Choosing Tofu for Your Health and Your Wallet

Happy belated Labor Day! Sorry you’re seeing this after Labor Day, but I just got the opportunity to sit down and write this blog. It wasn’t a particularly tough Meatless Monday because I didn’t go to a picnic. Instead, I went to the Strip District to pick up some groceries at Lotus Foods and Stan’s Market.

My main meal was tofu and Asian vegetables called, “Phooi leaves,” in a white sauce.

Tofu and phooi leaves in a Chinese white sauce

Lotus Foods is the only place in Pittsburgh I know that makes its own tofu. Today was the first time I bought tofu. Though I happily eat it when my mom or aunt prepare it, tofu isn’t something I feel confident preparing myself.

I felt so cool, like I was in the club, using a spatula to scoop up two 3-by-3 inch blocks of fresh, soft tofu.

Two blocks of tofu for $0.60! The Smarties are for scale.

When I went to the check out counter, I watched the numbers tick up for each of my purchases: Farmer brand peanuts, instant noodles, cilantro and of course, the tofu. The cashier rang up the tofu. It only cost $0.30 per block! What a value! I’ll definitely have extra for maybe a Meatless Tuesday.

I find that going veggie can save money. Though produce can be expensive, I’m buying about as much produce as would if I was just making sides for a meat dish. The savings comes when I replace my protein. When eating out, skipping meat on a pasta or salad usually knocks off at least three dollars per meal. It all adds up.

Going vegan, on the other hand, sometimes costs more money. From organic cotton clothing to non-dairy products, it can be a challenge. A few weeks ago I tried Rice Dream for the first time. It was a delicious addition to my cereal. Now, I have a 32-ounce carton of Almond Breeze almond milk in my fridge that I paid about three dollars for at Right by Nature Market. I feel a little guilty not buying the organic almond milk, but the Almond Breeze packs 20 percent of my daily calcium per serving. I couldn’t pass that up.

Almond Breeze brand almond milk

The taste is a little starchy, like the Rice Dream. But I love Almond Breeze’s sweet and nutty flavor. It’s something I could see myself drinking, unlike the Rice Dream. It’ll be a delicious addition to my morning cereal. And for how little I use milk (since I’m lactose intolerant), I think I can spring for the more expensive dairy alternative drinks.

So for the faithful Green Beet followers: How has going veggie or vegan saved you money?

Post and photos by Estelle Tran

Overcoming Thinking Icky, Being Picky

Like any picky eater, I hated most foods as a child. If it wasn’t beige or didn’t come from a box, I wouldn’t eat it. My diet consisted of four main food items: chicken, mashed potatoes, pizza (but not with too much sauce!), and bagels. During one particularly memorable family dinner, I was forced to try pasta. Clearly it should have fit in with the other foods as it is fairly bland and full of carbohydrates. Yet after one bite I declared it too “soggy” for my sophisticated eight-year-old taste buds. I shamed the family name. In our case, a long, consonant-rich Italian one.

All of that started to change this past spring. I read a book: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It offered a number of arguments for being a vegetarian appealing to all types of people: the environmentalist, the animal-lover, and anyone who just wants to know exactly what it is they’re eating. I definitely fit into the last category. Some of the descriptions of what the industry allowed to pass as meat had me thinking, yuck! So I decided to try becoming a vegetarian.

But that was obviously easier said than done. My mom worried that with all of the restrictions I placed on food, I’d never get all of the nutrients I needed without meat. Although at this point I had outgrown some of my rules and expanded my dietary repertoire to include pasta with a light sprinkling of sauce, I still refused certain staples such as soup, beans, humus, and other less than solid foods.

My mom and I have been working to overcome that this summer. We’ve been cooking our way through the Vegetarian Classics cookbook by Jeanne Lemlin this summer. Well, she’s been cooking and I’ve been stirring or rinsing or grating at her command. We’ve tried Zucchini Frittata, peanut noodle, corn chowder, and roasted eggplant sandwiches, all things that would have failed my earlier standards for consistency and taste but that now I’ve begun to find exciting and delicious.

A few nights ago we tackled Spanish Tortilla. Everyone’s familiar with a Mexican tortilla: a thin, round pancake made of corn or flour. But this is more like an omelet. The word tortilla comes from the Spanish word torta, which means cake. The -illa on the end is a diminutive. When you put them together, you get “little cake.”

The eggs, potatoes and onions cook ninety percent before the whole thing is flipped over.

This omelet is simple, with just potatoes and onions on the inside. Instead of placing the ingredients on top of the wet egg and folding it over into a half-moon partway through cooking, everything is mixed together and this omelet fills the whole pan. The climactic cooking moment comes when you have to flip the whole thing from the pan onto a plate and then slide it back into the pan to finish cooking. I let my mother do the honors.

