cheegan

Cheese and consequences

2006-11-30T08:36:00.001-08:00

I've been cheeging out a lot lately, eating cheese more often than I have in a long time. Reasoning, maybe some people really are just meant to have certain kinds of diets, and the type of food they are really drawn to is what they need. Thinking, if I had to choose one food (or two), on a desert island, I could live on bread and cheese alone.

And you know what else? I've had a cough that won't go away for the entire month of November. It's only gotten more gross and more phlegmy as time oozes cheesily along. This, from someone who as a strict vegan very rarely got sick and even then licked it in a day or two.

I blame cheese, and the various hormones (and other crap they give the animals) that it contains. Also, I'm not getting any more in shape this way. I'm going to try to lay off it.

Stupid, delicious cheese.

Cheese and consequences

2006-11-30T08:36:00.000-08:00

The Cheegan Confessional: Leather

2006-10-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Specifically: boots. Ok, I broke down and for the first time in probably 10 years bought a pair of leather boots. Why, you ask, would an animal-loving person such as yourself do such a thing, when there are all these nifty man-made materials these days? My reasons:

Have you seen the prices at Moo Shoes?? (Plus, from my experience, they are not water-proof. Trust me.)
My Payless shoes are death to my feet.
No, I cannot wear used shoes. Sorry, I just can't do it.
Snow + cold + hours in the dog run + canvas sneakers = wet cold miserable feet.

So I just bit the bullet and did it. Do I feel badly? Of course! But what's a girl to do? Don't my feet deserve love? When it's warm out I forego shoes whenever possible, and when necessary wear my un-evironmentally friendly vinyl shoes, but I'm finding I just can't do it in the winter. If I promise to not go on a shoe rampage and turn into a mini Imelda Marcos can I find forgiveness??

TCC: At the movies with popcorn and butter (at home with potato chips and french onion dip and regret)

2006-09-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

So I saw "Lassie" last night (which I urge y'all to run out and see right now) and gorged myself on movie popcorn. Ok, so the popcorn and butter was actually vegan because it's that wonderful fake chemical "butter." Maybe not as healthy and good for you as I choose to believe, but vegan, nonetheless. Well, you may ask, why are you confessing to THAT?

And I answer: the popcorn was merely a gateway food.

To tears and popcorn I added bourbon (also vegan and healthy) whilst my friend and I cosied up to a bar and discussed the various merits of dog movies, and then at home, the aforementioned potato chips and dip. French onion dip! I hate onions but I sure love me some french onion dip. And it went down so well, despite the more than vague feeling of nausea from everything else churning about in my stomach. So yes, I am not only a naughty cheegan I am a big fat greedy guts cheegan, eating everything in my path.

Oh, but I paid for it when I woke up with the worst stomach ache ever at about 2:30 in the morning. I do believe God (or whatever) was punishing me. I don't even know if I need to be absolved after paying that price, but I obviously need help . . . .

The Cheegan Confessional: Broccoli Robbed

2006-07-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm mostly blaming this on the booze, but I lied to myself and those around me the other night at my once-per-month ladies' get-together night. We were all sitting around one of those big round tables at Congee, sipping wine and eating whatever type of Asian food that is there. (Yeah I'm a racist, to boot.) As promised, they did have some vegetarian options in the myriad dishes presented on the oversized Lazy Susan in the center of our table. Those consisted of bland scallion pancakes and even blander noodles. But then I spied a huge pile of steamed broccoli, and I thought, hey it's HEALTHY. Problem was it was sitting in a puddle of chicken juice. So I decided if I didn't actually spoon any on to my plate, but just sat there rudely picking it off the communal platter, it didn't count. Or taste like chicken.

Cheegan injury

2006-06-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

Ya see that? Not the amazing owl crockery scored in Portland, not the awesome lamp I got upstate at a church sale in a town known for its legendary two-headed trout, but that cut on my finger. That's from actually lying in bed being a little too enthusiastic with one of those handled cheese slicers and a wedge of some kind of romano, which along with some popcorn ended up being my dinner, watching the Simpsons, just before another downpour hit, which cemented the nap that was coming anyway, and ensured that I slept all night instead of getting up and doing something.

I'm not proud.

