New Home.

Hey folks. I've moved this blog over to Wordpress. Click Here or enter the URL manually: wittslentils.wordpress.com.

I'll only be updating on that blog from now on.

R&R's house.

I'm at Rachel and Rob's house for a few days before I mosey on down to Blacksburg for a spell. The weather has been perfect (for some strange reason--It's late December), so I've been spending my days reading in their screened-in porch, preparing for next term (Heidegger and Russell--an odd combination if there ever was one). Last night I offered to make dinner for them. I went on over to Ellewood Thompson's and got some foodstuffs. We ended up having a Seitan (homemade) stir fry with brocolli and water chestnuts, peanut sauce (homemade), quinoa, and local beer. We ate it on the floor while we watched The Dark Night. A nice lazy Saturday, if there ever was one.

I hope I keep this blog going until the summer. Rachel and Rob have a fantasic garden. When the garden peaks in the summer they almost never buy food. They've grown onions, potatoes, garlic, watermelon, butternut squash, salad greens, dark greens, blueberies, blackberries, strawberries, thyme, basil, thai basil, rosemary, beets, pumpkin, tomatoes, you name it. It's such a nurturing experience to go into the backyard and dig the food you're going to eat out of the soil. It makes me feel rooted and empowered, as if I'm combating hyperreality one handful of sun-warmed soil at a time. I think Baudrillard would be proud! So come summer time I'll post some pictures of the garden.

And if you're ever in Richmond, VA, go to Ellewood Thompsons! It's seriously the best grocery store I've ever been to. They specialize in organic, local, sustainable, fair trade, healthy, veg-friendly food. They have a wealth of vegan options, and, if you're into that kind of thing, free range and "humane" meats, you know...if you're into that kind of thing. They're expanding and adding a fair trade, organic cafe soon. MacVegan paradise if there ever was one! Best of all, an Ellewood Thompson's is opening in D.C. in one year; me and my fellow districters can look forward to that!

I have my Christmas dinner photos, and I've been trying to upload them, but blogspot's been real cranky about those photos of late. I'll try again later.

Christmas Eve--Indian.

My family and I decided to make Indian food for Christmas Eve. We used to do a traditional Christmas Eve dinner, but since various scheduling factors have shifted our real emphasis from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, Christmas Eve has become more of a warm-up party for us. Since then, we've started to make creative foods like Mexican and Indian on Xmas eve. This was a good opportunity to have a rematch with Chana Masala (see 'Curried Humility' entry), to see if I could make it a bit more edible this time. It worked out well. I also made homemade Roti, an Indian flatbread, and I thoroughly impressed myself. It was actually fairly simple. Again, mom made spiced basmati rice, which was great. We had some mango chutney, which I never got a photo of. We also has some Indian cocunut rice pudding with raisins and pistachios. It all turned out pretty well.

My Aunt came down from Manhattan for dinner today. It was nice to see her and cook for her. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the family tomorrow.


Chana Masala (stewed chickpeas and potatoes w/ indian spices) with spinach. I took the photo really close because any wider shot didn't really show you the food anymore.



Spiced basmati rice with cinnamon, cardamom and cumin.



Homemade roti (indian flatbread, thinner than Naan) with vegan butter on top.



The whole shebang together with mango chutney and white wine.



Indian rice pudding with coconut milk, raisins and pistachios. I would have liked to use golden raisins, but didn't have any around.



Ye ol' hearth.


hat tip to Manjula's Indian Vegetarian Kitchen for helping me with the Roti. Here's the video. It puffs up when its cooking and forms an inner pocket like a pita. It looks really cool. Here's Manjula's video:


stay tuned for Xmas dinner tomorrow night!!!
happy holidays everyone!!!

"how hard is it to be vegan during the holidays?

Don't worry, I'm going to post whatever vegan concoctions my family and I cook up this year for Xmas when the time comes, but since I've been asked a million times before 'how hard it is to be vegan during the holidays,' and since I happen to have these photos from a year or two back on Thanksgiving, I thought I might as well post them, and then give a fuller and more thought-out answer to the question at hand. The quality is significantly better than the other photos on this blog that I've taken only with my MacBook. This is because my sister Vanessa was a photo major in her undergrad (She's since left photography for net.art).

