When You Steal Lemons from Life, Make Lemon Squares!

The other morning while eating breakfast on David’s patio, I noticed a lemon tree growing in the corner of his backyard. Well, calling it a “tree” might be giving it a little too much credit. It was more of a lemon bush; it barely came up to my waist:

It was downright laden with lemons. I wanted to take them all. Food doesn’t get much more local than lemons stolen from your boyfriend’s backyard. So I headed home with a huge bag full of lemons. I plopped it down on my kitchen floor and then immediately began to wonder what on earth I was going to do with all those lemons.

I’ve heard some annoyingly perky people say, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” But as it turns out, you only need about two lemons to make a whole pitcher of lemonade. That wouldn’t make a satisfactory dent in my giant bag of lemons.

Well, life hadn’t given me lemons; I had taken them. So I wasn’t going to make lemonade; I was going to make lemon squares, the unskilled baker’s lemon meringue pie. Here’s what I used:

Lemon Squares

Crust:
1 cup butter (2 sticks)
½ cup white sugar
2 cups all purpose flour

Goopy Part:
4 cage-free, local eggs
1 ½ cup white sugar
1 cup flour
juice of 5 lemons

First, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. To soften the butter for the crust, I stuck it in the microwave… in the metal mixing bowl. The answer to the question, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?! is that I wasn’t thinking. I spend a good portion of my life simply not thinking at all, and this was one of those moments.

It was only when I heard popping noises and smelled burning that I realized I had broken the Number 1 Rule of Being a Grownup in the Kitchen: Don’t put metal in the microwave. Luckily, I rescued the butter before the metal mixing bowl exploded and killed me and/or ruined my microwave.

I mixed in 2 cups of flour and ½ cup of sugar, then patted it into the bottom of an ungreased 9x13 pan. By this time, the oven was ready. I baked the crust for 20 minutes, until it was golden brown.

While it baked, I got to work on the goopy part of the lemon squares. I whisked together 1 ½ cups of sugar and ¼ cup of flour in another mixing bowl, then added the eggs and the lemon juice.

I started to just squeeze the first lemon directly into the mixture, but realized quickly that if I kept it up, my lemon squares would be full of seeds. I’m always one for a good surprise, but I don’t think breaking a tooth on a rogue lemon seed while eating dessert counts as a good surprise. So I squeezed the lemons into a little cup first, removed the seeds that accidentally got in there, and then added the juice to the mixing bowl.

When the crust was done baking, I removed it from the oven and poured the mixture on top of it as evenly as I could. Then I put the whole thing back in the oven for another 25 minutes. When I removed the tray from the oven, the lemon squares still looked a bit goopy. But they firmed up as they cooled down.

They have just the right texture and they taste perfect: lemony, but not too lemony. I still have a big bag of lemons in my kitchen, though. I’m not sure what to do with the rest of them – ideas are welcome!

Putting On Airs: Local Shrimp and Fancy Drinks at Coast Restaurant

Last night, David and I went on a spontaneous dinner date to Coast Restaurant at the Canary Hotel. Their motto is: “Eat. Drink. Local.” All things I like. Inside, Coast looks like an Elizabethan tavern had a baby with Gatsby’s library. The tables are thick, rustic-looking wood slabs and the chairs are distressed leather (distressed in a classy way).

Transported by the vibe of the place, I ordered a Manhattan, straight up. I had no clue what a Manhattan even was, but my dad used to order them when we went out to eat, and the waiters always looked impressed and slightly humbled. When our waiter asked what kind of Bourbon I wanted, I deduced that a Manhattan must include Bourbon. Since I don’t know the names of any kinds of Bourbon, I tried to make my face look mysterious and told him to surprise me.

Our waiter, Brett, was one of the best servers I’ve ever encountered. He asked us our names and shook our hands, but not in the affected way some other waiters do. I think we really made friends. I feel like having a party just so I can invite Brett. Maybe he’ll explain to me how to make a Manhattan, straight up.

I think I played the part of Person Who Knows Something About Fancy Drinks a bit too well, because Brett sent over the bartender (who is also the mixologist for the entire hotel chain), Kenny. Kenny told us about his plan to revamp the entire drink menu, periodically featuring a certain kind of drink in all its historical permutations. He convinced me to come back to Coast, if just to check out some other fancy drinks at the bar.

I perused the menu while sipping my Manhattan, and decided to order the shrimp with squash blossoms and pesto. Brett told me that the shrimp is caught just off the coast of Santa Barbara by a fisherman named Steve Escobar. Steve sells the crabs, lobsters, and prawns he catches at the Dory Fleet, the live fish market he owns in Newport Beach.

