In which I venture to the Japanese supermarket and experience Great Sadness, then discover a wealth of vegan items closer to home + try the Beyond Burger. Also, miso ramen and vegan tonkatsu! Kind of.
Category: Vegan and Vegetarian
VEGAN VLOG 17: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Vegan Thanksgiving, and Vaccuum-Related Shyness
It’s a freezing cold day in Chicago, and I’m heading out in search of groceries and T-shirts. Also, let’s talk some more about religion, because I see fire and immediately put my hand into it, apparently.
Vegan Vlog 16: How to make blurry vegan popcorn (one-handed!)
Testing out my Japanese camera again, I show you the ins and outs of making blurry, under-popped popcorn with a liberal application of vegan seasonings, none of which are expired. Hooray!
On Chosen, Writing, and Doing What I Please
Kaine’s kickass mother Hema, pictured here instead of Kaine because she’s far easier to draw in doodle form. :P
Long-time visitors will recall that I’ve been working on an LGBTQ+ fantasy novel called Chosen for approximately the last 17,000 years. Its main character, Kaine Ikarra, is a fifteen-year-old transgender boy who is struggling with magic, identity, and the fact that most of the people around town want very much to kill him. It’s tough being fifteen, man.
As I’ve mentioned before, this story started out during my teen years as a cookie-cutter White Dudes Doing Cool Stuff In A Fantasy Setting book, but it’s since evolved into a series that features mostly LGBT people of color doing even cooler stuff in a fantasy setting. Since this is a fantasy world entirely of my imagining, I can do what I want with it, such as making the dominant religion a pantheon of gods and goddesses, many of whom are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc., and this thus makes LGBT folks entirely normal and unstigmatized in this world. Likewise, the inclusion of a female chief goddess (and various other awesome females in the pantheon) encourages more gender equality, which means that gender roles in this society are far more equal, and that gives me the opportunity to have kickass ladies all over the place and not have that be at all weird.
The latest I Can Do What I Want aspect of the story has involved my going through the book and subtly altering what everyone is eating so they subscribe to a more plant-based diet. It’s not something you see often in fantasy books, I’m willing to bet, but given my own commitment to avoiding meat and animal products, I figured…why not? WHY NOT HAVE THEM ALL BE VEGAN. MUWAHAHAHAHA I’m drunk with godly writing power.
So. Chosen now features a transgender, pansexual, vegan person-of-color as its main character, and I am quite pleased about that. :D
Vegan Vlog 15: Tofu paneer, more mug cakes, and ACTUAL SUNSHINE in Chicago
Instead of sitting around growing cobwebs while waiting for UPS, I thought I’d make another vlog. This one concerns a strange brightness in the sky over Chicago and my recent vegan cooking experiments.
Religion and veganism and evangelizing, oh my!
Hey, let’s talk about religion, being vegan, and evangelizing, because what else can you do at five AM on a Monday morning? Also, I shall clear my throat approximately 7,000 times because **morning phlegm**.
Conferences, food, and drowsy catnaps
I thought I was done waking up at 3:45 AM due to the time change, but alas, this morning marked another early wakeup and general refusal from my body and brain to return to sleep. As today was Parent/Teacher Conferences and my last day at work, I took advantage of the extra time to (a) write thank-you cards to parents, (b) cook up some goodies to keep me alive and semi-coherent during conferences, and (c) stare into space for long periods of time while wondering what it must be like to sleep past 4 AM.
Donuts and coffee are always provided for conferences, so I brought along a chocolate mug cake so I could join in on the sugar intake and general glorious unhealthiness. I also brought a non-dairy grilled “cheese” sandwich, which involved spreading my version of Cheap Lazy Vegan’s tofu cheese recipe over toast and pan-frying it, and that made for an excellent hobbity Second Breakfast.
Conferences went very well, incidentally – it seemed like a fitting way to end my tenure at this school, getting to meet one-on-one with parents and rave about their kids (plus gently offering a few “things we’re working on” :P). Many of them took time out to say kind things about my contributions to their kids’ development, and overall, it was just a pleasant, positive, hopeful sort of day. (And let’s face it, chocolate cake tends to improve just about any experience.)
Upon returning home, burdened by a full-sized keyboard, giant backpack of stuff, and a gift bag packed with homemade cards and lovely little presents, I had some lunch and flopped onto the couch to drowse and watch HGTV. I spent much of the afternoon dozing with cats on either side of me, and I really can’t recommend that manner of spending an afternoon highly enough.
For dinner tonight, I tried my hand at a vegan mac and cheese, which I ate far too much of and which has led to a somewhat unhappy stomach and entirely unrepentant tastebuds. (And it must’ve been good, because Darla is currently up on the stove licking up a little spill of “cheese” sauce from the countertop. Weird, weird cat.)
Anyway. It’s now nearly eight PM, and despite my drowsy afternoon, I’m more than ready for bed. With that in mind, I shall bid you adieu for now, and hopefully have more to report on – possibly in wacky video form – at a later time. :P
