A pleasant surprise and some lols.

International Women’s Day is on Saturday, and this year will be the 80^th that the day is celebrated in Australia. To commemorate, I had a few feminist rants written for you all—about assholes who yell out ‘show us your tits’ as they drive past on the street, about super-expensive IWD events around Townsville, and sexual assault and prisons. But, I accidentally deleted them, and they can’t be recovered in any way. So, shoot. Maybe I’ll recreate them soon. For now, here are a few little things.

--The JCU Student Association hosted an alternative media workshop, a free bbq, and a movie night yesterday for all women. As far as I know, it was the only free, open-to-the-public IWD event in Townsville this year. Even though I am wary of bbqs, I wanted to go even if I just ate a bit of lettuce on bread. Well, imagine my surprise when I turn up to find an all-woman band playing kick-ass music while homemade chickpea-veggie burgers were being grilled on a meat-free grill! (There were beef burgers, but they were cooked after the veggie burgers were taken off.) Sure, the crowd was very small, but it meant that I got to have good, in-depth conversations with other feminists. And, even though I knew I would be eating dinner when I got home, I ate a veggie burger and it was so good. When the meat burgers were all cooked, no one was eating them. The 'chef', a veg*n, asked if anyone ate meat--amidst a chorus of "no", only one person said yes. Wahoo! Vegan feminists! Unfortunately, I had to cut the afternoon short because I was riding home on my bike, and I didn’t want to get stuck in the dark.

--When I did get home, Andy was just starting to cook me a delicious dinner. This is the second time he’s cooked in two days, thanks to late afternoon meetings—Tuesday I got home at 9:30 and was welcomed with fried rice and orange tofu. Last night he had the Ultimate Uncheese book open to the “Spinafel” recipe, which are spinach and ricotta balls. The recipe was changed in a fairly big way—instead of firm tofu we used a tin of chickpeas. And instead of vegan mayo, we used a block of silken tofu and a splash of vinegar. They were good, but a little dry and a little bland. After some tweaking, I’ll post the recipe. While he was mashing, I peeled and chopped some beetroot which we tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper.

--Nacho loves chickpeas. Andy was getting annoyed with her trying to get into the mixing bowl while he was cooking, and I overheard a conversation that made me laugh out loud:

“Nacho, when I sleep on the couch all day and you walk to the shop to buy the food, you can have all the chickpeas you want. Until then, get off the counter.”

--Nacho also loves Andy’s armpits, for some weird reason. The other day he was sitting with his arm resting on the windowsill, and she was going nuts, licking and biting his armpit hair. We bought her a toy a few weeks ago and she just doesn’t like it. We thought maybe it was the smell, so I came home to find the toy wrapped in Andy’s shirt, which was really sweaty from a bike ride. I laughed out loud when I saw that (maybe it was endorphins since I had just ridden home). She still doesn’t like the toy.

Pesto Dream Sauce

With all the rain we've had recently, interspersed with hot, sunny days, the garden has been doing pretty well. The basil was growing so well that the plants were starting to crowd one another, so Andy did some major thinning, and we were left with a whole lotta basil that needed to be used. We were having sweet potato croquettes for dinner, and I had planned on making some sort of gravy, but we decided pesto cream sauce would be a much better idea.

The croquettes are simply mashed cannellini beans, white sweet potato, frozen spinach, grated carrots, fresh corn, and onion. On their own, they were quite ordinary, but with the addition of creamy pesto deliciousness, they were an amazing dinner (and lunch the next day).

Here’s the recipe:

What you need:

2 T. olive oil or margarine
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1/3 c. plain flour
2-3 c. (low fat) non-dairy milk, depending on how thick you want it
1/3 c. minced fresh basil
2 T. ground almonds
¼ c. nutritional yeast flakes
salt and pepper to taste

What you do:

In a medium saucepan, heat oil or margarine over medium-low heat. Sautee garlic for 2 to 3 minutes. Whisk in flour and try to keep it from being lumpy. Cook flour to 3 to 4 minutes, and then whisk in a little bit of milk. When mixture is smooth, whisk in the remaining milk and stir constantly until sauce thickens to your liking. Remove from heat, stir in basil, almonds and nut yeast. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

The next day we ate the cold leftovers, which had thickened up quite a lot. This made a great addition to bean and veggie wraps—tomatoey refried kidney beans, corn, spinach, and capsicum.

