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Vegetarian chili that tastes good

Finally! My quest for yummy yet meatless chili is over!

I've been a mostly vegetarian for the past fifteen years. I've tried a lot of vegetarian chili recipes, because I love chili, but they've all had a big hole in the flavor, the hole that is normally filled by meat. The flavor of this chili, however, is delicious and complete. Oz loves it, and not just because it's an excuse to eat corn chips.

This recipe is a variation on a Black Bean Chili recipe in Simple Vegetarian Pleasures by Jeanne Lemlin. I have several of her cookbooks and they're all great, by the way.

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, diced
1/4 teaspoon (or more if you like) crushed red pepper
6 garlic cloves, pressed
2 jalapeno peppers, small dice, with the seeds if you like the heat
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 bay leaf
1 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes, with their juice
1 15 ounce can of corn, with the liquid
2 15 ounce cans of black beans, rinsed and drained
1 15 ounce can of pinto beans, rinsed and drained
3 ounces of tomato paste (half a small can)
Water (about a cup)
3/4 teaspoon of salt or to taste
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar (No substitutions! I think the balsamic vinegar is the key to the flavor.)

Possible garnishes:

Grated cheese, such as cheddar or Monterey jack
Plain yogurt or sour cream
Chopped fresh cilantro

Possible sides:

Rice
Corn bread
Corn chips

In a large pot, sauté the onions and red pepper over medium heat for ten minutes or so, until softened.

Add the garlic, jalapenos, chili powder, and cumin. Stir and cook for a few more minutes.

Stir in the remaining ingredients. Add water to get the consistency you like. About a cup of water gets you a nice, thick chili. When the chili starts to boil, reduce heat to low, cover, and cook for thirty minutes, stirring occasionally.

Remove bay leaf and serve the chili with garnishes and sides. Enjoy! The corn and/or rice plus the beans gives you a complete protein, so it's good for you too.

About the tomato paste: Don't you hate it when recipes call for two tablespoons of tomato paste? I always just add half a small can and freeze the rest. I spoon the remaining tomato paste onto a sheet of cling wrap, twist it closed, and put it in a small Ziploc bag in the freezer. Next time I need tomato paste, I just defrost the lump and I'm good to go.

About the jalapenos: Ever since an incident a couple years back, I wear disposable gloves when I chop them up. As soon as I'm done chopping, I dispose of the glove and wash the knife and cutting board. No more burning fingers or eyeballs for me.

About the beans: If you want to cook up dried beans and use those instead of canned, you'll want six cups of cooked beans (about 1 1/8 pounds dried). If you want to use different beans, use different beans. It'll probably taste as good.

Again with the bathrooms

If the horror of unisex public restrooms is the patriarchy's shills' strongest argument against equal rights, then maybe it's time for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Really, it's past time, but it's being given another shot.

But the bathrooms! Oh no! After all, it's not like we have unisex bathrooms in our houses!

Oh, wait …

Aren't public restrooms more an issue for local building codes anyway? Besides, if the only drawback to not having equal rights is the right, nay, the privilege of waiting in a women-only line to use a women-only bathroom, then I'll take equal rights. And until I get them, I'll use the men's room if the line for the ladies' is really long.

The bathroom argument, which I've heard before, is pretty old. It seems that the main argument against equality nowadays is that the ERA would require equal rights for everybody and that would be bad because everyone knows that some people are more equal than others. (Lest that be taken out of context, I'd like to say that I was being sarcastic and I do, in fact, believe that no one is more equal than anyone else.)

I expect that's why the ERA is being recast as the "Women's Equality Amendment," neatly cutting out all the people who are being discriminated against on the basis of their skin color, religion, sexual orientation, disability, etc.

Should equality be doled out piecemeal? No. Will I take what I can get? Yes.

A snapshot

When I take my constitutional, I carry my camera unless it looks like rain. I take pictures of things I see along the way, whatever catches my eye. I really should vary my route more, though watching how the same things change with the seasons has its own appeal. Over the last couple days, for example, all the cherry trees blossomed and now there are these clouds of pinkish white dotting the neighborhood. I never photograph people (unless they wander into the frame). The other day, though, I stopped to chat with a neighbor who always asks, "Taken any good pictures?" I said, "Uh. Not really. Can I take your picture?" "Sure!"

