I Feel Home

My first two weeks back in California have been absolutely amazing. My wonderful father drove me out to LA from Austin and from there I flew straight to San Francisco for Bay to Breakers!

Bay to Breakers Noah’s Ark Theme

I didn’t really have a costume because I had just driven from Austin and Fenner failed to get me a turtle costume, but it was fun nonetheless!

ADVENTURE FRIEND

After a rambunctious few days in San Francisco, I headed down to San Diego for a weekend of relaxation with some girlfriends. We went out to dinner for Danielle’s birthday and then the next morning we went out for a nice little hike:

Mt. Woodson

Lake Poway

Another birthday dinner:

Yummy Dinner

I couldn’t have imagined a better return to California than the last two weeks. I get the feeling it’s going to be a really good summer!

Tags: bay to breakers, food, friends, LA, San diego, San Francisco

The Education Enigma

DISCLAIMER: *If you are looking for some super clear thoughts on education, don’t read this. My brain is at 50% capacity after finals so we’re working with our C-/D+ game. My apologies.*

I’m back from neglecting my blog and more importantly: I finished my first year of law school! I could not be more excited and I can’t wait to get back to California for the summer. Yesterday, I spent a lovely morning reading through the NYT and came across a really great article on education you really need to read. The article talks about charter schools in NYC for predominantly poor, minority children and generally discusses issues of resegregation in schools and whether or not it’s a good or a bad thing. We talked a bit about this issue during my constitutional law course this past semester, but during my masters program, I took a number of education management courses and this topic came up over AND over AND over agin.

Resegregation is an extremely divisive issue with no clear solution, mostly because we can’t really seem to agree on whether or not it’s actually a problem. As an education enthusiast and someone who is deeply troubled by the direction of our country’s education system, I myself have trouble deciding where I come out on the issue. I like this article because it manages to be somewhat objective in offering you a sampling of both sides of the issue. On the one hand, integration is important in terms of citizenship. We want kids to grow up seeing other races, interacting with other races, and understanding different cultures because that is what they will encounter in the real world. On the other hand, it may be a wiser investment to provide schools in poor areas with the basics they so desperately need: books, good teachers, quality classrooms, libraries, and computers. The concern for those expressing the latter point of view is that we need to first make sure all children have access to better education and then worry about integration/diversity. While I do agree with making sure we’ve got our priorities straight, I can’t help but the think the two goals are inextricably linked.

One of the concerned parents said that race would be the only thing her child would see if he continued to be educated in a racially segregated environment. For me, that observation is what really nails the lid on the coffin. America is quickly becoming a mixing bowl. Fewer people are just white or just black and more are simply a lovely golden brown. That means we’re probably getting more attractive (my personal belief that mixed people tend to be wildly attractive) and we’ve got a whole new color to classify: light brown/caramel people. The thing is, becoming more mixed is unlikely to make us more colorblind. We will probably just start to have blacks, whites, light browns, browns, caramels, etc. The kids in the charter school already have these classifications and I actually heard the term “brown” used to describe a girl I went to law school with not too long ago. Well, actually my roommate heard and came home and asked me, “Is this where we’re headed now?” And I said, “I guess this is where we’re headed now.” I guess what that means is that racial classifications are here to stay. If that’s the case, then I think efforts to integrate schools are a good idea and will continue to have increasing importance in the years to come. Noticing race is fine, but we want to make sure that race is not the only thing that kids notice. At the very least, what we need to kids to understand growing up is that behind every color is a person, just like you.

Reflections of A Vegan

Well howdy y’all. Easter is only a few days away, which means…I don’t have to be vegan anymore in 3 days! The truth is, being vegan hasn’t actually been all that difficult. There were some moments some PMS moments where I really struggled with it because I wanted to eat all the cheese, all the sweets, and all the food generally, but that time only actually accounted for about 72 hours of the entire lent, so I think that’s pretty good. Otherwise, I think being vegan could actually be pretty okay, but I won’t do it because I tend to want things more if tell myself I can’t have them, which is why I don’t diet well.

Here are my reflections:

Cooking:

I loved it. It’s easy to be vegan if you eat every meal at home. I started doing some exploring with more herbs and more stir fry combos (I love stir fry).

