Morally superior granola

These are difficult times for people who constantly take the moral high ground and sometimes forget to point it out to people. For example, I recently got curbside compost (in addition to the backyard compost) and only put my trash out every other week. So, I’m a lot better than everyone else. The guys who pick up my trash know it, but I can’t tell if my neighbors have noticed. I should knock on their doors to tell them how environmentally friendly I am, but I’d hate to contribute to their carbon footprint when they open their doors and their air conditioning has to work extra. I just can’t take on that kind of responsibility for them.

It’s hard enough keeping your own household running. Did you know I caught my house keepers throwing my recycling away with the trash? And I found that monstrosity of a trash bag in the compost bin. Don’t worry, I wrote a very harsh review about the whole fiasco on Yelp. I’m waiting to hear back from the management to see how I can be compensated for the emotional toll this has taken on me.

Are you looking for ways to be more engaged in the community? You can start by providing spontaneous feedback to others about the choices they are making and recommendations about how to improve. Oh, you didn’t rescue your dog? You should abandon your dog right now so a better person can rescue him. Your dog doesn’t want to be with the kind of monster who got him from a breeder.

Another important aspect of being morally upstanding is making your own food, instead of buying food that may have indirectly caused human or animal suffering. Not only is this granola vegan, but it’s guaranteed cruelty-free (unless you accidentally burn yourself on the side of the oven).

Laying out your ingredients with a clean towel also helps you feel like you’re better than other people, if you need some help on that front

Adapted from Cookie & Kate

Ingredients:

4 cups oats

1 cup nuts (I used slivered almond and pecans)

½ cup melted coconut oil or unsalted butter

1/3 cup maple syrup or honey

½ teaspoon salt

½ tsp vanilla extract

½-1 cup dried fruit (I recommend anything but raisins because raisins are the worst)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350° degrees.

If you want this to be morally superior granola, you’re going to need to melt the coconut oil in the oven while it’s preheating. If you just want to make regular granola, I guess you can use the microwave, but I fully expect you to judge yourself for your decisions.

Mix oats, salt, nuts, coconut oil, vanilla, and maple syrup in a large bowl.

Spread thinly on a baking sheet or a 9×13 pan.

Bake for about 20 minutes, until oats and nuts are nice and toasty

Once cooled, stir in dried fruit.

Store in a jar that your boyfriend has tried to recycle numerous times, but you keep foiling him. You can’t recycle it until you’ve fully reused it. Try to make eye contact and bring up the history of the jar every time you get a handful of granola.

Blueberries are the dried fruit of choice. After our jar argument, I explained to my boyfriend that raisins are bad and he should feel bad about himself for liking them.

Defeated Eggplant

A Saturday post? What am I doing here? I thought it was still Tuesday. I’ll have to talk to my assistant about keeping a better schedule for me, and maybe limit my daytime drinking just a bit. 
This week has defeated me in almost every way. I am so excited for this weekend, where I still have a shit ton to do, but Annie is also semi available and I can just ignore it all and go drink sake in the corner. 

Since Serafina already shared my likeness, I’m sharing this intimate moment with Annie post coitus. Sorry we look like shit. I’m wearing my house/chore clothes and he’s a corporate accountant and has let himself go.

I promised myself I would never do an eggplant recipe on this blog, but, just like I do with everyone else, I break promises frequently and aggressively. This recipe will not win anyone over that is scared of eggplant.  It really is for people who already like it. 
It’s also adapted from my sister’s recipe that I saw her make once many years ago. I was going to call her and ask how to do it, but I just sent her dance videos for hours instead, never mentioning that I was destroying her recipe and posting it publicly. 
Let’s get to it. 

On the plus side, this recipe doesn’t involve much attention, so it’s good for fellow lazy assholes like me.

Sista Ethel May Darkhorse’s Eggplant Appetizer (pillaged from the mind of Mary Ellen’s sister, Inception style)

Ingredients:

• Eggplant
• Bell pepper (I like yellow)
• Balsamic vinegar
• Olive oil
• Salt (I used course Himalayan in a grinder)
• Goat cheddar (don’t fucking use anything else) 

Directions: 

Slice the eggplant fairly thinly, salt, and put in a colander to sweat for several hours. When ready to bake, rinse and pat dry. 

Eggplant sweat lodge. Yes, that’s my dirty pan from breakfast. It’s fine. I’m fine.

Lay the eggplant out on a pan with parchment paper and brush with the vinegar. Bake at 375 degrees until it’s pretty done. I didn’t time it, sorry. It’s up to you, young Jedi, to figure that shit out. 

I like to put the pepper on top because it’s pretty.

Remove from oven and flip the eggplant. Brush the other side with vinegar and then lay out cheese slices and pepper on top. Drizzle with oil and salt. Put the eggplant in to broil until the cheese is melted. 

If you didn’t almost burn the house down with the parchment paper, then good for fucking you. Guess you are just perfect at everything, huh?

Remove from oven, and eat it. It’s weird and eggplant-like. Yummy. 

Ugh, need to get a manicure.

The odds aren’t in your favor,

Mary Ellen 

How to create more positive self-talk

Listen, everyone. There’s a lot of negativity in the world, and if anything is going to change, we need to start with ourselves. I’ve included some examples of self talk that starts off not-so-positive, and how to flip it around to be more self-loving (but not in that way, stop being so gross).

Peaceful pictures of apple blossoms help inspire positivity

Example One:

“You really need to put on some make up so you don’t look like such an ugly hooker”

First of all, it’s best to use the non-pejorative term ‘sex worker.’ Next, you want to turn the statement into a positive. Try this instead:

“Maybe if you put on some make up you won’t look like such an ugly sex worker”

Didn’t that feel better?

This is a real picture from the back room of the vegan topless bar in Texas where Mary Ellen and I met

Example Two:

“You just ate two entire pints of ice cream, no wonder you’re such a fat ugly cow”

Cows aren’t fat, that’s just how Goddess made them. Let’s try taking a more cow-friendly, positive spin on this self-talk:

“Good job eating those two pints of ice cream, you’re such a fat ugly person. Cows are beautiful creatures.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel better when I’m noticing the beauty and majesty of cows, instead of focusing on the negative.

See, cows are beautiful

Example Three:

“I can’t believe you overdrew your bank account, you goddamn dumb bitch”

That sounded a little harsh, didn’t it? I bet it felt harsh when you said it to yourself. So, maybe don’t overdraw your bank account next time, you goddamn dumb bitch.

If you didn’t overdraw your bank account and get evicted from your apartment, you wouldn’t have moved to the forest to live with the squirrels

Namaste,

Serafina

 

Vegan Chocolate Sheet Cake (with non-vegan chocolate frosting)

Guess what, everyone? I tried to find a recipe for a vegan chocolate sheet cake last week (I was low on eggs and had to bring cake to a barbecue). I could not find any vegan sheet cake recipes. What the fuck? Is this because vegans don’t have enough friends to bother with sheet cake? No offense, vegans. But maybe if you used some butter you’d have more friends. #realtalk #sorrynotsorry

I am pretty new to sheet-cake-level popularity, so I don’t have large platters. I’m working on it, and I made do with the cake carrier this time

Anyhoo, I ended up making a few slight adaptations to a vegan chocolate layer cake recipe that I have used for years. It turned out marvelously, and thanks to a butter-filled frosting, everyone wanted to be my friend.

I poured my vanilla and apple cider vinegar into bowls for you guys, instead of just taking more pictures of my vanilla jar with the rusty lid. Making friends takes effort. And butter.

This works as a layer cake with two 9in cake pans, or it could also make 24 cupcakes. I found this handy baking time chart for all you type A vegans looking to make friends with cake.

Adapted from Joy the Baker

Ingredients:

2 1/4 cups flour

2 cups sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup canola oil

2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

2 cups cold water

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9 x 13 in pan and line with parchment. Line two cupcake pans with paper liners and set aside.

Mix flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt together in a large bowl. Sifting is advised because cocoa power is a pain in the ass and clumps.

Mix the water, oil, vinegar, and vanilla together in a medium bowl.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix until just combined (vegan cakes get cranky when they are over-mixed, no one wants to eat a cranky cake)

Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for about 35 minutes. It is done when the skewer comes out mostly clean.

Cool completely then transfer onto a cake platter to be frosted.

I was not sure about the baking time, so I stabbed the cake with a bamboo skewer about 20 times. It was effective. Also, I didn’t use a timer

Chocolate Frosting, adapted from a recipe on the back of a box of baking chocolate

Ingredients

8 oz baking chocolate (I usually do ½ unsweetened and ½ bittersweet)

6 tablespoons butter

About 1/3 cup milk (I use unsweetened almond milk)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon salt

About 3 cups powdered sugar

Instructions

Melt butter and chocolate. I usually use the old put a bowl over some boiling water method. Once melted, take off heat and let cool for a minute. Add vanilla and salt.

Alternately beat in powdered sugar and milk until you get a thick, but spreadable consistency. Spread evenly on cake. This frosting hardens and becomes fudgy when it cools.

I don’t know how there are already splashes of butter and chocolate on the cake carrier, I hadn’t even mixed in the powdered sugar at this point, and that’s the messy part

You don’t make friends with salad

Serafina

Making Salad While Procrastinating

I’m leaving on my trip to the state where Serafina lives, in two days! So, of course I’m not prepared and I’ve been putting everything off by watching Korean pop dance videos all week. 

However, if you make salad instead of a packing checklist, people will judge you less. They think you’re just prioritizing your health or some bullshit like that. 

Remember my post about how Serafina and I met? Well, in celebration of our impending reunion, I’ve decided to share the recipe for the Kicked up Kowboy Kale recipe that was so popular at the vegetarian topless bar that we once worked.  Instead of bacon bits, which I assume is on everything with a cowboy theme, we’re using spiced nuts.  It’s a really easy recipe, but makes just enough of a mess in the kitchen that you get pissed off because now you have more fucking cleaning to do before the god damn trip. Fuck. 

Kicked up Kowboy Kale (adapted from the sketchy owners of a 1960s era topless bar in West Texas) 

Ingredients: 

(If you’re making this for your own vegetarian topless bar, multiply the recipe by 40)

• 1 bunch of Kale 
• 1/4 cup ranch dressing (whichever you prefer)
• 1 TBSP BBQ sauce (again, whatever brand you prefer) 
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups walnuts (or pecans)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• Drizzle of maple syrup (a drizzle means different things to different people – you have to discover your own drizzles) 

Directions: 

Put the nuts in a pan at medium high heat with the salt, sugar, cumin, maple syrup, and a couple tablespoons of water. Toast them until they are sticky. 

I literally cook everything in my wok.

While your nuts are toasting, prepare the Kale. 

You will not be healthy for me today, Kale!

Here’s the thing about Kale: it’s great for you and all, but I find it chewy and not great to eat in salads (the curly stuff). Solve this minor problem by drizzling a teaspoon of olive oil and massaging it into the Kale in a bowl. It’ll prevent it from being chewy. 

Prepare the dressing by adding the BBQ sauce to the ranch dressing and drizzle onto the Kale. Toss with your hands and make sure it’s all thoroughly covered. 

Taking a page from the book of Serafina, I did not clean the kitchen before doing any of this.

Plate the salad and add the nuts. That’s it. 

I only have a few place mats left, so I didn’t use one this week until I can get more. It’s like formal dresses. You can’t be photographed in the same one twice. It’s the same with placemats.

I will see you soon, Serafina. 
-Mary Ellen