Joe Kruse Food Manifesto and Vegetarian Breakfast Tacos

Joe Kruse, bassist for progressive rock band Gone Quite Mad, has been living the vegetarian lifestyle since the age of ten. Previously his family had raised chickens and Joe, along with his brother, decided that animals should be treated with respect. So they both transitioned to a meat free diet.

Now-a-days Joe has a passion for cooking. In fact, each Sunday he invites friends and family to come over for an epic vegetarian brunch. Since I've become a bit of a bruncher in recent weeks, I decided to surprise Joe by inviting myself over for one of his gatherings. Unfortunately, before I was able to get to the door, I was headed off by a couple of mean old bouncers. I must say, I was utterly shocked. Who the hell hires bouncers for a brunch? Anyway, as those bouncers drug me away, I noticed some torn up pages on Joe's lawn. I grabbed the papers (I'm such a fanboy) and brought them home. After hours and hours of painstaking work, I was able to scotch tape those papers back together. What I held in my hand was like solid gold. It was Joe Kruse's manifesto, typed out on a creepy old typewriter and everything. Risking my freedom (there's a big ol' jail cell staring me in the face), I've decided to go ahead and publish this manifesto. Here it is in all its unauthorized (just kidding!) glory.

Joe Kruse's Food Manifesto

Most people are surprised to find out I’m a vegetarian. I don’t necessarily fit the description, though I’ve been one since I was eight or nine. It’s never been an issue of health but rather trying to preserve something I find special in my own way. Life, especially conscious life, is so crazy rare in this universe that I don’t want to flippantly end a life just so I can have some tasty nachos.  That said, and this might seem like a total 180, I’m not opposed to people eating meat. I just think many people have forgotten to respect the life they take to feed themselves.  This wasn’t always my train of thought. When I first started I was a kid and super idealistic.   I raised chickens and was horrified at the idea of killing something to eat it. If the world’s chickens were anything like my pets, then they all deserved to live.  But that’s just not the reality of what we are. So in my corner of the world I chose to avoid meat for now.  I can see myself eating meat one day, but I think I’d have to do the dirty work and kill the animal myself.  That seems kinda fucked up to write as a vegetarian, but I think the weight of that action is the appropriate price. 

I think we’ve forgotten to enjoy the experience and processes of life, and rather look to immediate solutions.  Hard work and creativity are overlooked for quick sufficient results. We lose something when we buy instead of create. We lose touch of what we’re capable of.  I love my kitchen and cooking for other people.  Experimenting with new ideas and recipes and serving them to a group of friends is my solo project away from the band.  When we’re out of town I don’t miss my bed so much as I miss my knives and my stove.  Putting in the work to make a good breakfast in the morning points me in the right direction for the day.  The next step is spending the afternoon in the shop building my guitars. I'll stop home to make a nice dinner for my girlfriend and I, maybe sit down for a second if I can and then it’s off to rehearsal for the night.

My 3 brothers and I took a vacation to Sayulita, Mexico last Easter. Every morning my Brother Dan (who is a hell of a cook) and I would make breakfast. I’ve always been obsessed with eggs for breakfast, so I would handle that while he cooked up some veggies. We’d sit down and feast to get ourselves fueled for a day of hiking through the woods to the next surf spot, or just to recover from a night of drinking tequila. The vegetables were honestly one of the most memorable things from that trip. They just tasted like nothing I’ve ever had even though it was something as simple as a bell pepper. I guess when it’s grown right down the street, it doesn’t have time to loose all its flavor or something. 

These tacos are my attempt to remember that amazing weekend away with my brothers. It’s best served to a group of awesome and inspiring people, or total lunatics…which ever you happen to have around! The ingredient list is really more of a list of suggestions. Any nice fresh vegetables will do (zucchini and mushrooms are particularly good in here as well), and the proportions are really up to your taste.  I also rarely cook with salt, or use it sparingly. It seems like a bandaid to me. If I want something that just tastes like salt, I’ll eat a cheap bag of chips. 

