Ugggggghhhh. Saturday was flip-flop weather and today, Monday, THIS:

WHAT IS THIS???

Here’s why Mark is great, or one reason anyway: Fortinbras was here last week and he and Mark went to the mall so Mark could buy a new computer. I refused to go because I despise the mall. When they returned, I was informed that once they got to the Apple store, Mark abruptly announced, “buying a new computer is stupid; let’s go buy Renae something instead,” so they went to Williams-Sonoma and got me a bean pot for no apparent reason. I hadn’t done anything to deserve said bean pot, especially a mere week after Christmas, when I got a Vita-Mix, but I’m not complaining because I’ve been wanting a bean pot, so yay!

The bean pot I suddenly came to own was packed with a couple of recipes so today I decided to make the included Oven Baked Beans recipe, which is slightly non-vegan with its can of pork and beans (and Worcestershire sauce, but since it’s easy for me to buy vegan Worcestershire, I don’t even register it as a non-vegan ingredient). So this is my adaption of the Le Creuset Oven Baked Beans recipe.

Le Creuset Baked Beans

1 1/4 cups dried kidney beans
1 1/4 cups dried baby lima beans
1 1/4 cups dried pinto beans
1 1/4 cups dried Great Northern beans
1 14.5 oz can vegetarian baked beans
1 medium onion, diced
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 cup loosely packed brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses (I used blackstrap; the original recipe didn’t specify a type)
1/4 cup vegan Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup prepared mustard
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp liquid smoke
2 Tbsp chili powder
1/2 tsp smoked pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp salt
hot sauce to taste – I used homemade sriracha
1 packet Goya artificial ham flavoring (optional, but it’s weirdly vegan, so if you want some of the hammy flavor you’re missing from the can of pork and beans, do it up)

Place the kidney, lima, pinto, and Great Northern beans in a large vessel. Cover with several inches of cold water and soak overnight (or all day). Alternatively, cover with several inches of boiling water and soak for one hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dice the onion.

Stir or whisk together the rest of the ingredients.

Drain the soaked beans.

Stir together all of the ingredients in a bean pot, Dutch oven, or large casserole.

Cover …

… and bake until done. The original recipe said to bake for two hours, and after two hours it was certainly edible, but I like my beans creamier so I added more water and baked for another hour.

Serve. This makes way more beans than you will probably need unless you are feeding 40 friends.

Moving on to completely off-topic items, the lovely Zoa asked to see some of the infrared pictures I took in Charleston and I can’t turn Zoa down.

Infrared filters work by blocking all visible light and allowing only infrared light to pass through to the camera. Because all visible light is blocked, the filters appear to be nearly opaque and you need to use shutter times of several seconds to many minutes, and thus you need a tripod. The images you make will appear very red with black detail. Usually you’ll convert this to black & white, where things that reflect a lot of infrared light, like foliage, will be more exposed, or lighter in tone, than they normally appear, which can give pictures an otherworldly appearance.

Here’s what a photo looks like before being converted to B&W:

This is the first infrared picture I ever took. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing and just held the shutter open for a random amount of time, so I don’t know how it ended up relatively well exposed. This is from Middleton Place. The South, with all that gorgeous Spanish moss, is a great place for these types of pictures.

Another from Middleton Place.

My tripod boy (Mark, acting as my assistant, is in charge of carrying the tripod) staged this photo. Can you find him? You can click for a full-size version if you need help.

From Magnolia Cemetery:

From Folly Beach:

We got a little silly by this time and started goofing off with the long exposures. This is me and Mark HAUNTING YOU.

Mark calls this one Portrait of an Artist as a Dead Man.

Okay, nothing too amazing, but I had a lot of fun taking them and am looking forward to playing around with the filter some more.

Those of you who live in the US may have heard (or dealt with) about the slightly freakish snow the East Coast got last Saturday (it doesn’t usually snow in October in the mid-Atlantic region). Ordinarily this is something I would have been loudly whining about – probably right here in this blog – but as it turns out, Mark and I left for LA Friday night and missed the whole ordeal. Yes, it was snowing at home and I was in California enjoying sunshine and 90-degree temperatures. Boy, was that a great feeling.

For our late evening flight, I prepared onigiri (rice balls), which is perfect travel food. I wish I had taken pictures while preparing it, but I was busy getting ready for the trip. Next time I’ll take pictures and do a real post, but really it’s so easy, you don’t need much of a tutorial. And as with most things Japanese, there is little point in me doing a tutorial when Maki of Just Hungry has one that can’t be beat.

To summarize, though, I used a mold similar to this one (Maki’s tutorial explains how to do it without a mold). Just prepare some sushi rice, but don’t cool it and don’t season it as you would sushi – just cook it. Then stir in some salt to taste. Next, fill the mold a little more than half way with rice, then (optionally), make an indentation in the middle of the rice and add about a teaspoon of filling. The filling can really be just about anything as long as it’s not too wet. I used pickled radishes this time. Umeboshi is traditional and I often use it, but I was afraid Mark wouldn’t like it and didn’t want to worry about marking what was in each onigiri. Then fill the rest of the mold with rice, put the top on the mold, and push together. Then unmold – my mold has tabs on it that facilitate pushing the onigiri out.

Finally, and this is also optional, wrap the onigiri in nori, which you can cut out into fun shapes. For traveling, I then wrapped each onigiri in plastic wrap. Unless you use a mayonnaise-y filling, these will be safe at room temperature for quite some time, which is one of the many reasons they are so great for traveling. Other reasons include: you eat them with your fingers, they are filling, they are healthy, and they are super-portable.

For maximum fun, be decorative with the nori.

And now time to bombard you with pictures, though I will try to keep them mostly food- and animal-related. Last year I went totally nutso over the food in LA. As the Angelenos would say, it’s amazing. Here is an example of how amazing: Monday night Fort and Mark and I were at an event, after which we were meeting friends in Silver Lake. I was hungry and my friend warned me there was no food at the bar we were going to and so urged me to find something on the way. I figured that would be a hopeless cause, as we were in a hurry. Then, a block from the bar we drove by a restaurant called Vegan House. There wasn’t anything else around, just a random, open vegan restaurant with, of course, awesome food. There is no need to plan your meals in LA if you are vegan: vegan food is EVERYWHERE. (Except the airport. I hate LAX.)

Another example: I was browsing thrift and book stores near Fort’s new apartment in Echo Park and walked by an ice cream shop. I had really liked the book store I was in and thought how neat it would be if this ice cream shop a few doors down had anything vegan. Turns out it was ALL vegan. That’s LA: I think it might actually be harder to NOT be vegan there.

So anyway, here’s a little recap of my trip. I managed to forget to take pictures of many of my meals – despite the fact I lugged my new camera everywhere – but I did get a few. Saturday Fort took us for a walk through nearby Elysian Park. I love this picture I took of a lizard because he’s looking right up at me and I swear, SMILING! (I have another photo where he’s NOT looking at me or smiling, which makes me all the more sure that’s what he’s doing in this one.)

We hit up wine country on Sunday, where Mark made a new friend …

… as did I.

The views were almost as great as the animals.

Oh yeah, the wine was pretty awesome, too.

Even if I had to share.

Monday night was not only the best holiday of the year, it was Mark’s and my 7-year anniversary. Do you know who we were??

Tuesday we again met up with our friends, who suggested we check out Mohawk Bend. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of our food because it was very dark but I did snap a shot of the menu because I thought it was really cool that everything is “vegan unless marked” otherwise, instead of the other way around! Not only that but they have separate kitchens for the vegan and non-vegan stuff. Everything was delicious here and the drink selection was terrific.

I chased a few cats around throughout the week. There are a particularly high number of them in Venice, where we went Wednesday.

Because I am a great wife, I suggested we go to Disneyland on Thursday, as Mark LOVES Disney. Disneyland fun, see?

Disneyland also vegan-friendly! Vegan gumbo in New Orleans! In a sourdough boule! If you’ve ever tried to find vegan food in a non-Disney theme park, you know how incredible this sort of thing is. It was good and very, very filling. Just what you need to fuel an action-packed day.

The rides are super-fun at Disney …

… but Mark found it very typical that I took more pictures of the ducks than anything else.

Disneyland and Disney World are kinda the same and kinda different. The castles…very different. Like Disneyland in general, it’s much smaller, for one thing.

After a long, hard day of Disneying, we were starving, so I checked my phone for vegan-friendly restaurants in Anaheim. Tana Ethiopian got good reviews and I love, love, love Ethiopian, so away we went! Veggie soup:

Awesomeness:

Friday the unthinkable happened: it RAINED! Actually, I didn’t have a problem with this, other than the fact that LA drivers are even worse in the rain than they normally are, and normally they are even worse than Northern Virginia drivers, who I previously thought were the worst. Mark and I took it easy and stayed local while Fort was in school, though. Which was fine because it gave me a chance to check out Sage Bistro, which was great.

A bright respite from the rain. The counter up front actually contains the vegan ice cream I mentioned earlier.

Mark’s Cobb salad:

My tuna melt with German potato salad:

The snails come out when it rains in LA.

Our final day was yesterday, Saturday. Fort insisted we go to his favorite beach, Malibu. I’ll let the pictures do the talking: gorgeous!

And that was our trip…and also an explanation of where I’ve been during my lull in posting. I’ve really missed Fort and V and am already looking forward to returning to LA, but in the meantime I’m glad to be home with Gomez and Torticia…if slightly less glad to be going back to work tomorrow!

Mark and I were invited to an open house at The Wildlife Center of Virginia this Saturday and decided to make a weekend out of it. The Wildlife Center is in Waynesboro, which is not terribly far from Charlottesville, which I’ve always wanted to explore. We got to see their hospital facility and then meet their non-releasable, resident animals. We weren’t allowed to see any of the patients, of which they see between two and three thousand a year. But it was cool to see where my parents’ money goes (Mark requests a donation to this place from my parents in lieu of Christmas gifts each year).

I thought this kestrel was just adorable!

Many of the other people at the open house were eagle fans. In addition to several other eagle patients, the center is raising several eaglets from the Norfolk Botanical Garden that were orphaned when their mother was tragically killed by an airplane, and most of the visitors have been watching them grow on the center’s eagle cam. We weren’t able to see these eagles, but we did see a couple of non-releasable eagles, such as this guy.

They also have a lot of owls. You might as well know now that I am totally fascinated by owls.

After visiting the Wildlife Center, we drove about 40 minutes east to a town (if you can call it that) called Schuyler, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where out in the middle of nowhere (we had absolutely no cell phone coverage at all) there is a most exciting establishment: a completely vegan bed & breakfast! The White Pig is a B&B and animal sanctuary, specifically for potbellied pigs. It’s a beautiful restored farmhouse:

The innkeeper, Dina, and her husband raise pigs they have rescued. I wish we had stayed two nights instead of one because we did not manage to find time to explore the farm or even see the pigs: we’re definitely going to have to go back. We DID see numerous non-living pigs. My friend Pig was right at home!

It’s a very interesting – and very wonderful – feeling to be staying in a place, especially one so remote, where everything is vegan, including the toiletries. There is even a “no meat on the premises” policy! I don’t generally feel unwelcome when I stay in a “normal” hotel or inn, but let me tell you, I felt damn welcome here! The back of the house:

An old barn next to the house:

Smark being silly:

After settling into the White Pig, Mark and I drove about half an hour into Charlottesville, looking for dinner. We found Lemongrass, a cute little Vietnamese/Thai place near the University of Virginia that had vegan meals noted on the menu. I noticed that some of the things marked vegetarian but not vegan were almost definitely really vegan as well, and in fact, asked about the tofu summer rolls, which fell into that category. Our waitress said I was right that the menu was sometimes wrong about the vegan items and checked with the kitchen to verify the summer rolls were also vegan.

I had the Orange-Tamarind Tofu, which was really good.

Mark had the Cashew Seitan. Let me tell you how Mark felt about the cashew seitan. None of the meals marked vegan were also marked spicy (although as I said, I believe several, if not all, of the vegetarian dishes may really be vegan), so when we ordered I asked them to bring us the selection of “hot stuff” you usually find at Thai restaurants, so we could spice them up. They didn’t remember to bring the hot stuff out, but Mark – the boy who will literally pour an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce over just about anything I serve him, and I cook fairly spicy to begin with – informed me the cashew seitan was so delicious it didn’t need hot sauce. I couldn’t refrain from stealing half of it from him, either.

Later that night we stopped by Whole Foods (I can’t decide if the Charlottesville store is bigger than my local store in Fairfax, or vice versa, but it’s pretty huge) and picked up some Sheese and crackers, which we ate sitting on the porch of the White Pig, drinking the vegan red wine and eating the vegan chocolates we’d been left, and gaping at the stars, which we don’t ordinarily get to see unobstructed by city and suburban lights.

The next morning we went down for breakfast and found two yogurt granola parfaits waiting for us, which I forgot to take a picture of, but which were delicious. Then it was time for blueberry pancakes, which Mark informed me were better than my pancakes. They were. The only time I ever cook breakfast is when Fortinbras is over and demands that I make him pancakes (he can be a bit demanding). So starting what promised to be a long day with a perfectly cooked homemade breakfast was delicious and wonderful. It was also so weird to be able to eat breakfast food while out! So weird that at first Mark avoided buttering his pancakes because we’re so used to just assuming we can’t do that. I had to remind him we could eat everything!

I also ordered box lunches from the innkeeper for us, which I didn’t photograph. They included “chicken” salad sandwiches, which Mark didn’t love because he’s not a fan of mayonnaise, but which I thought were really good. We packed up the car, including the lunches, and were off to Monticello, home of our third president and a prominent founding father, Thomas Jefferson. I’ve always wanted to see Monticello and it lived up to my expectations. Although it was sweltering (95 degrees!), it was just lovely. We had some time before the tour, which I had booked earlier, and stopped into the cafe, where they serve food made with produce grown in Jefferson’s garden, and I was shocked to find a vegan wrap available, although I didn’t buy it since we had our box lunches. I tell you, I barely feel weird any more as a vegan! The world is beginning to find me normal!

Not much else really has to do with veganism or even animals in the rest of this post, but I’ll share a few photos because Monticello is simply breathtaking, and well, it is Independence Day!

The house itself:

We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the house, but the kitchen is not actually in the house (!), so I can show you that:

Part of Jefferson’s beloved garden – he was a huge fan of vegetables and in fact introduced several of them to our country:

I’m telling you, it is ridiculously pretty:

I had never seen a blooming artichoke before:

A random view from the grounds:

Another:

We had a really great weekend. I highly recommend that any of you in the DC metro area make a weekend trip to the White Pig, and if you haven’t seen it (and even if you have), Monticello. In fact, any of you who plan to visit DC from other areas may want to consider including this as a side trip. Charlottesville and Monticello are just over two hours from DC, as is the White Pig. After a few days battling crowds, traffic, and the general unpleasantness that is DC, believe me, you will cherish a night or two in a serene setting, especially one that’s all-vegan!