Vegan for the People

Achiote Seitan Tacos with Yemeni Tomato and Cilantro Salad

2010-07-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

The chicken-style seitan in these soft tacos gains a deep red color and distinctive flavor from a marinade with achiote, also known as annatto. For a little achiote illumination, here’s Harold McGee, in On Food and Cooking:

“It is the seed of a bush, Bixa orellana, native to tropical America, and is much used in various cooked dishes from southern Mexico to northern South America. The bright red-orange pigment bixin is found in the waxy coating of the seeds, and readily changes into a number of chemical variants that are different shades of orange, yellow, and red.”

I don’t know of anything else that makes things such a dramatic red as achiote. Whole seeds are commonly available in Mexican markets, where you can also find prepared achiote seasoning mixes. I used the latter here, though I’ve experimented a couple of times with achiote seeds. Achiote seeds are very hard, so you need to spend some quality time with a mortar and pestle, or a serious spice grinder, to make a fine powder for marinades or rubs. Whole seeds can also be sautéed in a little olive, corn, or peanut oil and strained out, making a brilliant red oil for drizzling wherever you like.

Besides it’s use as a flavoring and colorant, achiote paste is used in some indigenous South American cultures as a body paint and hair coloring. I have a story about that, but I’m here today to talk about tacos.

Using prepared achiote seasoning, these were really easy. I just mixed a spoonful of achiote mix with some olive oil, water, and sherry vinegar, and soaked about a cup of chicken-style seitan strips in the marinade for an hour or so. Fry the marinated seitan for just a few minutes, until the pieces lightly brown, and you’re there.

The idea for this tomato and cilantro salad comes from my kitchen calendar, the 2010 International Calendar produced by the RPCVs of Wisconsin - Madison. Each month features a beautiful photo and basic cultural information, like recipes! Yemen is featured for July, and inspired me to use some fresh cherry tomatoes to make banadura salata b’kizbara, which also includes fresh cilantro, lemon juice, chili peppers, and olive oil. Despite the distance between Yemen and Mexico, those flavors sounded right at home in a taco.

That’s it for food today. I still have high hopes to get back to posting on a regular basis, but summer heat leaves me less than motivated in the kitchen. On my evenings and days off, the pups and I tend to wander off someplace we can go swimming - temps have been over 100 F on a regular basis. Otter and Maya have never been big swimmers, but the California sun has changed that. Otter turns 10 sometime this summer, and I thought she gave up swimming a few years ago. She’s back, and sometimes does laps around me in the swimming holes of Chico Creek. Maya has been afraid of water past her knees for most of her three years, but is turning into a comfortable swimmer.

Here's Otter keeping cool.

And Maya, in one of the swimming holes in Chico Creek Canyon north of town. Taking this picture made me think about how nice a waterproof camera would be. This concludes the “bragging about my awesome dogs” section of the blog.

Finally, if anyone is curious, I’m completely loving my new job. I’ll be back here soon with some photos of our friends at Farm Sanctuary.

Sopes with Porter-Glazed Black Beans, Guacamole, and Pineapple Salsa

2010-06-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

Corn masa flour is one of the cornerstones of Mexican cooking, and appears in an endless variety of shapes and sizes, from tamales to tortillas to empanadas. Sopes are another member of the family, essentially thick corn tortillas with a raised lip around the perimeter, which acts as a container for any filling you like.

I found a brand of sopes (pronounced so-pays) with no preservatives at a market in Chico, so knew I had to give them a try. It was also an excuse to make beer-glazed black beans with Sierra Nevada Porter, inspired by a Mark Bittman recipe in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I live just a few blocks from the Sierra Nevada brewery, and wanted to try their porter, but drinking dark beer in 90 F weather doesn’t have much appeal. To me, porters and stouts are for fall and winter. Consuming said beer as a saucy glaze for black beans, though, sounds like a pretty good idea.

You could use canned black beans for this, but whenever I’m making something specially flavored I strongly prefer cooking my own dry beans. In my cast iron frying pan, I sautéed a half cup of diced white onion, with a few cloves of crushed garlic, in corn oil. When the onion begins to brown, add 2 or 3 cups of cooked and drained beans, along with a 12 oz. bottle of porter, 1 tbsp. molasses, and 1 tbsp. ancho chili powder, along with salt and pepper. Use whatever chili powder you like - or none at all - depending on your heat preference.

Bring the bean and beer mixture to a boil, and reduce the heat to a light simmer, stirring occasionally. Cook until the beer has almost completely evaporated, leaving the beans in a thick sauce. I found the flavor almost a little too bitter at first, thanks to the porter, but that seemed to go away as the beans sat for a while after cooking. After the flavors mingled for a while, the result was a rich dark sauce - beer gravy, if you like - slightly sweet from the molasses, with just a hint of chili heat from the ancho powder.

While the beans are resting, fry the sopes in a little corn oil if you want a crunchy exterior, or simply warm in a dry frying pan. If my toaster had come along on the move, that’s what I would have used to make these - I think toasting would be perfect, since they are firm enough to survive a toaster, and would nicely brown on either side.

From here, use any fillings you like in tacos or any other Mexican food - salsa, guacamole, vegan cheese or sour cream, seasoned greens or mushrooms, roasted veggies, olives, baked tofu, etc. I made simple guacamole with cilantro and fresh lime juice, and another simple salsa, with tomatoes, lime, green onions, and pineapple chunks. The bright, sweet taste of pineapple or other citrus fruit is a welcome contrast to the porter sauce.

Like any customizable foods - sandwiches, pizza, tacos - these would be great for a party or cooking with friends. Just get a bunch of good fillings together on the table, fry or toast a few sopes, and let everyone make their own to their liking.

Here’s a simple sope with beans, to give an impression of the saucy porter glaze. A light Mexican beer like Corona would be perfect with these, especially in summer. Salud!

P.S.! I recommend everyone head over to The Crafty Kook right away for a beautiful video (with perfect musical background) from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. For those not keeping score at home, that's where I'm from, and TRNP is one of the treasures of the state. Very cool, River - thanks for the memories!

Beet Green Frittata with Beet and Potato “Home Fries"

2010-06-07T16:37:00.000-07:00

When you think of great breakfast food, beets may not be the first thing on your mind. I’ve been picking up a couple of nice bunches of beets every week at the farmers market, and they were welcome in this weekend breakfast of frittata and something like home fries.

Tofu frittata really captures the flavor and heartiness of a traditional baked egg frittata, and is a great vehicle to sneak a bunch of greens into breakfast. I used greens from a half dozen red and pink beets, sautéing the chopped greens in a little olive oil and minced garlic just until they wilted down.

This frittata is pretty simple, and like all of my frittatas and omelets, owes much to Vegan Brunch. In a large bowl, mix the following: lightly cooked greens* (about 1 cup), one 14 oz. block extra firm tofu, 2 tbsp. nutritional yeast flakes, 1 tsp. turmeric, 1 tbsp. Dijon mustard, 1 tsp. tamari soy sauce, 1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil, a little pinch of thyme, a pinch of black salt powder**, and a big pinch of red pepper flakes. Mash everything well with a fork or your fingers, and bake in a lightly oiled dish at 375 F for 25 to 30 minutes, until lightly browned on top. It can be served right away, but tends to hold its form better if allowed to cool. I sprinkled a light dusting of smoked Spanish paprika on the cooled frittata.

Since the oven was on anyway, I roasted beets and red potatoes at the same time, wrapping them in foil. This next step is optional, since roasted beets and potatoes are fine as is, but I finished them with a light fry in a little oil, just to give the potatoes a bit of browning and crunch. Season the potatoes & beets with salt and black pepper.

If you wanted to make this even easier, you could bake the potatoes and beets - thinly chopped as to cook evenly - right into the frittata, for a close vegan relative of the classic Spanish egg and potato tortilla.

One final note - I made all of this the night before, with a super easy breakfast in mind the next morning. The frittata especially benefits from the few hours of resting - it may be reheated if you like, but I think it tastes great at room temperature or even cool right out of the fridge. Serve with ketchup or hot sauce, or fresh salsa romesco if you really want a treat. (I list the ingredients on the link - not the quantities, but it's easy to figure out.)

By the way, thanks SO much to all of you who've left such kind comments about my recent move out here! I'm still trying to catch up on everyone's blogs, but I so appreciate your thoughtfulness and general good feelings about it all. Thanks everybody :)
* - I used beet greens here, but you can use just about anything - spinach, chard, broccoli, kale, collards, bok choy, etc.
** - Black salt powder is available at Indian markets, and makes tofu taste like eggs. Honest. Thanks again to Vegan Brunch!

Roasted Tomatillo Soup with Nopalitos & Mushrooms, and Daiya Cheddar Quesadillas

2010-05-31T17:28:00.000-07:00

The weekly routine here in Chico isn’t complete without a bike ride downtown to the Thursday night market. Cherries and new red potatoes are coming into season, joining the mountains of strawberries, fresh herbs and flowers, Asian greens like bok choy and Chinese broccoli, and more. One of the new items last week - new to me, at least - were cactus paddles (nopales or nopalitos in Spanish.) Here they are now:

Whenever I have a question about traditional Mexican cooking or ingredients, I turn to my copy of Rick Bayless' Mexican Kitchen, one of a handful of cookbooks I packed for the move. Bayless recommends roasting or grilling cactus paddles, and the recipe I knew I needed to try was a tomatillo soup with mushrooms and nopales. My version was a quick and simple adaptation, mostly because I lacked a few traditional herbs and chilis.

The cactus was surprisingly simple to prepare, especially since the vendor had removed the thorns. All I did was rinse it, cut it into chunks about an inch square, and toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I roasted the pieces for about 20 minutes at 375 F, in the same pan as about a half dozen husked and rinsed tomatillos. After about 10 minutes the nopales and tomatillos began to soften and release their moisture, and I added about a half dozen peeled garlic cloves to roast with them for the final 10 minutes.

After roasting, the tomatillos were soft and lightly browned, and the nopales were tender and juicy. They have a taste all their own, but I was reminded of a cross between roasted green peppers and good sour cucumber pickles, with a twist of lime juice.

Reserving the nopales in the roasting pan, I removed the tomatillos and roasted garlic and let them cool for a few minutes. They're then pureed in the blender with a little vegetable stock and water, and salt and pepper to taste. The resulting soup base was tart and tangy, with warmth from the roasted garlic and a pleasingly creamy texture.

Everything else came together in minutes. About a cup of sliced cremini mushrooms were sautéed in olive oil and a little salt in the soup pot for a few minutes, until lightly browned and fragrant. Add the tomatillo soup base to the pot, and stir in the roasted cactus paddles, keeping the soup over medium heat just until warmed. I mixed in a little fresh cilantro at the end, and garnished it with red pepper flakes and more cilantro. If you have fresh limes or vegan sour cream on hand, they would be naturals here too.

The soup was tangy and richly flavorful on its own, but pairing it with simple quesadillas made it special. I stuffed corn tortillas with Daiya nondairy cheddar cheese, and warmed them in a dry pan for just a few minutes, until the cheese melted. I’m pretty sure Daiya is the cheese substitute many vegans have been waiting for - it tastes great, and most importantly it melts. I've been using it everywhere.

The flavor combination of cheddar quesadillas with this soup was strikingly similar to one of my favorite dishes at Mexican restaurants - cheese enchiladas with green sauce. Dipping the quesadillas into the soup brought back fond memories of those meals.

Goodbye Fargo, Hello Chico

2010-05-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

I’m starting this post about changes with a final picture from my place in Fargo, North Dakota, which has been home for most of the past seven years. This is Maya, who I still call the puppy, though she turns three this summer. Time goes by a little faster every year. Maya’s chair was one of the last things we moved out of the apartment, and I think that’s when she sensed something funny was going on.

So what has been going on, and why did Maya lose her favorite nap spot? I have a new job, at Farm Sanctuary in California! This is something I’ve thought about for a long time, after interning at the California shelter two years ago, and visiting again for a couple weeks last spring. I was hired in March, but was grateful to have enough time to wrap things up in Fargo during April and spend time with family and friends before leaving in early May. I just finished my second week of work here - I’m a caregiver assistant - and I’m loving the job, which I expected.

I assume most of you are familiar with Farm Sanctuary, but if not check out their web site, which is linked here. The California shelter, with rolling hills and the Coast Range on the western horizon, is a beautiful place, and I feel pretty lucky every morning I go to work there.

Though it’s nice to be in northern California, leaving North Dakota was hard. Fargo is a wonderful place, and if you don’t believe me go visit sometime, though maybe not in January. The Fargo-Moorhead area has been showing up at or near the top of all kinds of livability and environmental reports in the past few years, and three major universities and significant communities of new Americans create a cultural atmosphere you might not associate with North Dakota. I don’t mean to go all Chamber of Commerce on you here, but I won’t leave Fargo without giving it a big hug. Fargo rocks.

Of course, I said my goodbyes to family and friends in person, so I won’t elaborate here. If you’re reading, thanks for everything, and I hope to see you out here sooner or later! I’m especially missing my 3-year old nephew Lucas, who has been my buddy in Fargo and an inspiration to all of his extended family. His attitude and energy light up wherever he is, and I hope to see him again soon.

I’m living in Chico, in an upstairs apartment in an older house. The neighborhood is full of huge shade trees, and I share a giant fenced backyard with my downstairs neighbors. There are dogs everywhere - woohoo! - so I couldn’t have hoped to find a better place for Otter and Maya.

From all indications so far, Chico rocks too. On Thursday nights throughout the summer there is a street fair/produce market downtown, that attracts big crowds of happy looking people. The fruits and veggies are abundant, varied, and cheap, so I’m already a big fan of the Thursday market after two visits.

If you’ve made it this far, I’ll remind you that this blog is usually only about food. So let’s get on with it. My cooking has been pretty basic so far, since I’m rebuilding my kitchen and pantry. In honor of simplicity and the Thursday market, here’s my Thursday Market Salad. Everything is fresh and local - avocadoes, phenomenal strawberries, walnuts, sweet peas, and spring greens including chard, spinach, and a few types of lettuce. The dressing is sherry vinegar, olive oil, black pepper, salt, and a little sugar.

Here’s some nachos, with beans and guacamole. The chips are topped with Daiya cheese, which I’ll have more good things to say about in my next post. Like I said, we're keeping it simple.

I can't break in the new west coast version of my site without a couple of pictures of Otter and Maya exploring their new environment. I think they'll enjoy the break from winter, but it's a little harder to find open spaces nearby to run around off the leash. I'm sure we'll figure that out soon enough. Here's Otter looking for fish, or maybe at her reflection, in a Chico creek.

One more of Otter and Maya for the road. I think they like it here.

Thanks for making it to the end of a longer than usual post, but we had some catching up to do. Speaking of, I'm looking forward to catching up with all of your amazing blogs that I've been following the last couple of years. Until next time, goodbye from rainy NorCal!

Bistro Asparagus Twists from American Vegan Kitchen, & Primal Strips vegan jerky

2010-03-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

This will be a quick post, but I couldn't keep these puff pastry-wrapped asparagus twists to myself. They're from American Vegan Kitchen, by Tamasin Noyes. Tami does the Vegan Appetite blog, which never fails to feature awesome vegan goodies. The cookbook is exceptionally well done, and delivers on it's promise of "delicious comfort food from Blue Plate Specials to homestyle favorites." I've also made the sweet garklicky ribz, and a fabulous non-meatloaf from this book.

This asparagus recipe is fairly simple, but looks and tastes totally elegant. Asparagus spears are blanched and then wrapped in strips of puff pastry brushed with mustard, and baked. There's a good dipping sauce to go with these too.

I've become a big fan of Primal Strips vegan jerky, since the nice folks at Primal Spirit Foods sent me a sample pack a couple weeks ago. There are six flavors - my favorites are the teryaki and mesquite lime, though they're all really good. Some are seitan-based, some soy, and the "Hot and Spicy" version is made with shiitake mushrooms, which is really creative. I was a big jerky fan in my younger days, so this is one more food I'm no longer denied, though I've long since lost the idea that eating vegan means "denial" in any way. These are great, and have been my staple afternoon snack since I received them.

Feijoada (E.A.T. World: Brazil)

2010-03-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

Feijoada is Brazil's take on one of the world's great food pairs - rice and beans. In it's traditional form, feijoada (pronounced fay-zwah-duh) usually contains meat, and judging by recipes online, lots of it. Since vegans know a thing or two about rice and beans, there are lots of recipes out there for vegan or vegetarian feijoada. I based this on a recipe in American Wholefoods Cuisine, my go-to old school veggie cookbook.

Everything here is pretty straight forward - long grain brown rice is cooked in water and tomato juice, along with a dried chili pepper and bay leaf. Black beans are seasoned with onion and garlic, and another couple of dried chilis. The greens are collards, also simply prepared and seasoned with a little salt and some chopped onions.

I was surprised by the great flavor the orange slices added, mixed with the rice and beans. Plus, they just look pretty as a garnish. At the bottom left is a spicy onion salsa, made by blanching sliced onions in boiling water for a few minutes, and marinating the drained onions in fresh lime juice and hot pepper sauce.

One of the classic Brazilian flavors I didn't incorporate here, but would like to try, is farofa, which is coarse ground, roasted cassava or manioc flour. This post from SHIFT Vegan has a nice pic of feijoada with farofa. If you want more Brazilian food, don't miss The Crafty Kook's trip to Brazil from earlier this winter!

I don't bake nearly often enough, so when I do I like to share it here :) I was cleaning my fridge this afternoon, and found black cherries and some cranberries in the freezer, so made this pie from The Joy of Vegan Baking. Yum.

Ancho Chili Enchiladas & French Meadow Bread Pressed Sandwiches

2010-03-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

Every time I make my own enchilada sauce with dried chilis, I wonder why I ever buy the canned stuff. Making your own is cheaper, it's really easy, and the results are always worth the extra effort. This was made with dried ancho chili peppers, seeded and soaked in hot water, and blended with roasted garlic, Mexican oregano, and ground cumin seeds and cloves. Apple cider vinegar and salt are mixed in at the end - as usual, my chili sauce is based on recipe from Rick Bayless' Mexican Kitchen.

For these enchiladas, I covered the corn tortillas with ancho sauce, then fried them for a few seconds on each side in a lightly oiled pan. Speed is of the essence - fry the tortillas before they get soggy from the sauce, and carefully remove them from the pan after just a moment of frying on either side. It's a little messy, but I love how the chili sauce gets seared into the tortillas. These are stuffed with roasted chayote, & sauteed spinach and mushrooms. The cheesy looking bits are a provolone "uncheese" recipe from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, by Joanne Stepaniak.

Here's a couple of sandwiches, made with spelt bread from French Meadow Bakery, thanks to some promotional coupons they sent me. There aren't a lot of French Meadow products at stores here in the Fargo-Moorhead area, but I really like this spelt bread - I'll have to try their rye too, which I also found. Since they're made without preservatives, they're in the freezer section. This bread includes exactly three ingredients: organic spelt flour, water, and salt. I've long since gotten tired of reading the long list of fine print ingredients on most supermarket breads, so I appreciate what they're doing here.

I used my Foreman grill for some pressed sandwiches, which makes this one of my fave kitchen gadgets. Elvis inspires the sandwich at top, with peanut butter and sliced bananas, and a bit of agave nectar to make it gooey and sweet.

This is my spelt bread panini, stuffed with roasted red pepper, sliced avocado, more of that provolone "uncheese", and a simple pesto of Italian parsley, spinach, garlic, and walnuts. Tasty stuff. The French Meadow slices are on the small side, making for nice little snack size sandwiches.

Fresh Herb and "Chicken" Larb with Sweet Mango Sticky Rice (E.A.T. World: Laos)

2010-02-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

It's been great to see E.A.T. World taking off across the blogs, and I've enjoyed travelling with everyone! Our ongoing mission: to explore new food worlds, to seek out new ingredients and new recipes, to boldly go where I almost certainly have not gone before. Like Laos!

My alphabet soup approach to E.A.T. World brings us back to southeast Asia, for an introduction to larb, sometimes called the "national dish" of Laos. Larb (or laap, larp, laab, or lob...it's one of those words with a slippery spelling as translated to English) is a salad of meat, fresh herbs, lime juice, hot peppers, and an abundance of fresh flavors.

This recipe comes from Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America. The Hmong are an ethnic group from mountainous regions of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, and southern China, and the authors of Cooking from the Heart say nobody makes a better larb than Hmong cooks. I've been curious about Hmong cooking and culture since getting to know some awesome Hmong students in a summer program a few years ago - there is a large Hmong population in Minnesota, especially in the Twin Cities. This cookbook nicely combines recipes with information about Hmong tradition and culture in Laos and America.

Vegan Chik'n strips from Morningstar Farms are the meat substitute here, although nicely marinated or seasoned tempeh, seitan, or extra firm tofu would be really good too. The flavors in this salad are so bold that whatever protein you use will be instantly infused with larby goodness and taste spectacular. Promise.

Regarding all those flavors, this salad is a showcase for a few ingredients I've never used before - Sichuan peppercorns, roasted rice powder, and galangal. Sichuan peppercorns can be tricky to find because they are quite often not labelled as Sichuan peppercorns, rather "dried pepper corn" like the packet above, or other variations on that theme. If you're not sure, ask the folks are your local Asian market, like I did. They have a light citrus scent, and a reputation for causing mild numbness on the tongue. I toasted these and ground them before adding to the larb, and used a fairly generous amount. The effect, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, is a little what licking a battery must feel like. My whole mouth felt all tingly and sparkly after a few larb lettuce rolls. Really worth checking out, if you haven't tried Sichuan peppercorns before.