We had some fresh greens on the side. It was a perfect meal in hot weather.

The Spanish tapas (meaning appetizers) bars serve their tortillas at room temperature, but ours was delicious right out of the pan--warm, mushy, and flavorful. Eating at the dinner table with my mother, I realized that there’s no faster way to overcome your pickiness than to be forced into trying new things by dietary restrictions. And it’s easier to be a vegetarian when you’ve got company. Although my mom and dad still eat meat, they also only want to make one meal a night. When there’s no meat around, it’s easy not to miss it.

Vegan Monday

It’s a Super Surprise Vegan Monday! Ding ding ding!

Wow, that was exciting. If you have been following my Meatless Mondays misadventures, you know this isn’t one of those hoity toity Meatless Monday blogs that boasts creative ethnic fusion recipes. Maybe one day it will be, but for now this blog just chronicles my journey to a new way of life.

I’ve always admired vegans and vegetarians, but when I think about being a vegetarian or a vegan, I always become fixated on what I’m losing. Without beef, that’s no more burgers or all-beef hot dogs. What will I do on the Fourth of July? Without pork, there’s no bacon, pepperoni or wonton soup. Going without chicken, fish and seafood would be the toughest hurdle.

So what gave me the push to consider vegetarianism? It was the New York Times best-selling book “Skinny B*tch.” The covers says it’s “a no-nonsense tough- love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous!” I can’t say that I recommend this book because it’s unnecessarily crude. But the short chapters make it a great book for reading on the bus.

The book covers information on chemical additives, animal cruelty, the environment and many other topics. The “Dead, Rotting, Decomposing Flesh Diet” chapter covered the mass execution processes and goes into gruesome detail about instances of struggling animals avoiding death on the kill floor and consequently being burned, skewered, and cut while alive.

In “The Dairy Disaster” chapter, the authors describe how the metal clamps attached to the cow’s sensitive udders often injure the cows. Their udders become infected and pus gets into the milk. Though I don’t accept everything in this book as fact or as a common occurrence, this description was enough to make me want to reduce my dairy intake. (I’m lactose-intolerant anyway. Why am I fighting nature in the first place?)

The book’s authors recommended Rice Dream as a milk replacement. I’m pretty picky about soy milk and only enjoy the sweetened kind I’ve had on the West Coast in Chinese stores. So, I decided to try rice milk.

Rice Dream and Special K With Red Berries for Breakfast on Meatless Monday week #5

It was pretty good! I can’t imagine drinking it, but to be fair, I don’t drink milk either. You should know that I take my cereal with skim milk, so the transition to the watery, somewhat starchy and sweet drink was easier. I don’t know how this would work in recipes, but it sure complemented my Special K with red berries.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has a great list of snacks and common packaged foods that are vegan. It includes Duncan Hines brownie mix, Pillsbury pizza dough, Oreo cookies and a few Progresso soups.

For lunch I’m having baby carrots sans peanut butter (shucks). On the bus going to work I realized that Jif creamy peanut butter contains mono- and diglycerides, which could be rendered from cows or pigs. I don’t see a clear answer if it is or isn’t vegan, so I’ll have to skip over regular Skippy and Jiff.

I added a tabbouli salad from Kassab’s to my lunch. A tabbouli salad contains chopped parsley, green onions, tomatoes, cracked wheat, lemon, oil and spices. It’s served with pita bread, which I understand is vegan-friendly.

Tabouli Salad, pita and chips for Meatless Monday week #5

So, that’s two meals down. Just dinner to go, and that’ll be the most challenging because I’m going home to my mom’s cooking...

Post and photos by Estelle Tran

Off The Beet: A Fashion Diet For The Environment

When I was in middle school, I had a friend who would write down what she wore every day in her little notebook. On the bus ride home, she would chronicle her outfit down to the brand and style of her jeans. She wanted to make sure she wouldn’t repeat an outfit in a month. Though I knew it was a faux pas to wear the same garment two days in a row, I never took clothing repeats so seriously.

It was easy for me, though. I have lots of clothes. Now I realize, I have too many clothes. So, when I read a New York Times story about shoppers on a “fashion diet,” it made me reassess my closet. The challenge: Wear six items of clothing or less for 31 days. Today, I’m on day 24.

Before I get too far, I better answer the common but-what-about questions. But what about undergarments? They don’t count in the six pieces. But what about socks and shoes? Fine. Outer jackets? A-okay. Actually all accessories are fine (including the suspenders I rocked on day three). The rules actually say you can have multiples of the same item to ease laundry woes, but I didn’t. I really wanted to explore how my clothes would wear in heavy rotation.

There are many motivations for this movement. Two of the biggest ones are to cut down on consumerism and to be more eco-friendly. This great article from Get Rich Slowly I read some time ago quotes fashion designer and Project Runway judge Michael Kors, who said our closets should consist of 70 percent “meat and potatoes,” or basics, and 30 percent flair. Cutting back on clothes we don’t wear saves us money and closet space, but also, it helps to save the environment.

