I'm in Love with a (Vegan) Stripper

Some strippers might feel like their customers think of them as nothing more than a piece of meat. Well, the strippers at Casa Diablo in Portland, Oregon don’t have that problem.

That’s because Casa Diablo is the very first vegan strip club in the world. A sign over the bar reads, “Please do not wear fur, feathers, silk, wool, or leather on the stage. Thank you – the animals.” Its awesomely named owner, Johnny Diablo, has been an “ethical vegan” for 23 years.

Photo: Alan.com

Jasmin Malik of Treehugger wrote a light-hearted post about Casa Diablo back in February, but it’s also gotten a lot of negative attention from people who think strip clubs are demeaning. They find it ironic that vegans, who care so much about animal welfare, could have so little respect for women.

As usual, the prudish refined journalists of the United Kingdom put a damper on the sexy news. On Tuesday, Julie Bindel of The Guardian said, “In Casa Diablo, non-human animals are afforded more respect than the strippers.” Clearly, Bindel believes the atrocities of strip clubs would be better accompanied by the atrocities that pass for food in the UK.

It’s obvious how Bindel feels about strip clubs. I, on the other hand, don’t really mind them. I’ve never been inside one, but it’s not because of any moral issue – I’m just too poor to afford all those tips (and I can’t dance).

I think it’s great that vegan strippers – and vegans who love strippers – finally have a place where they can fit in. But even if you think strip clubs represent the basest part of our society, isn’t a vegan strip club still better than a regular old strip club?

The Eating Rules "October Unprocessed" Challenge

Generally, I hate rules. Stay off the green, lush-looking grass? Can’t do it. No outside food or drinks in the movie theater? Um… no. I’m the lady sneaking in a bag of popped microwave popcorn under my coat and pretending to be pregnant with a lumpy baby if anyone gets suspicious.

But as I’ve gotten older, it has come to my attention that some rules have a purpose (and I am not talking about No Singing at the Table, my parents’ favorite rule to enforce when I was growing up. That was the worst rule ever).

No shoes inside the yoga studio? Fine. Nobody wants to find themselves in downward-facing-dog facing dog poop from your sneakers. No eating animal products? Well, duh.

So when my friend Paul sent me a link to the Eating Rules October Unprocessed Challenge, I was enticed. Andrew Wilder, the guy behind Eating Rules, wants to get as many people as possible to pledge to eat only unprocessed foods for the month of October.

Andrew gets that some people (like me) don’t do so well with rules. So if the most you can commit to is a week, or even a day, no problem. Do what you can. That’s my kind of attitude. Here’s the Eating Rules definition of “unprocessed:”

Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients.

I read this definition and realized that since I am certainly not a person of “reasonable skill,” I’d have to develop a Reasonably Skilled Alter-Ego to consult about my ingredient choices.

My Reasonably Skilled Alter-Ego would be tall, graceful, and soft-spoken, and her kitchen would be stocked with all kinds of helpful tools and appliances. She wouldn’t be afraid of the blender or intimidated by Indian spices. And she would always be around to take over when I got discouraged.

So I pledged! Not only did I pledge, I’ll be writing a guest post at some point this month. At first I was confused when Andrew told me I’d be the only vegan writing about the challenge. But once I thought about it, it made sense. Lots of my staple vegan substitutes are processed, and cutting them out is going to be a real struggle.

I went through my kitchen this morning to identify the foods I’m going to have to binge on for the next two days avoid next month:

Cheerios
Oroweat bread
Earth Balance spread
Almond Breeze almond milk
Trader Joe’s pita chips
Trader Joe’s hummus dip
CLIF bars

Yes, CLIF bars. The biggest challenge of all. Since I became a vegan, CLIF bars have been my go-to snack to avoid starvation when I find myself on campus in a vegan desert of fast food chains. But for all their convenience, they are processed, and thus on the no-eat list for October.

I’m going to hit up the Isla Vista Coop today to investigate possibilities for unprocessed almond milk (but my Reasonably Skilled Alter-Ego might have to make some in the food processor for me).