Regarding battery-licking, I'm sure you can find a lot of videos of kids doing that on Youtube, if you want to make yourself wish the Internet was never invented.

Above, from left to right: Galangal, lemongrass, mint, culantro, and green onions.

Besides the process of collecting and chopping all of the ingredients, larb is pretty straight-forward to make. The Chik'n strips were marinated and lightly sauteed in rice wine and lime juice. To this, I added all kinds of good stuff: lots of fresh mint and cilantro leaves, fresh culantro, green onions, a red jalapeno pepper, lemon zest, galangal, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, white pepper, more lime juice, and lemongrass. A few spoonfuls of roasted rice powder, pictured earlier, is added at the end. It adds a crumbly, sticky texture, and a distinctive and pleasing smell. You can make your own rice powder too, but it's really cheap to buy.

Once everything is tossed together, the preferred way to eat larb is in lettuce wraps. They're really onto something here, as the cool and crisp lettuce wrap is the perfect contrast to the chaotic jumble of flavors inside. Chaotic might be exactly the wrong word though, because all of these flavors come together in what might be better described as a chorus in perfect harmony. My ability to come up with a metaphor to describe what larb tastes like ends here, so I can only recommend you try it yourself sometime. I used butter lettuce, but Boston or good old iceberg lettuce would be fine too.

I'm not reprinting the entire recipe from Cooking from the Heart here, since I'm hesitant to copy recipes out of cookbooks without permission. There are a lot of larb recipes online, so google away...every one is a little different, so you can adapt to your tastes.

To settle things down after larb, here's a simple dessert of sweetened sticky rice with coconut milk and mango, also from Cooking from the Heart. I'm new to sticky rice too, and I screwed this up by overcooking the rice. It ended up as sweet sticky rice porridge, still pretty tasty, though the rice was supposed to hold together in a neat ball on the plate. Whatever :)

Potato Pancakes and Mulled Wine (E.A.T. World: Czech Republic)

2010-02-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

We're in the Czech Republic for today's stop on the E.A.T. World tour, enjoying a bit of street food and drink. These potato pancakes - I see them called bramboráky or bramborová placka - are the essence of the street food ideal: portable, hearty, and fried. If you'd like something to wash down those greasy golden wonders, you could do worse than svařák, mulled wine served steaming hot. Sitting here in midwinter, this pair seems pretty appropriate for a chilly weekend afternoon.

To set the scene, come along with me to Český Krumlov, along the winding Vltava River. I took this photo last January, from the castle overlooking the old town center. With ice on the river and snow on the ground, mulled wine was the perfect companion as I wandered around the city. One guy - just up the street from the bridge on the left side of the picture - sold cups of mulled wine at a table on the sidewalk, from one of those big coffee thermos servers. It's a brilliant idea for getting through winter, and I can't imagine why the concept never caught on here.

We'll get to the wine in a moment, but potato pancakes come first. They often contain eggs and maybe milk, but vegan bramboráky deliver exactly what a potato pancake should. They're crispy and golden on the ouside, soft and creamy on the inside, and flavored with onion, garlic, and marjoram. Sauerkraut is an optional addition. As a sauerkraut fan, I mixed a healthy dose into the potato batter, and loved the sharp and tangy flavor it added.

These are easy, and the quantities are pretty flexible. I found just a couple of tablespoons of all purpose flour was enough to bind about two cups of shredded potaotes while frying. Here's my quantities, and basic directions:
2 cups raw potatoes, peeled and shredded (use a grater or food processor)
1 medium yellow onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup sauerkraut (optional, but very nice if you like sauerkraut)
1 tbps. dried marjoram
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground black pepper
1/3 cup unsweetened almond milk, or any other non-dairy milk, or water
2 tbsp. all purpose flour (maybe a bit more, depending on your first pancake)
Oil for frying, enough to liberally coat the bottom of your pan

Here's what worked for me - mix everything together in a big bowl, keeping a little extra flour on hand. Test to see if your oil is hot enough by adding a tiny bit of potato - if it sizzles immediately, the oil is ready. Next, make a small potato patty with your batter as a test run. Let it brown on one side for a few minutes, then flip over. If it holds together, you have enough flour. If it's a little loose, mix another tbsp. of flour into your main bowl of batter, and make another patty. I mention this just because you might get a little variance in the moisture content of the potatoes or sauerkraut, so the amount of flour needed may fluctuate a little.

Fry on each side for 3 or 4 minutes, until nice and golden brown. I found the oil maintained a nice temperature, without cooking too fast, at medium high heat. After draining on paper towels for just a couple of minutes, enjoy them while they're piping hot and crispy.

Svařák
I found a bunch of different takes on mulled wine online, but the fundamentals are red wine, spices, and sweetener. Here's an excellent article on Czech mulled wine, as well as varieties from other cold countries of Europe. For the base of my svařák I used a bottle of Yellow Tail cabernet sauvignon, which is vegan - all of their reds are vegan, but not their whites.

Rather than getting into the whole vegan wine/beer briar patch here, I'd just recommend you check online about whatever brand you like and is available to you. Many companies - like Yellow Tail - include FAQs on their sites. And if you don't drink at all, problem solved :)

Cinnamon and cloves in the mulled wine will make your place smell like the winter holidays. Orange zest adds a little zing, and agave nectar and brown sugar heightened the sweetness.

While you can make mulled wine on the stove top, I took a tip from the Czech wine vendor and made it in my coffee pot. Here's the logic - my coffee machine pot never boils, so I put this on and let it be for almost an hour. You can do the same thing on the stove top, just as long as you keep the wine from boiling - the alcohol will burn off as the wine boils.

For a one liter bottle of red wine, I mixed in 2 tbps. each of agave nectar and brown sugar, 1 tsp. orange zest (lemon is great too), a cinnamon stick, and 4 cloves. Whether in the coffee pot or on the stove top, keep it hot but not boiling for at least a half hour. It can be kept hot throughout a party, and leftovers apparently keep pretty well. I just had a little cup when I made this, and put the rest back in the wine bottle. Now it's back in the fridge, ready to go whenever the mood for mulled wine strikes...which I think is right about now!
Na Zdraví! (That's Cheers!, folks :)

Harissa Seitan "Wings"

2010-01-31T19:22:00.000-08:00

Before we move on to the next stop on the world tour (remember your winter jacket!), I have a short follow-up from Tunisia. Harissa seemed like a natural for a vegan wing sauce, and this is a super easy recipe, useful for tofu, seitan, tempeh, or any other "meaty" food.

This technique can be used with any hot chili sauce, be it sriracha, red curry paste, chipotle salsa -whatever you like. Mix one part chili sauce with about half as much Earth Balance margarine, mixing together over low heat on the stove top. Toss the results with whatever "wings" you're using - baked tofu, fried tempeh, etc. In this case it was breaded and fried seitan pieces. Serve hot with a nice cooling dip on the side. For this, I blended together a little silken tofu, along with tahini, fresh lemon juice, minced garlic, and a pinch of salt.

My fried seitan chunks benefit from a couple of hints picked up from The Splendid Table: room-temperature foods tend to behave better when fried, and develop a nicer, crunchy coating. This worked like a charm, and I won't try to bread and fry anything straight out of the fridge again. Also, I mixed in a tbsp. of corn starch with the coating of flour, salt, and pepper. This adhered much better to the seitan bites than my usual breading, which usually is just all-purpose flour and some spices. These two tips were a big help for me, as I'm often stumped with getting a good, golden brown coating on fried foods.

Roasted Veggie Couscous with Harissa and Preserved Lemons (E.A.T. World: Tunisia)

2010-01-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

We're still in Africa for our third stop on the E.A.T. World tour, where the Atlas Mountains meet the sea, in Tunisia. The sun is shining in a clear sky, the Mediterranean is a sparkling blue, and I'm on the beach. North Dakota in January, with our ice storms and blizzards and Minnesota Vikings, are far, far away. Life is good.

I didn't know much of anything about Tunisian food, besides those four words in the title: couscous, harissa, and preserved lemons. That's a shame, but learning about food traditions is what makes E.A.T. World so much fun. Tunisia, as a coastal nation with indigenous diversity and historical influences from Spain to Syria, has a stunningly diverse food heritage. I began at the beginning, with a simple combo of roasted vegetables and couscous, as a base to experiment with the signature flavors of harissa and preserved lemons.

My veggie couscous contains a variety of roasted and stir-fried vegetables (cauliflower, sweet potato, carrots, zucchini, raisins, asparagus, eggplant, red bell pepper, chickpeas, onions, and garlic), seasoned with a little salt, pepper, cinnamon, and cumin. Toss the veggies with prepared couscous, and you have a versatile and easy meal. I used a ton of veggies because I roasted a bunch over the weekend.

Harissa is a hot chili sauce that seems to be mandatory in any Tunisian meal. I looked at a half dozen or so recipes, and no two are the same. I made this with dry pan-toasted caraway and coriander seeds and garlic cloves, along with chili powder, one fresh fire-roasted hot chili pepper, olive oil, and white wine vinegar.

My harissa is mostly based on the recipe in Robin Robertson's Vegan Planet. That's a great cookbook of international recipes, and also the name of Robin's blog. Here's my minorly adjusted harissa recipe:

1 tbsp. caraway seeds
1 tbsp. coriander seeds
3 cloves garlic
1 small fresh chili pepper (I don't know the name of the one I used, but it looked like a red jalapeno pepper, but a little hotter)
1/3 cup chili powder
1 tbsp. white wine vinegar
3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. salt

Dry toast the coriander and caraway seeds until they become fragrant - just a few minutes. Dry toast the peeled garlic cloves as well, watching that they don't burn. I did these in my cast iron pan, without any oil. Because I had that mystery pepper around, I fire-roasted it on my gas stove, and peeled and seeded it after allowing it to cool down. If you have a spice grinder, grind the whole spices, and mix with the ground chili and diced garlic and any fresh chilis, and the liquid ingredients.

For me, it was another chance to use the mortar and pestle - fast becoming my favorite kitchen gadgets. Here's the final product, with a little water added to thin it out a bit.

I introduced my preserved lemons in a previous post, and I'm trying them here for the first time, after letting them cure for nearly four weeks. Upon opening the jar, I was pleasantly surprised! They didn't go bad, which means the jar was sterilized well, and I managed to follow an extremely simple recipe. Good for me, I guess :)

To make one quart of preserved lemons, I used two pounds of organic lemons (organic is important here, because you're eating the peels) and a half cup of sea salt. After sterilizing the jar and lid in boiling water, fill the jar with alternating layers of quartered lemons (with the pulp and seeds still intact) and salt, and a few spices if you like - I used one cinnamon stick, 1star anise, 5 cardamom pods, 4 whole cloves, and a few whole black peppercorns. After the lemon quarters are filled to within a half inch of the jar top, squeeze juice from the remaining lemons into the jar until all the lemon quarters are submerged. Different recipes suggest letting the lemons cure for different periods of time, but three weeks seems about average. After curing the lemons in the sealed jar at room temperature, the lemons keep in the refrigerator for months.

To use, scrape out the pulp and seeds, and rinse in water to remove some of the salt. The flavor is - surprise! - salty and lemony. Use the diced or sliced lemon peels to season North African stews or tagines or wherever else a dose of salt and citrus sounds like a good idea. As with harissa, it makes sense to serve these as sides or relishes, so anyone can use them to their taste.

One final thought on harissa - I made much more than I could use with this couscous, so I have one thing on my mind: vegan harissa wings, which I remember seeing on someone's blog. I like the idea of combining North Africa with sports bar food, though I won't be bringing them to any Superbowl party. Thanks Vikings...though if Brett Favre is reading this, we'd love to have you back next year :)

Berbere Lentil & Seitan Stew with Injera and Awase (E.A.T. World: Ethiopia)

2010-01-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Once in a while I get mildly obsessed with finding a food I've never eaten before, and for a few months that's been the case with injera. And it may come as a surprise, but injera isn't exactly easy to find in North Dakota. So in the spirit of E.A.T. World, fasten your seat belts - we're off to Ethiopia.

Injera is a spongy, soft, and slightly sour bread (the batter is fermented, like sourdough) that blurs the line between bread and table cloth. Saucy stews or stir frys are served over injera, and the bread acts as plate and utensil, with scraps of injera used to scoop up portions of stew. It's one of the trademarks of Ethiopian cooking, but since I've never been to an Ethiopian restaurant, or for that matter Ethiopia, it was just one of those things I read about. That's why I was happy to find it at a new east African market in Fargo - it's actually made at the East Africa Injera restaurant down the road in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

I've even tried making injera a couple of times. Once I just ended up with sour pancakes - lame, but edible - and another time with a gooey batter that was impossible to flip over. Just lame. I'm not giving up, and even have a little bag of teff flour - injera's main grain - on the shelf. But for now, I'm happy with the stuff made by the professionals in Saint Paul.

OK, enough with my injera relationship. We've got a meal to get to: an Ethiopian stew of lentils, seitan, onions, and tomatoes, seasoned with a berbere spice blend, and an additional red-hot sauce on the side, awase. I did a little searching online for guides, but this is mostly out of Marcus Samuelsson's beautiful book The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa. It's full of gorgeous photos, and plenty of techniques, spice blends, and ideas to make a vegan cook happy.

Berbere is a wonderfully multi-dimensional spice blend, heavy on hot chili peppers, and another foundation of Ethiopian food. I made my own, first pounding the whole spices - coriander, fenugreek, cardamom pods, peppercorns, cloves, and onion flakes - to a fine powder with a mortar and pestle. Then I mixed in the chili powder and other spices.

Here's the quantities I used:
2 tsp. coriander seeds
1 tsp. fenugreek seeds
1/2 tsp. black peppercorns
6 cardamom pods
4 whole cloves
3 tsp. onion flakes (or powder)
2 tsp. ground ginger
3 tbsp. paprika
1/3 cup guajillo chili powder*
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
2 tsp. salt

I like guajillo for it's balance of bright flavor and heat - it's hot, but not blazing. You can use any chili powder you like, but mind the heat, since a third cup is a lot of chili powder. A third cup of cayenne, for example, would be pretty damn intense. Here's my finished spice volcano, Mount Berbere.

On to the main course. I used brown baby lentils (masoor matki at your Indian grocery) and seitan for a dish based on Samuelsson's recipe for a stir-fried beef stew. Thin sliced red onion and seitan are sauteed in 4 tbsp. (you know you love that) of Earth Balance margarine, standing in for the traditional butter. When the seitan and onions are browned, add 1 cup of diced tomatoes, 1 cup of cooked lentils, 3 cloves of diced garlic, 2 heaping tbsp. of berbere powder, a dash of ground cumin, and a half cup of dry red wine. Simmer for another few minutes, letting the alcohol from the wine cook off.

The sauce in the little plastic bowl is awase, a hot condiment that lets each diner regulate the spiciness for individual taste. It's a couple tablespoons of berbere powder, with a heaping teaspoon of cayenne pepper to make for serious heat. The spices are mixed with a tbsp. each of water, lemon juice, and red wine. Tear off a piece of injera, scoop up a bit of stew, and dip the roll in awase to your liking. One final note: if you're not a fan of seitan, or have a problem with wheat gluten, this is also excellent with diced eggplant replacing the seitan. I made that too, and it was every bit as good as the seitan version.

Pho with Tofu and Vegetables (E.A.T. World: Vietnam)

2010-01-16T18:57:00.000-08:00

I'm jumping into the stove-top travel project E.A.T. World with a trip to Vietnam, for a steaming bowl of pho. If Vietnam has a national soup, this would be it. Pho typically features beef broth and fish sauce, but a rich broth of ginger, onions, star anise, cloves, and vegan "beef" broth powder (with a few more additions) packs more than enough great flavor.

A quick side note on the E.A.T. World format - I know I'm not sufficiently organized to do this alphabetically, so I'm using a random approach. Thus, starting with "V." My goal is to cover the alphabet in the next few months...at least I say that now :)

I've had pho (pronounced "fuh," by the way...you probably knew that, but I've said "fo" more than once), but never made it at home, so I scanned a few relevant cookbooks for ideas. My main source is Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, by Mai Pham, another good library find. Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian has a nice faux pho recipe too. I'm used to soup being an easy and improvisational affair, but pho is nothing to mess around with. The key is the broth, so let's begin at the beginning.

Making Pho Broth
Pham's recipe for pho calls for toasting or charring the ginger, onions, and spices before adding to the soup broth. This makes sense, because roasting vegetables always brings out flavor that simple boiling does not. I charred the ginger and yellow onion over my gas stove burner, and peeled away the charred parts before adding to the broth. Here's the onion, which actually set off my smoke alarm.

The star anise, whole cloves, and black peppercorns were dry-toasted in a fry pan for about two minutes, before adding to the ginger and onion broth. Other broth ingredients include one crushed garlic clove, one tbsp. sugar, 1 tbsp. vegan beef broth powder, a pinch of kelp powder (a vegan nod to the fish sauce) and salt and tamari to taste. I simmered the two quarts or so of broth for about an hour, and then let it sit. The flavor developed nicely after the broth sat for a couple of hours, so if you make this I highly recommend making the broth well ahead of time, even the night before. After the broth has cooled, pour it through something to strain out the ginger, onions, and spices.

On we go to the soup ingredients. Since pho can include so many great fresh veggies and herbs, it really was born to be vegan, if I may say so. The trick of pho is to let the boiling hot broth cook the soup ingredients just before you begin eating. To ensure that everything cooked fairly evenly, I used naturally thin veggies - snow peas - and thin sliced carrots and broccoli florets. Deep-fried tofu cubes and cooked rice sticks provide the soup's bulk, with boiling hot broth poured over the tofu, noodles, and veggies. My ingredients are assembled below - the chopped serrano peppers, scallions, bean sprouts, thai basil, and cilantro are added as garnishes, to your taste.

Here's a broccoli floret, a brilliant green after a few minutes in the broth. The vegetables will still be pleasantly crisp, since they do their little bit of cooking in the soup bowl. It may be a good idea to blanche the vegetables for a moment in boiling water right before assembling the soup, just to preserve the heat in the serving bowl.

I almost forgot about the limes! Fresh lime juice is sprinkled in along with the other garnishes, like these bean sprouts and thai basil. I also made a little dipping bowl with hoisin sauce and hot pepper sauce (sriracha), since I've seen that done. The sauce was great with the tofu and veggies, and can also be used to further season the pho. Mai Pham frowns on that though, since she says it masks the subtle flavors of the pho broth. She has a point, but hoisin shares the licorice flavor of star anise, so I think they go together well.

Pho requires more than a little special preparation, but it really is a treat. It's also a good reason to break out the chopsticks, and pick up one of those cool soup spoons at any Asian market. The rice sticks tend to bunch together into one long rice stick weave, so I recommend shamelessly slurping and shoveling with your chopsticks. I think that adds to the fun. One more tip: use the biggest soup bowl you can find, since the more broth you use, the longer the soup stays nice and hot. Any proper pho is a meal in itself, so don't be shy about that big bowl.

E.A.T. World

2010-01-11T18:56:00.000-08:00

I love this idea. I've been a little lazy about coming up with interesting food lately - there was even a four day stretch last week of rice and lentils or beans every night, where I felt so much like the vegan stereotype...even though I think rice and lentils can be awesome.

Enter the E.A.T. World project! I just found this over at River's excellent The Crafty Kook , with an amazing introductory voyage to a sidewalk cafe in Austria. The rules, such as they are, are covered over there. In summary (and this is the best thing) there really aren't any rules. It's just a cool way to encourage everybody to try out recipes and inspiration from all over the world, with an alphabetical theme. There are even cool logos to use. I hope this spreads all over the place - it's a wonderful idea, and I can't wait to go travelling with you all!

Paella with Oyster Mushrooms & Sherry-braised Seitan Sausages

2010-01-03T20:20:00.001-08:00

First, happy new year everybody! I hope you all have a great 2010, and that our new decade is an improvement on the last. We'll leave it at that.

I would love to claim this recipe as my own, because it was perfectly awesome. It's from Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook. I picked up the book this weekend, with a Christmas gift card from my brother and sister-in-law. She said she wanted to give me a vegan cookbook, but they got a gift card so I could pick it out - very cool, so thanks Kim!

The Conscious Cook was on my cookbook wish-list. He was the chef who prepared Oprah's meals during her vegan experiment earlier this year, and clearly wants to eliminate any "second class" status for vegan cooking. All of the recipes and photos look like things you would find in a high-end gourmet restaurant. At least I assume that's what they look like, since I've never been to one of those places.

This paella sticks pretty close to Ronnen's recipe, and any changes were minor. Simmering the sausages in sherry just seemed like a good excuse to sip a little sherry while I was cooking. The oyster mushrooms were sauteed in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and dusted with nori flakes to give them a sea flavor. That trick alone made this recipe worthwhile - the nori-oyster mushrooms are simply delicious.