The Cheegan Confessional: You Can't Fight Cheese

2006-06-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

The Cheegan Confessional: Coffee - with MILK

2006-06-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Every day (well, weekdays) for the past three weeks I have been drinking coffee, light and sweet and yummy, and does it get that beautiful light creamy color from soymilk? No! Because I am a very very bad vegan. But wait: I do have an excuse (don't we all). Ok, milk is free at work and I am poor. Yes, those dollars I'm saving on soymilk do make a difference right now. Plus I'm, uh, kinda lazy and haven't felt like toting my own soymilk around. That cow milk is just sitting in the fridge here at work, begging me to use it to make iced coffee.

So ok, I confess. I'm a poor excuse for a vegan, I will never become a fifth level vegan and I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell. But man, that coffee is tasty.

Losing my religion? Nah…EVOLVING, maaaan!

2006-06-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

That’s me in the corner, delightedly and somewhat guiltily eating cheese.

I’ve run into multiple fallen vegans and vegetarians lately, and often their reason is just not giving a shit anymore, sometimes in those exact words. It’s especially interesting to me right now since the same thing is happening with myself and I, too, have been using the “not giving a shit” phrase.

But it just seems to be a natural evolution. You don’t find that many super-long-term vegans (though you do find long-term vegetarians). And it’s not a bad thing—I think once people, and women especially, quit giving a shit they become much cooler. It’s liberating. I still want to eat healthfully and naturally and not eat meat and not eat much animal products. But just like it would be crazy to eat a meat-only diet, it really does not seem natural to eat a plant-only diet. So there it is.

I recently read a great book, A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, in which the young author, disillusioned with Vietnam-era America, chronicled his walking discovery of the country and the people who make it up. At one point he is visiting Homer, an old hermit up in the mountains of West Virginia, and when dinnertime comes, our vegetarian hero quickly realizes the main course is not going to be a veggie casserole (or whatever the poor vegetarians of the early '70s had to eat in the days before Tofurkey--and from the looks of The Vegetarian Epicure, it was not very fun). Here’s an excerpt:

“Git ya one of them straightened coat hangers and cook yerself a chop o’meat. I guarantee it’ll be the best you’ve ever et.”
What Homer didn’t know was that I had been a vegetarian for the past three years. I felt it was a horror to eat meat that had been fed grain: instead of feeding grain to cows, people should eat the grain, and we could help feed the exploding world population with grain instead of meat.
But this lamb chop cut before my eyes with a swoosh of Homer’s hunting knife was different. Homer’s way of life made all my suburban blab seem dumb and meaningless.
His example made me understand where food really came from. His food wasn’t raised off somewhere a thousand miles away and wrapped and frozen in clear plastic. Homer had raised these sheep right on this unpolluted mountaintop. They ate a 100 percent natural diet from the mountain meadows and Homer needed them to survive.
[And then there’s a gross description of Peter cooking the meat.] Being in Homer’s presence made me see so many things clearly. It also made being vegetarian seem stupid and needless. He never knew, I never told him.

Ah, would that all meat were raised that way, and not on super-industrialized, hormone-pumping, worker-exploiting, resource-squandering, environment-polluting factory farms. I still wouldn’t eat it. And Peter’s reasoning worked for that case, but thereafter did not since the meat he continued to eat after that was the kind grown a thousand miles away and fed with grain, but he did have a point in a Ted Nugenty way. Yeah, it does seem more humane that the Motor City Madman is eating food shot on his property that wasn’t brought through some unnatural industrialized slaughterhouse horror, even though the Nuge is a gun-crazed fiend who delights in killing things.

I would try to end this with a relevant Nuge quote, but all I can think of is "Ze wango, ze tango, 1,2,3,4!" the intro to a horrible song of his that this WSOU DJ whose show I used to read news during used to play every single week. Wango tango, indeed.

The Cheegan Confessional: Sexico edition

2006-06-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

Chilaquiles!

When traveling, you especially shouldn’t expect to be as true to your diet as you might like, in the name of trying new things and also considering not knowing the language, food customs, etc. Even at my height of ingredients-reading veganism when in Europe, carrying Luna bars and trail mix everywhere to stave off potential starvation, I’d get a falafel that would turn out to have like, mayo or some dairy craziness on it. And even back then, as long as it wasn’t meat, who cared.

