crack the plates

Vegetable plates are mainstays of deep south diners. Most keep about eight different kinds of cooked(to death, mind you) vegetables in chafing-dishes for customers to mix & match. Green beans, field peas, creamed corn, fried okra, collards, squash casserole, and, perplexingly, macaroni & cheese, are routine offerings. Choose any four, add a cat-head biscuit* or a piece of cornbread (no sugar, please–that’d be cake) on the side and it’s a meal. Small-town holes-in-the-wall sell ‘em for about $5 for a 4-veg plate; big-time city joints like Mary Mac’s Tea Room in Atlanta will ask double, but you get more options. No matter where you are, vegetable plates are the cheapest full meals on the menu. Unfortunately most of the vegetable sides are laden with eggs, cheese, and whole milk. (In Atlanta, choose Soul Vegetarian or Calabash Vegetarian Kitchen for sublime vegan vegetable plates.)

I grew up with vegetable plates because I was raised by poor gardeners. On at least a large portion of an acre, my parents grew everything, and we ate all of it–except for the eggplant, of course. (Woefully, it was mostly for looks.)Our parents worked hard so that my brother and I could pile our plates. We may have received a new pair of shoes only once a year at Christmas, but boy, did we eat.

Because I babysit for a precocious first grader every Tuesday night, I had to put together a quick dinner. Seeking onions, I stopped by Richmond’s Tuesday evening farmer’s market shortly after it opened. I picked up two lbs of skinny sweet potatoes ($1), four acorn squash (.50/ea), and an enormous cabbage ($1) from Preston for a measly $4. For all that food, I felt guilty about accepting my one buck change.

Once home, I rapidly split the cabbage & boiled it just like momma taught me: a little water in the bottom of your pan, precious, a tablespoon of Earth Balance vegan margarine (she’d use butter), salt & pepper and let it steam a while til near-mush. I made short work out of the sweet potatoes, too: washed, cut, boiled, and mashed with unsweetened soymilk, a little eBal, salt & ground white pepper, and they were ready to go. Our proteinacious side was Road’s End Organic penne & chreese, an absolutelydisgusting and dreadful approximation of cheesy macaroni that I make palatable with the addition of tons of nutritional yeast, tamari, spicy mustard, eBal, and a splash of soymilk. It was on close-out at the Co-op.

Even factoring in what I paid for the spices, tamari, soymilk, Earth Balance and other ingredients, the entire meal cost about $6 to make. Since each side made about four servings, I made out with two meals for two people at $1.50 a pop. Eating locally, eating cheap…everyone wins!

*”cat-head biscuit” : not quite what it sounds like, this simply refers to a soft, fluffy white-flour** biscuit about the size of a cat’s head.

**My mom, and many other Southern women, swear by White Lily–but I go for the unbleached stuff.

One of my favorite quick meals that tastes like it took ages to make is bhindi masala. “Bhindi” is the Hindi word for ladyfinger AKA okra, and masala, as you probably already know, simply means warm spices. I use a superior pre-ground organic blend that I ordered through our local co-op from Frontier.

As a quick aside, I’ve found that it is much easier to find reliable indian recipes on google if one searches using Hindi rather than the english equivalents. (Check out this glossary for some ideas.) That’s how I found my favorite bhindi masala recipe, located here at Tara Shetty’s long-abandoned blogspot. Here’s a picture of tonight’s dinner:

Since I’ve already linked to the recipe, let me use my space here to counsel you all on selecting okra. Yes, I know it is almost out-of-season, so just keep this in mind for next year…unless of course you live in the glorious southern USA states, where it is available fresh in supermarkets year-round.

I grew up in the south–northwest Georgia, for those who don’t know–and I watched my parents grow okra, helped ‘em harvest it, and now plant my own. And so I learned early on, from my maternal grandmother, I think, how to pick okra. In the US and abroad, okra is also called “lady’s finger” or ladyfinger for short.

F-ed up gender & body notions aside, consider that some of the folks who first started calling it “ladyfinger” were likely the people who harvested it in the field. Most of us are so divorced from the growing processes of our food these days that we forget that it comes from farmers who have their own notions about the world and their own intimate connection with their plants. These farmers may have tagged the okra “lady’s finger” because okra tastes best when it is picked at about two inches in length, i.e, about the length of an average woman’s pinky finger. Allowed to grow much longer, the seeds get tremendous and the texture woody–only good for a heavily stewed gumbo, if that.

For best flavor, okra should be picked when it is young and tender. Both genders can judge a good piece of okra at the market by holding it up against the little finger. If it’s much longer, throw it back–it’ll be dry, woody, and the seeds, pearls. If it’s smaller, bag it and find its friends!

