hey I’m going to write on my blog now*

1

Working vs. Pretending to work

Note to self: these are not the same thing.

2

Insight into the self vs. Showing off

a) “Wow, I have deeper feelings about zoos than I thought I did” or b) “Destroying capitalism is an integral part of my sexuality”**

3

WordPress vs. Blogger

I actually don’t have any opinions on this anymore. I’m pretty firm in hating on Disqus, though. I mainly browse the Internet on crappy out-of-date devices and Disqus DOES NOT WORK on a 5-year-old Ipod Touch, OK?

4

Beer vs. Wine

Yes?

5

Poetry vs. Prose

Well, what is this?

6

Classic Doctor Who vs. New Doctor Who

DIFFICULT QUESTION. There are more like 5-7 distinct periods of Doctor Who – maybe someday I’ll go back to school and write a PHD thesis on it!*** Short wishy-washy answer: there are great episodes/story arcs in both, as well as some real stinkers and missteps. You know how I feel about Moffat, but then again I’ve been watching the 6^th Doctor episodes lately and if the show can come back from that it can come back from ANYTHING.

7

 Rob Ford did crack vs. It’s a left-wing conspiracy!

a) Rob Ford smoked SOMETHING from a pipe; he clearly is not a crack addict, but he might have done it once then gone back to hash or lines or whatever else it is he normally does. b) Why would you conspire to make Rob Ford look stupid when he’s so good at doing it on his own?

8

Twitter vs. Snapchat

I am too old to use Snapchat. Get off my lawn!

9

 Confessions

• I seem to be incapable of making anything fermented (yogurt, tempeh, etc)
• I do the crosswords and Sudoku in the free papers on the subway and leave the paper on the seat
• I also put my feet up on seats in transit (if there’s a free one)
• I will totally judge you if you carry your dog in a purse

10

Awkward moments

• When someone you know writes about a social event you were both at on their blog and you’re like “OMG that’s what you were feeling like? D:”
• Trying to navigate the sidewalk while pushing a stroller on garbage day, running into like 8 seniors in those motorized scooters
• When the cashier at the drugstore says “Would you like to buy a heart for two dollars? The money is for heart transplants for babies” and you say no and everyone in line looks at you like you’re literally Hitler
• When you run into someone you know, realize you’re going the same way on the subway but don’t really want to talk to them for 8-10 stops, so invent an errand to get out of it and have to hang around somewhere random for 10 minutes to avoid running into them on the platform

Maybe someday I will write real blog posts again. This is not that day.

I did write a poem a few days ago, so maybe I’ll look at it again, totally rewrite it, and post it.

Until then…

*Literally the thought that went through my head before I opened a Word document and started typing

**I didn’t make that up! I ran across someone on Twitter who put it in their bio. More power to them, but WTF?

***no.

Soy milk machine review: Soyabella vs. Soy Sensation

Remember when I bought a soy milk maker? Maybe I didn’t blog about it? Anyway, after Gus got sick I went full into Frugal mode and started making our soymilk instead of buying it. Only making soymilk by hand is a long, laborious process that creates a fair amount of dirty laundry, and I was tired of spending every third evening wringing out a hot bag of soy pulp over a glass measuring cup, so I started to look for a way out of the situation.

Being me I always try to get something for nothing, or at least for as little as possible. Once I discovered that soy milk machines existed (who knew?), I started to look for A Deal. I didn’t want to pay $120+ for something that might not work or might not make milk that I liked. Frankly I just didn’t want to pay $120+ at all.

Eventually I did find one (the Soy Sensation) going for the unbelievable price of $40, because it was discontinued. So no guarantee, no warranty, no replacement parts – but $40!

I bought it, and predictably it broke after three months (the heating element broke, rendering it useless), so I ended up spending the $120+ on a new, warranteed Soyabella (buy it here from Amazon), thus spending $40+ shipping more than I had to, but oh well.

Anyway, long story short, since I have now owned 2 soy milk machines I can do a comparative review. Which is better, the Soy Sensation or the Soyabella?

Verdict: Both make perfectly adequate soy milk, so it’s kind of up to you as to which features you want.

The Soy Sensation can only do one thing, and that’s make soy milk. It makes about 8 cups of soy milk from about 1/2 cup of soy beans. The milk is, as stated above, perfectly adequate.

Drawbacks: kind of big for a single-use appliance, tricky to clean, broke after 3 months.

The Soyabella makes soy milk OR raw nut milks OR rice paste (whatever you use that for) OR it can grind coffee. It comes with multiple little filter and grinder cups just for this purpose. I haven’t tried the nut milk setting yet, so I don’t know how it well it works, but I imagine just fine. The soy milk setting gives you about 6 cups of soy milk from about 1/2 cup of soy beans. The milk is also perfectly adequate.