Black Eyed Pea Stir Fry

I made the stir fry above not too long ago and LOVED it. I rediscovered my love of green beans and blacked eyed peas. I also discovered that I love dill and lemon juice. I especially love the combo of lemon juice and white wine in pretty much any stir fry.

I also tried this new blackened tofu recipe that I found on Daily Garnish! You should definitely try this if you like tofu! Absolutely the best tofu I’ve ever had that I’ve made myself. I have a feeling that will change soon because I’ve been perfecting my fried tofu recipe.

Vegan Food Substitutes:

Remember last time when I was trying this bad boy out:

Tempeh

I know I told you last time that tempeh is not the devil if it’s maple bacon flavored, but I was lying. After I had such success with tempeh, I went ahead and bought some  vegan cheese and tofurkey slices. no.thank.you. I hit my limit. Initially, I found these things helped my cravings for a turkey and cheese quesadilla or any sandwich really, but after the third or fourth sandwich with fake meat, I was finished. I just remember making the exact same wrap I made in my last post, but with tofurkey and almost throwing up it tasted so revolting. And it wasn’t just the tofurkey. It was the tempeh too. It.was.all.terrible. My cravings for chicken, turkey, and fish subsided once I realized they couldn’t really be replicated in any sort of vegan form so I just kind of dealt with it until it stopped bothering me.

How I Feel:

Well, I hate to admit it, but the energy thing is true. My energy is consistent all day long. I don’t really have any spikes and when I go to bed, I fall asleep almost immediately. I don’t really know about my weight because I don’t keep a scale in my house (I can be obsessive compulsive so healthier for me to not have one probably ever), but my jeans fit the whole time and some things are looser than they were before. My classmate also tells me my face looks thinner so I guess something happened. Looking down it seems like my infamous Ned belly has even survived veganism so I’m afraid there’s no way to kill that monster. It is officially just a part of who I am.

What I learned:

I need to relax on the frickin’ cheese front. I.LOVE.CHEESE. But I’ll tell you something, I didn’t miss it that much. Also, I would have rather had a delicious piece of halibut or salmon over a piece of cheese anyway. I missed fish so much because I am a pescatarian at heart. I want vegetables. I want fruit. And I want my freakin food from the sea. Seafood is my go to main dish for dinners so I used a lot of the same sauces I use for my fish dishes, but with a medley of beans, vegetables and tofu. It worked out well, but I cannot wait to cook a tilapia filet on Sunday. Like so excited I might have it for breakfast.

Oatmeal is just not filling. I don’t care what anybody says, if I have oatmeal for breakfast at 9, I’m hungry by 10:30. An apple and peanut butter is more filling than oatmeal. So is a smoothie. Oatmeal, I’ve decided, is a perfect snack food. It is an evil, evil thing to have for breakfast because the only thing its full of is false promises.

On that note, just give me my freaking eggs for breakfast. Egg whites with kale or spinach with tomato and onion every damn morning until 2013. I can eat this breakfast over and over again. It is always delicious, always satisfying and taste just as good with coffee as it does with green tea. (You know how there are some breakfasts that are meant to go with coffee? i.e. pancakes or bagels)

I can be vegan 75% of the time. Seriously though. I usually do a protein focused meal for one meal a day and the rest are vegetarian. If I leave the cheese off almost all the time, I could be totally vegan except for the egg I have in the morning or the fish I have at night. I’m going to pay close attention to this because I do like the idea of eating as clean as possible, I just want the freedom to have a burger when I want a damn burger. I’ll be sure to visit the farm like in Portlandia first before I order it (just saw this show for the first time last week, HIGH-larious!).

Carbs are the devil. I still have a skewed understanding of food leftover from my psychotic high school and sporadic moments in college days. I can pretty much tell you how many calories are in everything and I also just hate/fear/love carbs. It is the only diet that I’ve ever done strictly that worked and the pounds just seem to melt off of me. So every time I eat a carb, I assume I just gained five pounds. Not sure its a sentiment I will ever part with, but I didn’t like that I ate more carbs while being vegan. I actually hated it, but sometimes when there’s no other food, there’s a slice of bread. Did I mention I hated it?

