Vegan Soul Kitchen

“bryant terry knows that good food should be an everyday right and not a privilege. this book is full of easy, tasty, seasonal recipes that also happen to be vegan and affordable!”

—alice waters

Vegan Soul Kitchen (VSK): Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine is the latest book by Oakland-based eco chef, food justice activist, and author Bryant Terry. In this deeply personal and cutting-edge cookbook, Terry revisits his Southern roots and offers innovative, animal-free recipes mostly inspired by African American and Southern cooking. VSK includes a foreword by cookbook author Myra Kornfeld; beautiful full-color photographs; an original song written by singer-songwriter Don Bryant (the author’s uncle); new poetry by Michael Molina; suggested soundtracks for each recipe; and book, art, and film recommendations.

VSK recipes use fresh, whole, best-quality, healthy ingredients and cooking techniques with an eye on local, seasonal, sustainably grown food. Reinterpreting popular dishes from African and Caribbean countries as well as his favorite childhood dishes, Terry reinvents African American and Southern cuisine—capitalizing on the complex flavors of the tradition, without the animal products.

Includes recipes for: Black-Eyed Pea Fritters with Hot Pepper Sauce; Jamaican Veggie Patties; Double Mustard Greens & Roasted Yam Soup; Agave-Sweetened Orange-Orange Pekoe Tea; Baked Sweet Potato Fries with Ginger-Peanut Dipping Sauce; Cajun-Creole-Spiced Tempeh Pieces with Creamy Grits; Citrus and Spice Pickled Watermelon Rind; Caramelized Grapefruit, Avocado, and Watercress Salad with Grapefruit Vinaigrette; Sweet Cornmeal-Coconut Butter Drop Biscuits; and Molasses-Vanilla Ice Cream with Candied Walnuts.

The best way to summarize this eclectic book: Alice Waters meets Melvin Van Peebles. . .

About VSK:

Order here

What people are saying about VSK

Publication Date: March 2, 2009

Author: Bryant Terry

Foreword: Myra Kornfeld

Food Photographer: Sara Remington

Lifestyle Photographers: Keba Konte and Brittany Powell

Songwriter: Don Bryant

Poet: Mike Molina

Order Vegan Soul Kitchen

Click here to read about Bryant’s first book: Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (Tarcher/Penguin 2006)

Vegan recipe: Black-Eyed Pea Fritters with Hot Pepper Sauce

4 to 6 servings

1 cup dried black-eyed peas sorted, soaked overnight, drained, and rinsed

1/2 medium onion, diced

1/2 cup raw peanuts

1 teaspoon minced thyme

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water

1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

1/2 cup finely chopped green bell pepper

1 tablespoon cornmeal

5 cups coconut oil

Remove the skins from the beans by adding them to a large bowl, filling the bowl with water, agitating the beans, and fishing out the skins that float to the top with a fine mesh strainer. Rinse beans well.

In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, combine the beans, onion, peanuts, thyme, cayenne, vinegar, water, and salt and pulse until completely smooth. Transfer to a medium bowl, cover, and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 200°F.

Remove the batter from the refrigerator, add the bell pepper and cornmeal to the batter, and beat with a wooden spoon for 2 minutes.

In a medium saucepan over high heat, warm the oil until hot but not smoking, about 5 minutes.

Lower the oil to medium high, and in batches of 5, spoon the batter into the oil, 1 tablespoon at a time. Fry, stirring around, until golden brown, about 2 minutes. If necessary, adjust the temperature to ensure that the fritters do not cook to quickly.

Transfer the fritters to a paper towel-lined plate and allow them to drain. Transfer the drained fritters to a baking sheet and place in the oven to keep warm.

Serve hot with Hot Pepper Sauce.

Vegan recipe: Hot Pepper Sauce

1 cup

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 small red onion, diced

1/2 teaspoon cumin

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Coarse sea salt

1 large garlic clove, minced

1 habanero chile, minced

1/4 cup tomato paste

1/4 cup tomato sauce

2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup water

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

In a saucepan over low heat, warm the oil. Add the onion, cumin, cayenne, and 1/2 teaspoon salt and sauté until the onions start to caramelize, about 8 minutes.

Stir in the garlic and chiles and sauté for 2 minutes more. Add the tomato paste, tomato sauce, vinegar, and water. Mix well, and simmer until it starts to thicken, about 5 to 7 minutes.

Transfer all the ingredients to an upright blender, and purée until smooth. Store in a tightly sealed jar in the refrigerator.