So I shot a few pictures of him. Head and shoulders because I had the 50 mm lens and didn't want to zoom (away) with my feet. I couldn't tell from the LCD whether they came out or not or whether there was enough light. When I checked them out at home on my monitor, I found they were pretty good. The first shot was the best, as is often the case. I printed out a copy and dropped it through his mail slot the next time I went by.

The next day when I walked by, he leaned out his window and called, "Thanks for the picture! I look great!"

"You do!"

Festive Sunday

At the St. Patrick's Irish Festival, St. Baldrick's participants get their heads shaved to raise money for children's cancer research. Drummers and bagpipers provide the background music.

Yes, we went to the St. Patrick's festival today, for the first time ever. This is an annual church fundraiser held in the neighborhood. You'd think in fifteen years on the Hill we'd have made it before now, but no. Mostly because a lot of the festival involves standing around drinking beer and we're not so into that. They have a few stages set up and different performing groups, bands to pipers to Celtic dancers. In Patrick Henry Park, a children's area had large, inflatable, bouncy things, kid's games, and all the best shade. There are also Celtic-themed vendors (we're still not Irish so the "Kiss me, I'm Irish" stuff is right out), fried foods, and a Ladies' Auxiliary Bake Sale. We saw free range nuns, guys in eighteenth century garb from the Patrick Henry speech reenactment at St. John's, and lots of guys in kilts. [Note to guys in kilts: The kilt is great, but don't pair it with a worn out, too tight T-shirt unless you are extremely ripped. Everyone looks good in clothes that fit.] Lots of newly bald people too. I hope they remembered to bring sunblock for their heads.

In other news, spring is really here:

Lovely cherry blossoms

Camellias too

Quiz Monster strikes again!

This was not what I was going to write about, but the wonderful world of Japanese TV has its way of sidetracking me.

Quiz Monster was on this evening and featured the usual lot of questions (like "fun with pork" back in January) that somehow miss the whole point of reality. Tonight's stumper was "What is the correct pronunciation of 'Kamehameha'?" Note: This "correct" has nothing to do with actual correctness.

By most native Japanese speakers, Kamehameha is pronounced exactly as it's spelled: Ka-may-ha-may-ha. The same accent is placed on each syllable because, in Japanese, the same accent is placed on each syllable of most words.

This was a multiple choice question, by the way. The choices offered did not include the correct pronunciation of Kamehameha. Instead, the choices were all the exact same Japanese pronunciation of Kamehameha, only with a slight pause at different points: (1) Ka May-ha-may-ha, (2) Ka-may Ha-may-ha, (3) Ka-may-ha May-ha, (4) Ka-may-ha-may Ha.

I'm pretty good at quiz shows. I'm pretty good at Japanese quiz shows. (I am a dork.) I usually get the answer right off, especially when I already know the correct answer. In this case, knowing the correct pronunciation of Kamehameha was not a help. My first guess was option (3). Oz said, "I can't even say it after hearing all that!" None of the Japanese contestants got it either, even after three guesses. The "correct" answer? (1).

Yeah. I can see that Oz and I will have to start defining a new kind of correctness, "Japanese correct," to go with our two kinds of weird: weird and "Japanese weird," which is a whole other kind of weird. Not necessarily weirder, but seriously other.

Woodchucks in bloom

It's the first day of spring and I got to see two woodchucks. One gamboling across the hillside in Libby Hill Park, and the other lurking up in the woods on the hill over the stupid gas station and (in)convenience store. I do enjoy the woodchuckery and it's good to see them out and about after their long winter's nap. Another sign of spring is the pastel haze at the tips of all the trees. Some oak trees turn this lovely, subtle shade of pale reddish gray which if I could get a scarf in that color, it would look great on me. I think they're oaks. I'll have to remember which trees are ghostly pink now and then check them again after the leaves come in. Oz would call them oaks, but then he insists there are only two kinds of trees: oak trees and pine trees.

I like seeing creatures behaving as they ought since I'm not getting enough of that at home. Yes, the cats are still having issues. Rather than getting a cattle prod (Oz says, "No, it'd be a kitty prod."), I'm trying to do this another way. The Feliway. (I didn't buy from the Cat Faeries people, I'm just linking them. Gad, crystals?) I have some of the spray, but I don't think it's enough for hard cases like my cats. I got a couple of the diffusers so my house will be filled with cat pheromones to give my cranky little bastards a sense of peace and tranquility. They're going to be happy and tranquil whether they like it or not.

