Brewery: New Belgium Brewing (USA)
Beer: Snow Day, 6.2% ABV, 55 IBU, 355ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Pale, Caramel-80, and Midnight Wheat Malts; Styrian Goldings, Centennial, and Cascade Hops.
Style: Winter Ale
Rating: 4/5
Probably Vegan Friendly

New Belgium Brewing: Snow Day

Appearance
Nearly black, but not fully opaque, pours a fairly modest head, which doesn’t last for long.

Aroma
Belgian style malt, a hint of the roasted caramel malt, perhaps toffee?

Taste
Surprisingly light-bodied and hoppy given the aroma. I expected a Belgian-type dark ale, but the hops make this something else. Light at first, but with a strong aftertaste. A rather pleasant mixture of malt and hops in fact!

Overall
Well, there wasn’t a hint of snow here in North Carolina, when I reviewed this beer, although it was a rather chilly February night nevertheless, and I had a roaring fire going on. But, as it happens, we did get some snow the other day (even if it’s all gone now), so now I can relate to the ‘Snow Day’ theme! This is not a particularly warming beer though, despite the reasonable ABV. I think that they could’ve safely pushed the ABV even up to 9% or so without doing any harm to the characteristics of the beer. Sipping it further, the hops start to dominate a bit, so perhaps the malt could’ve been left a bit more room to breathe. Anyway, it’s an interesting enough take on a Winter Ale, with clear influences both from Belgium and the hop-friendly US brewing scene. This was my first encounter with New Belgium Brewing, but they do have a couple of interesting beers out there, and I’ll make sure to sample some more!

I’m a huge fan of lasagne, it has always been one of my favourite foods, even though I eat it very rarely. I recall that mum used to make good lasagne when I was a kid, not often though! It is a dish that requires a bit of work, but the end result is definitely worth the trouble. Now, this is my first attempt at a vegan lasagne, and I wasn’t sure about the white sauce in particular. In fact, Elizabeth made the white sauce, and it turned out to be excellent! So, even if this isn’t quite the ultimate vegan lasagne advertised, it’s certainly a pretty decent first attempt, and next time it will hopefully be just about perfect.

Ingredients
2 Small Courgettes
1 Orange Pepper
1 Yellow Onion
1 Pack of Daiya Mozzarella Style Shreds
~18 Lasagne Sheets

Marinara:
~400g Jar of Tomato Sauce of Choice
~200g Faux Ground Beef
Applewood Smoked Salt
Ground Nutmeg
Chipotle

White Sauce:
3 Cups of Soy/Almond/Oat Milk (we used soy)
2-3 Tablespoons of Flour
2-3 Tablespoons of Vegan Margarine (e.g. Earth Balance)
Thyme
Applewood Smoked Salt

Serves four to six, depending on how hungry (or greedy!) you are. We went through half of the lasagne in one go…

Mmm.. Vegan Lasagne

Cooking
Time required: ~1h30min
-Heat oven to 375 Fahrenheit.
-Chop the veggies into desired shape (flat).
-Start with the white sauce: melt the margarine in a pan, mix in the flour, and then add soy milk and spices, whisking regularly.
-The Marinara is easy: put the tomato sauce in a sauce pan, mix in your faux ground beef, add spices.
-Now the lasagne layers: start by covering the bottom of your dish, then add half of your chopped veggies and some Daiya shreds.
-Cover the first layer with the marinara sauce; you can use all of it.
-Next lasagne layer: cover the previous layer with lasagne sheets and layer the rest of the veggies on top, adding some more Daiya shreds.
-Cover the second layer with the white sauce, use half of it.
-Now the top layer: cover the previous layer with lasagne sheets and then cover the sheets with the rest of the white sauce, sprinkling the rest of the Daiya shreds on top.
-Cover the whole dish with tin foil and bake in the oven for 30-50min, or until the pasta is cooked.
-Uncover the dish, and bake for another 10-15min, or until the Daiya shreds on top have melted and most of the liquid boiled away.
-Cut into large squares with a knife and lift to your plate carefully!

