Serenity in the Storm

Hiking in the Olympics

Yesterday, we set out early, at 6:30am to catch the 7am ferry boat to Bainbridge Island. Taking the ferry, particularly when it’s cloudy and cool and you can smell the Puget Sound always feels like such a Seattle experience to me. Seagulls flying around, everything muted by the cloudy grey and the air is so fresh and crisp and sea-like. I think I’m turning into a real Northwesterner because I’m starting to revel in these cloudy cool days and look a little forward to the chilly and rainy fall and winter. Of course, the clouds didn’t last for long. They burned off to reveal a gorgeous sunny day for hiking. Upon reaching Bainbridge, we drove south and west into the Olympic Mountains. The total trip took about two hours and we ended up on a dirt road off a dirt road off a small paved road. I heard about this hike from a friend and the description of it in the hiking book says, “If for some terrible reason you are only allowed one hike in the Olympics in your lifetime, this should be it.” We figured this would be the perfect hike to take my mom on, who is visiting from Pittsburgh. The hike itself was difficult to say the least-10.6 miles (5.3 up, 5.3 back). The description didn’t say this, but the hike is pretty much 5.3 miles straight up hill, with only small reprieves to rest and have a look around. I’ve been working out a lot at the gym, doing cardio and weights, but this hike was hard. That being said, it was totally worth it and completely spectacular.

Starting out, the hike meanders (less steeply) through old growth forests with lots of moss and everything is green, green, green. It all just feels so alive, and the air is so good to breathe.

The trail follows a river for a long while, which gave off a nice cool wind.

After several miles, and very steep going, the trail starts to open into clearings where you can look out over the valley, and to the neighboring peaks. We were walking along with low-hanging clouds at the same level.

Finally, just as we thought we might not make it, the forest gave way to open meadows of wildflowers, where we took a nice break and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By the way, I’m not sure we would have made it up the trail without the Raw Fruit/Nut Trail Snacks I made the day before. Maizy had some lunch also, and was quite a trooper through the whole trip–sniffing everything, playing in the streams, eating peanuts that other hikers seemed to have dropped.

Continuing up the trail, we came to dry, open meadows and could finally see the top!

When we made it to the top, we could look back down over where we had hiked and we were well above the clouds.

And in the other direction, the panorama we’d been hiking all the way up to see:

It was a gorgeous hike, and it felt great to get out into the mountains and away from the city. We certainly don’t do it often enough.

When we got back to Seattle, we went to Maneki for dinner, a wonderful Japanese restaurant in the International District. I ordered an avocado ponzu salad:

And a durkee roll (avocado, pickled daikon, and cucumber), which is unpictured because I was so hungry I forgot to photograph it. And shared an order of vegetable tempura with the table.

Sushi was one of my favorite foods before going vegan, and it’s great to still be able to go out for Japanese food, and indulge in those delicious flavors in a plant-based way. Some delicious food at the end of a delicious day.

Enjoy the long weekend, everyone!

Raw Fruit/Nut Trail Snacks

Raw Fruit Nut Snacks — raw fruit/nut snacks

We’re thinking of going on a big hike this weekend and, in preparation, I’m (of course) thinking about snacks for the trail. These dried fruit and nut balls rolled in coconut were inspired by my dear friend Karen and her dear sweet boy Oliver. The three of us took Maizy to the dog park the other day and Karen brought these delicious snacks for us to eat in between taking Maizy to the off-leash area and Oliver to the playground. I couldn’t remember the recipe, nor did I think about looking up a recipe, so this is just a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants experiment that turned out well. I like some of the vegan fruit/nut bars you buy at the store, but they’re so expensive and there’s the packaging to think of too. These are a great alternative and you can make them with only your most favorite fruits and nuts! Karen says they’ll store in the fridge for about a week.

The Recipe:

1/2 cup raw almonds

1/2 cup raw cashews

3/4 cup dried pitted dates

1/2 cup dried goji berries

1/2 cup dried cherries

1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1/4 cup (or less) water

These ingredients are just the ones I had in the house and could be substituted for anything else you have lying around. I think my dream combo would be almonds, cranberries, dates, and cherries, but these ones are quite tasty.

Blend nuts in food processor until they are finely chopped. Add the dried fruit and chop until it, too, is finely chopped. Add the water, as needed, a little at a time. Blend until it is the consistency of a slightly chunky very thick paste.