So being in my most cheegan of times on my recent trip to Cabo, Mexico, and going to a land whose cuisine is ideally experienced in its cheesy glory, I did not intend to be strict. Since it was a press trip with most food stops planned out, they’d made special vegan arrangements for me. Then I was so exhausted the first night there, and already full from our lunch several hours before and apps just before the dinner, that I had to bow out of our dinner at the Mediterranean fine-dining restaurant of the resort, where the chef had, according to the other trip-goers, prepared some of the best taste-sensations ever for me. So two days later when we met the dashing, young-Herb-Alpert-esque chef for lunch in the sushi hut, he sat across from me and asked how I had liked the vegan stuff. I had to admit that I hadn’t been able to attend dinner that night due to exhaustion. Chefs and especially head chefs, according to ads for reality shows about chefs, have quite the egos, and I am fairly certain that what emanated from his glowering dark eyes as he ignored my several questions during the rest of the lunch was pure hatred. Whatevs.

The point being: chilaquiles. It was the only actual Mexican dish I tried while there, other than the disappointingly non-limey guacamole (it was basically mashed avacados). Some women from Mexico City introduced me to this breakfast dish one morning, consisting of bits of tortillas cooked in your choice of green or red hot sauce with some kind of white zingy sauce drizzled over it and that white Mexican cheese crumbled over it, then served with refried beans. MEXCELLENT! I was blown away: You mean, you’re allowed to have this for breakfast? I love Mexico.

My palate thus expanded, I don’t think that I can now live in a world without this occasional fatty treat. I made the first attempt yesterday to recapture this delight in the USA, and as predicted, it was far inferior; it was sailing the seas of cheese (and like, Monterey jack or something, not the crumbly stuff) and I had to banish the cheese mass and blobs of sour cream to another plate. But now I have a mission: find authentic local chilaquiles.

The Cheegan Confessional: PDX edition

2006-05-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

I had a quesadilla in Portland, hold the sour cream, "because I don't eat dairy."
I've decided that cheese is no longer dairy.
That's not true, I just don't give a crap.

The Cheegan Confessional: Egg regs. up your ass!

2006-04-15T12:16:00.000-07:00

Who I got to fear? Alec Baldwin? Canteen Boy has that shit covered, so the eldest (and most Care Bear-y Baldwin... or should I say Hair Bear-y) and his "Chickens are the most abused animals on the planet..." intro to that PETA video (ruff tuff stuff beak-choppin- way sadder than even Dinosaur Jr.'s Start Choppin- & brutal cage crammery being a given) don't cover that eccentric lady who has 4 chickens in some 'tuckey town near Princeton. She barters her chickens' eggs- dropped all about the property- with the local health food store for fuckin flax seeds or something. Those birds get treated better than my old blind cat- and she gets mad treats. Soon, I'll be fanning her with a feather and dropping them in her mouth like old school Greek whores droppin grapes into the gullets of fat, mediocre philosophers until vomitorium time.

So, after just over a decade of vegan power (because I hate moist and fluffy cake and not having any gas) I scrambled up some of Eccentric Elaine's Ethical-Ass Eggs. It was an inner conflict debacle (or in Carmine Jr.-speak, a "deb-uh-cul") for a while, cuz I felt like a sell-out for getting my B Complex and protein from an actual absorbable source, but, really, when I broke it down, aaabsolutely no one was being harmed in my egg swallowing activities. Hooooowever, this source wasn't consistant and I started looking into other egg farms who I could consider "totally cool to them and all that." I have worked in the "natural industry" for a handful of years, managing a HF store for a few, etc...) so at a couple trade shows, I asked the guys from Pete and Gerry's, and a few others what the story was w/regulations and conditions. They gave me the gist of what can be found here and told me that, indeed, the chickens that were too old to lay were sold to... um, not a bigger farm for elderly, limping & waddling hens who couldn't outrun a worm, to spend the rest of their days watching their stories and wearing little chicken mompants. Therein lies my goddamn quandry and the real cheegan action- A.K.A. "Whadda ya mean 'I don't support your system?!' I buy Organic when I have to!"

I'm goin' back to Jersey...

2006-04-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

...for Easter, so I thought I'd share this tantalizing item:

COOOKIE!!!

2006-04-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when things get really grown-up and not in any good kind of adult way but in a way where you start thinking nostalgially about any past younger time in your life, it's time to cram some f-in' cookies in your cry-hole.

Some vegan cookies that rule:

The wizards responsible: Back to Nature (Incidentally, this brand name is also useful to shout whenever you need to dispose of something when camping. Just throw the item into the fire and say "back to nature!")
The magic they make: Chocolate & Mint creme sandwich cookies
The spell it casts: Oreos plus Thin Mints= love

The wizards responsible: Alternative Baking Company
The magic they make: Cookie of the Season: Coconut Macaroon
The spell it casts: You will never again let this season PASS OVER without these!

The wizards responsible: Smart Treat
The magic they make: Chips of Everything
Whuuuuut: Within an innocuous cookie exterior awaits a treasure trove of half-baked delights--choco chips, peanut-butter chips, nuts, raisins, and I don't know what-all else is in there. It doesn't matter. If you've ever been prone to inventing dream snacks whilst under the influence of any illicit substances, consider at least one of your stoner dreams answered. I emailed this company and told them I wanted to marry whomever invented Chips of Everything, and I got a very appreciative, non-alarmed email back, saying that might have been the best fan mail ever, but I still didn't get to marry the lady responsible for these delights. That's OK anyway because she's a lady.

The Cheegan Confessional: Poppers Among the Blueshirts

2006-04-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had two of what might very well have been my first jalapeno poppers during the after-work Midtown blueshirt rush at a fireman bar near work. These poppers don't just have cheese in them, they have what tastes like melted cheese spread. I had one just to see what they were like. I had the other to confirm they really were that delicious.
Then I got taken out on a "date" by a great longtime friend. The orig plan was to go super cheapola at Dumpling Man or this Thai hole-in-the-east-village-wall, but since she was feeling flush she treated me to an a m a z i n g meal at Counter. (Sometimes, I'm easily bought!) It is all super fresh gourmet-style vegetarian shit there. We had phyllo pockets with mushroom stuff inside, stuffed artichokes, mushroom ravioli...After awhile it was all so amazing that I didn't even know what I was eating. (The confessional part about this is that I had spinoptika or whatever it's called--phyllo cigars with spinach and feta inside. In this case the cheese they use is super animal-friendly, according to their menu, so it's cool. Plus I already had cheese that day.)

Is it just me?

2006-03-30T14:44:00.000-08:00

How to put this delicately...has anyone else ever...experienced any unpleasant effects after eating this otherwise-decent chili? I wouldn't buy it anymore, but sometimes my parents give it to me (although I've advised Mom of this phenomenon), and I don't like to waste food.

I kind of want to call the company and ask them if this has been a regular complaint, but I'm too embarrassed. Not too embarrassed not to blog about it, though! Perhaps my Fantastic-chili-eating ways are the real reason why I'm still single.

Cheese, Glorious Cheese

2006-03-21T14:12:00.000-08:00

It was Henry of Punky Brewster fame, I believe, who first sang the song "Cheese, Glorious Cheese." But I have echoed this sentiment many a time myself.

I think God gave a special nudge to the wandering traveler who first used a cow stomach as a canteen for milk, the enzymes in which combined with the aging milk through the magic of science to cause cheese.

I think God probably meant this gift to humanity as a treat to have with baguettes and wine on a picnic. Not as a flavoring for Crazybread or something to be squeezed out of an aerosol can with a Nascar guy on it.

I know this, because when I first taste a delightfully sharp cheddar cheese, little pinpricks of sweat bead on my nose. Those are sweat-beads that say, "There is no better flavor in the world."

Please do not call Velveeta cheese--for not only is it an aberration; did you know its molecular structure is very similar to that of plastic? It's true; I heard it somewhere.

Do not bastardize cheese.
For it is glorious.

