The Cheesy Creamy Creamy Cheese

I just got a toasted plain bagel from Starbucks, and bemoaned the fact that there was probably no vegan cream cheese in all of Bastrop, TX. Lo and behold, HEB carries Veggie Galaxy (?) brand vegan cream cheese. I found this out *after* I finished my bagel.

My Musical Nomadic Lifestyle - Intro

After reading an account of another traveling gal who lives in an RV full time with her circus musician hubby, baby, and cats, as well as the blog of an American writer in Germany (said writer lives in a wagenplatz - several amazingly adorable gypsy vardo-style wagons), I came to realize that this blog has been really rather heavy on the "vegan" part and somewhat light on the "traveling" part. Now, this is not the first time I've thought of this; I've been taking some photos of our vintage 14' trailer as we fix it up, and been brewing up some posts in my head about our nomadic lifestyle. However, due to a combination of my natural tendency to procrastinate and the difficulty in properly blogging on a tiny iPhone screen (not to mention that tiny on-screen keyboard!), none of these things have happened.

However, I'm sitting here at the kitchen table in a friend's house, sipping rooibos & white chocolate chai tea topped with flax milk (probably the impetus for my use of the word "brewing" above), with my computer in front of me and my iPhone and digital camera connected to it and ready for business.

So, let's start at the beginning, shall we? Last week, one of Mark's friends asked us (excitedly, and in great length) about our lifestyle ("You guys are, like, real nomadic gypsies! The only ones I know! How in the world do you do it?) For him, and for anyone else out there who is curious about nomadic lifestyles (or those people who are already doing it and want to compare notes), here's our story.


I've been taking music lessons since the age of two. I went to college to get a Music Education degree, since I couldn't figure out any feasible way to actually Earn A Living(tm) performing music. I spent a year of teaching choir to 6th-12th graders, 5 years of teaching general music to 2-5 year olds at a private preschool, and 8 years teaching private piano and voice lessons. In 2009, I met Mark at the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival. We were both musicians there and hit it off right away. We started dating not long after, and decided to form a band as well. We managed to get contracts to perform at the Oklahoma and Kansas City Ren Faires as well as Sherwood Forest Faire outside of Austin, TX. We also managed to score performer passes to the Texas Renaissance Festival outside Houston.

Mark didn't have a day job at the time, but I was working at the preschool Monday-Friday, and my hours could be anytime between 6 am and 6 pm, depending on when the director needed extra people to act as assistant teachers in any given classroom. I used my limited vacation days to take half or whole days off on various Fridays and Mondays so that I could travel to Kansas and Oklahoma. However, when the vacation days ran out and my boss wouldn't approve any extra time, I either had to spend tons of money (that I didn't really have) on plane tickets to fly to Kansas (a 12 hour drive from Austin) or miss the weekend entirely. I had been telling numerous friends for years that what I really wanted to do was quit my day job and perform music full-time. The answer was always "Well, go do it! Live your dream!" However, I was just too worried that not having a day job would leave me too broke to pay rent/buy food/buy gas/etc., so I just sighed and stayed put.

In 2010, I was fired from my job at the preschool. After a day and a half of bawling incessantly, I realized that this might have been the universe's not-so-subtle way of telling me that it was time for me to go out with Mark and make our music our full-time career. I talked to the Texas Workforce Commission, and found that I was eligible for unemployment compensation (they ruled that getting fired was not my fault). Mark and I had moved into an apartment in Austin together, and the unemployment money covered our rent. Not having the day job left my days free to prepare music and garb (our Medieval/Renaissance clothing), work on making jewelry for my shop, and travel to faires and SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) events.

In November of 2011, our apartment lease came up for renewal, and we were faced with a choice. It was really nice to have a "home base" and an address, but the apartment was sucking money like nobody's business, and, unlike a house, we were never going to get anything out of that money nor ever be able to stop paying it. Mark owned a 14' travel trailer from the early 1970s, but it was not exactly in livable condition, nor did we have a vehicle that could pull it. After discussions with my parents and some friends, we decided to not renew our lease. We went through two or three weeks of vicious culling-of-stuff (both soul-wrenching and liberating). Since I had built up a few private piano and voice students, and needed to be in Austin to teach them, I moved some of my remaining stuff to a spare room in some friends' house, where I would stay Tuesdays-Thursdays, and my full-sized electric piano to the media room of another couple of friends, with the intention of teaching from their house. I moved the rest of my stuff to my parents' house in New Braunfels (about an hour and a half south of Austin) and to a storage unit also in New Braunfels. Mark (who didn't have nearly as much stuff) moved most of his things to his parents' house near Tulsa, OK. At this point, I'm starting to *really* understand where George Carlin was coming from in his "A Place For Your Stuff" skit. (Video contains a bit of NSFW language.) "You've got stuff all over the world!!!" Well, after reading several blogs of people who are trying their best to live simply, with a minimum of stuff, I felt much better after getting rid of a bunch of things, and will be continuing to pare down, but that's a different blog post altogether.

