2013: review

It's late December, which means it's time for the obligatory look back on the year. 2013 was a busy but rewarding year for me. Let's skim through some of the highlights (and lowlights) before I see how I went with my resolutions and look forward to 2014, shall we?

Every day is Boxing Day for Nacho. 

In 2013, I made my own deodorant, figured out how to make mochi on the stove top, made jam, made sponges, and ate banana flowers (and also bananas, from our garden!). We got a second dog, but after a month of fun Tika decided Marley needed to find somewhere else to live, which made me and Andy really, really sad.

I travelled to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Macau in June for work. I went to Melbourne in July for work. I went to Canberra a week later for work. I went back to Melbourne in November for work. All in a year I said I would travel as little as possible for work! Andy and I also went to Hobart, for fun (post, post and post). I wrote a first-year sociology textbook - though not from scratch, and not by myself, it was still a lot of work. I published two journal articles, though most of the work for these was done in 2012. I coordinated 4 subjects and taught into another 3. I went on strike. I felt at times like I barely made it through the week, needed to spend many weekends doing work, and then the grind started again. I think I learned some work-related lessons about saying no to a few more things and protecting my personal life and my research space, but we'll see if I can enact them in 2014.

Gardening is a good foil to work. 

I ran, I cycled, I started practicing yoga (again, but more seriously this time). I did push-ups, enough for a woman at work to ask how I get protein, which she followed up with "You even have muscle tone!" I read 59 books (and still going). Some of them were really short and easy, like 10 of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. But some of them were between 500 and 1000 pages long, so I think it works out to be rather a lot - 18,482 pages.

Book Aside: My favourite fiction was easily Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth, a literary re-telling of the Rapunzel story. Like Rapunzel's braid, it weaves together the stories of three very different women in three historical time periods, and it was just lovely. Second fave was The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, which I read right back in January. More historical fiction, this one spanning Mexico in the time of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Washington DC in the McCarthy era, in a way that gave me a much better idea of history than any of my actual history classes did. My favourite non-fiction was Real Dirt: How I beat my grid-life crisis by James Woodford. James is a friend of mine and this book is about his transition from a highly-strung, big city journalist to a rural, self-sufficient fella. There is a little bit of talk about killing animals, in the way that non-vegans always discuss self-sufficiency, but it's minor and I really loved the book anyways. 

So I guess it's no wonder I was exhausted by the end of November.

Here's a bowl of mulberries. We kept them in the freezer till
we had enough to make a cobbler. Then I forgot to
photograph the cobbler. 

2013 Resolutions - How'd I Go? 

I did one update on my resolutions in March, but the second and third quarters were rather busy for me and I didn't get round to talking about my progress.

1. Run 500k this year. I have run 515 kilometres, so: Nailed it. For the first few months I thought I would reach this goal somewhere around September, because I was going really well. I was regularly going 4 or 5k, 4 or 5 times a week. Then I got sick, and exhausted, and then I travelled, and then I started running again a bit more seriously, and then I got tired again. But I got there. And on Christmas Day I started a "From 5k to 10k" program, which Tika and I kicked off with a 7km run.

Tika usually touches noses with me to wake me up really, really early.

As a result we often see the sun come up.

Here are a few sunrises I snapped on particularly pretty mornings.

2. Cycle 1600k this year. I didn't quite make this one. I got to 1565, so close. I think the reason for this is that I started working from home one day a week, and I travelled more than I had planned, so I didn't end up cycling as much. But we did cycle just about every day to work, rarely driving, so that was a success anyways.

3. Do push-ups every week. There were 4 or 5 weeks throughout the year where I did 0 push-ups, but in most weeks I pushed-up on 3 mornings a week, and sometimes even 4 or 5 times. I did about 2700 push-ups across the year, so I'm going to call this one: Nailed it.

4. Clear out my inbox every day at work. I was going really well at this, but then I started slipping. I wanted to keep my inbox to less than 100 messages, with everything else being actioned and moved to folders or deleted. But then the slip turned into a slide, and now I have over 1000 messages to get through. So: Failed it. I think I'll do some serious deleting before I return to work, and I'll try this one again.

5. Unsubscribe from email lists that I don't read regularly, and stop subscribing to new ones. Again, I was going really well at this and then I Failed it. Must keep trying!

6. Turn my PhD into a book and get it published. I have probably 90% of a manuscript, and a proposal which is ready to submit. This is less than I wanted to have done, but the textbook sort of bumped back the PhD book. On the bright side, my writing mentor really likes it, and so do I. And I sent my proposal to my textbook editor (who only publishes textbooks) and she thought it was good, and will get published. I am hoping to submit the proposal to some publishers in January and be ready to send this off by March.