If you want to pledge, too (and I hope you do!), visit Eating Rules here.

Russian Raclette

On Saturday afternoon, I came home to find Erin and her boyfriend, Tyler, furiously chopping vegetables in the kitchen. We were all going to see Tower of Power perform later that night, so obviously I wanted to get in on their dinner plans (especially since my dinner plans had involved peanut butter toast and... nothing else).

They explained that they were going to make "raclette" for dinner. I had no idea what that meant, so I decided to go buy a bottle of wine.

When I got back, they took a break from vegetable chopping long enough to explain to me what this dinner would entail. Apparently, raclette is a Swiss/French dish usually centering on a kind of semi-firm, cow’s milk cheese of the same name.

But Erin and Tyler weren’t able to find the special raclette cheese (I guess the Ralph’s nearby isn’t fancy enough to carry it), so they had to settle for Fontina. Obviously, that didn’t matter to me, since I was rocking melted Daiya mozzarella-style shreds anyway.

The raclette set includes a platform that heats up (you grill the vegetables on it), and little dishes with handles for slices of baguette (you slide them under the platform to toast).

The grill spins, so if you're unlucky enough to get the heel of the baguette, you can always spin the grill around and steal someone else’s. Or if you see someone grilling a piece of delicious-looking garlic that you want for yourself, you can give the raclette a spin and snag it.

It’s like Russian roulette, but with vegetables instead of bullets.

The whole experience is really fun and social. You pick out the vegetables you want to grill and when they’re ready, you slide out your (now toasted) baguette and pile them all on top to eat. Here's Erin in her adorable apron, tossing some mushrooms on the grill:

My parents told me they used to own a raclette set when they were young(er) and hip(pies). Unfortunately, Erin’s raclette set belongs to her parents, and she has to give it back.

But I guess it’s for the best. I survived Russian raclette once, but I wouldn't want to push my luck.

Horchata Hubris

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Lauren sent me a link to the New York Times’ Essential Summer Dishes. She pointed out that a lot of the recipes were vegan (or easily veganized by omitting cheese or substituting a sauce or something).

I wasn’t feeling inspired to go through the veganization process, so I went with one of the already-vegan recipes: the hemp horchata, submitted by Coco Harris of the fabulous blog Opera Girl Cooks:

Photo: Operagirlcooks.com

Coco happens to be a friend of a friend (that friend being Sasha, with whom I recently baked my first date pie), and I’d tried and enjoyed her recipes before.

Horchata is a chilled Mexican drink, usually made with rice. Well, this hippie version is made with hemp instead. I’d never purchased or ingested hemp before; my only interactions with it had involved braiding or otherwise twisting it into necklaces during summer camp as a preteen.

But apparently, you can eat hemp. I bought hulled hemp seeds at the Isla Vista Coop and, ignoring their rancid pungent smell, got to work on my horchata.

But in my endeavor to recreate this hemp horchata, I encountered two problems: first, I didn’t have an immersion blender. Or any blender, for that matter. All I had was a food processor, so that would have to do.

My second problem was of the epic/tragic variety: hubris. In case you weren't a Classics major, hubris means over-weening pride, and it’s always the fatal flaw of protagonists who otherwise have pretty much everything working in their favor. Basically, these characters start dominating in life, get too arrogant, and then everything hits the fan.

Well, in the tragic episode that was my attempt at getting creative with this horchata, hubris was my downfall. “I am a creative cook!” I thought to myself. “I will add coconut shreds to this recipe and it will turn out great because things have really been going my way lately.”

So here’s what I threw into the food processor:

½ cup hulled hemp seeds
2 cups water
2 tbsp agave nectar
¼ tsp vanilla
dash cinnamon
and… ½ cup shredded coconut

After it was all food-processed up, I put it in a plastic container and stored it in the fridge until my friends came over. Then I could share my horchata with them and show off how creative I had been.

