Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies (Cookies 40)

As apocalyptic snow is apparently scheduled to descend on the Metro Washington area every weekend this winter, last Saturday found me browsing through my new cookie book looking for a quick, simple recipe whose ingredients were in my cupboards already—thus eliminating any need for the grocery store—when what to my wondering eye should appear but…chocolate + oatmeal?  Not what I would have thought of, but hey!  Sounds worth a go.  I fortuitously had cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and oats in the kitchen.  I didn’t have raisins or dried cherries, but Terry and Isa helpfully point out that these are optional.  So it couldn’t be too bad, right?

Once I’d mixed it up, the dough looked moister than I’d anticipated, and I worried the cookies would come out totally flat and spread so far that my cookie sheet was just one large cookie (which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but kind of defeats the point of cookieS, plural).  Oh well.  I figured I had enough of the afternoon left for a redo if they didn’t turn out.

Ho-lee mo-lee, did I underestimate this recipe!  The cookies indeed spread on the sheets, but no more than average, and when they’d cooled enough for a test-go, I took the biggest over to my roommate to share.  We each broke off a bite size piece and tried at the same time.  Then our eyes kind of got big and glassy.  Next thing I remember, Officer, the remainder of the cookie was gone.  And we were chattering about the best chocolate hit of 2010 thus far.  Man.  These things are amazing.  Moist.  Fudgy, as promised.  And chocolately.  Oh so chocolately.  But not, you know, too chocolately.  Not so chocolately you can’t go back for seconds.  Or thirds.  Fifths.  Sixths…  I’d honestly pick them over a Sticky Fingers brownie, and a Sticky Fingers brownie is no slouch in the fudgy chocolatey dessert department.

If you ever buy, borrow, steal, or otherwise acquire Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, and if you’re the least bit hesitant about your skills or just how good vegan baking can be, I stridently encourage you to make this recipe.  Stridently!  Make them!  And then send me some.  ‘Cause dang, I can’t be making these all the time.  But I could be eating them.

State of the World

Obama’s given his State of the Union, and as expected, proposed a 3-year freeze on all discretionary spending, omitting only Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and “national security” — i.e., military spending.  So.  No added spending for, say, food stamps.  Housing assistance.  Environmental protection.  Education.

Last Saturday, I took part in a workshop organized by the Health Disparities Committee of the Metro Washington Public Health Association, entitled “From Social Service to Activism: Where Am I?”   The workshop was inspired by this article, interesting reading for all the do-gooders out there.  I had the honor, with another organizer, of presenting a short PowerPoint presentation on the State of the World.  Since, you know, to paraphrase Allan Nairn, you have to count everybody because everybody counts — even if they aren’t part of “the Union.”  Here, with some minor modifications to make it more intelligible, is that PowerPoint.  You won’t hear my rant about neoliberalism, but you can at least enjoy the pictures!

Then Wednesday, before Obama’s big night, I met with some of the workshop participants and other activists outside the White House to demonstrate what the funding freeze would mean for one set of the population — people living with HIV/AIDS.  Pics are below.  This is a major issue globally as well as here in my own DC, where the HIV rate is well above epidemic levels and on par with some parts of Africa.  But, as one of the other activists said at the demonstration, really this isn’t just about AIDS funding — it’s connected to larger issues of health care, housing, unemployment, food, and poverty.  Whatever your particular focus as an activist/citizen of the world, we’re all on the same team now.  Unless you’re on Team Military Spending.  Which I guess is your right.  It’s a free country (isn’t it)?

Helping Haiti

Unless you’re a Pat Roberts or Rush Limbaugh, you’re probably moved to compassion and heartbreak when you listen to the news from Haiti.  If you’re looking to donate money, I encourage caution — not all aid organizations are created equal.  Here’s one that I trust: Partners in Health. They’ve been working in Haiti for decades, their model is community-based (meaning that people who need services are also in control of those services — at least to some extent), and they take an advocate’s analysis to the root causes of health problems and poverty within the country.