Anyway, so here it is, what a vegan eats for Thanksgiving--
(not pictured are the cranberries, vegan raspberry swirl cheesecake and apple pie)

Faux turkey cutlets.

Stuffed acorn squash with wild rice and cranberries.

Cornbread stuffing with apples, rosemary and sage

Roasted sweet potatoes with toasted pecans and brown sugar.

Green beans with fried onions

Garlic mashed potatoes


This is why I usually just laugh it off when people ask me how 'hard' it is to be vegan during the holidays. Being vegan is as abundant a lifestyle as I could ask for. I don't 'miss' anything at all from when I ate animals. If I had it, I wouldn't enjoy it. This is what I eat not because this is what I am allowed to eat, but because it is what I choose to eat, and in that I see an abundance I never imagined would come from conscious eating. The holidays are not just a time to unreflectively gorge on the foods that slowly kill us, made by the corporations that don't give a damn about us, relieved that 'today doesn't count,' and feel terrible about it the next day when you draft your new years resolutions. The holidays are a time to celebrate the abundance of resources that we have, and I'm thrilled that those resources allow me to give back to the world, my body, and other animals not just in spite of the holidays, but especially during the holidays, a time when the delicate, awesome power of the environment, the gift of our health and embodiment, and the welfare of the least among us should be at the forefront of our minds. For me and other veg*ns, the holidays are not a time where we grit our teeth and grudgingly surpass the turkey's breast or pig's leg because we 'have to.' For me at least, the ever-threatened, ever-abused 'true spirit of the holidays,' and the reasons that I choose veganism aren't in conflict--they flow from the same part of me--the part of me that embraces community, compassion, and respect for life. So in answer to the omnipresent puzzlement "it must be hard to be vegan during the holidays!?" my best and most honest response would be to laugh and say "how hard? as hard as it is to feel charitable during the holidays, as hard as it is to feel compassion during the holidays, as hard as it is to feel love during the holidays. The flavors of animals are long-gone from my palate. I don't even remember them anymore, so how could I miss them? The foods on a vegan holiday table are overwhelmingly flavorful, rich and healthy. Nothing is missing. I would choose them over meat and dairy even if I got a no-strings-attached option, just once a year, that let me eat meat that no animal had to die for. I would still choose these foods. A vegan holiday is not one of sacrifice and self-discipline. It is not one of bland flavors and colors. A vegan holiday is one of abundance, compassion, health, flavor, growth, community and joy."

...that's how hard it is to be vegan during the holidays.

BBQ seitan.

This was a tag-team operation. My sister and I wanted to make something warm and heavy on account of the weather, but still make it as healthy as we could. We made this entire meal from scratch--every bit of it. It took us two hours, but they were enjoyable. I made homemade seitan with homemade bbq sauce. Vanessa made mashed cauliflower w/ homemade gravy. She also made this kick-ass broccolli slaw. All things considered, we did pretty damn well.

By the way, a lot of people assume that when vegans eat something out of the ordinary, it's because its more ordinary counterpart isn't vegan. This isn't the case. V made mashed caulifour because its a lot healthier than vegan mashers and tastes (almost) the same (V claims that they taste better than real mashers. I disagree. In fact, if it were up to me, we probably would have made regular mashers instead. I'm glad we did the cauliflower though). Anyway, my point is we didn't begrudgingly do cauliflower mashes because regular mashers 'aren't vegan' or something. It was just easier and healthier.

I feel manly when I make cookies.

I wanted to embarrass myself as go as Martha Stewart as I possibly could once this Christmas, so I decided to do bracket my masculinity for the day and make vegan pinwheel chocolate peppermint cookies. The recipe wasn't vegan, but it was easily veganized, as 90% of baked foods are. I just did margarine instead of dairy butter, soymilk instead of cows' milk, and bananas instead of eggs (though there are many other ways to get around the egg thing). The non-chocolate parts of the cookies had crushed candy cane pieces in them. Look at them. They're adorable.

In other, completely inedible news, I really like to run, and when I was training for a marathon a couple of years back, I completely messed up my right knee, ignored it, and did what seems to be permanant damage. I can still run fairly long distances, around ten miles, but if I increase distance too much from run to run, or if I push fifteen miles in a single run, my knee inevitably acts up. After some research, I'm pretty sure it's iliotibial band syndrome. Anyway, against my best judgment I increased my distances a bit too quickly this break and my IT band is in some serious pain. It would be wise to steer clear of running for five days or so, but I keep ignoring my own advice. I ran a 5k today, and I plan to do a 10k tomorrow. My knee is KILLING me.
But this is supposed to be a vegan food blog.

