Raw Squirrel only 2 WeightWatchers Points!

While tracking the Squirrel Brand Classic Almonds I was snacking on, I discovered that squirrel is a top hit on WeightWatchers, both cooked and raw. 

Bachelor Bowl

Wild rice, broccoli, and Italian style Tofurky. There's
a hint in the background about an upcoming meal.

Back when I was single and only needed to please myself, I would make basic, three ingredient bowls. Rice or quinoa, broccoli, and some sort of protein like tofu, Gardein [product name], or a vegan sausage of some kind. Sautéed mushrooms would sometimes find their way into the bowl, too.

My wife is on vacation, so I immediately regressed to eating like a single basement dweller again. Tonight's bowl features wild rice, broccoli, and Italian style Tofurky sausages, topped with nutritional yeast and Sriracha. Weight watchers thinks this meal costs 18 points. That seems a little high to me.

Vegan Sandwiches at a Tech Conference, Again?

This photo is actually from yesterday.

The second day of Silicon Valley Code Camp was shorter and less heavily attended than yesterday. The vegan Ike's sandwiches still flew out the door, especially when we asked Ike's to remove the Tofurky from the Pee Wee sandwiches. We had learned yesterday that some people who have never eaten meat find "fake meat" just as repulsive as the real thing. The only options we had were Tofurky or "tofu chicken;" there was no meatless (fake or otherwise) alternative. Today there were about a half dozen people who were clearly pleased with the modified Pee Wee.

It looks like this is going to be an ongoing partnership, as my offer to return next year was not rejected.

Vegan Sandwiches at a Tech Conference?

This year the organizers of Silicon Vally Code Camp asked attendees what kind of food we wanted for lunch. I took the opportunity to recommend some vegan options, and they graciously asked me for some guidance. We ended up with over a 140 Ike's Place vegan sandwiches! I helped hand them out and I learned that there are some vegetarians who find fake meat (tofu "chicken," Tofurky) repulsive. So tomorrow we're going to get some vegan sandwiches without fake meat, and hopefully make them happy, too.

Tofu Frittata with Mushrooms

I had a potluck today, on a boat. I have about 1 go-to potluck recipe, it's a quiche from a miso cookbook that I'll post on this blog someday, if I haven't already. There happens to be a quiche-like recipe in America's Test Kitchen's "Vegan For Everybody," but it's called Tofu Frittata with Mushrooms. I was struck with the idea of making this recipe in cupcake format, rather than conventional, big disk format.

I made this before in big disk format. I messed it up pretty royally transferring it from the pan to the cutting board, and ended up with a half-frittata, half-scramble mess. It was a delicious mess, though, with a really good eggy texture without the eggy stink. The recipe turned out really well this time, flavorwise. The cupcake papers were a bit problematic, but the folks who ate them liked them a lot and wanted more. I present the rest of this post as captioned photos.

The frittata mixture spooned in to the cupcake forms (papers? cups?) very easily.
I pushed down on each sizable dollop with a spoon fill up the cups better.

Here the are out of the oven, with only slightly more volume and a darker color. This is after 35 minutes
at 350 degrees. They could probably stand another 5 minute to get a bit browner on top.

... But they look pretty good.

After cooling to room temperature I tore one out of the cupcake paper, maybe because the paper
was so moist. I wonder how this would have turned out with silicone cupcake molds. 

Dosa Brothers' Dosa

I think I have posted more about dosas on this blog than any other food. I'm OK with that. A couple days ago I tried my local dosa place's kitcheree. Today, I got a dosa to show you. I don't have too much to say about it, except that it was delicious. In the first photo you see it slathered with sriracha while protecting a timid scoop of coconut chutney. The other photo is a close-up of it on a fork.

In a box

On a fork

You can get your own from the Dosas Brothers on the corner of Market and Montgomery in San Francisco, on weekdays. Make sure to specify "vegan," because it comes coated with some kind of animal secretion by default.

Vegan Weight Watchers

Sometimes I'm fatter than I'd like to be. At the beginning of the year I hit a personal body weight record. The weight was not from muscle or bowlingballism, it was from fat. I was able to take most of it off in a few months by employing a radical technique called "exercise." Then I got hurt but kept eating like I was exercising, and I now my mass is trending upward again. It's time to turn another radical technique called "eating less."