How It All Cheegan

2006-03-16T20:46:00.000-08:00

My diet growing up was suburban meat & potatoes with a twist of healthy (i.e., we weren't allowed sugar cereals or junk food, and were made to eat whole-wheat bread and wheat germ, therefore I considered myself practically an abused child compared to the kids who got to eat Twinkies and crap like that). I was also exactly like that kid Randy in A Christmas Story who wouldn't eat his dinner, so every night at the dinner table was a major struggle as I was coaxed and urged to swallow whatever it was that I didn't like this time that I was pack-ratting in my cheeks.

I became vegetarian in college once I started meeting other vegetarians and had access to the veggie line at the dining hall. The change was pretty intuitive and didn't require much deliberation. I'd always been pretty grossed out by a lot of meats anyway and had had a bunch of proto-vegetarian moments during a childhood trip to Ireland. I still wasn't too hep on veggies, though, and was basically a cheeseatarian who lived on quesadillas, mac & cheese, pizza, and omelettes.

Later, during the dot-com boom, my dot-com job afforded me lots of Internet time, so I poked around the vegetarian websites. After reading/seeing the pamphlet Why Vegan? I didn't want be a party to the atrocities I'd just learned about. It was time to say goodbye to my old friend cheese.

Going vegan was much more of a lifestyle change than going vegetarian and was akin to a religious conversion--I bought a bunch of books to learn all about it, I gave away lot of my old wool clothes and leather shoes. I was really into it; it was my hobby. I cooked something new every night. (There were fewer soy cheeses on the market back then, but I had The Uncheese Cookbook to ease my transition, which yielded results of varying degrees of success.) My pantry was full of exotic new ingredients. I dragged friends to health food stores to help me find mystery ingredients like agar and nutritional yeast. I felt like I was doing something good. And it did good by me, too; the occasional interloping zit went away for good, I lost some weight, my cholesterol level disappeared, I just felt better overall.

For three years, I didn't look back. I was a model vegan. I was informed, I read every ingredient, didn't consider cheating, cooked often. Well, OK, once in awhile I thought about my old pal cheese and wondered what it would be like if we got together. I encountered a lot of people who used to be vegan. At first I'd felt a bit disappointed when they told me that. Like, why give up on it?

So then I went to Scotland, in the springtime, and all the cute baby lambs and calves and goats and creatures I saw there were living better lives than I led back in Brooklyn. On the idyllic isle of Mull, we stopped in a wee shop, and they were selling cheese made from those happy animals on that very island.

That cheese was a glorious, unparalleled flavor explosion in my delighted mouth. Soon after returning from that trip, I was quite unexpectedly dumped, and decided that I was therefore allowed to have cheese. I went on a bit of a cheese bender with help from a fellow wayward vegan, shoving cube after cube of cheddar in our mouths at a party and talking about what jerks stupid jerk guys were.

But the thing was...never mind that my stomach was none too happy about this dietary invader. It just wasn't the same. Gooey, heavy cheese no longer felt as much like essential food as it used to, in my mouth and throat it felt (to quote another veegs-ish friend of mine) mucousy. Now that I'm not used to it anymore, I've never wanted real cheese as a large part of a meal since--mac cheese and quesadillas would be way too much. Cubes of sharp cheddar at a party, though? All bets are off. Down the hatch!!!

So now that the seal has been broken, I've never gone back to hardline veganism. There are probably a number of reasons, one being that my beliefs about food have just relaxed over time. I still think it's healthy and good for the planet and all that...ah, we can get into this angle later. But I eat loads more real veggies than when I was cheeseatarian--in fact, if you showed young me (even teenage me) what my diet would eventually become, I would've been horrified--and now I even really like kale.

So I'm mostly vegan. Except for occasional cheese. Or other little cheats here and there (often in the name of trying something new). That's why I'm a cheegan.

By the way, I invented this word.
P.S. After Googling it: no I didn't. But I shall popularize it!

If I'm such a hippie...

2006-03-16T20:38:00.000-08:00

Then why do I want to murder everyone who makes the "tofu has no taste" claim/"joke"?
I've been thinking of creating this cheegan blog for a bit now, but this blog finally got me to do it. It's all, Ha ha! Tofu is terrible! What a funny joke!
To me, saying tofu has no flavor is equivalent to saying water has no flavor. You put the flavor in it, geniuses. Or don't you have any flavor?