That was lush! We ended up baking the lasagne under tin foil for quite a while, maybe 50min, but this depends on your oven, the amount of liquid used, and so on, so you have to keep an eye on it. There are all sorts of variations of lasagne, and you see it being made with just one sauce sometimes, either white or the marinara, but I think that a proper lasagne should have both sauces, that’s the whole point of the layers! We had the veggies layered in separately, but you could chop them a little finer and just add to the marinara sauce. This depends partly on what kind of veggies you’re using as well (spinach and aubergine are good ones at least). With hindsight I would’ve at least sauteéd the onion and put it in the marinara sauce, but I can’t complain really, this was absolutely delicious, and the consistency was good. The white sauce was indeed terrific, I think the applewood smoked salt and thyme was a great mix. I would perhaps like more layers if possible, but our dish was huge and there’s more than enough lasagne as it is!

Previous entires: #1, #2.

Firstly, if you happen to be in the area, make sure to catch my talk: ‘Why Quantifiers Cannot Carve at the Joints’, at The North Carolina Philosophical Society Meeting with the South Carolina Society for Philosophy, which takes place at Elon University, NC. My talk on the first day (February 24th), at 4:20pm, Belk 201. My other forthcoming talks are listed here.

UNC-CH -- The first state university (since 1795)

On the subject of talks, I gave my second talk this year last Monday right here in Chapel Hill. The mid-day slot on Monday is not the greatest, so I didn’t have a huge audience (maybe 15 people), but there was even a visitor all the way from the coast, and we did have a good discussion afterwards. The talk was on ‘The Epistemology of Essence‘ (click for an abstract and a draft of the paper).

What I got from the discussion is that I should perhaps try to motivate the whole project a little better for those who may be uneasy about (seriously) realist metaphysics, and essentialism in particular. In a way, the paper that it was based on is aimed at those who already accept a type of (neo-)Aristotelian conception of essence and Kit Fine’s idea that metaphysical modality reduces to essence in particular, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give something more to work with to those who don’t. Laurie Paul suggested that one way of doing this might be to include some discussion about scientific realism — indeed I do think that realism about essence is a prerequisite for any plausible version of scientific realism.

Around the Chapel Hill campus

Although any discussion like this will necessarily be a very small portion of The Epistemology of Essence paper, I did kind of get an idea for another paper from all this, one that would be a qualified defence of scientific realism understood from an essentialist perspective. What this means is basically that one has to acknowledge the existence of genuine, mind-independent natural kind essences (although note that these are not entities in themselves!). So, the paper could be called something like ‘There Is At Least One Natural Kind’, the thesis being that a foundation for natural science requires realism about natural kinds (or at least one of them), whether or not we can pick them out. The Epistemology of Essence paper, then, is a survey of our options regarding the epistemic access to these natural kind essences.

So, there’s some philosophical content for you — see, I have been working! In fact, just a bit after my talk we also had a meeting of the Metaphysics Reading Group. I opened the discussion since we read Kit Fine’s ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, which happens be the opening chapter of my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume. The presence of Peter van Inwagen was an added bonus — he recently bought a house in the area, and I understand that he’s on leave from Notre Dame, so he’s around, and participating in some events. Anyway, we should have some good discussions between Peter, Laurie, Thomas Hofweber, myself, and the bunch of grad students that attend more or less regularly. Fine’s ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ raised some interesting issues, although the discussion quickly steered away from the details of the paper. One of the main issues concerned the epistemology of some of the metaphysical problems that Kit identifies as being central to metaphysics — he doesn’t say much about this himself, but this is of course the very topic that I discussed in my talk earlier that day. (One of the important characteristics of metaphysics that Kit lists is its ‘eidicity’, namely that it concerns the essence or nature of things). We will be reading some van Inwagen for the next meeting, there’s a bunch of unpublished drafts and notes that he sent to the group waiting in my inbox, mainly on the topic of fundamentality; should be interesting…

Wildlife from our kitchen window

Apart from philosophy, I’ve been getting an average amount of running in, but the aerobic testing sessions that I mentioned in my last diary entry as well have still been taking some time from that — I’ve got my last session on Wednesday and I’ll write something more about the whole ordeal in another post once it’s all over. I’ve spent a lot of time just working at home and hanging out with Elizabeth, and, as you’ll know if you’ve been checking out my other posts, cooking! We’re cooking together virtually every night, and on top of that Elizabeth is always experimenting with some vegan baking, so I’ve got some very good reasons indeed to spend a lot of time at home… An additional feature of our kitchen is that there’s always some wildlife to look at. The squirrels I mentioned before, and I’m yet to get a good shot of the deer, but our latest entertainment were a bunch of these tiny birds: two males fighting over a female, it seemed. I didn’t get my camera out in time to capture the fight, but the pictures feature the birds in question. I don’t recognize them, but the males have beautiful blue plumage (quite like the Norwegian Blue, except these guys aren’t pining for fjords).

