Religion is kind of a crazy idea.

Think about it.  In the face of all rational thought and essentially zero supporting scientific evidence, the vast majority of humans on this planet—creatures capable of coming up with calculus, space flight, and the seven-layer burrito—believe in some kind of invisible superbeing.  Why?

Lots of reasons:  because the world is too awesome to be an accident.  Because we had some kind of mystical (therefore illogical) experience that convinced us God exists.  Because we were raised to believe.  Because a book told us to. 

A lot of us talk to this invisible superbeing, or beings, or force.  Sometimes out loud. We make offerings to it.  We believe it grants us special abilities or favors.  Most of all we believe that it takes some kind of personal interest in our lives.

That is just flat out batshit nuts.

The only thing I can think of that’s nuttier is believing that said invisible superbeing wants us to kill people who believe in a different invisible superbeing.

But at its heart, the amazing thing about this kind of insanity is that it’s beautiful and, if properly applied, it can make us better people or at least help us live happier lives. 

We make the mistake of thinking there’s something inherently wrong with being crazy when, throughout history, “crazy” has been mixed up with “genius,” “creativity,” and “inspired.”  How do you know what’s what?

Personally, I know by looking at the lives of the people who make claims about their God.  There are very pleasant forms of crazy—I’ve been known to exhibit a few.  Despite the pharmaceutical industry’s belief that anything “abnormal” should be medicated back to baseline banality, the fact is, there are some great ways to be insane.  It all really comes down to what you and your nuttery are trying to do with your life.  

Kindness and love = good crazy.  Blowing shit up = BAD CRAZY.

I’ve said many times that if religion were rational, it wouldn’t exist.  Spiritual beliefs aren’t meant to be held up under a microscope and proven to the world.  They’re meant to touch something that in itself can’t be proven or disproven. If people could just accept that all religions are equally crazy—and therefore equally valid—the world would be spared so much pain.

There’s nothing wrong with sprinkling a little fairy dust on the mundane.  Life is a big ball of awful sometimes, and sometimes the only thing that gets me through is that fairy dust.  But I can’t prove my Goddess exists empirically any more than someone else can prove Allah or Yahweh or Odin or Isis exists; neither can we really prove they don’t.  That’s the neat thing about science, actually—in the end nothing can be absolutely proven, because all it takes is one contradictory piece of evidence to send a hypothesis back to the drawing board.

All we know is that we as a species don’t know everything; given the vastness of the universe we don’t know much at all.  The concept of subatomic particles would have been laughed at back when they were burning Witches and bleeding people with leeches.   Yet as backward as that era seemed there are still doctors using leeches in modern medicine.  (Burning Witches, thankfully, has not proven useful in modern medicine.)  No one person, time period, or school of thought has a monopoly on wisdom.  No one religion has the one and only direct hookup to the divine. 

That’s just my opinion, of course.  But then again I’m a total whackjob for God.

I haven't cooked much in the last week but I more than made up for it on Friday--as it was time for my BFF's birthday party extravaganza, she'd asked me to bring a pot of Oh, You Beautiful Dhal and the chai cheesecake I made forever ago.  I decided, in my insane way, that that wasn't nearly enough, and appointed myself official caterer of the party.

Because, as I said, I'm insane.

By the time I was done we had:

• Potato-pea samosas (baked, not fried)
• Basmati pilau with almonds
• Dhal (that's red lentil stew for the uninitiated)
• Chai Spice cheesecake from Hannah's My Sweet Vegan
• Pita triangles (storebought, for dhalish dipping)

Judging from the yummy noises and groans of delight, I did myself proud.  The cheesecake especially was fantastic--do yourself a favor and pick up Hannah's book, and while you're at it read her blog Bittersweet.

One thing I discovered?  A menu like this required chopping a crap-ton of onions.  My fingers still smell like onions three days later.  No lie.  I dreamed of chopping onions Saturday. 