I first tried Weight Watchers online a few months after quitting smoking a long time ago. It worked really well. If you're not familiar with the program, it employs a formula that ascribes points to everything you ingest. The inputs are calories, grams of fat, grams of sugar, and grams of fiber. The output is a number that you subtract from your daily allowance. Most vegetables are "free," in that they almost always calculate to 0 points in reasonable portions. Foods like ice cream and pizza are very expensive. Eat too many points today? You can earn a few back by taking a long, brisk walk.

I like this system because if you eat a lot of vegetables (or, in my case, force yourself to choke down a lot of vegetables), you don't have do any data entry, because they're "free." When you do eat something processed, there's a very good chance it's already in the Weight Watchers food database and easy to select. Even tons of vegan brands. Worst case scenario, you input the basic stats from the ingredient label and it will calculate the food's points for you. You can then save it into your own database of favorites for easy selection later. In short, it's a super low maintenance system compared to conventional calorie counting.  Want a snack? look at your app. 5 points left? Have a spoon full of sand and a sprig of mint.

I've turned to Weight Watchers a few times since the first time, and each time they tweak their program a little more. Until recently, one aspect of their online program was that their web site sucked. It sucked really bad for over a decade.  When Adobe recently announced that Flash was going to be killed with fire, Weight Watchers finally produced a usable site using sane technology and reasonable user experience principles. I'm too traumatized by past experience to say that using the new site (and app!) is "a pleasure," but it's not constant hell anymore.

But I wonder if the latest version of their formula is buggy. Consider this photograph of a Lara Bar (Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough) and a Peet's Vegan Low Fat Apricot Scone. The Lara Bar is 9 points according to Weight Watchers, nearly a third of my daily point budget. I'm shocked by that. It's merely dates and cashews and a few chocolate chips. If a Lara Bar is 9 points, how much could that floury scone sprinkled with sugar be? Ready? 10. One more point than a Lara Bar. Maybe I'm weird but I expected the scone to be much more expensive. It certainly tastes more expensive.

For scale, compare the points one would spend to eat 1,000 bananas: zero. The rest of my blog will be about eating scones and bananas.

The Dosa Brothers' Kitcheree

The Dosa Brothers

Happy 3rd day of VeganMoFo2017. I have lowered the bar for the rest of the month: I will publish some words every day. I think that I have far exceeded my own expectations today, as there are also two photographs. I'm sure I'll receive a notice in the mail from VeganMoFo Corporate about violating the theme clause of our agreement. Look forward to more recipes from America's Test Kitchen's "Vegan For Everybody" shortly thereafter.

I was thrilled to see the Dosa Brothers set up their cart a couple years ago on the corner of Market and Montgomery in San Francisco. I love dosas. These guys are vegetarian and they dish out tons of dosa every day. I've consumed about a quarter ton myself since they showed up. They're pretty good, especially for $9. (I would prefer NY Dosas, but he's 3,000 miles away.) That may seem like a lot of money to people who live in reasonable places, but in this town you can't even cast a shadow for less than $3.

The Brothers added "kitcheree" to their menu a few months ago but I never tried it until today. Here's a recipe I just found that approximates the dish. The scoop of crumbly white stuff in this photo is their coconut chutney.

It had the texture of wet stuffing, and the flavors were mild. The temperature was a little low, so I popped it in the microwave at work for a minute. That really opened up the flavors, but it benefited greatly from a generous pour of sriracha sauce.. This... stew(?) is going to be especially good on the grayer Bay Area days coming down the pike. 

Red Lentil Soup with North African Spices

Not just for foodies anymore!

Today I prepared a recipe from America's Test Kitchen's Vegan for Everybody, "Red Lentil Soup with North African Spices." This is the first blog post that satisfies my contractual obligation under the "custom themes" clause of the VeganMoFo 2017 end user license agreement. I am not a lawyer.

Lightning FAQ!
Q. Am I being sued?
A. No.

I was so excited when I learned that America's Test Kitchen was publishing a vegan cookbook this year. This publisher strives to methodically determine the best way to cook something. They will repeat a recipe a dozen times, tweaking minor aspects with each iteration until they are satisfied. They will then meticulously describe the steps necessary for their readers to create the same perfect dish. Here is an illustration of their process.