Both produce as a by-product a very fine cooked okara, which you can use to make semi-edible chicken nugget substitutes or just throw away.

Drawbacks: Finished product still has about 1 tbsp okara in it, so it needs to be filtered before sweetening etc, makes less milk/bean than the Soy Sensation.

Overall I’d say I prefer the Soyabella as it hasn’t broken yet and is cleverly designed. The filter cups have a handle at the bottom that fits into a groove in the “utility cup” that comes with it (I’m not describing this well, sorry). You can stand the filter cup in the utility cup, soak the beans in it, then just take the filter cup out, rinse, and fit it onto the grinder head of the machine. You can also stand the grinder head with filter cup attached in the utility cup after the milk is done, allowing it to cool and the okara to drain. It’s also smaller, which is a big selling point here. And it came with a little tofu press, which is cool.

 

 

Hi! Let me tell you all about Doctor Who and how awful it is now

I promise there will be no recipes in this! If you want to cook something awesome buy Vegan Eats World by Terry Hope Romero. I’ve been really enjoying it.

So I’m breaking my blogging silence to complain about Doctor Who. If you don’t care about Doctor Who? Go, you are dead to me. No, really, you might not care, so just warning you this will be really boring for you. Also full of spoilers.

So after Karen Gillan and whatever his name was escaped from this trainwreck, the writers brought Clara from Assylum of the Daleks back. Only now she was a plucky Victorian governess. HUH? A selection of my reaction tweets:

Anyway. You get the picture. Clara is not only kind of annoying, but not actually a character. But I kept watching, because I have a major soft spot for this show and you have to have something to look forward to in life. I even LEGALLY BOUGHT IT in Itunes (which is a whole other rant I could go on, but not this time) to support the show.

And after 6 episodes of Clara being annoying and not having a character to develop, the season finale aired last Saturday. In which (major spoiler alert!) Clara is revealed to exist MERELY TO SAVE THE DOCTOR.

It’s like the writers looked at my tweets, said “Ha, you thought she had no inner life and seemed to only exist for the Doctor? Fooled you, I meant to do that!”

How is this not the most sexist thing ever?

Stephen Moffat, showrunner of Doctor Who, has responded to critics calling him sexist by saying:

I AM sexist: women are cleverer, nicer, kinder and better at stuff. Don’t let on or they’ll keep us in fields. FIELDS!!!

(Source: here.)

Uh…benevolent sexism is still sexism. Glad to know he’s not an old-fashioned woman-hater like some people I could name (but won’t, because I don’t want an influx of rabid MRAs calling me names), but putting women on a pedestal is still inferior to treating them like human beings.

I got into watching Doctor Who with the new series. I’ve since watched (most) of the old series, and while the Doctor’s relationship with his female companions is never one of equality* – except maybe with Romana? – even the worst of these characters have stories, needs, desires, and personalities. Clara…doesn’t. And turning it around to make her actually being a creepy middle-aged dude’s perception of a hot 20-something the climax of the season is…not cool.

I am going to keep watching, because I believe the show can come back from this – just like it came back from the 6th Doctor being a giant asshole and the writing being wildly uneven in the 7th Doctor’s last season – but I am seriously disappointed. I hope Moffat moves on to something else, or just sticks to Sherlock (an almost entirely male cast means all the characters get to be real people!) and someone who’s capable of putting themselves in the shoes of a woman takes over.

*At best he’s a friendly mentor, as the 4th Doctor is with Sarah Jane; at worst he’s emotionally abusive, as the 6th Doctor is with Peri.

Yo + a recipe

Hey! Sorry I didn’t blog for forever. Life. It happens.

…Mostly I’ve been working and looking after Cecil and agonizing. That counts as life, right?

Anyway, I’m not going to give you a report on What I Did on my Blogging Vacation, but I WILL give you possibly my greatest contribution to humanity: I have figured out how to make something edible out of the byproduct of making soymilk.

It’s called okara, and if you make soymilk you will know that you wind up with a tonne of the stuff. It has lots of protein and vitamins and stuff in it, so I’ve been trying different recipes of things to do with it. I made some OK okara burgers, but it called for red wine and yeast extract (!) which rather knocked down the cost-effectiveness. So I’ve been experimenting and this is my result.

GIANT DISCLAIMER – you must use cooked okara in this recipe. If you’re using a soymilk maker, which you really should invest in if you make soymilk more often than twice a month, the okara will be cooked by the machine. If you’re making it by hand and you boil the soymilk after straining it, you need to cook your okara. I think you can steam it. If you toast it I don’t think this recipe will work, which sucks, because you will have even more massive quantities of okara on hand than I do. Sorry!