Preserved Lemons

2009-12-29T16:48:00.001-08:00

Preserved lemons are often described as one of the signature flavors of North African cooking, adding a salty, citrus note to pilafs, tagines, and stews. I haven't been to Morocco or Algeria or Tunisia (yet!), nor have I ever tasted preserved lemons, but the latter will change in a few weeks. That's when this quart jar of lemons, salt, and spices will come to maturity, and I'll pretend I'm sitting down for a bowl of lentil tagine with preserved lemons in Tangier or Casablanca. How's that for budget travel?

Organic lemons are preferred for this, because the peels are the ultimate ingredient, and that's where pesticides can concentrate in non-organic lemons. Some preserved lemon recipes call for nothing more than lemons and salt, and some include lots of spices and sweeteners. I took the middle path, with lemons, salt, and spices, but no sweetener.

After sterilizing a wide mouth quart jar and lid in boiling water, I filled the jar with layers of sea salt (a half cup!), quartered lemons, and spices including cardamom pods, cloves, star anise, a cinnamon stick, and black peppercorns. If this works out, I'll post the actual recipe in a few weeks...I don't want to lead anyone astray in the meantime :) After filling the jar with lemons, I squeezed the juice of the extra lemons into the jar, until all of the lemon quarters were submerged in lemon juice. I used about two pounds of lemons in total. Now I'm shaking the jar every day, to keep the salt and juice mixed. The pickled lemons are rinsed of much of the salt before eating, so don't be freaked out by that half cup of salt.

This is sort of a recipe in progress, so I'll be back in a few weeks with the results, and hopefully a fabulous Moroccan recipe to showcase these guys. Meanwhile...

I've meant to make the tempeh sausage pastry puffs from Vegan Brunch since the first time I opened that book, but felt like they deserved a special occasion. I don't think Monday Night Football qualifies as a special occasion, especially when the Vikings lose, but I went ahead and made these last night anyway. They're delicious, with a spice mixture including fennel seeds, sage, thyme, red pepper flakes, and mustard seeds giving them a definite sausage vibe. Great served with mushroom gravy.

Another cookbook winner, this is a take on the Pad See Ew from Vegan Yum Yum. The greens are yu choy, which is pretty close to Chinese broccoli. The rice noodles here are kind of interesting too - Thai noodles called "Rice Flake" on the package. They look like flat cut-up squares of dry spring roll wrapper, but when cooked they roll up into cylinders. I was entertained (it's winter), and the noodle tubes are nice vehicles for the sweet and spicy Pad See Ew sauce. Yu choy is harvested fairly young, so even the stems are pretty tender after a quick stir fry.

Cremini and Oyster Mushroom Pizza Rolls

2009-12-20T15:39:00.001-08:00

Whenever we bring food home for the holidays, or to work or a potluck, we are ambassadors from vegan land. Our diplomatic duty is to show that vegan food isn't weird or bland or covered with alfalfa sprouts. Not to diss alfalfa sprouts, but they have their place. Vegans know we eat awesome food, but there are still some pretty powerful mindsets to overcome. My entry at Christmas this year will be these pizza rolls, inspired by this post at Bitten, Mark Bittman's blog at the New York Times.

The post is by Annemarie Conte, one of the blog's contributors. Many of the comments asked about making vegetarian or vegan versions of the rolls, which were heavy on mushrooms but also contained cheese and pork. I kept the mushrooms, but added sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, and capers. You could dress these up with all kinds of things - vegan cheese, cooked spinach or other tender greens, olives, marinated artichokes, etc. Anything you would like on a pizza. I just used what was on hand.

I chopped the oyster and cremini mushrooms to tiny bits in the food processor, and sauteed them in extra virgin olive oil for about five minutes. Next I added finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes, minced garlic, and two teaspoons of capers. Saute for a few minutes more, until the mushrooms release most of their moisture and the mixture is very fragrant. After cooling for a few minutes, spread the mushroom mixture on a prepared rectangular sheet of pizza dough. I'll probably use a home made dough next time I make these, but I was in a convenience mood and used Pillsbury pizza dough, which is vegan :) After topping the dough just as if you're making a pizza, roll it up and press the edges together. I baked the roll at 375 for about 20-25 minutes, and served the slices with a good pasta sauce. The rolls are plenty good on their own, but the sauce is a nice addition.

Sesame Long Beans with Five Spice Tofu

2009-12-13T13:17:00.001-08:00

This dish came about as I was fiddling with two different recipes over the weekend. I made some roasted tofu last night, inspired by a tofu technique from Chow Vegan which uses paprika to give the tofu a striking red coating. The tofu cubes are oven roasted on parchment paper, which is helpful in two ways: first, the spice mixture tends to stick better to the tofu rather than the baking dish. Second, by using a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper instead of a smaller baking dish, there's more space between each tofu cube, which helped them brown nicely. (tofu recipe below)

I hadn't cooked long beans (a.k.a. yard long beans) before, but picked some up at Fargo's Asian and American Market. These long beans - close relatives of black-eyed peas, by the way - weren't quite a yard, but still pretty lanky. I cut them into thirds.

Sesame Long Beans

This recipe features all things sesame, at least in my kitchen, with dark sesame oil, tahini (sesame seed paste), and white and black sesame seeds for garnish.

10 to 12 long beans, ends trimmed and cut in thirds

1 tbsp. peanut oil or other vegetable oil

1 tbsp. dark sesame oil

1 tsp. sugar

1 tbsp. tamari or other good quality soy sauce

1 tbsp. tahini

1/4 cup water, sake, or white wine (I used wine)

Black and white sesame seeds, 1 tsp. each

Over high heat, stir fry the beans in the oil (you can get by with less - I tend to be generous with oil). Mix the sugar, tamari, tahini, and water or wine in a small bowl, and add to the beans after they begin to soften. They cook quickly, so this is just around 3 or 4 minutes on medium high heat. Cook, stirring frequently, for another couple of minutes, just until the sauce thickens. Let cool a minute before serving, and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.

Roasted Five Spice Tofu

Paprika is the dominant spice here by quantity, but a little Chinese five spice powder goes a long way, and that's the flavor you'll notice. I made a slurry (for lack of a better term...slurries never sound very appetizing) with 1 tbsp. peanut oil, 1 tsp. tamari, 1 tbsp. Hungarian paprika, and 1/4 tsp. five spice powder. Coat the tofu cubes evenly in the oil-spice mix, and roast on parchment paper at 400 F for 30 minutes, flipping halfway through.

You can make your own five spice powder - it contains Sichuan peppercorns, anise, cloves, cinnamon, and fennel - but I use a prepared blend from the store.

Cheesy Mac and Ginger Tea (comfort food and drink)

2009-12-11T18:39:00.001-08:00

Winter arrived with blunt force this week, and the long semi-hibernation of the upper midwest begins anew. I’ve turned to a couple of my favorite comfort food standbys to cope. This time of year at work means catching up on all our remaining outside jobs of fall, even though it’s been below 0 F most mornings. Before and after work it's dog time, though they're tougher than I am regarding the cold. After our walks I spend much of my time inside just being grateful I’m no longer outside. Mac and cheese and ginger tea keep me from feeling too sorry for myself :)

The cheesy macaroni above is an amalgam of lots of vegan recipes, with a cheesy sauce of nutritional yeast, vegan cream cheese, tahini, miso, lemon juice, non-sweetened almond milk, and the rest of the usual suspects. I prepared the pasta and sauce, then mixed in a can of tomatoes and a bunch of fresh spinach, and baked it for about a half hour. The result was a really nice hotdish, or casserole, or whatever you like.

Ginger tea is another reason to make peace with winter. It’s super easy – just chop fresh ginger into coarse bits, then boil it in a few cups of water over a medium flame for 20 minutes or so. Strain it into your mug, and it’s pure bliss. I often add a little agave nectar for sweetener, and in the bottom shot I mixed in about a tbsp. of pomegranate juice.

Somali Sambusas

2009-12-05T14:41:00.000-08:00

I found out about sambusas just a few weeks ago, at Fargo's new International Grocery store. They have home-made sweet breads and other Somali specialties, and were very generous with free samples, so they've earned a fan here :)

Their sambusas - Somalia's samosa, you could say - looked good, but had a beef filling. I was curious to make my own, and found a very nice recipe at My Somali Food. That recipe is also for beef sambusas, but I just substituted cooked lentils and was on my way. Browned onions, garlic, scallions, and green chile, along with generous shots of cardamom, cumin, and coriander, make the lentils something special. Here's my recipe, heavily borrowing from My Somali Food:

Filling
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cups cooked and drained brown lentils
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic
1/2 cup chopped scallions
1 chopped green chile (I used one serrano pepper)
2 tsp. cumin powder
2 tsp. cardamom powder
2 tsp. coriander powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1/2 cup cilantro, coarsely chopped

Wrapper dough
2 cups all purpose flour
2 tbsp. olive oil
2/3 cup luke warm water
1/2 tsp. salt

I made the filling and wrapper the night before assembling and frying, just so the filling was cool and the dough had rested. For the filling, saute the onions in oil for about five minutes on medium heat, until they start to soften. Then add the garlic, chopped serrano pepper, and scallions, and saute for a minute or two more. Add all of the spices, and saute another minute, just until they become toasted and fragrant - you'll know :) Add the cooked lentils and fresh cilantro at the end, give it a stir, and remove from heat. Cover and let sit a couple hours or overnight. I lightly processed it all in the food processor at the end, which helps the lentils stick together and makes the filling easier to work with.

Mix the dough ingredients well, and let it rest at least a half hour or overnight as well.

The rest is easy, as long as you're careful while frying. Roll golf ball size pieces of dough out very thin - between 1/4 and 1/8 of an inch, if you can, and cut them in squares. Place a heaping spoonful of lentil filling in the center of each square, like this:

This dough is fairly moist, so you should be able to seal it just by pressing firmly, without fussing with water or a water/dough paste. I pressed the edges together and trimmed them with a scissors, making a neat, sealed triangle.

That's about it! I fried these in a half inch of canola oil in my cast iron pan, about 4 at a time over medium-high heat. A deep fryer is a better option, and they would be nice baked too.

And now for something completely different. From deep-fried and spicy to sweet and mostly raw, this is the cashew-cranberry cheesecake from the Nov/Dec 09 Vegetarian Times. It's straight from the magazine, though I subbed agave nectar for honey...there might be a little maple syrup in there too. I brought these home for Thanksgiving - my mom loved them, which is a good endorsement. The cranberry topping is awesome, and my mom couldn't believe there wasn't cream cheese in the filling.All the cashews make this recipe a little pricey, but it's worth it for company or a holiday.

Sweet Potato dog biscuits, and people food

2009-11-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

My two dogs - big Otter and little Maya - are big fans of home-made dog biscuits. Many dog treats include stuff that reminds me why I went vegan in the first place, like "animal digest." That kind of blew my mind when I first saw it, but it's a common ingredient in many products.

There are lots of good companies that make vegan and vegetarian dog treats, but they can be a little pricey. My standby solution is a peanut butter biscuit recipe, but this time I used half sweet potato and half peanut butter. It was an experiment - Otter and Maya love their peanut butter, but they gave these sweet potato biscuits two paws up.

Here's the recipe, really easy with a food processor:
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup wheat germ
1/4 cup ground flax seeds
1/2 cup natural peanut butter (or 1/2 cup roasted sweet potato, or a 1/4 cup of each)
1 1/2 tbsp. molasses (optional...I'm out of molasses too)
3 tbsp. canola oil
1 cup liquid, more or less (I use half non-dairy milk, and half water)

1. Combine everything except the water-milk mixture in food processor, and process until fine and crumbly. Keeping it running, add the liquid little by little, just until the biscuit dough balls together and no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl.

2. Roll dough out until it's about a half inch thick, and cut with your favorite cookie cutter. I bake these at 375 F for about 25 minutes, flipping all of the biscuits halfway through so they brown on both sides.

Readers without companion animals may not be with me any longer, but if you stuck around, here's some people food. A couple of Isa recipes, from Vegan Brunch and Vegan With a Vengeance, plus my first experiment with sourdough bread.

The VB omelette recipe always makes me happy, here stuffed with spinach, mushrooms, and Tofutti mozzarella slices. Tofu and chickpea flour, with some seasonings, and you'll never miss eggs again.

Here's a plate of Jerk Seitan, from VwaV, along with coconut-lime rice. Still one of my favorite recipes from VwaV.

Making sourdough starter is cool, just because it's fun to do things you're not supposed to do, like letting food sit around and ferment for a few days. This sourdough rye is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Georgian Cilantro & Apricot Sauce

2009-11-14T18:31:00.000-08:00

I learned about this sauce from the Republic of Georgia from an episode of The Splendid Table a few weeks back. Guest Martha Rose Shulman was talking about all kinds of wonderful cilantro based sauces, and included this recipe, adapted from Dara Goldstein's The Georgian Feast.

This versatile sauce features lots of cilantro and parsley, along with walnuts and dried apricots, soaked in boiling water and left overnight. Dried fruits like dates, raisins, figs, etc., almost always offer other cooking possibilities when they're rehydrated. I thought these dried apricots looked nice after spending the night in a jar filled with boiling water, almost doubling in size.

Soaking the apricots is the only advance step in this easy recipe, and your food processor or blender does the rest of the work. Here's the ingredients, listed in the order in which they were processed...I think it helps to do the garlic and walnuts first, to make sure they're finely ground before adding the rest:

4 garlic cloves
1/2 cup raw walnuts
1 cup dried apricots, soaked overnight (or at least a few hours) in 1 cup boiling water
2 tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 bunch (2 cups or so) fresh cilantro leaves
1/2 bunch (about 1 cup) fresh parsley
5 tbsp. walnut oil
reserved soaking water from apricots

After processing everything else in your blender or food processor, add the soaking water until the sauce reaches the consistency you like. I left mine a little thick, like a pesto.

Speaking of pesto, this evokes a classic basil pesto, but cilantro is the dominant flavor, and the pureed apricots lend both a citrus taste and a velvety texture. You could use this just about anywhere - I spread it over grilled marinated tofu, with roasted sweet potaotes, steamed broccoli, and some rice. After the photo, I just blended everything together, with the cilantro-apricot sauce smothering everything in sweet Georgian goodness.

Raw Breakfast Cakes, and Black-Eyed Pea Fritters

2009-11-08T17:39:00.000-08:00

Today's theme is brown, lumpy food that tastes way better than it may look. I promise.

I based the breakfast cakes above on Ani Phyo's coconut breakfast cakes in Ani's Raw Food Kitchen. They look like veggie burgers, but the idea is pancakes...they might be prettier if I had used golden flax seeds. The basic recipe also includes coconut oil, which is expensive but worth it, especially if you use it sparingly. Banana pieces, blueberries, maple syrup, and walnuts are worked into the "dough," and sprinkled on top.

Since flax cakes may seem aggressively health-foody, you might think the taste or texture suffers for it. Happily, they're really light, and the maple syrup and bananas combine for a silky smooth texture. Not at all gritty or chewy, which I'd expected.

Chasing away any thoughts of eating raw are these black-eyed pea fritters, from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen. They're brown, they're lumpy, and they're great. They also include peanuts, and are crunchy and spicy and greasy in the best possible way, as the soaked black-eyed pea and peanut batter nuggets are deep-fried in canola oil. I had these with a sweet and sour Thai mango dipping sauce.

Books and other good ideas

2009-11-03T20:30:00.000-08:00

This evening I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer's new book about ethical vegetarianism, Eating Animals. I just heard about it this weekend, so in my expectation and hope that it's as good as its advance reviews, I thought I'd pass it along.

Maybe it's just my selective consumption of pop culture and fleeting optimisim, but I really believe we're in that transitional time when a social justice movement is moving from punchline to something that can't be marginalized any longer. It's like the Gandhi line - first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Since I'm off food and talking about authors I like, here's another one. Karen Armstrong is leading a project called Charter for Compassion, which will be unveiled on November 12. It's an admirable effort, calling on people of all faiths - and no faith - to affirm that all of the great cultural traditions share at their core a call for compassion. Shame it's taken us a few millenia to agree on that, but better late than never.

Carrot Gnocchi with Basil Pesto

2009-10-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

Gnocchi, the tender little Italian dumplings, usually consist of cooked potatoes and flour. I see winter squash gnocchi here and there, but hadn't thought of making gnocchi with carrots until I saw the recipe in Marcella Says... , from Italian cooking jedi master Marcella Hazan. It makes perfect sense when you think about it, since boiled and especially roasted carrots develop such a sweet, squash-like flavor.

Hazan found carrot gnocchi in Friuli in northeastern Italy, and compares them favorably to pumpkin gnocchi in Venice. I adapted the recipe to omit an egg yolk, some cheese, and butter. The gnocchi binded well without the egg and cheese, and olive oil was an even match for the butter.

I first boiled the carrots until very soft, then sauteed them with onion in olive oil, until the onions were lightly browned and the carrots beginning to brown. Then they're pureed in a food processor, scraping the sides several times to make as smooth a puree as possible. Carrots aren't quite as amenable as squash or potato to pureeing, so it pays to put a little time into it.

The carrot-onion puree is seasoned with a little salt, black pepper, and nutmeg. Make a gnocchi dough by adding tablespoons of all-purpose flour until you have a very soft dough. I got by with about six tablespoons.

Hazan's method for cooking these was new to me too. First the gnocchi are boiled like dumplings for just a little while (she calls for only a few seconds, but I left them in for a minute or so), and then plunged in ice water. You do this a few gnocchi at a time, which keeps the boiling water from dropping in temperature. After they're all boiled, they're tossed with olive oil and sage leaves, and baked for about 10 minutes in a 400 F oven.

Here they are out of the oven. I coated them with a pesto of fresh basil, lemon juice, walnuts, and sun-dried tomatoes. The contrast of sweet gnocchi with the lemony basil pesto was memorable, until I make my way to Friuli someday :)

Ginger and Maple-Roasted Veggies & Tempeh

2009-10-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

I've been roasting all kinds of vegetables the past few days, one of the few good things about all the rain and cold we've been putting up with lately. I approach roast vegetables the same way I usually make soup, in that it's less about having a plan and more about using whatever odds and ends are on hand. Either way, you just cook them all together until all the flavors are mingling and getting along nicely.

This one includes brussels sprouts, apples, turnips, red bell pepper, sweet potato, mushrooms, and tempeh. After tossing everything in olive oil, it's roasted in a glass baking dish at about 375 F, with aluminum foil over the pan for the first 30 minutes. Removing the foil for the last 30 minutes or so allows for good browning...it's basically steamed for the first half hour, then roasted in dry heat for the last half hour.

Seasoning can be very simple - a little salt and pepper, along with the oil, and it's great. On the other hand, I also like adding some assertive flavors, since roasted veggies usually become sweeter and more mellow. This entry included grated fresh ginger, a half dozen whole garlic cloves, some fresh sage leaves, maple syrup, and a tbsp. of balsamic vinegar.

Tofu scramble is one of the joys of being vegan. Nutritional yeast, black salt, and turmeric transform crumbled tofu into scrambled eggs, and a bunch of fresh veggies make this look as vibrant as it tastes. It's almost November, and I'm still eating fresh cherry tomatoes, as the ones I picked before freeze are still holding up inside.

Rosemary Cannellini Beans

2009-10-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've made this a few times over the summer and fall, since I have a little rosemary plant in the garden...it's one of the final garden survivors after multiple freezing nights, along with my sage and Italian parsley plants. I've been covering them with winter coats over a wire frame every night, but I think we're losing the fight. Everything else is done and pulled out.

This is super easy, and usually a lunch time meal. Fresh rosemary leaves are tossed into a pan with lightly fried garlic in extra virgin olive oil, then the drained beans are tossed in and cooked just until they're warmed through. It's sprinkled with coarsely ground bread crumbs, also fried in a little olive oil. Sprinkle with a little salt, and splash a little more olive oil on the final product. I like to sprinkle a tiny bit of lemon juice on this too. This is worth it for the fragrance alone - rosemary is pretty subtle tasting, but the smell is wonderful - you know you're eating real food.

It's been raining, snowing, and chilly all week, and it caught up with me when I caught a little cold a couple days ago. That was my cue to make vegetable soup with kale and dumplings, and I'm feeling much better now. These dumplings are just flour, Earth Balance margarine, and water, mixed to the consistency of a slightly gooey bread dough. Added to a hot pot of soup, they're cooked for about 10 minutes on a low simmer.

I made this a little while back, but forgot to include it here. On the left are cumin-spiced oyster mushrooms, and on the right sauteed green pea shoots with tamari and sesame oil. I've just discovered pea shoots this summer, and I'm a big fan. They taste like fresh green peas, with the texture of spinach, so they cook in just minutes. In the middle is fried marinated tofu, with a tamarind glaze from Vegan Yum Yum. Here's the tamarind recipe from the VYY blog, also in the cookbook.

Smoky Spicy Spanish Seitan Sausages

2009-10-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

I think seitan is an acquired taste for some people, but it lends itself to some delicious creations, especially when coming up with meat analogs. When making seitan, or other patties or sausages featuring wheat gluten, I like using bold spices and flavors. These don't mask so much as outshine the taste of straight wheat gluten, which I'll admit isn't the top reason to go vegan.