My large sauce pan is a pot.

Foodies love America's Test Kitchen's recipes. Nothing beats knowing that you have prepared a dish in the best way possible, and sharing this accomplishment with your fellow foodies. If anyone protests or nitpicks your process, you raise your bourbon and wink, "that's how America's Test Kitchen does it." Point goes to the refined gentleman with the drinking problem.

I'm not a foodie because I'm vegan. One can't really prepare or ingest great food unless an animal suffered somewhere along the way. The best foodie experiences involve the least likely parts of the most obscure animals. Like an infant jungle bird served with sauteed bits of its nest. Or squirming cuttlefish. Or exploded goose liver. Offal.

My point is that I always envied the America's Test Kitchen books in foodies' libraries because I knew that they contained the truth about food preparation. It just wasn't the kind of food that I would prepare. Until now!

This quick and easy recipe is solid. While I love following rules, I tweaked a few things and it still turned out great. This is a strong contender for my top 10 recipe list.

Adjustments, hacks, and errors

• The recipe calls for a large sauce pan. Instinct recommended an 8 quart pot which turned out much better. There are 6 cups of liquid and 1 1/2 cups of dry lentils going in there FFS.
• The only broth I had is Better Than Bouillon's standard concentrate. It's darker than the chicken-style broth the recipe calls for. I think it turned out great anyway.
• I added all 4 tablespoons of olive oil at the beginning. I was only supposed to add 2, and reserve the other two for the spiced oil drizzle. So this recipe ended up with 5 or 6 tablespoons of delicious olive oil instead.
• I didn't rinse the lentils. They came in a hermetically sealed space bag looking perfect, so it didn't even occur to me. This resulted in some initial froth while simmering, but everything worked out ok.
• I didn't have any dried mint. I actually looked for it at Safeway, slightly skeptical that such a thing could be purchased. It couldn't. Instead, I got fresh mint and put it in a foil-lined lasagna pan and baked it for 10 minutes at 250 degrees F. Turned out great.
• Only needed a touch more lemon and salt at the end. 

This is a delicious soup. The lentils and onions had a nice bite. The spiced oil drizzle added some dark heat. Will do again.

Thank you, America's Test Kitchen.

Out of Retirement And Off The Rails #veganmofo2017

My last post on this blog was nearly six years ago. It was the first part of a series on brewing vegan beer (aka "beer"). I think the second part of this series is still in my drafts folder. I'll spare you further suspense: the beer was really good and it got me hooked on brewing my own! I have not brewed beer since.

I have announced a custom theme!

In a manic bout of web surfing over the summer I signed up for VeganMoFo 2017. I may not have been sober then, but I assure you I'm painfully sober now. So here I am, keeping my promise.

My theme this month is to prepare a daily recipe out of America's Test Kitchen: Vegan For Everybody, a book I'm excited about for a number of reasons. (I really can't wait to talk about it.) The screenshot from the very top of the VeganMoFo Themes page confirms that I have officially committed to this topic. So without further ado, I present to you Scrambled Tofu from the first edition of Isa Moskowitz's Vegan With A Vengeance!

Wat.

Let me back up. I shuffled into the kitchen this evening while my wife (I married a woman since my last post) was preparing a tofu scramble for dinner. She was "going to wing it," a strategy that made me wince. We have an impending avalanche of cookbooks stacked in the kitchen specifically so that we never have to "wing it." She sensed my discomfort and assured me that she had quickly flipped through an Oh She Glows coobook looking for a scramble recipe, but failed to find one. Fine. This is the kind of suffering you must quietly endure to maintain a happy marriage.

While my daring wife was chopping an onion, some chitchat ensued and we settled on the familiar topic of whether we would ever feed the cats again. We concluded that it was possible they might eat this week, because we ordered special food promoting anal gland health and it was due to arrive on October 4th.  My wife looked up from the growing pile of onion bits and asked, "What's today? The 2nd?" "Pfffft," I replied, always a step ahead, "it's the 1st." This is when I realized that I had to write a blog post.

"I'll cook!" I quickly offered. "I wonder if there's a scramble recipe in the new America's Test Kitchen cookbook." The book was handy, having stood patiently on the kitchen counter since it arrived months ago. I flipped to the back and found two entries under "tofu": Tofu Scramble with Bell Pepper, Shallot, and Herbs; and Tofu Scramble with Tomato and Scallions.

