Suffering for Foraged Nettle Tea

As we lounged by Berlin’s canal, one of my friends noticed that we were sitting next to a patch of nettles and suggested that we harvest some leaves to make tea.

Using nothing more than folded flyers, we harvested some mature nettle stalks with lots of leaves. Apparently, if you are careful, you can harvest nettle leaves safely with just your bare hands. Since the pricklies only grown on the underside of the leaves, you can fold the two halves of the leaf together, holding on to the upper side, and then pull the leaf off the stalk.

While making the tea, I got stung! Here I am taking the sting off with a jar of frozen red beans.

To make the tea, I just boiled the leaves for 10 minutes and then strained them. The smaller leaves are younger and less bitter. But I don’t mind bitter in my tea.

If you boil for less than 10 minutes, the stinging chemicals remain. In fact, two of my guests claimed they felt a little tingling on their tongues upon their first sip of the tea. It wasn’t painful or bad, however.

Too bad we didn’t have any lemons, because nettle tea turns bright pink after adding lemon juice, because of the ph change.

Other than tea, the leaves are edible too, like spinach. The tea can be cooled and used as shampoo.

Nuka and Narazuke Pickles

Photo from kyotofoodie

I have been reading about nuka pickles, which is a Japanese method of fermenting with rice bran powder, water, and salt.

It looks like so much fun! Like playing with mud, but you can actually eat the vegetables after fermentation!

Unfortunately, with my schedule, I can’t make the time to turn the pot twice a day. One more reason to live with another fermentator as collaborator…

But the more I learn about the possibilities of fermentation and pickling, the more amazed I am. For example, I just learned about narazuke, an alcoholic pickle made in Japan! After sitting in sake lees for 1-3 years, I guess the vegetables can’t help it.

Bread Recipe and Food Insight from Thoreau

In Walden Henry David Thoreau writes how he baked bread from a mixture of rye and “Indian meal” (I assume that this would be cornmeal), according to an old Latin recipe from Marcus Porcius Cato, without yeast or leavening:

"Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean, -- "Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking kettle.

Even back then, grains were fed to farm animals and farmers bought their grains:

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store.
Photo by pablo.sanchez

Last week's meals

For lunch last week, I ate cucumbers, tomatoes, red bell peppers, mushrooms and almonds with a mustard vinaigrette.


For dinner last week, I used some crusty old bread to make a creamy tomato soup. I swirled in some homemade soy yogurt, even though it was quite thick and 'creamy' enough.


To accompany the tomato bread soup, I marinated some radishes with equal amounts vinegar and jam, according to a Japanese-inspired pickling recipe. Delicious!

Day 4 of no cow torture

Dairy products are products of cow torture!

This new vocabulary should help me stop liking products of tortured cow secretions.

Originally, I had planned to write about the things I have eaten since starting my two weeks of no cow torture that may have been made from the secretions of tortured cows. But being vegan is not about being perfect or being pure. I don’t need to be 100% dairy free. Animals don’t care about purity. Animals care about suffering less and not dying.

This 14-day experiment helps me see how much power I have to decrease suffering.

In these 14 days:

I break through my belief barriers and live my truth rather than live my excuses.

I take full pleasure in eating and pay closer attention to life rather than
sleepwalking through the suffering around me.

I open my heart and take responsibility for my power to end suffering, so as
to live large and fully.

In that spirit, I will NOT focus on what I ate that may have had crossed the line. Knowing what they are and why they tempt me will help me avoid them in the future, however. Mostly, I need to think before putting something in my mouth—that is the tagline of this blog: eat consciously! Don’t eat accidents!

Eating no dairy, Day Half

I got inspired to stop eating dairy for 14 days.

I already ate dairy on Day 1 of my 14-day experiment without eating dairy.

This morning I completely forgot as I spread some butter on my morning bread.

And then there were cookies at the office. Dutch stroopwafels! Unfortunately, I ate them without thinking and then fished the plastic bag out of the kitchen trash can. Under the tea leaf, I found out that the cookies were made with glucose syrup and butter as the first two ingredients.

Otherwise, I was so happy to know that the cinnamon bread I get at Beumer & Lutum every morning is made with margarine. It is vegan!

And my lunch was a raw vegan salad, as always: 1 cucumber, 1 yellow bell pepper, 2 tomatoes, a few brown button mushrooms, and a handful of almonds.

Depite the setbacks, I am not at all disappointed in myself. These bumps on the road are keys to staying vegan. Now I know my barriers to eating vegan: butter and free sweets lying around. Why do I love butter on good bread? And why do I love eating sweets, especially free sweets? When I figure these answers out, I can release them.

Homemade Vegan Yogurt?

I found a pretty good tasting soy 'yogurt' yesterday, and I am trying to duplicate it at home.

Usually soy yogurts are full of stabilizers and other such junk that I can't pronounce. For example, plain Silk soy yogurt in the US is made of: Organic soymilk (filtered water, whole organic soybeans), rice starch, dextrose, organic evaporated cane juice, tricalcium phosphate, natural flavors, cultured glucose syrup solids, pectin, locust bean gum, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), yogurt cultures (L. bulgaricus, S. thermophilus, L. acidophilus, B. bifidum, L. casei, L. rhamnosus).

But Sojade is just "soya drink (natural spring water, whole soya beans 8%), and selected live cultures of which Bifidus and Acidophilus". And the taste is pretty good! And since I have cultured milk with yogurt cultures successfully before by following directions for making Greek yogurt from Bean Sprouts, it can't be that hard to culture soy milk with soy yogurt cultures. Basically, boil soy milk, let it cool to body temperature, add the live cultures, put in thermos for a few hours while the bacteria get it on--then yogurt!

So we will see what happens after 8-14 hours...

EDITED: When I made the yogurt and wrote this post, I forgot about this thing called the internet. I googled a bit and found some soy yogurt resources from soy milk makers.

I found out some cool facts. Apparently, the bacteria produces lactic acid faster if you add sugar to the soy milk! And that I could buy live non-dairy acidophilus (the Solgar brand is vegan) to make soy yogurt...which means that I could use it to culture nut milk to make nut cheese. And acidolphilus breeds roughly between 100 - 105F (40 - 45C), a little warmer than tempeh culture.

Vegan Pesto made with bärlauch, radish greens, and ancho chile

Last night I improvised a pesto. Improvisations are great ways to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Previously, I had made a vegan pesto inspired by delicious days’ radish green pesto. To radish greens, I added wild garlic or bear’s-paw garlic (what Germans call bärlauch), sunflower seeds, lemon juice and zest, salt, and olive oil. The radish greens give a peppery bite and a bright green to the pesto. Spring spreadable on bread!

Since I had some dried ancho chile peppers from my December trip to Mexico, I thought last night that they might be a good replacement for sun-dried tomatoes, so I added an entire rehydrated ancho chile to my pesto. Normally, smoky and sour and hot, the chile was perhaps not the best substitute for sun-dried tomatoes. In fact, it fairly overpowered the delicate spiciness of the radish greens and the delicate garlic flavor of the bear’s-paw garlic.

The pesto was still delicious last night on pumpkin seed bread under radish slices and tempeh, but restraint with the chile would work better next time.