While you’re at it, you could also ask Mr. Obama (while he’s in such a generous, compassionate mood) to put a definitive stop to the forcible repatriation of Haitian immigrants.

NYC Black and White Cookies (Co 161)

Time flies, whether we’re having fun or not (as my senior English teach used to say).  2009 has come and gone, and with it the 26th year of my life.  Gasp.  Luckily, Year 27 promises to be even better.

So to kick 2010 off right, I picked out this recipe from the brand new cookbook from your friends and mine, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero—a sibling, if you will, to Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World:

Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar!

<cue spooky ’50s alien invasion theme>

Rest assured, I’m not renouncing my cupcake love by any measure.  But it’s always good to have an outstanding cookie recipe in your back pocket.  Cookies are the universal comfort food, even easier to transport than cupcakes, and require less prep time (usually).  Plus eating more than one cupcake generally feels like gluttony while eating more than one cookie feels only natural.

I seized this recipe for my first go-round, in part because the black and white cookie is a fan favorite around our apartment.  Also, I had all the ingredients on hand.  If you’ve never had a black and white cookie, you have to imagine a large, cake-like vanilla cookie (flavored with orange and lemon extracts here), and iced on one side with vanilla (the white) and chocolate (the black).  In my pregan days back in Jersey, these were a special treat you could only get on trips into The City or, very occasionally, at the bakery.  It never would have occurred to me to make them at home.  But that’s why I’m not a bestselling cookbook author.

The first step here was mixing the dough/batter—again, the “cookie” part is very cake-like, and pre-baking, it most resembles a thick cake batter.  Next comes forming the cookies on the cookie sheets.  Basically you fill a ¼ measuring cup with batter and pour onto the sheet, leaving 3″ in between, although Terry & Isa are enamored of ice cream scoops for this operation.  Sounds simple right?  But here I goofed: I lined the sheets with waxed paper, unwisely assuming it was synonymous with parchment paper.  It’s not.  But I didn’t realize this until the cookies were baked and I attempted to lift them off the sheets to the cooling racks and got golden cakey cookies with a film of paper on the underside.  Fortunately the cookies that hadn’t been baked as thoroughly also didn’t stick so badly, and I was able to peel (most of) the wax paper off.  There were still a few scraps stuck to the edges of the better-done cookies.  I flipped to the front of the book and found, right there in the Tools for Success, the explicit warning: “Never ever substitute waxed paper for parchment paper!”  If only I’d read it sooner…

Be that as it may, there’s no better solution to waxy cookies than sugary icing.  This is quite simple to make, as it basically consists of powdered sugar, hot water, vanilla, and (for the chocolate portion) melted chocolate.  You make the vanilla part first, frost the cookies, and then add melted chocolate to the remaining icing.  For this, I used my new fave Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips.  I found I had to work quickly to do the black half, as the chocolate quickly thickens.  It seems to be the high-cocoa content.  Toward the end of the decorating portion of our show, I was adding a splash of hot water to the icing after every few cookies and mixing rapidly to keep it spreadable.  But the cookies looked divine!  The forms a glossy, gorgeous shell once it sets on the cookie.

Now to the fun part: eating!  Your biggest problem with these is deciding where to dive in: the chocolate? the vanilla? or right down the central dividing line, as one clever friend suggests?  My personal technique: alternate between a bite of chocolate and a bite of vanilla.  Try to keep it even, ok?  Fair’s fair.

And, hey!  I must admit, I had my nagging doubts that anything I baked at home could taste so close to its professional-bakery-made counterpart.  These do!  They really do!  Best of all, they don’t have any nasty milk or eggs.  My taste-testers agree, I presume, as there were fewer cookies in the batch every time I turned around.  Fortunately, this generous recipe yielded 16 big cookies.  And me?  I was whisked back to childhood visits to NYC with every bite.

What’s Archie disapproving of now?