When we buy cheap clothes, they usually don’t last as long. That means we use more water and pesticides to grow cotton, dye for jeans, and chemical fabric softeners. OnEarth magazine said it takes 1,500 gallons of water to yield the 1.5 pounds of cotton it takes to make one pair of jeans. Men, women and children in the United States get 1.5 new pairs of jeans a year. That’s 450 million pairs of jeans.

In addition to wearing fewer clothes, I managed not to buy any clothes. Twenty four days might not sound like a long time, but considering that I passed up the Shadyside Sidewalk Sale and dozens of e-mail offers from store like Urban Outfitters, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s, I’m pretty proud of myself.

I purposely varied my fashion pieces in quality. For the past 24 days, I’ve worn:

1. A pair of dressy-looking black shorts from H&M
2. A pair of gray-wash skinny jeans from Express
3. A gray pencil skirt from Express that I bought second-hand

4. A purple V-neck shirt from Forever 21
5. A teal Armani tank-top
6. A tight black T-shirt from Express

It’s like a math test question. The prompt: If Estelle has three shirts and three bottoms, how many outfits can she make? The answer is nine, assuming all of the combinations match. It’s almost like wearing a uniform. Getting ready in the morning is a lot easier, but sometimes I wish I had more options. I chose three tight-fitting tops because I wanted to be able to tuck them into my skirt or shorts. If I had a do-over, I would have switched-out the purple shirt for a more flab-forgiving top (I’ve been sucking my gut all month).

I talked to people about my progress, and I’ve gotten reactions of complete surprise. Others noticed something was up. I realized that most people don’t notice the repeats, and if they do, so what? What I care about is wear-and-tear on my clothing.

Even though I’ve only hand washed and air dried these items, I can tell the V-neck won’t make it after the experiment. I’ve worn it to work and to parties, and it shows. There’s discoloration along the neckline and pilling on my hip and underarm areas. I’ve been battling the the pills on my black shorts with a fabric shaver that I picked up at a church flea market. There’s an As Seen On TV version that probably would work as well. Just don’t push the clothes into the shaver too much or you could tear the fabric.

With less than a week left, I’m happy to go back to the rest of my wardrobe while there’s some summer left. But I think this experience will change the way I shop for many seasons to come.

Post and photos by Estelle Tran

Off the Beet: Rocking out Green Style

My friend Sam and I drove 140 miles from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to see our favorite bands perform. After a sweaty night of being packed in with the moshing crowds, we revisited those roads with the air conditioning on full blast to get home. I rolled into bed, exhausted from our road trip, and wondered how much I had polluted to have an adventure. Between the gas we used to get there, the gas the band, crew, and other fans, and the electricity required to power the sound equipment and video screens, probably an awful lot.



Tegan and Sara perform in front of a screen displaying their lyrics.

The Honda Civic Tour, featuring Paramore and Tegan and Sara, advertised itself as going green. But with the green’s growing trendy status, it’s hard to just take their word for it and rest easy. I visited their website to try to get some facts.

The tour is partnering with a non-profit called Reverb that helps the music industry take on more sustainable practices. A portion of the ticket sales revenue will go to purchasing carbon offsets and to “boosting the tour’s capacity to make environmental change,” whatever that may mean. The tour’s website also lists some small gestures, such as biodegradable products backstage as well as reusable water bottles and filling stations for the bands and crew.

I find the last part a bit ironic. I wasn’t allowed to bring my metal water bottle into the show. I could purchase a bottle of water for four dollars and watch as the vendors poured its contents into a plastic cup. The planners may have wanted the band to have refillable water bottles and an ample water supply, but the same couldn’t be said for the hot fans staring up at the stage.

Like Paramore, the Black Eyed Peas are partnering with two environmentally minded non-profits for their tour, aptly named “The Energy Never Dies.” An apparel company, Rethink, also joined the team to make the concerts green. The company encourages fans to recycle their plastic bottles, which it advertises will later become Black Eyed Peas t-shirts. But only one of the twenty t-shirts featured in the official store uses the recycled plastic. There seems to be further contradictions. Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas rapper, released his own clothing line last spring, featuring numerous leather jackets and leather bags.

The only concert series I’ve seen so far that truly earns its green label is the Solar Concert Series, hosted at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh every Wednesday in July and August at lunchtime. The sound system is powered by the sun. People on the North Side generally walk over to hear the bluesy, acoustic music during their lunch hour. There are two more concerts this season: Applasia performs tomorrow and Jerome Hawk Freeman comes to town next week. These bands may never go platinum, but in my book they’re already green.

Post and photo by Amelia Possanza.