My long lost friend, the oven.

Though Townsville doesn’t really have seasons in the same way that most people think of them, there are definite differences in the weather. For example, ‘summer’ is stinkin’ hot and humid. The weather tends to come from the north in the form of monsoonal lows. In the ‘winter’, however, the winds change and come from the south and bring cooler, drier weather. Some years (like last year) it can get downright cold—I think 13 degrees Celsius (55 F) was Townsville’s record-breaking cold day last winter.

Now that it’s ‘autumn’ it seems appropriate that there is a mild low hovering overhead that is making it cloudy with temperatures in the 20s instead of the 30s. Although the temperature drop doesn’t seem like much, it feels like heaps when you’re accustomed to sauna-like days and nights. On the plus side, cooler weather foods are much more appealing to us, especially those which require baking or roasting.

Wrapping or enclosing food in pastry makes it immediately appealing to me, no matter what the weather (I’m definitely not on a low-carb diet). So when Andy mixed some leftovers with some veggies and gravy and turned it into a pie, I was definitely a happy vegan. Since the oven was on, I cut up some radishes we found reduced to clear and tried them roasted. This was the first time either of us had (knowingly) eaten cooked radishes, and we were convinced that this is a great way to have them. I also sautéed some broccoli with bragg’s and cumin, and Andy—a tomato fiend—had some fresh tomato with his dinner.

An oven dish that I’ve wanted to try for ages (but have been dissuaded by it’s long cooking time at high heat) is Vicki’s Vegan Potato Tart. I made a few minor changes to her recipe, mostly using chilli-capsicum spread instead of pesto. And I made mine in a springform pan, in the hopes that it would crisp up and be gorgeous. It didn’t crisp, but it was delicious!

To double-up on oven usage, we had the potato tart with stuffed zucchini. Andy made the stuffing out of leftover rice, bread cubes, frozen spinach, soy sauce, and coconut cream. These were really good, especially with a bit of mustard on top.

It’s hard to resist eating garlic bread every time the oven gets turned on in this house. We buy buns and baguettes when they are reduced after 7 pm, and cover them with garlic/parsley butter (nuttlex margarine) before sticking them in the freezer for later use.

Since I’m already wearing sweatpants and it’s still 28 C (82 F), I think the oven will be getting a fair workout this ‘winter’.

New twists on familiar foods

I read in a magazine once that most people have an average of nine meals that they eat regularly in differing rotations, and they only occasionally step outside of that repertoire.

I don’t know if Andy and I fit into that statistic exactly, but we do have some staple meals that come up every fortnight or so. Normally we keep them pretty standard, but every now and then we’ll spice things up with some new flavour combinations.

Pizza is a perfect example. We have pizza fairly often, usually topped with chicken-style seitan, pineapple, capsicum, mushrooms, olives, and tomatoes. To mix things up, we tried a new topping combination that I’ve been meaning to try for a while now: Potato and Sausage Pizza. A simple crust provided the base garlicky tomato sauce spiced with oregano and aniseed, thinly sliced potatoes, and veggie sausages, all topped with freshly ground pepper and fresh rosemary. Andy was more than sceptical when I told him my plan for the pizza crust, but the simple elegance of this pizza won him over quickly (though he did add BBQ sauce to his half).

Notice the way the toppings come right up to the edge of the crust? Andy hates plain crust bites, whereas I enjoy a few of those at the end of my pizza slice. Similar to couples who have half-cheese/half-cheeseless, we have half-exposed crust, half-toppings right to the edge. How’s that for a compromise?

Risotto is a meal we have once a month, and our favourite is definitely lemon risotto with green peas. Unfortunately, lemons are expensive during the summer, so we have to change things up a bit. In my head (so Andy didn’t make fun of me), I called this ‘The Incredible Hulk Risotto’, because it was green, ‘meaty’, vegan and a little out of the ordinary. Yep, that’s right, The Hulk was veg, a little known fact I picked up when I was a member of the Vegan Freak Forums (which I unfortunately had to quit because it was taking up too much time and internet quota). Apparently there is one edition of the comic book where Bruce Banner is eating lunch and his co-workers make fun of his tofurkey sandwich. Out comes the green monster, shouting ‘TOFURKEY NOT FUNNY!!’