With that approach in mind, I intentionally went into high gear with the spices in these sausages. They're close relatives of the chorizo recipe in Vegan Brunch, with a heavy dose of smoked Spanish paprika, aka Pimenton de la Vera. I even used a little liquid smoke, which I'm usually not very crazy about, ever since a traumatic episode with a pot of chili. That's when I learned that a little liquid smoke goes a very long way, and a lot of liquid smoke will ruin a pot of chili beyond any hope of repair. I'm coming back around to appreciate it in certain recipes, though it should be used drop by drop. Maybe even with a syringe :)

Here's my ingredients:
1 1/4 cup vital wheat gluten flour
1/3 cup chickpea flour
3 cloves garlic, finely minced, or ideally grated with a microplane
1 cup water (or vegetable broth, if you have some)
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp. nutritional yeast
2 tbsp. tomato paste
2 tbsp. smoked Spanish paprika
1 tbsp. tamari, braggs, or soy sauce
1 tbsp. hot red pepper flakes
1 tsp. cayenne powder
1/8 tsp (just a couple drops) liquid smoke
1 tsp. ground black pepper
1/2 tsp. sea salt

The easiest way to do these is with two bowls. Mix the flours and nutritional yeast flakes in one bowl, and the grated garlic, water or broth, oil, tomato paste, and spices in another bowl. When both are well combined, mix together and stir just until all of the flour is incorporated. Divide into four equal portions.

If you don't have Vegan Brunch, the trick to making these is to form them into vaguely sausagey shapes, then wrap fairly tightly in aluminum foil. I steam these in a vegetable steamer in my soup pot, first bringing the water to a quick boil, then steaming over very low heat for about an hour. While they're cooking they expand into the aluminum foil rolls to form perfect cylinders. Pretty neat.

I made a couple of rice dishes with sausage chunks lightly sauteed in olive oil. The first is sort of a no-bake version of a baked Mediterranean rice and tomato recipe. Seitan sausages, fried onions, garden tomatoes, Italian parsley, and white rice. Sprinkled with a little more extra virgin olive oil, smoked paprika, and sea salt, and it sounds pretty good to me.

This is the same rice and seitan base, with fried onions, pistachios, and plump raisins that were soaked in hot water. I'll call it a pilaf, as it's seasoned with ground cumin and coriander, and has a sort of Middle Eastern feel. I love soaked raisins in savory dishes, because they're these sweet, juicy little surprises amid the all the spiciness.

Cherry Tomato and Olive Pizza

2009-10-05T17:01:00.001-07:00

If this looks suspiciously similar to my previous post, it's because I had a fair amount of leftover dough when I made focaccia a few days ago. I'm calling this one a pizza, but it's the exact same dough recipe and baking time. One handy trick I learned baking these is to finish the pizza/focaccia by carefully removing it from your pizza pan, and baking it for the final 3 to 5 minutes right on the oven rack. This ensures a crispy, crunchy, deliciously golden-brown bottom crust.

I'm savoring this one, because it contains some of my last cherry and green zebra tomatoes, along with chopped kalamata olives and oregano. I have a few tomatoes left outside, but I know it's going to freeze soon...we might even get a little snow tonight, which I'm in complete denial about.

Focaccia with Portobello Mushrooms and Crispy Sage

2009-10-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

My job was rained out today and yesterday, which hasn't happened for months. Although it's pretty early in the fall to start having rain or snow days, I can't say I don't love the idea of a surprise four-day weekend :)

Since I knew I'd have some time on my hands, I decided to bake bread. I also have a beautiful sage plant in the garden, so this focaccia recipe from Lynne Rosetto Kasper's The Italian Country Table looked like a good idea. The recipe calls for 30 fresh sage leaves, fried to a light crisp in olive oil, and topping the bread along with mushrooms and garlic.

I've made focaccia a couple of times before, but this was my favorite. It might be because of the accidental mix of flours - using what I had on hand in half-empty bags, this contains whole wheat pastry flour, all-purpose flour, and spelt flour. This was absolutely delicious, especially straight out of the oven, and accompanied with Kasper's recommendation of a little red wine. If only every day was a day off.

I'll steal a paragraph from Lynne to close out - she has a wonderful way of presenting food in a cultural context that somehow makes the results even more enjoyable:

"So what is focaccia? In my Italian dictionary, similar words reveal an intriguing pattern. Focolaio means focus, hotbed, center of all. Focolare is hearth, fireplace, home and focus. In Italy, they say, "I return to my hearth," when telling of going back home. The word focaccia can embrace all low breads and tarts, leavened or unleavened, that are baked on a griddle like a pancake, baked in shallow pans buried in embers on the hearth or baked in the oven."

- from The Italian Country Table, by Lynne Rosetto Kasper

Buttercup Squash & Sage Ravioli (with Roasted Garlic & Walnut Sauce)

2009-09-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

We're in that nice seasonal window when the gardens are still producing, the farmers markets are still rolling, and it's cool enough at night to turn on the oven and roast some veggies. Last night I roasted a bunch of garlic, a dozen beets, and a buttercup squash. I like doing this with a bunch of vegetables on the weekend, so they're easy and convenient for lunch and quick suppers during the week.

Today I used about half of the squash to make ravioli. Instead of making my own ravioli wrappers, I cheated and used gyoza wrappers. Gyoza or won ton wrappers lend themselves nicely to making ravioli, even though it's not exactly traditional. Just be careful to read the ingredients, since many brands contain eggs.

This ravioli filling was a fun balance of sweet and savory - natural sweetness from the roast squash, countered with roasted garlic, lots of fresh sage leaves, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. That's a walnut and roasted garlic sauce on the ravioli above - I wasn't crazy about the sauce's color, but it had great flavor.

Here's the breakdown, starting with the squash filling. These quantities made me about 15 ravioli:
1 1/2 cups of roasted buttercup (or any other sweet) squash
4 or 5 cloves of roasted garlic
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
salt to taste
black pepper to taste
1/2 tsp ground peppercorn medley (optional - I just bought a McCormick peppercorn medley grinder, with a few different peppercorns, coriander, and allspice - good matches for squash)
12 to 15 fresh sage leaves, minced (or 2 tsp rubbed dry sage)
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

1. Mash the cooled squash and garlic together with a fork - it doesn't need to be completely smooth, just well combined. Meanwhile, saute the fresh sage leaves in the olive oil, just for a minute or two.

2. Add in the rest of the spices, and salt to taste. Mix well and set aside.

3. Making the ravioli is simple once you do a couple. First, have about a half cup of water on hand - you'll use this to dip your fingers in, then use your fingers to moisten and seal the edges of the pasta. Place a heaping spoonful of squash filling in the center of one gyoza or won ton wrapper, being careful not to smear squash on the edges.

4. Moisten and seal the edge of the wrapper all around, then crimp together tightly in order to seal them well. If they're not well-sealed, you'll know when you cook them. You can crimp them any way you like - I used a fork on the first one below - top left - but decided to just use my fingers and crimp them all the way around like gyozas. This turns the ravioli into little bowls, which work as little basins to hold a bunch of sauce. This wasn't planned, but seems like a good idea in hindsight :)

5. You can cook these in boiling water, but I just sauted them in a little olive oil on the flat side. Then add just enough water to cover them about halfway, and cover the pan. Kept on medium heat, this steams the ravioli - the advantage over boiling is that they move around less, and are thus less prone to breaking apart or coming unsealed.

The walnut sauce is a lot easier. Just put these ingredients in a blender or food processor:

3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup raw walnuts
5 cloves roasted garlic
3/4 cup flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
2 tbsp. tomato paste
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup water (or pasta water if you boil the ravioli)

And blend to make a smooth sauce. If it's not combining down, add a little more water. I warmed this in a sauce pan just before serving, but there's no need to cook it. Toss the sauce with the ravioli, and enjoy! These are sort of labor-intensive, but worth the trouble.

Here's a bowl of chili I made earlier this week. It's with some leftover guajillo chile sauce from the previous post. I was trying to think of ways to use it up, and then the obvious one hit me. It's a bean and seitan chili, with garden tomatoes and a healthy shot of guajillo sauce.

Guajillo Chile Enchiladas, Two Ways

2009-09-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not yet ready to fly solo when making sauces with dried chile peppers, so I had my copy of Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen on the counter for this one. Yesterday I made my first sauce with guajillo chiles, and I was skeptical at first about what I was getting myself into. Before cooking, the sauce of guajillos, garlic, spices, and broth was unpleasantly, almost painfully hot, and I had that feeling that I'd just wasted a bunch of ingredients. I kept right along with the recipe though (and Bayless warns about the perils of raw chile heat), and after a half hour I had seared and simmered the sauce down to something impressive. It was thick, a beautiful brick red, and had fantastic flavor. Still hot, but in a great way. It mellowed while cooking in some kind of magical, alchemical way, and turned into something special.

I made an enchilada filling of tempeh, spinach, mushrooms, onion, and garlic. First I fried a crumbled 8 oz. package of tempeh in hot oil until it was browned and starting to get crunchy. I removed this from the pan, and sauteed the mushrooms, onions, and garlic, along with a little ground cumin, until everything was soft and fragrant. The raw spinach and browned tempeh went back in, and cooked just until the spinach was wilted down.

I took two approaches to making the enchiladas. The first photo above is a little trickier, and messier, than the second method. To make those enchiladas on top I quickly dipped corn tortillas in the guajillo sauce (completely cool by now), then fried them in hot canola oil for just a few seconds on each side. This sort of sears the sauce into the tortillas, but I found they were really fragile to work with...might have been the brand, which is a very soft tortilla. These were really tasty, and I loved how the sauce is fried into the tortilla. On the down side, it was kind of a mess to make these, and I got tired of torn tortillas.

The second method is much easier, and like enchiladas I've made before. Corn tortillas are stuffed with a little filling, rolled up, and packed into a baking pan on top of a little chile sauce. Extra chile sauce is poured over the top, and I baked them for just 20 minutes or so at 400 F. This was really good too, but not quite as exciting as the top version. I think I would go to the trouble of making those for company or a special occasion, while the simple oven version is good enough for every day enchiladas.

This guajillo sauce really is something though - worth a try if you're curious, and it's fun to watch the transformation of the sauce. The final product is something you can really be proud of, and it tastes really authentic.

Here's a couple more for the road. I picked up the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook last week - I love her site, and the cookbook has all of the quality and gorgeous photos as the blog. My humble little spelt flour pancakes look pretty ho-hum, but it's a great pancake recipe. I sort of fell in with the maple syrup, as you can see.

Finally, a stuffed green pepper. This wasn't especially exciting, but I think it's going somewhere. The idea was to mix cooked quinoa with the flavors of old school cream of mushroom soup. Man, I loved that stuff growing up. It's getting there, but my recipe isn't quite in shape yet.

Hmong-inspired Chik'n & Tomato Stir Fry

2009-09-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest reason why I love having a seemingly endless supply of cherry tomatoes this summer. It's adapted from a cookbook I picked up over the weekend, about Hmong cooking in America.

There is a big Hmong population in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and they have wonderful farmer's markets in the cities. It's one of many food traditions where I'm really curious but not very experienced, so I was happy to find this book - Cooking From The Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America - over the weekend. The book is equal parts recipes and cultural history, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

Lots of the recipes are heavy on fresh herbs like mint and cilantro, and Asian greens - sounds good, right? The first thing I made was based on a chicken and tomato stir fry, which the authors say is more Hmong-American than traditional Hmong food from Laos.

Here's the ingredients:
1 tbsp. canola oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled, lightly crushed, and coarsely chopped
6 scallions - I used everything, saving some of the green ends for garnish
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/2 a package of Morningstar chik'n strips (chicken-style seitan, or any seitan for that matter, would be good too)
20 or so cherry tomatoes
1 tbsp. tamari
1 tsp. agave nectar (sugar would work fine too)
lime juice
black pepper

1. Stir fry the garlic and scallions for 2 or 3 minutes in the oil, just until they begin to soften and become fragrant. Add the mock chicken or seitan, reduce heat, and cover for five minutes - just to steam the mock chicken or seitan until it's nice and hot.

2. Add the tomatoes and cilantro, and stir fry over medium heat just until the tomatoes are warm and the cilantro wilts a little bit. There's no need to overcook either, to keep the flavors nice and bright.

3. The original recipe calls for oyster sauce, but I finished this with tamari and agave nectar, mixed with just a couple tablespoons of water. Mix it in at the end, again just until everything is hot - a minute is enough.

4. I added lime juice to complement the fresh flavors of the green scallion ends and cilantro, but it's just fine without. Season to taste with black pepper, and eat immediately - I made some good white rice, which soaked up the flavors beautifully :)

This was worth snapping a photo too - chickpea croquettes from this month's Vegetarian Times, with a Greek-seasoned tomato and cucumber salad. The croquettes include roughly equal parts canned chickpeas and chickpea flour. I'm learning that chickpea flour is good in all kinds of places, and here it takes a star turn instead of a supporting role.

Tomatoes and other goodness

2009-09-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

If there is any food out there better than a fresh-picked tomato in the sunshine, I would love to hear about it. My tomato plants have been producing ripe fruit for over a month now, and they peaked this past weekend, when I picked a big basket full. My neighbor's have a dozen or so plants too, and they're sagging with huge, ripe, amazing tomatoes. I'll have to do some canning this weekend - I'm cooking with them and of course eating them raw as much as I can, but I can't keep up. What a great problem to have.

Besides the tomatoes, my family gave me a ton of fresh veggies when I was home last weekend. My sister's family has a big garden out in the country, and they gave me a bunch of pototoes, zucchini, these great twisty cucumbers, and peppers. To round things out, my parents gave me some sweet corn, a big bag of carrots and two big bunches of onions. And last week my brother, nephew, and I went down to a cool public apple orchard south of town and filled a couple bags. Needless to say my tiny kitchen is stuffed with veggies, and I'm just trying to keep up with everything at this point.

I'll keep this post to tomatoes, since I think they deserve the most attention, and everything else keeps a little longer. I've been making tomato-based suppers just about every night - there's a pot of marinara sauce on the stove right now. Here's a couple of pics of how tomatoes have been making me happy the last few days:

Another stove-top tomato sauce, over polenta slices. I mixed an ear of sweet corn in with the polenta, along with some fresh Italian parsley and basil.

I'm eating cherry tomatoes all day long. Here they're mixed with a tofu scramble, with some grated carrots and zucchini.

Just about every day, for lunch or an after-work snack, I make a little tomato and cucumber salad. They're the peanut butter and jelly of fresh summer veggies, really loving each other. Here they're joined by walnuts and walnut oil, with just a little sea salt. Walnut oil has a subtle flavor, and naturally complements walnuts really well. I'll have at least one full day off this weekend, so I'm looking forward to spending some more time cooking with the bounty in the kitchen. I know that in January I'll be dreaming of these days :)

Chard Empanadas with Zebra Tomato Salsa

2009-08-30T20:44:00.000-07:00

I share my little garden plot in the backyard with my next door neighbors, and we have a free trade policy regarding the veggies. They've taken a few zucchini and tomatoes off of my hands, and their patch of swiss chard has provided me with greens since the spinach gave up earlier this summer. The chard is still growing like crazy, so I picked a bunch to make these empanadas over the weekend.

Empanadas take on a variety of forms and fillings around Latin America. Basically, it's a dough of wheat or corn flour - sometimes mixed with cooked and mashed plantains or potatoes - stuffed with a sweet or savory filling. They're either baked or fried, and we went the baking route here since it was cool enough to use the oven.

I love cooked savory greens in tacos or enchiladas, so empanadas seemed like a great place to put a mess of greens. Here's my simple filling ingredients and recipe:

5 or so cups swiss chard leaves with thick stems removed, or any other greens like kale, collards, or spinach
2 tbsp. raisins (optional, but I love raisins with greens)
1 medium white onion, diced
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
salt and black pepper to taste

1. Heat oil over medium heat, and saute onions until soft and translucent - 5 minutes or so - mixing in cumin and cinnamon towards the end, just to toast the spices a little.

2. Add greens and raisins, and just enough water - no more than a tbsp. or so is necessary - to steam the greens a little. Cook over medium heat for a few minutes until the leaves wilt, and then turn heat to low and continue cooking until most of the moisture has evaporated, another 5 minutes or so. Cooking the greens until they're a bit on the dry side helps keep the empanadas from getting soggy during baking.

My shortcut here is a set of plastic turnover makers my mom gave me - old school empanada cooks probably would never use anything like this, but I love my kitchen gadgets. Here's what I'm talking about:

My mom and I used these to make sweet pumpkin turnovers when I was home last fall (can't remember the German or Norwegian name for them right now). They're like little omelette makers - you drape a disc of thinly rolled dough over the turnover maker, fill with a couple spoonfuls of greens, and fold together, applying enough pressure to seal the edges. You could do the same thing by hand, but these things eliminate all stress from empanada production.

What about the dough? I used about a half cup of masa harina, or fine corn flour, and about one and a half cups of all-purpose flour, along with 2 tbsp. olive oil and 2 tbsp. canola oil. This was mostly guesswork, like most of my work with bread dough. Mix the flours and oil, along with a little salt, until the flour and oil are well-combined. Add just enough water, mixing constantly, until the dough no longer sticks to your fingers. I chilled this overnight, covered with plastic wrap so it didn't dry out.

Letting the dough rest overnight, or at least a few hours, seems to make it easier to work with, and less prone to tearing or falling apart during assembly of anything like this.

Writing instructions for working with bread dough or baking always intimidates me a little - I just won't pretend to any expertise - so let's talk about salsa. Salsa I can handle :)

I have three varieties of heirloom tomatoes in the garden - Arkansas Travellers, something French, and Green Zebras. The zebras are ripening first, and they're amazing. I didn't want to overwhem their flavor in this salsa, so it's just the basics. A cup of diced tomatoes, 1 tbsp. diced white onion, 2 tbsp. cilantro, and a tiny splash of lime juice, with a sprinkle of salt.

If you're still with me, I baked the assembled empanadas for about 25 minutes at 400 F, turning them over half way through. You'll know when they're done, as the edges turn golden brown. This is a good recipe for making ahead of time, and the assembled empanadas would keep well covered with plastic wrap in the fridge for a day or so before baking or frying. This is nice stuff to make for friends or family, but it's just as good tearing into a pile of piping hot empanadas and fresh salsa on your own. It's a little trouble, but worth it.

Campfire Ratatouille & Wasabi Mashed Potatoes

2009-08-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

I couldn't let summer go by without making ratatouille, with everything coming from the garden or the Fargo-Moorhead farmer's market. It was hot and humid when when I made this earlier in the week, so I fired up the grill instead of using the oven.

I can't do a ratatouille post without giving props to the movie, which is not only a great food movie, but one of my favorite films from the past few years. If you want to see a beautiful tribute to the Ratatouille version of the classic dish from Provence, check out this post from A simple kind of life from a few months back. My ratatouille on the grill isn't nearly as elegant, but still tastes great.

The idea for ratatouille on the grill comes from a "campfire ratatouille" recipe in American Wholefoods Cuisine, by Nikki and David Goldbeck. It's a massive collection of vegetarian recipes, published in the early 80s, and back in print. It was the first vegetarian cookbook I really got into when I found it on some friends' bookshelf years ago.

This contains all the ratatouille regulars, with eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and red onions. It's all tossed in a cast iron pan with lots of extra virgin olive oil, a little white wine, salt and pepper, and dried oregano and thyme. I added fresh basil and flat leaf parsley towards the end. This was on the grill for around a half hour - I let it cook down to something that resembled a chunky pasta sauce, and used it with rice and pasta for the next few days.

This next dish isn't the prettiest thing I've ever made, but was great comfort food. Wasabi powder and fresh grated ginger are mixed in with the mashed potatoes...great as long as you don't go overboard with the wasabi. On the left is Miso Mushroom Ambrosia, from Lynne Rosetto Kasper's How to Cook Supper. I'm kind of obsessive about listening to The Splendid Table on NPR every weekend, and found her new book at the library. I might need to buy this one - a great mix of recipes, commentary, and passion for good food, just like the show. I added tofu to the miso mushroom recipe for a little protein. Topped with fresh chives, it was a nice mix of meat-and-potatoes comfort food with some lively East Asian character.

Squash Blossom Crema, and my favorite summer cookbooks

2009-08-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm determined not to let a single squash blossom go to waste this summer. This is a recipe I've been looking forward to since I picked up Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen a few months ago. This soup is chock full of pumpkin blossoms from my brother and sister-in-law's garden, and garnished with some of my zucchini blossoms.

This recipe turned out great, and the handful of vegan replacement ingredients were excellent - I'm pretty sure most people would be surprised there's no dairy here. Almond milk and vegan chicken broth powder provide savory and creamy elements, along with a boiled potato - I blended the soup in the food processor halfway through, and the potato provides a silky texture when blended. Sweet corn, diced zucchini, and roasted poblano pepper give the soup additional heartiness.

Bayless's recipe calls for a half cup of cream, so I used soaked and well-blended raw cashews. Unless you have a really great blender, this is the only time-consuming part. After scraping the sides a few times, and adding just enough liquid to make a cream, soaked and blended cashews make a nice cream substitute.

Of course, the majority of vegan food doesn't need dairy or meat stand-ins to achieve delicious flavor. That's why summer is the perfect time for the two Donna Klein cookbooks in my collection - The Meditteranean Vegan Kitchen, and Vegan Italiano. In both books, Klein builds awesome vegan dishes around fruits, veggies, fresh herbs, seeds, grains, and nuts, without using dairy or meat replacements to mimic anything. I turn to these books often this time of year, because her approach really lets fresh ingredients play the starring role. Above is one of my favorite ways to prepare fresh greens - spinach with raisins and walnuts. This recipe works well with all kinds of greens - kale, chard, collards, etc.

