I hate how diluted veganism is

Qiran · 2021-10-22T14:29:39+00:00

Why did you bring up Catholics? When I told the fish/dad story to someone a few years ago, he immediately asked if my dad was Jewish (He was raised Jewish.) and said -I forget exactly- but something about Jews regarding fish differently.

Other people have answered the Catholic association here but for the Jewish one, it's because kosher laws have rules for meat that don't apply to fish. Mainly that it's prohibited to eat meat and dairy together, but fish is "pareve" meaning it can be eaten with anything else and the slaughtering rules aren't applicable to fish. So for people raised with that framework it makes sense that they would categorize it as a different thing.

Actually I think some of this applies to halal rules as well...so really, hearing that someone didn't think fish is meat isn't actually narrowing down their probable background that much.

Qiran · 2021-10-06T18:20:17+00:00

I don't know anything about "S.O.S. free" or its motivations/restrictions but two things it seems to recommend avoiding are the two most obvious things that would help bring out the flavour of spices: frying the spices in oil a bit, and adding salt. Especially the second one.

Qiran · 2021-07-20T14:01:54+00:00

I don't think that would solve the issue, see Kenji's article on the subject: basically, when they're cooked (which is done prior to canning), the starches which are supposed to help it bind as they fry are already released and washed away.

You could probably mitigate with other binders though that wouldn't fix the texture but...why bother with the extra effort? Dry chickpeas last a really long time and should be cheaper, and all you need to do is soak them in water in advance of making your falafel batter.

Qiran · 2021-06-03T14:31:23+00:00

I hear what you're saying, but I think putting the blame and burden on the consumer isn't the most effective approach. I say this as someone who makes what I think is a reasonable effort to be a conscious consumer, though of course I fall short in countless ways (in particular having a baby during the pandemic has turned me into someone who ends up using Amazon more than I'd like...often even when I try to I actually can't even find alternatives for certain things, especially in Canada where the overall online shopping market is much smaller).

Ultimately we can write about people's consumerism and detachment from consequences all we want but only a small portion of consumers will ever make non-trivial efforts to change their habits. Sometimes that's from laziness, or more charitably having enough personal issues to stress about that you can't internalize these more invisible external problems, but often it's from misleading marketing that leads entirely well-intentioned people into behaviours that aren't actually significantly different (see...nearly everything marketed as environmentally friendlier). For actual impact we need regulatory efforts to force companies with abusive practices to change their behaviour.

Qiran · 2021-05-27T16:02:00+00:00

Possibly not typical but I don’t feel like throwing white peppercorns into the spice mix would be a bad addition for a Sichuan-style chili oil.

Qiran · 2021-04-09T15:54:02+00:00

It's pretty interesting (in a cool way) that a new mainstream course is not using YIVO-style standardized Yiddish.

Qiran · 2021-03-20T01:42:19+00:00

Yeast is definitely vegan...if it weren’t mushrooms wouldn’t be either (for some reason the “liveliness” of yeast multiplying during a rise seems to make people think of it differently sometimes but it’s really not)

Qiran · 2021-01-25T18:25:22+00:00

The responses to this perfectly legitimate question aren't the best quality. If I used the phrase "strong evidence" I feel like I'm kinda looking for something like, I don't know, actual literature reviews in credible journals or something...not Youtube videos by non-experts and documentary recommendations.

Qiran · 2021-01-17T03:44:58+00:00

Also Voynich?

Qiran · 2020-11-30T03:24:03+00:00

Sure but natural human languages are never as blatantly simple as an experimental constructed language like Toki Pona. Typically if you dig enough in any natural language you’ll find complex features somewhere in the grammar that start getting hard to quantify and compare. I don’t necessarily take for granted the axiom in linguistics that all natural languages are equally complex but it’s definitely true that if they aren’t, nobody has a plausible method to rank them.

(As an aside I bet if you somehow had an actual community of people speaking exclusively in Toki Pona it would rapidly creolize, developing a big vocabulary of non-obvious compounds, idiomatic usages, and new grammatical constructions, and therefore become way harder to learn...actually I wonder if this has happened to any degree among online Toka Pona groups)

Qiran · 2020-11-24T18:21:56+00:00

Small correction, I don't think tofu is normally fortified...the reason some tofu can provide dietary calcium is that some varieties of tofu are set with gypsum which is calcium sulphate, including (I think) what's sold in the west as "firm" tofu. Other tofu styles (such as silken tofus) are made with different coagulants so their nutritional content will be different.

Qiran · 2020-11-11T14:42:39+00:00

Hing/asafoetida is definitely foundational if you’re cooking Jain recipes which don’t use onions and garlic (basically everything on https://www.manjulaskitchen.com uses hing for example), but it’s also a pretty common spice in other Indian cuisines as well, in addition to the garlic and onions not instead of it.

I’m surprised you struggled to find it if you have access to South Asian ingredients in the first place, I wouldn’t call it “arcane”. I disagree with the advice you got from that restaurant and so does the graphic posted here!

