Imaginary Time Evolution
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This letter includes discussion of gun violence and mass shootings.
IMAGINARY TIME EVOLUTION*
On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future’s unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
My plan for August had been to write a letter about hope.
At the end of July, I made it through a week overfilled with research and organizing meetings and took off for New York before dawn one warm Friday morning, hoping to catch my breath before school is officially back in session and my job hunt in full swing. I packed two bathing suits (for surprise beach trips), a pair of bike shorts (for fashion), an Iron Maiden shirt and a Vektor shirt and a Boris shirt (for reaffirming my good taste), my running shoes (for not feeling lazy), and the mostly finished copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark I had checked out of the local public library. I jammed it in between two stacks of papers on vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates and localization properties of one-dimensional quasiperiodic systems, allowing myself the luxury of pulling it out on my plane ride instead of anything in those other two categories. I started a draft of the letter with quotes from chapters I had already read, a note about an Ursula K. LeGuin essay that seemed in line with Solnit’s arguments, a half-baked thought on queerness and challenging our imagination of the future, and a few rough paragraphs about me and my boyfriend discussing a dream home we’ll probably never have and a dream dog that we just might. I’d had a tough week, had been more or less struggling all summer, and was foreseeing the struggle would continue, so writing about hope would be good for me. It would feel good to convince myself to be more hopeful. I finished Solnit’s book on my boyfriend’s parents couch in Brooklyn after a long, sunny day spent eating vegan food and meandering through botanical gardens. I finished it and put off writing about it in favor of watching TV with my boyfriend and offering half-deep takes on a 90s anime. I was feeling calm and lazy and significantly less starved of some, or any, indicator that the future will actually work itself out for me. But then we heard about Dayton. And then we heard about El Paso.
Before I had left for New York, I spent a portion of an otherwise frustrating afternoon video-chatting with my mom, rehashing some of the news of the day on both sides of the ocean that keeps us apart. That day, one of the top items in the news had been about the violence and deaths in Gilroy, California. It is always odd to recount such news to a parent abroad because you don’t want them to worry about the country you have chosen to reside in being unsafe. It is odd to recount such news as an immigrant as well because you know you have to try and explain to the other foreigners, the people who are presumably your people, why such horrible things happen so often in the place you have now assimilated to, started to think of as something like another home. You move somewhere presumably seeking a better life but then the better life comes with 255 mass shootings in a year that is not even over yet. When you say it out loud, the presumed ‘better’ starts to sound weak and unconvincing. Is there a good way to translate gun violence, mass shootings, online manifestos full of hate, people younger than myself taking countless lives into your mother tongue without sounding terrified? Is there a way to say any of these things while offering reassurance that it certainly won’t happen on your campus, in your stores, while you’re visiting a busy big city, in any language? There is no language that can truly dull the impact of what can now only be described as terror.
So instead of writing about Solnit and LeGuin and queerness and dream dogs and hope, I was spending time in dirty New York City transit listening to podcasts I would usually turn to for news recount the horrors of two mass shootings happening back-to-back. Podcasters and newscasters were taking noticeable pauses between clips of tape from the ground in a clear attempt to remain professional, to keep it together. In a segment featuring parents of a victim of the Parkland shooting (Valentine’s Day, 2018) who found themselves in El Paso as the nightmare that had previously hit them took toll on other families, a New York Times reporter was softly sobbing as they answered her questions. Her disturbed breathing filled in the places where the speaker naturally stopped to catch a breath. Something delay-worthy was happening at the Grand Central Terminal so the train we were on was making all the local stops instead of running express and our car was filling up quickly. Two pairs of tourists that sounded Dutch, or maybe Danish (one woman in a flowy dress, one in a dark green jumpsuit, men in fashionable sneakers) were clearly confused about all the extra stops. The women standing right in front of us looked like they had just come from soccer practice, one sporting pink cleats, trying to ruffle life back into her now untied hair. An older Chinese woman boarded in heels, stockings and a white floral dress that had come ever so slightly undone and showed a sliver of her skin-colored-but-not-quite undergarments. A girl in high waisted denim shorts, an oversized denim vest and very bright ‘Calvin Jeans’ socks peeking out of her chunky dad sneakers sported an elaborate bobby pin in a cascade of long amber hair which rhythmically swayed as she check and re-checked the subway map. Her companion wore a distinct lack of blue, acid washed denim in comparison. There was nothing remarkable about all these people sharing stuffy subway space, and though I am somewhat partial to people watching, I would have not thought much of it on most days. Except on this day I did, because I imagined that a crowd at a garlic festival, a crowd on a busy street in the part of town known for nightlife, a crowd inside a Walmart looking to buy back-to-school goods, might look equally colorful. As statements from various politicians and political hopefuls made it from my ears to my brain – some hollow, some angry, some clearly just saying what you’re supposed to say when something terrible happens – I could not push away creeping thoughts about how fragile all of us on that train car actually were.
