The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I baked! And I did not bake failure for once!
For the next three hours or so, both of my novels will be $1.99. For the rest of the day after that, Skylights and The Sanctum of the Sphere will be $2.99. That’s still 40% off! The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will remain 99 cents all day.
If you buy one, I will think fondly upon you while I eat cheesecake. I may even say your name, if you tell me what it is.
I shall transform this into cheesecake. Probably poorly. 
Yes, that’s spaghetti.
But that isn’t ground beef, nor is it sausage.
Longtime readers know that I dabble with vegetarianism occasionally, and that I enjoy me a tasty boca burger from time to time. Meat substitutes intrigue me. Some of them are better than others, and some of them are just good on their own merits. Boca chicken, for example, tastes enough like chicken for me, but Boca burgers don’t taste like meat at all. They’re still good, because lots of things that don’t taste like meat are good.
Some of the Subways in Chicago had a veggie patty that was goddamn delicious, but none of the ones in Indiana seem to have it. It’s very depressing.
Anyway, a couple of months ago I suddenly saw a bunch of articles all in a short period of time about Beyond Meat, a company that was so insistent that their plant-based meat substitutes were indistinguishable from meat that the CEO was insisting that, chemically, they actually were meat. I can’t find any of the articles now, unfortunately, but this page on their website makes a similar claim. Key to their definition: you have to call it “meat” because of what it is, not what it comes from.
Available at Whole Foods, starting in January. Well, OK. There’s a Whole Foods in town, and I’d needed an excuse to go pop in anyway, so I used part of my free day off yesterday to go check the place out. I came home with some Beyond Beef Beefy Crumbles, which were around $5 for about 11-12 ounces.
Preparation was exactly the same as ground beef; I tossed it in a frying pan with a little bit of olive oil and sautéed it. I made the tomato sauce from scratch, and after tasting and seasoning it a bit I tossed it into the tomato sauce and let the meat and sauce live together for a little bit.
So here’s the skinny on Beyond Meat: It looks and cooks basically exactly like meat. I don’t think anyone would look at that picture and not recognize ground beef or sausage. And so long as you season it and put it with something, it tastes fine. But you know how whenever you make a meat sauce with pasta, your last bite is always just the meat, because the pasta is always gone first? Okay. That bite’s gonna be weird. The primary ingredient of Beyond Beef Beefy Crumbles is pea protein, and that last bite’s gonna getcha a little bit. The texture is a little– just a little— off, still, and you can sorta taste the pea even through the tomatoes and the oregano and rosemary and thyme and all the other stuff I had in my tomato sauce. Mixed with some spaghetti, though– basically anything else to chew on— and I would have fooled you.
Not quite perfect yet, in other words. But I’m keeping an eye on this company, and I’m curious about their not-chicken, because for whatever reason chicken seems to be easier to fake than beef.
I know I just posted and I DON’T CARE WANT MONKEY BREAD NOW
So… Friday was awesome, what with finishing the book and absolutely massive writing output and all. And I actually went to a party Saturday night, which really is not a Thing that I Do any longer. And I made dinner tonight. So I can’t reasonably make a claim that this was anything other than a good four-day weekend. But I apparently used all my words and all my thinkytimes for the rest of January on Friday, because holy hell have I been brainless since then.
I sent money to the cover artist for the new book today, too. I’m using Yvonne from Diverse Pixel again, who did the cover for the first Benevolence Archives book. We’ve talked about a design that I’m pretty excited about, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the end result looks like. I’ll share it here when I have something to share.
And… uh… that’s it. I’ll try and have something interesting to say this week.
It is 2015 and the future. Time to ruin my body with experimental food!
Have you heard of Soylent? I ordered a week’s supply in July, partially because I was genuinely curious about it and partially because I am a glutton for punishment and thought it might make for a hilarious series of posts for the blog.