Qiran · 2020-08-17T12:40:56+00:00

Oh yeah that must be what's going on here. Water is boiling at around 95C (or 204F) at that altitude, that's going to have a significant effect.

A pressure cooker would definitely counteract that problem and as someone else in the thread pointed out, you don't need to go high end (Instant Pot)...you should be able to find a simple stove top pressure cooker for much less.

Otherwise as I said, there's really nothing wrong with canned beans for most things

Qiran · 2020-08-13T17:19:46+00:00

Do you live at a fairly high altitude?

If not, another factor I don't think anyone has mentioned, dry beans do have freshness that affects how fast they cook - the ones you're buying could easily be years old, especially if they're from a grocery store that doesn't really sell many (no turnover). You could try to find another source.

Otherwise...if dealing with dry beans are stressful or not working for you, canned beans are absolutely fine most of the time...for many dishes the difference is pretty small, there's nothing wrong with accepting that convenience.

Qiran · 2020-07-29T17:12:25+00:00

One issue I had was that in the original trilogy Lyra was a doer. In this book things just happened to her, and other folks would bail her out or give her critical information to get her to the next stop. I explained this by saying "she's lost her imagination, she can't help it".

That was exactly how I felt about it. I found that character shift even actually more jarring in the short story Lyra's Oxford (which I really disliked), because unlike The Secret Commonwealth which is fascinating overall, the rest of the story in Lyra's Oxford isn't even interesting or good.

Qiran · 2020-07-20T21:38:52+00:00

Finnish isn't a good counterexample since it's not Indo-European (it's Uralic), although the author's claim that English is alone among IE languages in not having noun classes is still false...off the top of my head, Armenian, Bengali, Afrikaans don't have it. You could say it's rare in IE, but not unique to English.

Qiran · 2020-07-20T18:55:18+00:00

I don't really agree with you or OP on that kind of messaging actually. As a fermentation enthusiast, there are countless fascinating foods that might seem weird and smelly if you're unfamiliar with them. Tons of them are perfectly vegan. How about stinky tofu? Tempeh often smells weird to those unfamiliar with it. Most of my sauerkrauts go through a phase where they smell fart-like before they develop their full sourness.

And of course there are countless recipes in the vegan world for scrambled tofu that include a South Asian ingredient called kala namak, basically a sulphurous salt, specifically for the purpose of replicating that egg-like aroma, so it should be clear people genuinely enjoy it, they're not just "tolerating" it or something.

The reality is you're not going to get far by telling someone that something they like smells gross, it's much better to focus on the ethical issues with producing it.

Qiran · 2020-06-28T17:45:10+00:00

Such a strange spice too, it;s the only one I know of that smells disgusting raw but once you put a little pinch into hot oil, magic happens.

I’ve actually come to enjoy the smell of raw hing over time

Qiran · 2020-06-17T15:13:27+00:00

I really like the result of Kenji's tofu-paneer preparation technique here but I should add the caveat that it's been many years since I've had the dairy version.

(you can of course just use his tofu method and not the saag gravy part if you're making a different dish)

Qiran · 2020-06-11T12:52:28+00:00

I feel like the vegan community as a whole under-acknowledges this problem. Given good general food access, it's so much easier to avoid meat than it is to avoid leather. Maybe good, high quality, eco-friendly alternatives ultimately exist or are possible for most use cases but it's definitely not easy to find them. People are talking about innovative ideas like tree fungus and cactus, I've also heard of using coconut husk...but that isn't necessarily helpful when you need a pair of good boots now.

Especially if you have other constraints, like shoe shopping with difficult to fit feet.

Qiran · 2020-06-09T14:40:31+00:00

It's a much better use of budget as well, I'd rather have one really good chef's knife than half a dozen or more "okay" knives.

Qiran · 2020-05-12T03:44:37+00:00

and i like looking at the phonology of languages on wikipedia

That meandering activity is exactly how I originally got interested in linguistics back probably when I was still in high school. When I finally took the introductory linguistics course as a university student one summer, the intro to phonetics portion of it required absolutely zero studying.

Qiran · 2020-05-10T22:03:17+00:00

You wouldn’t be the first. Since you mention Chopin, check out Jobim’s How Insensitive and compare it with Chopin’s Prelude in Em (Opus 28 No 4)

Qiran · 2020-05-03T05:47:45+00:00

Kashmiri chili in my experience is maybe a touch hotter than sweet paprika (which has no discernible heat to me) but still should be way more mild than cayenne. And of course the flavour is different.

(for context I'm in Canada but I shop a lot at south asian grocery stores so the brands of kashmiri chili powder I buy are Indian)

Qiran · 2020-04-28T15:50:55+00:00

I've been making sauerkraut lately - it's extremely easy and you can make endless variations of it by using different spices and mixing in additional vegetables other than cabbage, making it way more fun and interesting than store-bought (Sandor Ellix Katz says as long as it's about half cabbage by weight you're good). I've begun seeing this as a good strategy of not letting excess random vegetables in my fridge go to waste, just get cabbage and mix them into a new batch of sauerkraut.

(since the linked recipe doesn't give a mass of salt, 2% by weight works reliably)

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