I haven’t had the little ones in many years, but the thought of them earlier today has me daydreaming about them. I spent too much time searching on the internet for a place that makes a gluten free version, and came up short.
The ones I like best are filled with stewed spinach or mustard greens (or both!). Yes, there are some good mushroom buns, but the ones with greens have such a fresh edge to them. There are larger ones sold in restaurants, but they are often strangely bland, and have too much dough relative to the filling (for structural reasons?).
I like them with a side sauce of Vietnam-style chili garlic paste mixed with soy sauce and just a little rice vinegar. Spicy, salty, and sour. A little sauce goes far on the absorbent buns.
I last ate them regularly more than a decade ago. I found a brand from China that was available frozen in a favorite local Chinese specialty market. (It was also my source for fresh lychees!) They were a great food to bring to pot lucks, as a few minutes in the microwave and a jar of home-mixed sauce would always get rave reviews. They were a great snack, too, and there were three vegan flavors I could get. (The vegan part is why I rarely got them in restaurants – most don’t bother with veggie versions.)
The internet is suggesting that I’ll need to make them from scratch if I want them, and that I’ll need many ingredients I don’t usually have on hand to do it (rice flour, tapioca flour, yeast, agave sugar(?)…), but the great thing about them was that someone else made them, and made many of them!
When Google+ shut down, I migrated my posts over to my smartphone photo weblog (a Blogger blogspot site) with some fan-made software, and it seemed to go well enough… but it really didn’t. A hundred or more posts were just error symbols, and they’ve been that way since 2019, to my enduring (but mild) shame.
I’ve finally purged all the broken posts. I can hold my head up a little higher now.
Mobilelene
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.
It’s “just” phone photos and migrated link-based posts from Plus account, but I want it to be clean. It has more than 3,500 posts (even after all the deletions from the 2011 – 2019 plus posts that were merged in), and I’ve been working on it since 2008, so tidying up seemed like a small investment of time relative to what I’ve already put in!
(While reviewing the older posts, I learned that I’ve been taking photos of our antique streetcar collection for even longer than I remember. 🙂 I am so… Consistent. Predictable. Both.)
During the pandemic, I decided to change a few things about how I was living, and one of them was my hair color. I had previously spent late 2019 and early 2020 trying to go a respectable shade of gunmetal gray, a color that looks very modern in architectural settings, and which would match nearly all of my black and gray clothes. But, for whatever reason, the gray never really stuck. The dyes were permanent and were being professionally applied by a real colorist, yet it always faded back to an ambiguous, ashy near-blonde that didn’t quite have its own name.
In March 2020, the pandemic ended professional salon hair color visits, and I was left to my own, not-fully-respectable devices. I noodled around a bit with gray, purple, and rose tints, some of which lasted a day, some of which stuck but didn’t stay true. I watched my roots grow out (and out, and out). I had to see my roots often, because I spent five hours daily on video calls for work, and I did not like what I saw. So, I decided to change direction. In August of 2020, I went pink, a color I had never seriously considered in the past. Pink hair. On ME, a middle-aged woman who showed visible signs of being cooped up indoors for too long. It seemed… unlikely to succeed.
September 2020 reflection in pink, with matching shirt and giant, noise-reducing headphones
And yet.
Pink hair inspired people to respond differently to me on video calls. They smiled more. They were more outgoing to me than they had been previously. When my employer was acquired, I met many people at the new parent company by video meeting, and it was fun to watch their faces change when my camera turned on. Yes, I was still a legal department representative, yes, we were going to discuss serious business, but their faces visibly brightened. The mood softened. They were professional, always, but also warmer than people usually are with legal department folks.
During the long, dark dread of the 2020 pandemic, that felt REALLY NICE.
2021 arrived, and as my hometown’s vaccination campaign succeeded and infection levels dropped, I left the house and learned that this cheerfulness toward me also happens in real life. Women say nice things to me every day I go out now. We don’t even need to be talking: I was smiling at a woman walking past with her dog, and she just said, “Yaaay, pink hair!” unexpectedly. I am awash in cheer and compliments, and it surprises me every time. It’s like I’m carrying a kitten on my head, or am dressed as a huggable mascot.
I’d already picked out my next color, but it won’t be as…soft, so perhaps I will stick with my friendly pastel pink (PINK! A color I didn’t own any clothes in until recently, and would not have been caught dead in during my youth!) for a while longer, so it can continue to soften my way as I readjust to the world.
Janine Vangool publishes Uppercase Magazine and an increasingly long list of books that have specific art, craft, and design themes. Vangool’s books in her ‘Encyclopedia of Inspiration’ series are collections of profiles + portfolios showing recent work on a given theme. These types of surveys of a creative space are a huge effort to solicit, judge, layout, edit, and proofread! This gorgeous, hefty volume provides nearly 500 pages of full-color, beautifully printed, elegantly designed profiles of artists, designers, manufacturers, and suppliers working with fibers and fiber-like materials.