Pour 1/2 cup of shredded coconut onto a clean plate. Now, the messy part! Roll the paste into balls with your hands in whatever size you prefer (the balls I made were about 1.5 inches in diameter). In retrospect, this might be less messy if you chill the paste first (give it a try if you prefer)

Roll the balls in the coconut to fully coat the outside. This adds flavor and makes it so they’re not so darned sticky!

Store in an airtight container in the fridge until you’re ready to pack them up for a hike, or a packed lunch, etc. Little powerhouse balls of protein, vitamins, and fruity sweet goodness!

Szechuan Noodle Bowl

IMAG0426 — vegetable dumplings with hot & spicy sauce...mmm

The Szechuan Noodle Bowl is one of those gems in Seattle that I’m maybe a little hesitant to post about just because it’s one of our favorite secret spots (much more secret than Cafe Flora‘s brunch). We took my mom there for the first time and she loved it. This is a very simple no-frills Chinese dumpling house. They also have soup and make their own noodles and dumplings. It is in the International District (420 8th Ave South) and they only take cash.

The owners are wonderful and hand-make the dumplings right there at one of the tables in the restaurant. Eric and I typically order 1 green onion pancake and 1 vegetable dumpling with hot and spicy sauce, both vegan. The hot and spicy sauce is not very spicy, fyi. The dumplings have green vegetable and tofu inside, and doughy wrapper, and are topped with scallions and a hot & spicy sauce that is pure magic. One time one of the owners gave me a whole container of the sauce to take home because she noticed that we always made sure to eat every last drop of sauce with the dumplings. The pancake is crispy and chewy and oh so good with soy sauce and chili for dipping:

For the pancake and dumpling order it’s $11. Not bad for dinner for two. We used to get 2 orders of dumplings and 1 pancake, so we had leftovers to take home, but lately we’ve been streamlining our order.

Have any of you been there? Let me know if you try it and what you think!

Dehydrated Yam Dog Treats

These dog treats are easy to make, healthy for dogs, and inexpensive. Also, Maizy has a sensitive stomach and these are easy on the digestive system. We got the idea to make our own after we had spent $15.99 on a single bag of dehydrated yam treats for dogs. We don’t have a dehydrator, so I used our oven to do the dehydrating and it worked splendidly!

You can cut the yams in whichever shape you prefer. Each will yield slightly different results: Thicker, larger slices will take longer to dehydrate, but will result in a chewier treat. Small pieces will be quicker to dehydrate and will often result it a crunchy chip kind of treat. And long thin pieces will result in more of a jerky. Experiment to find which ones you like best, or cycle through them so your canine friend has a surprise shape to eat.

The Recipe:

2 organic yams

Set oven to lowest setting (on mine, that’s 200 degrees F). Wash yam and pat dry with kitchen towel.

Prior to roasting, cut out any bad spots from the yam (i.e. anything you wouldn’t want to eat yourself). Slice yams in thin 1/8-1/4 inch slices (note: this is where you can get creative and cut them however you like):

For the treats I made yesterday, I cut the rounds into quarters. Maizy goes outside a lot and likes to have a treat everytime she comes in the house, so these end up being a great size for frequent treat eating:

yam quartered — quarter the rounds of yam

Use a large baking sheet. You should not need to put anything on the baking sheet (except the yams!). Lay out yam pieces in a single layer:

yams on pan — place yams on baking sheet

Place the pan in the oven, and crack the door to the oven (to allow moisture to escape). Let dehydrate for an hour and then check them (the first time you may want to check more frequently, just until you’re familiar with how your oven does the dehydrating). They should look dried out on top, like this:

Flip them over and return the pan to the oven for another hour or so. For small pieces, 2+ hours should suffice for the entire drying process. For larger pieces, it will take longer. They will feel dried out and light when finished. Let cool and then place in a dry airtight container, like this recylced pickle jar:

Obviously, this recipe requires the oven to be on for hours at a time, so you wouldn’t want to do this on a hot day. Yesterday was cool in Seattle, and I was around the house all day cleaning in preparation for my mother’s visit, so it was the perfect opportunity to dry some yams in the oven. It was a nice day taking care of putting our house in order, and spending the day with the animals. Eden even helped me put clean sheets on the guest bed:

Bulk Madness

Last weekend, we got the bug to organize our bulk food drawer. We buy a lot of our food from the bulk bins, so it’s important that we can actually access it. The project began with wanting to reorganize the spice cabinet, but we needed to get another shelf for the cabinet in order to maximize the space. The cabinets in our kitchen are from Ikea, so we thought it would be easy to just get a generic replacement shelf (we thought wrong, but that’s another story). Since we were going to Ikea, we decided we would look for jars and cannisters to hold our bulk foods (the 16 oz mason jars have just not been cutting it for everything). Our trips to Ikea are always harrowing. I think it might be the arrows on the floor that direct you through the entire store and don’t let you out until you’ve gone through every section. Anyway, here was the problem with our bulk foods drawer:

We ended up getting a few cannisters there, but then had to go to Storables for the rest of the cannisters. After many hours of working on the project, we fit all of our bulk items into the cannisters. Though, we ended up having to turn our bulk drawer into a bulk cabinet, which is not as user friendly (the drawer was not strong enough to hold the food and the jars). The outcome is this:

Much better! I actually enjoy scooping out the grains etc., instead of getting frustrated with all of the bags piled on top of one another. Plus, barring any bad falls on the part of the cannisters, they should last many years. We may expand to a second shelf eventually, but this works nicely for now, since it holds all of our essential bulk items.

Curried Chickpeas & Quinoa

curriedchickpeasandquinoa — curried chickpeas and quinoa

This recipe emerged as desperation food. This is what I call the cooking I do when I’m making food for myself when Eric isn’t home and I have very little food in the house (in the way of fresh vegetables). Also, I’m hypoglycemic and when my blood sugar gets too low, I get cranky (to put it mildly) and it’s just no good all around. Sorry, Eric! When I’m really hungry, I also have a difficult time coming up with ideas for food and so whatever is easy and nourishing is the best way to go. Late last week, I was in this state around lunchtime, and I looked in the vegetable bins and found only half an onion and I looked into the cupboard and found a can of chickpeas/garbanzo beans, and some diced tomatoes. It’s filling and easy and great paired with some quinoa (some of Maizy’s cooked quinoa, actually). It’s also good cold the next day.

The Recipe:

Serves 2-4, depending on portion size

1 can chickpeas (drained and rinsed)

1 can diced tomatoes

1 cup diced onion

~2 cups water or vegetable broth

2 tsp curry powder (one of my faves is the “chicken curry” (totally vegan) from Market Spice)

1 tsp garam masala (also from Market Spice)

1 tsp turmeric

1/2 tsp ground coriander

ground red chili to taste

salt and pepper to taste

Saute the diced onions in a pot or pan big enough to hold all ingredients. I tend to saute in water instead of oil a lot of the time, but you can use either water or olive oil. Cook till onions are slightly softened.

Drain and rinse chickpeas:

Add spices to onions and let the spices bloom (i.e. release their aroma and cook a bit).

Add the chickpeas and the tomato, and stir. Add ~2 cups of water or vegetable broth. Salt and pepper to taste.

add tomatoes and water — add the tomato, chickpeas, and water

You want the consistency to be kind of stew-like, so you’ll start with a soupy consistency and cook it down so some of the liquid cooks off. Stir and let simmer for about 20 minutes. All ingredients are already cooked, so you’re really just giving it time to combine the flavors and get that stewy consistency. Meanwhile, you can be cooking some quinoa, if you like, to serve with it, or it’s fine on its own. I usually try to have some quinoa or brown rice already cooked up and in the fridge for this kind of thing, but quinoa cooks in 15 minutes, so it’s a good quick food too. Pretty healthy, delicious, and easy. Plus, leftovers for the next day!

The Versatile Blogger

The lovely Jumbleberry Jam over at Rainblissed (one of my favorite blogs to read!) just gave Serenity in the Storm a shout-out as one of her favorite new “Versatile Blogs“. Thanks Jumbleberry; you’re awesome!! She was not sure how precisely this honorary title got started, but the rules are as follows:

• Thank the person who gave you the award & link back to them in your post.
• Share 7 things about yourself
• Pass this award along to 10 recently discovered blogs.

Seven things about me:

1. I want to start a sanctuary for previously farmed animals so they can live out their days free from harm and free from forced productivity.

2. Before I got going on the animal advocacy/ PhD track, I was on the path to being a fiction writer.

3. I’m generally a messy person and when I do tidy up the house, I tend to just make many stacks of stuff, so it looks tidier but I haven’t actually gotten rid of anything (notorious for boxing up unopened junk mail and stuffing it in the back of the closet-Yikes!).

4. I’m definitely a morning person. I love to get up and have a cup of tea, a delicious breakfast, a green juice, and catch up on computer stuff. After breakfast, the day is filled with declining productivity until I pass out exhausted anywhere from 8pm – 11 pm.

5. Our house is full of animals who wandered into our lives: 2 human animals (Eric and Katie), one dog (Maizy), two cats (Abigail and Eden), four zebra finches (unnamed by humans), 3 chickens (Charlotte (Bronte), George (Eliot), Jane (Austen)).

6. My favorite novels are probably Anna Karenina, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Parable of the Sower/Talents, though it’s been so long since I’ve read a novel that this might not be completely reliable.

7. I complain sometimes about school and academic work, but at heart I love it so very much and I feel incredibly lucky to be studying and working on exactly what I’m passionate about! Thanks, universe (and Eric)!!

Since I’m quite new to the blogging scene (I’ve had a blog previously, but was not really tapped into this whole world into very recently), my top ten are new to me, but seem to be quite established blogs. In no particular order:

1. Daily Garnish

2. Happy Herbivore

3. The Streets I Know

4. Chic Vegan

5. Choosing Raw

6. Vegan Score

7. Maoquai

8. Greens for Good

9. Sanctuary Tails

10. Abolitionist Approach

Okay, done! Thanks again, Ms. Jumbleberry Jam. Happy weekend everyone!

Hardly Alice Gloves

GG2 — the lovely Gwenda-lin and her gloves

My dear friend Gwenda-lin G. is not only a brilliant philosophy professor, but a master glove-maker with a penchant for lace and a long-standing appreciation for Lewis Carroll. She’s started her own line of lace tea gloves called Hardly Alice–you know, like for tea parties and wearing around town! Gwen wears them to peruse the offerings at New York fashion week, strolling through the gardens in Paris, and, I imagine, for reading Plato and Socrates at her desk with a nice cup of tea. No lace is too fine for the ancient philosophers. That’s for sure. She’s been featured for her Paris street style and at New York fashion week .

Gwen is vegan, her gloves are vegan, and she’s just acquired a variety of vintage lace with which to create some new and dreamy designs. The turn toward vintage lace is partly because of the quality and variety of the lace, and partly because it’s a turn toward more eco-friendly fashion (as the lace is recycled, or ‘upcycled’!) . She’s happy to take custom orders to create those little lace gloves of your wildest tea party-esque dreams. Some of her gloves are frilly and light:

while others have a darker edgier edge:

All are lovely and feminine and exquisite, just like Gwen!

Check out Hardly Alice. And, of course, you can follow and ‘like’ Hardly Alice on Facebook.

Green Juice

I was inspired by Kris Carr to incorporate a green juice into our daily routine. This is what Kris Carr says about green juice: “guzzling green goodness balances your pH and gives you a direct shot of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, protein and oxygen”. What better thing to have first thing in the morning to start your day out right?! I try for at least 5 days a week of green juice. Sometimes it’s more, and more often, it’s less. I’m a huge kale fan, so putting kale in my juice seems like a pretty good idea to me, though I know Eric is a little less than thrilled with that idea. Nonetheless, we both drink the green juice and it gives us lots of good energy for the day.

You can juice pretty much any fruit or vegetable, but the ones we juice most often are kale, lettuce, cucumber, celery, broccoli, chard, limes or lemons, and apples. The apples aren’t totally necessary, but the sweetness sure helps cut the sometimes-harsh wake-up of straight-up greens early in the morning.

Shopping for Juice:

Juicing can be expensive, both because a juicer can be pricey, and because it takes a lot of vegetables and fruits to make a glass of juice. I’ve figured out what I think is the cheapest (while still being healthy) way of buying ingredients for the green juice. It requires several stops, but I find that it’s nice to shop at a few different places anyway. First stop: MacPherson’s vegetable stand on Beacon Hill. I’ve seen other places that look like this open-air vegetable stand around town, but have never stopped. So I don’t know if their prices compare to MacPherson’s, but you can leave this place with 2 full grocery bags of vegetables and fruits for under $15. There’s really no beating the prices. The selection includes some organic produce and so we try to buy whatever organic veggies and fruits they have on the day we go. I almost always buy whichever type of organic apples they have, the limes (non-organic, but 6 or 8 for $1), cucumbers (also non-organic, but 3 for $1), and then I check for organic greens and celery (which usually they don’t have). Next Stop: farmers’ market (usually Georgetown, Columbia City, Capitol Hill, or Madrona, depending on what day it is). Here, I can most surely find organic greens (kale, chard, lettuce) all for no more than $3 a bunch (or 2 for $5-most farmers will let you mix and match) and celery is sometimes hit and miss (sometimes it’s there, sometimes not). Last Stop: If I can’t get any of the items I need at the farmers’ market, I’ll pick them up during our normal weekly grocery trip (usually PCC). The grocery is usually my last resort for vegetables and fruits because they’re usually very expensive there and I’m usually looking to buy a lot of them (for juicing and eating)!

Also, at the grocery store you can pick up the ginger juice for the recipe. A quick note about the ginger–I finally stumbled upon ginger juice in a bottle after getting really frustrated that our juicer wasn’t actually juicing the ginger root I was sending through it (fyi, they have extremely inexpensive ginger root at MacPherson’s). Using the microplane each morning to grate ginger into our juice was driving me crazy (and it was causing little chunks of ginger to end up in the juice). So, I was absolutely giddy when I discover the ginger juice by the ginger people. The bottle is around $3.50 and a little goes a pretty long way:

The Recipe:

Serves 2:

1 cucumber (deseeded and peeled, if not organic)

4 stalks celery

4-5 leaves of lettuce

4-5 leaves of kale (I’ll sometimes save the stalks from kale we’ve eaten and use those)

1 lime, peeled

1 apple

1 tsp ginger juice

Wash, peel, and cut vegetables/fruit as needed.

They obviously only need to be cut small enough to fit into your juicer. Juice all the vegetables and fruit, and then add the ginger juice before you pour it into glasses. Drink up, before it separates! You can easily substitute other things for these ingredients; this is just the one I make most frequently. Tip: wash the juicer right away (I never want to, but it’s a nightmare to clean if it sits in there all day long)!

Afternoon at the Dog Park

After I finished the project I was working on today (draft of a funding proposal for my dissertation research), I decided it would be nice to get outside with Maizy. I was feeling a little more adventurous than the old walk around the neighborhood and decided to take her over to Mercer Island’s dog park. Seattle, it seems to me, has an unusually high number of dog parks/off-leash areas. I mean, there are a lot. Maybe it’s just that I never was clued into the dog park thing living on the east coast, since I had not had the wonderful privilege of living with a dog until I moved to Seattle. In any case, the region has a range of dog parks, ranging from the quickie sandy pit with a fence around it (e.g. Blue Dog Pond) to the dog nirvana (e.g. Marymoor Park). We have not nearly explored all of the off leash areas around Seattle, but our favorites so far are Marymoor, Mercer Island and Magnuson (is there something about M’s and great dog parks?!). The reason these parks are so great varies a bit, but the most important thing is that they all have water! Marymoor is out in Redmond, so honestly we’ve only been there once. But it made quite the impression–40 acres of dog park with nice paths meandering through woods and clearings along a little river. There are ramps down into the water ever few dozen yards and so dogs can swim and run and roll in the grass and tromp through the woods to their hearts’ content. Magnuson is up in northeast Seattle off of Sandpoint Way. This offleash area is also very big and has a small beach on Lake Washington. Unlike Marymoor and Mercer Island, Magnuson is good because there are lots of options of areas to play or walk in. There are a couple sets of gates between the beach access and the rest of the park. So, if you are with a dog who is not supposed to go in the water for whatever reason, you can enjoy the rest of the park (the other two don’t have separators between the rest of the park and the beach). Mercer Island is a much smaller offleash area than the other two, but it’s beautiful and well-kept and there are a couple of beach access points:

IMAG0449 — Luther Burbank off-leash area on Mercer Island

Maizy, being a lab and all, is quite the swimmer:

IMAG0455 — Maizy swimming in Lake Washington

And quite the ball chaser. She kept digging under this rock, trying to get at something.

I should have known right away that it was a tennis ball. And not just any tennis ball, but a much newer, cleaner tennis ball than the one she brought to the park. She’s a girl who knows what she likes:

A couple of other features of Mercer Island off-leash area (and some of the other off-leash areas) are the small and shy dog area:

IMAG0448 — for small, shy and recuperating dogs

and the dog shower area:

After some great swimming, ball-chasing and running around, we headed back home so that Maizy could have a nap before she has a dinner date with her best friend, Mally: