Waves

While North America is getting buried under piles of snow, and shivering through below-zero temperatures, we Queenslanders are sweating our butts off. It's a heat wave here, much worse for others than for us in Townsville. I actually quite like summers in Townsville. Though it's hot and humid, it's steady. You can be pretty sure that the temperature will never really get above 34. Most of the time. But still, I'll take this over 49 degrees any day! For non-celsiusers, that's 120 degrees F!!

From weatherzone

But just because it's hotter somewhere else doesn't make 33+ days pleasant to deal with! We have ways of coping - for example, setting up a kitteh-fan that Nacho lays in front of.

Another method is cooking barely. Sure, raw foods would make the most sense on the hottest days. But growing vegetables in North Queensland in the summer is pretty limited, so we would have to do our shopping at the supermarkets and pay lots of money. So we get what we can locally, eat some things from the garden and the freezer, and look for reduced-to-clear items at the shops.

And so this dinner was born, requiring very little time in the kitchen. Lime & mustard tofu with okra, garlic bread, and salad (in the background). The tofu was reduced to clear at Woolworths. It's the "momen" tofu, the kind that is firm but jiggly. The garlic bread was also reduced to clear, as was the baby cos lettuce that formed the base of the salad. The okra, and the other salad ingredients - cherry tomatoes, basil, and some green beans - come from the garden. We cooked it all on the BBQ, for minimum-effort-cooking.

Lime & Mustard Tofu

500 grams firm tofu
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
2 Tbsp. lime juice
2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 Tbsp. mustard - I used half dijon and half whole grain
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp. dried thyme
salt and pepper to taste

Slice the tofu into 1cm slabs and put them in a baking tray or shallow dish. Whisk together all the other ingredients. Pour over the tofu. Let it marinate for an hour or more. Cook in the pan with the sauce on the BBQ over medium-high heat for about 20 minutes, checking to see if you need to add a bit of water to keep the sauce from burning. Or bake at 190 (375F) for 20 to 25 minutes. Or, take it out of the marinade and cook it straight on the grill or in a skillet for a few minutes on each side.

Choko Stew

I've talked about chokoes (aka chayotes) before on this blog, and even posted my favourite choko recipe - that is, my favourite winter choko recipe. At the moment, it is far too hot to have the oven on, even briefly.But, chokoes are a veggie that grows locally, lasts in the fridge for aaaages, and is pretty versatile (rumour has it they are actually the main ingredient in McDonald's apple pie filling!). So we grabbed some at the market recently, because even though I can't stuff 'em and bake 'em, I can use them in other ways.

For example, steamed, with sauce.

 

In this case, with pan fried potatoes, and steamed spinach and green beans, covered in garlicky tahini sauce.

The most exciting part about this cooking method is that sometimes your choko shows you some love.

But Andy and I sort of made up this recipe for a Mexican-inspired choko stew. The best thing about this is that it takes only 30 minutes from "Go to Woah", as they say, including polenta-cooking. Take that, Jamie Oliver. Also, it's versatile. I've made it twice, the second time deviating quite far from the recipe, and both times were equally delicious. It can be veggie packed, or if your fridge is a little bare, it can focus on beans or TVP. It's gluten free, and can really easily be soy free. So, essentially, it's a good all-rounder.

So what I'll do is post the recipe as we made it the first time, since, for a change, we actually wrote down most of what we did. Then I'll tell you about my second batch.

Choko Stew
1 red onion, quartered and thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp. minced chilli
1 choko, cut into wedges and then chopped
1 carrot, coarsely chopped
1 c. TVP crumbles, soaked in 1 c. vegan chicken or veggie stock
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. paprika
1 small fresh tomato, chopped
2 x 400ml tins of tomatoes (diced or whole peeled, just squash them if they're whole)
1 T. dried celery (or use celery seeds, or celery salt)
1/4 c. capsicum (we used pre-frozen)
salt and pepper to taste

Start by heating a pot over medium low heat. Quickly slice up the onion, then start that sauteeing in some oil. While the onion sautees, chop the garlic, chilli, and other veggies. When the onion is quite soft, mix in the garlic and chilli. Stir them around for about a minute, then add the choko and carrot. Stir them around for another minute, then add the remaining ingredients. Let it come up to a boil, then drop it down to a simmer, and cook for about 20 minutes, until the veggies are soft.

While the stew simmers, you can put together a quick polenta.

1 c. vegan chicken stock
1/4 c. soy milk
1 T. olive oil
1/2 c. dry polenta

Bring the stock, milk and oil to just below boiling and then whisk in the polenta. Cook it over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes, until nice and thick. It's best to dish it out into bowls straight away, before it sets to the shape of your saucepan.

We served this first batch, on the polenta, with a scoop of Uncheese we had leftover from some other thing, which was yummy. We got four Andy & Theresa-sized serves, which could easily stretch to 6. The polenta was only enough for three, though, so probably double it if you're hungry.

The next time I made this, which was just 2 days ago, I made the following changes:

• I used a brown onion, and chopped it instead of slicing
• I left out the chilli
• I added a sweet potato, chopped up
• I used a tin of 4bean mix instead of TVP
• I used 1 tin of tomatoes, 400ml of vegan chicken stock, and no fresh tomato
• And I left out the celery and capsicum

See, it's versatile. 

 This would be good with black beans or kidney beans, and served over quinoa or rice instead of polenta. Try it out, and let me know how it goes!

Cyclone Yasi: Cleaning up

Friday morning was the first day that I felt like we were truly "post-cyclone".  From Friday until Sunday, Andy and I went for lots of sight-seeing walks, ate much more (and much more richly) than we normally do to eat up everything before it went off, and spent a lot of time sitting around fanning ourselves and trying not to die from heat.

First, we cleaned up.  Except, we don't have a proper garden, so we don't really have garden tools.  So we improvised.  I swept, with a broom - the back courtyard, including the walls, which had been blasted with broken bits of leaves.  It started out like this:


And we ended up with a pile like this:


Then Andy and I moved out to the front and continued sweeping.  We swept all in front of our unit and the one next door, and then went down to #5 and #6, where some older women live.  We opted not to clean in front of the two middle units, because they are occupied by able-bodied young people like us, who can clean up themselves!  The front went from this:


To this:


We also helped ourselves to some pawpaws from the leaning pawpaw tree down at the other end of our unit block.


Then we walked up to Aplin's Weir along the bike path, and back through the suburbs.  I got a sunburn, and blisters, but the damage to the vegetation and houses along the river was much worse than my minor suffering.












We walked past Rising Sun Honda, where people were lined up out the door for generators.


Our neighbours spent a few days having a go at the tree across the road with axes.  Someone came along with a chain saw, to everyone's relief, and then some other neighbours used their truck to pull the still-huge tree pieces off the road.


Later, someone with a bobcat came and cleared further, so our street was once again passable (and it wasn't even an hour before we had hoons coming through!).


A different walk in another direction looked much the same - trees down, a few on houses, and massive piles of vegetation.






On Sunday we had to go in to the uni so I could pick up material I needed to teach the next day up in Cairns, and we got a bit of a broader view of the cyclone damage.

Annandale had loads of uprooted trees.


The uni didn't get off lightly either.






An evening walk on Sunday night was incredibly frustrating -- a kilometre or so from our house, we noticed lots of lights on.  As we returned home, we got very hopeful.  Then, two streets before ours, it got dark again.  And stayed dark, until one street beyond ours.  So, an area of about 2 or 3 blocks was without power, and we were in it.  The worst part was that our very street had electricity on, just 30 metres away from us.  There was even a streetlight lit up just outside our house.  Very frustrating.  Especially as one of the residents in our unit block had been running a very noisy generator since Saturday.  He had set it up in his courtyard, which meant that the fumes and noise was worst in the bedroom of our unit.  So we had to drag the mattress out to the living room in order to have open windows.

Post-Cyclone Food
Andy and I are both fans of not-wasting-food.  And we had planned ahead by filling the freezer with water bottles, which kept things pretty cold for a few days.  So it wasn't until Saturday that we really started throwing food away, though we had been without power since Wednesday night. Part of the reason is that we're not as precious about temperatures as we probably should be.  But, not having a fridge & freezer full of dead animals and dairy really helps, too!  Some of our post-cyclone meals...

For lunch on Friday, a container of bean salad that had been in the freezer, mixed with ceylon spinach, sundried tomatoes and olives (both of which actually survived without refrigeration quite well), and dill pickles (which I didn't want to leave at room temperature for long).


Friday dinner was a big curry - a block of tofu, a bag of veggies that were in the freezer and were all but thawed, a tin of coconut milk, and half a jar of rogan josh paste.


For Saturday breakfast, we had oats cooked with soy milk (asceptic cartons which we opened in the morning and used within a day, so Andy could have cups of tea) and bananas.


We ate lots of fruit - fruit leather and bananas that had been gifted to us after Yasi knocked down a friend's trees.  We also finished off a grapefruit that had been in the fridge, and some pawpaw from the tree in our unit block.


Saturday lunch was a much bigger lunch than we are used to.  Tofu, fried up with spinach and noodles from the freezer, and coated in half a jar of homemade BBQ sauce that had been in the fridge (and another pickle).


On Saturday afternoon, we took two batches of seitan from the freezer - they were defrosted but still cold.  Andy marinated one in a whole bunch of lemon juice we'd kept in the freezer, thinking the acidity would stop anything bad from growing.  The other batch was covered in dukkah, which we also store in the freezer.


For dinner that night, we cooked up a pack of still-cold hotdogs that had been frozen, and the dukkah seitan, and ate them wrapped up in mountain bread, with more spinach.


On Sunday we tasted our tofutti cream cheese and it wasn't off, so we  decided to eat it up.  We fried up the lemony seitan and wrapped it up with cream cheese and spinach for a late lunch.  We were so full that we decided to forego dinner that night.