I know, I know…not the kind of headline one would expect for a post during Vegan Month of Food Writing. Taco Bell?! Shouldn’t a responsible vegan just have some tortillas, a can of beans, and a jar of salsa on hand for that sort of thing? Well…yeah. It can certainly be much less expensive to make your own.

But for all of us, there comes a time when our schedule just does not permit even the slapping together of a couple tortillas…and we’re drawn like moths to the neon lighting of the fast food restaurant. Of course, this presents much more of a challenge to vegans than to flesh-eaters. Relatively-enlightened Burger King may have started offering a veggie burger years ago, but it’s still a Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie Patty made with egg whites and calcium caseinate. Sigh.

So vegans and fast food: ne’er the twain shall meet? Not if you’ve got a Taco Bell nearby. There, harried vegans can get 99 cent bean-burrito, fresco style. When you order the item “fresco style“, the preparer omits the cheese and replaces it with a pretty darn good pico de gallo (often with discernable cilantro!). You don’t have to say “no cheese” but I do anyway, just to be safe–at least a couple of the times I failed to do so I was unhappily surprised by its presence in the wrap.

It’s really a rather good deal for a quick vegan meal…BUT I wouldn’t do it on a regular basis because, despite the availability of some vegan options, eating at Taco Bell presents a major ethical dilemma. It is owned by Yum! Brands, a company that also manages A&W, Pizza Hut, Wing Street, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s a mammoth corp that satisfies its shareholders with the deaths of millions of animals a year, and it has even been tagged for human rights abuses in Florida. So while the burrito might satisfy in a pinch, I still regard it as a last resort.

In my last post I mentioned that I had helped cook for the Peace Form talk by Joy Ellison, former Earlham College turn Christian Peacemaker Teams nonviolence trainer and activist. She works alongside Palestinians in the West Bank village of at-Tuwani. Because of my involvement in a local oral history/storytelling project, I was able to borrow equipment to record Joy telling some of her stories in my own home today! As a thank you for participating in the Wayne County Girls Inc.-based What Is Your Story? project, I made her a delicious simple meal. The centerpiece: butternut squash soup, take II, creamy version.

To make this soup, I took my new food processor on its inaugural voyage! Nevermind the fact that we bought it almost a month ago and it has been sitting, neglected, since then. It’s in use now, and thank heavens, for it pureed beautifully. The soup was so thick and creamy that, upon describing it to a nonvegan friend, I had to remind her that no animal products were involved in its creation: just three beautiful garden butternut squashes slow-roasted for an hour + the power of the swank Cuisinart Prep 9. Behold!:

I used Isa’s recipe in Vegan With a Vengeance (that cookery-book stalwart) and added a maple-syrup drizzle on top. The only changes were a little more salt, a little less lime, and slightly different roasting measures.

Joy took one spoonful of it and sighed, remarking that while the soup yesterday was good, this was what she wanted in a butternut squash soup. If you’re able, check out her blog at http://inpalestine.blogspot.com to learn more about her amazing work among the people of at-Tuwani!

Today’s kitchen adventures began shortly after 9am (and an unsuccessful trip to the vet, sadly) at the ESR center dining room. Friend Bekah and I teamed up to make a butternut squash-fall harvesty-type soup for about 60 for Peace Forum. Today’s topic was entrancing–a woman from Christian Peacemaker Teams, who has been living in Palestine for some time now, shared stories of non-violent resistance in the tiny herding village of at-Tuwani.

The message was alternately hopeful and heart-breaking; the best part was how she described her Palestinian friends and fellow activists so clearly and penetratingly that I felt as though I got to know them through her. Appropriately, it persuaded me to take a look at my budget this month and see if there’s not a little cash there for her work, for these sisters and brothers who only seem so far away, but who, in reality, simply aren’t. You can read more at Joy’s blog, I Saw it in Palestine, here.

But this blog is about the food, so back to it! The recipe was a totally winged one. Here’s what we did, kinda, and you can, too, sorta:

• chop about: 6 lbs of organic carrots, 4lbs of onions, 10 organic sweet potatoes, a 5-lb bag of regular potatoes; a head of organic garlic; a bunch of organic parsley; a handful of garden-picked sage
• for a roasting pan, prep 10 huuuuuuge butternut squash
• use a box of no-chix vegan xGFx bouillon cubes
• spread everything but the butternut squash across two huge pots (I’m talking 50 servings in one pot, 30 in the other); season with organic marjoram, thyme, pepper, olive oil, and basically a shaker of salt; boil
• scrape the filling from the butternut squashes; process it quickly with some of the soup in a bowl with a hand mixer (no immersion blender, stand blender, or food processor required!) to get it sorta mushy, then return to pot and incorporate well
• season, serve, please 72 people (the final count) and put away the abundance of leftovers!

