Lentils, stirred, not shaken

Jen very kindly asked me to be a contributor to Sporty Vegans, and I did my first post over there a little while ago. If the bunch of us ever met up and did a ride together I think I'd be the slowpoke of the bunch, but hopefully I'll be able to contribute some good posts over there.



My superstar partner flipped through How it all Vegan! and whipped off Auntie Bonnie's Lively Lentil Stew today. It's going down as a "Anna Really Likes" and "Chris Likes" in our grading system.



So we ate the lentil stew, and then played guitar a little bit, and then both wanted dessert, so Anna grabbed Joy of Vegan Baking: Compassionate cooks' traditional treats and sinful sweets. And we made Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes.



Joy of Vegan Baking also has some nice veggie jabs in it... i.e. the discussion of the calcium which is in milk. Calcium is a mineral which comes from the ground, and which cows get because they eat grass.
"Ah ha!" a veggie animal activist thinks - "how many cows eat grass anymore??" Good question, almost none of them do, instead they get that slurry of liquefied fat that the factory farms feed them, and the factory farms have to add artificial calcium to the feed to actually make the cow's milk have any calcium when it eventually gets sold to us.

Lesson? Eat the dark greens (broccoli etc) to get calcium yourself!



Ciao for now!

Wacky Belgian Psychologists

Life in Orillia has been pretty busy so far, and I haven't had much time to poke around looking for neat veggie studies in the journal databases I have access to - coming up with material like this.

I did find a slightly strange article in the International Journal of Psychology today though. (If you want the citation, it's 2007 42(3), pgs 158-165). The article is titled Implicit attitudes towards meat and vegetables in vegetarians and nonvegetarians and it was written by Jan De Houwer and Els De Bruycker from Ghent University in Belgium.


I'm going to VASTLY simplify the study which they conducted using 47 vegetarians and 49 nonvegetarians - a) because I don't really understand their full methods, and b) the more I try to explain what they did, the less amusing the study becomes, and so, rather than describe their research as an Implicit Association Test (IAT) run alongside an Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST), I'll call their work the "YUCK!! GET THAT HAMBURGER AWAY FROM ME!!!!" study.



Basically, the participants were shown a bunch of pictures - happy babies, crying babies, sunsets, homeless life, vegetables and meat products etc - and were asked to press either a "negative" or a "positive" button depending on what sort of connotations the picture had for them. The two researchers were trying to provoke implicit attitudes towards meat - "Implicit attitudes can be defined as attitudes that are activated automatically, that is, when little time or process resources are available, when participants are unaware of the stimuli that activate the attitude."
So - although many vegetarians have logical reasons for their lifestyle... "Why don't you eat meat?" "Oh, you know, the animal cruelty thing is important to me, but it has also been well proven that meat farming is disastrous for the environment, and that vegetarians are much healthier than omnivores" - these guys were trying to zone in on instantaneous gut reactions towards pictures of meat.


Guess what the researchers found! "We demonstrated for the first time that vegetarians and nonvegetarians differ not only in their self-reported attitudes towards meat and vegetables, but also in their implicit attitudes towards these objects, that is, in the spontaneous, automatic affective reactions that these objects evoke.... the EAST results suggest that, compared to nonvegetarians, vegetarians have both a more negative implicit attitude towards meat and a more positive implicit attitude towards vegetables."

I just find this all amusing because I picture a bunch of vegetarians sitting at computers, seeing pictures of hamburgers and automatically associating the picture with a slaughtered cow, and hammering the negative "Dead Cow!! Dead Cow!!" button.

And actually, this study reminds me of the Joaquin Phoenix Veggie video on You Tube, where he stops dead in his tracks at the supermarket when he comes to the meat aisle.

the meat (and wheat!) free bookclub

When I was in library school (full disclosure - I'm a librarian), a group of us organized a book club, which I used to blog about on this site. I gradually stopped updating that blog, and am now thinking I'll just post some "book club" thoughts on this blog.

And the reason that it fits with this blog is because we're a vegan, and mostly wheat free, group of bookworms.


Way back when we began, only three of us (Mark, Danielle and I) were vegetarian, and on book club nights we just ordered pizza. Then Annalise and I went vegan, and the group of us decided that we would turn book club into a pot-luck affair, and a vegan pot-luck to boot.