Siege of Gaza

Let’s say you and about a million and half more humans lived in Queens.  Now let’s say the rest of New York City decided, for some reason, you and your million and half neighbors were undesirable and really, Queens would be more valuable to them without you all there.  So they built fences and walls around the borders, stopped allowing goods in and people out, and, oh, then bombed the hell out of the infrastructure because they don’t care for the people elected to Queens’ local government.  So you’ve got no food, no income (who can afford to hire you inside Queens?  and how could you get to a job outside?), no recourse to representative government (they don’t like the people you elected, remember?), and no way to rebuild your home (building materials can’t come through the border either).  What do you do?  Tunnel into Nassau County?  Oh—too late, Nassau’s building an underground steel wall.  And NYC is running air raids over that border.  Hope someone outside remembers you’re there and manages to push supplies through?  Sure, it’ll be a Christmas good deed for those who can afford it.  Just pray NYC doesn’t shoot them and Nassau doesn’t detain them too long.  Want to support those outside humanitarians?  Well, you don’t have any weapons, but you can throw rocks at the soldiers refusing to let them in.  Maybe the rubble of your home.

This is reality for anyone living in the Gaza strip today.  It’s been one year since the Israeli state’s military assault on the strip, what Israel called Operation Cast Lead.  Read through the report of the U.N.’s fact-finding mission, you’ll get the laundry list of Israel’s despicable actions—using human shields & supposedly illegal weapons such as white phosphorous, targeting a U.N. relief camp—as well as condemnation of Hamas-fired rockets on Israeli towns.  Now, as before the assault, Gaza is under blockade.  This means the import of food, medicine, building materials, every needed thing, is severely restricted.  Those Gazans who would leave to build lives elsewhere cannot exit.  And the internal economy has been systematically destroyed.  As Richard Goldstone explained, in an address to the U.N.:  ”The [facti-finding] Mission found that the [Israeli] attack on the only remaining flour producing factory, the destruction of a large part of the Gaza egg production, the bulldozing of huge tracts of agricultural land, and the bombing of some two hundred industrial facilities, could not on any basis be justified on military grounds. Those attacks had nothing whatever to do with the firing of rockets and mortars at Israel.”  It’s what international law calls collective punishment—forcing an entire community to pay for the perceived sins of a few—and it’s illegal.  But since international law is about as equitably applied as every other human law, Israel’s getting away with it hour-by-hour, and Gazans have to live with it.  Or die with it.  The rest of the human world doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other.

Thanks to Israel’s tight hold on the borders, the only way into Gaza is through Egypt.  Through a network of underground tunnels, some Palestinians do manage to bring supplies into the strip.  Yet the Egyptian state is building a steel wall to cut off even this conduit, and Israel continues to fly bombing raids over the area, most recently killing two men and a fourteen-year-old boy on Thursday.

Some humans do attempt to bring supplies in from the outside.  But attempting to go directly to Gaza is a good way to get shot by Israeli patrols, so humanitarian aid of this kind is contingent on the cooperation of the Egyptian government.  Some such grudging cooperation has happened before, but the government has just declared that aid convoys are now banned from crossing Egyptian territory.  Their rationale?  A riot took place at the Rafah border earlier this week as the Viva Palestina convoy, carrying food and medical supplies, arrived.  Now, why was there a riot?  Egypt banned the convoy from Sinai, its first port of entry.  Then Egyptian police attacked the convoy with tear gas and batons in the port of El Arish, then arrested seven of the volunteers for inciting riots.  When it finally arrived at the Gaza border a week late last Wednesday, Egyptian authorities turned back 59 of the convoy’s trucks, declaring they would have to go through Israel after all.  That’s when Palestinians, protesting the underground wall, threw rocks at the Egyptian soldiers; and the soldiers opened fire; 35 Palestinians and 9 Egyptians were wounded, and one Egyptian was killed.  One can’t help but notice that both instances of violence, in El Arish and at the border, were precipitated by Egyptian actions, hindering the convoy’s progress.  Not to mention the much larger issue of the blockade itself, which has forcefully made Gazans dependent on smuggling through the tunnels and on such humanitarian aid.  Convoys wouldn’t even be an issue for Egypt to ban if the Israeli state, largely funded by the U.S., were not systematically starving and brutalizing the humans trapped inside Gaza.

This bunny has as much desire to defend Hamas as the Democratic party in the U.S. (none).  But any attempt at “even-handedness,” i.e., to make Hamas and the Israeli state equally culpable for human deaths and misery, is patently absurd.  How any human could approve of Israel is a mystery to me.  Doesn’t your species claim the monopoly on moral feeling and empathy?

Kill your TV

Hi, all!  I’ve got an extra special treat for you: the latest short film from my talented friend Riccardo Pugliese (no relation to the high school physics teacher), recently screened in Venice with four of his other shorts.  You will understand the title of this post once you’ve watched.  All this was written and filmed in the DC area, so check it out, neighbors, & see if you recognize any of the locations.  Fellow classicists should also have a look at Elena, Ricky’s version of the Trojan War set in modern Venice and my personal fave.

South Koreans in the Debt Crisis

Check out my latest at Feminist Review.

Merry Christmas.

What’s Charlotte disapproving of? The Fort Hood shooting

Archie’s busy disapproving of our carpet and our efforts to keep him from chewing it.  So he let me take over for this round of disapproval.  A few things I need to point out:

• The events at Fort Hood are only the most recent in a pattern of violent incidents on or around military bases, by members of the armed forces.  In perhaps the most strikingly similar case, last May, another shooter at Camp Liberty in Iraq killed five people at a stress clinic.
• Mental health treatment is both extremely needed and inadequately provided in the military.  One in five veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Suicide in the military is incredibly high: at least 128 last year, a record, with more than that already this year.  Fort Hood, from January to July (the last month data is available), averaged over 10 suicides a month. On a base of 50,000 troops, that is astoundingly high.  This is the context in which Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist, was working.  He directly counseled soldiers everyday, describing the worst and most traumatic experiences of their lives.
• Hasan disagreed with the war Afghanistan—a conclusion he shares with a majority of Americans if polls are to be believed. His opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been attested by numerous people who knew him, family and acquaintances; before his transfer from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center to Fort Hood, he was apparently disciplined by the army and received negative work reviews because he argued this anti-war stance with other soldiers.  According to Hasan’s cousin, his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan was his worst nightmare and Hasan had hired a lawyer in an attempt to get out of the army.  But how easy is it to get out of an army stretched so far it’s sending physically and mentally injured soldiers into combat?  Journalists Dahr Jamail and Sarah Lazare describe hellish conditions in “legal limbo” for those who refuse to deploy.
• Hasan is Muslim–it is foolish and unnecessary to deny this fact.  Is it significant?  I think yes, but not in the way the mainstream media and President Obama, with his oh-so-helpful comments on Wednesday, are spinning it.  Instead, there are two reasons it bears mentioning: one, for the very fact that his religion, being different from the normative Christianity, offers an easy (if inaccurate) explanation for why he took this course of action.  If “we” can explain what happened in terms of religion, we need not think about anything else.  And furthermore, we can implicitly justify policies that stigmatize other Muslims.  Any time a person acts out, “we” are quick to seize on the most unique or unfamiliar aspect of their identity, and use it as an explanation, rather than looking at systemic forces at work.  (Recall the Columbine school shooting, when suddenly any teenager who wore a black trench coat was suspicious.)  Second, it is just possible that his religion allowed Hasan to sympathize with the civilian populations most effected by American military action.  While I don’t support using religion as criteria for determining moral obligations—in fact my moral obligations extend far beyond anyone whose religious beliefs match mine—religion functions as a sort of moral and spiritual language that allows those who speak the same one to understand each other, and avoid the type of othering and deperson-ing that lets one determine that the other’s suffering or death is acceptable.  Other types of language—verbal, cultural, etc.—function similarly, allowing humans to find to common ground and see one another as creatures of equal value.