I bought one of the diffusers at PetSmart where the clerk called me "Sir." Huh? I was so surprised I didn't say anything. I mean, I know I have short hair and no makeup on, but I don't look manly. Soft butch at most. Also, the purse with the big flower on it should have been a clue. After we walked out of the store I told Oz. He laughed and said, "You want to go back and rough him up a little?" No, I didn't think that was quite necessary.

Unlike my cats, I have tranquility to spare. Right?

No potatoes

We are so not Irish and it shows in our St. Patrick's Day. Korean food for dinner, and then we stayed off the roads because it doesn't make sense to be driving around on holidays that involve a lot of alcohol consumption.

I didn't wear green. Oz wore an olive sweater, but that's as close as he got.

For entertainment we watched sumo. The novel I finished was set in England, the novel I started was set in Scotland. I imbibed a wee dram of Scotch whisky.

Yep, St. Patrick's Day is not a big thing for us. It's not like we're Irish anyway, though I suspect a few of Oz's ancestors were run out of Ireland at some point in the distant past. That's about as close as we can get, and his ancestors were run out of a lot of places.

As of this evening and after a quiet weekend of doing chores and goofing off, Oz has spring fever. After dinner, he laid down in bed and asked for a thermometer (after looking for the thermometer on his own and giving up, which is fine because it was in no place he'd ever look). I didn't think his forehead felt hot, but it turned out he's about one degree above normal. Poor baby! He must have overdone today when he was running the vacuum. Then he wanted some Tylenol. "There's some *dainty invalid cough* over on the vanity." I should note that I started the dainty cough thing, with the back of one hand pressed to my forehead, of course.

Probably a deficiency of beer and potatoes.

Forty signs of cat pee

Actually, there's only one sign. It's yellow, damp, and stinky. It leads to conversations like this one:

Me: Oz, there's a sponge on the kitchen floor over under where the towels are.

Oz: And?

Me: You need to know that it's been used for cat pee.

Oz: So I shouldn't use it to wash my face?

Me: Yeah. Or to wipe off a dish. Or to clean the counters. Or anything.

Well, enough about the cat pee. It's been less of a problem of late, though I expect that to change as spring does its thing. That thing is happening now, in fact. Spring has crept up on little lamb feet, warming up the days and nights until we don't need to run the furnace, then we can open the windows during the day, then suddenly we're leaving the windows open all night and tomorrow it's supposed to get up to 80 °F. I love having the house open, but over the past year or so, open windows have correlated with bad cat toilet habits.

Again, enough about that.

I've been playing around with my 50 mm lens some. I think I have wide angle eyes, because with this lens I'm always having to back away from my subject. Other than that, it's a great lens, beautifully sharp and smooth. Oz and I were playing with the speedlight and I took a bunch of pictures of the cats (my principal models).

One thing about the fabulous optics and great resolution? When I view the photos in full screen mode on my monitor, I can see what a bad housekeeper I am. We have got some major dust in this house. One picture was of Sparky classily drinking out of the toilet. That picture would be appropriate for I can has cheezburger except that I can see how it's time to clean the toilet. It's also easy to see when someone needs to do a little nostril grooming.

I don't think I'll be posting any of those images. But here's one taken with that same lens.

X-treme pruning at North 27th near East Broad Street

The city and power company have been doing some long overdue pruning. If they cut the trees away from the power lines, maybe we'll have fewer power outages during the storm season. There'd better be. I want something to offset the loss of shade.

Daylight

In my default, self-employed and own-hour-setting state, I wake with the sun. Normally, by the time daylight savings arrives, my waking time is already adjusted, or has been forcibly adjusted by a cat who wants his feeding schedule set by the sun. The bumping up of the clock change has derailed the process. Last night I stayed up to some ungodly hour to finish a book, then slept till nine o'clock. Not much saving of daylight going on here.

The cats did their best to rouse me at a reasonable hour this morning, but I shut them out of the bedroom. Tricky me! I get up and walk to the door like I might possibly be going downstairs to feed them. The cat scurries ahead out into the hallway, looking back over his shoulder to make sure I'm following, then, click! I shut the door and go back to bed.