Anyways. The stock was a mixture of bad-tasting white wine we needed to use up, the dregs of a BBQ sauce bottle washed out with water, mushroom soaking liquid, and green herb stock powder. We stirred that into the Arborio rice along with broccoli, frozen spinach, green peas, and minced up veggie sausages.

Store-bought gnocchi is good for an easy meal that doesn’t require a lot of work. We usually pair it with a mushroom cream sauce, or a jarred tomato sauce. Inspired by Megan the Vegan, I wanted to try something a little different. I cubed some chicken-style seitan and sautéed it in veggie stock and bragg’s for a few minutes. Then I sautéed some mushrooms and cooked the gnocchi. Afterwards, I put the cooked mushrooms and seitan in the pan with the gnocchi and some fresh baby spinach, and poured in a mix of veggie stock, balsamic vinegar, and arrowroot. After taking it off the heat I mixed in ½ c. or so of minced fresh parsley. I would have liked the sauce to be a bit thicker, but it was a very yummy combination, anyways.

Finally, breakfast. I know I only recently lamented my boring breakfast repertoire. Saturday morning I woke up and really felt like corn muffins. I know that Andy isn’t a fan of muffins for breakfast, but I thought I could enjoy some fabulous corn muffins while he ate a boring bowl of cereal. As I was gathering ingredients, the good Theresa on my shoulder spoke louder than the selfish one, and I thought Andy might want some pancakes. Since the polenta was out, I made corn pancakes as a variation on our normal flapjacks. I would have added lemon or blueberries, but we didn’t have any. Still, I really liked them. They were like a denser version of corn bread. Andy didn’t love them, he didn’t even really like them, but he doesn’t like the gritty feeling of polenta in baked goods.

Plus, he’s a breakfast grinch, remember?

PS... Aussie vegans, voting has opened for the Aduki vegan awards. Vote for your favourite veg stuff!

Eating from blogs

In addition to being a good form of procrastination, blogs provide an abundance of great new food ideas and recipes. In less than a week, Andy and I have found three new favourites from different blogs.

First up, my favourite metal vegan femme, Ashasarala, posted her mum’s recipe for black bean burgers. I made these exactly as the recipe said, but the end result was a bit dry—I blame my oddly cooked black beans, a result of experimentation with a new pressure cooker. To make up for the dryness, I added about ¼ c. of veggie stock with a teaspoon of cornflour, to make the mixture the right consistency to form into patties. These were good. Really good. We had them in tortillas with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, beetroot, sautéed onion and mushroom, bbq sauce, and sour cream. We’ll definitely make these again.

Next up, I made Liz²’s recipe for Aloo Paratha, posted at her blog Kamutflake Girl. Tangy, spicy potatoes warmly embraced by whole wheat chapatti = heaven, plain and simple. I made the potatoes a day or two ahead of time, so they didn’t even feel like much work. I thought the process of stuff the bread with the filling would be complicated, but it was really much easier than I thought. The perfect accompaniment to dhal!

And for dessert, how about some pie? When I saw Emmie, aka VegBitch, post about strawberry lime no-bake pie, I knew I had to make this. The only problem was, we didn’t have many of the ingredients on hand. One evening Andy went up to the shop to buy marked down bread so I asked him to get some frozen strawberries and vegan biscuits. He came home with raspberries and blackberries. We got yogurt, and found some vegan Nice biscuits (Cole’s brand). There is no such thing as vegan whipped topping in Townsville, so I used some mango flavoured silken tofu. The only problem was that I didn’t really measure, because the cup was full of sour cream in the fridge. I think I had way more filling ingredients than the original recipe called for, because there was definitely not enough agar to gel the pie filling (we stuck it in the freezer to make it keep its shape). The end result was vastly different to the recipe posted, but it was good. With some tweaking, it will be really good. Andy and I are both imagining the different fruit and flavour combinations we can create with this basic pie recipe. For now, here is a picture of my Raspberry Blackberry Lime Mango no-bake pie!