Anyway, hopefully my next entry will be more veg-full. I'm missing fruits and vegetables.

Breakfast, too.

PANCAKES~~what of it?!?
--and vegan sausage too.

I think it can still be just like Norman Rockwell...

My sister Vanessa came home for Christmas today, so I wanted to make somefin fancy and festive for dinner. I also wanted to try my hand at homemade seitan again, which is getting surprisingly easy. I also wanted to do something with the Kale I had sitting around. Consult the Goddesses of Veganomicon! I found this badass looking recipe for Roasted seitan with brussell sprouts, kale, and sun-dried tomatoes stewed with red wine. Hell yes. It was a nice Fork You to the cold weather. We ate it around ye ol’ hearth. Norman Rockwell for the new millennium? Perhaps. Wish Rachel and Rob were there though.

I followed Isa and Terry’s reccomendation to make Broccolli Polenta with it. Unfortunately I couldn’t find yellow polenta in my one-stoplight West Virginia town. No surprise there—I just knew that white polenta would look like cat food, or worse, when photographed in my new precious food blog, so I pouted for a while (I got over it). I wanted to let it set and then pan fry it as a base for the seitan-kale-stewey-food-thing, but when it came down to it it seemed a bit too tedious and daunting. Next time, maybe. I just served it warm like grits--just as good.

Oh, and I made chocolate mouse with raspberries for dessert (I’ve never understood why raspberries has a ‘p’ in it. hmm…). Good stuff.

I've been told I should switch to wordpress, and I'm begining to see why. Look how oddly positions the photos are in this post. Again though, that also sounds tedious.

"Pressed down in your old quilt
and the third-grade chalk-stains on your fingers.
Grandma's sleeping in the other room-
Christmas is only ten months away-
I think it can still be just like Norman Rockwell!
I think it can still be just like Norman Rockwell!"

Kreecher Comforts

Oxford is known for a lot of things, and most of them I’ve celebrated emphatically in my first term abroad. However, fresh, healthy vegan food is not one of them, and I’ve been learning why. The monotony of limp salads and the endless stream of soggy french fries tested my endurance and my tolerance for a culture positively lacking in any degree of culinary heritage whatsoever. But, in the end, I wasn’t there to eat, and was too busy pouring over Kant and Aristotle to give a damn, so I contently heaved handfuls of dry cereal into my mouth for days at a time as I worked. I figured, if I could be contently vegan in Cairo for a week last Spring, I can be vegan here too.

Nevertheless, it’s become an unconscious ritual for me to cook this exact same dinner every time I come home to my parents form college, whether AU or OU, so I did just that when I got back at the end of Michaelmas. Something feels particularly ‘healing’ about it--probably because it’s a giant pile of nutrient-dense foods--but at the risk of getting waaaay too MacVegan right now, there’s something…well, spiritually healthy about it as well. Maybe because I make it myself, which is therapeutic, or maybe because it’s the first hot food I eat in weeks at the end of a semester, or maybe nutritive food simply IS spiritually nurturing food. Whatever it is, this combo makes me feel ‘at home’ in a significant way. *End the new-age MacVegan Berkeley talk*

So it’s this:
1) Toasted Quinoa (A high-protein South American grain. It always looks ass ugly when you photograph it, and I can never understand why. Oh, well.)
2) Smokey Red Wine Lentils with Celery
3) Baby Romaine with Balsamic Vinegar and Olive Oil
4) Roasted Butternut Squash with Black Pepper
5) Red Wine

Sorry about the awkward camera angle here—my sister is the photographer of the family. I just used my computer’s camera.

Curried Humility.

Having crossed the Atlantic to come home from winter break, I thought I would use the opportunity to wow my parents by cooking impressive Indian food…something I’ve never done…without any kind of recipe. I thought I was that awesome. I made Chana Masala, which turned out…okay enough, but not nearly as good as I wanted. Mom offered to ‘make some rice,’ which I assumed meant nothing more than rice+H2O+Heat. I was wrong. She made this kick-ass spiced basmati rice…thing! It upstaged my Chana Masala by a longshot. Credit must be given where credit is due. That was a pretty impressive stunt.

