I’ve been having an eventful summer. Too eventful maybe, since it’s making me miss precious hours of internet. So here’s a pictorial of my summer set to the tune of anything from Dirty Dancing.

First up, the Let Live Conference. It was lots of fun and I met lots of cool people and got a picture of Peter Young with my foot. Hot!

Them the strawberries in my garden ripened!

Next, my friends Jim and Evelyn came for a visit and we had a fairytale time. The kind of fairytale that is really creepy and scares children. Look at everything we did!

Seattle! And then the Redwoods!

And seals on the coast!

Them we drove through a forking mountain ON FIRE!

Just to go to Farm Sanctuary! It was worth it.

(more…)

Recipe plagiarism has been been burning up the internet lately, be it in the form of a VegWeb member submitting other people’s internet recipes as her own, or Cindy McCain claiming that a recipe from Hersheys.com were from a friend.

Copyright infringement and plagiarism aren’t the same exact thing, although it seems that here Cindy McCain has committed both crimes. The less interesting part is the legal stuff; that you can’t copyright food ingredients. Even if our recipes are identical in quantity, as long as the words were changed around a bit it’s fine because words, obviously, can be copyrighted. But the social ramifications go deeper. Taking someone else’s recipe and giving it a phony back story is frowned upon, whether the story is that you created it after having a feverish dream about butterscotch or that it was passed down a few generations. But it got me wondering, are these fibs particular to food? People don’t seem to lie as much about other things, like knitting or blacksmithing. Why do people lie about recipes so much? I don’t just mean bloggers who “forget” to attribute their recipes to someone else, or “forget” to mention that their entire knowledge of swiss chard is coming straight from Wikipedia.

For instance, my mom insists that certain things are “family recipes.” Like these tofu balls we’ve been making since I was a teenager. They are our tofu balls! We’ve eaten them for birthdays, we’ve rolled their little bodies between our palms after arguments, we’ve smothered them in sauce through the ages, since the eighties, and so they are ours. Well, yes. And no. They are from the Tofu Cookery. It was our first vegan cookbook, it was the first meal we cooked as a family and I can remember the day my mom came home with it and we passed it around, folding over pages, deciding what to make and finally coming to consensus on the tofu balls. My sister is now feeding them to her children and making a little gastronomical imprint in their psyches. For the whole of their lives, a whiff of these in the skillet is going to make them feel like they’re home. So, yeah, it really is a family recipe even if we didn’t invent it. But I think the truth is much more interesting than saying we made it up or it was passed down from our vegan Russian great great grandma.

On top of spaghetti…a pack of lies?

But why is my mom ashamed of admitting that it comes from Louise Hagler’s cookbook? That’s sort of a rhetorical question, and I think the answer would be really interesting so I wish I could give it to you. Why did Cindy McCain say that her Passion Fruit Mousse was a family recipe? Why didn’t she say she got it out of Better Homes and Gardens or where ever? Or even worse, that her people got it out of Better Homes and Gardens. It’s as if we all intuitively know this secret, but we don’t know what it is. Something about how our recipes make us seem, what they say about us. Would you rather have fresh baked cookies from someone who visits Hersheys.com or by someone who has a friend with a collection of vintage salt and pepper shaker and a box of recipes that goes back to the civil war? The cookies should taste the same either way, right? The fact that they don’t makes me think that there’s a secret ingredient here that’s a lot more esoteric than “nutmeg.”

Don’t Eat Off The Sidewalk Zine: Simple Recipes For Complicated Vegans is available again, so if you missed it the first time around, seize the moment and get it. For a mere 2.50 the tempeh wings that everyone is raving about can be yours!

What I am saying is, please vote for me for favorite cookbook author in the VegNews Veggie Awards. On my livejournal I threatened to cry if I don’t win. But here I will take a different route and threaten violence. I need to work all angles. Vote for me or I swear to Fizzle I will kick your computer screen in from the inside.

My feet feel like two blocks of pressed tofu but all the things considered I think that the NY Magazine event was a success. I'll start with the bad - even though I listed the good first. 1) The event started late and even though the kitchen was prepared to serve everything, we served about an hour later than we were supposed to. A lot of the food came out cold and the matzoh balls got gummy. And cold. 2) I think that some tables got screwed and had courses skipped or got less food because there were more people at their tables. We actually had extra food sitting downstairs for tables that got skimped out on but no one ever got them!

So because of the late start time I was kind of stressed out. My mom came downstairs to the kitchen to tell us that everyone was happy and enjoying themselves and the food, but she's my mom! She isn't gonna throw a cold tempura mushroom at me. And then my publisher came down and said the same. Chance of him throwing a cold tempura mushroom at me: only about 4% more likely. I read the reviews on Brooklyn Vegan and some were pretty bad, but studies have shown anonymous people on the internet to be 113% meaner than the general populace. When I combine the data from those factors I can easily grade everything as a solid B.