These two were picking on each other...

We did get out of Chapel Hill this past week though, as we made a trip to the nearby city of Durham (which, once again, is not the one in the UK!). It’s a city of just under quarter million people, making it the fifth largest in North Carolina, and much bigger than Chapel Hill. There isn’t that much to see though; in fact Durham is a rather ugly city, and certainly no match for its UK counterpart! No surprise though, as what Durham is famous for is tobacco: the cityscape is dominated by a Lucky Strike chimney… It was a rather rainy day as well, so I don’t have much photographic evidence. We did visit the Durham Arts Council (free), where there’s some local art on show, but the exhibition was tiny so we didn’t spend much time there.

Durham, NC -- Tobacco District

Rather more pleasant were the Bean Trader’s coffee shop and coffee roastery (we bought some beans too), and Cosmic Cantina, which claims to have ‘the best burritos on the planet’. Well, Elizabeth is the expert on this topic, having lived in San Francisco (where you supposedly get the best burritos), but these were certainly pretty good — I had a vegan tofu burrito with black beans which was great but could’ve been a little spicier. Finally, we hit Tyler’s Restaurant and Taproom right in the Tobacco District. The scene is not the most appealing, as they seem to be a family restaurant of sorts, but I wanted to go there mainly for the beer selection, which includes some 40 draft beers and a bunch of bottles. They did have some interesting rarities and seasonals, I was especially pleased to sample the excellent Founders Breakfast Stout, brewed with oats and coffee and rated extremely highly everywhere (my review here). By the way, all three of the mentioned places have locations in Chapel Hill as well, but we’ve yet to check them out.

Well, enough of all this, there’s a fresh batch of vegan maple sweet potato muffins waiting!

Brewery: Abita (USA)
Beer: Vanilla Doubledog, 7.0% ABV, 650ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Pale, Caramel, and Chocolate Malts; Willamette Hops; whole Vanilla Beans.
Style: Spiced Strong Ale
Rating: 4/5
Probably Vegan Friendly

Abita: Vanilla Doubledog

Appearance
Black, almost completely opaque. Pours a thick, creamy head.

Aroma
Cream, vanilla, just a hint of malt and alcohol.

Taste
Round and soft, rather light. The vanilla beans dominate this beer, making it creamy and smooth, with just a touch of the underlying malt and alcohol present.

Overall
A 25th anniversary special edition by this New Orleans based brewery, this beer is supposed to be something different, and I guess it is — but I have not had the original Abita Turbodog that this beer is based on, nor any other Abita beers, so I can’t compare (yet!). Anyway, I like how smooth the beer is, and it’s not quite like anything I’ve had before. The whole vanilla beans that are added during the ageing process are obviously the source of all this. Certainly an interesting idea!

I haven’t used tempeh much, and it’s not a usual ingredient in Thai curries, but there’s a nice selection of tempeh available to me at the moment and I do quite like it as a change from normal tofu. The tempeh used for this dish comes with some wild rice baked into it. It could of course be replaced with normal tofu, but I think that the tempeh actually works quite well in the Thai curry; I might try this again with Green Thai curry (I’ve posted a recipe for one before).

Red Thai Curry with Wild Rice Tempeh

Ingredients
250g (Wild Rice) Tempeh
1 Yellow Squash
2 Carrots
1 Small Broccoli
1 Yellow Onion
2-5 Tablespoons of Red Curry Paste (check for fish sauce!)
400ml Coconut Milk
1 Tablespoon Hot Pepper Sesame Oil (or something similar)
1 Cup of Brown Rice

Serves two. Coconut milk is very heavy, and rich in saturated fat, so I recommend using a light version if available. The veggies were a fairly random selection of what we happened to have in the fridge. You could also add some chopped chillies to this.