This is another Donna Klein recipe - grape tomatoes from my garden, sauteed in olive oil just until the skins start to wrinkle, then tossed while hot with red basil, sweet green basil, cilantro, and Italian parsley. As much as I love snacking on tomatoes right from the vine, this tastes even better.

Tired feet and paws on the Superior Hiking Trail

2009-08-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a break from food here to post some pictures from the Superior Hiking Trail, where the pups and I spent the last few days walking and camping. It's one of my favorite places anywhere, though trail life lost a little charm on Wednesday, when we were soaked to the bones by rain all day long. I'm already starting to miss it though, sitting here in my dry apartment with a cup of tea :)

The SHT is a trail system running from Duluth, Minnesota, along the north shore of Lake Superior, to the Canadian border near Grand Portage. We did a middle section, between Baptism River and Caribou River. Northern Minnesota, especially near the big lake, is a beautiful place. The trail climbs to mountain tops with expansive views of Lake Superior, winds inland to tranquil and isolated lakes, crossing clear streams and dense forest along the way. I did a little trail work here with MCC a few summers ago, and it was my first time back.

I'll let the photos do the talking from here, with a little explanation along the way. The top photo is from Lilly's Island on Sonju Lake. It's barely an island - a few big rocks with some pine trees, but a peaceful and charming place, connected to the mainland by a narrow boardwalk.

This is a popular rock climbing area called Section 13, dramatic cliffs rising above the Sawmill Creek and Baptism River valleys. We stopped here for lunch and a rest - here's Maya, who loved to run up to cliff edges along the trail and peak over. Both dogs were on leashes on the trail - not always my favorite way to hike, but a good idea here.

Our section of the trial is said to be prime moose habitat. We didn't see any - just tracks - but here's Otter doing her moose impression in Egge Lake. This is black bear country too, so we kept our beans and rice and dog biscuits tied up between the trees every night.

I can't talk about the SHT without talking about berries. Great stretches of trail are essentially berry buffets - raspberries were in abundance, along with my favorite berry, the thimbleberry. Ripe thimbleberries make me very happy, partly because this is the only area where I've found them.

Speaking of berries, trail food doesn't get much better than this - a peanut butter and berry bagel sandwich, sort of a proto-PB&J, with raspberries and thimbleberries.

We heard more wildlife than we saw - grouse, loons, woodpeckers, and lots of other birds. But I was so proud of myself when I spotted this little dude. Toads have been one of my favorite animals since I was a little kid, and this is the coolest toad camoflage I've ever seen up close. He looks exactly like this rock, and much like the surrounding forest floor. I snapped a quick picture and snuck away. Didn't want to make him feel bad since I noticed him there.

Here's a giant rock along the trail, known as a glacial erratic. It's around 20 feet high, sitting alone in the forest like it got lost along the way to a mountain.

One more lake before I go - this is Wolf Lake, home to the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. You know how it is - photos never quite capture these places, but the view from the cliffs over this lake was just gorgeous.

One more pic of the dogs, for the road. This was late on our last day, and we were all pretty soaked at this point. We stopped here to rest and check the map, in a grove of towering old cedars, along a little stream. Cedar groves were the only relatively dry places in the woods at this point. After this the choice was camping another night with wet everything, or hitchhiking out on forest service and county roads. We took the hitchhiking option, which turned into a mostly walking and getting even wetter option, though we got a little help on the way from a delivery truck driver - you can't beat random acts of kindness.

Heirloom Tomato Panzanella

2009-08-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

I picked up these heirloom tomatoes last weekend at the Fargo-Moorhead farmer's market - I'm not sure what the varieties are, but each had a different character. My favorites were a mottled red and green on the inside, and were sweeter than any tomato I've ever had - sorry I don't know the variety, because I'd love to recommend it :)

Panzanella is an Italian dish built around stale bread, tomatoes, and other veggies. I based my version on a simple and elegant take by Lidia Bastianich, in a short piece she did for Time magazine a couple months ago. It's about ways to recycle old bread, instead of tossing it out. Here's my panzanella, featuring cubes from a loaf of multigrain bread a little past its prime.

In addition to the tomatoes, we have some thin sliced cucumbers, red onion, and fresh basil. For seasoning I used about 2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil, about the same amount of red wine vinegar, and salt and pepper. That's all there is to it - everything is tossed together, and left to mingle for at least 10 minutes. My bread cubes were very dry, so I recommend a little more time if that's the case. Even with very dry and hard bread, the oil and vinegar will moisten the bread and add great flavor. Here's another pic, just because I like this so much.

Continuing the non-cooking theme, I made another fun recipe from Ani's Raw Food Kitchen. This is one of her breakfast scrambles - raw almonds and sunflower seeds, ground and mixed with water and turmeric for that great color. Delicious stuff, mixed with tomatoes, mushrooms, and fresh basil, rosemary, and Italian parsley.

Stuffed Zucchini Squash Blossoms

2009-08-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting all summer to try making stuffed and fried squash blossoms, and finally got around to it yesterday. I thought stuffing and battering these delicate, feathery blossoms might turn into a disappointing mess, and I was happily so wrong. It's really easy, and if you have access to fresh blossoms - I think any squash works, from zucchini to pumpkin - I promise you will love these things! I don't promise much, so that's how I feel about these.

To start things, I googled vegan squash blossom recipes, and found this very helpful recent post from Tami at Vegan Appetite. I did my breading a little differently, but did a similar cashew cheeze filling - I especially like the touch of white miso with the cashews. My full recipe is below, but here's the final product:

Let's start with fresh blossoms. Mine are usually wide open in the morning, and then close up later in the day...I don't know if picking them at either stage makes a difference, but I picked these later in the afternoon when they were closed up. I've also seen pictures of flowers for sale at farmer's markets that are wide open and blooming. Here's a little bowl of blossoms, along with some fresh herbs that I mixed with the creamy cashew filling.

I made the filling first. Here's the ingredients, blended to a thick, creamy consistency. You could probably get away with using unsoaked cashews if you're in a hurry, but soaking helps make a creamier cheese.

1/2 cup raw cashews, soaked for at least a couple hours, or overnight, and drained
1/4 cup raw walnuts
1 tbsp. shiro (white) miso
2 tbsp. nutritional yeast flakes (optional, but great if you like nooch)
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
chopped fresh herbs - sage, Italian parsley, and basil, between a teaspoon and tablespoon of each
salt and black pepper to taste

First process everything but the herbs in a blender or food processor, and mix in the herbs at the end. I think it would look more like a pesto if you add the herbs at the beginning, which would work too. Here's the cashew filling - maybe not the prettiest thing you've ever seen, but delicious - I could eat this by the spoonful.

The tricky part of making these little guys is, of course, getting the filling inside the flower. Some people recommend removing the little inside part of the flower...wikipedia says stigma or pistil, and I bet any flower people totally know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I didn't bother, and didn't notice anything. I say don't worry about it.

My cake decorating funnel bag made filling the blossoms a snap. If you don't have one, you can just cut a small corner off a plastic sandwich bag. Doing this with a little spoon would work too, but I think it would be harder. I filled each blossom about 2/3 full. Back to the Vegan Appetite post, Tami suggests using a little filling to get the blossoms to stick together and stay closed. That's what I did, and it worked perfectly. Here's the stuffed blossoms:

I skipped taking pictures during the breading process, since my hands were a mess and I'm tired of getting food on my camera :)

I'm always tinkering with how to get breading/battering right, and wanted a light, crispy crust for these. This worked pretty well.

1. In one bowl, mix about a cup of water or unsweetened nondairy milk with about a tbsp. of corn starch or potato starch - I used enerG egg replacer, which is mostly potato starch. Mix regularly while you're doing this, so the starch stays suspended in the liquid.

2. In a second bowl, I mixed a half cup of all-purpose flour with about a tsp. of salt, and generous sprinkles of black pepper, dried thyme, oregano, and sage.

3. With your fingers or tongs, carefully dip a blossom first in flour mixture, shaking off extra flour after removal. Then immerse the blossom in the starch/liquid mixture. Finally, dip the moistened blossom back in the flower mixture, coat completely, and again lightly shake off excess flour.

4. Almost there! I fried each blossom for about five minutes, in preheated oil on the stove top. I used a combination of peanut and olive oil, which may sound weird. My unscientific thinking is that peanut oil takes a long time to start smoking, and olive oil tastes really good, so I went for the best of both worlds. A deep frier would be handy, but I used my cast iron fry pan.

There you go. I thought of eating these with some kind of dipping sauce, but they tasted way too good to mess around with making a sauce.

Nigiri Sushi & Zucchini Pizza

2009-07-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

I'm torn between two conflicting forces. On the one hand, I try hard not to buy stuff I don't need - consumerism, simplicity, and so on. On the other hand, I'm a sucker for those kitchen gadgets that may have an extremely limited function, but perform that function extraordinarily well. Enter my new nigiri sushi maker - the consumer wins the day.

Nigiri sushi can be made by hand, but this little plastic sushi maker is totally awesome. Stuff some toppings and seasoned rice in the ice cube-shaped mold, press together with a second piece, and pop out perfect nigiri sushi that sticks together like magic. It makes five at a time, so it's quick too. Limited time offer! Buy now! But wait, there's more!

Aren't they the cutest things though? I cut slices of toasted nori to wrap the little guys, like the pros do. There you go...fight the recession, go buy stuff you don't need :)

We've had a cool July here. I know parts of the US are roasting this summer, but it was cool enough one night this week to turn the oven on and make a pizza. This is topped with thinly sliced fresh tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, onions (pre-carmelized in a pan before adding), zucchini, and mushrooms. The basil leaves were added after turning off the heat - I put them on the pizza, and popped it back in the oven for just a couple minutes to wilt the leaves. After snapping the photo I added nutritional yeast, red pepper flakes, and more olive oil.

Every time I make pizza or see it on blogs now I'm even more convinced that vegan pizza is the way pizza was always meant to be.

Shojin Cooking

2009-07-26T21:45:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of pictures of simple plates from The Enlightened Kitchen, Mari Fujii's beautiful book on Japanese Buddhist temple food - shojin ryori. In a nice opening essay, Fujii defines shojin cuisine as free of animal products, in line with the Buddhist ethic of nonviolence. Seasonal ingredients, and simple flavors like soy sauce, mirin, and miso are other hallmarks of temple food. The tradition is to begin the meal with soup, followed by a main course with rice. Shojin tradition has an interesting prohibition on leeks, scallions, garlic, and onion - according to Fujii because this family of veggies promotes certain energies which complicate a monk's training.

I add garlic and onions to almost everything without even thinking about it, and shojin cooking is one of those "less is more" concepts - by removing ingredients we are so accustomed to, it allows the basic flavors of the underlying vegetables to shine through.

I have two of the entree recipes here - above are shiitake mushrooms stuffed with tofu, and below zucchini with a peanut butter and miso sauce. I used zucchini to replace pumpkin in the original recipe, since the garden dictates all zucchini, all the time right now. I made this before with acorn squash, which was a better match for the rich sauce of peanut and miso, but fried zucchini was still pretty good. Most of Fujii's recipes are for lighter soups, salads, and sides, so I hope these heavier dishes don't misrepresent the cookbook. It's worth checking out if you find it, with recipes I haven't seen anywhere else, and tantalizing photos of almost every dish.

Below is a recipe from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's The Vegan Table. I just added black grapes to canteloupe with a sweet coconut milk-lime juice sauce. Her recipe calls for honeydew, but any melon would be great with the rich coconut topping.

I made this rice salad over the weekend too - it's short grain brown rice, with carrots, edamame, and hijiki, marinated in lemon juice, sesame oil, and tamari. Continuing the parade of cookbooks, this is from The Complete Vegan Kitchen, by Jannequin Bennett.

On Sunday the pups and I went out for a hike on a section of the North Country Trail, through the Sheyenne National Grasslands in southeastern North Dakota. This is a new trail system, running from Lake Sakakawea in ND all the way east to New York, though I'm not sure if the entire length has been linked and marked with trailposts. It's the upper midwest/rust belt's answer to the Appalachian Trail. It was another perfect day, but pretty hot.

Otter took a dip every time we passed a pond or a water hole on ranch land.

Otter and Maya leading the way through the high plains. There were lots of wildflowers still blooming, after a wet spring and early summer. Here's North Dakota's state flower, and one of my faves, the prairie rose.

German Borscht, classic sammies, and gardens gone wild

2009-07-23T20:12:00.000-07:00

I don't really know the details, but somehow my dad's side of my family ended up in North Dakota a century or so ago. Chances are pretty good that we were part of the mass immigration of Germans living in Russia who immigrated to the Great Plains of the US at the end of the 19th century. I mention this here only because somewhere along the way dad learned how to make a mean borscht, the eastern European beet soup.

When I was a kid, we had this tradition where dad would make borscht once in the summer, always on a Sunday, outside on a Coleman camp stove. Usually the whole family would get together for it. As I remember, it was made strictly with food from the garden, so we usually had it this time of year. As soon as we had beets, potatoes, and carrots, we would make this soup, with beet roots and beet greens as the centerpiece. Dad would always use a beef bone stock, which my veggie stock replaces here in fine style, thank you very much :)

I made this myself for the first time over the weekend, with fresh veggies from the farmer's market in Fargo. The beets and carrots were oven-roasted before adding to the soup, which also contains shredded cabbage, beet greens, new red potatoes, onion, garlic, and barley. If you like a deep red soup, my method works fine, since the roasted beets turn every bit of the soup red in a couple of hours. My dad's version always had a more clear stock, and I guess his trick was to boil the beets separately, and then strain off the liquid and add the cooked beets to the rest of the soup in a second pot. Beyond the veggies, seasoning is just salt, pepper, and a generous shot of fresh lemon juice.

So there you go. Even without the beef stock, my first spoonful of borscht was one of those transporting moments when taste evokes memories, like going back in time. I'm sure this recipe hasn't changed much since the German immigrants were making it in the 19th century, so I'm happy to keep at it.

Here's a couple of vegan takes on classic sandwiches too. Above is a seitan BLT, with fresh tomatoes - this thing was totally bursting with flavor, thanks mostly to real summer tomatoes. I gave thinly sliced seitan a quick treatment with the usual tempeh bacon recipe, frying the slices with a little maple syrup, tamari, and a wee bit of liquid smoke. There's a nice tempeh bacon recipe in The Vegan Table, among other books and blogs.

And this was lunch today. Vegan Brunch introduced many of us to black salt - you may find it as kala namak in Indian/Asian grocery stores - which magically adds the sulfury taste of actual eggs for all of those great vegan egg style dishes. I finally picked up a package - it's cheap! - at my local place, after Bianca over at Vegan Crunk made what may be the first ever vegan deviled eggs with it (speaking of food from my childhood). Can't wait to try those!

Anyway, that's a tofu salad sandwich, with good ol' kala namak making it taste just like an old school egg salad sandwich. Are vegans awesome, or what?

Finally, a picture of my garden...we hardly ever stop complaining about the weather up here, between endless winters, spring floods, and hot, humid and windy summers, but summer this year has been uncommonly mild and just beautiful. The garden is loving it. My nextdoor neighbors share the west end of this chaotic mess, on the left side. I think we were a little over-excited in the spring, and planted more than this space can take. Let me run down what's in this thing - butternut squash, turnips, swiss chard, kohlrabi, spinach, five kinds of salad greens, Italian parsley, basil, red basil, sage, rosemary, fennel, zucchini, and five kinds of tomato plants, plus at least three volunteer tomato plants from last year that already have fruit on them. I don't know what the hell we were thinking, but it's sure fun to go exploring in there. There's a line of tomato plants trailing off the left side out to the street too.

Polenta, Zucchini, and Tomato Napoleon; & Cherry BBQ Seitan

2009-07-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

This summer vegetable napoleon has a few things going on. First, I picked up Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's The Vegan Table this week, and made a pan of polenta with sun-dried tomatoes and fresh garden herbs, from her beautiful "polenta hearts" recipe. She includes nutritional yeast in her polenta recipes - the nutritional yeast flavor isn't as pronounced as it is in most vegan cheese recipes, but it adds a subtle yet rich dimension to polenta.

I went all fancy and made this napoleon stack because I wanted to do something special with my first tomato of the summer, which I picked up with a bunch of other goodies at the Fargo farmer's market down by the river...I try to make it down there every Saturday morning during the summer. It's amazing to taste the first real tomatoes of summer, after eating canned tomatoes or the ones from the supermarket all winter and spring. The zucchini comes from my garden, and I used my new cookie cutter to make the round polenta slices - both the zucchini and polenta were lightly sauteed in olive oil. That's basil and mint pesto - both fresh and local! - on top of and underneath the polenta and veggies.

Quick thoughts on The Vegan Table: I was really looking forward to Patrick-Goudreau's new book, since I'm a huge fan of her first, the Joy of Vegan Baking. Besides the wonderful, creative recipes and beautiful photos, I really appreciate the thoughtful essays and commentary throughout the book. She's a wonderful advocate for veganism and compassionate living, and it's so cool that vegans have a new book focused on entertaining and cooking for friends and family.

Fresh cherries are one of my very favorite summer treats, and I love this short window when Washington cherries are bargains at the grocery store - they're 98 cents a pound this week, and off sesaon they're 5 bucks a pound sometimes. I've been eating cherries every day for about two weeks, and made this BBQ style sauce with them. If I remember right, here's what I used - this was very much put together at random, tasting as I went along:
20 fresh red cherries, pits removed
2 medium tomatoes, diced
2 small white onions, diced
4 cloves garlic
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp. red wine vinegar
3 tbsp. brown sugar
1 tbsp. maple syrup
1 tsp. agave nectar
1 tbsp. Jim Beam bourbon, just because
1 tbsp. guajillo chili powder
1 tbsp. tamari or soy sauce

I may be forgetting something, but BBQ sauce is really flexible. I processed everything to a smooth puree in the food processor, then simmered for around 45 minutes over low heat. The result looks exactly like cranberry sauce, but the taste had the right elements of sweet, sour, and savory of a good BBQ sauce. Served with herbed mashed potatoes and seitan fried in a little olive oil and a tiny bit of agave nectar, which helped give it a good browned exterior.

A couple more snapshots here - I need some mac and cheeze once in a while, and my recipe is always changing, and comes from a mix of cookbooks and blogs...this time I used tahini and soaked cashews for a really creamy sauce.

Finally, I made this ratatouille with white beans and zucchini (remember, I'm up to my neck in garden zucchini for the rest of summer!), also a recipe from The Vegan Table. I made this into more of a soup than what I usually see labelled ratatouille. Fresh herbs really made this shine, and a reminder to enjoy summer while it lasts - I managed to work fresh basil, rosemary, sage, and Italian parsley into this, and the fresh herbs really make all the difference.

Vegan Chicago!

2009-07-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! I got back this morning from a long weekend in Chicago, my first real trip to the city after a couple of quick past visits. The general theme was baseball, bars, and music, so clearly I was in the right town. All of that, plus around 24 hours on Amtrak, makes me more than a little tired right now, but here's some pics from the weekend. That's the skyline as seen from out on Navy Pier.

We're starting with food, of course. On Saturday we had lunch at Frontera Grill, the Rick Bayless restaurant. Since I have done more than a few Bayless recipes here, and love his PBS series, this was sort of a big deal for me :) Given the place's stature, I thought it would be more expensive than our cheap selves were willing to go for, but it's pretty reasonable. The food, to pull out a word I promise you won't see often here, was exquisite. Plus, they were really cool about making vegans happy. First course was this salad of jicama, cucumber, and pineapple, powdered with guajillo chili powder and drizzled with lime juice. Served in a banana leaf, it's a lovely presentation of a street stall standard from much of Latin America.

Here's my meal - enchiladas stuffed with fresh mixed greens, topped with awesome crispy onions and a tomato-guajillo sauce. I've made recipes like this from Bayless cookbooks, but this was perfect. Plus, it was outside on Clark Street on a perfect July day, with a bottle of beer, and all of those things never fail to make food even better. If it's not clear yet, I was crazy about the place :)

Food was great and veg-friendly all weekend, and yesterday lunch was at the Chicago Diner, on the north side just down the street from where I stayed. As spelled out in a big sign on the side of the building, "Meat-free since '83!"

I tried the seitan wings and this California Reuben. It's thinly sliced "turkey-style" seitan, with a crunchy coleslaw topping and vegan cheese on a nice marble rye bread. The sides alone at the Diner are worth a trip...it was hard to decide, but I opted for these sweet potato fries.

I didn't take any pictures there, but the Pick Me Up Cafe, also up in the Wrigleyville neighborhood, was lots of fun too. Very hip, which only matters if the quality of the food matches the ambience, which it did. Here's a couple of non-food pictures too - this is the Jazz Record Mart, one of those music stores where you could spend a whole day looking around. Owner Bob Koester was there dealing directions and commentary...a big figure in the Chicago music scene of the last half century, he had a recent profile in the New York Times. He once called Iggy Pop and his friends "stooges," after thowing them out of his apartment.

Sunday was a day game at Wrigley. Cubs win! Here's the view from section 239. My first Cubs game too!