All of these recipes will be getting a workout in our house in the future, and I suggest that you try them, too!

Survey says?

This survey has been making the rounds in the vegan blog-iverse, so I thought I would jump on the bandwagon. As I was filling it out, I asked Andy many of the questions, and his answers made me laugh so I included them for you all.

1 . If you have to choose between locally grown or organic, which do you usually choose?
I would probably choose the cheapest option, but if they were both the same price, I would go local.

2. Favourite way to prepare potatoes:
I love potatoes in every shape and form. My favourite way for me to make them is probably mashed. My favourite way to eat them when someone else has made them is roasted and crispy—I can never seem to get them to go crunchy when I roast them.

3. Do you press your tofu before preparing/cooking it (if you eat soy)?
I have once or twice, but I generally find it’s a waste of time and I just skip that step in the recipe. If I’m using frozen tofu, I squeeze the hell out of it, but don’t press.

4. Name your favorite recipe that is a tradition in your family:
We’re not really a food tradition kind of family, though my grandmother’s recipe for peanut butter frosting has served several generations of cake-eaters quite well!

5. Any food allergies?
No, thank god. I have seasonal allergies, and possibly a wee little cat allergy.

6. When you want to go to a fancy dinner, where do you go?
I’ve never, ever been to a fancy restaurant—vegan or not. So I suppose my house is where we get the fanciest food when we feel like it. Andy has an aversion to any restaurants with a table cloth, because he says they give you tiny food on a huge plate, and charge a buttload of money for it. “I don’t care that they charge so much, but I want to be full at the end of it.” I’m inclined to agree with him.

7. When you have a cold, what do you crave?
Toast. Toast with avocado, toast with just margarine, toast with vegemite, toast with banana… Andy swears by a tea of chilli, ginger, garlic, oil, lemon, and hot water—chug it down and you’ll feel better straightaway.

8. What kind of water do you drink? (Filtered, spring, tap, etc.)

These days, either straight out of the tap or from a jug in the fridge (which gets filled straight out of the tap). I would like to get a filter, because I’ve always been a bit of a water snob—I grew up drinking the yummiest well water, and now chlorinated water doesn’t really do it for me. Plus, Townsville’s water is fluoridated, which kind of squicks me out. Do brita filters get rid of fluoride?

9. Name a flavor of soda you'd love to see:
I don’t really drink soda, but… maybe strawberry lemonade? Andy says ‘soy and mushroom… not garlic, not in a fizzy drink, it will go up your nose and hurt’.

10. If the recipes you ate as a child were compiled into a cookbook, what would the title be?
Convenience foods and creative leftovers

11. If you were allowed to grow one food that can't grow in your climate, what would it be?
Hmm… I think maybe cherries. And other stone fruits like plums. Andy reckons nectarines.

12. Favorite type of mushroom?
I’m not much of a mushroom connoisseur—we usually just eat regular button or flat mushies, but my favourites were some of the crazy looking ones I was fed in Thailand.

13. Most frustrating part of your kitchen?
There’s no pantry! Our cabinets are overstuffed because the food competes with pots and pans and other kitchen stuff.

14. Last food you burned?
Some toast I was making for breakfast, but then it was topped with tinned spaghetti so you could barely taste the burniness.

15. Usual response to a veg*n's favorite question, "But where do you get your protein?":
I haven’t gotten this question in ages. I always wish I had a witty response to that question, but I just kind of blabber about protein being in everything, like beans, veggies, grains, etc.

16. If you were baking your own birthday cake today, what flavor would it be?
Lime, coconut, ginger. That’s just what I feel like today, it isn’t always my most favourite combination. Andy says: Blue!

17. Favourite brand of chocolate chips?
No vegan chips that I know of in Townsville shops, so I buy vegan chocolate bars when they’re on special, usually Lindt 70% or 80% dark and then I smash it up.

18. You have $200 of your tax return reserved for Williams Sonoma - What do you buy?
I’m torn between buying a nice food processor, and cashing it in to head to thrift stores and garage sales to get all kinds of kitchen stuff like baking dishes, cake and cupcake tins, sifters, utensils…

19. Do you plan your menus in advance? Any tips to share?
If there’s a recipe I see on a blog or something that I really want to try, I will plan that ahead. And sometimes we’ll think about various things to have throughout the week after we get back from shopping. But nothing is set in stone, and it usually changes.