For the better part of three months (December-February), Mark stayed with his parents while I split the time between my friends in Austin and my parents in New Braunfels. While he was in Oklahoma, he worked on the trailer. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of it before he started work, but it was pretty bad. There had been several leaks, and the original wood insides had partially rotted away. The back wall of the trailer was just bare metal and the original wide window. The original cushions were all worthless, and several small creatures had made the trailer their home. Mark replaced a good portion of the back wall and celling, and did other repairs throughout to make it livable. In February, before our first contracted gig at the Sherwood Forest Faire, Mark came down to stay with me at my parents' house, and we made cushions from free foam we'd got from a shop that was going out of business and a futon mattress that a friend was giving away, covered with fabric from the red tag discount shelves at a local fabric shop. We also made curtains. (The beautiful chocolate brown of the curtains really matches the cushion fabric well, but doesn't show up very well in the pictures.)



As you can see, there's still a lot of work to be done. Mark is going to rewire the trailer so that we've got proper outlets and working lights (we've currently got a propane lamp, 3 battery-powered LED lights, and an electric lamp that clamps on to the front cabinet, and everything plugs into one power strip that plugs into an extension cord that comes into the trailer through a small hole). We're also going to paint the interior walls as soon as we can agree on a color (I'm leaning towards light mint green, personally) and add some laminate tile to the kitchen/dinette area. We're also going to do our best to add more organizational elements (shelving, hanging nets, etc.). While the trailer does have an air conditioner, it doesn't *quite* work anymore (we tested it). However, opening all of the windows and the door (which has a separate screen door to keep out bugs) as well as the new roof vent Mark installed goes a long way towards keeping the place cool. We also bought a small but fairly powerful electric column fan, which helps immensely.

A lot of people will look at the trailer and ask "How in the world can you both live in something that small?" Well, after living in a tent (which we're unfortunately going to have to go back to doing for a few months, since we can't use the trailer at our two upcoming SCA events), the trailer seems slightly spacious. The couch in the back slides out/folds down (like a futon) to become a bed, and the dinette seat closest to the kitchen comes up to reveal a half-size tub. We've got hooks in the celling from which to hang a shower curtain, and Mark has a nifty water pressure pump thing that will take water from the sink (heated on the stove) and pump it through a shower nozzle which can either be held by the person taking a shower or be suspended to the celling by a bracket. Eventually, the other dinette seat will house a flush toilet, but until we get that whole black water tank/sewer line business taken care off, we've got a collapsible toilet which uses trash bags and (yes, really) kitty litter. (We were using this Bio Gel stuff that was really neat, but we can't seem to find it in any of the stores around here anymore. We get eco-friendly cat litter made from corn cobs in bulk at Petco.) As for storage, there's a cabinet under the stove for food and a small fridge. Mark has stuff stashed in the space above the kitchen area, the space under the couch/bed, and in the small drawers next to the stove, as well as the drawers next to the closet. I've got my stuff in the cabinet next to the closet (and, to Mark's dismay, occasionally scattered on the table). We've both got clothes hanging in the closet, though it isn't full length (due to the wheel well), so my faire dresses get bunched up at the bottom. We do end up tangoing about each other to get from one side of the trailer to the other (about 4 or 5 steps, in all), but we've got pretty good about one of us sitting at the dinette or on the couch while the other person moves about. We keep semi-joking that we're going to buy one of those *really* tiny trailers (like the ones made from a pickup bed) to haul behind our current trailer, so that I can have a separate work space for jewelry, and we can each have private space when needed. If only it were feasible to haul two trailers!

Well, that's my blabbering for the moment. Right now, the trailer is at Mark's parents' place near Tulsa, and we won't be using it again until after Pennsic in August. Yay, tent-living in the heat. (Yes, that was my sarcastic voice, in case you couldn't tell.) Once we get it back and make more improvements, I'll post about them.

Kate's Granola Bars

La Fenice is a commedia del arte troupe based in Austin, TX. We have been performing with them for several shows now - the current show is called "Sloop of the Damned", and is about true love, pirates, and zombies on the high seas. The gal currently in charge is Kate, and she was nice enough to give me her very awesome recipe for granola bars. I modified it to be vegan, and it is absolutely delicious!


Kate's Granola Bars
(vegan subs by April)

1/2 stick Earth Balance (or 1/4 cup oil)
3/4 cup of brown sugar
1/4 cup of maple syrup
1/4 cup of peanut butter
2 cups of rolled oats
1 1/2 cups of other stuff (like sunflower seeds, flax seeds, cranberries, raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, etc.)

Melt Earth Balance (or oil) with brown sugar and maple syrup. When it just starts to boil, toss in peanut butter. Toss with rolled oats and other stuff. Make sure to coat everything.

Press well into a 9 x 9 pan lined with wax paper. When they're cool, cut them up.



For this particular batch, I used chocolate peanut butter, raisins, sunflower seeds, and vegan chocolate chips. It's very important that you wait for the liquidy part to boil before you add the oats and stuff, or otherwise it won't stick together as well.

Bikram Scones, Take 3

Mark's parents took us to lunch at Whole Foods yesterday, and I got a good selection from the hot and cold bars, as well as a vegan fruit & nut scone and some soup. Mark's dad had never heard of scones before, and was fascinated. After trying a small bite of mine, he decided that he'd love to have some, and I thought that was an excellent reason to make another batch of the PPK Bikram Scones that I've tried making twice before.

The last time I blogged about making scones, I mentioned that both my first and second batches, while having very different textures, were both a bit underdone in the centers (actually, the second batch was a bit too moist overall). My boyfriend Mark also mentioned that 2 tablespoons of baking soda seemed like too much. This time, I used 1 TBSP + 1 tsp of baking soda, and was going to use just 1 cup of soy milk, but after mixing, discovered that it seemed too dry. I added another 1/4 cup of soy milk (bringing the liquid to the specified 1 1/4 cups), and added raisins instead of chocolate (not my choice, exactly; Mark's dad isn't a big chocolate fan, but he likes fruit). Other than that, I followed the recipe ingredients exactly. In order to hopefully get the scones a bit more done, overall, I increased the baking time from 15 to 17 minutes.



This ended up being just right. The scones had a very scone-like texture: uniformly done throughout, dry, but not too dry, and a bit crumbly.



My one complaint was that they didn't seem sweet enough, though I'm betting that putting chocolate chips in them instead of raisins would have probably fixed that problem. Also, most of the fruit scones I've had at other places (Whole Foods and the Steeping Room in Austin) seem to have nuts in them as well. The next time I make these, I'm going to mix up the dough, split it into two bowls, and mix fruit and nuts into one and chocolate chips into the other. I'm also thinking I might go back to applesauce instead of oil, since it will be healthier and possibly sweeter as well.

Tamales and tacos and cupcakes, oh my!

Mark and I have spent our last two weekends performing at Four Winds Faire in Tyler, TX.  This means I've been eating a lot of vegan bars (Cliff, Luna, ProBar, Lara, etc.) and the occasional batch of sweet potato tots from Sonic.   Yesterday, we had our first performance with La Fenice at Whip In, doing a commedia del arte show called Sloop of the Damned.  Since we're doing another show tonight (and Mark and I are doing our steampunk music set after!), we decided to play hooky from Four Winds today.  This morning we visited the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market for breakfast.   I had a sweet potato and a tempeh breakfast taco from Happy Vegan Baker as well as a tiny cappuccino cupcake, and a nopalitos tamale and spinach and onions tamale from The Gardener's Feast. I was sad that I didn't have any room left over for the vegan pakoras down the way.  The tacos and tamales were all fresh, hot, and flavorful.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures, since it was very windy and I was trying to keep all of the napkins and other stuff from flying off the table.

Pancakes & Pizza

Mark and I are currently performing at Sherwood Forest Faire in Paige, TX (on Hwy 290, about an hour outside of Austin - if you've got a free weekend this month or next and are in the area, come see us!), and we're living in our 14 foot tiny trailer.  I will post pictures of the trailer later (we're fixing it up), but I had to blog about this morning's breakfast.  Last weekend, Mark and I bought a 6-8" cast iron skillet with  a pretty green ceramic bottom.  This morning, he used some Bisquik (not particularly healthy, but vegan), powdered soy milk, and a banana as an egg replacer and made pancakes!  He also made syrup out of water, sugar, and vanilla.  Oh, the luxury of having a 3 burner propane stove while camping!




I brought my Republic of Tea Double Chocolate Mate, so Mark made me a soy chocolate mate to go with my pancakes.  This was such a great breakfast, and not something I ever thought I'd be eating while camping!



For lunch, Mark got creative and made personal pizzas by toasting Orowheat sandwich thins and topping them with tiny "beef" and chunky "chicken" TVP, vegan bacon bits, organic red pepper flakes, and marinara sauce.  After we each had a pizza, he put the rest of the toppings on some orzo.

A Quick Update...

I used a lot of the groceries I bought yesterday to make today's lunch - kale, spinach, and carrots with tempeh. I also added a splash of soy sauce, some coconut oil, a splash of flax milk, and a tiny dollop each of Asian chili sauce, vegan blue cheese dressing, and cashew tamari dressing.