Vangool and her team included an impressive range of profiles, from flax farmers to wool processors, knitters to fine art portrait embroiders and macrame artists; from people who make natural dyes to those who machine knit; from people shredding used plastic bags to responsibly reuse them for a more durable purpose, to people shredding paper to turn into delicate, nearly lacy fabrics.
I appreciate the effort that went into this compilation and survey, and especially the impressive resulting range of work. Many of us only have a chance to see fiber arts if we happen to be in a region where they are being shown, or have a chance to watch fabrics being made at a textile museum. (I went to an experimental public elementary school, which means I’ve carded and spun wool, but that is a rare experience in a city!) This is a great way to showcase excellent work to a broader audience than most of these creators could otherwise reach, and to give more people a chance to see some great materials and works.
Vangool not only does a great job with the book, but also creates an embedded video for each of her publications on the Uppercase website, so you can view a video of the entire publication before you buy. That takes confidence! You can click on this Vimeo link, or on the book title just below the cover above ,to preview this book.
Summary: this is a high quality publication of some fantastic fiber art manufacturers, suppliers, designers, and fine artists. I recommend it highly if you enjoy well-designed books, textile arts, skeins of freshly dyed yarn (artfully arranged), or understanding how threads and fabrics are made.
Tlingit/Athabascan artist Rico Worl designed a GREAT stamp.
Mine just arrived, and they are GORGEOUS! I hadn’t realized that the stars and discs in the design are rendered in metallic gold.
News release here. USPS product link here (while available). I’m also providing an embedded visual link to Wikipedia’s entry on Formline Art, which I find very graphically satisfying!
Not just steaming bowls of fresh, hand-pulled noodles, served in loud, dark, crowded restaurants in bowls the size of my head, where I slurp my special vegan broth with joy while making delighted faces at my friends, who I can’t hear over the din. No, I also miss the cheap instant stuff I ate as a kid, with a toasted cheese sandwich beside it. Or the fancy-yet-still cheap instant ramen with brand names like Szechuan Chef or MAMA, which not only had the powdered broth packet, but also a chili paste or powder packet AND an oil packet, often with sesame oil in it.
Those instant soups were SO TASTY! The deep fried wheat noodles were just amazing in those spicy soup bases. I would dress those up with chopped scallions and bell peppers, or when I was feeling especially fancy, with a frozen veggie medley of snow peas, mushrooms, water chestnuts, and sprouts, which cooked along with the noodles. It was ready so quickly! It was so warming! It was so SATISFYING!
Packages of instant noodles are ubiquitous, but they are no longer for me: I have a medical condition that means wheat… doesn’t work for me anymore. Not just digestively (although that is terrible), but also immune system wise.
I am learning to let go, while also looking back at wheat fondly.
*
I hadn’t thought of myself as a big wheat-eater, since I love Asian and Mexican cuisines, which are rice and corn centered. Yet wheat was always somewhere in my kitchen: as the light, flaky crusts of my homemade apple pies; as the most sauce-absorbent tortillas of my homemade zucchini enchiladas; as the layers of pasta in my homemade artichoke-flavored lasagnas, as the linguini beneath my homemade mushroom-tomato sauces, or the crust of delicious veg local pizzas. Not one but TWO local beer halls that a friend liked to meet at had wheat-based vegan sausages on their menu, which they grilled on a veg-only grill and served on organic wheat buns.
Wheat was EASY.
Also, wheat can be beautiful: my cousin STILL sends me lovely photos of restaurant tabletops covered in hand-pulled pizza crusts, or delicious pastries he is enjoying with coffee. The crusts are beautifully browned; the pastries are streaked with spices or filled with air pockets from a slow, yeasty rise. They called to his camera for good reasons!
Wheat was important to me on special occasions. I can name at least three local bread bakeries whose loaves back in the early 2000s would absolutely make my day. While enjoying them, I felt I was living my best possible California life. (Acme (swoon), Grace Baking (I read they closed down), and Semifreddi’s, if you were wondering; but there is also great local sourdough…) Olive oil, some tapenade, some fresh, local herbed chèvre if I was dining with non-vegans, heirloom tomatoes, fizzy water, a glass of wine, and a fresh loaf of olive bread…
*deep sigh* So, wheat was not a daily food for me (unlike rice!), but it had a PLACE, and if I included it, I included a REALLY GOOD manifestation of it.
But then there was a medical incident. My digestion became impaired, and when it failed to resolve on its own (as a doctor suggested it would), a gastroenterologist had me try an elimination diet. Fructans (type of plant structure found in very firm/crunchy/tall plants, including wheat) turned out to be a villain in my new story. Once wheat in particular was off my menu, my bloodwork for my other doctors improved dramatically…
Which means there is no going back.