Okara nuggets

Take

3/4 C cooked fine okara (this is the amount that comes out of my soymilk maker; scale up as necessary). Press or wring as much liquid as you can out of it. This is a really important step – if you don’t get the liquid out the nuggets will be mushy.

Mix in

1/2 tsp salt – yes, this is a lot of salt. Okara has an incredible power of blandness. It needs it.
1-2 tsp of whatever spices you like – I put in some onion powder, cracked pepper, and minced garlic

Mix well. Add

1/4 c vital wheat gluten (you could probably use ground oats or rice flour just to thicken if you don’t do gluten, you just won’t get a meaty texture)

Knead until strings of gluten form. Form into nugget shapes. You should get 6-8 small nuggets. Coat in

- panko or crushed crackers

Spray with olive oil or cooking spray. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes, flip, spray again, and bake for 15 minutes more. Turn off the oven and leave them there. They’ll continue to firm up as they cool.

Serve warm or cool with ketchup, vegetarian tonkatsu sauce, or barbecue sauce.
I wouldn’t call these AMAZING, but they are pretty good and Cecil loves them, and you are getting not only 8 cups of milk but a decent meat substitute out of 50 cents of soybeans, so how can you go wrong?

HELPFUL HINTS: If you can’t use your okara within two days of making milk, freeze it and use it later. It goes bad pretty quickly. Also it doesn’t seem to matter if you take the hulls off the soybeans or not. I never bother. And seriously, use cooked okara. Uncooked soybeans are toxic to humans.

GTFO of your car

Reblogged from Dulce et Decorum:

Last Saturday, I was at a rally against planned cuts to social services announced by Agnès Maltais (my MNA) and the PQ government.

The rally walked down rue Charest and up to rue Saint-Joseph, but stopped in a street linking the two. The crowd was large enough to block two of three (or four) exits for a parking lot where a Metro and a Chez Ashton is located.

Read more… 708 more words

The birthday post

So a few days ago Cecil had his 1st birthday. Yes, that’s right, he has managed to survive his first year on this planet, and while I don’t think he had any great epiphanies about what he wants to do with his life just yet, I think I can confidently say he has had his best year so far. Also he got his first cupcake and was all WHAT IS THIS AND WHY HAVE YOU BEEN HIDING IT FROM ME.

We had a little party for him this weekend. It ended up being about 20 adults and 5 children (aged 9 months-8 years), not including ourselves, crammed in this little house. Cecil had a blast. Madeline was in heaven, except for the part where she got so over-excited we had to lock her in the basement for an hour, and Gus tolerated the whole affair.

…I wish I had some profound or witty observation on my first year of motherhood to add, but I don’t. It’s been a year. Parts of it have been amazing. Parts of it have been awful. Parts have been unforgettable, and other parts very dull. But overall it’s been great. And I expect this next year to be even better.

On being badass

I wrote a much longer, angrier response to the article which spurred the article I reblogged earlier today. It was rather incoherent, so I won’t publish it, but I do want to say one thing:

Life isn’t a game where the object is to collect the most awesome points. I think it’s great if you’re able to solve your problems without recourse to the authorities, but you don’t get to snidely look down on others if they can’t do the same. But if your argument against a woman involving the police to deal with a stalker is basically “Who’s against the patriarchy NOW?” and “Real women ride motorcycles and beat up the creeps they encounter!” you are a) incredibly naive and b) kind of a nasty person.

…OK, I wanted to say two things, as it turns out. The “just been mean/physically violent until the trolls go away!” is not just an unfair double standard – do men who have opinions in public have to do so? No – it is actually REALLY FUCKING DANGEROUS. Some predators back off when confronted. Others take verbal or physical aggression as an excuse to escalate the situation. And a woman who has been able to shut down predator type A “being directly and verbally such a cunt that he soon disappeared” (that’s a quote, by the way) will get a very rude awakening if she tries such tactics on predator type B.*

…Make that three things: the problem isn’t that women are insufficiently awesome. The problem is that we live in a world which actively and passively dehumanizes women and enables predators. Or even more succinctly, if members of group A are routinely assholes to members of group B, the solution is not for group B to be assholes right back.

What the solution IS is not for me to say. I am not a feminist activist; I’m more like a fan of feminism. But trust me, there is a discussion happening. Just not in Vice magazine.

*Simone de Beauvoir, of all people, describes exactly this situation happening to her rather farouche young friend Lise: “One afternoon three young fellows passed her in a deserted street…one pinched her bottom. She promptly lashed out at him, and was shattered to find herself lying on the ground with a bloody nose and one tooth broken.” The Prime of Life, p. 477