In the foreword to Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explains that she had written the book, all the way back in 2003, to push back on defeatists attitudes among activists and leftists and give them, and their supporters, some basis for feeling hopeful instead. Even though she had written it in response to the emotional turmoil that many experienced, privately or as a part of a movement, as the war in Iraq was taking off, most of the book reads as if it were written just a few months ago, as if the lack of the names of politicians we are most scandalized by today is just some editorial error. She writes about wars in the Middle East, about change of political regimes in South America, about environmentalism, and about the damage that insisting on perfectionism can do when turned against incrementalist progressive policy. She highlights how often times the seemingly worst failures of systems we have implemented to hold up what we like to call democracy can serve to boost previously marginal resistance movements towards center stage. She notes that even failed revolutions can lead to reverberation of positive changes through history, that even when a revolution fails, we very rarely go back to the exact same thing. She quite plainly states that hope is not about optimism but rather imagination: if we cannot imagine a future different than the one we seem to be moving towards, different than the one we are afraid is inevitable, then what is the whole point? Solnit is not peddling an ahistorically rosy view of the past, or the future, but she is challenging those who chronicle the present and study the past to take a wider view, resist focusing on the gloom a little more, look for places where daring to imagine a different future may not seem too radical a little more often. Solnit is the friend that takes you on a coffee date when you’re feeling awful, lets you wallow over an oatmilk latte, the gently reminds that there are days when you feel good and productive, and if you carry the memory of those with you just a little more forcefully, maybe you can imagine and manifest a few more in the weeks to come. I liked that reading her book felt this way. I liked her voice that came through as at the same time soft and scolding. I admitted to myself that I needed that scolding.
Being faced with news of terror and visceral loss and sadness, however, made me rethink whether it was all just a cute book, a neat idea for when you need a pick-me-up. The ideas about hope and imagination resonated with me, but maybe now was the time to snap out of it and face living with yet another body count firmly seared into our collective minds. How can you write about hope when people are dying because someone who they have never met thinks he might hate them? When going to a festival is deadly, when walking down the street is deadly, when buying pens and notebooks and backpacks is deadly? When it seems like every news report is a reminder that nowhere is really safe, when reporters admit, with as much desperation as a radio broadcast can handle, ‘I thought I would never have to report a story like this again’?
At the same time, if we cannot talk about hope, then all that is left to talk about is hate and despair. If we cannot make space for even the potential for hope then, as Solnit argues, we have failed to imagine a better future, we have failed to even dare admit that it does not absolutely have to be this way. Some would argue that it is disrespectful to victims and their families to entertain an it-gets-better scenario of any sort, or to compare the aftermath of one tragedy to another. Yet, it may be even more disrespectful to act as if nothing can be done, as if their unfair demise is an immovable fact of life. About such respect that can often take a turn into inert despair, Solnit writes
“There are those who see despair as solidarity with the oppressed [attacked, wounded, killed], though the oppressed may not particularly desire that version of themselves, since they may have had a life before being victims and might hope to have one after.”
The family members of those who have perished in the attacks of the past few days still have to live lives afterwards, still have to confront the fact that they have a future. We are all responsible for imagining this future and making that vision stick.
“Hope and action feed each other.”
Solnit argues and those that are left behind quite certainly need us to engage in both.
