Vida Vegan Con: The Joy Begins

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Hannah

When this post goes live, I’ll be on my way to Portland for Vida Vegan Con. My heart is so full of whirling excitement right now that I almost can’t breathe.

As I wrote on Twitter the other day:

I keep forgetting that VVC is about presentations/learning. My mind is all: ZOMG EXTENDED SLEEPOVER PARTY WITH SUMMA MAH BEST FRIENDS!!

I can’t wait to hug my Lisa, Gena, Amber, Hannah, Nicole and Ricki again. I’m thrilling for already-booked-fancy-dinners and spontaneous-dessert-expeditions and epic-vegan-conference-breakfasts. I’ve cautioned my roomie Angela to be prepared for (and thereby not scared by) my Medusa-hair in the mornings, and though Lisa has warned me to come up with an escape plan or else she’s taking me back to Toronto next week, she doesn’t know that I equally plan to kidnap her for my June U.S. travels.

Oh yes, my June travels! People, I’m pretty much having an extended slumber party with different friends across the U.S. all throughout June, and… pinch me. Just pinch me. What is this life? How did I get to be so lucky?

I’m so scared of using up my happiness quota. (I’m also nervous that the curse of my birthday will strike on Sunday.)

But I’m not going to let defensive fear prevent me from running towards these upcoming and unknown adventures with giddiness in my heart and dancing in my toes. After all, I’ve been knocked down before. If the universe sends me spiraling I shall simply, in the Shakespearean (ahem) words of Chumbawumba, get up again.

That’s enough thought-meandering from me. My excitement and nervousness and giddiness are rendering me incapable of staying on track, and if I keep typing much longer we’ll end up talking compass donkey backwards shimmer Lindy Hop eyebrow possum.

Plus, I’ve got some serious work to do before I leave tomorrow. All the So Delicious Mint Chip Coconut Milk Ice Cream, dark chocolate my brother sent me for my birthday, blueberry muffins, red velvet apricots, roasted seaweed snacks, Trader Joe’s sausageless sausage, and two different types of pie that won’t fit in my suitcase aren’t going to eat themselves.

Hannah out.

Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-free

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Hannah

At first glance, you may think that the above Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding is nothing more than an innocent sweet breakfast (or quick dessert) that ticks all the vegan, gluten-free, non-threatening, sweet yet healthful, delicious, moreish, and irresistible (particularly when topped with mini chocolate chips) boxes.

However, this breakfast/dessert is more than that. My peanut butter pumpkin pudding is a refutation, or perhaps proof positive (I haven’t quite decided yet), of Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and cultural hegemony, as defined and discussed in his seminal work La Distinction.

On the one hand, we have ingredients liked organic canned pumpkin, unsweetened vanilla almond milk, coconut flour, and mesquite powder, all of which can be classified as luxury goods available predominately to the cultural elite: those with the money, knowledge, and leisure time to be aware of, value, and have access to products (and “tastes”) classified by society as Healthful, Prestigious and [often thereby] Tied To Moral Virtue (“you are what you eat… and what you eat should by organic/local/ethical/healthy/virtuous”).

On the other hand, I threw in peanut butter-flavoured sugary kids’ cereal, blended it all up, and topped the resulting thick and creamy pudding with chocolate chips. Which is less in line with the Eat Only Homegrown Sprouted Polka-Dot Chickpeas And Foraged-By-The-Light-Of-A-Crescent-Moon Maqui Berries strain of cultural capital, and more, well, trashy, perhaps?

Of course, you’re more than welcome to simply call this recipe “delicious” and have that be that. It is, after all, a tasty and nourishing creation, with the nutty maltiness of the cereal, mesquite, and coconut flour combining well with the roundness of pumpkin and your chosen extract and sweetener.

But, see, sometimes I miss academic life and how it felt to thread together the theories of Bourdieu, Veblen, Baudrillard, and Foucault in such a way as to cast light on the way our world shudders and moves around us.

So I’m calling this my Capital Pudding. Because it is both capital (ol’ chum!) and potentially reflective of class capital.

Though I still haven’t decided whether it’s more high or low culture.

Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-free

Original recipe
Serves 1

1/3 cup (heaping; 100g) pumpkin puree, canned or pureed
1/2 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk, or any non-dairy milk
1/2 cup (heaping; 25g) Peanut Butter Panda Puffs, or similar peanut butter cereal (*cough Reese’s Puffs cough*)
1 tb coconut flour
1/4 tsp almond extract (or vanilla extract)
1/4 tsp mesquite powder (or cinnamon)
pinch salt
sweetener, to taste (coconut sugar, maple or agave syrup, or stevia)
chocolate chips, to garnish

1. Are you ready for this? PUREE EVERYTHING (except the chocolate chips) in a blender until gloriously smooth and thick. You can now enjoy this straightaway, or put in the fridge for an hour or so, at which point the pudding will thicken up gorgeously and you will be very happy. Garnish with chocolate chips before serving.

2. “Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.” - Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, Volume One.

Submitted to Ricki’s Wellness Weekend, Healthy Vegan Friday, Allergy-Friendly Lunchbox Love, and 5 Ingredient Monday.

How To Keep Falling In Love With Toronto, Part Four

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Hannah

Plans and dreams and endings and beginnings and disappointments and exhilarations and sleeplessness and giddy-bursts-of-joy-beneath-my-breath and possibilities and challenges and happiness and denial and hopes have been skittering within me for a good six weeks now, and somewhere along the way I forgot to tell you why.

Oops.

So here is the result, in a nutshell, of my recent bout of debating/positing/accepting/tinkering/hoping:

On Friday, I’ll be flying into California for another few months of travelling around the U.S., later returning to Toronto to continue building a soul-soaring life in Canada.

It feels fitting, before I bid the city a temporary adieu, to write one last installment of how to fall in love with Toronto. Shall we?

29. Continue exploring Kensington Market throughout winter, delighting in its ability to constantly surprise you. A sidewalk table laden with treats offering samples galore? Why not?

30. Step into Patty King, Kensington Market’s Jamaican bakery, and gaze excitedly at such unusual (to you) sweets as Tamarind Balls and Grater Cake.

31. Buy a snack called Doubles from said Patty King (thank your friend for being the hand model), and decide after a single bite that the turmeric-spiced fried-yet-soft bread filled with channa (chickpea curry) is quite delicious.

32. Laugh delightedly upon finding a reference to your home country in a Sunday morning crossword filled out with Lisa.

33. Laugh again (though on a different day) at how ornate and complicated sushi in North America always seems to be. Remember how simple (and wonderful) sushi was when you travelled around Japan a few years ago.

33. Attend a three hour hands-on chocolate class at ChocoSol, and be so impressed with the Toronto-based company’s ethics and chocolate creations that you buy several different flavours to review (eventually).

34. Giddily order vegan and gluten-free desserts to-go from Fresh after brunch with Sarah, your favourite housemate of all time.

35. Experience a very good day at your internship.

36. Experience a very, very good day at your internship.

37. Experience one of the best days of all time at your internship.

38. Be grateful that taking these steps towards falling in love with Toronto means you’ll truly look forward to returning in the fall.

39. Start packing. No really, Hannah. Start packing. START PACKING.

Homesickness

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Hannah

It’s not like I haven’t cried at all since leaving Australia. I teared up on the phone to my parents on December 23rd because it was a sunny family-filled Christmas Eve in Canberra for them while, for me, it was a grey winter’s day on my own in a place where the taste of cigarette smoke tendrilled through me almost as soon as I stepped onto the balcony.

There was another night, months and months ago now, where I shook silently in bed and awoke to find smudges of mascara on my pillow. And, once, I started crying in the middle of an Anthropologie store, but luckily the place was so packed with praying mantis-painted plates and lace-strewn teatowels that no one saw me falter.

For all that, today marked the first time I found myself curled up powerlessly, tremblingly, in as tiny a ball as my body could make, sobbing with homesickness, helpless.

I miss my friends back home. I miss the people who have known me all my life (or at least for many years), and I miss being able to call someone and arrange a coffee or dinner catch-up within the hour. I miss the softness of my grandma’s clothes and the perfume of my grandpa’s homegrown roses, and I miss the perfect contentedness of making coffee on the weekend to sip with my parents while we talk and laugh and talk.

I miss hugs. I really yearningly miss having people to hug every day. I miss the cocoon of arms and I miss familiar animated faces. Familiar names on an animated screen, while wonderful, are not quite the same.

I know this will pass. Or, at least, the intensity will pass. I am happy in my current life, my current world, my current challenges, successes, and adventures. I am chuffed that it’s taken eight months for homesickness to knock me down this completely.

I’m still happy, still excited, still thrilling to the touch of a new morning.

But I do miss having people to hug every day.

My First Canadian Easter, and Brigadeiros

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Hannah

This Easter long weekend could easily have trickled past in a mopeyhearted way for me, as Easter has always been a family-centric holiday in my world. More often than not, Easter has meant a long lunch out in the countryside with my parents, brother, grandparents, assorted other (beloved) relatives, and a table laden with much deliciousness.

In other words, I could have been very homesick this weekend. Instead, I was only a little bit homesick, because I found myself with more invitations to Easter events than I could accept. To everyone who extended hands and homes to me – thank you. So much.

I spent Saturday, the first beautifully-truly spring-like Saturday of the year, in the gloriously stunning new home of one of my favourite Canadians (and work colleagues), Kristy. She and her husband have an eye for art, design, and interior decorating that takes my breath away, and yes. Before you ask, yes, I did ponder whether the poofy skirt of my dress could adequately hide beneath it the vintage pink typewriter you see above.

But then I realised that I’d rather keep Kristy’s friendship than a stolen typewriter, so I stopped my plotting. (Convict roots.)

Kristy put together a wondrous spread of fresh fruit, fluffy scrambled eggs that I think she magicked into existence, and two epic breakfast casseroles unlike any I’d seen before.

In the foreground, we have a Canadian bacon casserole made with English muffins, and in the background a French toast casserole with a cinnamon sugar topping.

Warning: the below photo may surprise some of you.

People, I have found a way to consume the devilfruit.

It is called a mimosa, and it is delicious.

Considering that our brunch spread involved representation from Canada, England, and France (at least in terms of the dishes’ names), it makes sense that my contribution to the day was a batch of Brazilian brigadeiros, right?

Right.

Chewy, sweet, chocolate-y, eminently moreish, and rolled in coconut (rather than the traditional sprinkles), I can only hope that these simple treats in some small way conveyed how happy I was to be a part of Kristy’s Easter celebration. Dear Kristy: you are gorgeous and generous and amazing.

My heart soared.

(P.S. Get the recipe for the brigadeiros here.)

Wayfaring Chocolate

adventures in chocolate, travel, cooking, and living

Category Archives: Musings

Vida Vegan Con: The Joy Begins

How To Keep Falling In Love With Toronto, Part Four

Homesickness

My First Canadian Easter, and Brigadeiros