I make these observations because I do not want this moment to go by without consideration.  I do not wish to make Hasan a martyr or role model in any way.  But as we lay responsibility for 13 deaths on his shoulders, and as we rally to support and console the deceased, the wounded, and their families, I suggest we consider and hold accountable the institutions and systems that also must bear responsibility.  Individuals make choices, yes, but individuals do not choose their circumstances.  Individuals do not act with perfect knowledge or perfect power.  Hasan is 39 now; he joined the army out of high school—could he have known then what would happen in 2001, that the World Trade Center would collapse and the U.S. would invade Afghanistan?

Hasan will pay, I am sure—I suspect he is already paying, in physical pain and mental anguish, but the might of the court martial will be swiftly on hand to see that he pays more and more, for the rest of his life I expect.  And who holds the army to account?  The U.S. government?  The economy that demands nationalist rivalries and wars?

Incidentally, a friend sent me this thoughtful response to a post on the AFL-CIO blog:

Sisters and brothers,

While I certainly think the best of our sister who acted to stop the shooting at Ft Hood, I am deeply troubled if, as union members, our only reaction to what occurred is to “honor a hero”. We should be mourning for all our sisters and brothers forced into serving in these illegal and immoral wars and occupations. Acting out by shooting others is not appropriate but who is truly guilty for this tragic circumstance? More than 90% of the returning soldiers are suffering from PTSD (let alone the terrible physical wounds they suffer.) Unlike the earliest days of this war, soldiers are no longer buying into the government lies that they are fighting against their country’s enemies. They can see they are fighting a civilian population, disrupting their national aspirations, defending the theft of their land and resources, defending corrupt puppet regimes. Working people are being forced to turn guns on other working people. Their is no end in sight; in fact, the war is spreading. Back home, every kind of diversion is used to keep the war off the front page, unless it is the propaganda of “we are winning” or “we can win” this war. NO WE CAN’T!

The AFL-CIO voted for immediate withdrawal four years ago. It protested against going to war before the invasion of Iraq. Why not stick by those policies? Our reaction to the tragedy at Fort Hood should be to point out that what happened there is only an incident in an even greater on going tragedy that is taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, not to mention in other countries and here at home. The AFL-CIO should call on all its member unions and its rank and file to take a stand to call for the immediate end of war, the withdrawal of all troops, and then turning our national focus on our national and international responsibility to be a good citizen of the world. Jobs, health care, preventing global warming, combating intolerance and hatred, furthering the rights and empowerment of workers, restoring and building a genuine educational system that feeds the mind and spirit not just programs drones for menial labor and consumerism–these are the objectives the AFL-CIO should have its eye on.

Every worker out there, everyday, is a real hero. The AFL-CIO should be rallying them to build a better world, as it used to be the rallying cry of Unionism.

Our sister at Fort Hood who had to use her gun–does anyone really think she thinks of herself as a hero because she had to shoot a fellow human being, a brother in uniform? She probably knows better than the rest of us what a sad, pathetic victim of the system the Major is. She will be haunted by that day for a long time. She will not be wanting to be told she is a hero. She will want to hear us all calling for an end to the horror.

Bruce Wolf
OPEIU Local 2 (Social Justice Committee)
Participant Walter Reed Vigil for Peace

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cupcakes (104)

Hello, hello!  Charlotte here.  Hope your Halloween/Dias de los muertos were festive and fun, and just a little scary.  I know my 31st of October was muy excellente, the reasons for which I can sum up in three words: vegan cupcake giveaway!  Yes, there are few things that bring me greater joy than vegan food being made and distributed to the masses gratis.  (Which means I conceptually adore Food Not Bombs, even though the DC chapter does their cooking and distributing when I’m working and/or elsewhere.)  This Saturday, I decided to shake off a painful and frustrating Friday by getting back to one of my favorite activities, and then sharing the fruits of my labor with the world!  Or, at least the first twenty or so strangers I could persuade to take a cupcake from the strange woman in the red wig.  Let me ’splain:

Chipotle gives out free burritos on Halloween, to anyone who comes in dressed as a burrito.  In practice this means wrapping some part of one’s body, however small, in tin foil.  It’s fun, it’s easy, it gets me free quasi-Mexican food.  So it’s become something of a Halloween tradition for us underemployed young people in the greater metropolitan area. There’s always a crowd, which to my mind immediately means: perfect opportunity for some creative outreach.  I could put on my Halloween costume (Sally, from The Nightmare Before Christmas), go give out cupcakes, then wrap my wrist in foil, get my free burrito, and be done in time for the play my roommie and our friend Lady J had tickets for in the evening.  That was my thinking after getting out of bed.  Then I opened VCTOTW to this recipe, and that sealed the deal.  Mexican Hot Chocolate Cupcakes?  Chocolate and cayenne pepper?  What better way to celebrate the Days of the Dead?!  Clearly the spirits were sending me a message.

All right, so, the cupcakes: what exactly makes Mexican hot chocolate different from any other chocolate cupcake?  I already mentioned the cayenne pepper — just a pinch in the batter.  Plus cocoa powder (natch), vanilla and almond extracts (still a big fan of the old stand-bys), and cinnamon to round out your spices.  Instead of the usual soy or rice milk, these cakes are made with rich creamy coconut milk.  Pouring it from the can, I almost wanted to forget the cupcakes and drink it straight.  But I restrained myself, and luckily so, or the cakes wouldn’t have been so moist.  The batter also calls for corn flour, as in the substance to which we owe tasty chips, burritos, tacos–all manner of delicious things onto which one may spoon a generous helping of guacomole.  (But I wouldn’t recommend guacomole on the cupcakes.)

Either my flaxseeds have lost some of their oomphf, or my oven is dial is not spot-on (either might account for it), but these didn’t rise in the baking as nicely as other recipes have.  Probably I also took them out a smidgeon too soon.  Terry & Isa always say insert a fork into the center to test for done-ness; when it comes out clean, the cakes are baked.  Well, my testing fork was clean, but the cupcakes still looked a little gooey.  I went with it, though.  I had filled some of the liners too high, and they’d baked over the sides, sticking to the pan, which meant I had to chip a few edges off the cupcake tops to get them out of the pan.  Good for me — I ate the crumbs quite happily — not as good for the cupcakes’ appearance.  To compensate, and also because roommie wisely advised me that anyone who gets a cupcake–even a free cupcake–with no topping feels cheated, I covered each with the Rich Chocolate Ganache Topping (143).  This recipe calls for 4 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped, but I sped things along with some chocolate chips instead.  The Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips (unlike most of the Ghirardelli products I’ve come across) are actually vegan and quite good, in that pretensious fine-chocolate kind of way.

Results?  The cupcakes were an ooey-gooey chocolatey mess, and absolutely wonderful to eat.  Rich, moist, with a nice spicy kick at the end to wake you up.  But not too spicy for more sensitive palates than mine, if my roommate’s reaction is any judge.  It took a lot of willpower not to hoard them for ourselves, I tell you.  Fortunately we knew at least two friends who wanted to get in on the vegan Halloween madness, and we managed to get the rest of the cupcakes to Chipotle without inhaling them all.  The giveaway started slowly.  But my awesome roommate stuck by, handing out napkins and copies of the recipe (yes, Isa & Terry, if you’re reading this, I gave away your recipe — but I cited you!), and within an hour, we had three little cupcakes left from the original 2 dozen I’d made.  One kind man even gave us a $5 donation.  We met a nice family of tourists, and two actors from the local theater down the street.  And we saw lots of amusing costumes.  This may have to become a regular occurence.

Whew!  It’s been a loooong time since I did a cupcake recipe review — hope it was worth the wait.

A theme is emerging…

While helping organize an event to commemorate the radical abolitionist movements of John Brown and Harriet Tubman, I read an excellent book: Neither Fugitive Nor Free by Edlie Wong.  The author explores the issue of freedom suits in the antebellum U.S.: legal suits in which slaves sued their masters for their freedom, made possible by the delineation of free territory where chattel slavery was illegal, and slave territory, where it was. My review of the book is posted here with Feminist Review.  I’d can’t recommend this book highly enough!