20. You have 3 minutes before you have to leave the house and you're starving- What do you eat?
Toast with peanut butter. Says Andy: Bread.

21. If Martha Stewart, Paula Deen, and Rachel Ray got into a fight, who would win and how?
Martha Stewart. She spent time in prison, remember? She’s hardcore.

22. If you eat oatmeal, what do you add to it before serving?
We make oatmeal the night before and let it soak in the fridge, so it doesn’t take so long to cook in the morning. Usually Andy makes it, and he adds various amounts of brown sugar, dried fruit (which gets really plump overnight), jam, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, bananas, coconut, etc. I always sprinkle on some ground LSA before we eat.

23. If you got to travel to one country and learn all the traditional dishes there, where would you go (ignore commitments in your current place of residence)?
I think Ethiopia. It’s easy to get good, cheap Thai or Indian food. But great Ethiopian is hard to find, and usually expensive. Plus, they spend half their year in fasting mode, which is just a vegan diet plus fish, so there would be heaps for me to eat! Andy chose Thailand.

24. Favourite late night snack?
I usually eat so much at dinner that all I have room for before bed is a cup of herbal tea.

25. Favourite springtime food?
There’s no real spring here, rather just dry and wet seasons. But, I think fresh corn was really good at the market during the technical springtime, that and asparagus.

26. Favorite food-related magazine?
I read Vegan Voice, which is slightly food related. That’s the only magazine I buy.

27. Which do you prefer: shoyu, tamari, conventional soy sauce, or Bragg's Aminos?
Bragg’s.

28. What vegetable or fruit do you dislike the most?
Peaches and apricots. I hate the taste, and the smell. Especially artificial peach scented things—ack. Andy hates ‘those yellow button shit mushy things, disgusting, those green ones as well’—he means button squashes. He also listed artichokes, orange sweet potato, mushy pumpkin, leeks, those weird little eggplant things, durian… ‘they’re all shit’.

29. Name a holiday food you look forward to all year long:
Cranberry jelly.

30. If you could convert anyone to veganism with your magic wand, who would you convert?
Oprah. She has such wide-reaching influence that veganism would be a lot less ‘freaky’ if she were herbivorous. Andy thinks a vegan butcher would be funny.

Rollin'

Lately, we seem to be eating a lot of food that is either on a roll, or in a roll…

Soy Hot Dogs, reduced from $5 to $1! We bought a few packages and stuck them in the freezer, but then the freezer got really full and really icy, so we were on a mission to eat some stuff. The result, soy hot dogs twice in two weeks (and a bit of a belly ache each time). The first time, we ate them quite plainly, with just tomato and bbq sauce.

The next time, we had them with ‘the works’: mustard, tomato sauce, sautéed onions, and baked beans.

Now in a roll. During an exciting trip to the Asian grocery a few weeks ago we bought some yuba, aka tofu skin or bean curd skin. According to Vegan Planet, yuba is the skin that forms on the top of hot soy milk as it cools. We didn’t follow a recipe for these, but the filling is eggplant, leftover rice, capsicum and diced tofu, flavoured with hoisin and plum sauces. Yuba is funny to work with, and funny to eat—it’s chewy and so salty! We were gulping down water all night.

One rainy day when I was stressed out with some uni stuff, Andy made me a gorgeous meal from Vegan with a Vengeance: Sweet Potato Crepes with Coriander-Tamarind Sauce. He added spinach to the filling, and a bit of red dye to the crepe batter, but this recipe was basically followed completely. Except instead of coconut milk, he used coconut cream, which made the sauce really rich. I thought these were good, though not spectacular. Andy was so disappointed. He spent 2+ hours making this, and he just wasn’t bowled over with the results. This is a meal that looks much better than it actually is, I guess.

Our most recent rolled food, mango and beetroot rice paper rolls. In addition to the fruit and the root, these have mung bean threads and shallots. For such a simple combination, these were very good, though it was only halfway through rolling that I realised I wasn’t sure mango and beetroot would go together! Luckily, they do. The beetroot provides a delightfully earthy crunch to the sweet, soft mango. Andy made two dips for these, one soy-sweet chilli, the other peanut satay. Both were excellent.