I heard a ton of good music over the weekend too, at clubs and the Chicago Folk and Roots Festival on Sunday at Welles Park after the game. I didn't bring the camera there, but did get a shot of these towers downtown, familiar to any Chicago folks or Wilco fans...thanks for indulging my little slide show! Back to a food focus soon :)

Spanish Fried Almonds

2009-07-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

This is as simple as a recipe gets, but I had to share the love for these fried spiced almonds, from My Kitchen in Spain by Janet Mendel. Raw almonds are fried for a couple minutes in extra virgin olive oil, then tossed with coarse salt, cumin, and Spanish smoked paprika. I used the almonds for a roasted red pepper and almond spread over toast for lunch today, and tossed a few over this salad from the garden. They would be good in all kinds of recipes, but they've been disappearing too fast as snacks every time I walk through the kitchen.

Sweet Corn and Zucchini Burgers

2009-07-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

The 4th of July holiday triggered some kind of deep burger-craving mechanism in my head. At the same time, I'm trying to keep up with what's in the garden, so making frozen veggie burgers seemed kind of lame. These zucchini and sweet corn veggie burgers rode in to the rescue, courtesy of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. There's a section on veggie burgers for all seasons, and the summer one was just what I needed. As anyone who has grown zucchini knows, they're crazy productive plants, so I might need to rename this Zucchini for the People for the next couple months.

These burgers are really heavy on sweet corn, which is a good thing. Fresh corn is ground to a paste in the food processor, and cornmeal provides a little more binding. Hot green chilies, onion, and garlic round out the flavors, giving the burgers a good kick. Since zucchini and corn are the main components, they're much lighter than burgers heavy on beans or tempeh or other more dense ingredients. Great for summer.

Spicy Green Papaya Salad, & Ethiopian Crepes

2009-07-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

I love finding food I've never seen before, so had to buy a little bag of shredded green papaya this week at Fargo's Asian and American Market. Hema Parekh's The Asian Vegan Kitchen has a nummy spicy papaya salad recipe, without which I wouldn't really have known what to do with it. The photo doesn't convey the kaleidoscope of flavors, which includes green beans, peanuts, tomato, hot chilis, tamarind, lime juice, and tamari - all ground up in the food processor and tossed with the shredded papaya. Parekh's recipe is wonderful - sort of like a spicy Thai coleslaw. It's Som Tam in Thai, and apparently really popular in street stalls.

I'm still cooking my way through Vegan Brunch, and made the Ethiopian Crepes, one of the recipes I knew I had to try. The crepes are made with chickpea and all-purpose flour, and after making them a few times they seem just as easy as making pancakes. The filling is a delicious spicy lentil and tomato mix, with lots of spices...reminds me of many Indian curries, but unique. I have zero experience with Ethiopian food, but this makes me want to try more. Crepes are cousins of Ethiopia's injera bread, which I'd also love to try sometime.

Zucchini Flower Pasta with fresh herbs

2009-06-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

The biggest reason I planted a few zucchini bushes in the garden this year was to have access to zucchini flowers - not that I don't love zucchini, but it's so plentiful and cheap at the farmers' market all summer, so why grow it? The blossoms, on the other hand, are more elusive. I know a lot of markets out there feature squash flowers, but I haven't seen them here before. They're delicate and fragile and perishable soon after picking, so I understand why they can be hard to protect and transport to markets.

Since this is my first time growing zucchini, I've been closely watching the blossoms for a few weeks now, and reading about them online. They grow at least twice as big as the ones above, but with a thunderstorm on the way this afternoon, I picked a few instead of letting them stay out in the wind and even a bit of hail. This was the first garden zucchini too, along with flowers and herbs:
I really want to try stuffed, battered, and fried zucchini blossoms, but these little guys were way too delicate for anything like that. Instead, I added them to a pasta salad with zucchini and fresh herbs - this would be great picnic food! The sliced zucchini were sauteed in olive oil until just softened, and tossed with the thinly sliced herbs, cooked pasta at room temperature, and salad dressing. Here's the fresh herbs, and salad dressing ingredients:

1/3 cup mint leaves
1/4 cup basil leaves
1 sprig of fennel
2 or 3 sage leaves
1/4 cup Italian parsley
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. agave nectar
2 tbsp. lemon juice
1 tbsp. white wine vinegar
2 tsp. dijon mustard

I added the flowers last - they don't require any cooking. A story on the NPR food podcast from earlier this month described the texture of fresh squash blossoms as "like eating air." That's about right...aren't they pretty?

There's more zucchini in this pic from the week, but this time paired with grease and gravy, instead of flowers and herbs. It's "chicken-fried" tofu, with mushroom gravy made with a can of Hamms beer. Hallelujah.

I've been eating fresh garden salad after work all week - just took a picture because I know it will be gone too soon.

This morning I made the Hollandaise sauce from Vegan Brunch, which was super, of course. Instead of the full tofu benedict in the book - doesn't that look awesome? - I topped some hashbrowns and scrambled tofu with the sauce. It was brilliant - thanks again Isa!

Tempeh Kafta Balls, grilling time, and raw soup

2009-06-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

Kafta caught my attention while I was paging through The Arab Table, by May S. Bsisu. Kafta refers to a family of grilled, baked, or fried meat dishes across the Arab world, and in different places is made with lamb, beef, or fish, parsley or cilantro, and a range of spices. At first I thought it might be one of those veganized meat dishes that sort of strain credibility - I'm still trying to comprehend the vegan Monte Cristo sandwich, for example (though I've seen tempting photos). But then I figured that if kafta can be something different in Egypt, Syria, or Palestine, why not work on a vegan North Dakota version? I've had worse ideas.

I built my kafta with a tempeh base, using quick oats and wheat gluten for binding. Here's the ingredients, inspired by a recipe in The Arab Table:
1 8 oz. package tempeh
2 medium yellow onions, peeled and coarsley chopped
1 cup flat leaf parsley
1/3 cup quick oats
1/3 cup wheat gluten flour
1 tsp. allspice
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. ground cardamom
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
vegetable broth

Prep was easy - just pulsed everything in the food processor until well combined, leaving the onions, parsley, and tempeh still in coarse pieces. I added just enough vegetable stock to moisten the oats and wheat gluten, making a firm "dough." Form into walnut sized balls, like these:
A deep fryer would be ideal to fry the kafta, but I fried them in ample corn oil in my cast iron frying pan - as the top photo shows, I fried them to a nice deep golden brown. They were super crispy outside, and tender and spicy inside - here's a closeup:

The tomato sauce, by the way, is another recipe from The Arab Table. It's very simple, with sauteed garlic, tomatoes, red pepper flakes, and cinnamon - a nice complement to the taste of the kafta spices. Mint garnish wrapped up the Middle East vibe.

This weekend I broke out the grill for the first time this summer - nice to cook outside instead of heating up the apartment. Plus, standing in front of the grill with a beer is one of the finer things in life, I believe. Here's before and after shots of zucchini, BBQ-rubbed tempeh (from a BBQ rub in this month's Vegetarian Times - num!), baked potatos, and a kabob with mushrooms, onion, and yellow bell pepper. As the second pic shows, I let things get a little burnt, but isn't that the whole point of grilling?

Finally, time to cool down with this avocado soup from Ani's Raw Food Kitchen - a good book to have on hand as summer heats up.

Spring Greens, Spring Rolls, & Sea Veggies

2009-06-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

I made these spring rolls with some mixed greens I'm growing in the garden this year. I planted a mesclun seed pack, and they've really taken off. It's a nice mix of pretty looking and tasty greens, including arugula, endive, red kale, red and green romaine, and Salad Bowl and Lolla Rossa lettuce. The arugula is growing fastest and biggest so far, and it tastes wonderful - I've never grown arugula before, and the taste when it's fresh picked is really cool. It tastes like any other mild green at first, then this great peppery taste floods in...so good. I pick a couple leaves every time I go past them. Here's a pic from the garden:

Making spring rolls is pretty easy, and it forces me to clear off my little kitchen counter when I make them, to have all of the ingredients at hand. Here's what I used:

3 cups fresh greens - anything that is good raw
1 medium cucumber, peeled and seeded, and cut in strips roughly 4 inches long and 1/4 inch wide
1 medium carrot, cut in thin strips with a veggie peeler
1/2 cup raw cashews
mung bean thread noodles, rehydrated in boiled water for 10 minutes
rice paper spring roll wrappers - I made around 8 with these quantities

The rice paper needs to be soaked in cold water for about 1 minute, and then handled very delicately when removed. They do tend to tear pretty easily, but if you stay cool and work slowly, they're easy to use. Place about 1/3 cup of bean threads around the bottom third of the rice paper wrapper, and top with the carrots, cucumber, cashews, and greens. Here's a sample - I put around 6 leaves in each roll - as much as can be handily rolled up without over-stuffing the spring roll. Here's a roll before placing a few more greens:

After this, fold the bottom third up over the filling, then fold in the sides, and roll up to the top...it's pretty intuitive once you get started. The moistened rice paper sticks together well after rolling. Once you have them ready, they can be eaten right away, or chilled for a few hours. I wanted a dipping sauce that complemented without overwhelming the greens, and used pineapple juice, and little lemon juice, grated fresh ginger, agave nectar, and a tiny bit of soy sauce and sesame oil.

Here's a plate from last week - I must have been in a sea veggie mood, since I made sushi rolls and these tofu burgers the same day. The tofu burgers are another recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and include a good portion of rehydrated wakame. These burgers easily pass my only veggie burger test, in that they hold together and stay firm while frying or baking. I ate them with just a little soy sauce and pickled ginger, but they would be great in buns, using the pickled ginger like a relish, along with any other burger toppings.

Here's a bonus non-food picture from this weekend - my two brothers and I go on a river trip each summer in the Minnesota/North Dakota area, and this year we went down the Pembina River in northeastern North Dakota. It was a beautiful day, and a really fun river. So glad summer's finally here!

Roasted Garlic Bread Spreads, & Sweet and Sour Pomegranate Tofu

2009-06-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to bake some kind of bread each weekend. Bread making is one of those pursuits where it's pretty easy to get down the basics, but a lifelong challenge to get to anything approaching perfection. I'm certainly still in low-novice mode, but even half-decent bread is rewarding, and can be made for a fraction of the price of commercial bread, especially the good stuff. This weekend I made simple baguettes, loosely in the French or Italian "peasant bread" style you see at good bakeries.

With a couple loaves of good bread on hand, I decided to make a few Mediterranean style bread spreads - pesto, a bean puree, and a tapenade with sun-dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers. The unifying element in all three is a bulb of roasted garlic that I had in the oven along with the bread. Roasted garlic is one of my very favorite ingredients, and no matter how much I make I find all kinds of places to use it. It's great everywhere.

Going from left to right in the photo, first is a simple parsley pesto. This is a standard basil pesto recipe, with parsley because it's so much cheaper than fresh basil, at least until farmer's market season comes along and my little garden starts producing. I used half a bunch of parsley, a quarter cup of pine nuts, extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, and a few cloves of roasted garlic.

Center is another simple and delicious combination - great northern beans whipped to a puree with more olive oil, roasted garlic, and a little salt.

At right is a rich and tangy tapenade, with a half dozen sun-dried tomatoes, a few pieces of roasted red pepper, green olives, a tbsp. of capers, and more olive oil and roasted garlic. All of this would be great party food, with bowls of spreads served with lots of sliced and toasted bread. It's all easy to prepare, and though the pesto tends to lose it's bright green color fairly quickly, all keep in the fridge for days of great snacking.

If you want to eat more purple food - and who doesn't? - this is a good place to start. I bought some shiso leaves (also known as perilla) at Fargo's Asian & American Market last week, just because I've never tried them. They have beautiful green and purple color, but I didn't really know where to use them. As with lots of fresh herbs, they're pretty versatile, and I sprinkled a few on top of this stir-fry. Pomegranate juice is the heart of a sweet and sour glaze for stir-fried tofu, edamame, and carrots. The glaze is very simple, with pomegranate, brown sugar, and a little corn starch and tamari, added at the end of stir-frying the veggies and tofu. The shiso leaves tasted lovely on top. Wikipedia compares them to fennel, mint, or basil, which is about right...sort of a cocktail of those flavors. Sounds good to me :)

Black Bean Pupusas & a Vegan Brunch Omelette

2009-05-31T20:04:00.000-07:00

Pupusas are one of a variety of Latin American dishes that feature corn flour - masa harina - prepared with all manner of shapes and fillings and toppings. Of them all, I think the pupusa at least has the best name. I've only eaten pupusas in their native setting once, and it was love at first bite - is that too cutesy? Sorry, really....can't believe I even wrote that. Anyway, it's a corn flour dough, filled with savory mashed black beans (among other filling options), and cooked on a griddle until golden brown and crispy on the outside. I was going to go all out and take pictures of the assembly process, but will instead direct you to SusanV's Fat Free Vegan site, where she does the work for me - thanks! - and saves me from trying to take pictures with hands covered in masa dough. If you want to try these, the photos are really useful.

If you're curious, the day-glo pink onions on top are pickled red onions from a Rick Bayless recipe. Very easy, and a great condiment for all sorts of things - it would be fantastic as a Mexican-style veggie burger topping. Thinly sliced red onions are quickly blanched in boiling water, than soak for a quick pickle in apple cider vinegar spiked with black pepper and cumin seeds. Through some kind of food magic, this makes the onions turn bright pink, and oddly sweet. Check it out.

It's asparagus season, so I dug into these asparagus omelettes from Vegan Brunch for - I almost said lunch - brunch today. These are great, and it's amazing how well they mimic the taste and texture of an egg omelette...not exactly the same of course, but as tasty as any omelette I ever ate. Part of the goodness is the spoonful of topping, which is salsa romesco, from Donna Klein's Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. Almonds, tomato, garlic, olive oil, parsley, dried chilis, and red wine vinegar combine for a brilliant Catalan sauce that would be great in all kinds of places.

Mushroom Risotto, Vegan Brunch, and Picnic Beans

2009-05-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

This risotto recipe comes from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which at almost 1,000 pages is a great resource for veggie cooking. Bittman doesn't totally embrace veganism or even vegetarianism in all of his cooking, but it's still pretty cool to have somebody with his profile - all over the New York Times, the Today show, and elsewhere - promoting green eating. I'd put him next to Michael Pollan on the veg-friendly scale, since they are great advocates of the health and environmental benefits of vegetarian food, but often skirt around the edges of the case for compassionate eating, which trumps everything else in my view. That said, it's still a valuable book with tons of information, and most recipes (with the exception of a lengthy egg and cheese chapter) are vegan or easily adaptable.

The risotto features baby bella and dried porcini mushrooms, and the arborio rice is cooked in vegetable stock. I've started making my own veggie stock the last few months, and it's so worth the extra time. I keep a ziploc bag in the freezer, that I fill with vegetable trimmings - carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, garlic, greens, etc., throughout the week. Usually on Sunday afternoons I make a stock with what's in the bag, along with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. It's always good, and a nice way to turn food trimmings and leftovers into a really handy (and cheap!) resource in the kitchen.

Speaking of cookbooks, I was thrilled (seriously) to find that Isa Chandra Moskowitz's new Vegan Brunch is on the shelves! This book is fantastic and full of great photos and recipes, and I assume that most folks reading this are already well-aquainted with Isa's work. Here's a bowl of tempeh and greens hash...a little less breakfast/brunchy than most of the book, but very tasty. I can't wait to make some of the brunch sausages, and much more. It might finally convince me to buy a waffle iron too.

I had an hour between jobs around noon today, which gave me time for my favorite kind of lunch - a little picnic in the park across the street with the dogs. It was a beautiful, perfect kind of spring day. This was ready in five minutes - a can of black beans quickly fried up with diced red onion, cumin, and Mexican oregano. Chopped grape tomatoes and an avocado were tossed in, with a handful of flat-leaf parsley. Bean bowls like this remind me of the food stalls in Portland, and make me dream of opening a vegan bean and rice bowl joint someday :) Until then, I'm happy with my nice little picnic spot over at the park. I never miss a chance to give the dogs some blog space, so here's pics of my charming guests. That's Maya at left, Otter at right.

Rhubarb Muffins, and green & black beans

2009-05-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

The first rhubarb of the season was most welcome after a long winter, and it has the honor of going into some sweet and vegan-buttery muffins. I was going to make some frosting to turn these into cupcakes, but they really were good enough on their own, without the lily-gilding of frosting. Muffins are the only baked good where I feel comfortable winging it, since I've learned that they're pretty tough to screw up. As long as the muffin batter is somewhere between bread dough and pancake batter, the results will be pretty good. I know that real bakers have much higher standards, but as long as the ingredients are good, the texture of muffins is really forgiving and encourages lots of experimenting.

These muffins are pretty basic, with benefits of good rhubarb, a healthy dose of ground flax seeds, and a little apple cider vinegar to compliment the rhubarb flavor.

1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (all purpose flour with a little whole wheat flour would be fine too)
Four 6 to 8 inch stalks of rhubarb, diced
3/4 cup, plus 1 tbsp., brown sugar
2 tbsp. ground flax seeds
1/2 cup softened vegan margarine (I used Earth Balance), or 1/2 cup of vegetable oil
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
about 3/4 cup of non-dairy milk (I used almond)

1. In a saucepan, heat the diced rhubarb over medium heat, with about a tbsp. of water. After the rhubarb begins to soften, add 1 tbsp. brown sugar, and continue heating and stirring frequently until the rhubarb is very soft. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

2. Preheat oven to 375 F, and lightly oil your muffin pan - this recipe produced 7 muffins, in what I guess is a standard sized muffin pan.

3. In one mixing bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and flax seeds. In a second bowl, mix the sugar, margarine, and vinegar. Combine the two mixtures, and add enough non-dairy milk - about 3/4 of a cup worked fine - to make a smooth batter. It should be too thick to pour, but thinner and wetter than any bread dough. Fairly vague instructions, yes, but I won't pretend to be an expert :) - this is just what worked for me.

4. Spoon the batter into prepared muffin pan, with equal proportions for each muffin. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, and remove from oven when the muffins are golden brown on top. Cool and enjoy!

Here's a couple other tasty pics from the past few days, both from cookbooks I've been enjoying lately:

Here's a plate of twice-fried green beans. Check this out - fresh green beans are fried in peanut oil, next cashews are fried in peanut oil, and than crumbled tempeh is fried until crispy in even more peanut oil. Then, everything is thrown together and stir fried in a little more peanut oil, with a simple tamari, sugar, and red pepper sauce added at the end. Pretty greasy, and pretty awesome.

Finally, this is a black bean tortilla soup, another one from Rick Bayless. The greens are bok choy, and the soup has great texture and flavor from rehydrated and pureed ancho chiles. I want to learn how to use dried chilis more often - it's a whole dimension of flavors that I don't really have any experience with cooking, and I'm looking forward to fooling around with the huge selection of chilies out there. Any ideas for varieties I ought to try?

Edamame, Gnocchi, & Tomatoes, and Coconut Cream Pie

2009-05-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

This is one of those meals that just sort of came together by chance, and a pleasant surprise...plus, I love the colors. Home for lunch, I found almost-empty bags of edamame and gnocchi in the freezer, and a can of fire-roasted tomatoes. The gnocchi were boiled in five minutes, and I gave the edamame a quick stir-fry. Mixed with a can of tomatoes, and a weekday lunch is ready in 10 minutes. A sprinkle of lemon juice finished it off, along with a little salt and black pepper.

Here's a slice of coconut cream pie, from this month's Vegetarian Times. The recipe is for cute little mini graham cracker pie crusts, and I just made a full-size one. It's deliciously rich and creamy, made with a can of coconut milk and about a quarter block of silken tofu, and topped with toasted dried coconut flakes. This was gone really fast, with a little help from the pups, who discovered that they're big fans of coconut pie.

Mushroom Roulade, Maple Tofu, and Berry Crepes

2009-05-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

I spent much of the weekend goofing around in the kitchen - it was pretty cold for May - with lots of good eating. First up is a portabella mushroom roulade, another recipe test for the upcoming Farm Sanctuary cookbook. This one was a little tricky, but the results were worth it - this is special occasion food, and probably not something I'll whip up on a weeknight any time soon. The effort was worth it, and the combination of marinated portabellas, sauted for a *long* time until they become very pliable, and filled with a French bread stuffing was pretty good. This works best with the biggest, widest portabellas you can find - optimally, I think they're supposed to completely wrap around the stuffing...and I suppose I may have overstuffed them. I bet this is something that would be really awesome after a few learning attempts, but it still tasted great. The stuffing was super, with sun-dried tomatoes, walnuts, and green olives - apples are suggested too.

This plate of tofu and brussels sprouts it why I love reading vegan food blogs. I was completely uninspired for supper ideas last night, and did a quick little whirl around some of my fave blogs. Within minutes I was overwhelmed with awesome ideas, but these two recipes matched what I had on hand - a nice maple balsamic tofu from Vegan Dad, and a dish of brussels sprouts and pecans from Vegan Crunk. Good stuff! For the latter I just went from the picture, mixing the sprouts and pecans with some extra maple-balsamic goodness from the tofu. Delicious.

