Good Food

By Emily

PO Box 74002

Vancouver, BC

V5V 3P0

Canada

So much for "every day until I finish all these zines", sigh. School takes up a lot of time you know?

Plus, for this zine I wanted to actually cook some of the recipes. What good is a review of a cooking zine if I don't try the food? (We'll ignore the fact that I'm name dropped in a burrito recipe.) (Why is "burrito" underlined as though it was not a word? Technology...)

Anyway, I made the quesadillas (also not a word apparently), for myself and two friends, and they were considered a great success. Hell, I'd make them again.

We also accidentally doubled a cookie recipe and had so many cookies we're still eating them. This photo makes it look like they're burgers, but they're really chocolate cookies with like four types of chocolate in them. Yum.

Brunch Scene no.1

By Sarah Noonan and Emily Ostapovitch

When I heard my friends were making a zine about brunch, I was pumped. A zine about all their favourite brunch places! Restaurant reviews for a city I don't live in! Excellent. (I'm not even kidding, I loved this zine about pizza places.)

So I was a little disappointed when I discovered that this was actually a recipe zine that told you how to cook various brunch foods. Despite this zine sitting in my house (actually three houses at this point) for months, some of the food seeming pretty delicious, and one of the creators actually coming and sleeping on my floor, I have not even come close to cooking any of the things in here. I guess as awesome as vegan chorizo sausage sounds, I'm just not willing to buy multiple ingredients that I doubt I'll ever use again.

So instead, here are two anecdotes related to this zine!

When Emily came and stayed at my house last month, I did what any person would do: threw zines at her. Specifically I threw this very zine at her. At first she was confused, and then excited, because she had apparently never seen a copy of this zine before. Her friend had printed it and hadn't mailed her a copy yet! (Reminiscent of when I wrote something for a zine Emily was editing, and then reprinted it in my own zine and sent her a copy before her's was finished.)

Just before Emily left, she and her friend decided to take my friend and I out for brunch (hurray!). We agreed on a place just down the street from where we lived (though Emily and her friend were now staying somewhere else in town), and my friend and I went down there and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally we heard from them that they had gotten on the wrong bus and ended up in Dartmouth (how awful!). (Or perhaps they'd gotten on the correctly numbered bus, but the bus's number changed while they were on it. A suspicious story, but something I've heard from other people as well.) Eventually they managed to find the place and we all had lunch (it being too late for brunch).

Of course if Emily had just cooked us something, we wouldn't have had to wait around so long...

Feeding the Masses: A Guide to Mass Vegan Catering

By The Anarchist Teapot Mobile Kitchen
www.eco-action.org/teapot

The Anarchist Mobile Teapot are a pretty rad group of people that cook loads of food at protests throughout the UK. If you've ever read Morgenmuffel you're probably at least somewhat familiar with them as Isy is a member.

This zine is a guide on how to start a group that cooks food for lots of people. Not like twenty or thirty lots, but hundreds and hundreds lots. At the protests the Teapot attended they'd feed several hundred people multiple times a day, often while cooking in a field!

The zine breaks down large scale cooking into several sections, covering laws concerning cooking for others in the UK, transport, equipment needed, bulk food ordering, hygiene, and other things. While some of this may seem obvious at first, most of the information given is useful, in-depth, and probably not available in other cooking books.

The style the whole thing is written in is quite casual, and filled with UK slang which can be amusing/confusing at times ("leccy" means electricity). The information is generally well presented and easy to understand, though occasionally there are bits that are like "we didn't do this, but maybe it will work!", which are less useful.

Throughout the zine are anecdotes, stories, and examples about large scale cooking that the Teapot have done. Also included is a several page long account of a protest they cooked at in Scotland. It seemed pretty intense, but these stories are useful in that they show that yes, it is possible to cook for this many people, but you will have to plan for it.

There's also a large section on recipes, which admittedly I didn't look too hard at, as I don't think I'll be planning meals for several hundred any time soon. But if you are, then this is an incredibly useful guide, and you should probably get it.

Food Magic!

By Erin

This zine marks an incredibly important day for this blog, as this is the final zine I got at the 2009 Portland Zine Symposium. When I started this blog last January I had a stack of around sixty zines, most of them from that event, but (as you can tell from the fact that there are more than sixty reviews on this blog) I kept getting more, and certain zines ended up getting pushed to the back of my review box.

