Previous entires: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6.

In Durham, they sell metaphysics by the pound. (Ninth Street)

Firstly, I’ve got another batch of talks coming up. First of them is tomorrow, Friday March 30 at Duke University (3:30pm, West Duke 202) in the colloquium series. I’ll be talking about ‘Quantification and Ontological Realism’. The talk will be followed by a reception, so stick around if you’re attending. I’m looking forward to this one, as I think I’ve got a nice paper. It’s mainly a critique of Ted Sider’s recent defence of fundamental, perfectly joint-carving quantification in his Writing the Book of the World (OUP, 2011). It’s nice to go to Durham too, since they have a “Metaphysical Shop” and all (see the photo)… Ninth Street, which is relatively close to the campus, has a very nice selection of shops and cafes.

Already on the following Wednesday, April 4, I’ll be talking at Boulder, Colorado (3:30pm, HLMS 141) with the title ‘(Neo-)Aristotelian Essentialism’. I’ll be in Boulder April 3-5.

Other than that, I haven’t got much in terms of news. I pretty much missed the whole of last week being ill with a flu. Fortunately it only hit me after the party that I organized with Elizabeth at our place. The party went well, although the turnout could’ve been better — we’re a little bit out of the way and not that many people know me yet. It was fun anyway, with a good mix of Chapel Hill faculty and graduate students. We also had someone from another college in North Carolina, whom I knew from a conference. Oh, and Peter van Inwagen showed up too, which was nice! Unfortunately I don’t have any photographic evidence of the gathering, as I was too busy entertaining guests. I particularly regret not snapping a photo of the all-vegan buffet feast that we prepared with Elizabeth. A list will have to suffice: vegan sushi, seitan-tomato-onion skewers in jerk marinade, seitan-pineapple skewers in lime marinade with lime and cilantro dip, olive-walnut rolls, green salad with vinaigrette, hummus tray with veggies, olives, gingerbread cookies, and a chocolate-cherry cake. We made everything from scratch (except the hummus), so it was a fair bit of work! But very enjoyable, and people seemed to like the food too.

Cardinals are quite common here

I ended up missing talks by Ned Markosian and Jonathan Schaffer at Duke last week because of the illness. Fortunately I managed to catch Schaffer at Chapel Hill. He gave a talk on ‘Structural Equation Models of Metaphysical Structure’ — not a very informative title. Effectively he revised his story about grounding a bit and suggested that it’s best understood as analogous to causation, or as “metaphysical causation”. I wasn’t convinced, but I won’t go into the details as I wasn’t able to follow the talk that well in my tired post-flu state. I might get my hands on a draft of this paper though (for the metaphysics reading group), in which case I’ll perhaps report in more detail.

Unsurprisingly, my running has suffered a big blow in March: I’ve missed two full weeks of training, with a half decent week in between. I’m back at it now, but still not up to full health. I’m running the Tar Heel 10-miler on April 21, so I’ve got another three weeks or so to get back into racing shape. Did I mention that I’m gaining weight from all the tasty craft beer and cooking and Elizabeth’s baking and… Well, maybe some of it is muscle from the gym work, who knows.

Deer, from our kitchen window

It’s effectively summer here now. Spring came and went with the cherry blossoms, and we even had a sweltering day of +31 Celsius not long ago. It’s nice and green everywhere. I hope to do a photography walk soon to capture some of that green stuff. The nights are warm enough to sit outside gazing the stars. Wildlife is still active too. There was some kind of an eagle on our backyard last week; I tried to photograph it but couldn’t get close enough to get a nice focus. Instead I managed to capture the Cardinal that you can see above, although it’s not the best shot — I’d really need a decent zoom lens for these birds. We also have woodpeckers visiting frequently, but they’re rather shy birds. I still haven’t gotten a better shot of the deer either, so I’m attaching one of my older shots of a couple that were hanging out around our house.

"Caribe", at Sage Café

We haven’t been out in Chapel Hill or around much recently, but we did make another trip to Sage Café — a nice vegetarian restaurant quite close to our place. You can get almost everything vegan as well. This time I remembered to bring my camera and snapped a photo of my dish, Caribe — Caribbean style black beans topped with a slice of avocado, served with rice, grilled spicy tofu & plaintains. It’s not the cheapest place, but the food is quite tasty.

I’ll report back after Boulder, I think. A friend of mine from Finland is coming to visit right after though, and we’re planning to do a week’s road trip, so I’ll be away for a bit.

For this recipe I used only my second ever batch of homemade seitan. It turned out pretty good, tastier than the first one. I still think it requires some further marination or frying with spices, but it is perfectly good straight out of the broth.

I’ve got a huge batch of seitan ingredients now — I ordered four 22oz packs of Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten and two 22oz packs of their Garbanzo Bean Flour. These were just $35 altogether with postage included and they will make a MASSIVE amount of seitan. I’m estimating eight or so batches, each of which will make maybe five or six meals for two people. That’s pretty cheap! The seitan you can buy from stores is generally flavourless, has inferior consistency, and costs about $5 for a pack which makes maybe two meals, so there’s no contest here. Plus you get to experiment with the spicing of course.

Peppered Seitan Steaks & Mashed Potatoes

I used the same proportions of wheat gluten and gram flour (i.e. chickpea/garbanzo bean flour) as I did before, namely 2:1, and roughly the same amount of liquids. The spicing was slightly different, although I did use chipotle again. The chipotle was supplemented with some applewood smoked salt and some of the liquid was replaced with a mixture of tamari, mirin, and miso. The broth was quite similar to the one I used before. Another obvious deviation from my previous batch was that I also formed some steaks from the seitan mass (before boiling it). Anyway, since I’ve already posted a seitan recipe, I’m just going to assume that you’re using ready-made seitan for the purposes of this one.

Ingredients
4 Seitan Steaks (previously prepared)
3-4 Potatoes (large)
Cauliflower (half)
Black Pepper from Grinder
Curry Powder
Earth Balance (or other vegan margarine)
Soy/Oat/Almond Milk
Ground Nutmeg

Peppered Seitan Steaks

Serves two. The amount of Earth Balance and soy milk needed depends on how much potato mass you end up with and what kind of consistency you’re looking for. It might be in the range of a tablespoon of margarine and a cup of soy milk. The side of curried cauliflower is of course entirely optional, we just happened to have some handy. Broccoli would go quite nicely as well. You could also prepare some sort of a brown sauce or gravy for these, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I would’ve decorated the mashed potatoes with some fresh coriander or other fresh herbs, but we didn’t have any in the house when cooking this, so this is what you get.

Cooking
Time required: ~50min
-Peel and dice the potatoes (fairly small), boil until soft.
-Mash the diced potatoes when soft, adding margarine and soy milk in small quantities until desired consistency is reached.
-Heat some oil in a pan, fry the seitan steaks on both sides, about 5-8min each side or until nicely browned.
-Add black pepper from grinder to taste to both sides of the seitan steaks towards the end.
-Chop the cauliflower into chunks.
-On a separate pan or on the side of the previous pan, heat some oil and fry the cauliflower chunks in curry powder until nice and brown.

Another hearty meal! Long ago as a kid, when I was a meat eater, I liked peppered steaks — not so much because of meat, but because of the pepper! The peppered seitan steaks take care of that childhood memory, except that they’re tastier and certainly healthier. The consistency turned out very nice and chewy, but not gummy. I used quite a lot of pepper for these, so I couldn’t quite tell how the seitan was until I tried some of it from the same batch without the pepper; I guess that this would be a good dish even if your seitan turns out to be a bit flavourless. I made some extra steaks as well, some of which were eaten as burgers on homemade molasses-oatmeal-carrot rolls with mustard.