This was breakfast on Saturday morning. Easily my most successful attempt at making crepes, but only because the first couple of times were pretty lame - once I could only turn the batter into thickish pancakes, and the other time a thin batter was impossible to flip over without falling apart. This is the recipe from Vegan With a Vengeance, and I think the trick is chickpea flour, and actually following directions. The filling and topping is super simple, just frozen blueberries and raspberries, defrosted, and warmed up with a little agave nectar and lemon juice. Now that I have a crepe recipe I can rely on, this is definitely showing up again for weekend breakfasts, especially with berry season coming soon.

Dandelion Pesto & Sweet Potato Salad

2009-05-10T19:41:00.001-07:00

People with yards might not like to hear this, but I kind of like dandelions. I think they're an invasive species here in the states - people say they were imported by European immigrants as an ornamental flower - but I can't help but root for them in their ongoing resistance against the perfect herbicide and pesticide-laced American lawn. Their bright yellow flowers are one of the first signs that spring is finally here, and if that wasn't enough, the leaves and flowers are edible - and pretty good, at that. I think the leaves taste a little like arugula - on the bitter side, but not as bitter as mustard or turnip greens.

Some stores sell dandelion greens, but they're one of the easiest wild plants to forage, since we all know what a dandelion looks like. I picked these in a little grove of trees nearby where I am sure nobody has ever sprayed for weeds - that's obviously a concern when picking wild plants, though I did think for a moment that I don't give much thought to what's been used on non-organic vegetables that I buy. I've heard they're best in the early spring too, and that the older plants are more bitter. Given the slightly bitter taste, I thought they would make a decent, tart pesto, and this tasted a little like arugula pesto.

Here the pesto is tossed with some roasted cubed sweet potato - the sweetness is a great contrast to the subtle bitterness of the lemon juice and greens in the pesto. It's a simple salad, and you could get more creative with other added veggies - squash, red potatoes, sweet peppers, pasta, and beans would all be great. Here's what I used for the pesto, made in the food processor:

2 cups dandelion greens, washed well
1 cup flat leaf parsley
1/4 cup walnuts
2 cloves garlic
3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. salt
juice from 1/2 a lemon, 2 tbsp. or so

Recession food, granola, and enchiladas

2009-05-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! I've been away for a while because my computer was in the shop for most of the last week - after four years, it was starting to lock up and generally act funny, all of which seems to have been fixed by the brilliant folks at the computer shop. They also backed up all of my music and pictures - a project I've been putting off for a long time, and felt better having in the hands of pros. While away from the internet, I caught up on some reading -with real books! Imagine that. Also snapped a few food pics, as follows.

Last week, NPR did a week-long series on feeding a family of four for under 10 bucks, asking celebrity chefs for recession food. The only remotely vegan one (and we all know nothing is cheaper than cooking vegan, especially with whole foods, but never mind that) was this Andalusian take on chickpeas and spinach, from Jose Andres. Do check out the link, with a much prettier photo. The creamy, rich sauce comes from frying whole garlic cloves, then chunks of bread, in lots of olive oil. The fried bread, garlic, and oil is blended - which tasted so awesome - and then used as a thickening base for the cooked chickpeas. I eat lots of chickpeas, but this was a revelation - great stuff. Andres did a cool show on Spanish food on PBS too, worth a look.

I hadn't made the Snobby Joes from Veganomicon before this. Here they are, in all their snobby glory, on top of some quick beer bread made with Hamms and sun-dried tomatoes, next to a cabbage coleslaw. The beer bread is from Donna Klein's Vegan Italiano, a good weeknight bread, since the beer is a shortcut substitution for waiting around with yeast and rising and all that jazz. This bread went from mixing bowl to oven to table in less than an hour.

Here's a mess of granola, with golden raisins and dates. I made this with brown rice syrup, which I had almost forgotten in the back of the fridge. The results were super - very crispy, and brown rice syrup will be my new granola standby. It's also the main sweetener in Clif bars, and they're always good.

Here's a bowl of golden granola in breakfast mode, with banana, mango, and almond milk.

Finally, a rocking enchilada recipe inspired by a green enchilada sauce in one of Rick Bayless' cookbooks, which I'm always checking out from the library. The sauce is from my canned green tomatoes with chiles and cilantro, in place of traditional tomatillos, thickened with a little masa harina. The filling is mostly leftovers, with kale, seitan, and baby bella mushrooms. Crumbled on top is some vegan monterey jack cheese, from Jo Stepaniak's The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. It's a block cheese that crumbles very nicely, made with cashews and tofu along with other vegan cheese usual suspects like nutritional yeast, tahini, and lemon juice.

Manicotti with Walnut, Tofu, and Roasted Garlic Ricotta

2009-04-25T20:21:00.000-07:00

I love stuffed pastas, from ravioli to gyozas to pierogies - there's good reason these dishes show up in food traditions around the world. The combination of fillings, pasta, and sauce include so many flavors in every bite, and the opportunities for variety are boundless. This was a really easy dish, mostly because I did most of the prep work - making a vegan "ricotta" filling and a nummy red wine tomato sauce - the night before.

Tofu and walnuts, with a healthy dose of roasted garlic, form the base of the ricotta-style filling. Here's the ingredients:

1 14 oz. package firm tofu, pressed for an hour to drain excess moisture
1/2 cup walnuts
6 cloves roasted garlic
2 tbsp. nutritional yeast flakes
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup chopped fresh basil leaves, loosely packed

I mixed everything but the basil in the food processor, but you can do it with a fork. Mix in the basil after everything else is well-combined.

The tomato sauce can be replaced in this recipe by any decent prepared pasta sauce, though I went the home-made route. It's a basic sauce of tomatoes, garlic and onion, with some oregano and a little bit of sugar, salt, and pepper. A shot of red wine added to the sauteeing garlic and onion brought some nice character, but it's optional.

The manicotti are boiled until just slightly undercooked, about 7 minutes, since they finish cooking while baking. After draining the boiled manicotti, and rinsing with cold water, I used one of those pastry decorating funnels (what are they called, anyway?) to squeeze the "ricotta" into the manicotti tubes. This could be done by hand or with a spoon, but would be a lot messier...well worth picking up one of those pastry tubes. Pour your pasta sauce over the stuffed manicotti to cover everything, and bake at 375 F for 45 to 50 minutes.

I sometimes avoid making stuffed pastas because it can seem like a lot of work, but this is a very easy way to create those tastes with pretty minimal effort. Enjoy!

Ceviche Salad with Hearts of Palm and Avocado

2009-04-21T19:21:00.000-07:00

Ceviche, the Latin American dish of raw fish "cooked" in lime juice, works as a technique for preparing this hearty, tangy salad. The star here are some hearts of palm I picked up in a grocery store clearance bin - what a great find! They're combined with avocado, tomato, sweet corn, and mango, marinated in a lime juice and cilantro "ceviche" base. Here's the simple recipe, inspired by a ceviche salad in Rick Bayless' Mexican Everyday.

Marinade ingredients:
Juice from two limes
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro
1/2 tsp. salt

Stir up the ceviche marinade, and add whatever fruits and veggies you like. I used:
3/4 cup sliced hearts of palm
1 avocado, diced
1 roma tomato, diced
1/2 cup sweet corn kernels
1/2 a ripe mango, diced

Garnish with additional cilantro and lime. Popcorn is a fun traditional ceviche topping, but I skipped it today - I recommend it though.

I had to snap a picture of these delicious slices of raw bread - I finally picked up Ani's Raw Food Kitchen last week, after seeing so many amazing pics online from her recipes. This is the sesame sunflower bread - really tasty, and ground flax seeds work so well to bind the bread together. I don't have a dehydrator, but I do have a gas oven. The pilot light always keeps the oven slightly warm and very dry, so I made these by just keeping them in the cooled oven overnight. I know it's slower than a real dehydrator, and probably wouldn't work for a lot of things, but I'm definitely making these on a regular basis.

Kimchi fritters and adventures with cashew "goat cheese"

2009-04-15T19:45:00.000-07:00

These fried kimchi nuggets started life as mini-pancakes, but I decided the fritter label was a better fit, since they're crispy, golden-brown, and greasy. I'm all for lots of greens, and think eating raw is pretty cool, but I'll never stop loving all that is deep-fried. My cabbage kimchi was developing some "character" as it matured, and it was mixed here with a batter consisting of: equal parts water and all-purpose flour, 2 tbsp. rice flour, and 2 tbsp. egg replacer (basically just potato starch).

This photo looks kind of like some deformed sea creature, with the billowing tail and all, but it's actually a vegan "goat cheese" from a recipe in the April Vegetarian Times. I've never eaten real goat cheese, but it seems like a perennial favorite with foodie types. Soaked and ground cashews and lemon juice are the main tastes, and it's a fun recipe. Working with cheesecloth was a little clumsier than I expected, but I managed to come up with a nice log of very creamy cashew "cheese."

I ate some in sandwiches and some in soup, and also made these delicious proto-jalapeno poppers - just stuffed and baked, forgoing the mess of battering and frying. The peppers were roasted long enough to cut back on the spiciness, but kept a fairly firm form. Really good, and the cashew cheese browns nicely.

Finally, stuffed baked potatoes. Here I mixed about a half cup of cashew cheese with the insides of two medium sized baked potatoes, adding some sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, and rosemary. These were super-easy and made me wonder why I don't make stuffed potatoes more often.

Fanesca - Easter soup from Ecuador

2009-04-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

This soup is required eating in much of Ecuador during Semana Santa, the week leading up to Easter. Where I lived, lunch on Good Friday was time for fanesca, a soup inspired by the Catholic tradition of refraining from meat during holy week, especially on Good Friday. Traditional fanesca includes a broth based on salted cod and milk - as most vegans are aware, lots of people don't consider fish to be meat. We'll leave that mindbender for another day, and fanesca works just fine without the cod, since it's packed (and I mean packed) with hearty beans, squash, and grains.

As a nod to the twelve apostles, a good fanesca includes 12 different beans and grains, so it's a great reason to tap into those random half empty bags of adzuki beans and split peas and wheat berries waiting in many of our pantries. Because this soup invites so many ingredients, a definitive recipe probably doesn't exist. Like so many food traditions, every family has it's own interpretation of the soup - my host family's fanesca was pretty awesome, and that was the taste I was going for here.

While looking at recipes (and there's a ton of them) online, I found a nice New Yorker article by Calvin Trillin about looking for good fanesca in Ecuador. It's a great combination of food and travel writing, well worth a read.

Here's a quick rundown of my first take on fanesca...my only problem with the finished result is that the broth was a little darker than normal. I used homemade vegetable stock for the base, and my stock ingredients were pretty heavy on trimmings from dark greens, which resulted in a darker color. Real fanesca ought to be bright yellow, so I cheated a little and mixed turmeric with coconut milk to save the color. Anyway, here goes:

Soak the beans, and any grains which might benefit from soaking, overnight. Not to dissapoint any of those apostles, I made sure to go for the full twelve. Here's the list, and I used about a quarter cup of each (dry):

1. chickpeas
2. great northern beans
3. black-eyed peas
4. yellow split peas
5. brown lentils
6. adzuki beans
7. black beans
8. wheat berries
9. quinoa
10. barley
11. sweet corn
12. green peas

I cooked all of the soaked grains and beans on a low simmer in veggie stock for an hour or so, adding frozen corn, green peas, and chopped scallions towards the end. Every bean/grain has a different cooking time, but with fanesca it doesn't matter if some things get too soft, since it all adds to the creamy nature of the soup. Just stir once in a while to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pot.

While the beans are cooking, I sauteed some red onion and minced garlic cloves, adding them to the bean/grain pot close to the end of cooking.

In the blender, I mixed a medium-size roasted butternut, a baked potato, a cup of coconut milk, and a cup of vegetable broth. Blend until smooth. This is where I added the spices too - just a tablespoon of ground cumin, and salt and pepper to taste.

Back to the beans and grains. Continue simmering until most of the liquid has evaporated. Fanesca is somewhere between soup and stew, but it should be nice and thick. Add the blended squash mixture to the beans and grains, bring it back to a low boil, and remove from heat. Like any soup, this only gets better after it sits for a while.

I used cilantro for garnish, and seasoned with some hot pepper sauce. Those are patacones - deep-fried and slightly mashed plantains - on top, as if fanesca isn't hearty enough. I know these aren't the most organized cooking directions, but you get the idea - fanescas are like snowflakes or fingerprints, no two ever the same.

Thai Red Curry Seitan Wings and Cabbage Kimchi

2009-04-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

These seitan "wings" are from a recipe from Tami's Vegan Appetite blog. Thai red curry paste replaces the usual hot pepper sauce here, with vegan margarine, lime juice, agave, and sriracha hot sauce rounding out the flavors in the "buffalo wing" glaze. These aren't as blisteringly hot as wings made with just hot sauce and margarine, but still plenty spicy, with all the complex flavors of red curry paste. This would be good with other kinds of curry pastes too, but red curry is most similar in appearance to traditional wing recipes.

Keeping with the Thai theme, I used a coconut milk based dip to replace the ranch or blue cheese dips that usually accompany wings. The dipping sauce is coconut milk, a little agave, 1 tbsp. lime juice, and some thinly sliced Thai basil leaves on top. I thought it might be a little thin, but it was pretty substantial. Good stuff, and it performs the same function as those dairy-based dressings, as a cooling counterpoint to the heat from the "wings." The seitan is home made (as usual based on the Veganomicon recipe), first boiled, then cut into triangles, lightly breaded, and baked just until the breading lightly browns.

This weekend I made a batch of Napa cabbage kimchi too. It's pretty good, just hot enough to get your attention, and I have a couple of kimchi-based recipes in mind. Half of a big Napa cabbage, along with about a dozen scallions, garlic, and ginger, yielded just over a quart of kimchi.

Stuffed Papaya, and Peanut Butter Dog Biscuits

2009-04-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

This recipe didn't quite work out, but it was a good practice run at stuffed papaya. My neighborhood grocery store had mini papayas on sale, and I thought their size would be perfect for single serving stuffed papayas. Unfortunately, I bought one of those fruits that never really ripens, and goes from unripe to just plain bad. I'm sure there's a good scientific explanation for this, which may have something to do with getting papayas from trees in Mexico to markets in North Dakota. Another argument for eating local I suppose, but I can't resist some great tropical fruit once in a while.

Since I had a declining green papaya on hand, I tried poaching it. After simmering over 30 minutes, it got a little softer, but still didn't taste great...not bad, just bland. I had a stuffing made anyway, which redeemed the dish. Here's the stuffing ingredients:

half a ripe banana, diced

half a ripe avocado, diced

1/2 cup cooked jasmine rice

1/3 cup diced ginger seitan (home made seitan with a healthy dose of grated ginger)

1 tbsp. fresh lime juice

1 tbsp. agave nectar

1 tsp. sriracha hot sauce

I cooked the rice, seitan, agave, lime, and hot sauce, just until warm, and gently mixed in the soft avocado and banana and removed from heat. The stuffing was great, but the papaya was a loss. I found lots of recipes online for making savory stuffed green papayas, but I think a stuffing like this would be awesome in a good, sweet, ripe, raw papaya. Next time. Now for a recipe that had everybody smiling here:

I finally got around to making my own dog biscuits! I had fun making these, and the dogs love them. It's a simple recipe, just sort of a mess to mix completely, and I ended up with sticky peanut buttery hands, but that's ok. They came out nice and crispy, and I even tried one myself...with more sweetener, these would great peanut butter cookies. This is a fusion of a few vegan biscuit recipes I found online. Here's what I used:

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 cup wheat germ

1/4 cup ground flax seeds

1/2 cup natural peanut butter

1 1/2 tbsp. molasses

3 tbsp. canola oil

a cup of liquid (I used half almond milk, half water)

I think that's everything...my dog bone cookie cutter went into overdrive, and I made two full pans with this recipe, baked at 375 F for 15-20 minutes. Here's satisfied customer Maya.

Yes, I'm posting two dog pics this time, but I love this photo of Maya licking her lips post-biscuit. She's in her favorite chair, where she can look out the window and see if anyone needs a good barking.

Fargo watches the river flow, and pics from Farm Sanctuary CA

2009-03-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

I always like to start here with a photo, so here's a portrait of the very handsome Ari, one of the goats at Farm Sanctuary's California shelter. That's where I've been most of this month, and we'll get back to California in a moment. Isn't he great?

Here in Fargo we're cautiously optimistic about the flooding situation on the Red River, at least those of us still on dry ground. The crest appears to have come and gone over the weekend, although now the National Weather Service is telling us to expect another crest, at similar levels, in another two weeks. We're in the middle of another blizzard tonight, with more snow expected before the final spring thaw even starts, so the river still has a lot of water coming its way. So far so good, but it looks like we'll be waiting on pins and needles for the next two weeks to see how this ends.

This has been exhausting for everyone, but the spirit here in Fargo, and Moorhead MN on the other side of the river, has been inspiring. Tens of thousands of volunteers from the Fargo-Moorhead area, with many more from around the region, have worked so hard this past week to prepare for the flooding. We've filled around three and half million sandbags, built miles and miles of sandbag dikes, and received so much support and well wishes from around the country.

I'm sitting here tonight watching the snow fall and wind blow, and happy to finally have an evening that doesn't involve filling, tying, tossing, or stacking sandbags. We'll see how things go the next couple of weeks, but we're all looking forward to getting through this.

On the personal front, I got back last week from sunny California, where I spent a couple of weeks volunteering at Farm Sanctuary's shelter near Orland, CA. I was at the FS shelter last year around this time for a month, and I'm so happy I was able to get out there again this year. It was another fantastic experience, and great fun to see all of the animals and folks at the shelter. I stayed at the farm with three other interns on three-month terms - Hi Roxie, Amanda, and Brian! - and they were first rate housemates. Good cooks too - I wish I'd taken some more photos of the food everybody was making, and every evening after work was good fun - thanks everybody!

If you're unfamiliar with Farm Sanctuary, they have two sites in the US, in New York and California. They provide life-long care for rescued animals, and support education for ever-growing numbers of people about the conditions these animals have survived as former commercial commodities. The website is full of information on the animals' stories, ongoing campaigns, and educational resources, so I encourage you to check it out - even better of course would be a visit to one of the sanctuary sites - they have weekend tours throughout the summer, if you get the chance! You'll love it, and I guarantee you'll fall for a few of the resident animals.

Now for some photos - the darlings of the shelter this spring are two lambs, Colvin and Adi (not sure about the spelling), brothers born after their mom Wendy arrived. Here's a picture of Adi - the little brother - running around their yard. He isn't quite sure how to use his legs yet, and I broke out laughing every time he ran around, with legs flying in random directions. He would occasionally launch into a full four-legged leap like this, just jogging around with his brother - that's Wendy at the right.

Below is Ramona pig, digging into a bowl of fresh greens and carrots. Feeding Ramona and her group of pig pals is always gratifying - they get so excited whenever the produce bowls come around, and this disappeared in minutes.

Whitaker calf - another sweetie, waiting to grow a little bigger before he joins the main cattle herd in the pastures.

This is Maya - she arrived at the shelter with pal Rosa last year. She just took a bath in the pond the main pig group shares with the geese and ducks here, and came up to visit and pose for her close-up. Lookin' good.

Here's Rosa - she and Maya sleep cuddled up together in the pig barn every night, and they're pretty adorable. Rosa's fired up about eating a bunch of shredded carrots here. They're as gentle as any friendly dog when it comes to eating treats out of hand.

Finally, my buddy Blue, one of my favorites from the sheep herd. The photo doesn't really convey it, but I always feel good when Blue comes up to see what's going on. He's pretty cool. Blue shares the pasture with the rest of the sheep and goat herd, and they're probably my favorite group of animals at the shelter to spend some free time with. The goats especially are endlessly curious, especially when I have treats like apples or carrots in my pockets. Some of the sheep are a little more wary, but Blue always comes up to say hi.

Thanks as always for reading, and I hope to be back soon in regular recipe/food mode. In the meantime, I have a feeling that the river is going to keep us on our toes for another couple of weeks.

Avocado & Black Grape Salad, Steel Cut Oats, and the elusive Pileated Woodpecker

2009-03-04T18:35:00.001-08:00

I love making salads like this for lunch, and they're usually not the result of any planning, just what happens to be on hand. I'm happy for any reason to eat an avocado, and it's paired here with crispy cucumber slices, black grapes, kalamata olives, and walnuts. Most salad dressings I make are experiments in on the spot trial and error, and this one was pretty good. Here's the dressing, more or less:

2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. white wine vinegar
1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 tbsp. agave nectar (or sugar)
1 tbsp. capers
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley
1/4 cup pineapple juice
salt and black pepper to taste

Winter is oatmeal sesaon, and I can usually carve out a little more time in the cold months to actually cook something for breakfast. Here I tried steel cut oats for the first time, soaked overnight. These were cooked for about a half hour on a low simmer, and still retained some texture - sort of like cooked barley or brown rice. I added yellow and purple raisins during the simmering, so they got nice and plump, along with a sliced dry fig, half a fresh peach, and ground flaxseeds.

I was curious about steel cut oats, but I think the longer cooking time will keep me from replacing regular quick oats, or even slightly longer cooking rolled oats, in my regular breakfast rotation. Good though, and people who know about this stuff say they're really healthy, since they're not processed nearly as much as other oats.