The whole dish was delicious. The pasta had just the right combination of butter and pesto, and they certainly hadn’t skimped on the shrimp. Sometimes you order a shrimp dish and it includes exactly three, tiny little shrimp. To my delight, that was not the case here.

David ordered the seared chicken. I asked Brett where the chicken came from, and he assured me it was local, from a farm just about thirty miles north of Santa Barbara.

I wanted to find out more, but I didn’t want to be like Peter and Nance in this Portlandia sketch, who demand to know the most minute details about the life of the chicken they are about to order, from its diet to its name (which is Colin).

I was glad to discover Coast, which is within walking distance of my cottage downtown. Even though it looks like the type of place that should be reserved for special occasions, with the happy-hour price of our drinks, the bill wasn’t mind-blowing. And the atmosphere made me nostalgic for the summer days I spent on docent-led tours at the Vanderbilt mansions in Newport, Rhode Island as a child. Ah.

Grilled White Cheddar with Strawberry, Avocado, and Balsamic

One of the best things about Santa Barbara is that we have a farmers market almost every day. Now that I’m making a point of eating locally, I have to be careful about how much money I spend on food. I am always a bit anxious about the price tags at farmers markets, but it’s worth it to me to support local growers.

Spending a little extra on groceries means I’ll have to cut back in other areas of my life, like haircuts (hello, Supercuts!) and clothes. Try not to be too jealous of my resourcefulness when you see that I’ve sewn the legs back onto my jean shorts come winter.

Last week I grabbed one of the reusable bags that have been piling up in a corner of my kitchen and headed to the market with my friend Sasha. When I got back, I wanted to eat everything I’d purchased right away. So I got it into my head to make a pretty weird sandwich. Here’s what I used:


Grilled White Cheddar with Strawberry, Avocado, and Balsamic

2 slices whole grain bread
1 large strawberry, sliced
2 tsp slivered almonds
1/4 avocado, sliced
1 handful fresh baby spinach
2 slices raw white cheddar cheese
1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Earth Balance

I used strawberries from John Givens Farm in Goleta (distance from me: 9 miles). John Givens started his farm in 1980 with just one acre of land; now it’s 180 acres. They grow a ton of different crops, from cabbage to broccoli to peas. I bought a crate of strawberries for $4 and snacked on one of them while I perused the rest of the market. Seriously, I snacked on one strawberry. It was enormous.

Obviously, any kind of cheese will do in a grilled cheese sandwich. But I found that white cheddar was tasty when combined with the sweetness of the strawberries. I used raw white cheddar from Spring Hill Jersey Cheese in Petaluma (distance from me: 360 miles). This farm turned out to be not as close to me as I would have liked; when the man operating the stand told me they make the cheese in Petaluma, I nodded and pretended I knew where Petaluma was. According to Google Maps, it would take me six hours to drive there… but I guess I can still count it as “local,” since this cheese is so tasty that I might just make the drive on my own.

Spring Hill Jersey Cheese is “estate produced,” meaning the cheese is manufactured in a single location. The milk comes from a herd of 400 pasture-grazed Jersey cows, and it’s made into cheese on the premises. My white cheddar is raw, or unpasteurized, so it contains a lot of healthy enzymes. So they tell me. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know an enzyme from my elbow.

To make the sandwich, I piled all the ingredients except for the balsamic vinegar onto the bread and spread some Earth Balance on each side. Then I grilled it for about two minutes. Flipping the sandwich was quite tricky – I have to admit, I lost a strawberry slice or two – but once the cheese melted, it was a lot more manageable.

After grilling each side, I removed the sandwich and poured the balsamic vinegar into the hot pan. I quickly put the sandwich back into the pan on top of it, and the balsamic vinegar absorbed right up into the toast. Yum.

Don't Get Slimed: Buy Local

The standards of industrialized food production were called into question recently when details about “pink slime,” the ammonia-treated animal bits used as filler in most ground beef sold in supermarkets, came to light. The stuff is pretty much indisputably disgusting.

Photo: EducationNews.org

Since the media revealed to Americans just what they have been nomming on every time they devour a Big Mac (hint: it rhymes with schmat and schmonnective tissue), pink slime’s biggest producer has taken a financial hit. Beef Products, Inc. has had to suspend production at three out of its four plants, affecting over six hundred jobs.

Obviously, nobody wants to see jobs disappear. But nobody wants their kid to be served a burger that’s 25% pink slime for lunch at school, either.