A few things didn't make it at all - cooked beans, in both the fridge and freezer, started fermenting fairly quickly.  Ditto with the soaked soy beans.  We didn't even attempt to save the vegan mayo.  We also had to throw out the bananas, ginger, frozen spinach and chillis from the freezer.  Nacho had a big feed of frozen corn and peas before we threw the rest.  But other than that, jams, nuttelex, and curry pastes lasted the distance.  Our freezer houses lots of stuff that doesn't have to be frozen, like chia seeds, flax seeds, and yeast, so we just re-froze them when the power came back on and they seem alright.  And our ceylon spinach, which we had harvested in anticipation of the cyclone, lasted really well in a big tupperware container for about 6 days.  So all up, though it was annoying and hot with no electricity, we managed just fine, thanks to ice bottles, a camp stove, and strong stomachs.

On Monday morning I went to the airport early and headed up to Cairns to teach an intensive class, while Andy went back to uni to sit in air conditioning and use the internet do some work.  When he came home that afternoon, the fans were spinning and we were back in business.  So although there are still massive piles of debris waiting to be cleared up around town, that was basically the end of our Cyclone Yasi experience.

If you want to see more photos, you can check out my flickr set, the Tropical Cyclone Yasi flickr group, or the Townsville Bulletin galleries.

Cyclone Yasi: Weathering the Storm

Picking up where I left off, the power went out around 5.30 on Wednesday evening. At this point it was windier than normal, but not dramatically. We looked outside and there was a tree down from the neighbour's house, completely blocking our street. We watched out the kitchen window as our idiot neighbours (from the other side) walked outside in the wind and rain to have a look – bringing their not-yet-teenage children out with them. They sent one of the kids back in after a few minutes, but only to fetch them cold beers. Talk about responsible parenting choices.

Because the power was off, it got pretty warm pretty quickly – we don't use aircon at home, but the lack of fans was definitely noticeable. But we realised how lucky we were. The wind was coming, at that point, from the south. Our unit is on the north end of our unit-block, so we were able to leave our windows open until 10pm or so, without too much blowy-ness.

We spent lots of time watching the wind whip the palm trees from the kitchen window.

When it got a bit darker, we could only see the silhouettes, but it was pretty clear that the wind picked up speed progressively.

All the while, Nacho slept through the storm. She's normally a major scaredy-cat, so we were surprised how utterly unfazed she managed to remain.

We snacked on cold sausage rolls, cooked earlier in the day, throughout the night. Our only battery powered radio is a bit insufficient: it plays FM only, and it needs earphones. So much of the time, Andy and I were squeezed together despite the heat, sharing one set of earbuds so we could hear the local radio.

After we shut the windows it got oppressively hot inside, so I ripped apart a shoebox to make a fan to cool us off ever so slightly. Then, as the storm got even worse and the wind howled around us, Andy and Nacho both fell asleep. I did a crossword puzzle by candlelight, listened to the radio, hoped the noises I was hearing on the roof were branches and not our roof blowing off. Between 12 and 1, the eye of the cyclone crossed between Cardwell and Mission Beach – around 200kms north of Townsville. Then the wind changed direction, coming at us from the east this time. By 3am, the windows hadn't blown out, the roof was still attached to the walls, and it was starting to (barely) calm down a bit. So we went to bed. I woke up a few more times, but by morning it was clear that we had made it through unscathed. It was still a bit blowy on Thursday morning, but much less than the night before.

We went outside, but not far. We had a peek at the downed tree, crossing the street just beyond our driveway.

We walked up in the other direction, but were quickly stopped by downed power lines in every direction. Since the wind was still blowing, we didn't want to take any silly risks.

We noticed that traffic poles had a bit of an angle that hadn't been there before.

And we saw a smashed window at Liquor Land.

On closer inspection, though, we concluded that it wasn't cyclone damage. There was a rock just outside the broken glass, and just inside were two bottles of booze that looked like they'd been quickly abandoned.

We went back inside, fired up the campstove, and made a cup of tea.

Then we hung around and waited for things to settle. I had a nap, we listened to the radio, read books, did crosswords, and played cards. We snacked on some carrot sticks and green hummus - chickpeas with spinach and also sundried tomatoes - which Andy had blended up the day before, when we still had power.  The fridge stayed cold overnight, but by morning we emptied out the important stuff into an esky bag with a bottle of ice, but we left things like jam in the still-slightly-cool fridge.


Since the power was out, we wanted to keep the freezer shut for as long as possible, to keep the cold from the ice bottles in. So for dinner that night, we made pasta with sauce – a jar of pasta sauce with added beans, carrots, and spinach.

We ate by candlelight, which may have been romantic if it wasn't so... dark.



While we were eating, the army rolled up.  I thought they were there to clean up the tree blocking the road... but they left a few minutes later.

And we went to sleep almost as soon as the sun went down – at around 7.30pm – and slept like logs until well after the sun came up the next morning. Then, the weather was good, and it definitely felt like the storm was over – so I'll be back with a final post about our clean-up and sight-seeing adventures.