Compounding Medicine

Corn, the insidious beast it is, not only invades our food supply but also our medicine supply. I recently got a script for Amoxicillin(the common penicillin antibiotic) from the University doctors and went over to the CVS to get it filled only to have my suspicions fulfilled: they have corn in both the tablets and liquid solution; this was on top of the fact that purely corn-free antihistamine does not exist for some reason, so you'll actually need to get that compounded as well. However, since people working at CVS only have Bachelor's degrees and are what Nurses are to Doctors in a hospital, competent but not the one you want committing surgery upon you, you can't get your medicine there because they have no idea how. You have to go to a compounding pharmacist(which apparently used to be called a formulary, according to my parents), where the head Pharmacist has a doctorate degree. Not only that, you have to get your doctor to write the script specifically for it being compounded and being corn-free(do call the pharmacist to find out exactly what they want though, I'm sure it varies). The little tidbit of advice I have is to sort this all out as soon you can, preferably before you're coughing up half a lung like I was during this process because it's quite likely that your doctor has never written a script for a compounding pharmacist and that unless you happen to be lucky, the pharmacy is probably somewhat far from you. A nice introduction to this issue can be found at: Corn-Free Compounding
So by all means, good luck and take care of this early. Also, curse the corn-production industry on your way to the pharmacy.

College & Falafel

Jesus, College is slowly killing me with corn. Until I have this constant paranoia about contamination worked out this isn't going to be the best situation. However, I want to get the recipe I've always used for falafel out there because it's just too damn good not to share:

Falafel

1 (19 ounce) can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1 small onion, finely chopped/minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon dried parsley
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/8 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup fine dry bread crumbs (check for being corn-free, of course)
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cracked black peppercorns

1 quart vegetable oil for frying

1. Mash the garbanzo beans in a large bowl. Stir in the onion, garlic, cilantro, parsley cumin, turmeric, baking powder, bread crumbs, salt and pepper. Do not be afraid to use your hands. Shape the mixture into 1 1/2 inch balls; you should get 18 to 24*. If the mixture does not hold together, add a little water.
2. *If no deep fryer, skip to step 3* Heat the oil in a deep fryer to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Carefully drop the balls into the hot oil, and fry until brown. If you do not have a deep fryer, heat the oil in a heavy deep skillet over medium-high heat. You may need to adjust the heat slightly after the first couple of falafels, and be sure to turn frequently so they brown evenly
3. If you don't have a deep fryer, it will be a bit tricker but shouldn't be terrible assuming your careful. Take a pot and fill it with 1-2 inches of oil and heat this up very hot and drop the falafel in this, probably need to spin it around to ensure uniform coverage. You know it will be of the proper heat when the falafel bubbles like french fries do in oil just with less intensity. Use tongs for this or you will no longer have fingers. A very, very, important note of this is that if your oil starts smoking at any point in this situation, stop using it immediately, turn off the heat, and dispose of later. If an oil goes over its smoke point it becomes carcinogenic amongst other bad things.
   

*Note: I only got around 16 of these, maybe I made them a bit larger than it called for or had a smaller amount of garbanzo beans than I had thought. Also, I substituted ginger for turmeric, as they are the same family and similar in some respects. Tumeric would probably have been better, but it turned out to be excellent nonetheless. It will also be much easier if you just mash the beans by hand rather than by any machine, they lack enough moisture to be pureed nicely(I always use a plastic ice cream scoop because it works in a bowl well).

A delightful picture of my falafel frying in a pan, step three style. I fry them in sunflower oil because it's not only very healthy for an oil but it has a smoke point of around 450˚, so I'm very unlikely go over it's smokepoint on my stovetop.

Oat Milk!

After finding almond milk to be a bit of a pain to make due to the whole having to finely grind the nuts to a powder in my coffee-grinder(which my mother did not appreciate due to her having almonds in her coffee for the next few days), I decided to attempt to make Oat Milk. I probably shouldn't say "attempt" as it was a success, just a royal pain the ass. However, it is deceivingly simple, as the recipe shows:

Oat Milk
4 cups cooked oats (not quick oats)
4 cups warm water
Sweetener and flavoring as desired

Basically, cook the oats, put them in a blender with half the water and whip the hell out of it. Then after five minutes or so add the other half of the water and blend for another five minutes. When this is all done, attempt to run it through a cheesecloth.
That last step is where the issue arose. Notice the word "attempt". The stuff has so much sediment that it just outright stops going through the cheesecloth fairly quickly and requires a multi-tier cheesecloth system and is really much more work then it's worth. The nut milk was much easier and is more nutritious(Oats are pretty much lacking in nutrition, they have a bit of iron though), so I'm sticking to that in the future. As the last note about this, I did something that proved I am an idiot: I cooked four cups of oats, which is very, very different than four cups of cooked oats when it comes to steel cut oats. Around ten bloody cups of oat difference. I now have four quarts of oat milk and 9 days to use them. We'll see how this works out.

Vegan Sloppy Joes

I've had a package of Textured Vegetable Protein(TVP), a soy flour product, since pretty much the beginning of summer but hadn't made a single thing with it. The only recipe I had really found was a Shepard's Pie adaptation and I was honestly just too lazy to make it. Then I found a recipe for a vegan sloppy joe a few weeks back and since my parents ate meat-people sloppy joes, I was feeling left out and wanted something akin to it. Hence, this fairly easy recipe and delicious adaptation:

Vegan Sloppy Joes

1 small onion, diced
3/4 cup boiling water
3/4 cup TVP
1 1/4 cups tomato sauce
1 Tbsp. mustard (I made an adaption to this by mixing ground mustard and rice vinegar to around 1/2-3/4 tbsp, as it will be much stronger)
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tbsp celery seed
1 tbsp paprika
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp sea salt

Saute the diced onion in a pot with a bit of oil. Once it is soft and becoming translucent, add in all other ingredients, mix well, and cook for around twenty minutes on medium-low heat. Stir occasionally. Serve on either toast or old dry bread, softer bread won't hold up to this at all.

Almond Milk & Extracts

First off: Fuck you, Silk soymilk. I naively drank this in quite significant quantities(not necessarily drank, but used it in all kinds of cooking as well) and was therefore messed up for the rest of this week due to the corn in it. However, I have now recovered and have time/energy to tell of the many things I created this week.

The first thing I made this week were extracts. I made spicy pepper oil and peppermint extract(both still brewing actually). The oil is absurdly easy to make, just take two hot peppers per quart of olive(or your preferred) oil, chop them up, put them in a mason jar and let them sit for a few weeks, shaking every few days. I would recommend using Serrano peppers in the mixture, but you can use whatever kind that you prefer depending upon how hot you want it; either way, make sure no seeds are wasted. After the few weeks run through a fine colander or cheesecloth and store it like a normal oil.

After my realization that pretty much all toothpaste in existence has corn in it(I've heard Tom's Of Maine "Silly Strawberry" does not but I cannot verify this), I started using a 4:1 mixture of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide as my toothpaste. Cheap? Yes. Terrible Tasting? Yes. Hence, the want of peppermint extract to mix into the paste to make it slightly less horrendous tasting. To make it, buy a fresh bunch of mint, pull it all apart, bruise the mint with a mortar and pestle(or with whatever you have handy, they're friggin' leaves), put it all in a mason jar. Fill the jar until the mint leaves are just covered with potato vodka. Potato vodka is superior due to a complete lack of corn, fairly neutral flavor, and not being overly expensive for a quality product. I used Luksusova and it cost $13 for a fifth of it, so it wasn't that pricey(or that bad tasting). Let this sit for 2-3 weeks depending upon how strong you want it; Strain it through a cheesecloth when finished.

Since I can't have any soymilk around here and I'm now weary of even the unflavored rice milk, I decided to make my own nut milk. Since the nut I have the most of is almonds, almond milk was the one I chose to make(that and almond milk is the most commonly made one and I'm new at this). The recipe for making the milk is as follows, read the comments after it before you start making it though:

1/2 cup raw almonds(or other nut/seed)
2 cups cold water
1 tbsp natural sweetner(I prefer agave nectar)
1/4-1/2 tsp vanilla(make sure it's corn-free! Mine is from Mexico)

Crush the nuts into fairly small chunks and then grind them finely inside of a coffee-grinder. If you don't crush them first the size of the almonds will impede the grinding process. Pour the nut powder into the blender with one cup of cold water, the sweetener, and the vanilla. Have this whip for at least five minutes. Add the other cup of water slowly to the mixture will it is still mixing and let mix for another five minutes(*If you want more cream for milk or the like then stop before you add this water and just mix longer). Mix for another five minutes. Double layer cheese cloth within a colander and pour in the mixture and allow it to pour through without tampering. You'll probably want to do this yet again to ensure that there are no particulates in your milk, unless you fail to care that much.

A few very important notes about making the milk:
1. I highly recommend getting a separate grinder for nuts if you're going to do this consistently. If not, you will end up with coffee in your nut milk and nut residue in your coffee. Not as nice as one would hope.
2. The nuts powder may very well clump up as its being ground, so make sure it's all going through the machine fine so you don't break it.
3. The second straining is very important if you're using the same grinder as your coffee. Otherwise the bottom of the glass is like gritty coffee.

In the next week I plan to set up vanilla extract seeping, make pickles(I have a large amount of pickling cucumbers from the garden), and I'm heading to Toronto for some shenanigans. Good stuff. Oh, and pictures will return as soon as I get a non piece-of-shit camera. Working on that.

Teff Pancakes

The Post-Punk Kitchen gives an excellent recipe for vegan pancakes but the issue is the primary flavoring for pancakes is from the eggs and milk. Therefore, the veganized adaptation is going to need some compensation for the lack of flavoring and that's why I came up with this recipe. I had some teff flour lying around that I still had not used for a lack of reason; the flour is supposed to be quite flavorful(which it is) so I decided that it would be an excellent addition. The mixture of the teff and cloves make a warm, almost malty flavor. The recipe I created is as follows:

1 cup White Flour
1/3 cup Teff Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Sea Salt (Normal iodized salt contains dextrose as a stabilizer to help prevent the iodine from evaporating from the salt)
2 tbsp Sugar
1 tbsp Oil
1/4 tsp Cinnamon
1/8 tsp Nutmeg
1/8 tsp Cloves
1 cup Soy Milk (Trader Joe's makes safe soymilk that contains just soybeans and water)
1/3 cup Carbonated Water

Mix all the dry ingredients then stir them well. Add the wet ingredients on top except the carbonated water and whisk until the batter is smooth. Add the carbonated water and slowly fold into the batter to ensure the carbonation stays, otherwise the pancakes will not be as fluffy. Cook in a pan on the stove that has spray oil as a lubricant and flip when the top of the pancake starts to look dry. Serve with apple butter or a plum jam. Hooray for Breakfast!

Tempeh Sandwiches & Cincinnati

I went to Cincinnati this last weekend to visit my sister and, needless to say, was worried about the prospect of actually finding places to go out to eat. It turned out I got lucky and unlucky; I had an allergic reaction to corn after not thinking about cornstarch being in the sauce(my reactions aren't terrible but they do take me out for a while), and lucky as I also found an excellent deli. Mentioned in the New York Times article on Cincinnati for their 36 Hours not too long ago, Melt Eclectic Deli is an excellent place to go for vegans who have non-vegan compatriots who complain about having to eat vegan food. I had the veggie seitan cheezesteak and it was awesome. If you're ever in Cincinnati for a meal I highly recommend stopping by. The neighborhood it was in seemed pretty interesting as well but I arrived too late in the evening to be able to peruse much.

Anyway, going to the Melt made me want to have a sandwich again to remember its greatness. I was also getting quite hungry due to my hypoglycemia and did not want to spend a huge amount of time in prep work. Therefore, a sandwich seemed grand to me. I had some tempeh bacon and fake white cheese in my refrigerator from my voyage to Whole Foods(I say voyage because it was an hour and a half away and I don't believe this items are available in my county). So I whipped up a fairly quick sandwich, with the ingredients as follows:

1 Package "Fakin' Bacon" Tempeh
1 Small Onion
4-5 Baby Bella Mushrooms(I really like the flavor of these mushrooms but you can use whatever kind you like and it'll work out fine)
3 Tbsp Balsamic Vinegar
~3 Tbsp oil for frying
2-3 Leafs lettuce(I like Romaine or Boston Bib)
1-2 Tomatoes
Vegan Cheese
Wheat Bread

Fry the tempeh up in medium to high heat in the oil until its browned on both sides. Remove and set to the side. In the same pan, throw in the sliced mushrooms and onions cut into rings; fry them until the onions are starting to become translucent. When that happens, scrape them all together into one bunch in the pan and pour the vinegar over them, stirring afterward. When the fluid as boiled off, turn off the heat and assemble the sandwiches over some wheat or rye bread.

On a totally separate note, while down in Cincinnati I obtained some Kaffir Lime Leaves. They are a common ingredient in many Thai or Indonesian curries and dishes. So a recipe of such should be up soon; I'm fairly excited actually.