We served the soup with a gigantic salad (most of the ingredients donated by our local Kroger), some green beans and garlic, a fruit salad, and a soy-bean side of some kind. Miraculously, the entire freaking meal was both vegan and xGFx!

in the pot

Beautiful soup, so rich, and….orange?

For future reference, it would’ve been good to mix it up with a few tbps of good-quality curry powder, or with some maple syrup.

First, the most important news: our katze Unix seems to be doing much better today than she has since the fleabath incident Sunday night. (Worrisomely, she’d put her appetite on hold and would mew loudly every time we touched her). She’s in fine furry form tonight, though, and is currently sitting in my lap encumbering my typing. And oh, how soft and flea-free her tortoiseshell fur is! (Alas, we’ll still be heading to the V-E-T in the morning.)

Tonight’s dinner was generously provided by friends N & J in celebration of Nate’s upcoming birthday. As a special surprise, they prepared some sushi–Nate’s favorite–with avocado, carrot, and cucumber. (I brought over the materials to make a quick miso–red miso paste by Westbrae, cellophane noodles from Jungle Jim’s, japanese-style firm tofu, two cloves of garlic sliced thin and some kombu kelp.) Observe the taller N coach the shorter one on the wily ways of sushi:

Those are taller N’s in the foreground (second picture). Little N…well, let’s just say he could do with a little more larnin’:

But hey, who am I to judge? I didn’t even try! On that note…

In the interest of full disclosure (because this blog ought not be about my triumphs only, but about my royal struggles too), I will admit that I f-ed up not one but TWO desserts tonight. I fail so comprehensibly so infrequently that it is quite marvellous that I was able to do it twice in one evening. Still, I admit: I ruined some rice pudding by using short-grain BROWN rice and not cooking it through; mere minutes after wiping the apron of this masterpiece, I whipped up some chocolate pudding that didn’t set because my arrowroot was so expired it had completely lost its potency. Oops?

Le sigh.

Hope you’ll check out tomorrow’s update on cooking for Peace Forum: butternut squash soup that isn’t (DUN DUN DUN) …pureed!!! Better yet, just come have lunch! Tomorrow’s talk: “One Hill at a Time: Supporting Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance at Al Tuwani.”

Too little time + not much of a taste for anything made lunch look anything but promising today. Until, that is, I happened upon an 8 oz container of Tofutti creme cheeze in our totally underused dairy drawer. Set to expire at the end of this month, I started to brainstorm…& recalled a lovely sandwich I used to eat on lunchbreaks & special occasions while working at Alon’s: “the Tuscany.” To make it, the line-cook slathers about three ounces of high-quality herbed goat cheese on either side of a ciabatta mini loaf, alternates layers of marinated roasted eggplant with sun-dried tomatoes, and tops it with fistfuls of arugula. Pretty charming, eh? So so unvegan.

My answer was an herbed creme cheeze of my own made of Tofutti and generous piches of ground garlic, organic basil, marjoram, & thyme from Frontier, a splash of Santa Cruz organic lemon juice and a little salt and white pepper. Whip this briefly with your hand mixer and then slather it on some delicious hearth-made bread (in our case, the last of Zingerman’s farm). Add some reconstituted sun-dried tomato pieces a dear friend kindly brought you back from Atlanta, where they’re available at a reasonable price, and then stuff some organic arugula on that mess. Ta-da, ta-die-for:

For dinner I made a simple take on a pad thai, based off of Isa’s recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance. As with the kale and tofu I made yesterday, the idea is basically to balance the flavor–here, you’ve got some tamarind concentrate (sweet, bitter), tamari (salty, pungent), unrefined sugar (sweet), and sambal oelek (spicy!). I sauteed the tofu with a lot of garlic, onion, and red peppers and japanese eggplant from the Saturday morning farmer’s market, see?:

And as a bonus, here’s a picture of the wickida Unixera protesting our closed-door policy:

Seriously, she just got a fleabath.

Love!

Having just returned from a mini-vacay where I enjoyed especially the privilege of other folks cooking for me for two days, I was reluctant to make dinner tonight. (Not to mention the fact that when N came home, his right shoulder smelled strangely of cheap Chinese food which I immediately started craving. But as that is basically too weird to have written, let’s move on.) Admitting that 1) our fridge is stuffed with raw materials purchased at the Ann Arbor farmer’s market and 2) the visit left me penniless, I decided to whip up an old, quick favorite–sweet hot n sour kale n tofu.