All in all, being vegan was not a life changing event for me. I did decide the other day, as I was eating peanut butter out of a jar, that I could go raw if there was an exception for nut butters. I love peanut butter, almond butter, sunflower seed butter. You name it, I love it. I have at least one scoop of peanut butter a day, sometimes 2 or sometimes I just give up and sit down with a jar and a spoon. Actually the other day, I had a plain spinach salad and 4 spoons of peanut butter. I wish I was lying, but I’m not. It is pathetic and amazing all at once. I’ll do a special nut butter post one day because, well I don’t like to brag, but I’m kind of a nut butter aficionado. Ya, I know, I’m kind of a big deal.

Well that’s all my thoughts on being vegan. Until next time my friends.

SKs to all,

Bribri

Bri’s Excellent Vegan Adventure

Well folks, turns out being vegan is ALL she wrote. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds nice. It’s actually not all she wrote, but I am hanging in there. The first week and a half was totally fine. I pretty much ate like I normally do except I had oatmeal, fruit and peanut butter, or a smoothie for breakfast everyday instead of an egg scramble or yogurt. I must say, I don’t think about my egg scrambles or yogurt that much, but I really do miss them! I am a BIG breakfast person because I wake up starving every.single.morning. Sometimes my body wakes me up well before my alarm because I’m just so freaking hungry. It’s a serious problem.

Anywho, I am now getting to the more adventurous part of my journey because the same veggie soups and stir fry concoctions are just not cutting it. I finally gave in to vegan cheese and more importantly, this:

Smoky Maple Bacon Flavored Tempeh

Now what you need to know about me is that I HATE Tempeh with a deep fiery passion because I just can’t begin to handle the texture, but I was hungry in a grocery store and I saw bacon flavored and I gave in. A couple of nights later, I’d done a really bad job of getting in my protein for the day, so I decided to give the evil tempeh a try. I followed the directions on the box and just let it cook in a frying pan with some olive oil for 2 minutes on each side like this:

Frying the Tempeh

After it was finished, I gave it the almighty taste test. Excuse the photos. I tried to book Deb’s Glamour Shots to take them, but she wasn’t available so here I am in probably some of the worst photos ever taken of me:

Questionable First Impression

I think I can eat this crap

Well, after a few questionable first bites, I started to turn the corner. The bacon flavor was so strong that it took the attention away from the texture problem and I found myself actually enjoying tempeh. It was incredibly strange, but you really just can’t imagine how happy I was to like it and have some more protein options in my life.

Fast forward two days later and look what I was up to in the kitchen!

TLT

That’s right folks. I made a freakin’ TLT wrap and it was scrumptious. Whole wheat tortilla smeared with red pepper hummus, spinach, red pepper, tomato, salt and pepper and the star of the hour: MAPLE BACON FLAVORED TEMPEH. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself and I think I ate the whole thing in 3 bites. It was so good and I cannot wait to make another one or do other fun things with flavored tempeh.

Otherwise, the whole vegan thing is going pretty well. I have a pretty stable energy level and don’t really seem to have any dips in my energy levels, which I think is pretty interesting. I also sleep like a rock and fall asleep almost immediately after crawling into bed. My new favorite thing to do is to think about my first meal on Easter. You better believe it is going to involve some EGGS and CHEESE!! SO MUCH CHEESE!!! Some chicken also sounds super delicious, but maybe that’s because my evil roommate has been keeping a rotisserie chicken in the fridge that I’ve been staring at for 2 weeks now. It’s not even still good, which means she keeps it in the fridge at the front of her shelf just to torture me!!!!! The worst.

Okay, well that’s all I have for now. One of my best friends and my parents are here visiting for spring break so it’s time for me to go back to playing and doing all the things that are SXSW!

SKs,

Bri

Tags: being vegan, tempeh, vegan

Did I just hallucinate a cow?

No, but talk to me mid-March and I might be. Yes, that’s right, this year for lent, I’m going vegan. Ohhh baby.

As you all may or may not know, I don’t really have an ounce of religion in me, but I do find Lent to be a very fascinating ritual and think it’s fun to participate in. In year’s past, I’ve given up sweets, ice cream and one year I did cheese. That was the worst of them all. I did not grow up in a religious household, but (hold your breath, hear comes the blasphemy!), I think church and worship are a bit of a silly ritual with that old preacher man up there telling you what’s right and wrong. I think there probably is a higher power, but I am pretty sure me and that being can figure out what’s right/wrong, good/bad all on our own without someone telling me how to do it. So basically, if you haven’t figured it out yet, my problem with religious things is that I just don’t like people telling me what to do. That and I’m not a very good singer. And on Sunday morning, I wanna be at brunch having a mimosa. That’s just me though.