"We don't have any of those things," my wife stated.

I looked at the onion pile that was clearly going to be the central ingredient in whatever we would make. Then it struck me: Isa's Scrambled Tofu. We almost always had the basic ingredients for that. It starts with a ton of onions and mushrooms and ends with satisfaction, every time.  There are plenty of other days in the month for ATC:VFE. Surely my faithful audience would understand.

I helped my wife tease the first edition of Vegan with a Vengeance out of our Jenga library. (We have the new edition, too, but this exact book is the one that taught me how to cook like a human back in 2005. It's special.) Scrambled Tofu was clearly marked by a pink post it and years of accumulated scramble splatter. I asked my wife to shovel the onion pile into the pan and bid her withdraw into the parlor. I was about to follow some rules.

Having made this recipe countless times, there were few surprises. I used Wildwood firm tofu, which is a bit dry and required adding about a cup of water while simmering. I added broccoli at the same time as the tofu, and it cooked nicely. I forgot to saute the garlic with the onions, a pretty rookie mistake. I added it early into the simmering phase and no one got hurt, thank God. I definitely missed the classic tang of hot, oily garlic, but the sweeter notes of simmered garlic weren't bad.  I served it with Field Roast breakfast links and grilled toast.

Looking back at my early posts, this recipe was also the subject of the 7th blog post I ever made, during the very first VeganMoFo. So it's a good recipe to come out of retirement with.

Vegan Home Brew: Part 1, The Wort

I got my shit together and completed the first step of my first batch of home-brewed beer. As I mentioned in an earlier post, several of my dearest friends got together and bought me an avalanche of beer brewing equipment. The only missing ingredient was... ingredients. For that, I went to the closest home brewing supply shop, San Francisco Brew Craft. The place was smaller than I expected, and I instantly found myself in front of the hirsute dude working behind the counter. He greeted me with, "hey, what's up?" and before I finished explaining that I needed ingredients he'd already started filling out a hot pink "Beer Recipe and Brewing Instructions" sheet. I told him I was thinking about a pale ale a little less hoppy than Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He scribbled a couple more things on the sheet and started shoveling ingredients from bulk containers around the shop. This was a pleasant surprise, as I had expected to be handed a dense box of pre-selected ingredients. Instead, I was getting a customized set of ingredients and brewing instructions! I was out of there in under 15 minutes, a mere $42 poorer.

I had prepared for Brew Day by reading SF Brewcraft's brewing instructions and the first chapter of "How To Brew," which came with my brewing supplies. I also watched Homebrew Heaven's awesome "Getting Started Homebrewing" DVD, wherein Chris and Don demonstrate the rudiments of brewing and bottling your own beer. (I watched this video repeatedly, mostly for my fascination of the cheap porn production quality.) Finally, I talked to my good friend and brewing veteran Dave for reinforcement.

Despite all this preparation, the whole process seemed to take all day. It took forever to heat the wort, and then to bring it to a boil after adding the malt extract. Then it took forever to cool it down to "pitching" temperature, which was a little higher than ideal due to my impatience. Consequently, I rehydrated my yeast about an hour too soon, but assured myself that yeast is a hearty little organism and wouldn't mind waiting for all the delicious sugar I was about to feed it. When I pounded the lid on the fermenter and stuck the airlock into its hole I really had no idea if I had succeeded. I had to wait for a couple days to know for sure.

And man, did I succeed! The airlock was bubbling along happily in the second and third days (see the video!), and calmed down toward the end of the week. The beginning of the week enjoyed ridiculously hot weather (high 70s!), so the beer didn't hit ideal fermenting temperatures for a couple days. I left it near an open window with a temperature-activated fan to keep things between 68 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm pretty confident that this is going to turn out well.



Next episode: Secondary Fermentation.

I Made Chocolate Chip Cookies

There was no soy milk, so I ate them with beer.

I finally made something with my own two hands for VeganMoFo 2011.  I decided to cease posting boring, every-day fast food simply for the sake of posting something.  The rest of my October posts will discuss stuff that I made myself.  (Exceptional exceptions excepted.) Consequently, this is my last October post.  JUST KIDDING.  Probably.