When I work at home, Nacho likes to "help" me write...

7. Set up one of our spare rooms as a craft room. Nailed it. I'm not so good at keeping it clean when I'm busy, but the table has also been doubling as my desk when I work on my books. 

Futon, $20 from gumtree, tables and other furniture in the
room are "in storage" for a friend living overseas.

Hooks and thumbtacks keep my stuff organised.

8. Finish crocheting the blanket I started in early 2012. Nailed it. I finished this, and then Andy said it wasn't long enough, so I made another, 7 feet long and 5 feet wide, so we can both fit under it and it covers Andy's feet entirely.

Both blankets, folded in half. 

9. Sew curtains. Well, I did this for the bedroom, but haven't gotten to any of the other rooms yet. 2014!

10. Plant more flowers, bee-attracting ones, in amongst the veggies. We've done this pretty well, with sunflowers mostly but also marigolds. Need to try branching out with more flowers for flowers' sake.

11. Keep track of everything we spend for at least two months of the year. Nailed it. Though this is a good way to keep track of where our money goes, at the moment we are financially secure enough that I won't bother with this in 2014. 

12. Do more food-prep and meal-planning on the weekends. We did try out meal planning and it worked fairly well, but on the weekends where I was busy working, I was too tired to bother. Luckily Andy is a wonderful partner and a pretty good cook, because I would have eaten a lot of toast and peanut noodles if it wasn't for him! 

Here's a meal - maybe it was even meal-planned - I think I never
blogged about. It is pasta carbonara, with Vegg and bacon bits
and mushrooms. It was good. I should make it again and
post a recipe.

13. Help out with at least 3 vegan outreach stalls. Not quite nailed it. I did two - one at the Uni O-Week, and one for Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale. We did have multiple vegan picnics and get-togethers, though, so I guess this isn't a fail.


So, for 2014?

I'm not going to make 14 resolutions. I'm going to keep it a bit simpler this year:

• In line with trying to up my running from 5k to 10k, I want to increase my overall kilometrage. Ideally, I'll do a few 7-10km runs 3x per week, so my goal: Run 750kms.
• Improve my posture - I am having a private yoga lesson in January and I'll flag this as an area I want to work on.
• Keep working on the things above - mainly email related - that I didn't quite nail. 
• Spend less time doing things that make me unhappy, spend less time with people who make me unhappy. Surround myself with people I love, doing things that I love. 
• Run the robot vacuum cleaner at least twice a week. We have lovely wood floors that look amazing when clean, but they are usually covered in dog and cat hair. We bought a robot earlier this year just for this purpose, so I may as well use it more often.

Hands down best purchase of 2013.

How was your year, and what are your plans for the next one? 

Christmas Wrapping

I'll pause my Tasmania recaps, because hey, it's Christmas. It sort of snuck up on us this year. Without going into too much detail, I had a rather busy year this year. It was full of workworkwork, to which I said yes too often and found myself often overwhelmed. And it was a bargaining year - so the union activities added to my things to do, but the whole process also made me feel a bit less generous towards my employer. When you see how little regard management holds staff in, it makes it hard to love what you do, ya know? So I got to the end of November utterly exhausted, and though I've been on holidays since then, I still feel like I'm in recovery mode.

Long story short, the weekend before Christmas I realised I had no plans for a meal or anything. Our Asian grocery store has stopped getting in gluten flour, because their supplier has stopped supplying. So our tradition of a seitan log was out of the question.

Eventually I got it together, though Andy said he would have been happy with just a regular dinner, and our Christmas involved an appropriately festive series of meals, a few little gifts, and some lazy chores (okay, that last part isn't that festive but it's how we roll).

Andy has spent most of the week turning rubbish timber from our neighbour's renovations into a BBQ table. 

We ended up having the Festive Chickpea Tart from Let them eat Vegan!, which we both really liked. It wasn't as firm as Dreena's picture, which probably means I need to process the filling a bit more, but I was nervous about overdoing it.

Along with the tart, we had rosemary, okra and mushroom stuffing (I tried to bake them as stuffing balls but they sort of fell apart), and a simple salad.

With rosemary dressing - 2 Tbsp of fresh rosemary, 1 tsp of dijon mustard, 1 Tbsp of dark tahini, 1 tsp of balsamic vinegar, 2 tsp of pomegranate molasses, and about 1/2 cup of olive oil. Also salt and pepper. Shake it all up in a jar, and then pour it onto salad, stuffing, and chickpea tart. Yum.

On Sunday, Kari posted a raw vegan mango cheesecake recipe to her blog, and my dessert indecision was over. This became our holiday dessert:

Served with extra fresh mango, and at another time with a fruit salad of pineapple, starfruit, kiwifruit and mango, it is pretty much as perfect as you can get for a tropical christmas.

We had our main Christmas meal on Christmas eve, as we always do. When I woke up on actual Christmas, I took Tika for a 7km run (the longest I've ever run in one go, and also enough to bring my annual total from 496 to 503, thus making it to my 2013 running goal). When we got home, Andy was just starting to make breakfast, and it was raining a little bit.

Baked Latkes, from Betty Goes Vegan, became BBQ Latkes. We've been looking for a good hashbrown/latke recipe for many years, but they never seem to work for us. This time, though, we found a winner. Andy sprinkled bacon bits on top at the end of cooking. They were crunchy outside, soft inside, and very delicious.

And with them we had herby mushrooms in a Vegg gravy.

Mushrooms with thyme, parsley and garlic chives.

I spent the morning drinking iced christmassy tea - rosella, cranberry and vanilla, refreshing and a little bit festive. Andy played with the compost while I did laundry.

I got this fancy iced-tea maker when a friend moved overseas, but I cannot for the life of me pour a glass of tea without dribbling heaps. 

And then moved on to this vegan coconut nog (with a splash or five of rum). And salt and vinegar chips for lunch, because tradition.

Some gifties - tea (and a teapot, not in the photo) from Andy's parents, some dried edible seaweed from Andy's co-worker, a seaweed book from Andy's boss, and a tropical gardening book from me. Also coconut nog. 

For dinner, we had more chickpea tart, which Andy reckons is the best savoury tart I've ever made. And grilled pineapple, and garlic bread (and more cheesecake).

And now it's Boxing Day, and we will eat the last of our cheesecake and watch Doctor Who. I hope you've all had as enjoyable a few days as we have!

Andy refused to put on a shirt, Tika refused to sit or stand up, and Nacho refused to come near us.

Plans, Goals, Resolutions

I know some people think new year's resolutions are for suckers. I've heard the argument that January 1st is an arbitrary date, that resolutions are just setting ourselves up for failure, that if you want to change your lifestyle you should do it and not wait for the new year, yadda yadda yadda. When I was younger, I never had resolutions. I don't know that it was for any of these reasons, or because I was already so perfect I didn't need to make any changes (ha!), or more probably, because resolutions weren't a thing we did in my family. But somewhere in my 20s I started making them, and I think it's a good opportunity. Sure, in absolute terms, the start of the year could be any day. But in our social context, January 1st marks a new beginning, and I am happy to take advantage of that opportunity!

Just to keep things interesting, some photos. This is cashew cheese, enjoyed at a Vegan picnic and again at our house. Yum yum. 

So this year, I have some resolutions, some plans and some goals for the year ahead. I have found, over the years of resolutions and non-new year life changes, that I commit to new habits much better when I have a concrete goal. If I say "keep doing X" I'm more likely to let it slide than if I say "do X 3 times a week". I also do better, as many of us do, when my plans are recorded so I can be held accountable. So the list below reflects that, and also gives me an opportunity to keep track of what I've done, which gratifies my Type-A, list-loving personality.

Fitness
Run 500k this year. I started running in October 2012, and in an attempt to keep me running regularly, I'm setting this as my target. My normal running routes are between 4 and 5 kilometers, so this means I will need to run an average of twice a week across the year. Do-able.

Cycle 1600k this year. My commute to work is 4k each way, so this is 40 weeks of riding 5 days a week. That gives me some wiggle room for the weeks I am on holidays, the weeks I travel outside of Townsville for work, and any days that are rainy.

Do push-ups at least once a week. I started doing some push-ups every now and then in the second half of this year, and I think that strength-training in general is a very good thing.

Breakfast on the patio on New Year's Day

Work
Clear out my inbox every day at work, most likely at lunch, but at least before going home for the day. This way, I will be less likely to forget to respond to emails (especially from students, who get a bit stroppy when you don't reply to them!), and I will have less clutter in my inbox for when I need to find important things. Despite cleaning out my inbox in the first half of 2012, I still ended up in December with 1300 messages - just in my inbox. I spent about 2 days deleting most and moving some to folders. I'd like to do that more regularly this year so I don't have a big task in December 2013!

And a related one: Unsubscribe from email lists that I don't read regularly, and stop subscribing to new ones. I put my email address down for a lot of things, and as a result I get a ridiculous amount of messages that I delete without reading. Instead of telling myself I might read it next week, I'm just signing off.

My biggest work goal for this year is to turn my PhD into a book and get it published. The second part of that might take more than 2013, but I have already started on the first part. I have a well-published mentor to keep me on track, I've made my plan public to colleagues, to friends, and to the people I researched with, so the plan is set in stone and it will happen this year.

Crafty
Set up one of our spare rooms as a craft room. At the moment I have a table, a few boxes of yarn, fabric, paints and glitter(!!), and a new sewing machine. But there is no real order, nothing is organised and the room isn't really pretty, so I don't use it much. (There is also space in the room for a futon or some kind of guest bed, and it's also the room that houses my clothes and some random bits like suitcases, so it's more a craft-corner than a craft room, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it.)

Finish crocheting the blanket I started in early 2012. Preferably in time for winter, so we can use it to keep warm. It's about halfway finished.

Sew curtains for the bedroom and the hallway, and possible for other rooms.

Garden
Plant more flowers, bee-attracting ones, in amongst the veggies. We actually looked at buying a hive of Australian native bees, which are sting-less, and which would really help our pollination efforts! But at about $500 to get the hive and the bees up to Townsville, we decided against it. Instead, I will put more sunflowers and other bee-friendly flowers in our garden beds to get some to visit our garden of their own accord. (Note that Australian native bees produce almost no honey, just enough for themselves, so our plans to get bees were of course unrelated to honey.)

Home and Life
Keep track of everything we spend for at least two months of the year. This is something we have done every now and then for the last few years, mainly when we were saving up to buy a house. We keep a scrap of paper on the fridge and every day write down what we've spent, and on what. Then I transfer that to a spreadsheet and we can see, over the course of a month or two or three, what our money goes to. We're pretty good at saving rather than spending anyways, but this is just a good check of what is up with our budget.

Do more food-prep and meal-planning on the weekends. In the last few months of 2012 Andy and I were both super busy, and I don't think 2013 will change very much. As a result, we'd often say to each other, "What do you want for dinner?" - "I don't know, what do you want?" - "I don't know". And then we would just decide to throw some veggies on the BBQ and that was that. BBQ veggies are good, but not particularly inspiring, and they don't really make good leftovers for lunch the next day. So I'd like to have a better idea each week of what we can have, especially quick meals, and also maybe keep some food in the freezer that I can have for lunch on BBQ days when there are no leftovers.

Help out with at least 3 vegan outreach stalls. I hope it is more, but I'll be realistic. For at least one of these, I'd like to head over to Magnetic Island to hang out with Stevie and Luc at their weekly vegan outreach table.

So there you have it - 13 things I'd like to see happen in 2013.

The three days of Christmas

This year, Andy and I continued some of our earlier Townsville Christmas traditions, which are beginning to cement themselves into place as proper traditions. Basically, we spread things out across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

We have Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. We had, of course, a stuffed seitan roast with yuba skin. I had planned to cook this on the BBQ, so as to avoid heating up the house, but then Christmas eve was rainy and by dinner time it was a chilly 25 degrees, so into the oven it went! 

Christmas dinner, waiting to go in the oven.

The yuba didn't crisp up as much as usual, for some reason, but it was still good.

Along with the seitan roast, we had okra-corn bread stuffing (based on Susan V's recipe), mushrooms baked with garlic-parsley-butter, some (bought) cranberry jelly, and spinach. We topped the seitan with mango chutney, made that morning (which will get its own post soon). 

Tika got a veggie pig's ear, and Nacho had some pumpkin, one of her favourite treats. 

For dessert we had mango-fruit mince ice cream, made with the tropical fruit mince I also used for tarts.

Served up with little pastry bits, the baked scraps from when I made my tarts.

Christmas morning, Andy woke with the beginnings of a sinus infection or summer flu or something, so I cooked him up a nice breakfast and a hot lemon. For breakfast we had creamy mushrooms, spinach, and Vegg (another thing which will get its own post soon) with toast and tea. 

After brekky, we took Tika to the beach, where she chased plenty of sticks, ran around with a few other dogs, and ate too much salt water, making herself a bit sick as a result. 

Then it was back home for a cup of tea (for Andy), a mango-ginger-rum smoothie (for me), and some chocolate and white chocolate spiders, as we opened the gift(s) Andy's parents sent us. 

It was in pieces when we opened it, but a phone call cleared things up - it's a seedling tray, and a little thing for making seedling pots out of old newspaper.