Food on a roll is definitely easier to prepare than food in a roll (especially for me, I can’t seem to roll a pretty roll for the life of me! They are all so sloppy), but food in rolls is tastier and more fulfilling, in my opinion.

The last weekend of summer. In words and (cat) pictures.

This past weekend was the first dry, sunny weekend in a fair while, and it’s also the last summer weekend (Australian autumn officially starts the 1^st of March). Andy and I saw it out in an appropriately summery manner.

The weekend started on Friday night with a trip out to Thuringowa’s Riverway.

Photo courtesy of my mum and dad.

They were having a Friday night market and a ‘dive-in’ movie. We wandered through the market, entered a competition for a new bike which we don’t need, and then hopped in the pool. The movie that was playing was Open Season, and though I couldn’t hear much over the splashing and yelling, the gist I got was that it was a pretty vegan film. Basically, a bear is living a cushy life with a forest ranger but something happens and he is forced to move into the wilderness. At first, he doesn’t fit in with the wild animals, but they eventually band together to fight off the evil hunters. His wild side comes out when his annoying deer sidekick is injured, and at the end he is forced to choose between a return to the log cabin or life in the woods. Of course he chooses the natural life, because even a loving human isn’t a good enough excuse to keep wild animals in captivity! If you have children in your life that need to be indoctrinated with animal rights messages, this is probably a good film to show them. ;-)

After we dried off and came home, we enjoyed the very last fresh (giant) mango of the season…

Luckily we froze a few mangos so we can enjoy them all year long.

Saturday morning was an opportunity to give the house a big end-of-summer clean. With all the rain we’ve been having lately, everything got very damp and mouldy. Plus, with a kitty in the house now, it’s easy for cat hair to build up in corners and carpets. We washed all the sheets and put them out in the sun with our pillows to let ultraviolet light work its anti-microbial magic while we got our sweat on. Andy vacuumed the whole house (vacuuming is just as effective against fleas and other pests as chemicals) and shook the dust and hair out of furniture while I scrubbed surfaces in the kitchen and bathroom. All our cleaning supplies are cheap, vegan and environmentally friendly: salt, vinegar, bicarb soda, eucalyptus oil, and lots of elbow grease.

I also made some herbal mothballs from dried cloves, rosemary, thyme and mint, tied up in a tissue.

To cool off, we headed to the Townsville Rockpool…

Photo courtesy of my mum and dad

and after the swim, we swung by the Townsville City Council building for a Sustainability Expo. We each got a free greenbag and compact-fluoro lightbulb. We got info about hybrid cars, solar panels, a natural pest control business in town, and we got a free shower timer. There was a stall giving away free native plants, so we grabbed a Palm Lily, a Stiff Jasmine, and a Paroo Lily. There was also a sausage sizzle, and while there may have been veggie sausages available (I didn’t ask), I always find it amusing and also depressing that people are so unwilling to make the connections between meat consumption and the environment.

When we came home, I planted our little plants in the front garden. Andy installed our two new CFLs in the last two vestiges of incandescence—over the stove, and in the toilet. Now all of our light bulbs use less than 40 watts—there’s one big fluoro in the kitchen, the rest are 10 or 12 watt CFLs.

Sunday began with an early morning trip to the farmer’s market where we gave our new bags a workout. We didn’t get much because the pickings are still slim, but there were glimmers of a produce-filled future. New season avocados were for sale! They were $1 each, which is too much, but soon they will come down. I can’t wait. Then we had a leisurely day of reading the newspaper, flipping through the new Vegan Voice magazine, screwing around in the garden and getting ourselves ready for Monday.

Unfortunately, Sunday was our last leisurely summer day for a while—Monday saw me teaching qualitative research methods to physiotherapy students for 8 hours. Andy had to wake up at midnight to head out for a diving daytrip to do counts of bull rays. The new semester is starting, and much busy-ness is predicted for the future. At least this last weekend was a relaxing end to my most favourite season.

Farewell, summer! Come back and visit soon!

Happy birthday to...