This isn’t the first slime-related controversy to sweep the country. Since the 1980s, the TV channel Nickelodeon has been dumping green slime on any game show participant who utters the phrase, “I don’t know.” Just listen to the stress it was causing these mullet-headed kids in 1984:

I wasn’t aware of the slime debate in 1984 for a couple of reasons. First, I wasn’t born. Second, even after I was born and of the Nickelodeon-watching age, my parents didn’t allow me to watch You Can’t Do That On Television, the most slime-happy show of all. Apparently, they deemed the dumping of slime on unsuspecting kids to be inappropriate.

If only American supermarkets had the discretion of my parents. When it comes to slime consumption, most chains seem to have had the parental controls disabled until this past week. Yes, this type of slime is pink, not green. (And yes, this analogy is getting a little out of hand.) But I’d much rather accidentally ingest the green Nickelodeon stuff, which is apparently just a combination of water, Jell-O powder, and flour.

It’s my hope that this pink slime scandal will result in individual Americans evaluating their meat-purchasing decisions and coming to the conclusion that buying ground beef from Who Knows Where is just not worth it.

Maybe they’ll cut back on their meat consumption all together. Or maybe they’ll start spending a few extra dollars to buy meat from local ranches. I just don’t know! (Cue green slime.)

Meghan, Post-Veghan

Exactly a year ago, I decided to become a vegan. I was motivated by my environmental and economic beliefs, and by what promised to be a challenge. I was excited for what I saw as a lifelong adventure ahead of me.

But I knew I was taking a risk by adhering to a diet that would require me to restrict my food intake. I suffered from a pretty gnarly eating disorder during college, and even though I’ve had a healthy relationship with food for over five years, I knew I’d have to take careful note of any weird habits that seemed to be resurfacing.

Well, a few weeks ago, my roommate Erin had some friends over for dinner. They were going to have homemade pizza; though Erin encouraged me to hang out at the house and be social, she apologized that the pizza dough wasn’t vegan. I said I’d just go to a coffee shop and get some writing done rather than join them for dinner. As I walked to the coffee shop, I became aware of a disturbing feeling. I was glad the pizza wasn’t vegan because it meant I couldn’t eat it, and thus I didn’t have to eat dinner.

I could skip dinner and nobody would notice. That thought might seem inconsequential, but it was a huge red flag for me. It was an impulse to use my very public veganism to mask a very secret anxiety about food.

When similarly unhealthy thoughts popped into my head in the following weeks, I took note. And I decided that while veganism has been conducive to my physical health (and the physical health of countless animals, I like to think), at this point in my life, it was threatening to my mental health. I like food. I want to keep liking food. And sticking to any kind of restrictive diet is not the best decision for me.

Emphasis on for me. I am not suggesting, in any way, that veganism is an eating disorder, or that vegans develop eating disorders any more frequently than anyone else. In some cases, though, veganism and vegetarianism can be used as a cover for an eating disorder; Canada’s National Eating Disorder Information Centre published this article about it a couple years ago. (For more about eating disorders in general, visit http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org.)

I knew that Meghan the Veghan would have to become Meghan the Post-Veghan. But I wanted to continue to eat in a way that reflects my environmental and economic concerns. And it’s not like I could ever get tired of writing about myself...

So from now on, I’m going to do my best to buy local groceries, eat at restaurants that use local ingredients (there are a ton of them around Santa Barbara), and learn as much about my food as possible. And I’m going to blog about it. I hope my followers, vegan and non-vegan, will continue to support me! I know this post has been kind of a downer, but I’ll be back to myself once I get writing about my adventures in local eating.

By “local,” I mean food that I could feasibly go get for myself (and I don’t mean by walking to the supermarket). There is a farmer’s market almost every day of the week here in Santa Barbara, so it will be pretty easy to get local groceries. I might even start a little garden (or I might just mooch some produce from my landlady’s garden; I haven’t decided).

It’s been a good year. But as much as I’ve enjoyed my vegan adventure, I have missed eating certain things. And by “certain things,” I mean bacon.

I Kid! Some Vegan Snacks to Make You Feel Young

This week, I participated in my very last seminar meeting as a graduate student – the last class of my life. Of course, I will still be a student for infinity the next couple of years as I write my dissertation. But as far as coursework goes, I’m done!

This milestone, while exciting, is also terrifying in that… I’m kind of an adult now. At the very least, I’ve inched a little farther along that life axis that spans from the belligerent, generally inappropriate child I once was to the belligerent, generally inappropriate old person I hope someday to become.