Let me say that again: July. My Soylent arrived yesterday. They are backlogged like a sumbitch in supplying new orders, although the website claims that reorders will ship within a week or two. At the moment, I don’t actually plan to re-up, but we’ll see what happens. Today you get the unboxing and some theories on when I’m going to actually eat this. I’m thinking about starting next Friday, because I’ll be out of town all weekend and… well, there’s a reason I’m calling the series THE FARTENING– users have reported some minor issues with adjusting to a Soylent diet. The first taste may have to wait a little bit. We’ll see.
Your Soylent arrives as two boxes inside of a bigger box. Exciting! There is no packaging foam or other nonsense inside; luckily, nothing is especially breakable.
The two boxes inside the box. One contains the actual Soylent products, the other is my customized pitcher that came FREE! with my eighty-five dolla worth of powder and oil.
Everything inside both of the containers. The boy was super excited by this entire process and wanted to touch everything; I’m amazed that I kept him out of all of the pictures. A day’s worth of Soylent fits in the pitcher; that’s all I’m supposed to eat for the entire day. In three separate meals. This is going to be interesting.
At any rate: one pitcher, one scoop, seven bottles of oil, seven packages of Soylent, one information card, one instruction booklet.
The Official Soylent Scoop is actually pretty well-made (so is the pitcher, for that matter) and supposedly gives the proper dimensions for a single serving of the stuff. I might indulge in one serving tomorrow just out of curiosity; we’ll see. I also need to check and see if this is any sort of standard measurement because it really is a nicely-made measuring cup.
A close-up of one package of Soylent. One package is three meals; supposedly a day’s worth of food. One of the decisions I need to make is whether I’m going to try and go whole-hog on this stuff or just eat it during the day at work and then have a regular dinner; the first makes more sense as SCIENCE! and is definitely going to be better for the blog (you guys are never happier than when I’m miserable) but the second would fit into my life better. We’ll see; I’ve got time to think about it.
A closeup of the oil bottle. Soylent is 100% vegan, by the way.
Man, it really is the future. Food comes with instructions now! This thing’s like fourteen pages long!
Can I point out that the “L” in the “Release notes” font is terrible and drives me crazy? I can? Good.
More later, as I decide exactly how this is going to work.
A word that, I discover, I have no idea how to spell. But I’m makin’ ’em.
Let’s start with the picture from the recipe, shall we?
And here’s the entire recipe. I found this on Facebook:
Shape into 1/2″ balls and place them on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Press flat with a fork and then chill until ready to serve. Store in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to two weeks or freeze for up to two months.
Lies. LIES, I tell you! First of all, you cannot meaningfully do anything to four ounces of cream cheese with a mixer. Four ounces of cream cheese is a very small amount of cream cheese, folks! I knew this, but fooled myself into thinking I didn’t, and thus did not immediately double the recipe. The cream cheese immediately sucked itself into the blades of the mixer and stayed there, mocking me. Adding the sugar, a cup at a time, didn’t help much, and when I was done I had a lump of cream cheese and sugar maybe the size of a baseball. Maybe.
I love the verb “shape.” Does it say how? Of course not. I had pictured some sort of rolling with my hands, as I’ve done with a variety of meatballs and my reindeer shit, but it’s cream cheese with sugar in it. It’s way too goddamn sticky for that. I considered coating my hands with sugar, like I’d do with flour if I was working with dough, but, y’know, sugar is pretty sticky itself, and I don’t think that would have worked. I ended up using a melon baller, which did the job OK, I guess, but didn’t produce anything even remotely round. Press it with a fork? Fuck you, it sticks to the fork.
So basically I ended up with a dozen or so cream cheese lumps that I just put on a plate, because the idea that I needed an entire cookie sheet for them was ludicrous– this does not produce very many not-cookie things. They were horrifying-looking. I knew they’d be tasty, as I’d sampled them, and it’s not exactly surprising when peppermint, cream cheese and sugar produces something good, but hell if they didn’t look terrible.
So I melted a few dozen chocolate chips and drizzled some chocolate on them too, because to hell with it.
Nailed. It.
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