We have seen, in the past, new movements and new activists and leaders emerge from tragedy. We have seen, in other countries, that legislation can indeed be passed with the explicit intent of preventing future violence. There being a movement does not mean that there will be a revolution and legislation being passed elsewhere does not mean that we can copy-paste that approach, but these facts do underscore the possibility of stretching our view of what is possible and plausible a little more, making more room for things other than gloom. Political pundits bring this up all the time – so many policies that we hear about in anticipation of the 2020 presidential race would have sounded like madness in previous election cycles. Politicians have gotten hip to this; they understand that to get somewhere you have to allow for bold imagination, bold enough to inspire hope if not directly turn us towards it. They may be doing it for more cynical reasons, but for those of us living regular lives, the boldness is even more important. There are and there will be marches and letter writing campaigns and calling your senators and chanting ‘do something’ at a rally, and all of those require us to boldly imagine that our voice can make a difference, to find hope in sharing that imagined future with others, in seeing them as refusing to feel defeated instead of fragile and constantly in danger. Allowing ourselves to hope that things can and will change is not all that different from allowing ourselves to see each other as capable and powerful and so much more important than a victim or a target.
This is not the letter about hope that I wanted to write, not a convoluted meditation on something I read in a book that I wanted to meander through, but sitting down to write it, releasing it in one long exhale on one rickety train after another, feels like kicking myself a little, grabbing my own shoulders and vigorously shaking, because I had briefly considered not writing it at all. And I owe an apology to all those strangers on the way to Grand Central – as long as we keep the courage to go places, to keep reinforcing the idea that safe spaces are possible by materializing them through moving our bodies and cramming them together, we are all really the opposite of fragile.
Best,
Karmela
*Imaginary time evolution is an algorithm used in physics to numerically determine the ground state of some physical system. Often, the behavior systems composed from many atoms, tens or hundreds or thousands, is described by non-linear partial differential equations which are extremely difficult or simply not possible to solve analytically i.e. with a pen and a piece of paper. In such cases, physicists turn to numerical methods and let a computer deal with it instead. To minimize the amount of computational power used, or simply make the solution process faster, various tricks and shortcuts are commonly used – letting time be ‘imaginary’ is one of them. This is a mathematical trick consisting of multiplying the time variable by a square root of a negative number which then makes the calculation faster due to certain properties of such numbers. The ground state of the system, the one imaginary time evolution algorithms are used to solve for, is its lowest energy state and therefore the state that the system is most likely to be found in. In other words, if one numerically obtains the ground state of the system, it is then possible to predict measurable quantities such as, for instance, its energy or angular momentum.
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ABOUT ME LATELY:
LEARNING: Since my last letter I have been working both a whole lot and not at all. My research advisor is about to leave for a year-long sabbatical so lots of discussions, about research projects and otherwise, got fast-tracked and over-populated my schedule in the recent weeks. Between all these meetings, I have been working on a number of research projects that continue to be in a permanent state of ‘almost done’. This included everything from sifting through superfluid hydrodynamics papers from the 1970s to learning to adapt a collaborators code to run a new algorithm someone just sort of threw out there in a meeting. Hopefully something fruitful will come out of not just letting that comment be a scribbled note on a notebook margin. Since my last letter, three potential papers have been outlined and re-outlined and faculty members and senior researchers whose orbit I’m caught in promised to start filling out their sections. Every single time, seeing my name close to the top of the co-author list makes me feel both flattered and terrified. A friend and a frequent collaborator touched base on an old idea as they were packing up a remarkable stack of books that will follow them to a new research position overseas. Following up on the idea is now on my to-do list, together with tackling of all those outlined sections myself. And then there’s the job hunt that is looming very, very large in my mind despite most post-doctoral positions for next year not being announced yet. Another friend on the edge of leaving for their own ‘next career step’ cautioned me that deadlines mean nothing, and I should just reach out and ask for the job I want. Both deadlines and the lack of deadlines make me feel uneasy. To deal with that, I have partially revised my research statement (something similar to a cover letter), I am taking a more critical look at my CV, and I am very much trying to turn the melancholy of seeing good friends graduate and move on into encouragingly concrete proof that snatching something on the academic job market is still possible.