As for my decision to be a vegan this year, I think the vegan lifestyle is wildly over-hyped and I want to know if people do it to lose weight or if it really makes your body feel oh so wonderful. Am I going to have more energy than I’ve ever had in my life or am I going to be cranky and hungry as hell? I already ate a mostly vegetarian diet before I started my veganism today. When I do eat meat, it’s usually fish. Otherwise, the majority of my meals are vegetarian.

Things I’m worried about:

I can’t eat CHEESE or EGGS aka my two favorite foods! I will be lost without them.

Accidental slip ups. Because I’m not one of those psycho people worried about whether there’s butter in the food I’m eating and whether that butter came from a cow, I am prone to accidental slip ups, where I think something is vegan, but it’s not. I went grocery shopping last night and had to read the ingredients of every product I bought a couple times to make sure I was getting it right.

I’m gonna be hungry. Though being vegan isn’t a huge departure from my normal diet, I really depended on things like greek yogurt and eggs for protein to keep me full. I’m not sure how life will work without them, but I’ll figure it out.

Things I’m excited about:

This supposedly “amazing transformation” that’s bound to come any day now (haven’t even been vegan for 24 hours) where I just start glowing and get great skin and constant energy and blah blah blah. Wouldn’t mind if my pant size dropped either! (Hey, no one ever said I wasn’t shallow!)

Creativity in the Kitchen. The first couple of weeks, I’m sure I’ll be content with my old bean, vegetables, and grain medley for dinner and salad with some sort of vegan burger for lunch, but by mid-March, I’m gonna need to branch out. I’m gonna need to lurk on vegan, food blogs and learn how to make some creative foods that  I will mostly likely thoroughly enjoy and add to my regular rotation once this is all said and done.

I’ll try to keep you guys updated over the next 40 days. Depending on my mood, you could be in for quite the comedic treat.

SKs,

Bri

 

 

Tags: lent, religion, vegan

Sunday Soups

Oh hey! Remember when I tweeted about this a while back??!!

Turkey, Navy Bean and Kale Soup

When I wake up on the weekend and it’s cloudy outside, only one two things come to mind: I’m never getting out of this bed and later when I do decide to get out of bed, I’m making soup. For the past year or so, I’ve had the idea of a turkey, bean and kale soup in my head. I searched online for recipes and they always seemed to have bean and kale, turkey and kale, or kale and bean, but never all 3 together unless it was turkey sausage or something (gross). So, I finally decided to take matters into my own hands and make my own recipe. The last time I did this, it didn’t work out so well and I think it’s because I tried to do a Bethenny Frankel “use what you have” soup. I didn’t have chicken broth (a major ingredient) so I used water. Ya, I know. Epic disaster. But this recipe is way better and super delicious because I thought it through and stuff.

So without further ado, Turkey, Navy Bean, and Kale Soup!

Ingredients:

1 medium onion

2 garlic cloves

1 medium bunch of kale chopped/shredded/however you break kale into smaller pieces

1 of those cartons of chicken broth low sodium

1 can of navy beans

2 celery stalks chopped

3/4 to 1lb. of ground turkey or roasted turkey chopped into small pieces

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 cup chopped basil

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 to 3/4 cup of shredded carrots

A pinch of crushed red pepper if you like spicy

Directions:

1. Chop your onion and garlic and sauté them together in a pot with some olive oil. Once they caramelize, add the turkey.

2. Break up the turkey and cook most of the way through if it’s raw, ground turkey. If it’s roasted turkey, then it’s already cooked so just throw it in there.

3. Once your turkey is cooked add all the rest of the ingredients, stir and let simmer on medium for about 30 minutes.

4. After 30 minutes, do a taste test. If you want it spicier add that crushed red pepper or if you are a salt freak like me, you’ll add some more salt (preferably with a heavy hand if you are me!).

5. If you adjusted the seasoning, let it cook on medium for another 10 or 15 minutes.

6. After cooking about 45 minutes to an hour, it should be finished.

Nomnomnomnomnom

This soup is very warming and comforting in the winter time. And if you are on a diet, it’s low in calories, fully of veggies and quite filling. If you aren’t doing a low carb diet, I highly suggest serving this soup with some warm bread on the side, preferably smothered in melted cheese like this:

Toasted Multigrain bread with Cheddar Cheese on the Side!

Oh yayayayayaya. I loved this soup! And I’m so happy I finally have a successful recipe for turkey, bean and kale soup!

Ok that’s all. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a wonderful Valentine’s Day on Tuesday!!!

-Bri

p.s. Never forget how delicious sweet potatoes are. Last week I had half of one for dinner and served it like this:

Gourmet Sweet Potato Dinner

That is a sweet potato topped with steamed kale, goat cheese, cranberries, and sliced almonds with salt and pepper. So good and a very filling vegetarian meal for dinner. Next time you want a loaded baked potato, I highly suggest you sub in the potato’s sexier cousin, the sweet potato. Can’t beat the sweet and salty combo. Ok time to stop ignoring my brief I’m working on. Goodbye for real!

Tags: soup, weekend, winter meals

How Important is the Middle Man?

Hey peeps. So I’m back in Austin for another semester of law school. Since the semester just started, that means I’m doing less studying, more procrastinating, and hopefully blogging once a week or so. I’ve got an intellectual topic today. I’ve been watching all the news, the protests, and the debates over SOPA and PIPA. Thanks to my friend Jen Martinez, who works at Politico, I’ve been following the issue pretty closely and trying to decide which team I’m cheering for. As someone who wants to pursue a career in entertainment law, my heart goes out to the content providers. The core and most important part of their argument and reasons for wanting these laws is that piracy is wrong. There’s no real away around that. Stealing is wrong and when you steal a physical thing from someone, the law punishes you. Stealing a purse or a car is a much easier theft to police because the owner will actually know its missing. With music, movies, videos, games, and whatever else people steal over the internet, it’s a lot more difficult to police because the owner doesn’t necessarily know they’re missing a copy of their work. But at the end of the day, it is still lawlessness and it is still illegal. Then we have the other side; the googles, twitters, facebooks and other Silicon Valley tech giants. They argue that SOPA and PIPA are censorship and legalizing these bills would put us closer politically to China and essentially go against this country’s democratic values. I’ve listened to about 4 or 5 podcasts, and read about 15 to 20 articles, and I still have no idea who I agree with more.

When I was thinking about the issue some more today instead of doing my reading, I started asking myself about the content providers, the production companies, the record labels, the book publishers, and who is really losing out as a result of piracy. Is it the actual artist in most cases or is it the greedy company making a fortune off the artist’s work? Artists, especially musicians, advertise their work for free through mix tapes, youtube videos, Tumblr, etc. When I started thinking about it, I was a little annoyed to realize that no one seems to be focusing on who these bills are trying to help. It’s clear to me that censoring the internet is not going to work and people will always find a way to get something free on the internet. There are just too many websites and too many hackers that are smarter than our government. So the better question to ask in my mind is: how important is the middle man? How important are these content providers to the entertainment industry and how much do artists need the business man in the fancy suit to come riding in on his white horse to strike a deal and show their work to the world? It seems to me the entertainment industry is a very greedy place to be and has lost a bit of its sense of humanity. There’s a lot of rich people at the top who have tunnel vision for dollar bills and a lot of people at the bottom getting taken advantage of. There’s absolutely no support for you if you’re at the bottom and not many people are willing to lend you a helping hand. That’s why they call it a tough industry.

So my question then, isn’t necessarily whether we should be passing SOPA or PIPA but rather who wants these bills passed, who the bills will actually help, and the motivation behind wanting the bills in the first place. If the actual artist isn’t going to benefit from SOPA/PIPA  then we need take a step back and ask why we’re doing it in the first place and whether or not its important to help the middle man.

 

Back later this week with that soup recipe I’ve been promising on Twitter! Sorry for the delay! I’ve been busy doing a whole lot of nothing!

 

SKs,

Bri

Tags: Entertainment Industry, PIPA, piracy, SOPA