Just as my sister is preparing to potentially get back on her vegan wagon, I am preparing to, in a limited, guarded, hesitant way, get off of mine or at least stick a toe over the edge.
Eggs!
I've been dreaming about omelets for months. My roommates are both big egg-eaters, and every time I walk through the kitchen and smell delicious delicious fried eggs I have to send myself to my room to Google "battery cages" until I remember why I can't have any. I'm worried that if I keep doing this I will start to get Pavlovian associations between tasty egg smell and horrifying chicken pictures.
But eggs! One of the grad students in my department has taken pity after months of listening to my cholesterol yearnings. She will be hosting a group of happy chickens in her backyard this year and she has promised to supply me with happy chicken eggs! It does not get better than this: not only do I know that fuzzy animals are receiving the benevolent attention of a trustworthy hippie person, I get to eat the delicious direct result! I-the-vegan-who-dearly-hopes-someday-to-stop-being-vegan welcome this development with a fervor I could not possibly put into words.
I have to find some appropriate way to pay her back, but my brain has been derailed by the magnitude of my eggy desire and I can't think of anything except what I'm going to put them in. Omelets. Fried egg sandwiches. French toast, which is one of the few things in the world that are really, legitimately, fucking difficult to make vegan. Meringue? Souffles? My family's admittedly strange recipe for puffy microwaved fried eggs that are soft and nice when you are sick? Eggs and I together make a world without limits!
Also, my egg supplier (egg dealer? egg connection? egg pusher?) has informed me of something I totally did not know, which is that my local plant nursery not only keeps and deals chickens but even holds workshops on urban chickenry. I'm planning to go to one, because a) my owning roommate has mentioned a vague hope to keep chickens in our own backyard at some point and b) a workshop should provide enough time for me to sneak up on a chicken and pet it.
OMG. I HEAR THEY'RE FLUFFY.
Posted by dianna at February 21, 2008 06:00 PMNow if only you knew someone with a happy dairy cow you could make yourself a proper custard.
To bad my folks' cows are for MEET.
Posted by: Chris at February 21, 2008 08:34 PMChris:
Speaking as a vegan, I would very much like to MEET your parents' cows. Do they have an appointment available?
Posted by: MoltenBoron at February 21, 2008 08:47 PMMB: They don't take appointments, but they're nearly alway available for walk-ins. Personally, I don't see the point of having a freakin' cow if it's not even a milk cow. Actually, the initial point was to secure an agricultural water subsidy (yeah, my folks are totally gaming California's archaic system of farm subsidies). Of course, now my mom treats the poor beasts like pets. Meanshile, I feel no particular attachment to them.
That being said, I identify with Dianna's enthusiasm about getting to have ethical eggs, since I plan for my parents' steer to be my first [intentional] taste of beef in nearly nine years. Driving by Harris Ranch on I-5 is always a good reminder of the reasons not to eat most beef, but since my folks' are doing proper (or at least as close to proper as you can get while still eventually killing the animal) and raising "Chuck" on nothing but good old grass and hay, I think I'm going to feel alright having a little taste when his time comes.
But what I'm *really* looking forward to is their lady goats having delicious little baby goats. Because c'mon guys: ribs.
Now if only I could break my pappy free of his love affair with herbicide.
Posted by: Chris at February 21, 2008 11:16 PMOMG baby goats. Are they too cute to be delicious, or just delicious?
Di: maybe with you eating acceptable eggs, we can finally make a FUCKING RUM CAKE again.
Sorry for all-caps ranty type, but it seemed appropriate.
Posted by: katie at February 21, 2008 11:51 PMI assume that the kids in question will be neither *too* cute to be delicious, nor *just* delicious, but will (in fact) be *both* cute *and* delicious.
If I'm lucky I'll have a chance to take some fottergrafs before they "come of age."
Posted by: Chris at February 22, 2008 07:17 AMRibs: ew. Not to disingenuously claim some kind of precocious juvenile moral sensibility, but man, bones in my food have always freaked me the fuck out. I distinctly recall a dinner at which I refused to finish a perfectly tasty drumstick because I'd eaten enough to expose the bones and was too creeped out to continue eating. Ew. I think as much as anything else it's actually related to that awful teeth-scraping-on-something-hard feeling, which I found so traumatic as a child that I still remember it despite not having experienced it in probably twenty years. Gaaaah!
Rum cake and adorable baby goats, on the other hand, are things of which I thoroughly approve. But I prefer to taste the former and merely look at the latter.
Posted by: Dianna at February 25, 2008 11:13 AM