This whole recipe can be made in one pan if you’re just doing one serving, so use a big one to make some space.

Gone Quite Mad's newest single is "Neptune." According to sing Chris Gesualdi, "Neptune" tells the story of a future courtship. The protagonist of the track wants to take a partner to the Neptune Chariot Races, a futuristic take on auto-racing. The track is best served with a pile of breakfast tacos and a few placemats decorated with Joe's manifesto.

Simon Spire Food Manifesto and Coconut Collard Greens

If I learned anything from Ted Kaczynski it is that people love manifestos. This just served to reinforce it. People also love extremes. So last time it was the meat eating, Swedish “shoegaze electronic” innovators Fort Fairfield who “invited” you to the table in their Lonneberga cabin. This time it is Simon Spire, a vegan macrobiotic foodie who writes catchy alternative rock music while discovering the best of New York’s vegan, organic and raw food scene.

Spire is kicking of 2012 with his first US EP release (on January 31st). No Solid Ground is a stunning piece of work that continues Spire’s tradition of meshing together feelgood anthems with “indelible hooks” and lyrics that are both “personal and confessional.” He has drawn comparisons to the likes of Sufjan Stevens, John Mayer and Ryan Adams. Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Neil Diamond and Alanis Morrissette have all served as inspiration at one point or another during his life. It is all paying off as recently Spire won first prize in the Rock/Alternative category in the 2011 USA songwriting competition for his song “A Four Letter Word.” It was here, as Spire walked forward to grab his award, that I noticed the big bundle of paper stuffed into his bag. Making sure no one was looking I reached in and was elated to find this:

Simon Spire’s Food Manifesto

I’ve been called weird and I’ve been called boring. It’s sometimes hard for people to fathom that my culinary preferences really are that—my preferred fare. I have to admit that there was a time when I would have responded with similar bafflement. The truth is that, after a number of years of exploring the world of natural, unadorned, whole foods (the category of food, not the supermarket), any minor lapse in adherence to this approach only reminds me why I started eating like this in the first place. 

I have no creed or membership to any particular movement, but at some point it just made sense to me to forgo the often lifeless yet over-flavored food I had become accustomed to in favor of “natural” food. Easier said than done. Paradoxically, truly natural food can be hard to come by; it’s much easier to find complicated, refined, and manipulated ingredients. Chalk it up to the momentum of collective habit and the premium placed on convenience. What should be so easy—finding ingredients in their natural state —is difficult when the vast majority of normal food is processed in some way. Once you get into the swing of it, however, it’s possible that you might find yourself appreciating the subtleties of nature’s unadorned ingredients. The vibrancy, wholesomeness, and freshness of simpler foods may become more appealing both as a culinary experience and as a pillar of an energized body and clear mind.
Whatever the case, try out some of the following simplifying ideas. If anything strikes you as “bland,” think “minimalist” instead; if an item is more expensive than its conventional counterpart, remind yourself that it’s more nutritious and probably sustainable too, whereas many conventional foods are not. Let’s make natural the new norm! 

*Eat your veggies—local and organic if possible. Squashes, root vegetables, greens (kale, collard greens, spinach, bok choy, mizuna, mustard greens): they’re about as natural and life-giving as it gets—straight from the earth to your plate, the only processing being that which you do in your own kitchen. Kale is my staple. Robust and vibrant, it’s often available year-round without having to be transported too far and comes in a number of varieties, Red Russian being my favorite. Last week, while visiting New Zealand for the holidays, I was pleasantly surprised to learn the kale I was purchasing (nero/lacinato) had been picked the previous day from a local organic farm. Not always possible, of course, but not all that unheard of, either; farmers’ markets are my favorite location for produce when stateside. It’s usually organic or minimally-treated produce and, importantly, local which means that it hasn’t endured too many miles and days of transport and preservation. 