The recipe is based on one I read in Dr. Andrew Weil (say “while”)’s book Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, and the idea is to use your ingredients’ sweet, spicy, and astringent tastes to balance & illumine one another. Here’s what I do:

• Clean and chop some kale (I’ve used regular curly; heirloom Red Russian & Dinosaur)
• Put a little oil in your [cast-iron] skillet; generously add minced garlic (prepared or freshly minced) and some red pepper flakes to taste
• Saute, add greens with a little powdered mustard (a few pinches; it helps the flavor of  the greens); toss around well; add some tamari or soy sauce, a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (I like Bragg’s organic), and a couple tbsps of brown sugar
• Mix well and cover for a few minutes so that it can steam and cook down a bit (greens cook down a LOT)

To up the protein and make a full meal, use your skillet to stir-fry some (extra-)firm tofu in a little oil with garlic; toss with the cooked greens and serve over organic brown rice.

Heey, here’s a picture!

(That’s Zingerman’s vegan farm bread in the back.)

No offense to progressive cities (or obsessive vegans), but I’m pretty sure there’s a strong correlation between how yuppie a place is and how likely it is to sport a cupcake shop. Said shop may offer delicious treats, but let’s face it, it’s still an entire establishment devoted to pretty, precious desserts. Such a place does not spring up during a recession; significantly, it looks stark against the backdrop of one.

Nevertheless, I deeply enjoyed the signature vanilla vegan cupcake Jiji picked up for me at Ann Arbor’s Cupcake Station just before I skipped town. The flavor of both the cupcake and the frosting was suprisingly complex–delightfully, I could nearly taste the apple cider vinegar they used to sour the soymilk. The frosting was rich and buttery, the kind that can only happen with a generous amount of Earth Balance (hereafter, eBal).

Thank you, J___, for a delightful weekend! I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed catching up and getting to know your new home better (in all its present charms and aforementioned growing edges). You probably have the best apartment in the city.

Love, A

Friends,

I’m relieved to report that it is quite easy to find vegan eats in Ann Arbor. Last night we dined at Seva, the city’s most popular vegetarian restaurant. The menu is about 70% vegetarian, 30% vegan, yet many of the dishes can be made vegan. We started with the yam fries, though if they were made with true yams or just plain ol’ sweet potatoes, I’ll never know. They were certainly delicious. (Note: the accompanying dipping sauce is not vegan, though you can sub for another). Jiji and I caught each other up while sipping the outstanding Ginger Julep (Fresh ginger shot with Maker’s Mark Bourbon, sugar syrup & soda, garnished with a lemon wedge)–a very good complement to the crispy yam fries.

At Jiji’s generous treat, I chose the curried eggplant. The menu describes it thusly: “tender chargrilled eggplant with tamarind-coconut-peanut sauce, served with a really spicy vegetable-brown rice biryani and a cooling beet-soy yogurt raita.” The eggplant was cooked well but the sauce lacked the depth of flavor one might expect from its triple-noun nomen, and instead simply tasted rather sweet. The biryani was not nearly as spicy as advertised–on a scale of 1 to 10, it was a three. Nevertheless, all of the flavors–raita included–danced nicely together, and I am looking forward to enjoying the leftovers this evening before heading to see “Nico Icon” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Today we went marketting at the tremendous Ann Arbor farmer’s market. It is so big, with so many vendors from all over, that the City of Ann Arbor devotes substantial space to it on its website. I made off with three bunches of organic heirloom kale, organic mizuna, organic arugula, un-sprayed spaghetti squash and “sweet potato” squash, and a half gallon of cider for just around $15–not bad! Best of all, my BFF treated me to 8oz of pure Michigan maple syrup. (At a dollar an ounce, it’s quite a treat.) I plan on baking the squash and serving it with the syrup for our lunch tomorrow.

We left the market for Zingerman’s, where we stood in line outside for about 10 minutes before we were able to enter & order. It was totally worth it. I chose Stewart’s Farmer’s Hash, Zingerman’s vegetarian hash. From the menu: “Oven-roasted sweet potatoes & redskin potatoes, piquillo peppers, sautéed spinach & crispy shallots. Served with buttered onion rye toast & sour cream on the side.” To veganise the meal, I subbed wheat for the onion rye and asked for it dry; I also requested that they prepare the hash with olive oil as opposed to the usual butter. No problem!

We sat down at the coffee and pastry house next door, where our food was delivered. There, we snagged an Americano (Jiji) and, because it was featured and I was feeling decadent, a cup of Vosges’ Aztec Elixir haute drinking chocolate, prepared by the barista with soymilk (no extra charge!). Composed of only ancho & chipotle chillies, Ceylon cinnamon, Madagascar vanilla bean, cornmeal (for thickening), and dark chocolate, it is divinity in a cup. I shared; we swooned.

Now I’m back home, trying to decide whether to grab a quick nap or head out to do a little exploring. Though I miss my sweetie very much, I am happy to get away for the weekend and experience someplace new. And while the food is quite good here, it is no match for the company. :) It will be hard to say goodbye!