Tofu Omelettes: Part Two

This has to be a first. I don't believe I have ever blogged about the same subject twice. At least not in two consecutive posts anyhow! But I cannot help myself - I am still just totally bowled over by the whole tofu omelette thing and I now have pictures to prove it...erm, I mean 'to share.'

This morning, My Beloved and I made a second attempt at the brunch omelettes, this time stuffing them with leftovers from last night's dinner.

[Sidebar: Since it had been such a wonderful summery day yesterday, we made plans to grill and assembled a motley crew of vegetable victims - a couple of squash (one zucchini, one yellow squash), a gigantic green pepper, a more modest pepper of the orange variety, two portobella mushrooms the size of small dinner plates, cauliflower and broccoli florets and some thick slices of red onion. Having tossed them in a little olive oil, garlic salt and a dash of chipotle pepper, we stepped outside to throw them on the grill only to find that the heavens had opened and it was now pouring with rain.

Undaunted, in that peculiarly British fashion, we grilled in the rain. Well, My Beloved did, and I leant support from the relative safety of the kitchen. Finally, when he considered them done to perfection, My Beloved appeared at the screen-door, bedraggled and dripping wet but proudly bearing a platter of the most intensely delicious-smelling vegetables ever. End sidebar and fast-forward back to this morning's brunch.....]


OK, so the batter looks a little scary, but perservere and you will be rewarded....



Starting to look like the omelettes we all used to know and love...


Drape over a selection of your favourite grilled vegetables....




...fold and we're in business!

And they were 'the business'. Terrific. Tremendous. Delicious and fantastically more-ish. My Beloved, who - to my eternal annoyance - is of a preternatural slenderness, decided that we absolutely had to make the recipe stretch to TWO EACH.

Two.

Each.

I quietly thanked the tofu gods that the batter did not go that far - I would have ended up looking like the Pilsbury Doughboy....Or at least even more so than usual. LOL

Anyways, I have to say - this recipe is no one-hit wonder. It was just as good the second time as the first and got us both thinking about other ways we could use it for weekday dinners. OK, omelettes are great but what about the spanish omelette/tortillas we used to make back in our egg-eating days? I imagine that we could cook up some veg, make a few fried potatoes (homefries-style), fold them all into the batter and pour the whole thing into a somewhat shallow dish to bake until firm. I am poised to experiment. Served with a fresh green salad and a hunk of crusty bread, I can see this going down really rather well as a mid-week dinner treat.

However for now, I thought you might like to see the 'proof positive' of the true magnificence of this recipe from Isa's Vegan Brunch. And, if you are teetering on the verge of trying once again to satisfy your post-egg omelette cravings, to nudge you over the edge into trying out this dish. Believe me....it's well worth it!

Let me know how it goes and stay vegan, friends!

Cold Comfort Farm

As a vegan, I am often asked about my diet and although most people can grasp the idea of not eating the bodies of animals - aka 'meat' - many have a harder time conceptualising a diet free of eggs and milk...oh, and especially cheese. Thanks to extremely successful marketing, eggs and milk are seen as healthful, desirable, 'perfect' foods despite the fact that the exact opposite is, in fact, true.

Similarly, most people do not want to know where their milk and eggs come from, the process which brings them from an animal's body to their plate. The perceived innocuousness of the humble egg is an especially tough one to crack, as it were. The ubiquity of eggs in even apparently unrelated products, combined with the erroneous perception that the 'cage free' label on a carton actually means something in respect of the conditions of production, combined with intrinsic self-centeredness, add up to a situation wherein people succeed in brushing aside the misery and suffering inherent and inevitable in mass egg production. And it is comforting to those fortunate enough to live in rural areas to argue the 'small, family farms, humane conditions' angle, so beloved of my New England neighbours.

However it is a false comfort. A cold comfort. Because it seeks to deny the common-sensical truth that these local farms, family farms, simply cannot provide eggs, cost effectively, on the scale currently demanded. It is logically impossible.

And this is why the majority - the vast majority - of eggs come from massive industrialised battery operations, where tens of thousands of hens are packed into sheds and each one lives out her miserable, foreshortened life in a barren wire cage along with perhaps 7 or 8 cage mates.

That's eight or nine souls in a cage roughly the size of a file cabinet drawer. Eight or nine pairs of eyes looking out into the ammonia-sodden darkness. In fear and panic. Eight or nine bodies with skin rubbed raw from the wire, beaks seared off, sharing space with the dead or dying around them. Until their time for release comes and each cage is finally opened and each spent, broken hen is shipped to slaughter, since her egg production has declined.

Until now, it's been possible to imagine this only from our human perspective. From watching brutal and devastating video of these confined feed operations. Always looking in with the freedom of an external position. But, thanks to web developer and activist Mark Middleton, new perspective is available which puts the viewer squarely in the center of the action - in the place of the hen.

I came across this project - The Virtual Battery Cage - via Animal Voices and recommend it to anyone who has even the slightest interest in knowing where the eggs for their weekend brunch omelette come from. It's a powerful tool in helping us to see life from the perspective of the others. Those who are unfortunate enough to call a battery cage their home. Whose lives and cries are unheeded and whose deaths are mandated by pure economics.

Please check out The Virtual Battery Cage and then decide if that omelette truly is worth it to you.

Stay Vegan, Friends.

Hot Pans & Shiny Hands

Sounds like a bizarre euphemism, right? But actually no, it's more a matter of one preceeding the other. In my last post I mentioned being slightler the worse for wear (am fine and dandy again now - thanks for asking!) and the reason had to do with Spanish Omelettes, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and raw stupidity. Let me explain....

Last night, I was yearning for an omelette - you know, the kind you have with a huge fresh salad and perhaps some crusty bread. So I plumped for the Spanish Revolutionary Omelette in VWAV - throwing in some extras like kalamata olives (yes, more Greek than Spanish but wickedly tasty in any dish as far as I am concerned) and sun-dried tomatoes. I steamed sme asparagus to have on the side (My Beloved won't touch it for some insane reason!) and was thrilled when the timer echoed brightly from the kitchen to announce that the omelette (50 mins in a 400 degree oven) was finished.

I was busy trying to work out how to use Facebook at the time so My Beloved answered the timer's call and took the saute pan out of the oven. Enticed by the aroma, I finished up my FB activities - becoming friends with Erik Marcus of Vegtalk! - and wandered into the kitchen to serve dinner. Now, I ought to say that - in my own defence - I was pretty tired. It had been an incredibly long day which started with a routine trip to the doctor's office (I finally, finally agreed to a cholesterol test just for the anticipated pleasure of getting a good result and blaming it on my diet! tee hee!!) at 7am, work from 8am to 5:30pm, errands on the way home, walking les gars who pulled and tugged and barked hysterically for the whole walk and then starting dinner at 8pm....Yes, I was a trifle fatigued.

However that doesn't excuse the idiocy with which I proceeded.

Yes, you can see it coming, right?

Noticing the omelette on the stove top ready to be sliced, I picked up the saute pan.

Sparing you the grusome details involving screams, gallons of cold water and tears, I spent the rest of the evening with my hand in a gallon baggie of ice, even taking it to bed with me wrapped in a flannel pillow case because my skin was on fire. Well, not literally, but it felt that way whenever the ice-numbing wore off.

Waking up this morning, I found to my utter amazement that not only was the hand still there, but it hadn't even blistered. Yes, the skin is kind of tight and white across my palm and fingers, but there is no lasting damage. Except to my ego, of course. Oh and the Chardonnay-fueled hangover from drinking a glass or two too many 'for medicinal reasons' as prescribed by My Beloved.

So the moral of the story is....?

There isn't one. Just wanted to explain my ealier comment of feeling under the weather....

Stay Vegan, Friends, and away from saute pans!