Vegan recipe: Baked Sweet Potato Fries with Ginger-Peanut Dipping Sauce

Serves 4

Fries

4 uniformly shaped medium sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds), peeled

1 tsp. course sea salt

1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

Dipping Sauce

1 heaping tablespoon minced ginger

½ cup toasted peanuts

½ cup apple juice

1 tsp. agave nectar

⅛ tsp. cayenne

¼ tsp. coarse sea salt

For the fries

Cut the potatoes into slices about ½-inch thick and then cut them ½-inch lengthwise into the shape of fries.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Combine the sweet potatoes, 3 quarts cold water, and 1 teaspoon salt in a large pot over high heat. Parboil, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Drain in a colander and pat well with a clean kitchen towel or paper towels until completely dry. In a large bowl, toss the sweet potatoes with the olive oil.

Arrange fries on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for 50 minutes, gently stirring every 15 minutes with a wooden spoon to ensure even browning, until tender and caramelized.

For the dipping sauce In an upright blender, combine the ginger, peanuts, apple juice, agave nectar, cayenne, and salt and blend until creamy. Transfer to a small bowl.

Taking Chantix or Zyban and Feeling Totally Hostile, Suicidal or Psychotic?

Are you trying to quit smoking and taking Chantix or Zyban? Kicking the nasty habit is supposedly as difficult as kicking heroin, they say (who they are is another story, or blog, altogether), but taking either of these FDA approved drugs is not worth it!

I now wonder if two people I know are actually acting different and/or see-sawing so drastically because of Chantix and "the increased risk of serious mental health concerns — including changes in behavior, depressed mood, hostility, and suicidal thoughts. Both display a handful of the above, and one might have all the "unusual changes" in mood. 

I noticed the changed in one of them shortly after the medication began, but my concerns were fluffed off. You'd think a doctor would have said something, but not once did I hear of a doctor — either of their doctor's — giving a warning about the medication.

I'm going to be printing out the article and handing it each of them. I wonder if it will even make an impact. Sometimes people just don't even want to hear it once they're so in their "mode" of personality change. They don't even realize they aren't themselves. Others are aware, but don't care. I'm crossing my fingers.

Chantix, Zyban Users Warned of Risk of Suicide, Depression

By PSYCH CENTRAL NEWS EDITOR 
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 1, 2009

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that it is requiring manufacturers to put a Boxed Warning on the prescribing information for the smoking cessation drugs Chantix (varenicline) and Zyban (buproprion).

The warning highlights the increased risk of serious mental health concerns — including changes in behavior, depressed mood, hostility, and suicidal thoughts.

“The risk of serious adverse events while taking these products must be weighed against the significant health benefits of quitting smoking,” said Janet Woodcock, M.D., director, the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

“Smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States and we know these products are effective aids in helping people quit.”

Similar information on mental health events will be required for buproprion marketed as the antidepressant Wellbutrin and for generic versions of buproprion. These drugs already carry a Boxed Warning for suicidal behavior in treating psychiatric disorders.

Woodcock said health care professionals who prescribe Chantix and Zyban should monitor their patients for any unusual changes in mood or behavior after starting these drugs. She added that patients should immediately contact their health care professional if they experience such changes.

The FDA’s request for the additional warnings is based on a review of reports submitted to the agency’s Adverse Event Reporting System since the time the products were marketed and on an analysis of information from clinical trials and scientific literature.

The analyses revealed that some who have taken Chantix and Zyban have reported experiencing unusual changes in behavior, become depressed, or had their depression worsen, and had thoughts of suicide or dying. In many cases, the problems began shortly after starting the medication and ended when the medication was stopped. However, some people continued to have symptoms after stopping the medication. Also, in a few cases, the problems began after the medication was stopped.

Neither Chantix nor Zyban contain nicotine and some of these symptoms may be a response to nicotine withdrawal. People who stop smoking may experience symptoms such as depression, anxiety, irritability, restlessness, and sleep disturbances.

However, some patients who were using these products experienced the reported adverse events while they were still smoking.

In addition to the Boxed Warning, the FDA also is requesting more information in the Warnings section of the prescribing information and updated information in the Medication Guide for patients that further discuss the risk of mental health events when using these products.

Manufacturers also will be required to conduct a clinical trial to determine how often serious neuropsychiatric symptoms occur in patients using various smoking cessation therapies, including patients who currently have psychiatric disorders. The FDA’s review of adverse events for patients using nicotine patches did not identify a clear link between those medications and suicidal events.

Chantix is manufactured by New York-based Pfizer Inc. Zyban is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, Brentford, Middlesex, United Kingdom.

Source: U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Squash That URL Down!

This is a handy little blog entry taken from the tweetmeme blog, which, according to them, tracks "the hottest links on twitter."