At the same time, in the past five or six days that I have spent with my boyfriend on the East Coast, I have done close to no work, even when he got whisked away to research meetings and I only got out of bed thanks to something like sympathetic magic. Upon returning to Illinois next week I will be faced not only with all these half-baked publications I am trying to co-author and thesis writing I should soon actively get to (my advisor has already made it clear that winter break really ought to be penciled into my calendar as a thesis writing break this year) but co-organizing and facilitating an overnight retreat for women and gender minorities in physics, another one for the physics graduate-undergraduate mentoring program I help run, and playing support for a big sign-up push the local graduate employee union mounts every fall. In other words, I left for this short break after dealing with a whole lot of everything and I will soon be right back in the thick of it. So I’m allowing myself to be lazy, to take just a step back from being that person that is always pushing forward on every project, always sending middle-of-the-night updates, always saying ‘yes’ to looking into every new idea. I’m eating a little too much, doing yoga in the middle of the day, and reading books instead of cryptic papers. I’m trying to not feel guilty about taking a few days off just because I can, and adding this to my ‘learning’ column because it feels like something I do have to learn, and I hope trying to learn it will aid me over the next year when the potential for everything going haywire will be so very high.
LISTENING: I first added Hope in the Dark to my to-read list after hearing her speak on this episode of On the Media from January 2017. Just as the book has aged well, so has the segment and it is worth a repeat listen. Their recent episode on restorative justice has been illuminating for me as well. In the vein of activism, this interview with adrienne maree brown on her new book Pleasure Activism on Call Your Girlfriend is also both engaging and uplifting and speaks to the issue of activist fatigue and gloom-as-politics from a completely different standpoint. This episode of Slate’s Amicus stuck with me as well, in part because it lays out so many harsh realities, but also in part because it does end on a somewhat hopeful note both in interviewing Michele Goodwin, a law professor with background in bioethics from UC Irvine, and the playwright Heidi Schreck and Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School.
Three quick recommendations on the music side of things: the very loud, noisy, punky British Columbia trio Nu Sensae and their record Sundowning, the three records the Baton Rouge screechy sludge metal outfit Thou put out in 2018, and the absolutely gorgeous lo-fi black metal record called As If Sunlight Could Warm the Deceased by Montana’s Hyalithe. These are all fairly different acts for fairly different moods but all very enjoyable and full of feeling.
WATCHING: I finished the second season of FX’s Legion since my last letter and the ending surprised me though I probably should have seen it coming. This ending also makes me reluctant to pick up season three of the show, as it seems to inevitably be sliding deeper into darkness. Maybe it is naïve to think that what is essentially a superhero show, though a very aesthetics-heavy, quirky one, would not seize the chance to explore what happens when power goes unchecked or trauma does not get addressed but rather supplemented with abilities and ego. However, I have always liked Legion because there was something earnest about it, something a bit unvarnished about the way it treated its characters, exemplified by how both sex and violence in season one were always more cartoonish than the dark, brooding, hyper-realistic punch that other Marvel shows tend to pack. By the end of season two, this impression has fallen away and no-one in the Legion world is spared, no-one regains any sort of innocence and the intriguing is-there-or-is-there-not-something-wrong-with-him thread wound around the main character, David, has become less of a philosophical question and more of a road to badness. The final half hour or so of David’s demise specifically struck a chord as he consistently repeats that he is a good person and that he is worthy of love in a way that reminded me of the darker corners of contemporary Internet, of the kind of potent mix of hurt and entitlement that leads real life men to do horrible things. I was sad to see David’s fall from grace because I could not convince myself that, in the grand scheme of the show’s worldbuilding, he actually deserved it. Similarly, once the credits rolled on the last episode, I was not sure whether the showrunners left space for any of the other characters to become anything other than bitter, oblivious or just plain evil. I’ve had trouble with some of the pacing of this season, and the twistiness of the story occasionally felt gratuitous, maybe at times populated by a few characters too many while some plot strands and references were left half-baked. I probably would have forgiven Legion for all of that had the season two finale not felt so unexpectedly cruel to its cast. I guess I’ll need a bit of breathing room before I plunge back into it.