Red Thai Curry with Wild Rice Tempeh

Cooking
Time required: ~45min
-Prepare the rice (brown rice takes a while to cook), and cook.
-Chop the onion and fry on its own until golden.
-Chop the tempeh into cubes and add to pan, season with the hot pepper sesame oil (or add some chillies for instance), fry for some 5min.
-Chop the carrots and squash into desired shape, add to pan.
-Fry for a moment, then add the coconut milk.
-Simmer on low heat under cover for 10-15min.

I ended up boiling most of the coconut milk away, but personally I like a thick consistency in a curry sauce, or any sauce for that matter. This was a nice spicy dish with an added curiosity of the distinct tempeh-flavour. I’m tempted to experiment more with tempeh now. I’ve had rather similar dishes in Indonesian restaurants though — they do a curry-type thing which is quite close to Thai curries in some respects, but with tempeh.

Not really in my area (geographically or philosophically), but I thought that it’s worth promoting (yet another) event bringing together Aristotle and contemporary philosophy — there’s an ever increasing number of these around now. I like to think that my volume is the first of its kind within the current trend (although it doesn’t really include any historical work). Anyway, this conference is probably worth checking out if you’re in the area.

The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium will sponsor a conference on Aristotle and contemporary philosophy of action to be held March 24, 2012 on the campus of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. The conference brings together specialists in ancient philosophy and philosophers working in contemporary philosophy of action. The schedule for the conference is as follows:

March 24

1:00 “Aristotle on Action and Teleology”

Ursula Coope (Oxford University)

Commentator: Fred Adams (University of Delaware)

3:00 “Teleology and Free Will”

Scott Sehon (Bowdoin College)

Commentator: Matthew Walker (Rutgers University)

Haub Center, 5th Floor

McShain Hall

Saint Joseph’s University

5600 City Avenue

Philadelphia, PA 19127

For more information, contact Andrew Payne – apayne@su.edu

Brewery: Highland Brewing Company (USA)
Beer: Thunderstruck Coffee Porter, 5.8% ABV, 26 IBU, 355ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Pale Malt, Carmel 60, Chocolate Malts, Midnight Wheat; Chinook, Hallertau Mittlefrue, and German Select Hops; Yeast, Water, and Organic Coffee from Dynamite Roasting Co.
Style: Coffee Porter
Rating: 3/5
Vegan Friendly

Thunderstruck Coffee Porter

Appearance
Black, pours a modest but creamy head.

Aroma
Roasted coffee beans, hint of chocolate; not overpowering.

Taste
Coffee is evident, but it’s fairly mild. There’s not an awful lot of character or body to this beer. It’s satisfying though, and the hint of coffee (less than you might expect from the aroma) does give it a bit of something extra — I suspect that otherwise this might be a rather bland porter.

Overall
I’m sampling through the beers of Highland Brewing Company, a brewery which I had not heard of before I came to North Carolina. They’re located in Asheville, and their beers are readily available in Chapel Hill. The branding is a bit silly, with a bearded guy armed with a back pipe and a pint in the label. So, they’re trying to be Scottish, and I guess that their beers are somewhat influenced by Scottish brewing traditions, but they’re no match really. Still, their range of products looks nice, and they do make some decent, affordable beers.

One strange thing about bottled beers in the US: very often they do not indicate the ABV — this is true of the Thunderstruck as well. I assumed that this just means that the beer is some standard ABV, like 5.0% or something, but no; from the brewery’s website I learned that the Thunderstruck is 5.8% ABV. Rather peculiar!