Still, few things in the world will perfume your house as wonderfully as sauteed onions when they just start to brown around the edges.  The only thing better is a pan full of spices toasted until the mustard seeds start to pop and release their volatile oils.  It's such a simple thing, but it lends such complex flavors to whole spices.  The dhal recipe calls for mustard seed, cumin seed, fenugreek, cardamom pods, cloves, and coriander, all toasted together and then cooled and ground to powder along with a bit of cinnamon and chili pepper.

I didn't take a picture of the dhal itself because, frankly, it's not the most photogenic food in the world.  I meant to get pics of all the finished products, but I got so involved in getting everything done and ready for transport that I forgot, and once I was at the party I was distracted by something shiny (translation: booze) and missed the opportunity to snag some images of the sliced cheesecake or the bowls of lentils served over flavorful rice. 

I did, however, catch the samosas before they disappeared.  The cuddly little pastry packets are much like empanadas, pasties, hand pies, even ravioli--just about every culture has some variation on a dough pocket stuffed with either sweet or savory goodness.  Most traditional samosas are filled with potato mixture and usually deep fried, but I'm a bit phobic of frying at home, so I save the fried pockets o'love for when I make it to an Indian restaurant.  This recipe, which came from Vegan With a Vengeance, calls for baking the samosas.  It also suggests using edamame instead of green peas, but I'm a bit of a purist, so I stuck with the green pea-ness.

Here's the bright yellow filling, of which I have about eighteen tons left over, which does not displease me.

 I'm proud to say I resisted the urge to shove my face in the bowl and simply nom-nom-nom the day away.

You can make them in just about any side, but for appetizers I tend toward about a 3" diameter circle of dough folded around a couple of teaspoons of filling, pinched shut with a damp finger and brushed with olive oil before baking.  I like them best warm, but they kept well sitting out at room temperature.  They're just such happy looking little guys, tiny pillows of potato ecstasy. 

The only real pain with making samosas is that it takes forever to shape them.  There's really no way around doing them one at a time; if you're lucky you have a lovely assistant to help you with this part.  Otherwise I find what works best is to set up on the coffee table and watch a movie while I work.

If you're impatient and don't have a party to cater, just say to heck with it and eat the filling plain, or better yet, make "dosas" by rolling the filling in tortillas or spreading it between tortillas for a non-queso-quesadilla.  I imagine you could squish them into potato pancakes and fry them, too.  

Dessert, of course, was the aforementioned much-hallowed Chai Spice Cheesecake, and let me tell you, if I'd ever had any doubts that vegan desserts could be just as good (if not better than) their critter-laden counterparts, this recipe would have blown those doubts out of the sky.  Eyes rolled back in heads and English language skills were reduced to a series of vowel sounds as everyone had a piece drizzled with impromptu blackberry sauce (basically just a reduction of blackberries with some sugar and a little juice, strained and thickened with a bit of cornstarch).  One of these days I'll get a picture of the cake as it's served all sauced up, but today a shot of the whole cake fresh out of the oven will just have to do.  Imagine, if you will, the delicate scent of chai spices:  cardamom, coriander, ginger, cinnamon, allspice...thick and rich over a spiced graham cracker crust.

Don't you wish it had been your birthday?

Sure, we'd all like to say we create magnificent culinary tours-de-force every night, and try a new cookbook every week; we'd love to say we've sampled all the weirdo produce at Whole Foods, and that we never, never eat out of the saucepan standing over the sink in our underwear.

But let's face it:  the average home cook has a repertoire of perhaps seven dinners.  If you do the vegan equivalent of meat-and-two-vegs you can come up with a lot of combinations, but that gets really boring really quickly.  So do beans and rice--even if you like rice, which I don't especially (except for appropriately spiced basmati like they serve at the Clay Pit).  The culinary possibilities in veganism are endless, but most people are creatures of habit.  We tend to have the same basic shopping list week after week unless we're cookbook testers.

For a typical shopping trip my list looks something like this.  (Note that the spiral's on the right--I'm left-handed.  This of course means I'm superior,  just FYI.)

(Click pic to enlarge.)

