So far so good

I went with my friend Ada to the Japanese restaurant Wagamama over the weekend and had a delicious vegetarian noodle dish, which inspired me to create my own. What follows took me less than half an hour to throw together and was light and surprisingly tasty. I recommend making it on a lazy Sunday evening and eating it while watching reruns of Sex in the City.

Ingredients:
Handful of mushrooms (I used a combination of shitake, enoki and button)
Handful of Beansprouts
Fried tofu cut into bite size pieces
1 red or green chili sliced
1/4 cup shiro miso (white fermented-soybean paste)
6 cups water
Soba noodles
Green onions for garnish

Directions:
Bring 6 cups of water to boil in a large pot. Turn off the heat and stir in 1/4 cup shiro miso paste. (Note: Do not boil the miso, it will become gritty when overcooked).

Boil another batch of water in a large pot. Add the soba and cook according to directions. Drain when ready and set aside in a bowl.

Meanwhile, heat up 1 tbs vegetable oil and quickly stir-fry the mushrooms, beansprouts, chili and tofu. Season with a light splash of soy sauce, salt and pepper.

Place the mushroom/tofu mixture on top of the soba noodles, add green onions and miso soup.

Serve immediately.

What the heck is a Vegi-Shrimp?

Wan Chai Market

Today Eric redeemed himself after the chicken-blood-spurting comment by composing a list of vegan restaurants for us to eat at.
"There's Chinese Vegan, American Vegan, Thai Vegan..." he pulled up the website of a place called Grasshopper that, aside from an unappetizing drawing of a grasshopper, looked promising. It was Asian Vegan and located fairly close to our house, so with great expectation we made our way there.

It was our first time in a vegan restaurant and there were a bunch of things called vegi-meats made from something our waitress described as seitan or wheat gluten. It didn't sound very appetizing but the taro pot with vegi-shrimp, vegi-beef, and vegi-chicken came highly recommended so we decided to go for that. To tell you the truth those pseudo-meats freaked me out. They looked like miniature marzipan meat cuts and tasted exactly what you would imagine "flavored" meat to taste like. The shrimp was particularly disturbing with pink lines across a crescent of white dough. Needless to say, our first vegan adventure was not a fulfilling one.

When I got home I looked up what "seitan"was and discovered that its exactly what the waitress said it was - a food made of wheat gluten that is often used in Asian, vegetarian, Buddhist and macrobiotic cuisines. I did a double-take when I read that its often used in Asia and then deduced that there must be two types of Asians in this world - the type that eat seitan and the type which eat anything. It didn't take me long to figure out that my family fell into the latter category.

Before moving to Boston five years ago I lived in Malaysia and Hong Kong. Two hectic, metropolitan cities reknowed for their cuisine. Food considered unusual in America are de rigueur in Asia, and I grew up eating things like duck tongue, pigs ears, coagulated blood, snake soup and pigeon. I used to follow my mother to the Wan Chai open-air market every weekend in Hong Kong, and while I enjoyed talking to the vegetable vendors and selecting ripe fruit, I dreaded the meat and seafood section. The open-air markets in Hong Kong are arranged much like the supermarkets in America - a section for fruits and vegetables, a section for fish and seafood, a section for fowl and a section for beef, pork and other meats. The big difference is that the meat in Asia is not processed, chemically treated and packaged in plastic. Asians are obsessed with freshness, and as a result most of the meat is live. That means chickens in wire cages, fish in aquariums, and eels in buckets of water. The only things I've never seen live are cows and pigs, and I think that's probably due to space constraints.

Going to an open-air market in Hong Kong is not for the faint of heart, and for me perusing the meat section was always a traumatic experience. I once spotted a pigs head in a bucket of blood and dry-retched uncontrollably, and still have visions of rows of fish sliced in half with their hearts pumping. That said, there is something healthier about the relationship people have with meat there compared to their counterparts here in America, where the meat is packaged to look wholesome but in no way, shape or form resembles the animal it came from. Perhaps if your stomach can't face the facts of how the animal is killed, you don't deserve to eat it.

