Note to readers: Full disclosure – I received free copy of this book through Library Thing’s Early Reviewer program.

Note to self: Never never ever again will you request from LT an environmental book written by a non-vegan. Nothing good ever comes of it.

Clever title, but this marriage was already fracked.

Suppose a natural gas company offered you a small fortune to lease your land for exploration and possible drilling. Would you do it? What if all your neighbors had already signed on, thus transforming your small, idyllic “home away from home” into one giant construction zone, complete with road-clogging traffic and the ceaseless noise of drills and pumps? Further imagine that the energy company has the legal right to extract gas trapped under your property – without your consent – if it drills horizontally from a neighboring property, thus making your “sacrifice” all but futile.

Author Stephanie Hamel doesn’t have to imagine such a scenario; she’s lived it. In Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage (2011), she explores the ethical, emotional, and practical implications she and her family faced when offered to lease their fifty acres of farmland in north central Pennsylvania to a natural gas company at $2500 an acre. Hamel’s parents had purchased the land when she was just a girl, to serve as a vacation home. (“Camp,” they called it. I can relate; my father recently inherited a small cabin in the Adirondacks, similarly bought and built by his parents when he was just a kid. A multi-generational family project, you could call it.) Hamel’s childhood is peppered with memories of escaping to this rural oasis, where her family played at part-time farming, landscaping, and construction work. The existing buildings were old and ramshackle, and required much repair and maintenance. While this might not sound like much of a vacation, Hamel’s clan tackled these projects with much gusto – together. Consequently, the land holds a special significance for Hamel; and so, when her father passed away, she decided to purchase the property from her mother, to keep it in the family, and to carry on the traditions she so enjoyed as a child with her own children.

In 2008, an unnamed natural gas company approached Hamel – and many of the other property owners in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania – about leasing her land for gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing. A relatively new procedure in 2008, “fracking” has met with greater opposition in recent years. Among other things, fracking is associated with groundwater contamination, air pollution, the mishandling of toxic waste – and perhaps even earthquakes. Though most of Hamel’s neighbors quickly signed up – many without so much as consulting a lawyer – Hamel dragged her feet. When rumors of drilling began circulating through Wellsboro in early 2008, Hamel was staunchly opposed to drilling. However, as gossip materialized into a pricey contract that fall, she began to waffle: with her husband’s job on the ropes, they could really use the money. Plus she could donate some of the windfall to environmental organizations. Surely this could help to offset any damage done during drilling? And if the gas company could extract gas without her permission anyhow (via the “Law of Capture”), wouldn’t it be foolish not to take the money? Besides, with all her neighbors jumping on the bandwagon, the town was already being sullied by traffic and noise pollution. Complicating matters further was her husband Tom, who welcomed the drilling as a financial boon – hence the titular “fracking of a marriage.”

While this all but promises to make for a compelling read, the result is anything but. Hamel largely based this memoir on a diary she kept during this time – and it shows. (Cue Sarah Silverman’s rant about diaries in her own autobiography, Diary of a Bedwetter: “Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind’s pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality.” No one wants to read your diary – yourself included.) Although there is some useful information to be found in Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage – concerning, for example, the legal issues involved in drilling, as well as the possible health effects of fracking – these bits are few and far between. (Indeed, the entire reference section consists of just three items. THREE! Why bother?) This is especially disappointing given the author’s background: though currently a stay-at-home mom, Hamel holds a BS in Chemistry and a joint PhD in Exposure Assessment and Environmental Sciences. You’d think she’d be uniquely qualified to comment on the subject, no?

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Wanna win a copy of this awesome cookbook?

OF COURSE YOU DO, IT’S COVER-TO-COVER VEGAN JUNK FOOD!

The nice people at Adams Media sent me three copies of Lane Gold’s Vegan Junk Food, one for me and two for you. Enter for your chance to win a copy over on fuck yeah vegan pizza! Since I’m shipping these myself, the contest is open internationally. Don’t say I never did anything for you, Australia!

By the by, I’ve only been able to try one recipe out so far, but it’s a doozy: Pesto Chicken Pizza with Creamy Garlic Sauce.

Gold’s pesto is the besto, and the garlic sauce – made out of pureed white beans – is reminiscent of garlicky mashed potatoes. Super-delish, I could definitely see myself whipping up a batch to eat on its own.

Did I mention that Gold devotes an entire chapter to pizza and bread? MY KIND OF COOKBOOK! No ice cream, but that’s alright; I already own two ice cream books as it is. Although, I would love love love to see someone veganize Ben & Jerry’s flavors; Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night Snack, with the chocolate-covered potato chips, is the stuff that dreams are made of. Much like donkey semen.

Mags like to clean the other dogs’ faces, but only Finnick and O-Ren will tolerate it. (Which is a shame, seeing as Peedee’s face is always dirty, and I’d rather turn the job of washing it over to Mags.)

It occurs to me that when I think of this behavior in relation to Mags, I categorize it as “maternal.” But Peedee does the same thing with ears, and I’ve only ever thought of it as gross, never nurturing. Possibly there might be a difference in motivation – Peedee enjoys the taste of the ear wax, methinks, whereas Mags doesn’t seem to derive a gross kind of pleasure out of consuming eye snot – but still. Internalized gender roles much?

A(nother) page from Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011).

excerpted from the short story “Cold-Blooded.”

To my sisters, the Iridescent Ones, the Egg-Bearers, the Many-Faceted, greetings from the Planet of Moths.

At last we have succeeded in establishing contact with the creatures here who, in their ability to communicate, to live in colonies, and to construct technologies, most resemble us, although in these particulars they have not advanced beyond a rudimentary level.

During our first observation of these “blood creatures,” as we have termed them – after the colourful red liquid that is to be found in their bodies, and that appears to be of great significance to them in their poems, wars, and religious rituals – we supposed them incapable of speech, as those specimens we were able to examine entirely lacked the organs for it. They had no wing-casings with which to stridulate – indeed they had no wings; they had to mandibles to click; and the chemical method was unknown to them, since they were devoid of antennae. “Smell,” for them, is a perfunctory affair, confined to a flattened and numbed appendage on the front of the head. But after a time, we discovered that the incoherent squeakings and gruntings that emerged from them, especially when pinched, were in fact a form of language, and after that we made rapid progress.

You guys, I did it! I figured out how to turn So Delicious’ Coconut Milk Nog into a rich, creamy, honest-to-goodness ice cream!

My first attempt, you might recall, resulted in a sorbet-like concoction. Assuming that the nog was thick enough as is, I just dumped a chilled quart of the stuff into my ice cream machine and let it do its thing. Apparently there’s a higher concentration of water in the nog than I realized, because the finished product, when completely frozen, is rather hard and full of ice crystals. Delicious, but difficult to eat and not especially ice creamy. (Seriously, you have to let that block defrost on the countertop for a good half hour before you can shave a spoonful off of it!)

So this next time around I tried a different approach. Not only did I add some arrowroot “slurry” to thicken the batter up (a standard procedure in soy milk-based ice cream recipes), but I simmered the rest of the nog on the stove top for a bit, so that some of the excess water evaporated. And it worked! Once it was chilled, the batter had the consistency of pudding (that’s good!), and the frozen dessert is rich, thick, and creamy – much more like ice cream than Italian ice!

If you’re anything like me, you stocked up on nog while it was in season and now have a fridge full of drinks set to expire. (I have three more quarts, all dated February 8!) Ice cream to the rescue! Freeze that deliciousness and enjoy it all year long. Errr, not that it’ll last long enough for you to celebrate Christmas in July. Probably you’ll polish it off well before spring – it’s Coconut Milk Nog Ice Cream, yo! But still, one can dream.

Seen here with a chocolate, raspberry ganache-filled heart from Rescue Chocolate!
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Coconut Milk Nog Ice Cream

(Makes about 2/3 of a quart.)

Ingredients

1 quart So Delicious Coconut Milk Nog, divided
2 tablespoons arrowroot powder

Directions

1. Pour 1/4 cup of the nog into a small mug or bowl. Add the arrowroot powder and whisk briskly with a fork. Set aside.

2. Pour the remaining nog into a medium-sized sauce pan. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat to medium-low. Simmer for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring or whisking the liquid every few minutes so as to prevent burning. When done, increase the heat and bring the liquid to a boil. Remove from the heat and immediate add the arrowroot slurry. (You may need to whisk the slurry again before doing so, in case the powder has settled to the bottom of the mug.) This will cause the batter to thicken noticeably.

3. Cover the container and chill the batter in the fridge for three to six hours or more. (I prefer to make the batter the night before, and let it chill in the fridge overnight.) When cold, process according to your ice cream machine’s instructions. Enjoy immediately as soft serve or chill in the freezer for a half hour or more for a firmer ice cream. When kept in an airtight container, you can store homemade ice cream in the freezer for months at a time!

FYI: This process would probably also work well with other seasonal nondairy drinks, such as Silk’s Pumpkin Spice, Nog, and Chocolate Mint flavors. I usually have good luck making ice cream with Pumpkin Spice and arrowroot powder, but the Nog and Chocolate Spice produce an icier dessert. Simmering them on the stove top first (as outlined above) could help fix this problem, I think.

A page from Margaret Atwood’s latest, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011).

excerpt from the short story “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet”

3. In the third age, money became a god. It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk. It began to create on its own. It created feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations. It created greed and hunger, which were its two faces. Towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands, and the lives of children. It ate armies, ships, and cities. No one could stop it. To have it was a sign of grace.

“If you and a chicken were in an airplane, and you crashed on a deserted island…” *

“Dinosauria, We (blue man)”: CC image via flickr user danielofredorota.
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Father Gomez

I.

He came out at sunset on a little headland beside a shallow bay. If they had tides in this sea, the tide was high, because there was only a narrow fringe of soft white sand above the water.

And floating in the calm bay were a dozen or more. Father Gomez had to stop and think carefully. A dozen or more enormous snow-white birds, each the size of a rowboat, with long, straight wings that trailed on the water behind them: very long wings, at least two yards in length. Were they birds? They had feathers, and heads and beaks not unlike swans’, but those wings were situated one in front of the other, surely…

Suddenly they saw him. Heads turned with a snap, and at once all those wings were raised high, exactly like the sails of a yacht, and they all leaned in with the breeze, making for the shore.

Father Gomez was impressed by the beauty of those wing-sails, by how they were flexed and trimmed so perfectly, and by the speed of the birds. Then he saw that they were paddling, too: they had legs under the water, placed not fore and aft like the wings but side by side, and with the wings and the legs together, they had an extraordinary speed and grace in the water.

As the first one reached the shore, it lumbered up through the dry sand, making directly for the priest. It was hissing with malice, stabbing its head forward as it waddled heavily up the shore, and the beak snapped and clacked. There were teeth in the beak, too, like a series of sharp incurved hooks.

Father Gomez was about a hundred yards from the edge of the water, on a low grassy promontory, and he had plenty of time to put down his rucksack, take out the rifle, load, aim, and fire.

The bird’s head exploded in a mist of red and white, and the creature blundered on clumsily for several steps before sinking onto its breast. It didn’t die for a minute or more; the legs kicked, the wings rose and fell, and the great bird beat itself around and around in a bloody circle, kicking up the rough grass, until a long, bubbling expiration from its lungs ended with a coughing spray of red, and it fell still.

The other birds had stopped as soon as the first one fell, and stood watching it, and watching the man, too. There was a quick, ferocious intelligence in their eyes. They looked from him to the dead bird, from that to the rifle, from the rifle to his face.

He raised the rifle to his shoulder again and saw them react, shifting backward clumsily, crowding together. They understood.

They were fine, strong creatures, large and broad-backed, like living boats, in fact. If they knew what death was, thought Father Gomez, and if they could see the connection between death and himself, then there was the basis of a fruitful understanding between them. Once they had truly learned to fear him, they would do exactly as he said. [...]

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