*Whole grains and legumes are, again, going straight to the source. The only processing these babies have undergone is that they’ve been dried. Soak the legumes (especially beans) overnight and then drain them to aid in digestion and to remove toxins. What was previously known as “rice” now becomes a whole new world where one encounters short-grain brown rice, long-grain brown rice, sweet brown rice, brown jasmine, and brown basmati. Try barley, millet, and quinoa. Your lentils can be red, brown, or green; your beans black, red, or fava, or try my favorites, mung beans and adzuki beans. And yes, flavor matters just as much as color. Luckily, whole grains and beans have been a mainstay of international cuisine for so many generations, that the methods of preparation are endless (to get started, think Indian dahl, Cuban black bean soup, Jamaican rice and peas, or Greek gigantes). 

*Ditch the table salt. I basically question all processed foods, and table salt undergoes a serious amount of treatment to transform it from its natural state into what we eat, rendering it unrecognizable to the body in some cases. Sea salt, however, is natural, health-supporting, and has a much milder flavor; table salt starts to taste harsh and bitter by comparison. I opt for Redmond RealSalt—the fine crystals make for easy use and a simple substitute for table salt. I also avoid the following: packaged convenience foods (including nuts and seeds, which are so much better when raw and unsalted), refined sugar (opt for agave, maple syrup or, if necessary, organic evaporated cane sugar in its place), and anything with artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives. You could say that avoiding all of these processed foods doesn’t leave much to choose from. I say, it leaves everything that nature has to offer. 

*When in New York, splash out at these tasty and natural restaurants:
Candle 79 or Candle Café Souen (all three locations)
Applewood Pure Food and Wine or One Lucky Duck  

Celebrate the availability of nature’s brilliance with this Coconut Collard Greens Recipe. Slice those greens to the rhythm of my new single, “Knocking on an Open Door,” a song about searching, and searching, and searching, only to find that what was searched for was waiting here all along. Naturally.

I sat back in amazement, it was like this bundle was meant for me.

Fort Fairfield Food Manifesto and Boueuf A La Bourguignonne

Swedish innovators Fort Fairfield are currently holed up in a Lonneberga cabin putting the finishing touches on their new album (working title of The Straw Boys). Comprised of brothers John and Tom Lück, Fort Fairfield is best known for their atmospheric experimental music dubbed “shoegaze electronic.” The brothers are joined on the new album by producer Egon Ramberget and guest vocalists De Montevert, Brenden Beu (of The Fearsome Sparrow), Cosima Lamberth, Marcus Wahlström and Tomas Halberstad (whom they claim is so gifted that they will “wait for him to get done or die waiting”).

Along with finishing the album, Fort Fairfield has also been hard at work penning a food manifesto they hope will someday find its way onto gallon sized milk jugs, much like missing children did on American milk cartons back in the 80’s. Through illegal means, we are talking coercion here, I have obtained a draft of the manifesto:

Fort Fairfield Food Manifesto 

*Never buy bintje, it’s pig potatoes. After a nuclear bomb hit’s the ground the only thing left will be bintje and cockroaches, think about it.  

*If it’s possible, always have a German guy with a last name as a surname in the kitchen with you. His sole purpose is to point out the importance of smoked bacon in every dish. Obviously you don’t take his advice except when the dish demands it. If you don’t have accesses to a German, two budgies will do. They won’t point out the importance of smoked bacon, but they will be good company and they will most likely let you watch La Liga instead of Bundersliga.  

*When choosing a producer don’t just go for his musical skills as his food skills are just as important. We can’t stress this enough. Make a mistake and you will end up with a two pound bag of lime leaves that you never will use.  

*Chile is the new truffle (yes that’s how you spell it, if you spell it like chili then it’s a dish). And yes we do think we stand above The Swedish Academy Glossary.  

*When cooking and chopping its mandatory to have Paul Kalkbrenner in the speakers, what’s good for the soul is good for the food.  

*Keep it Kosher in your fridge because it looks so neat. 

Taped to the back of the manifesto draft was Fort Fairfield’s top secret recipe for Boueuf a la Bourguignonne. It ain’t a secret anymore.

Boueuf a la Bourguignonne is the type of dish that requires “Patience”: