two things, i think: my rice cooker is hella cheap; in fact, it was free from someone on Craigslist i think. that doesn’t mean it’s bad, necessarily, but in this case the bottom of the rice was burnt and the top was soggy. also the taste of this ended up like fairly sweet. i am wondering if there was an issue with the tomato paste i used; when i open a can i freeze little tablespoon sized balls of tomato paste and i just tossed two of those in. it just ended up soggy and weirdly tomato-sweet.

that said, there are a couple folks who recommended this recipe, so if anyone wants to give it a shot and see, it’s here.

been just preposterously busy with work as i just got kind of thrust into a new role as a sysadmin for which i am entirely unqualified, lol. but! in order to swim rather than sink i’m now learning Powershell, which will hopefully be useful long-term. we’re also in a season of needing a lot of work on our home; my wife and i just finished rebuilding a fence that blew over in a windstorm, and then as we were preparing for a flooring project we found mold in some drywall that we’ve had to isolate and will need to mitigate, and just this morning we had someone out to do a yearly furnace check and we need a new actuator in the furnace. hopefully by the time this is all done i’ll both know powershell and also be a functional handyman, ha! which is something i never had any interest in before.

outside of work and home repair, i’m trying to start a habit of yoga in addition to my meditation practice, but that’s been tough because the room i usually do yoga in is the room that closed off due to the mold remediation! lol/sob.

also just trying to stay on top of cooking. my wife and i make a giant weekly pot of Nigerian style jollof rice, and that’s been a great relief so we don’t need to figure out lunches for the first few days of the week.

so, boring life stuff but busy. never a dull moment.

i’m sure my story’s not that interesting, but that’s never stopped me before!

i had a friend go vegan in high school, probably 2002 or 2003; i thought she was nuts. we lived in Iowa which is hardcore meat and potatoes territory. but this was my first real-life exposure to that ideology. Alice, if you’re out there, i hope you’re still vegan and know that while i was not cool about it then, it affected me!

anyway, fast forward many, many years of loving animals but never thinking about where food came from. i ate the standard American diet, drank too much, lived a sedentary life; by the time i sort of “came to” i was over 400lbs (180+kg), a pack-a-day smoker, a heavy drinker, etc. shortly after i realized what i was doing to myself i got diagnosed with diabetes and moved to Colorado. the more active lifestyle out here combined with some other choices helped me get a bit healthier, stop smoking, and some other things. i think this was the first time i tried going vegan myself, maybe 2011 or 2012. it was really difficult and my complicated relationship with food made it not work.

around this same time i began practicing Zen Buddhism, which i continue doing to this day. i tried going vegan several times over the years and never lasted longer than about six months - the Buddhism strongly encouraged the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, but it still didn’t click.

in 2022 my wife and i bought a house and got two cats. they are an absolute joy in my life, and it was that which made me realize ever buffalo wing or hamburger i ate came from a creature with as rich an internal life and as much feeling and personality as my boys, and i couldn’t do it any more. in 2023 i became a vegetarian, and in 2024 (April-ish) i became a vegan and have stuck it out since then. the kitties, the zen, and the internet have all helped.

additionally, going vegan made tremendous positive impacts on my health. for the first time in my life my diabetes is under control, my depression is moderated, my gout isn’t flaring up, and i’m almost 100lbs lighter than i was when i started all this stuff.

so… yeah! tofu is amazing.

one way that being vegan has improved my life is that it’s reduced the stress of cognitive dissonance, by which i mean i feel like my dietary choices are in line with my values and beliefs. i’m a practicing Buddhist and not killing is the first precept in Buddhism - and there’s millennia of history of at least vegetarian if not entirely vegan cuisine coming from countries and societies where other people took that precept seriously.

for me personally, another moment that impacted me was when my wife and i adopted two cats that had been discovered in an empty house. they were such playful, intelligent, and obviously feeling creatures; what in my life made me feel like cows, pigs, or chickens were any different?

anyway, that’s sort of what’s improved. it’s definitely created more complications too as so many others have pointed out. my wife’s not vegan, which bothers me occasionally. my mom totally doesn’t understand what being vegan is; she seems to think it’s basically keto somehow? i travel a lot for work and in some of the really rural places i visit, finding vegan options can be tough. i don’t mind that, but when i travel with co-workers they love to give me shit about being vegan. i keep showing them delicious food options (for example, Frisco, CO, has an amazing Vietnamese restaurant with some of the best vegan food i’ve ever had), but they still like to mock. oh well. i hope that by living according to my values, i will have an impact on them even if they don’t admit it.

thanks to this post i just learned about rajma! i am excited to try making it in the near future.

hella delicious!