I'm so glad the door-shutting trick works in my current bedroom. In the room where I used to sleep, there was an inch and a half gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. If I tried to shut the cats out, they would reach a paw under the door, rattle the door against the doorjamb, and meow piteously and very loudly. The door of my current bedroom does not have paw clearance.

The cats may find away around even that. The smart cat, who is also the one that wants to eat in the morning, is catching on to the door closing thing. Now instead of running out into the hall, he stops and waits under the chair by the door. Thus far, I've been able to reach under the chair and gently push him into the hall, but as soon as he starts digging in his heels, I'm toast.

Since cat tricks are the theme of the day, here's another cute thing my cat did. The not-so-smart cat, Sparky was sitting on my desk the other afternoon, being helpful by sitting in front of my monitor while he engaged in a little pre-dinner primping. He stretched out one foreleg while he washed up a tricky spot on the elbow and put his paw down. On my keyboard. Suddenly "fffftttttttttttttttttttttttt" (something cats actually say) appeared in the middle of my translation. Maybe Sparky's smarter than I thought.

Bad habits

I really need to start writing the clever things down when I think of them, or when Oz says them, rather than waiting till evening when my head empties out after a soul-crushing day of weird technology (right now I'm translating patents for automotive supplemental restraint systems that look a lot more dangerous to the vehicle occupants than oncoming traffic). The problem was compounded today with a migraine plus bonus light sensitivity. Thanks to the joy of tight deadlines I was stuck staring at screen after screen of car passenger-damaging equipment and when I finally gave up, I still had to shade my eyes every time I walked by a window. And that's with the blinds drawn. Oh, my head hurts just thinking about it, so I'll stop thinking about it now.

I had the foresight to run over to the donut shop before the dizzy spells began in earnest. (After the dizzy starts, I don't drive.) Donuts and coffee are surprisingly effective headache remedies. The donut shop lady said, "Hey, I haven't seen you for a while." I told her that I'd been going to be in a wedding and I wanted to be thin for it. She said, "Oh, we're all the same. We always starve ourselves for important events." I wouldn't go quite that far. My slack weight gain avoidance plan has a special exception for headache donuts. Actually, I have a special exception for just about anything I want to eat as long as I've been getting regular exercise.

So, how about some architecture? Get it while you can.

Murphy's Hotel, aka the Eighth Street Office Building, North 8th and East Broad Streets

Despite efforts to save Murphy's Hotel, demolition of this 1911 building will start in a few weeks, after they salvage some of the pretty bits. The state owns this old hotel and has been using it as an office building. When the fancy trim started to fall off, they built covered walkways down on the sidewalks, because that's cheaper than maintaining the thing, I guess. Now they're going to tear it down and build something new and boring in its place. It seems the new building will be a better match for all the other new, boring buildings and boring surface parking lots that are springing up all down Broad Street as older, interesting buildings are getting knocked down.

Here's a dandy detail from a completely different building.

From the Grace Street façade of Berry-Burk Co., North 6th and East Grace Streets

Though, alas, the department store is long gone, this building is not endangered and has been turned into apartments. We suspect that the dandy is meant to be Beau Brummel, noted Regency dandy. Though Mr. Brummel shuffled off this mortal coil over eighty years before this store was built in 1926, he was immortalized in a 1924 film. Coinky-dink? I think not.

Oz can't believe that anyone ever dressed like that, with a top hat straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

Trapped at my desk

By a cat.

Might as well write a little.

I came downstairs to wash the dinner dishes, take my meds, and get a glass of water. I sat down at my desk to do a little surfing before I went back upstairs and Sparky climbed into my lap.

I'm stuck here.

The cat weighs like seventeen pounds and that's not when he's being a cat of incredible heaviness like he is right now.

I did put him on a diet again, which I think is very brave of me considering that the last diet made him so grouchy he bit me. This time, instead of following the vet's advice to switch them over to mostly canned food, I just got "light" cat food which I mix with their regular food. They are getting more food, but less fat. Thus far, the only difference I've noticed is super silky coats from the brewer's yeast in the light food. Sleek, silky, non-grouchy kitties are fine with me; I don't even care if they don't lose weight.