So when Shannon and Katie visited last night to celebrate my roommate Erin’s birthday, I pulled the hemp horchata out of the fridge and examined it. The agave nectar had sunk to the bottom and the whole thing looked like… well, it looked like off-white, cloudy water with specks floating in it:

I mixed it up by shaking it, then poured one glass for us all to share because I was not delusional enough to think that each of us was going to be able to drink an entire glass of this stuff.

The thing is, it tasted good. The one problem was the hubris-inspired ingredient: those coconut shreds. They had not been pulverized by the food processor, so they got caught in our teeth as we drank. And the ones that did not get caught in our teeth gathered at the top of the glass like a pile of soggy toilet paper:

Delicious.

I had been thwarted by hubris! But unlike that of a hubristic literary protagonist, my life is not a tragedy. Given the evidence, I’m pretty sure it’s a comedy.

And that means I get to learn my lesson – don’t add coconut shreds to a perfectly good drink recipe! – and move on to make more mistakes. The story of my life.

It's Hard to Find a (Vegan) Friend

Over the past months, I’ve become involved with Go Vegan Santa Barbara. Its founder, Carrie LeBlanc, is an activist who manages to be convincing without being annoying to non-vegans. She uses Meetup.com to organize events for vegan-curious people and vegans who need vegan friends.

I fall into the latter category: I need some vegan friends. Despite many attempts to convince myself otherwise, I have to admit that Twitter followers don’t count as friends. And don't even get me started on Facebook "friends" (just because I clicked on "accept" when I was bored one afternoon, doesn't mean I want to be bombarded with your angst in the form of song-lyric status updates).

It’s not that I don’t love my non-vegan friends. We’re not dinosaurs, after all; omnivores and herbivores can totally play together without one party (um… the herbivore) getting eaten up by the other.

But it would be nice to have some people with whom I could prepare a meal or go out to eat without feeling like I’m limiting their options because I’m a vegan. We could just assume that whatever we prepared/ordered would be vegan and I wouldn’t have that lingering sense that I’m coming off as some combination of snobbish and unreasonable.

Obviously, making friends as a grown up is hard. But making vegan friends is pretty near impossible; I can’t just go around asking people first if they’re vegan and second if they want to be my friend. Unfortunately, there is no vegan equivalent of “gaydar,” as far as I know… “vegan-dar”? Lame.

So yesterday, I went to the Go Vegan SB Summer Salad Potluck event with the hope of meeting some non-annoying vegans to be friends with. It was hosted by Marq (who is obviously awesome because he spells his name with a Q) and his partner Tom (who, despite his less exciting name, is equally awesome).

I brought a rather uninspired quinoa salad with olive oil and every random vegetable I had in my refrigerator mixed in. It tasted good because the vegetables were fresh, but it looked pretty boring next to some of the really inventive dishes other people brought:

As it turns out, vegans love salad. Did I just blow your mind? Well, it’s true.

Luckily for me, all these salad-loving vegans were pretty friendly. I think if I keep attending these meet-ups, I might get some real friendships out of them – at the very least, I’ll get some more delicious food.

Man-made Risotto

I grew up watching my Italian grandmother and great-aunts slave away for hours in the kitchen while their husbands sat out in the living room and watched TV. Then after dinner, the women would clean up and wash all the dishes while their husbands went back to the living room and slept.

So when my friend Matteo – an Italian man – offered to cook me dinner, I was thrilled at the chance to vindicate my female relatives. I told him that my plan was to sit out in the living room and watch TV (well, watch Hulu on my computer) while he worked hard in the hot kitchen.

He became annoyed and told me that real Italians don’t live like that anymore; it’s just the old-school Italian-American families, like my mom’s, that keep the stereotype alive. I asked him if he would at least yell, “Mangia! Mangia!” at me when he was done. He rolled his eyes and didn’t justify my request with an answer.

