summer in the city July 4, 2009

Did you ever take a self-taken photo that makes you think you might actually be a serial killer and not even know it? My Dexter is showing a little in this photo, no?

I’m following my sweetheart around on tour for the next few days, and today the laminated piece of paper attached to my belt loop says we are in New Haven.

I have a tour routine: while he’s working, I scope out the city, then we have lunch, he works more and I settle into computer work and more wandering around.

After walking around the Yale Campus for an hour or so today, checking out the current college fashions and thinking about how everyone passing me had done better on the SATs than me, I hopped up on an old stone wall and sunbathed while reading this week’s New Paltz Times.*

And the troubles began.

Is this outfit just too skimpy to wear out and about? Ladies, please let me know. I’ve got the little slip that prevents the dress from being too short and everything!

So today, I was sitting on the wall, legs crossed all tidy, not laying out in the sun lolling about or anything, and a dude whistles at me.

Of course, New Haven is 20 or whatever times bigger than the town where I usually hang out, and this sort of thing happens in cities, I know that. A whistle, who cares. I’m reading the paper completely happy. But combined with three other incidents, it all added up to some annoyance on my part that I think I need to blog out of my system.

So I’m sitting on the wall, and after 10 minutes or so I suddenly become aware of a figure creeping toward me around the corner. I jump about fifty feet in the air and literally gasp, and a very white, very withery 70ish man straightens up and says “I was just going to tickle your foot–it was just dangling right there.”

UM.

I jump up and gather all my crap and start hustling down the street, literally too stunned to say one word. Should I have laughed it off? It freaked me out to a ridiculous degree, to be honest. Before I could tell that the dude was super old and possibly insane, his creeping form seemed like an attacker who was going to snatch me away to a certain death—seriously.

As I was booking it, he was on the other side of the street, and he said that he was “just kidding! I didn’t mean anything by it!” and I yelled back over my shoulder, “No worries, it’s fine!” when in reality in no way was it fine.

Why do we do this?

Most women do it: the desire to be nice above all. My concern is always that if I am my interior brutal self, I will have misjudged the situation and everyone will know what a serious asshole I am and how badly I overreact. I felt bad for being so jumpy, to be honest, and just exactly how fucked up is that?

So then I go back to the venue and tell Jacob the story and head out for a walk. While window shopping, a (pretty cute, actually) dude walked up to me and asked if he could ask me a question. Warily, I said OK. “Are you part Japanese?” “What? Um. No.” “Oh, because you look sort of Japanese from a certain angle.” “Ah.” And I wished him a good day and walked on.

I know pretty much all women get flirted with in this way pretty much all the time. I just don’t leave my little bubble that often, so it doesn’t happen to me that often. But I am also afraid that my love of the world—my wild, intense joy at having a day to spend walking around in a brand new city in the summer sun—was palpable. My heart felt very open today, and how depressing that if you’re putting out open-heart energies you attract crazy dudes.

People who live in cities have a public face that they put on—a blank, impassive, dead stare that repels panhandlers and overly friendly tourists. If I’m in a city for a few days I can get into that routine, but yesterday I didn’t have a city face at all. I was open, very alive and wildly happy. The world will not tolerate this in women who are wearing short dresses.

Why did it have to be dudes, though? (Don’t answer that one.) Why couldn’t cute girls ask me where I got my dress? I could have told them the best story: I got it in Tasmania, at a music festival in the rain and the mist at the very bottom of the world (yes, even at the bottom of the world there are vendors selling cheap China-made dresses).

So, back in New Haven, after the sunbathing and the window shopping I go to a charming little indie coffeeshop for lemonade and computer work at a table outside, and a Yalie prof. comes up to me after a few minutes, saying he is sitting inside and is wondering if it’s too humid to sit outside. And even though he is in this 40s and is interminably blah (fuckin’ chinos and a blue cuffed shirt), he begins blatantly flirting, saying I have an interestingly-shaped face (was that even a compliment?) and asking what I’m studying (”Um, I’m 31. I’m not in school.”) and the whole fucking thing. He was a brain scientist dude…what’s the word? Where you do MRIs on people’s brains and shit? He did that sort of stuff. Eventually I scratched my head and my luscious armpit hair entered the picture and he seemed sufficiently bored with my non-answers (”Where are your ancestors from?” “It doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t matter in a larger sense, or you’re just saying it shouldn’t matter to me?” “The latter.”) that he drifted away, but not without me telling him my real name for some stupid reason and him saying a whole long thing about gusto and tongues and ick ick ick.

