Man up, you pansy!

I just found this challenge to reduce your personal carbon emissions to 90% of the national average. This sounds like an awesome challenge, both in terms of difficulty and being a fantastic thing to do. Just reading about it gets my tree-hugging self all excited. I'm going to have to talk to Matt about it and also do some calculations to find out the Canadian national averages for the carbon emissions categories included, but as of this very moment, consider me a contender! Will you join me? It's exciting! It's daunting! I urge you to at least give it a good read and think about what small (or big) changes you can make to the way your lifestyle effects the world at large.

Animal liberation + uncheese

Tonight Matt and I made the worst pizza we've ever made. It was kind of my fault and kind of Matt's fault, but mostly I think it was the fault of Jo Stepaniak, author of The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. Yes, we made uncheese pizza.

I should have known better when I saw that the recipe called for 1/2 cup of nutrional yeast, which I find to taste really nasty. I should have stopped when I realized I was missing a key ingredient. And I really should have let the blender run longer so as to avoid chunks of oatmeal in my cheese. Alas, I did none of these things, and now I have about two and a half cups of mushy stuff that looks like hummus but tastes like... well, not cheese.

Matt's part of the story is just another chapter in his endless search to find a pizza crust recipe that tastes really good and not bready and doesn't take upwards of three hours to prepare. This time he went with a recipe involving beer. Was this just so that he could go buy beer? He may deny it, but I think it was. (Incidentally, I was the one who pointed out the fact that cases of Stella Artois were on sale at the IGA and that the purchase of said case intitled one to a free commemorative tote bag. The tote is huge.) Despite several reviews stating the contrary, the pizza crust was really bad. It's what I imagine hard tack or whatever the pioneers ate on the road tasted like. Only fresher, not that that makes it much better.

The pizza sauce I made was tasty. Not my best, but tasty nonetheless. Here is a picture of our pizza. The uncheese is under the sauce since its texture would have made it impossible to spread on top of the sauce. The cheese on top is colby that I wish I had saved for more noble purposes.



One highlight of the evening: an animal liberation protest outside our house! Oh yes! This is the second protest we've witnessed on our street. Both times the cops have shown up before the protesters. This protest lasted much longer than the first, and there were way more cops this time. We even saw a few in riot gear: masks, clubs and all. However, as I'm sure you can imagine, there was no need for riot cops. The vegan protesters were quite peaceful as well as bilingual. The first protest was in French, so I'm not sure what their demands were.