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Today, the 21^st of February, is the 160^th anniversary of the first publication of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I think it’s safe to say this has been one of the most influential books in the world we know today. Over the course of 16 decades, a lot has changed. But I think the basic argument of the Manifesto is still incredibly salient in the world today. This isn't the communism that we know from China or the USSR. This is a critique of capitalism, and a hope for a better world.

As is pointed out by Marx and Engels in the text as well as in prefaces to several editions, “the practical application of the principles will depend … on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II” (from the Preface to the German edition of 1872). So, if the idea of all workers of the world uniting in the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie sounds a bit far-fetched, fret not, the nuts and bolts of the revolution isn't the important part of the Manifesto.

Despite the change in conditions, much of the critique still remains pertinent. For example, the Manifesto argues that capitalism reduces humans to their monetary value [I would argue that it does the same to animals, as well]. It argues that capitalism is out of control, no longer led by the bourgeoisie--it's become an entity of its own volition.

One of the things that I find the most appealing about the Manifesto is that it doesn’t just critique; it also offers a vision for the future: Communism, that is, the abolition of bourgeois property (not property generally). Marx and Engels saw a world in which no one can make profit from the work of others. In fact, the whole notion of profit would be thrown out the window. Exploitation of men and women alike would become extinct, and likewise, “the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to.” As vegans, let's take that one step further and make exploitation of animals extinct.

The other great thing is that Marx and Engels wrote with the average joe as the target audience. The argument is clearly laid out, and though the critique is incredibly potent, it isn’t hidden amongst high-fallutin’ theoretical jargon. The point of the manifesto was to incite a revolution, and that won't happen if everyone is left scratching their heads and searching for a dictionary.

Sure, there are problems with Marx and Engels and the Manifesto. It is very andro- and euro-centric (though some of these issues are addressed through footnotes added later, mainly by Engels). Marx’s idea that every society must go through very specific stages is narrow and has been argued against by many, especially third world scholars. And the notion of violence and bloodshed doesn’t really appeal to me, nor to most people.

But still, the idea that there is a better way for the world breathes life into my inner idealist and revitalises my commitment to ending exploitation and injustice—to animals, to women, to black people, to poor people, to all people.

Happy birthday, Communist Manifesto. Whether you’ve ever read The Communist Manifesto or not, get thee to the nearest library and check out a copy today!

All of my quotes come from the version of the Manifesto which was printed in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (1978). I highly recommend this book.

More hot damn and hell yeah

My obsession with my newest cookbook is still going strong. Probably our two favourite recipes are for mayonnaise and almost sour cream. They have graced the table for a lot of meals in the past few weeks. One thing we’ve discovered, though, is that using lime juice in the sour cream is much better than lemon juice. The best part about them? They only use a little bit of oil, so they are leaps and bounds better for you than their cruelty-filled counterparts.

Fajitas. Tofu strips marinated using the ‘beef style’ marinade. Served with salad, and with almost sour cream and salsa.

Leftover salsa was mixed with fresh raw corn and sautéed onions, and put on top of boiled whole potatoes (we wanted baked, but the oven heats the house up too much). The potatoes were topped with more almost sour cream.

Layered nacho dip. Refried beans, a layer of fresh raw corn, a layer of ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Cheese’ Sauce (from the Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook), a layer of almost sour cream, and a dollop of salsa. The whole lot was topped with some diced cucumber and made a perfect dip for crunchy corn chips.

A Mexican-style pasta bake—pasta with refried beans, tomatoes, corn and capsicum, topped with a mixture of bread crumbs and polenta and baked. We served it with lots of almost sour cream, as well as salad and garlic bread. Yum!

Last night I had a human rights group meeting and I came home to couscous and roasted vegetables with dressing. Though the cookbook was open on the counter, I’m pretty sure the only part Andy read was the title before he started making this—aside from couscous, just about none of the ingredients in this dinner were the ones in the recipe. Still, it was delicious!

Though we’re quickly making our way through this cookbook, we have yet to make it into the dessert section… but I’ve still got my eye on the recipe for Apple Enchiladas!

But of course, my favourite vegan Nacho isn't found in this cookbook. She’s nearly five months old now, and more than 2 kilos!

And, for all the aussie vegans out there, nominate your favourites for the aduki aussie vegan awards!