Happy Birthday, The Frugal Veggie

My little blog turns one year old today. In retrospect, I probably should have picked a more distinct googleable name. Or gone with my original choice of "Pushpanathan". I was thinking I could've named it "The Lentilist" but that might be a little too typecasting.

Still, over its short life there's been 85 posts which have been visited 1,252 times (with 2,477 pageviews) from 21 different countries. The blog hasn't been as productive lately as it was in its early halcyon days. By which I mean I haven't been as productive. Still, I've keep to the Sunday Frugal Sunday schedule since getting back from the Dominican (even if an entire month was about cabbage and another entire month was basically reviews of California restaurants most people will never get to go to).

So happy birthday! Who knows what adventures the blog will have between now and when it becomes unprofitable?

Sunday Frugal Sunday

Hello, my neglected readers. When I started this blog I mentioned I had created this as a summer hobby (in lieu of getting a goldfish named Pushpanathan¹). Since that time the blog has gotten literally tens of hits²! While traffic has not been noticeably down during September, my posting has been. Whycome? I was really busy in September (September included the first couple weeks of October just as the 60s actually continued until 1975³). This not only meant that I didn't have time to post but also that I wasn't eating very interesting food: lots of pasta with tomato sauce and cans of chickpeas (that's not pasta with tomatoes and chickpeas, but two separate items: I actually more than once just had a can of chickpeas for dinner). However, things have calmed down a bit. So I'll resume blogging, but probably the once-every-day posts some periods of the summer had won't return. Here is what I will do: try to make sure to post every Sunday. That doesn't mean I won't post in the rest of the week necessarily, but that there will be a type to check and see new content.

In lieu of a recipe or restaurant review, here is fascinating look at the history of modern ketchup (via a comment thread on home-made ketchup at The Paupered Chef)

1 I have since found out that Pushpanathan is not pronounced Push-pan-a-than but Push-pa-NA-than. This disappointed me greatly and my hypothetical goldfish will need a new name.
2 Actually I've gotten over 1000 pageviews. But I like that expression.
3 Many decades are like this. For example, the 50s lasted from 1948-1963.

Introduction

My roommate gone for the summer, I decided to start a food blog. I suppose I could've learned how to yoodle or gotten a fish (which I'd have named Pushpanathan) but I decided to do this instead. I do love to cook, though I guess it doesn't naturally follow that I should thus share recipes and my thoughts on vegetarian cooking with the entire internet. The project might seem narcissistic but... well I guess it is narcissistic. Still, it's not any more than most other kinds of blogging, so I guess I'll try it for now.

I didn't cook much for most of my life. My parents cooked for me throughout high school and there was a (not particularly great and overpriced) meal plan in first year university. Everything changed in second year when I went to live at Sci '44 Co-op a co-operative housing organization. Well not everything, there was still a meal plan. The difference was, we needed to work for it. Every week I'd enter our big stainless steel communal kitchen and cook for a hundred people (hundred fifty if everyone showed up). I'm still very grateful for my co-cooks and the head cook (A wonderful woman named Wanda) for really teaching me how to cook and tasting the meat for me to see if it was ready. I'm definitely still an amateur though.

I consider myself fairly frugal when it comes to buying food, but I definitely don't want to get into a frugaler-than-thou contest. If being frugal is part of your identity, I'll concede you're more frugal than me (for example, I just switched away from Lakeport Beer. Not worth the savings). Still I have some fun stories about frugality that I'll share over the course of the blog, some of which maybe only I find funny. One thing about not spending a lot of money on food is that it can still taste great! I remember reading a blog about a person who ate for a dollar a day for a month. It was really cool, but a lot of the stuff sounded really bland. He ended up having some money left over, it probably would've been good to invest in some spices other than relying simply on salt. It certainly did for me when I've spent a similar amount in some months (which isn't, of course, a fair comparison because I already have spices).

When it comes to cooking, aside from the internet I have three main cookbooks. Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything Vegetarian is fantastic. It's a thousand pages of information about how to set up a kitchen, buy produce and, of course, hundreds of recipes. My other two are both from the earnestly vegetarian Moosewood Collective: Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day and Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals. They're less comprehensive but there are some really great recipes in there. And although I don't own it, Fuschia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province is also amazing. Though far less vegetarian (maybe cause, uh, it's not a vegetarian cookbook) it also does double duty as a travel memoir.

So that's where I'm coming from. Basically the plan is to talk about recipes, cooking and vegetarianism and hopefully not be too boring in the process.