So, back to cookies. I used to make chocolate chip cookies all the time throughout my adolescence. While my peers were playing sports and making out, I was getting high and chubby on cookies. My parents got a microwave/convection oven back in the late 80s and we all thought that it was the shit.  It came with a cookbook that showcased some of the amazing things you could do with this cutting-edge technology.  One of the recipes therein was an ordinary chocolate chip cookie recipe that exploited none of this technology.  It was a straight-up, dependable recipe that I used to pump out hundreds of perfect chocolate chip cookies.  (By "pump out," I mean, "pump through my digestive system.")  Then, one day, I grew up and became vegan.

Since being vegan, I've made chocolate chip cookies about three times.   The first time, I adapted that wonderful recipe from my youth.  The results were disappointing.  I tried a couple vegan-ready recipes after that.  Shrugworthy.  Finally, I tried the recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking.  Oh, em, gee.  They turned out so well.  They were lightly crunchy on their perimeters, chewy at their epicenters.  I shaved a minute off the bake time with each of the three batches and the last one was the best.

I was curious about the Internet's opinion of this recipe, so I did an image search.  It's certainly popular.  But I'm surprised by their wild variation.  Mine definitely turned out darker than others'.  Maybe that's because I used golden brown sugar instead of light brown. Well, I don't care;  I'm just glad that I can resume pumping chocolate cookies through my digestive system.

Herbivore's Grilled Soy Chicken Sandwich on Focaccia

Did you know that Ansel Adams was a failed
food photographer?

Yes, another fricking sandwich. Hey, it's what I ate.  I'm just being honest.

The thing about living a couple blocks away from Herbivore for most my vegetarian life is that I have eaten almost everything on their menu.  That's bad because the menu no longer holds delightful surprises.  It's good because I have confidently isolated three menu items that rarely disappoint me: the Southwestern Scrambled Tofu, the Sandwich Featured In The Title Of This Blog Post, and a Third Item To Be Disclosed In A Future Blog Post.  This sandwich makes the list simply because the soy chicken is tangy.  It's coated in a delicious garlic-lemon sauce, and it's perfect.  It even comes with Herbivore's signature Absurdly Copious Side Salad!

Another Hand-held Meal

Tonight I made a variation on Eastern Capital Sandwich.  It's a real lazy person's home-cooked meal; all you really have to do is assemble some simple things in the right order and, before you know it, you're looking at a sloppy pile of delicious.  My secondary neighborhood rip-off health food store's green peppers looked like crap today, so I used red peppers and jalapeños instead. I grilled some Alvarado St. Sprouted Rye in place of a roll.  The fries were frozen Cascadian Farms; nothing special there.  It was very difficult to eat using conventional sandwich techniques, so I fell-back on a fork and knife.  Still delicious.

The Plant Cafe's Beety Burger

For lunch today I got a Plant Burger to go from The Plant Cafe at 101 California. The Plant Cafe has three locations in San Francisco, but for as long as I can remember Google has not acknowledged this one. Try for yourself: go to maps.google.com and search for "plant cafe san francisco." You'll get the other two locations only. This is very frustrating, because I stopped remembering numbers, names, and places several years ago when I got my first iPhone. A rare alignment of luck and miracle helped me find it today, and the reward was significant; The Plant Burger is delicious. It's hearty in flavor, but light in matter. You could probably eat two and still be able to walk back to work fully upright. There's a bunch of other vegan stuff on their menu but I didn't really pay much attention; this is the go-to to go item. (Oh, and don't worry--that undocumented dollop of white stuff is Veganaise.)

A Vegan, Pre-packaged Starbucks Food?

Photo stolen from starbucks.com

A few months ago I noticed a new product in the Starbucks display case, a "Sesame Noodles Bistro Box." There were other "bistro boxes" from this new product line in the case, but this one grabbed my attention because it wasn't obviously vegan-hostile.  It threw a wrench into my daily routine.

Typically, I peek in the Starbucks on 2nd Street to see if it's ridiculously crowded.  If it is, I walk a diagonal block to the Starbucks on New Montgomery.  I usually stand in line for about 2 and a half minutes at the lesser-crowded franchise.  I play some Words with Friends while I'm at the tail of the line, but I gradually lose my tenuous connection to the AT&T network as the shortening line draws me deeper inside.  When my phone is rendered useless, I turn my attention to the broad array of vegan-hostile baked goods, sandwiches, and pre-packaged nonsense in the display case.  This exercise keeps my contempt for Starbucks at a healthy level. It reminds me that I have no affinity for the Starbucks "brand;" it's simply the most efficient source of caffeine available to me in the monotonous system that defines my professional existence.

