“Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.”

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

Yang and I are attempting a little experiment. We are trying to be vegetarians, who from time to time eat meat. [1]

Why do this? Because we just read Eating Animals by JSF, and, despite all efforts to remain “neutral,” we were convinced. The trouble is, we love meat. So short of eschewing it entirely, we’ve decided upon a set of finely tuned (not really), intellectually watertight (not really), agonized over (yes actually) rules for being vegetarians who eat meat.

Without further ado, I give you…

The Yang and Tina “Vegetarian” Project

Rule #1: Every week, we will be allowed to make one choice towards meat. Everything else should be vegetarian.

Examples of what counts as our one choice: one dish to be consumed over several meals, one meal of multiple meat dishes, etc. But each week we only get to do this once.

1a. If we are eating out or ordering in, we can eat any kind of meat (conventional/organic/etc), but with a preference for ethically raised meat.

In an ideal world, we would only ever eat meat that was raised humanely. In reality, it’s prohibitively difficult to tell where restaurant meat is coming from—feedlot or family farm? Precious few dining establishments serve only ethical meat on principle, even in a city like New York. And for the rest, you can pretty much assume it’s all conventional meat. So rather than lose sleep over this, we decided to put our efforts elsewhere.

1b. However, if we are cooking it, the meat must come from an ethical source.

Here’s where we can actually control sourcing, so why not? Yes, this means we’re going to start paying $12.99/lb for pasture-raised, grass-fed ground beef. Yes, it’s total madness, and no, we are not loaded (I’m in grad school… oh let me tell you about the loans…) We are just attempting to reframe meat as a luxury item, an accessory to a special meal rather than the centerpiece of every one. Isn’t that what meat always was, before industrialization ‘optimized’ our meat production system for unrealistically low prices?

Rule #2: Eggs and dairy should come from humane sources too

This is much easier than getting meat. The Greenmarket has free range, organic eggs (actual free-range) for $4/dozen. Amazing fresh milk for $5/quart. Done deal.

Rule #3: If family or friends are cooking for us, we will eat whatever it is, no questions asked. This rule trumps everything else.

I believe there are 2 kinds of suffering related to eating meat: that of livestock in terrible living conditions, diseased and drugged, bludgeoned and beaten and worse; and that which would show on my mother’s face as disappointment if I were to refuse something she lovingly cooked for me. Those are not equivalent quantities of suffering by any means, but you can probably guess which means more to me. Yang agrees.

And that’s basically it. We’ll be eating a whole lotta legumes, leafy greens, and grains! And I’m gonna have to learn some new dishes. Should be fun!

I wonder, if anyone reading who is reading this has ever attempted vegetarianism before, or tried modifying their meat-eating practices? If so, I’m curious to know how it went. I would love to swap notes on thought process, implementation, and all those goodies.

Wish us luck! I, for one, will need it.

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[1] We realize that a more appropriate term for what we’re aiming to be is “flexitarian.” But, as far as my omnivorous appetite is concerned, we’ve already embarked on the unthinkable: deliberately choosing to avoid meat at all. So if I listen carefully at what my lizard brain is saying, I’m pretty sure it’s wrathfully accusing me of being a… vegetarian.

I’ve made pork tenderloin before many times, but it was always hard to tell when it got done, and whether it would be juicy or a log of shoe leather by the end. I also could never seem to get a nice crust on the outside. So finally I decided to get down to learning how to do it right. The recipe I used tonight came from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which is a sizable compendium of classic French recipes generously annotated by both Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. The recipe is simply called Sautéed Pork Filet or Tenderloin. It was pretty standard, following your classic “sear, bake, and make sauce” procedure. However this time around I made sure to follow the recipe to the letter. And when I deviated, I noted what went differently, why, and how I fixed it. As a result I think tonight’s pork tenderloin was the best I’ve ever made.

I learned a bunch of things in the process, so I shall write them down here in case you too might find them useful. What follows is my version of the recipe, adopted from and even more thoroughly annotated than J&J’s version (if such a thing were possible).