It seems like everyone had fun, and that is probably the most important part. Man Man was more insane than a drum circle in Tompkins Square Park in 1992. But they sounded awesome and there wasn't a random guy playing “the bottle.” (ie: tapping his empty 40 with a stick) They just may be my favorite newish band lately, besides the Prids.

I also saw some guy fall of his chair. If that isn't a measure of success then I don't know what is.

There are some pics up at NYC nosh, like this one:

Shiitake Tempura

Enough with this vegan parent baby killers thing already. I probably get 10 angry emails a day about it, all of which I ignore along with the emails about canine teeth, lack of protein and instructions directly from god to eat meat. But this op ed piece by Nina Planck really bugged me. I wrote a response to it elsewhere, but I'm posting it here for good measure.

For starters, Nina Planck, is not a doctor or even a nutritionist. She is a business woman whose business is selling meat and dairy to people, including her book about why meat and dairy are good for you.

There are plant sources for DHA yet she chooses to omit that fact. She does say that plant sources for essential amino acids are “inferior in quantity and quality” but offers no evidence of this. Probably because there is actually no evidence of this. Humans can synthesize enough DHA from eating plant sources rich in Omega-3s, like flax seeds. So if the mom is eating her omega-3s and breast feeding, DHA levels should be sufficient and free of mercury and other toxins that a fish-heavy diet would surely contain. However, I'm not a doctor, so here is an article about vegan pregnancy and infancy by someone who is.

She says that this has happened three times in four years, but I can think of only one other case where the parents actually were actually feeding their child cod fish liver oil and so this seems to directly contradict Nina's assertions that fish oils would have saved the baby. It also contradicts the very notion that this baby was fed a vegan diet.

Also, how many babies starved at the hand of omnivorous parents in the past 4 years? I bet that Nina doesn't have those statistics at hand. “Meat Eating Parents Starve Baby” doesn't make a very good headline. Also, how many vegan babies did not die of starvation in the past 4 years? Again, that would probably not make a very sexy headline either.

Finally, I just want to add some anecdotal evidence into the mix. The vegan children that I know have all been vibrant, happy and healthy. If anything good can come of this recent tragedy it will be that some responsible reporter somewhere in the world will decide to do a story about them.

Who are these elusive happy, healthy vegan mom and baby?

I bit the “ethical omnivorism” bullet. As you probably have noticed, I tend not to talk politics, instead opting to make yummy vegan food and force feed it to people. But jewcy.com asked me to debate a yoga guy about ethical meat eating and I said yes. What followed was a few days long email debate, which you can read here. Only the first 2 emails are there so far, the rest will be up this week. Jewcy introduced me as a utilitarian, which I'm not really, but whatever.

New York magazine asked me to host this vegan dinner party on May 23rd, and gave me the free range to come up with a creative menu that fit with their theme. I can't give you all the details but think Asian Bat Mitvah!

We are having our event at a yet to be disclosed location, and if you buy a ticket, you'll be getting an e-mail from me 24 hours in advance with the location, the menu, and some fun places to hit up before the dinner party.  Before this event gets too public, I wanted to give you, my loyal friends, cooking partners, and readers, the chance to buy a ticket!  Its $35 bucks, and you get a multi-course meal, open bar, dance floor and the delicious tunes of Man Man!

Buy your tickets today between 3 and 6 to make sure you get a seat!

Here are the details again:
 
Who: Post Punk Kitchen
What: A dinner party
When: May 23rd, 2007 from 7:30 to 11:00
Where: We're not telling
Why: Because you want yummy food
How: Go to nymag.com/nyxny to buy a ticket for $35

The charitable partmer for this event is NY Cares.

I can't tell you the exact details yet but this is going to be awesome.  NY Magazine and NY Cares are hosting a vegan dinner with awesome music and an open bar and a dance floor. Tickets will be 30 bucks. I wish I could tell you all the details now because it's just insanely ridiculously awesome, like the vegan bat mitvah I never had. But I can't tell you the details. Yet.  But save the date! And save up 30 dollars!

http://nymag.com/nyxny/kitchen.php

This link will take you to the event page, if you try to buy tickets right now it will say it's sold out, but it's not. I'll give more details sometime this week. Seriously - save the date like crazy.

The last brunch went so well that we're making it a regular thing. So show up this Sunday May 6th between 11am and 1pm  to get your vegan waffle on.

The menu is the same - Breakfast burrito with scrambled tofu, homefries, tempeh bacon, salsa fresca (that's fresh salsa to you, bub) and guacamole

or

Pumpkin waffles with apple butter, vanilla soy yogurt and the freshest fruit that Brooklyn has to offer

We're raising the price to 8 bucks, but it's a benefit for Eastern Shore Chicken Sanctuary, so I won't be lining my own pockets with your hard earned cash.

I hope to see you there!

Vox Pop website for directions and what have you.

Happy brunchers from last time