Then there's this new "bento box."  I actually reached into the display case and withdrew the product for closer examination.  I scrutinized the ingredients.  It looked pretty damn vegan, though the "sesame peanuts" were questionable.  You can list sesame seeds as an ingredient, or you can list peanuts as an ingredient.  But "sesame peanuts" is suspicious.  What's adhering the sesame seeds to the peanuts, exactly? Dried cane sugar solution?  Kangaroo lactate?  Fortunately, Starbucks lists the complete ingredients on their site:

sesame ginger noodle salad (water, broccoli, semolina durum flour [niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid], cucumbers, sugar snap peas, roasted peanuts, carrots, lettuce, red bell pepper, sprouted soybeans, sugar, 2% or less of: cabbage, soybeans, whole wheat, sesame seeds, salt, nigari [magnesium chloride (a natural firming agent), calcium sulfate], wheat flour, sesame oil, ginger, modified cornstarch, xanthan gum, lactic acid, spices, jalapeno peppers, green onions, cilantro, garlic, dried onion, tomato paste, cornstarch, rice vinegar, brown rice syrup, rice wine, vegetable oil [sunflower, palm and/or canola], lime juice, dried orange pulp, extract of mushroom, alcohol [to preserve freshness], sodium benzoate [preservative], guar gum). dark chocolate bar (cacao beans, cane sugar, cocoa butter, soy lecithin [an emulsifier], vanilla). 

Yet I still haven't tried this product, after all this time.  I think that, subconsciously, eating a pre-packaged Starbucks food would be a sort of communion.  I would be taking Starbucks inside me in a different way.  I'm not sure that I'm ready for that kind of relationship with such a big, powerful corporation.  On the other hand, I feel obligated to vote for this product with my consumer dollar.

Ok, I'll try it, and I'll post the experience here.

The Little Chihuahua

Photo stolen from haighteration.com

VeganMoFo founder Isa Moskowitz once told me that she preferred the taste of burritos from some joint in my 'hood named "The Little Chihuahua," over those from world-famous Papalote.  I was skeptical.  I couldn't believe that this respected and prolific cookbook author had such poor taste in burritos.  Papalote smacked-down that insolent Bobby Flay, for chrissakes.  Their roasted tomato salsa is so popular that it has its own Web site! How could some poorly-named hole-in-the-wall compete with perfection? I concluded that it wasn't fair of me to judge Isa so harshly, especially when I had never stepped foot inside The Little Chihuahua myself*. So tonight I went to check it out.

I skipped burrito photography class.

I was immediately surprised by the large number of happily chattering customers stuffed into the tiny restaurant.  The interior was warm and welcoming on a gray, drizzling San Francisco night.  I ordered a regular chile verde tofu burrito with black beans and guacamole on a tomato-chile tortilla, to go.  I then spent 10 minutes bobbing and weaving my way around the salsa bar until they called my name.  I remained skeptical that this burrito was going to be anything special, right up until I got it home and stuffed it into my mouth.  Holy shit.  It was good.  The tortilla was toasted.  There was delicious pickled cabbage inside.  The tofu was tangy. The beans were flavorful. Two bites, three bites... It was really good.  But was it better than Papalote? I can't believe I'm saying it, but... maybe. I'll have to do some more research to be certain.  For now, I'm relived that Isa does indeed have excellent taste in burritos.

* I had eaten several burritos from the previous taqueria at 292 Divisadero St., and they were all poor to mediocre.  Does anyone know what it was called?

Vegan Beer Brewing

A few of my forthcoming blog entries for VeganMoFo 2011 will document my attempt to brew some beer.  I've been muttering about brewing beer for several years, but I never seemed to get around to doing it.  Many of my beloved friends grew weary of these mutterings and collectively shipped me a home brewery for my birthday this year.  It is now time for me to stop muttering and to start brewing.