Before I get started, I should note that book reviews — at least when it comes to fiction — have not featured and probably will not feature prominently on this blog. However, I’ve noticed that the blog’s ‘Literature’ category (which I’ve classified as a sub-category of ‘Pleasure’) is getting a lot of hits, even though there’s hardly any content there. I thought I’d better remedy this with at least some book reviews and/or other literary content. In general, I haven’t been reading nearly as much fiction as I used to at one point, and especially when I was doing some studies in Comparative Literature at Helsinki during my M.A., but I’ve always got some book or other under way. War and Peace was under way for a long time…

It would be silly to try to write any kind of a comprehensive and informative review of War and Peace, which has been so extensively studied. That’s why I’ll opt for the same style as I have done in all aspects of this blog, i.e. I’ll just write about my personal reading experience. So, don’t expect a synopsis here; you can go read one of those on Wikipedia, among other places… I finished War and Peace towards the end of last year after working on it for about a year. That’s a long time despite the 1300 pages, and I’m not a slow reader, but what happened is that I went through stages of reading the book regularly, and then 1-2 month periods of not even touching it and reading something else. The original idea was to do a sort of a reading group with a mate of mine in the UK, but then I moved back to Finland and the initial motivation to keep reading died. I’m telling you all this because I feel that War and Peace is not an easy book to read, in fact, it’s very boring at times, and it’s very difficult to keep track of all the Russian names (notoriously, the same person may be referred to with a number of different names), especially if you’ve put the book down for a while. Anyway, let me get into some more detail about the actual book.

The Oxford World Classics edition of War and Peace

I read the Oxford World Classics version of the book, which comes with extensive notes, all of which I read. This is one reason why I said that it’s not an easy book to read, for if you want to stay on top of all the references, you really need one of these thoroughly annotated editions, and then you end up checking the notes every five minutes. That kind of ruins the pacing of an already very slow going book. Of course, the pacing of the book changes a lot from section to section, being very slow with the descriptions of the family affairs of the characters, and occasionally quite action-packed when it comes to descriptions of battles. I found the war sections more interesting, and I think they work well to give an impression of what war was like back then, despite Tolstoy’s obvious pacifist agenda.

One thing that I’ve learned to know and love in Russian literature — which I’ve read a lot — is the inner dialogue of the characters, closely associated with the psychological aspects of the great Russian novels. There’s less of this in Tolstoy than Dostoevsky for instance, but it’s certainly a visible element in Tolstoy’s work as well. There is virtually none of this well into War and Peace, which was a bit of a disappointment for me, and a major reason why I didn’t relate to any of the characters to begin with. Later on in the book there is an increase in this type of character development though, and Pierre’s inner dialogue in particular becomes a major aspect of the novel, especially in the sections where he explores Freemasonry and when he is captured by Napoleon’s forces in Moscow towards the end of the novel. I enjoyed these, although Pierre’s naivety is slightly irritating at times.

I don’t have much to say about the family relations and love affairs that take so much space in War and Peace. They are amusing at times, and give some insight — albeit surely caricatured — into the lives of the Russian nobility back in the day, but the drama with the ladies is just so much over the top that it’s a bit difficult to take it seriously.

Tolstoy’s remarks and (pseudo-)philosophical pondering about military strategy, determinism, and the interpretation of historical events increase in frequency towards the end of the book. I found them entertaining, although all of the complaints about military strategy and at least nearly all of the comments about the study of history are utterly obsolete. Over and over again we hear that military historians are under the illusion of Napoleon and his ilk being some sort of heroes who guided the events of the war with clear vision et cetera, et cetera. While this may or may not be an accurate description of the historians of Tolstoy’s day, I’m confident that contemporary historians have a rather more realistic picture about historical events. Having said that, the picture that Tolstoy paints is rather close to the one that children might get in school — it’s all very much focused on the persons.

Anyway, what I can say, with more confidence, is that Tolstoy’s conception of determinism and the power of individuals to change events is very naive, and probably inconsistent. This may be easy to say now, when we know about things like quantum indeterminacy, but regardless of all that, Tolstoy does get way too preachy about this. It’s fine if you read it as a curiosity and know a little bit about Tolstoy’s character, but I also feel that this is something that is not sufficiently clarified in the extensive notes of the Oxford World Classics edition. While this is of course a novel first and foremost, Tolstoy himself clearly intended it to be much more, and not least a philosophical essay of sorts. Hence, it would be useful if at least some of his more preposterous philosophical claims were assessed in the notes as well.