Not that I didn’t try: my bloodwork was so good that my doctor expressed doubt I’d ever had an issue, so I recently did an immersive personal-wheat-festival to confirm it, and… Things went south on about day 10, remained bad for WEEKS, and weren’t right for MONTHS. So, my wheat issue really is a thing.
*
You may wonder how I was able to work in Europe when I was there for business without being able to tolerate wheat. Or lactose, for that matter.
It was… difficult.
Here at home, I can make my own choices, but when relying entirely on office cafeterias, hotels, and business restaurants in Europe, things get dicey. I chose hotels that offered hot foods, rather than pastry-toast-cheese-coffee breakfasts. Eating in company cafeterias was possible thanks to salad bars, grilled veggie side dishes, and random vegetarian specials were were NOT wheat-based; catered lunches were a disaster, as my hosts would kindly accommodate my vegetarianism with a wheat pasta dishes or cheese sandwiches. Team dinners were usually at places with limited menus, and I would have to accept whatever the vegetarian option was, and ritually nibble on it if it was wheat-based.
Left to my own devices in the larger cities for business or pleasure, I manage(d) exceptionally well. Thai red veggie curries in Budapest (with local beer!); Japanese veg sushi lunch and Thai dinner in Switzerland; Vietnamese in Berlin; Thai or Indonesian or Vietnamese or Ethiopian or Persian or hybrid cuisines in London; Indian and pan-Asian pan fried rice noodles topped with veggies and sauces of my choice in Copenhagen; Nepali foods, Breton buckwheat savory crepes, felafel salads, or any number of fancy French vegan restaurant meals in Paris; beautifully arranged rice noodle plates with fresh beans and colorful veggies in Amsterdam; risotto in the Hague; Korean stone pot, Indian curry-poutine, and savory Chinese mushroom dishes in Toronto…
(Yes, I have tried eating Mexican food in Europe, and… it is not. I appreciate the effort, and conceptually I can see how it happened, but the interpretations are… novel.)
But: this worked when I was alone, or when I was with a fellow veg-gf friend who helped me research our options. When ordering airplane meals for my 10+ hour flights or if going out for a compulsory business meal, the odds were not in my favor. There are rules, and no one is supposed to have more than one restriction. Even now, when I order groceries, I can choose vegetarian OR I can choose “gluten-free.” Not both! Airline meals have the same issue. I always choose vegan (or vegetarian if that is the only veg option, as it is on some airlines), but can’t ALSO ensure my vegan dish it isn’t pasta in tomato sauce or a grilled veggie sandwich. This is not EASY.
*
So: I will periodically have a nostalgic outburst here about some food I miss, or I will bemoan wheat being added to something unnecessarily. (People who “bread” their fried potatoes with a wheat batter: I’m looking at you!)
*
Yes, I have tried rice-ramen; yes, it is healthier because it isn’t fried; no, it is not THE SAME. More importantly, non-wheat ramen (which is technically some other noodle, I’m sure) is only available in certain (amazing) restaurants. I can’t just walk into any old ramen place now, even if they have a vegetarian special broth.
So, my world is a little smaller, and has fewer steaming bowls and fewer merrily-slurping crowds in it.
Watching the fog roll in just over sailboat height yesterday
Life in San Francisco: July was a very foggy month in my San Francisco neighborhood’s microclimate, and I’ve had to make field trips to other parts of town to see beyond the edges of our gray blanket. It still amazes me that a blue sky can be just a streetcar ride away!
Last weekend, I spent 6+ hours walking in the sun with another fog refugee on the east side of town. It was a delightful, relaxing, restorative day. I watched a bike rally and its DJ on the back of a flatbed truck; I had an excellent (yet overpriced) espresso drink; I advised my friend not to interact with a gathering of furries; we squirmed through a cheerful crowd of baseball fans; we enjoyed a delicious vegan Indonesian lunch at a picnic table; we explored a neighborhood she’d never visited; we had delicious frozen vegan desserts… [Drifting into a saffron-flavored reverie…]
I kept saying aloud: we are so LUCKY to live here. After sunset, we walked back to catch streetcars to return to our still-foggy homes. *sigh*
It was restorative not only because we enjoyed bright, mild weather, but also becauseit felt like the Before Times. The many traumas of the past year weren’t on the surface, and it was barely noteworthy to wear masks on transit or while ordering food.
We are so very lucky.
*
Life in a Global Pandemic: It has been discouraging to read the news on the dominance of the Delta COVID variant, and to see the local cases rise from low double digits up into the hundreds.
It is especially discouraging knowing that this scenario was preventable. That future similar (or worse) outcomes are preventable. But too many people are choosing not to contribute to prevention.