 

Notes:

• Honeycrisp is the awesomest apple.
• Toadfood = tofu
• EB = Earth Balance fakey butter
• Yes, "red" is a flavor. In Crystal Light at least. It's basically food coloring and chemicals, so who cares if it's "cherry" or "raspberry?"
• Observe my egregious abuse of the umlaut.
• "Fruity Oaty Bar" is code for "some form of breakfasty granola bar thing." Firefly fans will get it. Everyone else...what the hell is wrong with  you?
• If I am bleeding when I write a grocery list there are at least five chocolate items, a can of Bean Dip, and a bag of Fritos added.
• Shit, I forgot hummus.

I usually organize my list according to what area of the store the items are found in.  Mostly.  There are always wild cards and afterthoughts.  Note that I tell myself only to get two bananas--this is because no matter how many bananas I buy, at least one ends up going bad.  I can buy five and I'll eat four; I can buy two and I'll eat one.  To keep from wasting food I've had to cut back on how much produce I buy in one go; you can only freeze so many overripe bananas.  I try not to buy more than two of anything unless it's for a specific recipe. If I need to go to the store again, I will.  I'd rather do that than throw away food.

And yes, that's actually how I write things.  It's a family tradition to deliberately misspell items for the hell of it.  My mother knows perfectly well how to spell "sausage" but she's written "sauges" since I laughed myself hoarse over it twenty years ago.  We're just odd like that.

Although I do admit to being influenced by sites like GroceryLists.org, where found grocery lists are shared with the world--sometimes I insert something random in my lists, like "XXL Condoms," or "Tractor Tires" just in case someone should find it somewhere.

Grocery stores in Texas can sell beer and wine but not hard liquor.  If they could I imagine "vodka" would show up on my list a lot more.

What does your grocery list look like?

Operating out of a kitchen with very little storage space, I've learned to pare down the array of gadgets and cookware that I permit to clutter up my three drawers.   I keep a minimum of pots and pans, and store things on the walls (like my skillets and knives) when I can. There are definitely things I'd like to upgrade; I need better knives, for one thing, as I've been using the crappy IKEA cutlery that sells for $8 for a Santoku.  (Okay, I admit, I love that knife, and I'll love it a lot more after I remember to take it to my father to sharpen. Still, one day I'll have grown-up knives.) Every cook, however, has those gadgets and tools she loves regardless of price or practicality.

Here we see, from left to right:

1 - My favorite cooking spoon, which I think came from Target. It has a lovely handfeel and somehow has managed not to collect any gouges or burns so far.

2 - A Mario Batalli tasting spoon I got from Whole Foods. Drastically overpriced, but I just loved the way it felt in my hand, and the fact that it has a stirring end and a tasting end. The small end helps you take a taste without burning your tongue.

3 - A cookie scoop that S1ren gave me; the back is silicone, so you scoop up dough and then push it out the front. It makes perfectly sized lumps of dough.

4 and 5 - Pinch bowls, one of my weird little passions.  The top two are glass from IKEA and measure perhaps 1 1/2" across; the bottom two are silicone.  I hate silicone bakeware, but silicone definitely has its culinary uses.

If you look carefully on the right-hand side you can see Owen's paw.

Here we have the rest of my favorite gadgets:

Across the top is another gift from S1ren, a Pushme/ Pullyu, which normal people would call an oven rack hook.  One side hooks on the rack to pull it out of the oven, and the other side is notched to push it back in. That way you avoid burning yourself, which somehow I always manage to do on oven racks even in a hazmat suit.

Second row, left to right:

1 - Contrary to expectation a potato masher is not a unitasker.  I've used it on potatoes, yes, but find it equally handy for beans, blending crumbly pastry dough, and squashing solids in a soup to thicken it when I don't feel like pulling out my hand blender.

2 - I pretty much never use my ice cream scoop for ice cream, being the "eat it out of the carton" kind. What I do use it for is cupcake batter. An ice cream scoop is perfect for portioning out cupcakes. 

3 - One of my oldest gadgets, a Graham Kerr branded "Bash N Chop," basically a bench scraper.  I use it for scraping up dough, yes, but it's also handy for crushing garlic, transferring chopped ingredients into a bowl or pan, and cutting bits of dough for rolls or cookies. This one has a ruled edge so you can measure portions accurately.

4 - Spice toasting pan - The screened lid flips up, allowing you to dry-fry whole spices without them popping all over the place. Was it a necessity? No.  But it's one of those little things that make life easier...the definition of a gadget, I suppose.

Front Row, left to right:

1 - Spoon holder - This nifty little doodad was in my stocking last Christmas. It's a clip for the side of a pot that holds your cooking spoon up over the pot, so you don't need a spoon rest.  It makes it easier to clean the stovetop since, even with a spoon rest, I'm forever leaving spoons on the counter and wiping up puddles of soup.

2 - Tea bag squeezer - Weird, eh? My mother got this back when she was heavy into Tupperware. I don't drink tea, but I do make a lot of things with chai, and this silly little bit of plastic is quite useful in getting the goodness out of the bag. (Yes, I know that when drinking tea you shouldn't squeeze the bags as you'll get bitter tannins in the cup, but this doesn't seem to be a problem with baking.)

3 - Salt cellar - I love, love, love my salt cellar.  It is of course the model used by geeky food genius Alton Brown, and it's very practical; the hinged lid can be opened with one hand and the lid has a silicone seal to keep moisture out.  The bowl comes out and is dishwasher safe; the base is weighted. It even came with a tiny spoon, which I don't really use, but being a sucker for tiny things (hence all the pinch bowls) I found it quite charming.

Not pictured is my hand blender, a Cuisinart Smart Stick that came with a chopper/grinder attachment and whisk.  I realize, of course, that the more things something can do the more likely it is to suck at all of them (if you have experience with copier/fax/scanner/printer machines you can probably testify to this), but in this case it worked out well; the Smart Stick is easy to use, easy to clean, and has thus far performed admirably.

One day when I have a huge kitchen and all the money in the world I'll have a proper Kitchenaid stand mixer and a Vita-Mix blender, but in the meantime, I enjoy my little gadgets and am pleased that they don't take up all that much countertop real estate which is at a premium in my little kitchen.

The beginning of October was so chaotic and weird that it has only just occurred to me that it's actually October.  As in, Fall.  Really, truly, and honestly Fall.  Good God. 

The weather's gone schizo and can't seem to make up its mind what season to be in, but today it's cool and gloomy and the high this week is scheduled to make it to 86 or so with quite a bit of rain and another front coming through on Thursday.  Autumn.  It's in the wind, the rain.  Go outside and taste it every time you breathe.

Such a paradox, Autumn.  It's life in death.  All the rain has made the lawns and flowers come alive, and there's something vivifying in the air, but it's an exhalation, not an inhalation. 

There are cooler weather, lots of birthday parties, new seasons of TV shows, my favorite clothes, and Halloween candy.  There are wonderful memories.  And there are also very unpleasant ones.  Autumn is emotionally heavy and edged with the ache of loss.  It's the Witching Season and the Weeping Season and the season of looking in and the season of looking back.

As they say, you can't step in the same river twice; each year that Autumn turns around again I find I'm a slightly different person in a slightly different place.  

Almost ten years ago at a job I hated, I got a small pothos ivy that eventually grew to five feet long on either side.  When I took it home I placed it on what would become my altar to the God, and for years it grew on top of my entertainment center as the focal point of that altar.  I've never been able to keep plants alive, but this one thrived for a long, long time.

This past year it started dying. Strand by strand of the ivy turned yellow, then brown, and shriveled.  I trimmed it back to the pot to help it retain energy, and finally changed the soil and fertilized it, but still, one leaf at a time, it died.

There is one leaf left. I can't say whether I want it to survive or not. That ivy is a deeply layered symbol of my past, and I think it's time for me to start over with a new plant, perhaps even in a different pot. The timing of its death is not lost on me.

There are a lot of things in my life that are coming to a head--nothing external, really, but changes that have been on a slow burn for, in some cases, years.  My Saturn return is about to officially end and I can feel the energy of my life shifting, as it has been an inch at a time for months now.  I feel like a cycle that started when I turned 30, that frightening night and the upheaval that followed, is completing this year, and whoever I've been has only been the barest shadowed edge of who I'm starting to become.  

Maybe in a couple of months I'll have some idea what all of that means.