On the completely opposite end of providing commentary about superheroes and their inner lives, my boyfriend and I recently managed to wrestle ourselves away from MasterChef and spent a night watching the animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse instead. While I appreciate being able to stream this movie, I do regret not having caught it on the big screen instead because it is nothing short of stunning and I can only imagine how immersive it would have felt in a movie theater. I’m not awfully well-versed in Spider-Man lore and have only really seen a few 90s cartoons and maybe one or two of the Tobey McGuire starring movies that now feel quite ancient, but I have been aware of Miles Morales since he was introduced and was excited to see his story told or re-told in this film. Into the Spider-Verse moves pretty fast and though the plot does pack some emotional punches, it is not terribly unpredictable. Miles is a bit of a misfit, he’s a bit misunderstood by his parents, and he’s definitely not ready to take on the responsibilities of being a vigilante. These are all tropes, but they are executed well in Into the Spider-Verse and the vast majority of its awkward teenager jokes do land (we chuckled). The cultural updates stemming from the story moving to Brooklyn and centering people of color feel seamless and the film avoids any sense of forced diversity that one may be worried about. And then there’s the superhero stuff. Without quibbling with the physics of a particle collider opening a black hole and also a portal into other dimensions beneath Brooklyn, the premise of various other iterations of Spider-Man finding themselves having to join forces with Miles is mildly gimmicky but ultimately pretty clever. Maybe it’s commentary on the nature of comics and the never-ending ability of franchises to reboot and restart and retcon everything, or maybe it’s commentary on how lonely it is to be a superhero and how only your peers can really understand it, except that often there are none. Either reading works and this probably proves how successful this movie is, regardless of utterly bonkers parallel universe Spider-people that keep showing up (one is voiced by Nicolas Cage, one has a robot spider). Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did not leave me in tears over the true meaning of friendship and it did not make me want to write a book about the loneliness of vigilantes, but it was a shining example that a film can feature a diverse cast and very innovative and fun art while at the same time being genuinely fun and cool, and I was very happy about that.
During this past week, we also fell prey to being able to stream Neon Genesis Evangelion and finished it a little more quickly than we probably should have. I have seen the entirety of this show before – I have a pretty vivid memory of watching it at my grandparents’ house on my first laptop with my brother while adults in the room gossiped after dinner – but I’m finding that I’ve forgotten a lot of it and even more probably went straight over my head in the past. Given that this show is a classic, but also more than twenty years old at this point, I’ve enjoyed seeing how influential it has been (Pacific Rim is a clear successor and even some of the computer lab design in Netflix’s Maniac must have been lifted from NGE) as much as I have cringed at gratuitous fan service and some fairly gross gender stereotyping. And even though I did remember the rough outline of the show’s last two episodes, approaching them felt pretty fresh and I was pretty ready to indulge the dark existentialism brought forward by, you know, teenagers piloting mechas to fight alien angels. I do not have a particularly deep take on where the show goes at its end nor do I think one is necessary – NGE feels like an artifact of its time that went way off the rails and became known for that. The premise put forward in the two episode finale, essentially arguing that we have power over our own happiness, is as interesting and true as it is boring and sophomoric, but it does make for a engaging conversation about how much of the early run of the show can be taken to be a dream or a fantasy. This is the kind of show that confused me when I was younger, that may have made me feel more feelings about how I view reality a few years ago and that mostly makes me wonder about its production now; I appreciate all of those layers. We haven’t gotten around re-watching the movie Gainax put out to make up for the weirdness of the finale (my boyfriend correctly identified it as a visual essay full of telling instead of showing) yet, but I’m sure that will not disappoint either.