Oh, Oz came into the office and sat down at his computer. Ruined everything for Sparky and now my lap is catless.

Eclipse

We got to see the lunar eclipse Saturday night. No photographs, though someone else in town got a great shot. We were making a trip to the grocery store and Oz was under the weather, so standing out in some cold place wouldn't have done. Even so, we had a great view of the moon on the drive home and I even managed to keep the car on the road. The moon looks cool under weird light. It's only then that I get the sense of the moon as a three dimensional object. Sunlight flattens the moon to a disk, but reflected light from earth or the penumbra gives us spooky moon.

Oz is feeling better, by the way. He did call in sick today, but this morning found him curled up in bed with a Flashman book which he dug out of my library book pile and spent the day reading like an avid little beast. I think this was a Flashman day. Sticking a bookmark in the historical endnotes, Oz said, "That Fraser! He writes this like it's trash, but it's all, like, true."

And, lastly, I'm wondering if the city parks department follows my photostream. On 27 February, I expressed disgust at the appearance of the new parking deck at Rockett's Landing, as viewed from Libby Hill Park. Two days later, some parks department guys planted a shrubbery, as pictured below.

Now the unattractive parking deck is almost completely hidden … at least to people sitting in that bench.

Please honorably accept our humble apologies

The other night I was doing my physical therapy and watching Close Up Gendai, a daily news show on NHK which typically features one in-depth story on some current topic. They do all different kinds of stories, from international and very local news, society and culture, and science. That night's story was "Whither keigo?"

Keigo is the Japanese system of honorific language, which doesn't have any exact parallel in English. Compared to keigo, formal English and casual English sound identical. Go ahead and read the wiki. It's quite interesting. Really.

The theme of the keigo story was that no one knows how to use keigo properly anymore, especially those young whippersnappers. Why? And what can be done about it?

There are a few reasons why. The principal reason is that interpersonal relationships have become less formal. For example, family members use the same register with each other as they do with their friends, whereas in the olden days, children would have used keigo when speaking with their parents. Since kids aren't picking up keigo at home, they're learning it in the streets. And fast food joints and coffee shops, from service industry workers who have to be trained in "service keigo" by their employers.

Anymore, the only place most people hear extreme keigo is on samurai dramas, where, between internecine warfare and ritual suicides, the female characters speak in ultra-flowery language, while the male characters use manly keigo (butch, yet still flowery).

As a result, keigo is getting weird because people don't have a good grasp of it. People are making it up as they go along and throwing in the service keigo, which is what they hear most on a regular basis. And the service keigo is not correct. Whose fault is that?

At this point in the show, the camera zoomed in on the sign of a fast food restaurant. The camera stayed out of focus and moved pretty fast, but not so fast that we couldn't all get a glimpse of the golden arches. Yes! The adulteration of the proud Japanese language is all the fault of the McDonald's employee manual! The set phrases to be used by employees speaking to customers were translated from English into incorrect keigo because there are no corresponding correct keigo phrases. Hence the introduction of the bugbear (to Japanese language purists) "yoroshikatta deshou ka" which is wrong keigo, but which is supposed to stand in for "Will that be all?" or "Would you like [fries with that]?"

Can keigo be saved? Language is a viscous system and these trends are hard to turn around. This isn't a new trend either. When Princess Diana and Prince Charles visited Japan back in the 1980's, it was scandalous how the Japanese newscasters reporting on the story stumbled horribly over their keigo, wrongly using super-humble forms for the royals.

Nowadays companies are holding keigo seminars for new hires to prepare them for properly polite client interactions. An employment agency is offering keigo classes for their job-seeking clients. The show dropped in on one of these classes where a group of young men were trying to un-learn their bad keigo and learn proper keigo. They all passed the written test, but failed in ad lib dialogs. The instructor corrected one student and told him the proper phrasing. The student said, "Ah, samurai poku." ("Sounds like a samurai.")

I think that's the crux of the matter right there. If proper keigo is something one only hears on TV in costume dramas, one feels pretty silly talking like that in real life. How would you feel if you had to speak Elizabethan English in order to be considered mannerly?

Keigo, use it or lose it. I bet keigo could be saved if it could be spun into a pop culture trend. Consider the staying power of Hello Kitty. All keigo needs is a pink bow and some glitter.