A Nether Ending Story

Well, I got approval. Now I’m waiting for the paperwork to arrive in the mail and to pick up my actual card. I’m a little, legal immigrant! I’ll ruminate more on this development later, but for now I’m going to bask in this new day. 

Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m saving a more in-depth review of this book since I just finished it and need some time to digest, but suffice it to say I found it to be one of the more thoughtful and effective books on why a vegetarian diet is not only the best choice for animals, but for the environment, human health, human rights, small farmers, etc.

My favorite aspect of Foer’s book is that he seamlessly weaves his beautiful writing style into a book that could have easily become a difficult-to-manage tome of statistics and graphic imagery from slaughterhouses. It’s not to say that Foer some how glosses over the atrocities of slaughterhouses - in fact, he goes into gruesome detail about the ineffectiveness of some operations that leave animals conscious and feeling of pain even as they move down the line - but he delivers this information in a sensitive way, almost like someone bringing terrible news and putting a hand on your shoulder as you try to understand it.

Another unique and quite enjoyable part of the book is Foer’s inclusion of intensely personal memories and feelings. At some times the book comes across as a memoir more than an argument for vegetarianism. As a vegan and as someone who loved the food-centric holidays of my southern family, the choice to change my diet carried much more weight. Foer asks himself the same questions I did as I started this journey. Will I have the same connection with my family if I don’t eat grandma’s goulash or chicken casserole? Will my food choices alienate me? The answers to both of those questions, if you’re wondering, are no. In the end Foer decides, while thinking of his Jewish grandmother’s words about having to care about something in order to justify saving anything, that vegetarianism is the most ethical choice for him and his new family (he talks in great length about his young son’s influence on writing this book).

While he doesn’t go into much discussion of dairy or egg production (it’s already a lengthy book), which can be just as vile and gruesome and torturous for the animals, his take on meat production is enough to jar even the most dedicated carnivore into considering a more plant-centric diet. The book that pushed me over the line into veganism is “Mad Cowboy” by Howard Lyman and I think it did so because Lyman also used his personal narrative rather than extensive statistics to make his point. Sometimes it is the stories that can be the biggest agents for change and I think Foer used his talent to do just that.

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My partner and I are off to celebrate a romantic (and undoubtedly cold) weekend in Maastricht. This is my first time visiting the city, but everyone assures me it’s beautiful. Also looking forward to the rain snow mix in the forecast. Keeping my fingers crossed that it holds off for a day or so. Any recommendations for places to visit?

I’m wondering if I’m drifting slowly into a life crisis of sorts. My career never really started before I changed it and then my second career, if I could call it that, got off the ground right before I up and moved to another country to be with the man I’m pretty sure I want to spend my life with. I often envy people who’ve been in jobs for long periods of time. They seem to have a commitment characteristic engrained in their personality that allows them to do this. They’re most likely the same people that say they’re going to start jogging and acutally do it. I’m always thinking about the next thing or how I can grow and move on to bigger and better projects, but is this the healthiest way to be? Should I try and settle down for at least five years (Jesus, that sounds like a long time) in some sort of position so I can see what I might be missing? 

Photo by slimmer_jimmer

Time has always been a fickle reality for me. It goes by so fast, but at the same time I beat myself up for not being a completely established professional, fluent in Dutch after only being here four months. I should cut myself some slack, I know, but it’s hard when I feel the sands of time slipping through my fingers while I’m sitting on the couch watching an antique appraisal show on BBC just to hear some English. (I wish I could get some decent American English in my life, but I can’t handle another episode of MADE or 16 & Pregnant. I just can’t.). I’m only 26, I tell myself, but then I also think: Holy shit, I’m 26. So many questions are running through my mind at this point. Am I going to get married? Should I be having kids right now or is that just my reproductive system sending me weird evolutionary signals to procreate? Why haven’t I published anything creative? Why is my freelance career so fledgling? What should I be doing differently? 

These panicked moments of self reflection often send me into a tailspan of clicking embedded links endlessly on LifeHacker productivity articles. Yes, I’m one of those people that frets about productivity by procrastinating on my to-do list through reading how-tos on how to be productive. It’s shameful and yet I continue. 

So then I think again about that person in the office, having put in a good five years with the company, has a pin to show for it or something. And then I wonder, maybe that guy hates his life and wishes he’d dropped it all for something else. I go back and forth on this imaginary shmoe’s innermost feelings about his career. I suppose it boils down to my simultaneous yet conflicting desires for spontinaeity and security in my life. How does one reconcile these two longings that seem to have equally strong grasps on my life trajectory? 