This isn't to say that this zine is bad, in fact I enjoyed the recipe I (finally!) made, and both of my parents complimented it saying that it was very good. The only reason I didn't use it sooner was that whenever I opened it I didn't feel like cooking any of the recipes, and you know how that happens. That recipe for tempeh bourgignon might be really good, but tonight all you want to eat is cookies. Also, I don't currently have access to any tempeh.

I'd also love to someday try the cocktail recipes that are included (the white sangria sounds delicious), but at least for the moment I can say that the peanut stir fry sauce recipe is a good.

Uncle Tex' Down by the Bayou Good Time Home Country Kitchen presents Good Time Chilli Brownies

By Tom Hunt
www.misprintcomics.com

Quickly, name some of my favourite things!

If you said monsters, comics, and cooking (or baking), you will already know why I love this comic/recipe.

The recipe is good (I just made some! My parents demand more), and it's easy enough to follow. The ingredients are all in grams, which I'm in favour of since I now own a scale and just learnt this week that cups differ from country to country (ie. Canada, the USA, the UK, Japan, and probalby other places all have different definitions of what a cup is. Canada's is best btw).

The comic part isn't very long, but it features a tiny cowboy and his dog (or possibly a normal sized cowboy and his giant dog) wondering how to make their brownie recipe more amazing. Suddenly Xipe Totec shows up and aw yeah, I love Aztec gods. Hunt's version of Totec is pretty awesome.



Though in general I really enjoy Aztec gods as they look awesome and are incredibly insane. Just read this guy's wikipedia entry: "Xipe Totec is represented wearing a flayed human skin, usually with the flayed skin of the hands falling loose from the wrists. [...] It is likely that sculptures of Xipe Totec were ritually dressed in the flayed skin of sacrificial victims." Holy fucking shit. This guy was a god of agriculture (amongst other things). I want an entire comic about him.

Some of the text on the inside is a bit hard to read, but you can read all the instructions and ingredients. My only big "complaint" is that they're not vegan, but I'm sure I can figure out a way to fix that.

Hunt also draws a pretty good robot, though I can't find it online. Apparently he has more of these recipes planned, I just hope they're all as good as this one.

Mild Peril #9

By Deanperil and Sausage Punk Pete (and others)
myspace.com/mildperilzine
£1 half sized.

Somewhere in here amongst the 40 or so pages that make up this zine there's a reference to it being used as bathroom reading. Not something I'd have mentioned in this review if I hadn't managed to accidentally drop the zine into the (thankfully clean) toilet and then snatch it out again without it getting even a little bit wet. My quick reflexes, combined with the weight and solidity of the zine, and the way it fell into the toilet meant that it barely even touched anything at all.

Despite all that, this zine really doesn't belong in the toilet, being a totally solid punk zine filled with record reviews, band interviews, rants, tour diaries, show reports that start off as factually inaccurate accounts of viking history, bad spelling, and recipes (I really want to try the caramel shortbread recipe but fear it would be all I eat for the rest of the week).

Reading through all the reviews and everything here I'm struck by two things. First, none of the bands seem to be able to take being interviewed seriously. Their answers to the questions are constantly filled with brutal honesty, stupid jokes, and outright lies. It's kind of strange to read an interview with a band and have them say that at the last show they played nobody showed up, and yet they still had a good time.

And that's the second thing that struck me, the repeated references by various bands and reviewers about bad turnouts, promoters disappearing, nobody showing up to shows, or the people that do being assholes. And yet they keep doing it because they love it and when they do have good shows they're amazing, and even the ones that sucked they're able to laugh at. One of the bands talk about how on the last date of their first tour the bar didn't even seem to know the show was supposed to happen, so instead they all piled into someone's car and drove off to another show and had an awesome time. Being able to create positive from negative situations is a way of living that should be adopted by more people (including me). Hurray!

Cute Things With Faces

By Bryony Matthewman
PO Box 1116
Enfield
EN1 9LD
UK
misslilies.blogspot.com
www.youtube.com/paperlilies


It is only now that I have sat down to write this review that I suddenly managed to read the cover of this zine. Things! Of course, that actually makes sense, I was wondering what “chengs” were.

This is a collection of poorly drawn comics. But don’t stop reading the review yet! Poorly drawn they may be, but some of these are actually really quite funny. There’s a really good one about sentient Tetris blocks, and another good one about clouds vomiting rainbows.

Okay, so I guess they’re not for everyone, but I enjoyed them. In addition to the comics there are a bunch of random doodles, and a recipe for a kind of horrifying sounding “Delicious Rainbow Cake”. Though that does raise the question of why I’m okay eating food colouring in candy, but not in cake. Hmm....

(Huh, apparently the girl who made this is internet/youtube famous. Crazy.)

Cat Week: Krazy Katlady Cookbook Volume 2

A Vegan Cookbook (of food for humans)
By Heather

The introduction to this cooking zine says that it’s made up of recipes created after forgetting to go to the grocery store. As someone who has cooked a lot of food using limited supplies, I can totally understand this. However, it’s also pretty clear that this person lives somewhere that you can actually buy ingredients.

Like last time, I struggled to find a recipe from this that I could cook using what was available to me in the shops near my house. Tofu? Only silken. Nutritional yeast? No chance. At least this time it explains what Tony’s sauce is.

Sure there were a couple of things I could have made (corn bread! I even made it earlier this week), but generally they seemed to be things I wouldn’t like that much, or which I already had an awesome recipe for (peanut sauce nom nom nom).

However, there is content here other than recipes I cannot make. There are pictures of cats. Lots of pictures of cats. In fact I have to wonder if the creator of this cookbook really just wanted to showcase her cats. There are 22 photos of cats in this zine, plus two pages of bios! Apparently the owner has eight cats! That is a lot.

I generally prefer cookbooks that are filled with stories, so that even if you aren’t that interested in the recipes it’s worth reading. I’d have loved it if this zine interspaced the recipes with funny cat stories. As much as I like cooking, I sometimes want a funny cat story more than a recipe.

Portion of the profits are donated to no-kill animal shelters and animal rights organizations.

Mild Peril #8

By Deanperil and Sausage Punk Pete (and others)
myspace.com/mildperilzine
£1 half sized.

Despite going to three (!!!) anarchist bookfairs (and yes, I know not all anarchists are punks) last year I have a weird relationship with punks and the punk scene. I’m not a punk, but during high school and university I hung out with a lot of punks, lived in my town’s “famous punk house”, went to punk shows and parties, and was at least tangentially involved in the scene.

Why did I do this if I wasn’t that into punk (or at least not the hardcore that was prevalent at that time and place)? Well, because I didn’t live in that big a town, and there weren’t really that many options for who vegetarians that cared about the arts and sustainability could hang out with. Hell even in cities you’re going to struggle to find many anarchogoths (or whatever it is I am).

Okay, so why am I going on about this? I guess it’s because zines like this about local punk scenes make me nostalgic for an era that it seems unlikely I will ever reclaim.

Mild Peril is all about the Norwich punk scene, and it’s really big! At over forty pages it took me longer to get through this than most zines I’ve reviewed so far. It features loads of interviews with bands, both local to the area and stopping by there on tour, loads of reviews of cds, records, shows, and other zines, a comic, rants, and some other stuff.

I found the show reviews the best part, possibly because they were for bands I knew of and, in one case, had actually seen (Gogol Bordello!). Also they were more diary entries that talked about events surrounding the shows rather than just the show itself. I guess that despite liking punk music (Defiance, Ohio are one of my favourite bands), I don’t know enough about it to find most of the comparisons in the reviews to be useful. Amusingly the one band I did look up turned out to be one who appeared on a mix CD I received last year.

Anyway, this was a pretty good read, and worth checking out if you’re into punk music. I’ll be sending my copies onto friends that are more into the scene than I am.

Krazy Katlady Cookbook Volume 1

By Heather Q

Why are there so many vegan/vegetarian cooking zines? (Hell, even I’ve made one!). Is it because there aren’t that many published cook books that cater to vegans? Is it because vegans spend so much time cooking at home because they can’t eat out? Is it because the type of people that are likely to be vegans are also the type of people who make zines? Probably a combination of all three really.

This zine is filled with recipes that, to be honest, I will probably never make. These are, as a note in the back says, “comfort foods”, with a decidedly southern slant. Having lived most of my life in cold northern climes I guess I’m not really that into southern food (rice and potatoes in the same dish? What are you doing!?).

To add to this is the problem of acquiring ingredients for these recipes. Sure, some are easily replaced (frozen broccoli? Why would I ever buy that when I can buy fresh stuff?), but others are things I can’t get where I live (I cannot even buy black beans in this town let alone soysage), or seem like things I will never see in a supermarket outside of wherever the author lives (Tony’s Cajun seasoning is in like every second recipe and I’ve never even heard of it).

However, I did manage to cook one of the dishes (stuffed bell peppers), and even if I did make some additions (must put garlic in everything), substitutions (cayenne is southern right?), and wondered about some of the measurements (how many tomatoes are in half a cup?) it turned out pretty well.