I ended up not relaxing in the living room while he cooked. Instead, I hovered around him drinking wine, asking questions, taking pictures of what he was doing, and generally getting in the way. Here’s what he made for me:

Risotto ai Porri, Vegan-Style
(Risotto with Leeks, Vegan-Style)
Makes 6-8 servings

4 leeks
2 cups Village Harvest Organic Arborio (risotto)
4 tbsp Earth Balance
Vegetable broth (a lot)
A handful of Daiya mozzarella shreds

Silly Matteo had assumed that I would own some vegetable broth. Since I don’t own any useful ingredients, including vegetable broth, Matteo had to make the broth from scratch.

He boiled a whole pot of water and threw in the ends of the leeks, a zucchini (or as Matteo obviously called it, a single “zucchino”), an onion cut in half, and a handful of kale. We let it simmer for 20 minutes:

While the broth was broth-ifying, Matteo chopped the leeks into very thin slices. He put the Earth Balance into the middle of a big wok and poured the risotto and leeks on top of it in a pile:

Then he spooned a few ladles of broth on top and stirred it up with a wooden spoon over low-medium heat. The trick, I guess, is to never stop stirring. As soon as the risotto starts to get sticky and clumpy, you add another few ladles of the broth. After about a half hour, the risotto had expanded to its fullest potential.

We sprinkled some Daiya mozzarella shreds on top and ate it with what was left of the white wine. It was perfect. And the best part is that the leftovers tasted even better the next day, since the flavors had had some time to mingle with each other in the fridge.

This man-made risotto definitely beat any woman-made risotto I could have cooked up. But I’m glad I watched closely and took detailed notes because it tasted just as good as any buttery, cheesy version. And I doubt you could get vegan risotto it in Italy, so... Italian-Americans win.

First Date Pie

Back when my sister and I thought we were badass enough to be raw foodists for two weeks, we went grocery shopping with raw recipes in mind. We wanted to make some kind of raw date concoction that required a blender, and since we only discovered that we were blender-less after having purchased a 2-pound container of dates, well, we had a lot of dates and nothing to use them for.

I’d had enough bad dates in my life to know that I didn’t want a whole tub of them hanging out in my cupboard, so I needed to find a way to take advantage of them all at once. The fruit, not men! Get your mind out of the gutter.

Anyway. The other night, I had a date with Sasha. I cooked her dinner – we ate on the floor because I still don’t have any chairs – and we indulged in strawberries and vegan chocolate while we drank red wine.

Then we decided to take it to the next level and get something baking in the oven. I found some ideas for a date pie online, but we had to alter the recipes slightly due to my general lack of ingredients. This first date experience was not off to a good start.

I’d never used dates in cooking before. In fact, I don’t think I’d had a date at all until I moved to California after college. I was a date virgin. And this was my first date pie.

Here’s what we used:

First Date Pie

The Moist Middle:
2 lbs. pitted dates
1 ¾ cups water
1 cup sugar
1 cup agave syrup
2 tbsp. vanilla

The Crumbly Crust:
3 cups quick cook oatmeal
3 cups unbleached flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 cups brown sugar
2 cups canola oil

We preheated the oven to 375 degrees. While things were heating up in there, we stirred the filling ingredients together in a big skillet and brought them to a boil. Then we reduced the heat to a simmer – we wanted to take things slow, after all – and stirred them up some more until they were smooth(ish):

Sasha, melting those dates like buttah

While Sasha dealt with the mushy dates, I prepared the crust mixture in a big bowl. As it turned out, we had a lot of dates. And a lot of crust.

It was too much pie for one pan. So we made two pies: one for the two of us to share and one for me to give to my landlady to get back on her good side after drunkenly falling into (and partially destroying) her rose bushes last weekend.

We packed a layer of the crust mixture into the bottom of each pan and plopped the hot dates down on top of it. Then we poured the rest of the crust on the top, patted it down evenly, and shoved the pies in the oven.

After 25 minutes of baking, the date pies were ready. The crust had turned golden brown and the whole cottage smelled delicious.

We waited about 10 minutes for our pie to cool and then dug in. It tasted so good, there was no time for awkward conversation. And frankly, that’s the best first date experience I’ve ever had.