She said she learned it from this lady’s youtube channel--Manjula's Vegetarian Kitchen. Check it out and tell me if its any good. Here's the Basmati one in question:

A Green Bowl of Green Food for Green People.

I have to admit it at long last: I really really don’t like Tempeh. At least in huge chunks. The dry, nutty, fermented flavor of tempeh suggests to me something that died—a long time ago, and sat in the fridge to ferment in its despair and solitude. No thank you. A sole exception has to be made, of course, for the sassy, delectable, divine concoction that is Tempeh Bacon. As far as I’m concerned, smother anything (vegan) in maple syrup, soy sauce, and liquid smoke, and its fair-game as face-fair. Yum!
But that’s another story. Point is, tempeh tastes like fish sauce and bricks and I usually sidestep it. It’s not that I haven’t given it fair game. I’ve been veg for nine years and vegan for four, and tempeh never worked its mojo on me. Tempeh adventures I save for bolder and more heroic times, not the everyday. Knowing, however, that I would be spending as much as four weeks in my parents West Virginia home doing absolutely nothing (cue Dueling Bangos), I picked up a slab of tempeh for another one-on-one to see if we could come to terms with our differences.
Simultaneously, having been in the deliciously nerdy habit lately of taking pictures of everything I eat, I came to the sudden and unsettling realization of how anti-green I am (by which I mean food that is the color green, indicating that it is nutrient-dense. Vegan food is almost always in the ballpark of the Green Movement, and a vegan diet taken as a whole certainly is). Veg*ns everywhere beware: Having sworn potential pets, and maybe their reproductive secretions, off of your plate does not in any way entitle you to thinking you’ve got your green covered indefinitely. Eating green food is a conscious project for all of us. A harmless and joyful project, but one that needs our attention anyway. So lately. In response to the drolling monotone of what I thought were a series of seriously nutrient-packed dinners, I’ve decided to see just how green I can go with dinner. It seemed that between my tempeh-therapy and my green-boosting, a pretty interesting dinner conbination was underway tonight.
Enter red-quinoa-spinach-tempeh-lemon-food-thing, and it’s humble sidekick, brocolli-water-chestnut-food-thing. Tonight I made red quinoa with roasted tempeh crumbles, spinach (a hell of a lot of spinach I might add, about 50% of the dinner was spinach), lemon, ginger and garlic. It came from this stellar book I’m always going back to: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. It’s not all-vegan, but it’s mostly vegan and all the vegan recipes are labeled as such. I took some liberties with the recipe though, adding veggie stock and lots of ginger. The sidekick tonight was ginger broccolli with water chestnuts and sesame seeds. Pretty damn, healthy, if I may say so myself, and the profoundly Eurocentric theme that saw unity in all flavors ‘other’ was enough to make any quasi-postmodernist MacVegan* blush with embarrassment (quinoa—S. America, Tempeh-Indonesia, Spinach—southwest asia, water chestnuts—china, etc.) Still, nothing too wring with that.

*MacVegan is a term my sister coined which refers to the painfully identifiable post-hippie vegan culture that I, admittedly, ascribe to. Vegans with MacBooks. The ones that like Yoga and irony. If a series of related images aren't blossoming in your head right now, see Stuff White People Like

Cream of Cannolini Soup with Kale.

My diet has been way less green (in color, not climate commitment) lately that I’d like it to be. So I’ve been finding ways to sneak in green things in everything I eat. Tonight I made cream of cannolini soup with kale and lemon. It’s from this book Tofu 1-2-3 that, from its title and cover design looks absolutely worthless, but actually turned out to be one of the best (and incidentally vegan) cookbooks I (we) own. I threw a toasted whole-wheat pita on the side and called it something mediterianian. …OPA?!...er, yeah. As you can see, mom helped me out by making this sassy grapefruit…thing. It was chopped local grapefruits, basil strips, and balsamic vinegar. It was really vibrant and light and went with the warm, earthy soup really well.

Preliminary Considerations...