Well, I think I’ve written quite a lot already, without saying very much about the book at all. At any rate, I don’t think that this ‘review’ will make anyone want to read War and Peace. That would be unfortunate, as even though I’ve said some rather negative things about the book, I still think that it’s one of the few hundred books out there that everyone should read. Just know what you’re getting yourself into!

I’ve read (some of) the other major novels by Tolstoy, namely Anna Karenina and Resurrection, but I read both in Finnish — like I’ve read nearly all of the Russians. I do think that they translate into Finnish nicely, although this is difficult to assess without knowing Russian! I suppose that there is at least some sort of a resemblance between the Finnish and the Russian mental lives though, so I suspect that this may help. Anyway, I’m not a huge fan of Anna Karenina, but I recall that Resurrection made some sort of an impression on me. I read it many years ago though. I just wanted to mention these because I do think that Anna Karenina may be a better Tolstoy novel to start with rather than War and Peace; the former gives a good idea about Tolstoy’s idealism.

I think that’ll do, but I’ll try to add some more content to this category of the blog eventually. I’m currently reading another epic, James Joyce’s Ulysses…

This workshop in Cologne might be of interest to some readers.

L A W S & C H A N C E S
Workshop in Cologne
March 5, 2012

DFG Research Group Causation | Laws | Dispositions | Explanation

SPEAKERS

Claus Beisbart (University of Dortmund)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers University)
Alexander Reutlinger (University of Cologne)
John T. Roberts (University of North Carolina)
Markus Schrenk (University of Cologne)

TALKS

Loewer: “Two Accounts of Laws and Time”

Schrenk: “Do Better Best Systems Accounts deliver the Metaphysics, Epistemology or Pragmatics of Laws?

Beisbart: “Big or Bug? A Skeptical Guide to Humean Chances”

Reutlinger: “Ceteris Paribus Law = Statistical Law?”

Roberts: “Counterfactuals, Norms, and Natural Modality”

REGISTRATION
Please register by sending an email to Arno Göbel: arno.goebel@gmx.de. We can offer only a limited number of places. The Deadline for registration is February 26, 2012.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the organizer:
Alexander.Reutlinger@uni-koeln.de

FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE RESEARCH GROUP
http://www.clde.uni-koeln.de/

This is a hearty meal to my liking!

Field Roast Sausages with French Beans & Carrot-Parsnip-Ginger Stir-Fry

Ingredients
2 Field Roast Italian Sausages
250g of French beans
2 Carrots
1 Parsnip
Shreds of Ginger to taste
2-6 Cloves of Garlic
Chopped Chives
Handful of Pumpkin Seeds
1 Cup of Brown Rice

Field Roast Sausages, with Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Serves two. Obviously you can use any Veggie sausages that you happen to have handy. I’ve discovered the excellent Field Roast brand here in the US — they’re wheat gluten based vegan sausages that come in a variety of flavours — all very tasty. We used the Italian ones for this. They’re extremely rich in protein, just one sausage is plenty for one person, great nutritional profile too.

French Beans with Chives

Cooking
Time required: ~40min
-You can use two separate pans or just prepare one dish after the other; I did the Carrot-Parsnip-Ginger Stir-fry first and then the Sausages.
-Better prepare the brown rice to begin with though, as it takes a while to cook (maybe 30min, depending on the variety used).
-Chop the carrots, parsnip, and ginger into desired shape, I went for matchsticks.
-Chop or crush the garlic and add straight to a pan with some oil, adding the carrots, parsnip, and ginger soon after; stir fry for some 15min.
-In the meanwhile (or after), chop the sausages and fry on a pan — you could also grill them.
-At the very end of frying the sausages, add a handful of raw pumpkin seeds and a touch of salt from a grinder; mix with the sausages.
-The French beans take less than 5min to cook, no matter whether you steam them, boil them, or fry them, so you can do this any time.
-Once everything is done, serve with some fresh chopped chives.

Carrot-Parsnip-Ginger Stir-Fry

I’m a big fan of French, ‘stringless’ beans, although they’re more of a green than a bean. They work nicely as a side though. I would’ve steamed them, but we still haven’t got equipment for that. Boiling works fine as well though. The end result was a tasty and hearty meal, very nice with some pale ale! There’s a good mixture of flavours there, and the protein content is guaranteed with the Field Roast sausages.