At x-mas time, when visiting my folks, some of our holiday presents included some excess bounty from their garden, including a shopping bag full of potatoes, a handful of sweet potatoes, and three obscenely large (and shaped) neck pumpkins.
Witness one of these obscene bastards!
(more…)
From my fortune cookie at Thai Cuisine the other night. By “home”, i suppose this could be referring not only to Torley Manor itself, but also to Bloomfield. I mean, where else can one enjoy great vegan thai food (with the legendary veggie chicken ham) while seated one booth over from Tom Savini?
Wednesday night we ripped the carpeting off the stairs. It went fairly quickly. There was some nasty dust under the carpeting and foam, but we were fine because we wore our breathers (you know i don’t work without one of them breathers!), as should you whenever tearing apart something in your old home. I think my lungs got pretty messed up the first couple years i lived here cuz i was tearing shit apart but not wearing protection. Lately i’ve been smart and have worn protection and my lungs seem in better shape than they have in awhile.
Anyway, enough safety first lectures. Next lecture – before starting a home project that involves demolition, take a “before” photo and make sure the batteries in the camera are in good shape (or that you have backups) – as we did not. We have rechargeables, but they seemed to have shit the bed, so our attempts to document the procedure didn’t go that well. But here’s one shot of me during the process and a shot of the stairs after we were done.
Feeling pretty happy with our work, we figured we should finish the drywall in the front hallway and make some overall design decisions before proceeding any further with any attempts to re-finish the stairs.
Wake up saturday morning. Emma had off work, so we lounged about in bed and began to talking about the status of the hallway/stair project. She thought we should rip out the carpet in the front hallway. I suggested that it might make more sense to tear out the capret in the upstairs hallway. Before you know it our plans to hit up the museum are cancelled and we are tearing out the upstairs hallway carpeting. Once again, its a simple process that goes smoothly, the only problem – we realize that its ugly ass linoleum tile underneath this carpet and lots of it is cracked and all of it is ugly. boo hiss!!!
ugly ass cracked tile
Were we done now?? Not quite yet. We still had the arch!! At the top of our stairs there is an arch at the hallway leading to the bathroom. It is on an angle and as such the one side of the arch has a small portion of wall that sticks out into the hallway and is a toe-stubbing hazard, not to mention being kinda stupid looking (i’d show you a photo but having not fixed our battery issue yet, we were unable to take the requisite “before” photo). Having had enough of the arch, we decided now was a good time as any to remove it. Thus we stripped apart the plaster and into the skeleton of this beast. Unfortunately we were unable to completely finish the beast as we’ll need a Sawzall or similar tool to cut out part of the structure of it.
Witness the carnage!!
Of course having done all this damage we are left with a host of questions. How much further do we go with the demolition (do we tear about the drop ceiling while we’re at it? do we replace our broken and ugly banister) How do we brighten up our hallway when it only has one light and all the trim/doors are stained this dark dark brown? What do we cover the horrible tile with? What colors do we paint everything?
A couple of these questions we’ll need to sleep on for a couple more days at least. In the meantime we made a basic timeline of tasks to come and a checklist of the remaining questions.
We’re getting ready for the next big thing. These last few weeks, we’ve been slowly, diligently, ploddingly organizing our lives and messes. In theory, I support “everything in its place” but not really in practice.
So what we’ve been paying attention to is figuring out how we live and work, and more specifically where we work, and finding solutions that actually apply to our lives instead of trying to apply our lives to a solution. An example: when we bought our house, I bought a huge desk to put in the “office” upstairs and then never ever even once did any work at it. The drawers became storage and the surface became a debris-holder. We always did bill-paying and work in the dining room. Always. So what we want to do is figure out a system for keeping that stuff together downstairs, where we’ll use it, without having a filing cabinet in the middle of everything.
It’s a design project at heart — how we use the products in our lives — and I’m pretty excited about it. I have a plan but we’ll see how it goes. I think the solution is a sideboard or buffet in the dining room, so that all the pens and tape dispensers and crafty project supplies and bills and stamps can all be in one place together that’s actually where we’ll use them — and put them away when we’re done too.
In the meantime (while I slowly hunt around to find a sideboard that I can afford and that will suit our style), we’re finally making some headway on carpet removal.
Tonight’s the night! I’ll post some pictures of the stairs and our test area too — Q discovered last night that the stairs are in fact normal regular wood stairs. No linoleum, no tile, nothing weird. Just regular wood, stained the same color as the trim on the staircase. At least, that’s what the test-area showed. Here’s hoping we don’t find ten different kinds of stairs.
hooooooo boy.
For x-mas I got Emma the Veganomicon cookbook. We’ve been trying a handful of the recipes out since then. A couple weeks ago we made homemade seitan for the first time using their recipe. Tonight I tried out their Chickpea Cutlets recipe and used it to make a big ass Vegan Chicken Parmesian Sandwich. Here’s how ya do…
The Torley Manor Winter 2008 greeting cards!!! as inspired by this. Three color hand-screened in Torley’s basement workshop. If you want some, let us know!!!
Ideally, fake cheese would be firm in the refrigerator and melt when heated. Ideally, it would become stretchy and somehow recreate the opiates in actual dairy-based cheese (or is that the ideal?). And of course, ideally it should taste good and not be made of chemicals.
In a pinch, Tofutti brand products will get the job done but they’re so very very processed that the sheer glowing whiteness of the mozzarella slices and sour cream make me nervous. So onward!
There are a lot of variations on making fake cheese at home. The recipe we usually use is the “Classic White Uncheese” from a weird little cookbook that I am certain is owned exclusively by vegans. It’s the venerable Nutritional Yeast Cookbook by Jo Stepaniak (purchased for a buck or two at a used book store in Ithaca NY once upon a time.)
It’s pretty convoluted and absurd but I really like it a lot. It doesn’t get stretchy but it will melt and it will brown a bit if you broil it. It’s also firm enough to grate or slice. Yeah!
Step One: Get everything out and ready first. Normally I don’t bother doing this but this is fairly involved, so just get out and measure all your ingredients and oil the container you want to mold your cheese in at the end.
Step Two: Blend. A food processor or blender really is essential for this recipe. Blend together everything but the water and agar. It looks gross. Roll with it.
Step Three: Dissolve the agar. Agar is a crazy and amazing seaweed that works like gelatin. You can buy it in flakes or a powder. I’ve only ever used the flakes for this recipe but have used the powder in other recipes with equal success, so really use whatever you prefer. Use the tiniest saucepan you’ve got, bring the water and agar to a boil, and simmer it for about five minutes till all the flakes are dissolved. If you don’t have a heat resistant (silicone) spatula, consider getting one. They are great for this kind of thing.
Step Four: Hustle and blend everything. Pour the agar/water into the food processor and blend the shit out of it, stopping frequently to scrape the sides down. You have to work fast because the agar starts to set up as soon as it gets cool. Blend it thoroughly but be snappy, and then pour/scrape everything down into your prepared container.
Let it cool for a few hours in the fridge (leave it uncovered until it’s cooled through) and then do with it what you will! Our plan is fake Philly cheese steaks! I made some homemade seitan for the first time today too. As Q put it, we are Kickin’ Ass in 08!
