beautifully, adding moisture and density.

Sour cream is difficult indeed.  Non-dairy “sour cream” products are made with many thickeners for the sake of texture, and not all of them react well to heat.  The texture of your finished product can suffer badly.  Also, their fat contents are not the same as that of dairy sour cream, which means that in terms of chemistry and physics they will not perform the same way.  I learned the hard way that it wasn’t possible to make a sour-cream pastry dough for kolaci with non-dairy sour cream.  The dough wouldn’t perform correctly without my adding enough extra flour to turn it into something much closer to a pretzel than a pastry — inedible.

Some recipes, however, will do well with soy yogurt instead of sour cream if you do the following: the day before you want to use it, pour the unsweetened, unflavored soy yogurt into a colander lined with a damp clean kitchen towel and let it drain as much as it can for about 24 hours.  Then, just before you are going to use the drained soy yogurt, whip about a teaspoon of lemon juice and a  tablespoon to a tablespoon and a half of neutral oil (grapeseed, canola) into the yogurt to increase fat and acidity.  This will work well in things like sour cream coffee cake.  I still wouldn’t try it in pastry dough, though.

Yogurt generally speaking can be substituted for with soy yogurt.  Once in a while you may find that due to one of the thickeners present in the soy yogurt, you’ll end up with a texture problem, but if you try to buy the least thickener-happy soy-yo you can find, that should be diminished.

I have not yet tried baking with coconut milk yogurt.  I am a little suspicious of how it would perform because the protein content is so different.  Also, I haven’t been able to find a source for unsweetened coconut milk yogurt.  If anyone who reads this has experience baking with coconut milk yogurt, would you let me know how it went?

When it comes to things culinary, some dairy things can be substituted for with relative success.

Other things cannot.

Fluid milk is in the first category.  Soy milk, nut milks, and seed milks can do a pretty darned good job of substituting for liquid milk in nearly all situations.

Butter is also pretty easy to substitute for.  Ghee or clarified butter is an option for many people.  But if it isn’t, or if its more assertive flavor wouldn’t work as well, there are many different plant oils that will work wonderfully.  Pastries can be made with leaf lard to fine advantage.  And there are hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and various kinds of margarines, which I list last because I like them least.

In the second category, the things for which there are no good substitutes, is cheese.  I’ve tried the vegan cheeses.  Some of them are in fact edible.  But they are not, emphatically not, cheese.  Anyone who tells you they’re the same, or “so close you won’t be able to tell the difference,” has a palate made of purest tin.  Either that or they’ve been vegan so long they’ve forgotten what cheese is supposed to taste like.  I’m sorry, it’s just true.  Cheese is sui generis and there is nothing that replaces it adequately.

There are some things you can slip into sandwiches and burritos and such that will give the same unctuous, rich, yielding quality of cheese.  Avocado and guacamole are fantastic, silken tofu “ricotta” is sometimes a nice touch, hard boiled egg yolk is also very good in some things.  But none of these have the tang or the body of cheese, nor the saltiness, and certainly none of the specific flavors that come from the various bacteria that act on the cheeses are present in the substitutes.

Liquid cream  is difficult to substitute.  There are nondairy creamers and some of them will work in some applications and others will work in other applications.  Coconut cream can be used in ice creams, panna cottas and other custardy type dishes, ganaches, and similar sweet applications but it does bring a coconut flavor along for the ride.  Condensed soy milk can also work, depending on what you want to do with it.  It’s also easy, since it just requires boiling down some (unsweetened, unflavored) soy milk until it is thick enough to get the job done.  I know some people also have success with extremely rich nut milks, but I haven’t experimented with these.  I have tried a product called Mimicreme, and have not been thrilled by it.  I suspect it would be great for ice creams, but I wasn’t pleased with it on berries, that’s for sure.

Whipped cream, however, is not possible with either coconut cream or condensed soy milk.  There are, yes, nondairy whipped toppings, e.g. Cool Whip.  I don’t care for them or the plasticky smeary mouthfeel they leave behind, but sometimes they have a use just the same, especially if you aren’t as put off by the texture issue as I.  But for the most part, if you can’t have dairy you just can’t have whipped cream.  (It’s a tough one.  Not as tough as cheese, though.)

Yogurt is difficult partly because so many American yogurt companies cannot seem to make decent yogurt in the first place, and partly because American yogurt companies cannot fathom the idea of yogurt without sugar.  I prefer yogurt to be unsweetened, and like to use it in savory applications better than sweet ones, so this is a problem for me.  I have found one, and only one, brand of commercially-available soy yogurt that is unsweetened, and it is Wildwood’s Soyogurt in the plain unsweetened version.  It has a decent texture, although to me it tries a bit too hard.  I get the sense that they are adding a lot of inulin to produce a smooth texture through a fiber suspension, and it comes off to me as a bit artificial, almost plasticky.  I have not had good results with it for labneh or Greek-style strained yogurts, and I suspect that the high-fiber texture trick is why.  Every once in a while I think I should experiment with making my own soy yogurt to see if I could do better.  Maybe I really ought to.

I have never found a source for non-dairy kefir.  I would adore one, and one for non-dairy ayran or dhalla, both of which I love, as well.  I know that some people make non-dairy kefir at home with kefir grains to get the fermentation rolling, but I haven’t experimented with it.  Another thing I ought to try!

A reader asked me if I could post some tips about living without dairy products, since it sounds like she may be facing a need to do that.

I’ve been doing without dairy for several years now.  I have an intolerance to casein, the protein in milk.  My reactions to it fall somewhere in between what doctors think of as classic allergy territory and what’s considered merely a “sensitivity,” so I’m not sure, technically speaking, what that’s called.  All I know is that mostly I can’t eat dairy products.  I can tolerate very small amounts, on a very occasional basis, of butter and heavy cream — I can eat ghee/clarified butter without a problem — because they are mostly butterfat with only incidental amounts of protein.  Clarified butter is all butterfat, the protein has been removed.

So I guess that’s my first thought: figure out, if you can, what aspect of the dairy is bothering you.  If it’s the sugar, lactose, you are in luck, because lactase enzyme may make it possible for you to eat dairy.  Lactose intolerance is really common, much more common than having a problem with dairy protein.

If it’s dairy protein that bothers you, you’re going to have a harder time.

Dairy ingredients are used in a lot of prepared products.  Baked goods, particularly, are loaded with dairy products in the US; it adds richness and improves mouth-feel.

If you must avoid all dairy, then you will have to avoid most prepared foods.  This is probably not a bad thing in the long run, it’s just kind of an inconvenience sometimes.

You need to learn to read labels.  Read carefully, not all dairy ingredients look like dairy ingredients.  Caseinate and sodium caseinate are found in a lot of meat products, in particular.  They’re dairy derived and if you’re allergic to casin, you’ll be allergic to these.  (I’ve had some unfortunate run-ins with sausages.)   Lactic acid may or may not be dairy-derived.  Whey protein and derivatives are off the list.  And of course anything that says “milk” — or “butter” or “cheese” or “yogurt.”

You also have to get a sense of what prepared foods are likely to include “stealth dairy.”  Dairy ingredients sometimes sneak in under the convenient phrase “natural and artificial flavors,” and also there are some kinds of foods that simply won’t have a label you can easily look at.  Nor do people selling you things necessarily know everything that goes into them — the person at the farmer’s market who sells you the sausage is not necessarily the person who made the sausage.  For me, the categories of food of which I am  most wary of dairy ingredients are: sweet baked goods, savory baked goods, sausages and other types of charcuterie for which a mixture is prepared (pates, terrines), jarred pasta sauces, prepared salad dressings, prepared sandwich spreads, and canned soups.

The solution is often to just not buy these things.

You can also take a shortcut and look for kosher certification on the label.  Kosher-certified meat products are guaranteed not to contain any dairy products.  For non-meat products, however, Kosher certification alone doesn’t mean something is non-dairy.  What you want to look for is the word “Pareve” or “Parve” or a big letter “P” — this means that it does not contain either meat or milk.  Kashrut authorities vary, however, on what counts as “milk.”  Sometimes if milk ingredients are sufficiently denatured by processing, a kashrut authority will decide that it is no longer “milky” in nature and will allow it in a pareve product.  So if you are particularly sensitive, you may wish to not place all your trust in this shortcut, and read ingredients closely anyhow.

More as I think about it, I’m sure.  If the person who originally asked about this has more particular types of questions in mind, please let me know.

Some of this weekend’s greens haul, a nice smallish head of napa cabbage, was cut into ribbons, sauteed with onions and garlic, and used as a base for a fava bean and ham hock broth.   Some of the scraps of ham perch on top, for extra juju. Especially with a starchy broth like a bean broth, using greens as a base is an excellent idea, and balances the textures well, whereas using a starch like noodles or rice would just get stodgy.

And speaking of ham hock… Miriam asked, in a comment on the previous post, where to look for local, sustainably-farmed meat and poultry.  This will be a Baltimore-centric answer, so I hope that’s what you were looking for, Miriam.

For convenience, you can go to Mill Valley General Store, at 28th and Sisson (2800 Sisson St. is the actual address).  They’re open Thurs-Sun and they carry meats from Gunpowder Bison, Wagner’s, Five Cow Farm, and I think perhaps others.  I know they’re working on bringing in chickens also. Mill Valley also carries a fine, well-chosen selection of local dairy, eggs, and produce and the freshness is impeccable.  I am particularly fond of the Five Cow Farm beef, which is always salutary.

At the Waverly farmer’s market on Saturday mornings,  you’ll find Broom’s Bloom’s stall.  They sell chicken, pork, and lamb, as well as eggs, all raised north of town.  Gunpowder Bison also has a stall at Waverly.  I’m not sure if Truck Patch Farm is selling at Waverly or only at the downtown (Sunday) market this year, but if you like pork, Truck Patch is  my favorite and I recommend them highly. (Truck Patch is also bringing in beef, I seem to recall, starting nowish… haven’t tried it yet but I expect it’ll be good.)

There are a couple of other meat vendors at the Sunday market under the JFX, but I haven’t actually shopped around too much as I so often get my meat at the Saturday market or at Mill Valley.  One whose meat I can vouch for, though, is the goat from Jeanne Dietz-Band at Many Rocks Farm.  It’s very well reared, well cut, and of high quality.

My standbys are Truck Patch for pork, Many Rocks for goat, Broom’s Bloom for lamb, Gunpowder for bison, and Broom’s Bloom again for chicken.    That said, I keep an eye out for specials and unusual items as they show up.  I recently had a lovely beef heart from Broom’s, and this ham hock was from them as well.

It occurred to me yesterday, as I stood in the SuperFresh reading labels on cartons of soy milk, trying in vain to find one that didn’t have sugar in it, that I don’t eat as well as I do — by which I mean a minimum of processed and prepared foods, virtually no junk food, plenty of good wholesome home-cooked whole foods prepared in tasty ways — because I’m so damn discriminating and disciplined.  Truth is, I often eat like I do because I’m picky, arrogant, and lazy.

I am forever picking up prepared foods in supermarkets, scanning the labels for hidden dairy products (to which I am allergic), and then, finding none and having no ostensible reason not to buy the items, I put them back on the shelf.

What goes through my head is not “No self-respecting foodie would eat something made in 5000 pound batches and shipped from Arkansas.”

It’s also not “Oh my God, I can’t believe I almost bought that nutritional nightmare, I can feel my arteries clanging shut at the mere thought of putting that in my mouth.”

It’s generally more along the lines of “Oh, the hell with it.  You know that is never going to taste as good as you think it will, and the texture will make you grumpy because the texture is never quite right in the pre-made versions, even though they sure do charge enough for it.  I mean, seven dollars!  That’s highway robbery!  Why should I pay someone to do poorly what I could do perfectly well for myself for less?  I could make it at home for four and then at least I’d know it tasted good, because at least I can trust myself not to screw up the texture…”

And then I go home and can’t be arsed to actually make whatever it is, because as it turns out I am not actually going to overcome the bounty of inertia with which I have been so copiously blessed to make my own batch of vegan coconut-lime sugar cookies  or deli-style mayonnaise-a-go-go potato salad or whatever it was that I was fondling with intent.

With the result that I am compelled to cook and eat what’s actually in my refrigerator and pantry, which, because I am that kind of person, is primarily occupied by a) bags of leaves, b) cartons of righteous all-volunteer eggs from groovy liberal-arts-degree chickens, c) many many bottles and jars of non-Western condiments, d) dried beans and whole grains, and e) garlic.

Virtue has nothing to do with it.

Updated April 28, 2010:  Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in this internship.  The position is now filled.  Please check back in midsummer for information about fall/winter internships.

Writer Hanne Blank (Virgin: The Untouched History, Unruly Appetites, Big Big Love, etc.) is looking for a summer intern to assist her with completing two books during summer 2010. This is an unpaid, part-time position. Position can be in Baltimore if the successful candidate is local, or telecommuting if not.

The internship will include three primary kinds of work.

1. Manuscript prep: I will be submitting a book manuscript to one of my publishers this summer. Intern tasks will include things like proofreading, bibliography/bibliographic formatting, and fact-checking for this ms.

2. Research: General library and Internet research for book and other projects, assisting with development and implementation of a survey for use in another book project.

3. Interview-related: Assisting with scheduling, tracking, and (where needed) transcribing interviews for a book project.

Candidates must be over 18 and both comfortable with and reasonably knowledgeable about sexuality topics. Must have excellent reading, writing, and research skills and be sufficiently conversant with technology to do things like upload/download files, do online research competently, and similar tasks. Those intending to telecommute must have their own computers and reliable Internet access. Interested? Please email hann...@gmail.com with a resume and a non-academic writing sample and tell me why you think you’d be a good fit for the gig.

Please feel free to forward this listing.