In recent years, I have become more and more anxious about aging. (The other evening, I purchased a bottle of pinot noir without getting carded and I almost cried.) So I decided that if I couldn’t regress physically back to childhood (obviously, I couldn’t), I could at least regress gastronomically.

I got to work preparing three of my favorite childhood snacks, one of which had to be veganized. The recipes, if they can be called that, are delightfully simple. Just like childhood!

Ants on a Log

Chop celery sticks into 3-inch pieces. Spread a generous amount of peanut butter on each one, and top with raisin “ants.”

Homemade Apple Sauce

Skin, core, and chop up four apples. Put them in a sauce pan with ¾ cup water, ¼ cup organic sugar, and ½ tsp ground cinnamon. Cook over medium heat, covered, for 15-20 minutes. Transfer the apples to a food processor and pulse until the applesauce is the texture you want.

Bagel Pizza

 

Cut a bagel in half. I use Bagel Josef’s plain bagels from Trader Joe’s, which happen to be vegan. Sprinkle Daiya vegan cheddar cheese and layer sliced avocadoes (or tomatoes, or whatever creative pizza toppings you have lying around) on top. Broil in the oven for about three minutes, or until the cheese melts.

Hey-o! Vegan Mayo!

Sandwiches are one of those things that can either be mindblowingly good or incredibly bad. We all know what it’s like to bite into a surprisingly delicious sandwich – the kind that makes you a horrible lunch buddy because all you want to do is talk about how amazing every bite is. On the other end of the spectrum, a poorly made sandwich is not just disappointing – it’s devastating. A bad sandwich can really ruin your entire outlook on life day.

Unfortunately, I haven’t eaten too many sandwiches since becoming a vegan. At first I thought it was because most sandwiches include meat and cheese (except for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, on which I could subsist for weeks if I needed to). But I recently realized another non-vegan ingredient that has thus far prevented me from enjoying sandwiches as regularly as I would like to: mayonnaise.

I’ve never been a huge fan of mayonnaise on its own (who is?), but it’s hard to deny that it really makes a sandwich hang together. Vegan-friendly sandwich shops often substitute hummus, but it’s just not the same. There exist a few vegan mayonnaise options – vegenaise from Follow Your Heart is my favorite, and they just came out with a few flavored varieties.

But vegenaise is only sold at Whole Foods. The problem with Whole Foods is that… I love everything at Whole Foods. Sometimes I manage to pay my eighty bucks for six things and get the heck out, but usually I do more damage to my grad student budget than that. So I needed a way to have vegan mayonnaise that didn’t involve setting foot in a Whole Foods.

With perfect timing, my former classmate Jesse sent me a link to Kenji’s slideshow of vegan recipes from his month-long vegan adventure (see his story at seriouseats.com). All the recipes look mouth-watering, and I have added a bunch to my To-Try-To-Prepare List (excluding the ones with “spicy” in the title).

Included in the slideshow is Kenji’s recipe for – you guessed it – or did you? – let’s assume you guessed it – vegan mayonnaise. I followed his directions, but I decided to add Ener-G Egg Replacer because I thought it might act as an emulsifier. Also because I have a huge box of Ener-G Egg Replacer and I don’t know how I’m ever going to use it all up.

What, you might be thinking, is an emulsifier? Apparently, it’s an ingredient that just makes the rest of the ingredients hang together. Much like mayonnaise itself, when used in a sandwich.

Here’s what I used:

Vegan Mayonnaise

4 ounces soft silken tofu
1 clove garlic, chopped
juice from ½ lemon
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 ½ tsp Energ-G Egg Replacer + 2 tbsp water
1 ½ cups olive oil
pinch of sea salt

I dumped all the ingredients except for the olive oil and salt into my food processor and blended them together until they looked like this:

Now comes the risky part. I had to drizzle in the olive oil while the food processor was running. I've had bad luck with similar situations in the past, and I couldn’t help thinking of that old saying that goes something like: Explode all over the kitchen once, Food Processor, shame on you. Explode all over the kitchen twice, Food Processor... well, I was committed to making this mayonnaise, so I went for it.

And the mayonnaise didn’t explode! It stayed right in the food processor where it belonged while I poured in the olive oil, a quarter cup at a time. Here's what it came out looking like:

I enjoyed it on whole grain toast with slices of organic beefsteak tomato on top. It tastes good; almost exactly what I remember regular mayonnaise tasting like. The only problem is that it is really oily and hard to spread. I had to kind of pour it onto the toast.

But I plan to use it in every sandwich I make now! Except for peanut butter and jelly. Gross.