Tina’s Julia & Jacques’ Pork Tenderloin

Ingredients
1 small pork tenderloin (about 1 lb.)
10 apricots
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tbsp minced shallots
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/3 cup beef broth
1/2 tbsp jam (such as black currant, plum, or, in my case, lingonberry)
1/2 tbsp ketchup
fresh parsley or basil for garnish

Method

1. Cut the pork tenderloin into 4 equal-sized chunks and salt/pepper it.
   Jacques says to angle the knife differently each time so you end up more with a series of tetrahedral hunks about 2″ thick at the center, than with round discs. At first I did not know what difference this made, but I realized that this helps you actually brown the entire exterior of the meat, instead of ending up with just the top and bottom browned (as would be the case for a disc-shaped piece).
2. Preheat oven to 350˚ F. Heat vegetable oil in pan on high heat.
   Here is where I began to deviate from the original recipe. First, J&J say to set the oven to 200˚. The oven is for gently roasting the pork after you sear it quickly in the pan, so the inside cooks up all juicy and tender. I found that 200˚ was too low, but this may also be my oven being an old batty apartment oven. Let’s just say you, too, have an old batty apartment oven. Go with 350, otherwise your pork will never be cooked to an edible state in time and you will end up with cold sauce in the pan waiting for it. Secondly, I accidentally used olive oil (reflex…), which was dumb. Olive oil has a low smoke point and it isn’t suitable for high-heat activities like searing… let’s just say our kitchen had an interesting haze for much of the evening. You should definitely use a vegetable oil such as canola. Thirdly, medium-high heat to me is a 7 out of 10 on my electric coil-style stove on the largest burner (8″ diameter). The different burner sizes vary significantly in heat output, so I would say, be sure to save the big burner for this step. Finally, use a non-nonstick pan because I find that nonstick pans just don’t heat up well enough. Also, you’ll never be able to deglaze it without also ripping off all the nonstick coating. I used my 9″ Cuisinart stainless steel frying pan for this.
3. Sear the meat for 5 minutes total, turning throughout.
   First step to happy searing is to really heat the oil up real hot. Heat it until it gets that ripply look on the surface. This is where I often trip up because I’m impatient and the electric coils heat up super slow (I’m a gas stove kind of Tina, alas.) Then when the oil is hot, put the meat in the pan. It should hiss mightily at you. If not take the meat out and keep heating the oil, then try again. When searing, make sure your pan is big enough for at least 1″ of clearance around each chunk or else you will get steaming action and not frying. If there isn’t enough clearance, do 2 batches. One area which I personally have a lot of trouble with is knowing when to flip. I discovered that 2 minutes on aforementioned 7/10 heat is enough to get a perfect golden brown crust on the first side, but the first side only. And no peeking. Afterwards, I begin to turn the chunks every 1 minute or it starts to burn. After 5 minutes and 3 or 4 turns you should have all sides cooked to a crusty, even, golden hue. If not, you will know next time whether you should adjust the heat on your stove up or down.
4. Lower heat to medium. Put the meat in an oven-proof dish and pop it in the hot oven.
   This is to finish cooking the insides, which right now is straight-up raw. At this point, set the mental timer for 10 minutes exactly. At 10 minutes, open the oven and poke the meat. If it feels completely squishy still, give it another 5. Meat should still yield a bit to the poke when you take it out. This will result in medium to medium-rare meat. (I did extensive research, a.k.a. reading the first 10 links in Google, on whether rare pork is OK. The consensus is that nowadays, it is just as OK as rare beef, as food safety standards have improved drastically since the 60s when everyone was scared of trichanosis poisoning.) In any case, 10-15 minutes will result in meat that is still a little pink in the center, but really juicy and nothing like the awful leathery stuff you get when cooked to FDA specs of 155˚ internal temperature. Totally worth the sliver of a risk of dying, if you ask me.
5. Make the sauce: in the pan where you cooked the meat, add shallots and sauté for 30 sec. Add red-wine vinegar, stock, and port. Deglaze pan. Add apricots and reduce for 5 minutes on a gentle boil. Stir in jam and ketchup.
   This step is pretty self-explanatory. The jam essentially thickens the sauce into a beautiful glossy sheen, as Jacques explains in the sidebar. It’s a great trick. Look ma, no flour. Anyway, if you have everything already measured out, making the sauce will beat the roasting meat to the finish line. In which case you can turn off the heat, cover the sauce to keep it warm, and wait for the meat to finish. Use your newly emancipated attention to check up on the meat assiduously so it doesn’t get over-cooked.
6. Take meat out of the oven, arrange on plates, and pour the yummy leftover pork juices into the sauce. Stir, pour sauce over meat, and serve!
   

That’s it. It’s really quite easy once you figure out what your own oven/stove’s equivilant of high and medium heat are. So I guess it really comes down to practice. I’m happy to say next time I make this I’ll have this extremely verbose guide to refer to, and it just might come out as awesome as this time.

***

PS: Yang and I have decided I should publish a book called “Difficult, Unhealthy Dinners,” along the lines of this one. Because I champion fat-and-black-bits-laden foods the world over (hey, Julia says it’s totally OK in moderation) and I seem to have a knack for making easy recipes sound hard. But I think maybe we’ve got it backwards. Many recipes that claim to be easy are actually pretty hard to master. They only seem easy because they are written with an economy of words. You can only learn by doing, for instance, that your oven temperature will be way off and the supposedly “quick” recipe will take twice as long and can no longer be relied upon to produce what it claims to be perfect done-ness. So the purpose of this book would be to make easy recipes seem hard by making them super-long, but of course in doing so they will be easy again because you will be totally prepared when your oven is way off from what it’s “supposed’ to be. And of course all of the recipes will feature ample amounts of fats, sugars, and crunchy blackened crusts. Oh yes.

I love French onion soup in restaurants, the way they come in a little clay bowl all bubbling over with melty cheesy goodness. They can do that because they can stick the whole bowl in a hot oven and let it broil the bejesus out of the cheese. But we can’t, mostly because my mom and Yang teamed up against me to prevent me from purchasing 4 ramekins for $3 at TJ Maxx.

But it’s okay, I’m not bitter. Because I figured out another way to get practically the same delicious result.

Basically first you make French onion soup in a pot on the stove. I prefer Elise’s version over at Simply Recipes, even though she, too, says to do the oven bit at the end. Simply ignore step 3, and do like follows instead:

First you get some bread. Hamburger buns split in half will also do. This is what we had.

Then you get some garlic and put it through the garlic press (Anthony Bourdain be darned). Then you smear this lovely garlic mush over the top of each bread piece. Then you brush the top with olive oil…

…And stick it in the toaster oven on “bake” for however long it takes for the top to get golden brown.

Then you put cheese on top of the bread. We had slices of Swiss, which, if you fold the corners in, kinda fits perfectly on a Trader Joe’s hamburger bun. Now you know…

…And switch the toaster oven to broil, whereupon it doth broil until the cheese bubbleth.

And then, when the bread is yummy, and the soup is done, you do this:

+

=

In the end, equally delicious as the restaurant version, AND we managed to use up 4 more onions out of our Costco onion bag. Hooray!

ADDENDUM: The only downside is that hours later, I still can’t sit in the kitchen without eyes stinging and nose running. I need to work on this.

Yumbox started off as a complaint. “There are no decent recipe managing websites out there,” I whined. It’s true. All of the popular ones are too bloated with so-called community features. Now I’m not a bah-humbug recluse type of Tina, but I do want to keep things simple. I simply want to be able to collect, catalogue, and organize recipes, without having to field ads on the left, comments on the right, and watch out! a seasonal feature coming right at you overhead. On the other end of the spectrum, we already have many super pared-down, personal-recipe-collection types of web apps, which initially seemed more to my taste—there was even a mobile version of some for iPhone!—but ultimately none of these were completely satisfactory. They either lack essential features, have an inflexible organizational scheme, or just plain don’t look good.

Yumbox seared all of these flaws with its laser vision, plus it has all the lovely corner-rounding CSS that you could ever want.

After four months of grueling hard labor, Yumbox (Personal Tina Edition) is ready for the looking-ats. We’re still ironing out the final bugs in the iPhone version, but in the meantime, you can check it out here!

Yummy features include:

• smartypants parsing of pasted ingredient list into separate table columns for amount, unit, ingredient name, and optional note
• freeform + flexible tag-based organization scheme
• super-fast Ajaxified editing, tag adding, login, etc.
• shopping list that supports drag and drop reordering, automatic ingredient combining, amount specifications, and colored ingredient highlighting (so you can see which ingredient belongs to which recipe)
• iPhone version that fully supports editing and adding new recipes, and most importantly, the shopping (check)list
• ability to choose between a traditional, full-text recipe or a recipe link (useful for bookmarking blogs within your food-centric existing tagging system, so that you do not have to maintain a separate Delicious account or Bookmarks folder for keeping track of interesting recipes)
• background colors and images change according to the seasons, featuring randomized photos of seasonal produce (a friendly reminder to eat locally and seasonally)
• Doubles as a personal recipe-focused food blog and a recipe manager
• Large font for reading off the screen while cooking
• Clean, recipe-focused design

The hope is that someday we can roll this out to be a full-fledged web app so everyone can use it, not just me. In the meantime, I’ll be the guinea pig. =) And from now on, I will post almost all of my new recipes in Yumbox, save for the ones that come with a verbose tale… like Roll Cake (sigh).

I think I know now why the cake wreck blog took off so quickly, and why it’s actually gotten popular enough to be made into a book. Cakes are immensely prone to wrecks. At every stage of the process, from mixing the batter to baking to getting it out of the cake pan to frosting can go disastrously wrong. It’s also that many things normally considered excusable in other forms of food-making suddenly seem heightened in their awfulness when you’re making a cake. People have high standards for cakes. Not only must it taste good and have good texture, it must be structurally sound and beautiful. No one cares if a stir-fry or a spare rib doesn’t stay stacked in a three-layer tower, or crumble when you try to roll it. No one cares if it looks disheveled and thrown together, which often actually adds to its devil-may-care culinary appeal.

Today, my cake roll adventure, which may or may not have ended in a wreck this time (you judge), took from start to finish a total of four hours. Cookies, muffins, and even cheesecake? Half an hour for certain, I can do it. Cake, particularly this cake roll, was a challenge. Every step of the way I was a nervous wreck. A nervous cake wreck. This was exacerbated by the fact that I had to fulfill certain stringent requirements with regards to the color of the cake (I’ll explain). Furthermore, if anything went horribly wrong, I couldn’t exactly start over because there are no replacement ingredients to be bought today, it being Thanksgiving and whatnot. (By the way, what a funny grammatical construction. But I guess it’s cool for me to be colloquial. It being that no one reads my blog and whatnot. =D)

Cake rolls are notoriously hard… for me at least. (OK ex-roommates. Stop laughing now.) My last attempt ended up in a smushed cake… uh, casserole. Basically the darn thing fell apart when I tried to roll it. This time I did my research ahead of time. I learnt that a good spongecake is required. Spongecake is bouncy and resilient and kind of stretchy. You could roll and unroll that sucker all day long and it’d keep its structural integrity. Although you probably would not want to eat it afterwards. Here is the recipe I found and used:

Orange Sponge Cake Roll

I made some modifications as I didn’t actually want the cake to taste of orange. So I left out the marmalade and subbed blueberry jam. I also didn’t have cake flour so I followed these tips to make my own approximation thereof. Finally, I halved the sugar, as this was being made for a Chinese parents type of crowd and they do not like their cakes all sugared out.

The cake itself went pretty well, up until the point I got it out of its pan. I had not greased the wax paper well enough. Whodathunk you had to grease something that was already waxed? I ended up spending way too long peeling off wax paper in little shreds, and the cake cooled completely before I could roll it up in a towel to set its shape. I stuck it back in the oven, at which point it then overbaked slightly and got a little harder than it should have been. Oh well, next step.

I then spread the cake with Acadia National Park wild blueberry jam, which is awesome. This step went well. Then I rolled it back up. This step went well, too. It did! You can look at the pictures at the end if you don’t believe me.

There was a problem.

Okay, so I mentioned before there was a color requirement. My cake had to be… blue. This is is because I was making it for Thanksgiving dinner at Yang’s house, and his mom decided that the theme of the dinner is to be colors. And I was assigned the most impossible color. Blue. Nothing is blue in nature that’s meant to be edible. Not even blueberries are blue! Technically speaking. She told me she gave me blue was because I’m the most creative. Sigh.

The problem was that, because of this color requirement, I had put a tiny bit of blue food coloring in the batter. When I was mixing the batter, it looked reasonably blue. A little teal, perhaps, from combining with the yellow of the egg yolks. But after baking, the color was decidedly green. And not even a nice, springly vegetal green… it was sickly blue-green. I made a blue-green cylinder. By Jove, it did not look delicious at all.

My original plan was to sprinkle powdered sugar over the whole shebang and be done with it. I now knew that was not going to be okay. This blue log deal had to be frosted.

I was like, This is cool, I can frost this thing. I’ve made awesome buttercream frosting before. But then all sorts of stuff went wrong. The butter wouldn’t melt consistently. Then it melted into pure hot liquid. Then I beat in too much sugar and it got hard, so I added milk. I added too much milk, and it was basically water until I added all the powdered sugar we had in the house. It was still runny as hell. I was all @#$%^&@!* at the ceiling. Then I realized we had a small reserve of powdered sugar that Nika’s mom brought over. I went for it, but not before siphoning off half of the goo. I mixed all of the sugar in the goo and it turned into frosting consistency. WHEW.

I frosted that sucker. And here it is: blue roll cake.

Off to the party!

Berry Banana Yogurt Popsicles
Banana, any kind of berry, vanilla yogurt, honey or sugar to sweeten

Mango/Coconut Pineapple Popsicles
Mango chunks and/or pineapple chunks, coconut milk, small bit of lime juice, sugar or agave nectar to sweeten

Strawberry Sour Cream Popsicles
Strawberries and sour cream (roughly 3:1 proportion), lemon juice, and sugar or agave nectar to sweeten

Cherry Almond Vanilla Popsicles
Cherries, vanilla yogurt, apple juice, honey, and a few drops of almond extract

Honeydew Lime Popsicles
Honeydew melon, lime juice, sugar or agave nectar to sweeten

Tea Popsicles (!!)
Any kind of tea that would taste good iced and brewed really strongly, made with extra honey or sugar mixed in. Last year we made matcha tea popsicles that were good, with heavy cream mixed in, except I think I whipped the mixture a bit too hard and the frozen result was kind of… foamy. Ever eaten frozen foam? It’s weird.

Mojito Popsicles
Lime, mint, and sugar. Maybe some strawberries too… oh yeah, that’d be nice. One of my favorite flavor combinations of all time! Too bad I am putting myself on an alcohol diet =( otherwise I imagine you could spike this with some rum, but not too much, or it won’t freeze.

Strawberry Balsamic Popsicles
Strawberries, brown sugar, really high quality balsamic vinegar, apple juice (to hold it all together)

Cheesecake Popsicles
Cream cheese, yogurt, strawberries, sugar

Lavender Lemonade Popsicles
Lavender lemonade… frozen

All of the above are pretty much made by combining all of the ingredients in a blender, blending until smooth, and then pouring into molds, and freezing for ~6 hours, depending on how cold your freezer is. The recipes all ask for extra sugar because stuff tends to taste extra-tart when they are cold (Presumably because the coldness does something to numb the receptors for sweetness? I don’t know.) I’m also told that simmering the ingredients with the sugar beforehand will produce more of a syrupy consistency and, as a result, the pops will be easier to bite into when they’re frozen. We might try this out because every time we made pops before, we ended up with jaw-destroying rocks (of deliciousness nevertheless). The only truly hard part about making popsicles is getting them back out of the mold again, but you can do the hot-water bath trick to melt them a little on the outsides…

Yang is also enamored of the idea of banana pops. You know, where you halve a banana, put a stick in it, dip it in chocolate, and freeze the whole shebang. Actually, we ought to get some bananas tomorrow =) Luckily we are conveniently sandwiched between Stop ’n’ Shop and Trader Joe’s, both ~2 minutes’ walk away. (Did I mention this apartment rocks?)

Oh man, now I wish it weren’t 1:15 AM. I’d go out right now and get me some popsicle fixings. Yeah.

Really this is quite an amazing discovery, because cocktail sauce is something I always thought you had to go buy because it had some patented top-secret ingredient to it. Except it turns out that it’s just ketchup and horseradish (or, in this case, wasabi).

What if tonkatsu sauce turned out to be the same way!? Life would never be the same again. There might actually be room on the fridge door!