Shorten It: Most popular URL shorteners

Chris

22

March 23, 2009

We’ve all used them: services that allow us to take that horrendously long URL and compress it into a manageable size so it won’t take up too many precious characters in our tweets.

Here at Tweetmeme, we’re constantly downloading and storing your tweets with links in, so we’re in a unique position of being able to tell you exactly how many of you are using which URL-shortening service, and how they’re competing. We’ve taken a couple of weeks worth of data from Tweetmeme , and compiled the top 5 URL shorteners.

Site	Market Share (%)
tinyurl.com	75.49
bit.ly	13.02
ff.im	4.87
is.gd	4.36
twurl.nl	2.26

  
As you can see, Tinyurl.com is clearly in the lead at the moment – this is most probably because it is the default service that both Twitter and Twhirl use (TweetDeck uses Bit.ly by default, but can use others) to shorten users’ URLs when required.

But we can do more than that – we’ve stored data from when the links are posted over time, so we can show you how the use is trending over time.

  
Use of top 5 URL shortening services over a 2-week period.

  
Close-up of services not including Tinyurl.com.

22 Responses to “Shorten It: Most popular URL shorteners”

(Edited to show you only responses from users/owners/developers from URL shortener websites and other helpful suggestions)

Alex Schleber  on March 23rd, 2009

Problem is, Tinyurl wastes at least 5 characters right of the bat with their domain name alone, and then does things like stripping out your # anchor extensions, e.g. when trying to link back to a specific blog comment (is.gd does the same BTW).

While some of the other services help in some way, they each have their own quirks, like wanting to own your stats data, or not allowing custom extensions when creating the shortened URLs from their bookmarklets.

I’ve come up with a completely free, no-strings-attached solution using a Wordpress theme hack, that allows you to own your very own Tinyurl-like service. Check it out here:

http://3on.us/why-diy-tinyurl

Rex Dixon  on March 27th, 2009

Nice to see this update on the URL shortner world.

Even though Tiny URL has the big jump (obviously!), bit.ly is starting to come up nicely at ~13%. Another nice thing is that when you hit the retweet button – it’s a bit.ly created URL.

Thank you for helping to spread the word about how cool and up and coming bit.ly is these days!

Questions or concerns about bit.ly? Drop me a line anytime!

Rex @
bit.ly

Stu  on March 27th, 2009

http://tinyarro.ws/ Can get a URL down to something like 10 characters. It’s great for saving space in tweets.

Mike  on April 7th, 2009

SmallerLink.com lets you customize your ending, so that you can always remember where your photo albums are, or directions to your house, etc. We also track clicks, and let you browse through the history to see what others are shortening (and if you want you can keep your links hidden from the public list).

http://SmallerLink.com any thoughts and suggestions are more than appreciated.

Have fun guys,
Mike

John Ritz  on April 12th, 2009

A big problem with some of these shorteners is that they aren’t consistent with the shortened URLs. This is a problem when trying to get the shortened URL for a blog post, for example, to look up tweetbacks.

Here’s an example: Tweetmeme returned this Bitly URL for one of my blog posts

http://bit.ly/3DPhKA

When I go to Bitly and type in the same long URL, I get a different shortened link:

http://bit.ly/1HmBeu

You can see that both shortened links lead to the same URL.

The same thing goes for TinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/dha7vr (generated by Tweetmeme)

http://tinyurl.com/dnakmd (generated by me)

So if I search all tweets looking for http://tinyurl.com/dnakmd (when they tweeted withhttp://tinyurl.com/dha7vr ), it won’t find their tweets, even though they are out there.

I’m also curious why Tweetmeme would use Bitly for one post and TinyURL for another?

But this isn’t a problem with the plugin, it’s just an issue with URL shorteners in general (although I’ve heard is.gd is consistent). Anyone know a way around this? I’ve been racking my brains and looking online for some way to force the URL shorteners to be consistent with their shortened URLs.

John

(me here. you know, spookie, the blogger… tiny url's come in handy everyplace. they are very handy when posting a link in a blog comment, and when posting long URL's in bulletins and posts on Myspace, which sometimes makes thew URL run off the browser page.)

Nine Inch Nails - Wave Goodbye Tour 2009

Prague, Czech Republic

featured photo: Nine Inch Nails - Wave Goodbye Tour 2009 by decimal

Wave Goodbye 2009: NIN/JA Prague, Czech Republic 2009-06-24O2 Arena Flickr code: nintk3f73o19k [?] view 9 videos from this show

Yes, I'm Still Alive!

Hello, friends, acquaintances, strangers, the lurking passerby and my stalker! I'm still here. I've come across quite a few topics to blog about, but just haven't had the time to sit down and compose a neat and fresh blog entry. I've also had a lot on my mind I've wanted to blog about, but I feel I still have to censor myself because I know the stalker still lurks in the shadows of the zeros and ones of the internet, and it keeps me, unfortunately, from posting what I want to. Trust me, it ticks me off. Had I not seen a tweet from someone just the other day — a little twitter blurb stating that said annoyance had still been trying to annoy — I'd have started openly blogging about everything I've always wanted to. for now, I'm still on hold…

Catch you all soon. 

My dear cat Buster from April 2005.

R.I.P. Buster, we all miss you!

(Yes, I rescued him off the streets, of course! The friendliest feral in Long Beach!)

There Really is No Telling!

 The entry below is reposted from BrooklynVegan

35 lbs of Psilocybin Peanut Butter Cups meant for Bonnaroo intercepted by Tennessee police

Nearly 35 pounds of Psilocybin (hallucinogenic) mushrooms baked into about 500 chocolate peanut butter cups were intercepted by Murfreesboro Police vice detectives before being sold at Bonnaroo music festival beginning Thursday in Manchester.

Vice detectives Wednesday raided the Kingwood Drive home of suspect Charles Culver, 22, and located the illegal drug with a street value of $10,000, said police spokesman Kyle Evans.

"We have seen an increase in LSD over the past several years and this is another form or substitute for that drug," Evans said.

"The affects are hallucinogenic in nature, similar to LSD. They are very dangerous and there have been incidents of people dying the first time they used this drug."

Origin of the mushrooms is not being disclosed.

"There's no telling how many lives these detectives have saved by keeping these drugs off the street and they should be commended for an outstanding investigation leading to these arrests," Evans said. [The Murfreesboro Post]

There really is no telling.

Between the Lines from ZDNet.com: AT&T's Really Bad Week (and I Still Can't Have an iPhone with Verizon Wireless.)

I WANT an iPhone. I DON'T want AT&T. I had an iPhone when they were first released. I actually returned it. Yes, me, the Apple pusher, the Mac manic, the one who would never turn away an Apple product actually returned an iPhone — because it was useless to me without my wireless provider.

June 12th, 2009

AT&T's really bad week: The network reputation hits keep coming

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 3:42 am

It’s safe to say AT&T is ready for the weekend. The telecom giant has had a horrid week with a backlash against iPhone 3G S and complaints about the network. The latter item may create the most lasting damage.
For now, much of the focus is on AT&T’s upgrade pricing for the iPhone 3G S. Simply put, if you want the new iPhone and you’re still under contract you won’t get it for $199. You’re on the hook for $399. Apple iPhone fans, the types who are used to upgrading when a new device is available, are pushing a Twitter petition. AT&T informs folks that it is listening to the complaints.

Lost in this hubbub are the anecdotal signs that the reputation of AT&T’s network is taking a hit. When the Apple-AT&T exclusive iPhone deal ends we may learn that AT&T emerged with its reputation in tatters. A bad reliability reputation will last well beyond the iPhone exclusive. Let’s recap the signs that AT&T’s network is becoming a punch line:

• As reported by Sam Diaz, WWDC attendees chuckled when AT&T was mentioned at the iPhone 3G S launch. Apple was laughed at when it was mentioned that AT&T would support MMS. AT&T wasn’t mentioned in the same sentence with tethering. And you know that “S” is a joke waiting to happen. Speed? Try slow.

• AT&T promises a significantly faster network. That’s good news for iPhone users. The bad news: It’s an admission that AT&T can’t handle the iPhone traffic and is slow about upgrading its network.


• Verizon Wireless is deftly taking advantage of AT&T’s network troubles. Last month, Verizon Wireless chief Lowell McAdam said that AT&T’s “ceiling for their network will be the floor for our network.” McAdam called AT&T’s announcement on its network upgrade old news—about a year old. He also noted AT&T’s promises to upgrade speed are spin.


• Even Howard Stern, who chose a BlackBerry Bold over the Palm Pre, notes that he can’t make calls on AT&T’s network without being dropped repeatedly. Stern’s sidekick Artie Lange—and others on staff—mention that Verizon Wireless is flawless. Verizon Wireless usually has to pay for a commercial like that.

And the hits just keep coming. Don’t be surprised if Jay Leno and David Letterman start knocking AT&T in monologues. It’s not immediately clear how AT&T can counter the perception that its network can’t hang with heavy data usage, but it better figure out something quick.
It’s nice that AT&T is listening to the iPhone pricing backlash, but it may be focusing on the wrong problem.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Email Larry Dignan

meh.

Perry on His Day Off From NIN/JA

June 8th, Etty Lau Farrell posted this on Twitter.

I thought it was adorable! Perry and his son having a normal, father and son day.