Having offered oh-so-many times to guest write on my friends blog, the Wet Hot American Vegan, and having failed oh-so-many times, I decided that it was time to piece together my own vegan blog and jump into the blogosphere with everyone else. Each time I thought of something to contribute to WHAVegan, I had moved on to a bigger and better idea before it came together. Surely this is a sign that my own blog is in order, so here we go. In starting, I tip my hat to the patriarchs and demigods of webVegans. VeganDad, Vegan Yum Yum and PPK are some of the most noteworthy, but there are thousands out there that do this way better than I do. After all, I’m basically here to brag about my cooking.
I may confine this blog to food and veganism, I may not. My other kreecher comforts will probably find their place in here soon enough: Philosophy (Post-Kantian), Critical Theory, running, indie folk music and post-rock to name a few. So don’t be alarmed if you come across a book reveiw or a rant here. They are indeed not edible, but that’s just the way I slap the keyboard.
The title of this blog, and its subtitle, are a little humorous homage to recent posthumanist ‘scholars,’ Specifically, Jacques Derrida’s lecture ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (more to follow)” and Cary Wofle’s essay “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion.” Derrida’s work exemplifies, and Wolfe’s explains the gravity of the current animal rights movement; a gravity not acknowledged by their analytic counterparts. Modern analytic ethics (a-la Peter Singer and Tom Regan) are correct as far as they go in asserting the moral status of animals, citing the absence of any morally-relevant characteristics that distinguish us from animals. These perspectives do most of the pragmatic work in making the case for animal ethics, and they should be abundantly applauded for this. But these perspectives fail to recognize that profundity of ‘animal rights’ (an unhelpful and blunt term in both its parts). These Anglophone, analytic ethicists would paint for us a picture of a human ethical agent so progressed in its ethical theory that it touches the fringes of significance in finally ascribing moral status to non-human animals. But these ethicists are riding the waves of an ideological revolution, never once pausing to realize their motion, never noticing that their microscopic perspective masks a macroscopic Copernican Revolution. The analytic perspective on animal rights is but a symptom of a greater and more profound shift in Western ideology. In the shadow of Darwin’s evolution and Kant’s transcendental psychology we are beginning to fully realize that the human experience is not THE experience of the world, but only AN experience of it, and the comfy throne that humans hold at the center of relevance and orientation is exposed as an arbitrary center. The Human of the Enlightenment is beginning to unravel, and the naked animal out of which it was born stands exposed among many. Analytic ‘animal rights’ philosophers would have us believe they are touching the fringes of ethical consideration, pausing to take note of the faint similarity that non-human animals share with us. They fail to realize that the very topology that allows such a declaration, a declaration from the human from at the ‘center’ about the animal on the ‘fringes’ or 'margins' is unraveling at is very core, and that indeed they are the ones pulling the thread, ignorant to the consequence. I am reminded of Neitzsche's madman, who warns the villiagers that the Death of God forever disoriented them, throwing them into a cosmic tailspin in which relevance will forever slip through their fingers. A similar shift is charecteristised by these Singerian ethisists, though instead of the Death of God we might call it the Death of Man, or at least a fundamental reconsideration of the properties of Man--a Disrobing of Man, perhaps. From this, macroscopic perspective, ethicists have not discovered the faintly human in animals, but we have all discovered the animality within ourselves, and the relationship between humans and animals, indeed the very topology that holds all ethical declarations in perspective, is overthrown.
This is not to say that animal issues are the most important issues in applied ethics today. Animal rights activists have a striking tendency to block out all other justice issues, and this is a shame. It is a confusion that stems from an inability to realize that metaethical primacy and applied ethical urgency need not coalesce. Nevertheless, it seems evident to me that animality—both the human in the animal, and the animal in the human, is at the very core of any contemporary ethical theory, if it chooses to excavate deep enough into the topic at hand. We must speak out for humans and non-human animals, and we must realize that the ideological support structure of injustice toward either inevitably entangles the two. This is the perspective on animal ethics that Derrida exemplifies and Wolfe identifies, and I find it to be a far more fitting than Singer’s or Regan’s (or Linzey’s, or Nussbaum’s, or (barely) Rorty’s etc). For more on this, check out Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, or Wolfe's Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory or Zoontologies. There are many other great titles on the subject, but these are the ones I feel most comfortable recommending.
For a thorough A-B-Cs of Veganism and Animal Rights, check out Colleen Patrick Goudreu's podcast Vegetarian Food For Thought. I can't reccomend it enough.
And if you need a five-minute wirlwind tour of the essentail reasons to go vegan, click here, but brace yourself.
ANYWAY! Onto the foodstuffs!