I now have my first, close/personal, vaccinated friend with a ‘breakthrough’ case. She is an organized person with natural curiosity, so she formally polled her social circles, and has come up with 14 breakthrough cases within her network. (Yes, she is in the greater Los Angeles area, which has been an infection hotspot this entire time, likely due to right wing anti-prevention sentiment.) This alarming information helps me reset some of my own planning about indoor activities as a vaccinated person, which I am less likely to expand now.
I’ve ordered some more fabric face masks in nice patterns, and in black. Including more that have a pocket for an anti-particulate-smoke filter.
*
Life in a Climate Crisis: Speaking of smoke masks, the climate crisis is in the news daily, for all the wrong reasons. Rather than great news about countries meeting their climate goals, there have been a long series of disasters relating to increasing, localized extremes. There were so many flood stories last month (Japan, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the US (New York City)) and so many fire stories (we have more area burned here in California than even last year gave us; Siberia is on fire; tourists are being evacuated from fast moving fires in the Mediterranean by boat!) that any disaster image that appeared on my phone’s screen from the news could be from ANYWHERE.
Because: the climate disaster is striking everywhere.
There were some unflattering quotes from survivors of the German floods saying that they had not believed this sort of thing could happen TO THEM, in THEIR country. (One of them named places where they WOULD expect this to happen, as if such events reflect a personal flaw of the citizens of those regions.)(*facepalm*) It suggested that they hadn’t had sympathy with flood-hit regions they had seen on the news. They hadn’t found it relevant when people in low-lying Pacific islands went to the UN, or when Greenlnd’s high northern communities were suffering, but NOW it is real to them.
Perhaps this is what it takes. Wealthy, developed countries watching flood waters destroy their own cities and towns. Perhaps that is what makes it real enough for urgent action.
*
The news is filled with stories of Americans who are hospitalized with COVID complications, who want the vaccine too late to save their lives. I desperately want us to be smarter than that – not just about COVID, but about our environment. Perhaps we are already in the climate-crisis-hospital stage, and I’m just not accepting it.
Book:The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson audiobook read by Nicole Lewis published by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group 2020
Here’s a great premise for a sci-fi story: rather than developing time or interstellar travel, scientists find a way to travel between a limited number of parallel universes with parallel earths, and then use information from those earths to adjust our earth for success. Though not for EVERYONE’S success…
This conceit has a catch, and it is a brilliant one: the only people who can travel to parallel earths can’t be alive there. Those with a living equivalent die a horrific death in transit due to [mysterious law of physics]. So, the most valuable potential multiverse spies alive on earth zero are those who live in dire circumstances. This means interworld travel is NOT safe for members of the ruling elite – only the marginalized, living marginal lives, who have the odds stacked against them in a way that killed them off in other universes.
Cara, our heroine, had a rough upbringing that was fatal to her on most earths, so she can go to more earths than anyone else. She is recruited to the small force of traversers, and finds herself working for the predominantly white elite, living in their fancy walled city, and manifesting on other earths where everyone looks so familiar, but where the other versions of herself are dead. Her position on Earth 0 feels tenuous, her crush is cold toward her, and she experiences racist and classist snubs as a black woman from the desert. A forthcoming scientific breakthrough OR being too ethical about what she sees (and what her bosses collect) could end her job and her chance at a safe life with clean water and fresh food.
When something goes terribly wrong on another earth, she has a chance to shake things up, though she may not survive it, and has no way of knowing what the result will mean…
This book didn’t go where I thought it would go; it wasn’t over when I thought it was over; and it was filled with thrills and surprises in all the best, ultimately epic ways. Cara is a savvy, smart, opportunistic, determined heroine. (I only yelled at her for saying something dangerous when she was delirious/medicated, and it couldn’t be helped. Note: yelling at an audiobook is best done when you are home alone, so as not to startle others.) She isn’t some perfect superhero – she gets hurt, she carries scars, she’s loved/hated terrible people, she’s survived horrific abuse, she wallows in self-doubt and self-blame, she put ethics aside in favor of survival – but her determination and ethical evolution as she makes a place for herself in the world(s) is a solid, stimulating heroic journey.
This audiobook (libro.fm) is performed by the remarkably talented Nicole Lewis, who reads beautifully, acts brilliantly, represents the many characters by voice clearly, and makes a fantastic Cara. The author, Johnson, provided excellent dialog in the unabridged version, and Lewis made it come to life. (I discovered this audiobook on Libro.fm’s Playlist, “Black Narrators You Should Be Listening To” from June 2021. Nicole Lewis is fantastic. She sounds like black women I know, and hearing her perform these characters so brilliantly was a delight. I would have appreciated this list even if I wasn’t half black myself, the same way I research and enjoy great books by Asian writers without being Asian.)
This book is impressive sci-fi, I loved it, I zealously recommend it, and I’m hoping for more brilliant work like this from Micaiah Johnson.