When Cindy gradually came to realize that she and wheat didn't get along very well, we took the "wheat-free" challenge upon ourselves (which isn't really that hard, as long as you have spelt in the house), and lo and behold we became a vegan and wheat free group of readers and cooks.

We had a meeting yesterday afternoon at Laura's place to discuss "A Spot of Bother" by Mark Hadden (general verdict - decent, but light, read). As the host, Laura made the main course, a vegan Sheppards pie (spelling?). I changed my plans at the last minute, and found myself surfing the net yesterday afternoon for a new dessert to make. I was initially very happy to find this meat free / wheat free blog, but the author uses lots of eggs and even fish so it wasn't going to work for me.
I eventually settled on these banana oat bundles, and with lots of help from Annalise, they turned out pretty good!

beans and salad dressing

So when you read some of the veggie blogs, most notably Megan the Vegan, (and sometimes, when she writes about things like pumpkin bread, my girlfriends' blog), you cannot BELIEVE how delicious the meals they describe are, and when you're a guy like me, you cannot really comprehend how the meals are prepared.


I'm on my own up in Orillia at the moment. Annalise is still at our place in Toronto until early December, when she'll be moving up here. So that means I'm also preparing my own meals. I'm neither a good or a bad cook, I just don't have much patience for it. I tend to make an effort to learn one dish, and then just keep making it for weeks until finally I think I should try something different.



So - the point of this post is that even dumb males can be vegans if you're willing to pour salad dressing over canned beans and call it a meal. I googled "easy vegan bean salad" and the recipe pictured above was one of the first ones I found. It basically is beans covered in salad dressing. Incidentally I don't own a can-opener at the moment, ergo the Swiss Army knife in the above picture. I made a few alterations in the above recipe - I don't know what navy beans are so I just bought chick peas, and I really dislike celery so I used a red pepper instead, and I threw in some almonds and lemon juice as well.


And this is what I've been eating all week!! Fibre, protein and iron. Next time maybe I'll throw in some spinach as well for some of the health benefits of dark greens. So to bona fide cooks like Megan and our Veggie Triathlete (p.s. - the Rockies have a Canadian so I'm cheering for them) - this post isn't meant for you, but for all those clueless in the kitchen guys like me.

Luck of the veg-head

It was really nice in Orillia today.



Orillia, my new hometown, is a smallish city of about 35 000 people, and Annalise and I were a little bit worried about what sort of vegetarian/vegan dining we were going to be able to find in our new town.



We decide to go to the town's main pub (there are several pubs here, but Brewery Bay is the "Cheers" of Orillia - the iconic one on the scenic main street), and when we opened up the menu we couldn't believe how many veggie options there were.



After gushing to our waitress about all the veggie alternatives, and the ability to substitute veggie "chicken" for regular meat, we learn that the owner and his entire family are all vegetarian, and therefore all the VegHead stuff.



Orillia otherwise doesn't seem to have much vegetarian cuisine on offer, though the supermarkets are well stocked with soy icecream etc etc. but thank god we at least have one place that we can go to and eat.

Canadian Thanksgiving

I apologize for the lack of blogging recently. I've taken a new job and am in the process of moving cities, so finding veggie and factory farming stories to write about hasn't been possible.

This weekend is thanksgiving in Canada, and for the first time in ages I commuted INTO Toronto, rather than out of it, on a long holiday weekend. So instead of being with my parents and siblings up north, or with Annalise's parents in Waterdown, we spent the weekend on our own in the city.

Thanksgiving dinner came out of Vegan Planet - Black Bean and Sweet Potato Enchiladas. Hopefully you can get the gist of the recipe from this photo (clicking to enlarge).

I'm not the biggest fan of sweet potatos, though I should mention that I'm not a very discerning eater and can eat the same meal for about a month without getting bored of it (which I'll probably be doing a lot of when I'm cooking all by myself up in Orillia until Annalise moves up in December).
But, these enchiladas were pretty yummy - we used mild salsa though, and I think I would have enjoyed them more if we'd had medium or hot salsa.



These are the enchiladas being prepared for the oven, and this is Annalise hiding behind the finished product.

Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair

Anna and I spent some time at the Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair today. I took some quick photos of random things as we walked around. I remember it being a lot busier last year, but maybe we just picked a good time to go.