I, as I'm quickly discovering, have a very weak stomach.

My One Year Vegetarian Diet Plan

I've devised a tactical plan to achieve my aim of eating no meats within a year. The plan is slow and steady vs. quick with immediate results (because everybody knows that the tortoise wins the race). My plan goes something like this -

Month 1: Give up red meat

Month 2: Give up pork

Month 3: Give up chicken

Month 4: Give up seafood

Month 5: Give up dairy and eggs

Month 6: Give up all leather and suede products

Month 7: Keep this going for another 6 months

My approach is a simple one - to scare the crap out of myself into giving up meat. I am going to take my head out of the sand, where its been buried for the last thirty years, and face the cold hard facts about meat production. I will watch gruesome videos of chickens getting slaughtered, I will figure out how much of the environment I am destroying by eating a hamburger, I will seek out an abattoir to visit.

Last night I explained my strategic plan of no meats to my husband Eric.

"So I'll gradually phase out meat in our lives," I said. "But that doesn't mean you can't eat meat outside of the house. Its just that I won't"

"That's nice honey," he said over a bowl of instant noodles.

"And at some point I'd like to visit a slaughterhouse," I continued. "To see how cows are killed."

"Hmmm...." he murmured.

I was disappointed at his lack of reaction. "I'm serious." I said. "Will you come with me? It might put you off meat for good."

He turned to me with a skeptical expression on his face. "You know those things don't bother me, animals are meant to be eaten."

"But maybe that's because you've never seen an animal being slaughtered," I countered.

"-Sure I have, at my grandma's house in Malaysia. She used to kill her own chickens."

I looked at him with horror. "And that didn't affect you?"

He shrugged. "She used to slice their heads off with a knife. I thought the blood spurting out was kinda cool."

That's not even funny, I thought. My husband thinks that spurting chicken blood is cool? Where was the sensitive new age guy I'd married?

"But of course I'll support you," he said as he slurped on his noodles.

I wondered if there was actual beef in his beef flavored noodles. And if not, where did the beef flavor come from? And if there was beef in there, did this mean I would have to give up instant noodles forever? The thought was disturbing.

"Our year of no meats," Eric said. "I like the sound of that."

Silence of the Pork

In Nicaragua about to feast on a big plate of fried pork fat

I had a dream recently that I'm sure Freud would have a field day with. It was about chickens, and it was after I'd just consumed a large plate of fried chicken for dinner. For those of you imagining a peaceful pastoral scene, think again. This was no dream suitable to be shown on Animal Planet. The dream involved me, chickens and some sort of post-modern abattoir. Yes, that's right there is a worse job out there than my former job as an IT Consultant. In this dream I had to grab the chickens by the neck (two or three at a time), and place them in a plexiglass box. I then had to watch as they were systematically electrocuted. You know those horror movies where they go for an extreme close-up of the victims face just before she gets killed? This was one of those movies, and I was the deranged serial killer who zapped the chickens to death. Let me just say that chickens have faces that convey pain very well. I can still hear them screaming.

Like the good Freudian student that I am, I know this dream must be linked to my childhood. Everything is linked to some childhood pain isn't it? I didn't have to plumb far through the depths of my mind to discover the long-repressed memory - year: 1989, place: grandmother's porch, incident: chicken slaughter. My grandmother used to keep a small coop of chickens on her porch in Malaysia. I remember gazing at them through their wire cage, watching as they pecked at grain and wrinkling my nose at their stinky poop. I knew my grandmother kept these chickens to eat, but I'd never actually witnessed her killing one. All I knew was that one day there would be one less chicken in the coop, and a big fat bird on the table for dinner. The slaughtering process was a secret one that occurred between grandma and the chicken. That is until the fateful morning I saw grandma kill a chicken. If I recall correctly, I was playing some inane chasing game with my cousin and ended up running on to the porch. There I saw grandma, one hand around the chicken's neck and the other hand firmly grasping a cleaver. Before I had time to scream/run back inside/beg her to stop, she'd brought the blade to the chicken's neck and in one swift flick of her wrist sliced off it's head. I remember blood, matted feathers, and inexplicably that my grandma was wearing brown flowered pajamas.

The incident with my grandmother occurred twenty years ago, so why is it that I am now only having these dreams? I blame Ruth Ozeki and Lester Brown for triggering my subconscious. Ruth Ozeki is famous for her book "My Year of Meats" which Newsweek describes as "a sexy and funny cross-cultural tale of two seemingly disparate women that... leaves you hungry for whatever Ozeki cooks up next." I'd be the first to admit that I love books about food - My Life in France by Julia Child? Check. Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes? Check. French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle? Check, Check, Check. I bought Ozeki's book expecting a romantic tale involving eating in Japan and perhaps falling in love with a handsome Japanese man along the way. Boy was I wrong! Ms. Ozeki is one cunning, sizzling, bloody writer (and I say that in the most tender of ways). In one scene from the book we follow the protoganist through a slaughterhouse, watch a cow get knifed through the throat, and learn that the still-pumping heart muscle causes the blood to gush out in rhythmic spurts. McDonalds anyone? Lester Brown may not employ such sizzling visuals but his book is equally as disturbing. In "Eco-Economy" Brown lays out some scary statistics about how the consumption and production of protein has led to overgrazing of rangelands, overfishing, extinction of plant and animal species, dust storms, water deficit, deforestation, the list goes on and on. Childhood trauma + Ozeki's lusty visuals + Brown's irrefutable statistics = one big case for vegetarianism.

So I've talked about the pros of becoming vegetarian, what about the cons? I only have one word to say - pork belly (ok that was more like two words). Have you seen those reality cooking shows where they ask contestants to cook their "last supper"? ie. the one thing they would like to eat before they die? I know exactly what I'd want to eat - pork belly. My mother spends hours in the kitchen cooking this traditional Hakka dish, and the result is thick slabs of pork fat that explode in your mouth in deliciousness. This dish is more tasty than Pierre Herme's macarons, more mouth-watering than Thomas Keller's bone marrow and don't even compare it to Joel Robuchon's pork belly! In my mind it is the king of all dishes, the Oscar of porks, the Grammy of pork cuts. A friend once said that eating pork is like having sex - once you go there, you never go back. If so, my mother's pork belly is one great lay.

Yet, the faces of those chickens come back to me. Their small beady eyes implore me to set them free and try as I might I cannot get those screams out of my head. Can I, pork-loving enthusiast, become a bona fide vegetarian? Does this mean I'll have to become all crunchy granola, grow dreadlocks, not shower and have bad breath? "All myths," my friend Louie told me as he bit into his spinach burrito. I could not help but notice that Louie was dressed in what looked suspiciously like hemp and had hair in desperate need of a combthrough. "When you give up meat you feel much more attuned to nature," he said. "When I swim in the ocean and the fishes swim next to me, it's like we're communing with each other." Yes he really said that, and yes he does sound like a crazy hippie. Fortunately his wife interrupted him and offered a more desirable view of vegetarianism. "It was our neighbor who convinced us," she said. "He doesn't eat any meat and grows his own vegetables. He's been doing this for years, the man is 82 and he can out-jog me." Eighty-two and still jogging? That sounded like a pretty good proposition. "And get this," she continued. "He uses his own shit as compost."

Human shit as compost aside, I've realized that the only way to assuage my guilt and keep those nightmares at bay is to give vegetarianism a try. At least for a year, if not more. My thorough research (ok more like google) has shown that the easiest way is to start with red meat, then move on to pork (*sigh*), chicken and then seafood. So it is with great trepidation, some hope, and a naive notion that this may somehow improve my health and happiness, that I begin my year of no meats.