I’ve just downloaded a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. Yes, I feel stupid about this. I’m now going to load it onto the e-reader I never feel like I read enough and get to thinking about my productivity, or lack thereof. I’m curious if this book is even made for funemployed, 20-something, expats like myself whose GTD lists involve things like starting a new blog, knitting a neck cowl, and trying my hand at homemade, vegan ba pao. We’ll see. 

Photo by cindy47452

I’m not sure where my disdain for this nostalgia-inducing bit of precipitation started, but I can’t deny that I really don’t enjoy it anymore. I remember the days spent wishing and praying for a snow day to cancel school. In my part of the states, schools were canceled for even the slightest bit of snow because no one knew how to drive in it, particularly bus drivers. A light dusting of snow could bring Southeastern Virginia to a screeching halt and did quite often. But as I grew older I seemed to lose the excitement that came with snow days. The flakes, instead of representing that youthful energy that one also gets in finding a tall pile of leaves that seems to call out the child in you to jump into it feet first, came to represent inconvenience, time lost in lengthy commutes, and money. (I had a car that didn’t always work well and loved to demonstrate this fact during winter storms)

My go-to bit of small talk, as is the case in dealing with most strangers, is the weather. Everyone always asks me, sarcastically, how I like the Dutch weather. I chuckle goodheartedly and say I find it absolutely dreadful. This has been mostly in jest since I’ve yet to see what a true Dutch winter is like (though I have witnessed the incredible amounts of rain this country gets), but if this cold snap and forecasted snow is any indication, I won’t be able to say what I think about it because my mouth and nose, along with all other exposed body parts, will be wrapped tightly in scarves, jackets, mittens, and boots.

Climate is one of the characteristics of a country that, like no other, can make you feel far away from home. You can hole yourself up in an apartment, hide from the locals, and try to recreate the feelings of your home country. You can trick yourself into feeling like the old you - the one from “zee old country,” but you can’t do anything about the weather. Whatever filter I may have had on my view of The Netherlands is quickly dissolving as the cold gets more fierce and my body struggles to acclimate to it. I imagine veteran expats, the ones that have moved all over the world, have bodies accustomed to abrupt changes in the weather. They no doubt have wardrobes that keep them prepared for any situation, from bikinis in 30 celsius to snow boots for those negative 10 situations. I, on the other hand, am still finding my way around. For example, I’m not looking forward to traveling to Dutch class this evening in a pair of Keds while the wind whips its negative four air around my shivering body and snow flakes cake to my glasses.

And so this is one of those things from which I can’t hide. As I face down the (thankfully small) snow flakes tonight on my way to Dutch class, I’ll be thinking about the many other aspects of this new life I’ve been hiding from but which I should face head-on, confidently. They aren’t going away. Neither am I.

I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving because I’m into the genocide of the native peoples of America. I do like the side effects of this perverse holiday, however, because it affords me the opportunity to eat with reckless abandon. This is the first Thanksgiving holiday away from my family back in Virginia and while the big day always seemed to stress me out, I’m actually missing it a little. My brother has promised to Skype chat me while everyone is there so I can get a taste of what I’m missing. I am not going to miss out on Thanksgiving flavors this year, though. I’m celebrating in my own delicious, vegan way.

I toyed with the idea of inviting people over, but that got me stressed me out. We don’t have a big kitchen to cook a ton of food and we would need to invite too many people. Instead Thomas and I decided to celebrate with one another alone this weekend. I’m so thankful to have a partner that loves me as much as I love him and what better way to celebrate that than with way too much food, wine, and movies in our sweatpants. I’m cooking a few things ahead of time, but the rest will happen on Sunday morning and afternoon. Thomas and I are cooking together, so I have to rein in my inner kitchen control freak for the holiday.

Our menu will change based on what I can find at the market and shops, but so far it’s looking something like this:

• Seitan roast
• Garlic and chive mashed potatoes
• Gravy. I’m going with the golden gravy from the Real Food Daily cookbook. I heard it’s delicious! I found it through Amazon’s “look inside” feature.
• Dressing. That’s stuffing for you non-Southern folks. It will probably have mushrooms since I have to work some mushroom man stuff into the dinner somehow. This is also the best part of any Thanksgiving dinner. Real talk.
• Corn relish. Amazing family recipe!
• Something with brussel sprouts - probably a creamy casserole a la the traditional green bean casserole
• Southern-style greens. I can’t find collards here, but I’m hoping some shredded cabbage and kale will do the trick.
• Mac and cheese.
• Something with sweet potatoes if I can find them.
• A soup - possibly carrot, sweet potato, or pumpkin. Will also involve coconut milk.
• Dinner rolls. I’m just going with the packaged stuff from the store.
• Dessert? Thinking an apple crumble with oat topping and vanilla soya ice cream on the side.