Finally, I have been watching Marvel’s The Punisher on Netflix. I’m not quite sure what exactly it is that compels me to keep returning to Marvel shows other than some sort of cultural inertia and a vague awareness that all these comic book based shows and movies are the new place where everyone’s media consumption intersects, but it has certainly become easy for me to default to whichever one I have not seen yet as I am eating dinner or just want to zone out over a cup of coffee for ten minutes at a time. I have been reluctant to pick up The Punisher, however, because a story about an overly righteous, gun-loving vigilante, and one that has been so fully embraced by various real-life police and military forces, just seemed like a hard one to take in and digest right now. The iteration of Frank Castle headlining The Punished appears in Daredevil, another Marvel-and-Netflix product, and having seen those episodes did not endear me to the idea of spending more time with him. The actual show, however, does not exactly do Frank any favors, and its commentary on the military industrial complex and the notion of justice imparted on soldiers and law enforcement, Frank included, is less ham-fisted than I had feared. Of course, it is near impossible to watch a show and not grow at least somewhat sympathetic to its protagonist, but there is little about Frank Castle in the eight or nine episodes I have seen so far that is aspirational or endears him to the viewer all that much. Contrasted with Micro, another former government employee hiding from the world while working on a grand revenge plan, Castle is clearly more wound than a man, unable to control himself and barely ever acting on anything other than most basic instincts, almost animalistic in how he switches from being a protector to being an aggressor to being someone that is just very, very hurt. Beyond Micro and Castle, the show introduces a few government agents, a few bad guys, a couple of vets from Frank’s past life and brings back Daredevil’s Karen Page. All of these secondary characters play surprisingly well and have storylines that are at times a good distraction from the constant anxiety of looming destruction at the center of the show. I’m not sure I want to like this series, but it is certainly less lazy than it could have been, and I have become invested enough to see it to its, quite certainly not feel-good, end.
EATING: Though I am still trying to follow a pretty restrictive diet for the sake of my misbehaving stomach, I have had a few pretty decent moments in the kitchen recently. I made vegan sushi rolls for a picnic with my research group, a big pot of rice noodles drenched in a pesto-like, Thai-inspired basil sauce and mixed with spicy peanuts and crunchy farmers’ market cucumbers for another potluck, a batch of coconut crusted tofu perfect for work lunches, and a fairly large serving of veganized zucchini rollatini baked in tomato sauce that even my boyfriend’s mom liked, regardless of my improvised tofu ‘ricotta’ filling. To be quite honest, I am not happy about not being able to eat beans or garlic or onions, or even gluten-full bread and pasta, but I have also allowed myself to slip-up a few times which has, stomach distress aside, been helpful. We made it to one of my favorite vegan pop-up events in New York and that certainly buoyed my mood though I knew I shouldn’t have eaten almost anything that was being offered. One of my many doctor’s appointments is coming up and I am really hoping it will help me address my health issues in a way that won’t interfere with my ability to share meals with friends or occasionally eat out so much. In the mean-time, I’ll do my best to manage and adapt dishes that I consider staples, such as the basic coconut curry recipe I am sharing here. This version has scallions instead of onions and I have skipped the garlic, but you can most certainly use both of those ingredients, as I mention in the notes below. This is a really rich curry due to coconut milk and peanut butter, and it is full of flavor that pairs well with vegetables and proteins alike. I’ve made it with tempeh, with tofu and with just some potatoes and carrots and it was quite good every time. I hope you give it a shot, especially because it makes leftovers perfect for a not-sad-desk-lunch.
(Tempeh in coconut curry with short grain brown rice, chopped cilantro, okra sabzi and a generous squeeze of lime)
For about 4 servings, you will need:
1 tablespoon coconut oil (or olive or other vegetable oil)
1-2 tablespoons fresh ginger, grated or finely chopped
3 finely chopped scallions (or 1/2 of finely chopped onion or 2-3 shallots)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 teaspoon garam masala
1/4 teaspoon cayenne (or more, to taste)
2 cups diced or pureed tomatoes, canned
1 cup full-fat coconut milk, canned
2 tablespoons smooth, natural peanut butter (or almond butter or tahini)
1/2 teaspoon tamari or soy sauce
Juice of 1/4 of a lime (or more, to taste)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Tempeh or other protein of choice
Cilantro (optional) and extra lime wedges for serving
In a small dish, mix all the spices together so that they will be handy and ready to go later.
Heat the oil in a medium sized pot then add ginger and scallions. Lower the heat and cook for about 5 minutes, until soft and fragrant. If using onions, they should be golden and slightly transparent by the end of this step.