The first thing I need to do is to figure out what's vegan and what's not.  Most beer, in general, is vegan.  There are many beers that use animal products in their clarification and filtering processes, but your average home brewer is not going to employ them.  (If you're curious about the vegan-friendliness of your favorite mass-produced beers, check out www.barnivore.com.)  So far, my home brewery contains two questionable products: BTF Iodophor and Super Grunge Remover (sodium carbonate).  My cursory Web research suggests that both of these products are pretty simple chemicals with no obvious animal origin, but I e-mailed the manufacturers for the final word.  If they turn out to be non-vegan, I can fall back Five Star Star San. Here's an e-mail exchange I had with the manufacturer:

Hi!

I'm interested in using your Star San product for home brewing. However, I prefer to use products that are:

100% cruelty free (not tested on animals)
100% free of animal by-products (no animal-derived ingredients of any kind)

Can you confirm that this product meets my criteria? 

Thank you!
Stephen

To which Jon Herskovits responded via his iPhone: 

All the ingredients in star San are on the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) list. This means they don't need bunny testing. You are good to use all five star products.

Jon Herskovits

Sent from my iPhone

"Bunny testing" sounded a little patronizing, so I thought I would press for more information:

Thank you very much, Jon, for your response.  Could you also respond explicitly to my other question, about whether your products (Star San specifically) contain animal-derived ingredients?  (I intend to share this information with readers of my blog, by the way.)

I really appreciate your time,
Stephen

To which I finally got a satisfactory, if terse, response:

No they are not animal derived.

Sent from my iPhone

 Thank you, Jon!  I feel bad about pestering him while he's on the go, but it's worth it to move forward with confidence in this long-overdue endeavor.

I ran a half marathon!

I can't say that it was easy, but it was a lot less impossible than I imagined.  The first two miles made it clear just how long the race was.  "I only have to do this six and a half more times," I  thought.  But one mile bled into the next and eventually I passed the halfway point.  I was grateful for the pacer groups, who were clusters of runners with times posted on their backs like "3:00" and "2:45."  If you ran with them you would finish close to their posted times.  I passed 3:00 pretty early on, but I didn't see 2:45 until the very end. The last three miles were by far the most difficult, as my quads were numb and my heart rate was over 190 bpm.  (Is that even possible, by the way?  I wonder if my monitor is accurate.)

I'm proud that I raised $740 to combat animal abuse.  I'm also proud that I finished my first half marathon. And while I didn't enter the race with any competitive aspirations, I'm proud of my performance:

• Finish time: 2:42:23
• Placement: 7338 (out of around 12,000) 

How does a vegan celebrate finishing his first half marathon?  He eats a mushroom, olive, and broccoli stuffed vegan pie from Paxti's, accompanied by some delicious Sierra Nevada Tumbler Ale.  And then he takes a 16 hour nap.

I'm going to run a half marathon!

I believe that, as a vegan, I should appear to be healthy. I would love to sit on my couch all day and drink beer and eat chips, but should I ever shamble out of my womb-like dungeon and into daylight, people on the streets would point a me and shout, "Look at that soft and pasty vegan! See? Vegans are so unhealthy!" In reality, I would be unhealthy simply because I'm lazy. But I doubt that I would be able to explain this to my tormentors, so it's easiest to just be healthy.

I have discovered one old weird trick to appearing healthy: being physically fit. Once very couple of years I string together a series physical activities that I call "exercising," and I try to incorporate these activities into my life's patterns. Invariably, my laziness will prevail and I will end up back on the couch with my friends Beer and Chips. About four months ago, as another period of exercise was looming on my horizon, I passed by the PeTA booth at the San Francisco Green Festival.  A friendly representative was promoting the Bay Area PeTA Pack, a group of people who were going to raise money for PeTA's undercover and rescue operations by running the San Jose Rock and Roll Half Marathon.  This seemed like the perfect way for me to get off my ass and help some animals out at the same time.

I have been running ever since, and the Half Marathon is tomorrow. Franky, I'm terrified. I ramped up my training slowly to avoid injuring myself, and never ran more than about 5 1/2 miles in a single session. I'll have to run more than twice that tomorrow. Fortunately I can always walk a bit if I need to. All I have to do is make it to the starting line by 8AM, and cross the finish line by noon. I think I can do that, especially because I know that my friends and family support me, and that the money we raised will help some animals.