We're now in bird-watching mode, so if that's not your thing you're politely excused :) I do my best to take the pups on a long walk every day, and one of our favorite places in town is Oak Grove park, a beautiful expanse of oak trees on a bend in the Red River near downtown Fargo. In the summer it's a busy frisbee golf course, but I love the winter here because we usually have the whole park to ourselves, so I can let the dogs run around off the leashes. A highlight of the park is the chance to see pileated woodpeckers - today there were two in the park, calling to each other from opposite ends. They're extremely wary of people, but this one kindly let me take a couple of pictures before taking off across the park. They really are amazing animals, and their call is always what tells me they're around - you'll never forget it, and it apparently was the inspiration for Woody the Woodpecker's laugh...

While I was waiting to take a picture, these guys decided to take a breather from tearing around the park. If I can presume to speak for them, this means "forget about the damn birds, let's go play!"

Crusted Eggplant with Orzo-Wild Rice stuffing

2009-03-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

I haven't eaten eggplant since last summer, so this FS recipe test was a chance to make stuffed eggplant again. The recipe suggests using mesquite flour to coat the eggplant, but I've found that's a hard ingredient to find in Fargo. Has anybody out there cooked with mesquite flour, or have any ideas on it? I used a matzo meal instead - matzo meal is my usual replacement when recipes call for fine bread crumbs, since most commercial bread crumb products contain eggs and dairy. The stuffing here features walnuts, carrots, orzo, and wild rice - I used a nice multi-rice blend sold in bulk at a local store. Pretty good, and I love the creamy texture of nicely roasted eggplant. As with all stuffings, this one is open to all kinds of variation and experimenting.

Sweet Cherry Tomato Tarts

2009-02-28T18:43:00.000-08:00

This FS recipe test calls for a good heirloom tomato, so I'll revisit this in summer when more tomato varieties are available. I used some tasty cherry tomatoes instead. The tomatoes are lightly stewed in a sugary broth, and placed atop home made almond cream "cheese" in sweet tart crusts. I don't usually think of using tomatoes in a dessert dish like this, but the tart flavor of fresh cherry tomatoes works nicely with the sweet ingredients.

A poem from Bill Holm

2009-02-26T21:14:00.000-08:00

Bill Holm, a poet and essayist from across the river in Minnesota, died yesterday. Here's a poem of his, which I found written on the wall of a camp shelter on Isle Royale a few summers ago. I don't know much about poetry, but I like this.

"August in Waterton Alberta" - Bill Holm

Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the Aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
In doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful

Red Beans and Rice and leftover pizza

2009-02-25T18:51:00.000-08:00

I've been on a mission lately to do more cooking with dry beans, for the obvious reasons - they're so much cheaper, and I like being able to manage the taste and texture. Plus, winter is a great time to have a pot of beans simmering on the stove for an hour or so. I was looking longingly down south the last couple days, as Mardi Gras came to a close - I participated in spirit by making some really good red beans and rice, using a delicious recipe from http://www.fatfreevegan.com/. Nothing beats a good bowl of beans and rice.

I made this pizza earlier this week, with the last of my block of colby/cheddar from the Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. The toppings were mostly leftovers or stuff hanging around in the fridge - marinated artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and seitan. The base sauce was super easy and tasty - it's made with almost a whole bulb of roasted garlic, blended with a bunch of Thai basil leaves, spinach, and olive oil.

Chermoula Seitan and Squash Kebabs

2009-02-23T18:10:00.000-08:00

This weekend I broke out the trusty Foreman grill yet again, and made these kebabs with seitan, zucchini, and yellow squash. Two cookbooks - Donna Klein's Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, and Marcus Samuelsson's pan-African The Soul of a New Cuisine, inspire the chermoula sauce - I have my combined adaptation below, with a little of my own tinkering. Chermoula features fresh herbs like cilantro and parsley, a citrus tang from lemon juice and zest, and an array of ground spices that complement each other very nicely. It's traditional in Morocco and Tunisia, and seems highly versatile - I think it would be great with roasted veggies, in fresh salads with raw ingredients, and as a marinade or rub for anything on the grill.

My take on chermoula sauce:

1/2 cup fresh cilantro

1/2 cup parsley (I used flat leaf parsley)

juice from a lemon, plus a tsp. or so lemon zest

2 cloves garlic

2 tsp. paprika

1 1/2 tsp. cumin powder

1 tsp. ancho chili powder

1 tsp. red pepper powder

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. brown sugar

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Chermoula tossed with chunks of seitan, zucchini, and yellow squash.

I processed the chermoula ingredients in the food processor, scraping everything together a couple of times until I had a paste with fairly coarse pieces. The seitan chunks and squash pieces were tossed in the chermoula, left for about an hour, placed on bamboo skewers, and grilled for around 5 to 7 minutes, until the squash and seitan had browned nicely with some blackened grill marks. The squash is still a little firm, but zucchini and yellow squash are soft enough that they really don't need additional cooking time. I drizzled a little more lemon on the kebabs, and the combined flavors of the marinade were tangy and spicy, with just the right amount of heat.

Stuffed Poblano Chiles with Creamy Walnut Sauce

2009-02-21T21:12:00.000-08:00

Today's recipe test produced this souped up version of chiles rellenos, with a creamy walnut sauce. Poblanos are fried and peeled, then stuffed with a vibrant spiced filling of onions and garlic, tomatoes, fruit, and seitan. The recipe suggests pomegranate seeds as a topping - the idea, which I love, is to use the flat leaf parsley, seeds, and sauce to represent the colors of the Mexican flag. I subbed roasted red peppers, but I bet pomegranate seeds would be great with this. The sauce was made with a base of soaked walnuts and home made tofu sour cream. Each bite was full of different flavors, and the filling invites all kinds of variations. Stuffed peppers require some patience, but the payoff is always a treat.

Earlier this week I made a block of cheese of the Colby/Cheddar variety, from Jo Stepaniak's Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. Cashews, tahini, miso, nutritional yeast, and other ingredients are brought together with the magic of agar powder. It's very tasty, and works pretty well for sandwiches and grilled cheez - I crumbled some in a simple beans and rice bowl too, which was great. When it's mixed with hot food, or reheated, the agar softens up and "melts" nicely.

Beignets and soup

2009-02-19T20:21:00.000-08:00

Today's recipe test for the FS cookbook produced these tasty beignets - the French word for doughnuts, so says wikipedia. To me, they're reminiscent of the fried doughnut pastries my German great aunt would make - I wish I remembered the German name for them. This is happy food - deep-fried dough doused with powdered sugar, and I probably ate more of them in one sitting that I should have. My deep-fryer's basket suffered a serious injury a while back, so my deep-frying is now done in one of my soup-pots on the stove top. I went off script for the recipe, because it was an excuse to use my new dog bone cookie-cutters to make the beignets. I have big plans to start making my own dog biscuits, and picked up these great cookie-cutters at the local True Value, of all places. Even though these beignets are probably not ideal for dogs, my taste-testers were fired up to try a few bits and pieces.

I picked up a couple of new cookbooks, Donna Klein's The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, and Vegan Italiano. In both of these books, Klein focuses on dishes that are naturally vegan in their traditional context, rather than veganizing meat and dairy based recipes. That's a pretty cool approach, as much as I like tempeh meatballs and seitan burritos and stuff like that. The first thing I made was a gigantic pot of minestrone, with loads of fresh veggies and white beans.

Grilled Rum Peaches in Phyllo

2009-02-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

This is another FS recipe test I would love to take credit for. I used frozen peaches instead of fresh, since fresh peaches are pretty scarce in these parts this time of year. After soaking in spiced rum and olive oil for about an hour, the peaches are grilled or roasted - I used the Foreman grill again. My phyllo sheets were kind of torn and crumbly right out of the package, but since they're wrapped in multiple layers everything ended up working out fine. This was really good - sprinkled with cinnamon and sliced almonds, and a subtle hint of spiced rum.

Seared Tofu with a Miso Glaze

2009-02-11T18:24:00.000-08:00

I don't have many kitchen appliances, mostly because of space, but also because so many of them seem a little silly or redundant. That said, I would be lost without my coffee maker, blender, and George Foreman grill. Even though I don't use the grill as often as the first two, I love how well it does its job when called upon.

For example, take this seared tofu, another nummy recipe test for Farm Sanctuary. I made this in a hurry over lunch today, and the grill is great because it presses the tofu and drains extra water while it's cooking. You get to skip that step of tofu prep, and it's done in minutes. I'm starting to feel like I'm doing an infomercial now, so I'll stop singing the praises of the grill.

On to the sauce. This sauce is super simple - just three ingredients, and after a quick simmer you have a sweet and tangy miso glaze for tofu or veggies. Glazed and grilled tofu is topped here with roasted red peppers and shiitake mushrooms, on a bed of just-wilted cooked fresh spinach.

Broccolini Rotini with Raisins and Sun-dried Tomatoes (and some pics from Europe)

2009-02-09T15:42:00.000-08:00

I know broccolini isn't trying to confuse people, but it goes by a lot of aliases - I gather that broccoli rabe, broccoletti, and rapini are all the same stuff. Maybe it was in some kind of vegetable witness protection program at some point - it prefers not to talk about its past. Anyway, it's like broccoli, but different, and really tasty. I see it in all kinds of good looking recipes in some of my favorite cookbooks, so finally tried it. It's a little pricey, at least here, but definitely into my greens rotation.

I used half of this bunch in the broccoli rabe-tempeh recipe from Veganomicon, and made this little pasta bowl for lunch today. First I blanched the broccolini for just two minutes or so - it softens in boiling water pretty quick, and I try to retain some crispness. I boiled a cup or so of rainbow rotini in the same water, and poured hot water over some raisins and sun-dried tomatoes to rehydrate them while the pasta was cooking. It's all tossed together with sauteed garlic, slivered almonds, red pepper flakes, and lots of olive oil; and finished with a little salt, black pepper, and a splash of lemon juice.

Now for some trip photos - I got back from my whirlwind tour of Europe a week ago. Most of the first week of my vacation was spent visiting a couple of friends and their significant others in the Netherlands and Magdeberg, Germany. After that, I rushed off and managed to see Prague, Venice, and Paris in just over a week. Ideally, the next time I go to Europe I'll have six months and see the little places in the countryside and learn Italian and all of that jazz, but I was happy to spend time in a few of the great cities.

Venice was like walking into a very wet and beautiful history book. Because it's an island full of tourists, everything was wildly expensive, so that was the only reason I was satisfied having just a day there. Paris was stunning, from the Louvre to the Champs-Elysees to the top of the Eiffel Tower at night. Amsterdam and Prague both surpassed their colorful reputations. Prague especially seemed almost otherworldly in places, with such a variety of architecture and tiny little allies and typical grand castles and cathedrals and the rest. Cesky Krumlov, a smaller town in the Czech Republic, was really nice too - an old medeival town on an oxbow in the Vltava river, very pretty and guarded (dominated?) by a huge clifftop castle. Anyway, let's check out some pics:

A Dixieland jazz band in the middle of Old Town Square in Prague, exactly what you'd expect to find in the Czech Republic. These guys were fantastic, and I could have sat and listened to them all day. In the background is a statue of Jan Hus, Czech hero and martyr.

A traditional gondola jam in Venice. I have lots of pictures of St. Mark's Basilica and beautiful old waterfront buildings, but this captures commerce in modern Venice pretty well.

This cool Egyptian dog/jackal figure at the Louvre attracted slightly smaller crowds than the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, or Venus de Milo.

Paris at night, almost as pretty as Fargo.

Amsterdam around sundown on my last night. The church at the left is the Westerkerk, permanent home of Rembrandt. Just up the street from the church from this perspective is the Anne Frank house, every bit as moving as you would imagine.

Chili-Chocolate Mole Seitan

2009-02-04T19:21:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody! I'm back at home, after a busy couple of weeks in Europe. I had a great time - which I guess goes without saying - visiting friends in the Netherlands and Germany. After a few days of sleeping on couches, the ultimate budget accomodation, I headed off to be a happy tourist in Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Venice, and Paris. This was my first trip to Europe, and something I've put off doing for years, so I was thrilled and so grateful to finally go.

I'm skipping the full slide show presentation for the moment (so much to say!) to get this vegan food blog deal rolling again. Today's star is a chili and chocolate mole recipe test for the upcoming Farm Sanctuary cookbook. I don't think my photo comes close to capturing how good this was - it was made with lots of home-ground spices, seeds, chilis, and nuts, with tomatoes and a heaping helping of cocoa. The flavor was deep and complex, and I'm glad I still have leftovers. I simmered the mole with seitan chunks from Veganomicon. After boiling the seitan, I cut them into chunks and pan-fry them for a few minutes, and they develop a nice golden-brown color and slightly crispy exterior. Definitely my new favorite seitan approach.

That's about all for now. I think I'm finally starting to catch up on sleep from the past couple of weeks, and once I sort through the pile of photos from the trip I'll get a couple of them up here. I have some more FS recipe tests I'm excited about trying, and hope to get going with some recipes from Europe - no lack of inspiration. In the meantime, as much as I love being out there in the world, I'm happy to be back to my own kitchen and the dogs. Look forward to catching up on everybody's blogs!

Winter vacation

2009-01-15T19:26:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody - just doing a short post to say I'm getting away from an especially challenging winter in North Dakota for a couple weeks, so the blog is going on break too. I'll be back in February, and may subject you all to some trip photos - be warned :) Thanks so much to everyone for the comments - I don't mention it often, but I really appreciate all of the positive feedback, and I always enjoy all of your lovely food creations and thoughts on vegan life, and life in general. See you all in a couple of weeks!

Portabella Pizza

2009-01-11T17:47:00.001-08:00

This blog is going through a portabella mushroom phase for a moment, which gives me a good excuse to extoll the virtues of vegan pizzas with a quick pic. Vegan pizza can be just as good, and usually better (I'm looking in your direction, Dominos) than the standard excesses of the chain restaurant pie. It seems especially weird because traditional old-school Italian pizzas, at least according to cooking shows and travel docs, are often these spare little flatbreads with no more than quality tomato sauce and some basil leaves.

Anyway, I made a pizza yesterday with more of those portabella mushrooms. The "cheese" is that great tofu ricotta recipe from Veganomicon. The tomato sauce is the last of my tomato-eggplant sauce I made this fall, which accidentally ended up with the perfect consistency to use as pizzza sauce.

Roasted Portabellas with White Wine Stuffing

2009-01-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

This white wine stuffing is another nummy recipe test for Farm Sanctuary. My local grocery must have received an extra shipment of portabella mushrooms, because they're selling 6 oz. packs, usually $3.50 or so, for 99 cents. I love portabellas but don't often buy the big caps because of the price, so I'll be eating lots of mushrooms the next few days. Here the portabellas are brimming with stuffing and mushroom gravy.
Sometimes stuffing doesn't really stand out, but this is full of nice texture from celery, onions, and walnuts. With more mushrooms, of course. I used chardonnay, adding the wine to a hot pan of frying vegetables and bread cubes. Pouring wine into a hot cast iron pan is fun, with a sizzling burst and the smell of the alcohol burning off. I don't make stuffing very often at all, but this will probably become my standby. Cooking with wine (chardonnay even!) always makes me feel uncharacteristically sophisticated, so this was a fun recipe.

Happy New Year

2009-01-05T19:46:00.000-08:00

I know I'm almost a week late, but I hope everybody had a great New Year's eve. I caught some kind of nasty bug last week, so have been out of commission. I tried to make the best of things, with lots of ginger tea and HBO series DVDs.
Any decent cooking was limited to New Year's Day, since I was determined to make some Hoppin' John. Growing up here in the frozen north, I didn't know about the southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas on Jan. 1. I'll let real southerners, or wikipedia, explain the reasons for this. I'm happy letting the calendar tell me to eat some black-eyed peas. Served here with quinoa and fried red kale and yellow sweet pepper.

Chickpea & Yuca Encebollado

2008-12-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

It snowed another 8 feet or something (ok, maybe 8 inches) last night, breaking an 80 year-old snowfall record for December in Fargo. It all looked so pretty this morning, until I got my work pickup stuck a couple of times on the way across town. Work in general was snowed out by noon, so I went home to make soup and pretend I was in the tropics. Or any place where you can walk outside without your face freezing solid in 30 seconds. But I'm fine, really.

The soup in question is an encebollado. The Spanish word translates to something like "onioned," as if onion were a verb. Maybe it should be. But I'm getting off track, and over my head liguistically. I got to know tuna encebollado pretty well in Ecuador in my omni days. The soup has a reputation as a hangover cure, and as such is usually sold in the mornings at street carts and market stalls. Steaming bowls are served with lime quarters, or even a plastic bottle of fresh lime juice. Toasted corn or popcorn are used in the same way as saltines, to scatter over the soup.

Encebollado takes to the vegan treatment really well, since bold flavors like onion, lime, tomato, and cilantro don't need those poor fish to make a good soup. To add a sense of sea flavor, I boiled the yuca chunks with a piece of kombu, and sprinkled the soup with some kelp powder. The sea veggies aren't totally necessary, but I liked the evocative effect.

Encebollado de Chickpeas y Yuca
1 big red onion, halved, sliced exceptionally thin, and rinsed in lots of cold water*
1 medium yuca, peeled and cut in chunks
1 14 oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 cups canned unsalted tomatoes, pureed in the blender
1/2 cup tomato juice
Juice from a half dozen limes
1 cup fresh cilantro
Toasted corn or popcorn for garnish
avocado slices, also optional
kombu and kelp powder, both optional**

1. Once you've tracked down yuca and kelp powder, this is a pretty easy soup. Boil the yuca chunks in just enough water to cover them, and with the piece of kombu if you like. They should be tender in 15 to 20 minutes, and soft when poked with a fork.

2. Strain the broth to remove the yuca. At this point I like to rinse the yuca chunks in cold water, and then remove the little spine/stem thing that runs through the center. It falls right out, and in some yuca I've found it cooks too and gets soft. I'm no yuca expert, but I guess it probably depends on the size of the tuber. Maybe.

3. Add the tomatoes, tomato juice, chickpeas, and yuca chunks back to the cooking broth. Bring to a simmer, add half the cilantro, and remove from heat.

4. Ladle into bowls, and add as much lime juice and popped/toasted corn as you like. Sprinkle a handful of sliced onions and more cilantro on top. Avocado is perfect over this too.

* Rinsing those onions takes away some of the raw bite, and my friends in Ecuador always did it. This way you get the crunch and onion flavor, but it's more mellow.
** Kelp powder has a mildly salty taste. Salt to taste if not using kelp.

There you go. I had fun veganizing this, although the whole deal is wildly inauthentic. But next time you get a craving for popcorn, tomatoes, and kelp powder, this is the soup for you!

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-23T20:01:00.001-08:00

I'm heading even further north for Christmas, so I'll be gone for a few days. Just wanted to send a message of happy holidays to everyone out there who has helped me have fun with this blog for the past year. I have found so much inspiration and amazing food and ideas doing this, so thanks so much to all you wonderful vegan bloggers! No food content today, but I have a couple of shamelessly cute animal pictures to say thank you to everyone who has spent the past year trying to live compassionately and reduce suffering in whatever ways we can. Be well everyone.

One of the year-old calves at Farm Sanctuary in Orland, CA, from this past March. That green grass and blue sky looks pretty good right now.

Finally, Maya, when she was even more pint-size. This is last summer, scrunched up in her favorite sleeping spot. Peace everybody!

Dengaku Tofu

2008-12-20T12:26:00.000-08:00

Lunch today was my latest Farm Sanctuary recipe test. I hadn't heard of Dengaku tofu before, so this was educational and tasty. The tofu is traditionally served with bamboo skewers, and the name refers to the stilts used by performers in the Japanese Dengaku festival. Dengaku tofu features a sweet (traditionally red) miso sauce, but I used yellow miso I had on hand. The miso glaze includes ingredients I was pretty familiar with - miso, mirin, sake, sugar, and water from rehydrated seaweeed - but after a reduction on the stove the combined taste was all new to me. Very distinctive, sort of like a gravy, with sweet and tart notes. I love this stuff, and it would be perfect with any variety of stir-fried, roasted, or raw veggies. The tofu is battered in panko crumbs, fried, and served over a tamari and fresh ginger sauce, alongside a little napa cabbage-wakame-cashew salad.

Snow day cooking!

2008-12-16T17:37:00.001-08:00

The good part of living in a state where blizzards come in to stop civilization a few times every winter is the snow day. After getting the call yesterday morning to take the day off (woo hoo!) I made these spinach gyozas (another wonderful Farm Sanctuary recipe test). It's so cool how you can pack a whole bag of fresh spinach into a dozen or so little gyoza wrappers. These were great, with a burst of green goodness inside each gyoza. The dipping sauce was tamari, pineapple juice, chili oil, and green onions.

After work today I broke out that rye bread and made a reuben. Slices of seitan-lentil roast replace the meat, with lots of sauerkraut and a combo of Nasoya vegan mayo, ketchup, lime juice, and sweet pickle relish in the dressing. I like this bread - it has a milder rye taste, as the recipe calls for around 2 parts all purpose flour to one part rye. The flavor fits a reuben really well, but since it's not a really dark rye bread it still works well for PB & Js. The recipe is from the new Vegetarian Times mag.

If you've been paying attention, that's puppy Maya's nose in the photos. The dogs' standard routine goes like this - they roll up, drop a nose down next to the plate, and then look at me like I'm severely neglecting them by not putting the whole mess of food on the floor immediately.