Add the tempeh, or your protein of choice, and the spices. Mix very well and continue sautéing over medium heat for another two minutes.
Add the coconut milk and mix well, then add tomatoes and mix again. Bring to a boil.
Lower the heat, cover with a lid and let simmer for at least ten minutes, but preferably twenty.
Add peanut butter and tamari then turn up the heat slightly and stir until the sauce is thick and even, just a few minutes.
Turn of the heat and finish with lime juice, salt and pepper.
Serve over rice or quinoa, with a side of steamed or roasted vegetables or a sabzi and alongside extra limes for squeezing and chopped cilantro for garnish.
Tips:
Proteins: If using tempeh or tofu, you can follow the steps outlined above or marinate and bake either then just add it in at step 5. If using tofu in any capacity, opt for firm or extra firm and drain and press it for at least fifteen minutes first. For marinating, I would try a mix of lemon juice, nutritional yeast, salt and a few tablespoons of coconut milk, but you could try blending some coconut milk with about an inch of fresh ginger, a few teaspoons of turmeric and a generous pinch of salt. Marinate your tofu or tempeh for about half an hour in the fridge then bake in a 400F oven for twenty minutes, flipping each piece or shaking the pan about halfway through.
If you’re not big on soy, or time, drain and thoroughly rinse a can’s worth of chickpeas or red kidney beans and add those in after step 5. Some cooked red lentils would do the trick as well, but they will make the curry much thicker and I would add them with the peanut butter and tamari.
If you’re down with murder and environmental destruction, I guess you could follow the steps outlined above with some bite-size chopped chicken instead of tempeh but sauté it with the spices a bit longer, so it gets more of a sear. (But really, think of the murder and environmental destruction qualifier.)
Veggies: There are two ways to add veggies here: if they are fresh and chopped, add them with your protein and just check for doneness before you turn the heat off, if they are frozen, add them about ten minutes before you add peanut butter and tamari. Big, organic carrots or baby potatoes work well if you would like something more starchy while broccoli or cauliflower will do the trick if you are craving something a bit more green (and you can usually find frozen mixes of broccoli and cauliflower florets for a few dollars pretty much everywhere). Zucchini and other summer squash will likely fall apart and eggplant may be too bitter, so I’d stick to something cruciferous or, as the easiest option, just stir in a few cups of spinach after turning off the heat.
Garlic: If you can stomach garlic, I would very much recommend chopping up or crushing about three cloves and adding them to ginger and scallions (or onion) in step 2.
Spices: If you don’t have garam masala, you can skip it and just use a bit more curry powder instead or add about 1/4 teaspoon of each ground cinnamon and cloves. In general, you can skip most of the spices if you don’t have them though I would argue that cumin and curry powder are pretty essential here. Curry powder and garam masala mixes vary depending on the brand and how long they’ve been sitting in your spice cabinet so do taste the curry more than once and adjust accordingly. If you are worried about having to buy a whole container of a spice you may not use often, try and find a local store where spices are sold in bulk – this way you may be able to buy a few tablespoons only.
To make it a full meal: If you’ve added some veggies to the curry then all you really need is some sort of a carb so the easiest way to make a whole meal out of this is to use a protein that does not have to be prepared beforehand (like tempeh in my write-up), add some spinach at the end and serve over either a pre-cooked grain (you can buy frozen cooked rice and shelf-stable pre-cooked quinoa if you don’t want to spend time cooking them yourself) or with store-bought naan. If your curry is just sauce and protein, either steam some frozen veggies or chop up some fresh ones and roast them with a bit of salt and olive oil for 40 minutes at 400F, shaking the pan halfway through. Pile your veggies and curry on top of a grain or scoop it all up with some naan. Roasted squash or eggplant would work well here, as would okra or green beans. Instead of turning on the oven, you could opt for some sliced cucumbers tossed with salt and lime juice or massaged kale as well. Finally, to make this more fancy, serve with a veggie, a grain or naan and a few dollops of coconut yogurt, then top with chopped cilantro and a few generous squeezes of lime.