I need to track down some cheesecloth for the seitan roast today (kaasdoek in Nederlands). I’m planning on making the roast, corn relish, greens, and soup ahead of time. Possibly even the dressing and mac and cheese and baking them off the day of. My goal? To cook so much food we don’t even have to cook that week. That’s what Thanksgiving is about to me. Being Thankful for your life and family and celebrating that with eating until you pass out.

Happy Thanksgiving, Americans! Keep an eye on the Macy’s Day Parade for me. My favorite part is watching the floats crash into buildings. Like Nascar, only nerdier.

I’ve embraced a lot in my cross-Atlantic move and I’m quite proud of myself for it, but some days I wonder if and when I’ll be able to shake some of the Americanness that keeps me from learning to love everything here.

Take for example the business hours of most shops in The Netherlands. Most places, even bakeries, open no earlier than 8 a.m. and most times it’s closer to 9 a.m. This would be okay if they stayed open late, but most businesses close around 6 or 7 p.m. Many shops, including one of the largest grocery chains, are closed on Sundays and even more shops open late on Monday. I come from a world of 24-hour convenience and I even worked for a time at a bagel shop that opened at 6 a.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. on the weekends.

This cultural difference never seems to bother me until it inconveniences me. Then it leaves me seething and frustrated that I was again foiled by my new country and its nonchalance toward convenience. Today was one of those days. My bike is quite old and I’m starting to suspect the tires are dry rotten. It’s quite a difficult ride since the tires don’t hold air well, but I don’t have the money to replace them and I needed to visit the post office to mail some important documents to the IND. So I ponied up and pedaled, at a painfully slow pace, to the nearest shopping center with a post office. I arrived breathless and clammy from the winter sweat that comes with a bit of fitness in near-freezing temperatures. I was already on edge about the state of my bike tires when I walked into the grocery store to find the post office “gesloten.” Closed. For lunch. A two-hour lunch! It was just too much for me at that moment. Before arriving I’d had to type text from an IND letter into an online translator just to make sure I was mailing the right thing. Still unsure, I called the IND at 10 euro cents a minute. Then I had to wrestle my bike from the storage unit, which was blocked by a construction company’s scaffolding. Then there was the slow, thigh-aching ride. All to be confronted by a cheery, orange sign letting me know the folks at the post office were off enjoying a relaxing, two-hour lunch.

I often wonder if I wasn’t so privileged if I’d be as frustrated by little hang-ups like these. I can’t change where I came from or how I lived there, but I can change how I see the way people live in The Netherlands. I want to embrace it and feel like all of this time and energy spent just getting to a shopping center is normal and worth it, but some days I can’t help feeling like a lot of it is a waste of my time. I could be doing something else, I say to myself. I could be writing those questions for the person I’m interviewing later. I could be cleaning the apartment.

But I also could embrace the bike ride, laugh off the post office bit, and hope for an easier day tomorrow. I could look around me and find charm in the children leaving school for the day, running to their parents and climbing on their bikes. I could watch the ducks in the creek or be happy that the sun is shining today.

I know it’s all a choice I just wish it were easier some days for me to make the laid back one - to laugh it all off and just be happy I’m experiencing something new. I’m over it now (after I drowned my sorrows in a delicious bag of chips), but still reflecting on when I’m going to shake the Americanness I’ve brought with me and come into my own as the worldly expat I want to be.

So often I hear about vegans that won’t join their families at steakhouses for dinner or the Thanksgiving table because of the dead turkeys and other animals on the menu. I’m just going to go ahead and say that’s ridiculous and that doing so only serves to further alienate others from veganism. Maybe I’ve just been desensitized to the fact that people eat meat around me, but if I avoided everyone in my life that eats meat I’d end up alone and only have myself to talk to about animal rights, environmentalism, and all the delicious vegan food that’s out there. Where’s the fun in that? I much prefer to be around the people I love and share my love of vegan food with them even if they’re slopping my vegan casserole onto a plate with ham and turkey.

Dining out is an even thornier issue since so often it’s the vegan that is left to scour the menu for anything (see: iceberg lettuce salad) edible at the steakhouse. My recommendation, however, is to plan ahead and when possible call or email the restaurant.

I had an extremely pleasant experience recently in Amsterdam at a place called De Blauwe Hollander on a recommendation from some fellow expats. My former boss and old friend Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach was in town only for the night with a few members of her family before they traveled on back to America. They wanted to walk around Amsterdam a bit and grab some “typical Dutch” food. I knew that “typical Dutch” food was not very vegetarian friendly as it consists of mashed potato dishes known as “stampots” served with meat gravy and sausages. Nevertheless, I thought positive and emailed the folks at De Blauwe Hollander. They were prompt in responding and said they’d think of something for me. When we arrived our server knew exactly who we were and said the chef had been thinking about what to make for me all day. I was excited since I planned on ordering a salad and calling it a night. Instead I got a beautiful stampot with fresh herbs served with grilled asparagus, roasted mushrooms, and roasted red peppers.

So don’t underestimate the restaurant that screams meat, butter, cheese, etc. when you have to dine out with friends and family. They can surprise you.

The recipe is: get oats and whatever else you want - mix it together. As for proportions, I went with four cups of oats to one cup of mix-ins, but will probably up that next year. We included pecans, walnuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, golden raisins, and chopped bits of dried apple. The nuts and raisins came from our Turkish market and the seed mix and dried apple came from our grocery store. The only hard thing to find around here is rolled oats. The grocery stores seem only to carry oatmeal, but we tracked down the oats at our windmill and have even seen them in the health food store.

I eat a filling bowl of this each morning with a little soya yogurt and milk to thin it out. In the summer I chopped fresh strawberries and bananas on top. Do it. It’s better than toast.

This post is part of VeganMoFo - the Vegan Month of Food. Learn more about it by checking out VeganMoFo Headquarters where you can subscribe to a bunch of vegan blogs and drool over delicious and cruelty-free food.

Then I found the steamed white seitan recipe in Viva Vegan by Terry Hope Romero and all was right in the world. I’ve been using this versatile seitan recipe in a number of dishes. It’s plain enough in flavor that it works for all cuisines, not just Latin. 

Recent ways I’ve honored this seitan:

Mediterranean Feast! I found a shwarma marinade recipe online and subbed the meat with my thinly sliced seitan and then baked the slices. Perfect inside some locally-baked lavash bread with all the fixins. More photos of our Mediterranean feast are on my flickr stream.

Guatita! I’ve been more than bummed about the selection of Latin cooking ingredients in The Netherlands, meaning there is no selection. They have some crappy taco kits in the store, but that’s it. I brought a tortilla press with me and saw some masa harina lurking in the Asian market, but without things like chilis I feel like it might be a waste to even try. I did, however, have enough ingredients for this amazing peanut stew from Viva Vegan called guatita. I planned on my partner and I eating it for two days, but I should have served it with rice. The pot went in less than 36 hours. One of the best recipes I’ve tried this year.

Braised Seitan with kale, brussel sprouts, and sun-dried tomatoes! I think this is a sleeping winner in Veganomicon. I hadn’t heard much about it when the book came out, because it’s obviously overshadowed by other amazing dishes, but it’s very simple and flavorful. I wanted to use this recipe since it’s boerenkool (kale) and spruitje (brussel sprout) season here and we have a leftover bottle of red wine to use. We served it with some pasta noodles and it was a hit. 

I was having a barbecue craving and reached for the Backyard BBQ recipe in Veganomicon and some of the seitan. I pulled it apart with two forks and cooked it in the homemade barbecue sauce. It was delicious on some toasted ciabatta with vinegar slaw and quinoa salad on the side.

A few nights ago I tackled Seitan Mushroom Stroganoff with the steamed seitan I had left and I didn’t totally love it, but I enjoyed it in that creamy, comfort food way. Plus I used up some leftover wine - win! It was much better the next day as leftovers.

The moral of the story is eat your seitan. You won’t regret it.

This post is part of VeganMoFo - the Vegan Month of Food. Learn more about it by checking out VeganMoFo Headquarters where you can subscribe to a bunch of vegan blogs and drool over delicious and cruelty-free food.

Are you ready?

Okay, here goes.

You can make brownies in the freaking microwave. That’s right. Delicious, chewy, moist brownies with whatever add-ins you like (walnuts are my favorite) in the microwave! I won’t post a picture because these little morsels aren’t the least bit photogenic, but they make up for their ugliness tenfold when eaten warm from the microwave.

This is the recipe I follow, subbing oil for the butter. A few tips from a mug brownie aficionado:

• Make sure you whisk each item well as you add it to the mug. I use a fork for this.
• I’ve used smaller mugs than the 12 oz. one recommended without any problems.
• Your microwave may be much more powerful or weaker than mine. I would say start with 45 seconds and inch up by 15 second increments from there. The worst thing is to end up with a microwave-dried brownie.
• It’s “done” when you stick a toothpick in the outer rim and it comes out fairly clean. The center will still be a bit molten. Your kitchen will also start smelling like brownies, a sure time it’s getting close to being done.
• I like to let it sit for about 15 minutes in the mug since the residual heat cooks it through a bit more. Plus this thing is crazy hot. You want to avoid any napalm-like batter burns to the roof of your mouth. Trust me. Wait.
• Some successful add-ins at our house have included chopped nuts and a little square of vegan chocolate pressed into the center of the brownie batter.

So what are you waiting for? This is the perfect brownie fix without making a whole pan of brownies. Do it.

This post is part of VeganMoFo - the Vegan Month of Food. Learn more about it by checking out VeganMoFo Headquarters where you can subscribe to a bunch of vegan blogs and drool over delicious and cruelty-free food.

Because the food is awesome! This is true, and I know this is the vegan month of FOOD, but I wanted to explore this question myself and VeganMoFo seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I ask myself this sometimes. Unfortunately, no matter how much they should, people really can’t help but ask this when I’m at a party or a restaurant. It’s unfortunate that when one chooses a lifestyle outside the “norm” that people consider it a responsibility of that person to explain it to everyone else on command, but I digress.

I ask myself this sometimes because I wonder why I went vegan when I did (nearly five years ago after the death of my grandmother). I knew all along that animals raised for eating couldn’t be treated that well. I mean, whose life is awesome when it ends in slaughter to feed humans? But I still ate them and the byproducts that came from their raising (milk, eggs, butter, etc.). I was vegetarian for a long while in high school and even vegan for a time, but in college I went back to being a regular old omnivore. Somehow I must have created some cognitive dissonance in my mind and been able to consume meat because the thought now repulses me. 

The only answer I can come to is that my grandmother’s death allowed me to see my own life in a different way. I’m reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s amazing book “Eating Animals” right now and his relationship with his grandmother, of which he goes into great detail, reminds me of my relationship with my late grandma. While her own personality wasn’t very approachable or warm, she showed her love and nurturing through food - food which more often than not contained chunks of fat-back and loads of butter. Imagine a Paula Deen-style Thanksgiving every day…for lunch, even. It was hard for my grandmother to understand my diet choices as I had them throughout my life. She couldn’t “get” vegetarianism, let alone veganism, and I wasn’t very articulate about why being vegetarian was important. I didn’t really know much about it or why I was even doing it, so of course my choice seemed strange to others. 

Then I read “Mad Cowboy” by Howard Lyman. For some reason personal narratives, like Lyman’s and Foer’s, speak more to me than data-chocked books exposing the underbelly of the factory farming system. Lyman has had an amazing life, but his story of going from a cattle rancher eating six eggs and a bunch of bacon each morning to a vegan, animal rights activist seemed redemptive and hopeful. It made me feel like my apathy and flaky diet changes over the last years didn’t matter and that I could truly live the life I knew to be ethical if I wanted to - I didn’t have to explain it to anyone. But I became much more equipped to do the explaining if and when the time came (and it always comes, trust me). 

To me, being vegan means trying to live a life that does the least amount of harm to people, animals, and the environment. For quite a few years I told people that the environment was my main reason for going vegan and maybe that was true at the time, but I was also afraid of the animal rights discussion. Environmentalism seemed safer than animal rights, especially when I came from a city home to a much-reviled organization known as PETA. But in recent years I’ve become a little braver. When people eat meat in front of me and feel the need to apologize to me about it (seriously, your guilt isn’t my problem), I often say “Please, don’t apologize to me. If anything apologize to the (insert animal).” They laugh and then it’s over and I can get back to my own eating, but my hope is that it plants a little thought about the life that animal had before it became their food. I make an important point not to dive into gross detail about the factory farming system at the dinner table because I feel like that alienates people and does little to help animals. If people truly want more information, I offer to discuss it when we’re not eating or to email them later. 

Humans are animals no matter how much we try to dissociate ourselves from them and my grandmother’s death showed me, in a way that I could truly understand, the suffering of an animal. I know that sounds strange, but to see a human, something that we consider so strong and resilient, suffering and dying in a hospital room made me think of the many other animals (human or otherwise) suffering as a result of the little choices made at our dinner tables. Yes, you can care about people AND animals at the same time. Considering how much food is raised just to feed our food - land that could be used to grow food for hungry humans in the world - going vegan is a human rights decision as well. Going vegan also gave me a project - something to focus my thoughts on after the death of my grandmother and in a way honor her even if she would never understand it.

While personal narratives are powerful, statistics still have the strength to jar me even after going vegan. I’m at a point in reading “Eating Animals” where Foer uses some facts and figures from a U.N. report to support his ideas. I’d never heard the true figure behind the statement that animal agriculture contributes more to climate change than all sorts of transportation in the world combined until this book:

“According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transportation sector - cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships - combined…The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.”

If you’re looking for something fast, make a stir fry. If you’re looking for some extremely complex flavor profile, reach for your Thai cookbooks. Italian food is complex in its simplicity and fast is rarely a characteristic of its dishes. But the time spent cooking all the different parts for a baked pasta dish (the vegan ricotta, the tomato sauce, the noodles, the veggies, etc.) will all be worth it when you have that first bite.

It’s been a while since I made a lasagna, but I had a craving one day for cannelloni. Not sure why, because I don’t think I’ve ever actually had cannelloni, but there it was and I needed to tackle it. I decided to make the cashew tofu ricotta recipe from Veganomicon and mix it with some spinach (frozen, chopped spinach that I thawed) and sun-dried tomatoes in the food processor. This was my filling. Next I set about making a garlicky bechamel sauce. The process was similar to my recipe for alfredo (minus the shallots and lemon juice) but I also added half a tub of vegan cream cheese since we had that in the house (I’ve made it without the cream cheese and it was perfectly delicious). I also made a chunky tomato sauce full of sun dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers to serve over the creamy canneloni. 

Who says you need milk and eggs to make a great pasta dish? The bechamel on the top of the baked canneloni browned up just like the “real thing,” and the pungent, chunky tomato sauce added a bit of extra flavor to the dish. Sure, it took me forever to cook and stuff each of the little pasta tubes, but you quickly forget that after the first bite. 

This post is part of VeganMoFo - the Vegan Month of Food. Learn more about it by checking out VeganMoFo Headquarters where you can subscribe to a bunch of vegan blogs and drool over delicious and cruelty-free food.

I think it is from her that I get my love of DIY cooking. If I can figure out how to do it from scratch, I like to try it at least once. Canning to me is one of the most fulfilling cooking projects. You get something, maybe berries or cucumbers, at its peak of freshness and turn it into something you can savor for months, sometimes years, to come. You can open up a jar every few months and be reminded of the wonderful days of summer when you take advantage of the sunshine and appreciate everything that grows. And home-canned treats are always a welcomed gift.

My first experience with canning came after my friend Amber and I took a drive out to Pungo in Virginia Beach to pick blackberries. A forrest fire was burning nearby and we came home smelling like a campfire, but it was worth it. That blackberry jam turned me into a pick-your-own, can-your-own convert if I wasn’t well on my way already. The following year I went out to Pungo on my own and picked 25 pounds of strawberries before 7 a.m. while ankle-deep in mud. I made 12 pints of strawberry jam that summer, but it barely lasted six months. It was just too delicious.

On my last trip to America, my mom and I planned two cooking projects: habanero pepper jelly and salt-free bread ‘n butter pickles. My mom is on a low sodium diet, so things like pickles, which are chocked full of sodium, are off limits to her. We are a family that loves our pickles (hence my Twitter username pickledtreats), so this was a really bummer. The habaneros were grown by a friend of ours and we froze them until we had time to make the jam.

Both projects turned out fabulously and I even managed to bring a few jars of the habanero pepper jelly back to The Netherlands with me (pepper jelly is crazy delicious on crackers with a bit of vegan cream cheese). My mom now has six jars from which she can pluck pungent slices of cucumber without worrying about her heart. And we got to create something together to remind us of one another even though we’re on different continents. 

Canning seems ominous, but it’s really one of the easier cooking projects. Libraries are chocked full of how-to books, but the Pick Your Own Web site is also a great resource. You can find home canning supplies every where, but they’re more prevalent in the spring and summer. I got my whole water bath canning kit for around $20 brand new.

You should seriously try it. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is and you can’t help but be proud of yourself when it’s over.  

This post is part of VeganMoFo - the Vegan Month of Food. Learn more about it by checking out VeganMoFo Headquarters where you can subscribe to a bunch of vegan blogs and drool over delicious and cruelty-free food.