For lunch, Andy cooked up some mushroom burgers with spinach and bacon bits and cranberry jelly.

Which we ate with salt and vinegar potato chips, another of our solidifying christmas traditions.

We spent the rest of the day doing not much - reading books, watching a movie, pulling some weeds in the garden, and drinking rosella cordial.

Our first harvest of rosellas was a small batch, so I only made a little cordial.

Then we ate leftovers for dinner, adding some more mushrooms and spinach to our leftovers, because Andy got a lot of both on Christmas Eve, reduced to clear!

Now all that's left is one piece of seitan, and some sweets. 

Our Boxing Day was pretty similar. For breakfast, we had mushrooms on toast, with spinach and Vegg.

And we spent the rest of the day eating fruit, chocolate spiders, and panadol (for poor sickly Andy). It wasn't the christmassiest christmas - in fact, it didn't really feel terribly christmassy at all. But it suits us - a christmas full of mushrooms, spinach and mangoes is a success, as far as we're concerned. 

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrated it!

Tropical giftie tarts

As an anthropologist, I appreciate the importance of gift giving as a tool of affirming relationships, showing appreciation, and just being nice. As an anti-capitalist vegan, I'm not so good with the buying of cheap stuff to give to people. As a cheapo, I'm not so willing to buy expensive stuff! The easy solution is handmade gifts. Last year I made crocheted Christmas ball decoration thingies for my friends at work. This year, I decided to go the food route.

I've never actually had a fruit mince tart, but for some reason this year I decided I had to make them. But then I decided, why not use tropical fruit? I tropicalised a traditional fruit cake a few years ago, when I made tropical fruit cake for our wedding. So the idea implanted itself firmly in my brain, and I had to see it through.

I made the fruit mince on the weekend. It's best to let it sit for a few days if you can, so the fruit soaks up as much of the boozy flavour as possible. We made a pretty giant batch, because we had some fruit that needed using, and also because I wanted to make not only tarts, but also fruit mince ice cream. The amount in the recipe below could probably make 4 dozen tarts, so consider cutting it in half if you don't want that many!

Tropical Fruit Mince
4 small granny smith apples, cored and grated
1 small-ish green-ish mango, peeled, seeded and diced
4 c. dried fruit - I used 1 c. mango, 1 c. papaya, 1/2 c. crystallised ginger, 1/2 c. mixed peel, and 1 c. dried mixed fruit. The dried fruit should be chopped up roughly
1/2 c. macadamia nuts, chopped coarsely (other nuts would work, too, but less tropical...)
3 Tbsp. mixed spice
1 c. rum
200 grams brown sugar
3 Tbsp. nuttelex (vegan butter)
1 lemon, zested and juiced
1 vanilla bean, split in half and with the seeds scraped

In a big bowl, combine the fruit, nuts, and spice.  Mix them all up well. In a saucepan, combine rum, brown sugar, vegan butter, lemon juice and zest, and the vanilla bean and its seeds. Bring this up to a boil, let it boil for 2 or 3 minutes, then remove from the heat. Pour the hot liquid over the fruit, mix it up, and let it stand. When it cools a bit, transfer to a tupperware and store it in the fridge until you're ready to proceed.

I made the rest of the tarts this afternoon. I used bought pastry. I know some people will scoff, but in my opinion life is just too short to screw around trying to make pastry from scratch in the tropics, and with no food processor. Five sheets of short crust pastry was the perfect amount for 2 dozen tarts.

Use a big drinking glass or a small bowl to cut muffin-tin sized circles from your pastry.

Brush the circles with oil.

Then put the pastry, oil side down, into a muffin cup. Fill it up with a scoop of fruit mince.

Cut some pretty shapes from the pastry scraps, and put the pastry-shapes on top of the fruit mince.

Brush them with a little bit of soy milk, and then bake them at 180 (350F) for 20 minutes. When they're done, they need to cool in the pan until they're fully cool. So plan ahead, so you don't have to do what I did and run across the road to ask your neighbour if you can pretty please borrow some muffin tins. Luckily Claire is a very generous neighbour :-D

I baked the extra scraps of pastry on a baking tray, so that I can somehow incorporate them into fruit mince ice cream later on this month. When they're just out of the oven, run a butter knife around the outside of each tart to loosen them up.

When the tarts have cooled completely take them out of the muffin tins.

Wrap them up to give as gifts, or put in the freezer for later, or eat them straightaway.

Now that I have eaten a fruit mince tart, I can say that they were worth making, especially tropical style. Hopefully my work friends like them, you know, for the sake of maintaining our reciprocal relationships and all that.