And we’re beyond the need for feminism, right?

Even though we can’t walk down the street with open hearts and short skirts without dudes jumping into our lives?

Please.

*Speaking of: I generally cannot find fault with newish Town Board member Jeff Logan—he was super sweet when he was my nurse when I went to Dr. to get a part to a tick extracted from my back during the Lyme Disease scare a few months ago—but I was more than a little weirded out by the fact that all of the sudden he is apparently obsessed with some New Paltz medical imaging company getting rid of a trailer they apparently shouldn’t be allowed to have that they use for MRI scans (I don’t have the paper in front of me right now for the details). It seems more than a little sketchy that he works at a clinic where MRIs are available [update: maybe not---their website doesn't mention it], which he comes pretty close to pointing out in the article, even—I’ll toss the quote up here when I get back to my car with the paper in it.

What gives, Jeff?

pisces love cancers / everyone should be loving agar July 4, 2009

For someone who says she doesn’t believe in astrology, I seem to have a ridiculously large amount of Cancer friends. I’m pretty in love with all of them, and was super psyched that I rounded so many up to have dinner and managed to fit all their names on one cake! I was planning on decorating it with tiny peanut butter cups, but in the end it was just going to be too busy, so chocolate shavings won.

At any rate, I’m pretty happy with this cake. It’s a basic chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and filling that I frosted with my favorite easy easy easy chocolate frosting: ganache (yeah, it’s got a double frosting: ganache, then the pb just on the top.). Ganache frosting really is the shit. Have you ever made it? You pour it on the cake and it hardens to a shiny, smooth gloss. It’s incredibly rich and, unless you always have a lot of untempered chocolate to use up like I do (you don’t need tempered chocolate for ganache, and I’ve always got chocolate hanging around that’s been in the tempering machine for 2 hours or something and is tired of being tempered. [Yes, chocolate gets tired and needs a rest sometimes too!]), it’s pretty expensive. Basically you’re covering your entire cake in a chocolate bar.

I usually use about half a pound of chocolate on a standard cake. To make it, just bring 3/4 of a cup coconut milk and 1 tablespoon coconut oil to a strong boil. While it’s coming to a boil, finely chop 8 oz. of chocolate and put it in a medium bowl. When the liquids boil, pour them over the chocolate, stir for a few seconds, then cover it and let it sit for a few minutes. You can also add 1 tablespoon or more of any alcohol that will go well with your cake, or 1/2 teaspoon or so of any extract that will go with the cake. I usually add a little brandy. After the chocolate has sat for a few minutes, stir it until it’s completely smooth. If some chocolate pieces won’t melt, cover it for another few minutes then try again, and remember to chop the chocolate more finely next time.

Spread whatever filling you’re using for your cake on the middle layer (you can use ganache for that too, or raspberry jam, or anything else you can think of), top it with the top layer, and make sure it’s nice and cool before frosting. Set it on a rack on top of a parchment-lined sheet pan—all three of these (rack, parchment, sheet pan) will make your life so much easier when frosting this cake, I really wouldn’t recommend doing the ganache frosting unless you have a rack or can rig up something like a rack to put the cake on. You need some space between the cake and the pan to let the excess frosting drip.

When the ganache is super smooth, pour it over the cake. Use an offset spatula to smooth it all out gorgeously. Work rather quickly, because it’ll start setting up pretty quick (especially if the cake is very cold), then you won’t be able to smooth it out. You can always reclaim all that frosting on the parchment and spread it over any holes on the cake, too.

Here’s a picture of a plain chocolate cake frosted with this frosting.

I pretty much made up the peanut butter frosting on the spot (I knew Jacob & Veronica liked p.b. + choc, but I had to quickly call Randy to make sure his sweetheart Lacey liked the combo. ["Randy, is Lacey near you? Don't say it's me!" "Sort of." "OK, just say yes or no: does Lacey like peanut butter and chocolate?" "YES!" "OK, see you tomorrow!"], and I know it’s going to enter my regular rotation. I’ve been slowly training myself to use agar-agar powder to thicken all kinds of sauces, frostings, fillings, etc.

I already make a killer fluffy chocolate fudge frosting (it’s based on one in Myra’s first book—that recipe is worth the price of the book alone, I swear) with coconut milk and agar that incorporates lots and lots of chocolate. It’s a perfect decorating frosting, you can pipe it into all kinds of shapes, and it makes great fluffy fudgy swirls of frosting on a cake. It’s the complete opposite of the cool cucumber that is ganache frosting, which is sophisticated and fierce. It’s good to have both under your belt.

I also make a super basic white frosting used only for writing on cakes and decorating that is nothing more than coconut milk, water, agar-agar powder, maple syrup or sugar. It sets up very firm then I process it in the food processor and it’s perfect to put in a pastry bag. You can tint it with those nice all-natural food colorings the health food stores have, or you can go all DIY and add some turmeric (yellow), or beet juice (red).

Oh wait, but what is agar-agar? I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it on the blog and as I am writing all this from a hotel room in downtown Manhattan on the Fourth of July,* I’m not exactly inspired to get all into it right now, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Vegans should be using a lot more agar than they do (I use the terms “agar-agar” and “agar” interchangeably). Agar is often called “vegetarian gelatin” and that’s exactly what it is. You don’t use it exactly like the ground up hooves and whatever else is in death gelatin though.

Hmm, can I find something already written about how to use agar, so I don’t have to do it myself? Well, here’s something.

Where they get it wrong:

• “Agar, also know as agar agar,”   Um.
• “Create a mousse or pudding by adding tofu or yogurt—or both.” Eeeew. Tofu thickened with agar, ick.
• “Gelatin can be replaced with agar powder or flakes in a one-to-one ratio.” Nope. Agar powder is about ten zillion times stronger than agar flakes. My guidelines are to 1) NEVER EVER use agar flakes, or those horrid agar bars. They are a huge pain to work with. Buy agar powder. You can get it in health food stores where it will cost you dearly, or in Asian (usually Thai) markets where the exact same stuff will be 99 cents for a packet that will last you a while. I’m all fancy these days and I buy Ferran Adria’s brand of agar, but that’s because I like to pour money down the drain. If you can only find agar flakes, grind them as finely as you can get them in a coffee grinder. The truth is, it’s not difficult to get the flakes to work perfectly too, but agar powder is so much easier that I hate to think of novices even fucking with the flakes. The bars are twice as annoying as the flakes, so, skip those all together. 2) If you’re using powder in a recipe that calls for flakes, use about 1/2 as much powder as flakes.
• “Agar will not gel liquids containing vinegar or foods that contain high levels of oxalic acid, such as chocolate.” Uh, that’s completely wrong. I’ve made lemon gels and tons of chocolate-agar concoctions. The trick is to use a lot more agar in recipes that contain a lot of acid, and if you’re using chocolate make sure you have some sort of carrier like water or coconut milk, because you couldn’t just melt chocolate and add some agar powder and you know what, actually? Who knows? It seems like it wouldn’t work because of the oxalic acid, but I’ve never tried it. I’m not sure why anyone would, but I’m not going to be a hater like stupid ehow and say it’s impossible.

OK, clearly someone different wrote this article on using agar in dessrts, and it’s a lot better. Good tips, lady!

So, that peanut butter frosting.

I didn’t write down what I did, but here’s what I can reconstruct after three days, two glasses of wine, 1 glass of sake, and four beers standing between me and the frosting:

2 (14 oz) cans coconut milk

3/4 Tb. agar powder (I bet you could do 1/2 Tb. I always add too much agar because if you add too little your recipe is crap, and if you add too much you just need to process it more later and it’s fine.)

pinch of sea salt

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 c peanut butter, but actually I have no idea. It could have been 2 cups.

splash vanilla

So you just bring the milk, agar, salt and sugar to a boil, whisking once in a while. Bring it to a boil slowly so the sugar dissolves. When it’s all dissolved, crank up the heat and let it come to a real, rock-solid, rollicking boil. Agar needs heat to do its thing, but too much heat will kill it, so don’t boil it forever. Turn off the heat and whisk in the vanilla and p.b. If the p.b. doesn’t want to get totally smooth, don’t sweat it, it’ll be fine.

Taste it and see if you want to add more p.b. or sugar or anything. If you want to add more sugar, use powdered sugar so it doesn’t get grainy. Put the entire thing in the fridge for an hour or so until—magic!—it sets up super firm and hard. You can now have fun by slicing it up and handing out slices, or you can make a frosting by whipping it in the food processor until it’s creamy and smooth. Keep tasting and adding stuff (vanilla, sugar, peanut butter) until it’s perfect.

Spread it on the cake!

*

(Oh, hey, local peeps: I brought this cake to Garden Café in Woodstock**, and they were so incredibly sweet about a party of 11 people and a cake—they even put candles on it and brought it out singing, though I didn’t ask them to do either! And as always the food was super super tasty, and I loved that they were only going to let me bring the cake if it was vegan—fuckin’ A! Go Garden Café!)

OK, oh dear, its getting late, I’ve got to go outside and hang around super sweet people who maybe make really stupid decisions once in a while but I’m trying not to let it get me down.

*

*Can you believe there are hotel rooms so teeny that they don’t even have a bathtub? This Wall St-area hotel is ridiculous. One of the main reasons I decided to follow my sweetheart around for the past few days was to stay in an NYC hotel room & take a bath, because my bathtub at home is so shitty. Tragic.

**Um, a message to the person who wrote the “disappointed” review on that page: you are possibly certifiably insane and should really seek professional help.

it’s all over now, baby blue July 1, 2009

I’m writing a teeny little thing about my childhood for a reason too dumb to even go into, and to help me out with facts and spellings I’ve been doing lots of Google searches. I just looked back at my last hours’ worth of searches and they make the most perfect poem about my first 18 years:

gila monsters

low-lifes

drug you make by heating a spoon

drug that sometimes causes houses to blow up

sugarcoat or sugar coat

Phoenix razing desert 1 acre per minute

ornamental orange side effects of eating

“bread cereal”

do people really go to prison for tearing labels off mattresses

shooting guns backfiring bashing forehead

You’re all grown now, kiddo. Things were crappy all those years ago, but now you’ve got the pretty kitchen and the cupcake papers and it’s all over. No one’s ever going to make you shoot a gun again. Repeat repeat repeat.

(late) Monday miscellany: tiny readings June 30, 2009

Ick.

Totes.

IN LOVE.

Made me puke. You?

I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS!

Thanks to Carol Adams’ Facebook for this ridic link.

Thanks to the THREE! friends who posted this on FB! So not surprising, and another reason to eat real food, duh.

placeholder June 29, 2009

Argh, I can’t stand it when I have a super negative post up and it’s the first thing people see when they come to the blog. No time for a real post now, lemon cupcakes with lavender icing and edible flowers (you know the ones) need to be made, NYC trips need to be taken, long-distance sweethearts soon need to be kissed. Until I have some computer time, here’s a preview of some prettiness to come in the form of (not quite tempered) chocolate poetry. Be excited! Poetry in chocolate as a form of postmodern unification of the signifier and the signified? YES, how did you guess?

prepare to be shocked: PETA people are misogynists + stupid June 26, 2009

So I’ve been dealing with a really & truly & seriously dumb customer for the past three weeks, and I am in no way above laughing about her to all of the internet for two reasons: she is obsessed with PETA and literally cannot say the word “feminist.” Quelle surprise that these two go hand-in-hand, non?

She has a vague connection to PETA and called me up to order truffles for Ingrid Newkirk’s 60th birthday. In our many phone conversations (it’s taken me more time to talk her through the ordering process than to make the truffles) she has namedropped Ingrid’s name about 60,000 times, and each time when I respond with polite silence or a flat”hmm” I can tell she is utterly perplexed over why this vegan chef she’s talking to is not falling all over herself to get these truffles to *****INGRID*****NEWKIRK****!!!!!

As you know, I CANNOT STAND Ingrid Newkirk. This made for many conversations in which I am the most polite and fake person you have ever met–the consummate business owner who is 100% business—kind in a closed-off sort of a way, answering her many many extremely idiotic questions in a cheery, vapid, detached monotone.

It is clear to me, from our hours together on the phone, that this woman has no idea how the world works and has never had to work a day in her life. She clearly fritters away her life on various boards of directors, and she clearly had her “consciousness raised” (I’m sure that is the phrase she would use) about animal issues in a complete vacuum and has no greater understanding of their connection to larger concerns.

I’ll try to restrain myself from getting into the myriad hilarious details about how much trouble this poor (in all but money), sad sack has had in ordering three boxes of truffles. It’s taken three weeks and six phone calls (yes, I looked back into my caller ID to see). It’s taken me repeating the same simple sentences many times over, sentences like:

“I know the last time we talked you said that you were trying to order from a file of my website from two years ago that you had copied and pasted into a Word document. I just want to mention again that that information is outdated, and the words that say ‘order here’ aren’t actually links, so you’ll have better luck if you go to the website and order them there.”

“Yes…I hope I explained it well last week—when you called on Friday and I mentioned that we make everything fresh and ship truffles every Friday, I hope I mentioned [I KNOW I DID] that you need to place an order by Wednesday night, since as I said we make them on Thursdays. Um…now it’s Friday again and unfortunately because I didn’t receive an order from you…” (she will say that she thought that last Friday she called later on and maybe this week since she was calling earlier and…I could go on and on and on.).

[I just want to insert a little bit here about how I know that LL can be an annoying business to order from---orders go out every week, not every day, for one thing. And if people are on a time deadline and have questions about the ordering process and whatnot, I am more than happy to talk to them about it and help them out in any way I can. Of course! I love 99.99% of my customers dearly, and they are almost always amazing, interesting, brilliant people that I am proud to attract.]

It took three weeks, but finally the order was placed today—well, she says it was, but clearly something went wrong because I haven’t received any notification of it and I’m sure that’s going to entail another round of calling and me suggesting again that instead of using a credit card, something she seems absolutely incapable of doing, she just send a check—after she called me with perhaps the most hilarious question of all:

“So, I am placing my order and it says that it needs a 3-digit confirmation code from the back of the card. I have a MasterCard, and there are seven numbers on the back. Can I give you the seven numbers? Four are on the signature place and three are in a little box.”

“Ah. It’s just asking for those last three numbers.”

!!!

And people wonder why I am a grumpyass bitch all the time? For $45, I have spent THREE WEEKS on the phone with this person.

None of this would annoy me, however, beyond the little pinch of annoyance that comes with daily life when you are smart and awesome and the rest of the world is not, if not for one thing. Because of this one thing, I am pretty much enraged by this woman.

She kept telling me that she wanted to get these truffles to Ingrid ASAP. I kept explaining the truffle schedule (see above) and she kept missing it. I refuse to sell people truffles that are more then 2 days old, so I wasn’t about to make extra just in case she ordered them. I make truffles to order, end of story. On the other hand, I explained to her about 50 times that 4 of the 6 Bonbons are not as perishable and we mostly have them on hand all the time. If she wanted Vandanas, Vulvas, PB Cups or Patties, I could send them out THAT DAY.

But she didn’t want anything to do with that shit. She started reading the little bit about the BBs over the phone, and her mouth could barely even say the word “feminist.” That put the kibosh on everything. No matter how many times I tried to tell her how lovely the boxes are (I always steer people to the BBs and away from the truffles because although I like making them both, the BBs boxes are so much prettier—true confession!) and how so many vegans order the peanut butter cups and peppermint patties (they do), the “f” word just clamped her mouth shut and that was that.

She kept saying that “getting my candies [insert truffles-are-not-candies rant here] into the hands of Ingrid would be such a great opportunity for me” and that “PETA has an online store where they might want to sell them” [this would never happen for 80,000 reasons] and I was just gnashing my teeth and thanking her profusely and trying to be polite.

Because she was a very nice lady.

A sweet sweet idiotic dumbbell.

And now I’m off to call her to see why her order did not go through.

In happier news, I read Noel (pictured above) a very very very XXX note a vulva customer wanted included with her vulvas to be sent to her long-distance girlfriend, and, as I knew she would, she laughed and appreciated and loved it. If I didn’t have the Noels of the world to balance out the PETA people, what would I do?

who cares? June 26, 2009

Yes, after these strawberry tarts with almond crust and chamomile-lavender coconut cream I am pretty much going to quit my regular job and move around the country with seasonal strawberries, making strawberry tarts in every town until they go out of season, then packing up my paring knife and tart pans and moving to the next strawberry harvest, how did you know?

.

.

Apparently all of Facebook (which, horrrifyingly—extra r for the extra horror—, has become how I measure what the big news stories of the day are) really really cares about Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both dying today. I feel sorta horrible saying this, but I sort of don’t. I mean, I care because they were (to varying degrees) fairly decent people (one a lot more than the other, of course) and fairly young and it’s sad when people die. But it doesn’t mean anything to me, and I’m having one of those weird moments where I realize that everyone sort of grew up with Michael Jackson and I grew up with, like, the soundtrack to Hair. It’s a strange feeling. Pop culture—I’m just not that into it.

Happy am I, however, to have a blog where I can deposit such random strange feelings. I can now go off to sleep safe in the knowledge that should anyone be wondering what I think about MJ’s death in the next seven hours in which I am out of commission, my bases are covered. What would we do without the internetz? Why is adding extraneous “z”s to words so rad?

Must. stop. taking. pictures. with. camera. phone.

perfect day, pretty much. June 24, 2009

Got up at the ungodly early hour of 10:30 AM.

Took pictures of three cats all snuggly next to me in bed with crappy phone camera. Photos blurry but adorable.

Cleo, mid-midmorning bath; Noodle, lovey as always.

Email phone calls blah blah.

Strawberries.

Finished cycling laundry load #1, hung up on clothesline.

Began cycling laundry load #2.

Mowed lawn with electric mower.

Strawberries.

Weeding. More mowing. Extreme thirst.

Water, email, Facebook. Narrowly averted getting into a giant stupid horrible fight about veganism with a friend of a friend on Facebook.

Cycled laundry #2 whilst talking to sweetheart (en route in Minneapolis) about narrowly-averted fight. Decided and felt thankful for the millionth time that without level-headed sweetheart with which to work through massive amounts of annoyance, I would spontaneously combust.

Vacuumed and mopped entire house.

Minestrone + Martha Stewart Living on the patio.

Shower, hair washing, leg shaving (!!!), weekly general bodily tuneups and maintenance.

Post office drop off (”Anything fragile, perishable, liquid, or hazardous?” “Just chocolate vulvas, as usual.”)

Computer work in café.

Dinner with a pal: black bean soup in a sourdough bread bowl, chocolate stout; talking about where our lives are going, the importance of balance, whether or not we exercise (mostly we don’t) and whether or not we should (yes).

Email, paperwork, facebook, blogging, cat petting.

Strawberries.

The New Yorker.

Sleep.

a not-annoying story by the not-annoying Jonathan June 24, 2009

How nifty was the story “Good Neighbors” in the June 8 & 15, 2009 New Yorker? I so enjoy Jonathan Franzen, and I so enjoy that he is not Jonathan Safran Foer, who I dislike for no particular reason except it just seems to be the right thing to do. Anyway, this line has been reverberating in my head for a week, so much did it make me laugh:

Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formerly been active with the S.D.S. in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.

Oh, too, too much. It made my week!

ecofeminist primers June 23, 2009

A pal emailed to ask me for some ecofeminist book recommendations, so I thought I’d toss them on the blog. Ecofeminism was my main squeeze in college, but I haven’t been keeping up with the new awesome books I know have come out in the nine years since I was a coed. So here are my picks, what are yours?

-Anything by Carol Adams. First you must RUN to read the Sexual Politics of Meat and/or The Pornography of Meat. I love them about equally, but SPOM is the classic. After that:

-Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development by Vandana Shiva (yeah, my BFF.)

-The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant—a classic. A downer. Great.

-Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin—awesome. Another total classic.

-Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva—a great reader.

-Reweaving the World—another great reader.

-Women Pioneers for the Environment by Mary Joy Breton (I can’t remember this book, but it’s next to everyone else on my little ecofeminist shelf, right next to my college senior thesis on the radical ecofeminist politics of the poetry of Adrienne Rich)

-Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern by Ariel Salleh—I vaguely think there might be better books of hers out there, but this is the only one that appears to be visible right now.

-Ecofeminist Literary Criticism—Awesome! If you’re into that kind of thing.

-If you want something totally wild, settle down with some Mary Daly. Gyn/Ecology, yes!! It’s crazy! Oh, I adore that Mary Daly.