crack the plates

My cat Perl is enormous. It makes me sad.

She wants to eat everything. Like most human adults, she’s addicted to carbs.

But tonight she went too far, begging for curry.

actual conversation with my cat, perl:

(I scrape curry onto my plate)

perl: I LOVE CURRY! I LOVE CURRY! I LOVE CURRY! I LOVE CURRY!

(leaving kitchen, carrying plate, followed by perl)

perl: I LOVE CURRY! please! Give me curry! I LOVE CURRY! Please! Curry!

me: you hate curry. you don’t even eat this! go away.

perl: I LOVE CURRY!

me: this is people food. give it a rest.

perl: CURRY! CURRY! I LOVE CURRY!

(plates are set on table; i look away to jot a quick e-mail)

(perl props herself on coffee table & paws at curry)

me: PERL!! GO AWAY!!

(perl stalks off and sulks on the couch. no curry for perl.)

Only a reworking of the first two frames of Dinosaur Comics can adequately express my frustration with myself right now:

T-Rex images owned by Ryan North/Dinosaur Comics/Qwantz.

So there you have it. It’s pretty freaking hard for me stay on top of my blog as of late! It’s probably harder to admit it, which is why I’m saying it with a post, in hopes that this will jar me from my inaction!

It’s mostly frustrating because some interesting things have happened that I want to tell you about. I mean, I only did one day of mid-June’s San Francisco trip, when I ate at so many awesome vegan restaurants! (Donuts with in-house-ground organic flour, for goodness’ sake!!) There was also a drag show a few weeks ago, and a couple recent trips to see my gorgeous BF Jina beena. I want to tell you the exciting bits!

But alas, the non-exciting parts have been dragging me down. As I anticipate yet another move, I once more find myself in that tight “in-between” place. Waiting, waiting, for things to happen, in the meanwhile, hesitant to put down any roots. I’m also languishing in this heat/humidity, but then again, who isn’t? Except for what’s been mentioned previously, not much punctuates these days of languid reading, drinking iced oolong, eating chilled watermelon, and generally assuming a couchant position as much as possible. And when the temperature in your house climbs towards the mid-90s, who in the hell wants to use a laptop as intended?

In the interest of getting you caught up (turning a new leaf? or is that too ambitious at this point? sigh), let’s have a bit of a camera dump from the past couple weeks, with commentary. Deal? Deal.

I made a vegan shepherd’s pie, which was phenomenal. I spread the mashed potatoes over the filling just before putting it in the oven to bake:

There is no recipe, but here’s roughly what I did: re-hydrated large chunk TVP, cooked in tamari, nutritional yeast, and pepper; cooled & roughly chopped the TVP; added it to home-made no-fat gravy; added an assortment of fresh chopped and steamed vegetables; poured it all into a casserole dish, covered with home-made mashed potatoes, baked. Sounds easy, right? It took a couple of hours in one of hell’s hottest rooms: my tiny, poorly ventilated, very dilapidated kitchen (with two working eyes on the stove).

Here’s the finished product:

Oh, cute story about the framing of this photograph. While I was in San Francisco, we dined at Millennium, SF’s chicest (read: simply most expensive) vegan restaurant. I called the waitress (seemingly pretty laid back) over to make a joke about the fact that my apricot-glazed portabella stack looked somewhat cheaply made. I pointed at the familiar threesome of just-so cut carrots, peas, and corn and teased, “This trio comes from a can, and it says VEG-ALL on the side!” Apparently she took herself more seriously than I did, because she didn’t get the joke, insisting the ingredients were harvested at the peak of freshness from local, organic ingredients. But she went one further, claiming that the chef meant the dish to be an “homage” to Southern cooking.

Uhhh…. are you laughing yet? I wish I had a picture of it to share with you, but suffice to say it looked nothing like the above. This desiccated morsel with hardly any of the advertised apricot glaze, sitting dumbly atop stiff, flavorless mashed potatoes and the inspid trio of carrots, peas and corn, was the furthest thing from “Southern cooking”. Just to confirm that she did mean Southern US (rather than Southern CA?) I shared that I was from the South, the deep south, northwest Georgia, in fact. Undeterred, she claimed “the South” as well–Bloomington, Indiana.

Hm.

Sorry, Millennium chefs. That dish was the furthest thing from the cooking I grew up with and loved, and you’d do your otherwise highly competent wait staff a favor by not trying to pass this disaster off as anything but. You know what, just scrap the damn dish. Everything else–appetizers, spirits, main courses, desserts–was superb!

Wow, side-tracked.

On the subject of a proper apricot barbeque glaze, though, here’s the first I made using Isa’s recipe from Veganomicon–and about ten fresh apricots! Thick, hearty, oozy, shiny:

Plated:

Would you believe I’m not a huge broccoli fan? Alas, it’s true. I had to cover mine in extra apricot sauce.

Earlier this month I went to see one of my favorite queens from season two of RuPaul’s Drag Race with Nate & Michael at the famous Union Cafe in Columbus Ohio. We had dinner at Indian Kitchen before the show. Complimentary papadums:

The view from our table.

Greasy snacks.

Michael’s lovely plate.

What is that you say, dear server? Complimentary aloo parathas, as well? Don’t mind if I do!

Sadly, we were the only ones in the place. Highly recommended! Try it next time you’re in Columbus, instead of the Taj Mahal (which is basically across the street).

Fireworks in the sky:

Fireworks on stage.

Gorgeous Columbus gal Nina West chides an extremely drunk Polish man.

Jujubee prepares!

Look at that body!

I am also in possession of an extremely embarrassing shot of Juju, but I’m choosing not to post it out of RESPECT! (E-mail me if desired.)

I made some orange cranberry scones on about three hours of sleep for church brunch. They were great. The best part was when an elderly member of the congregation asked for the recipe and where, exactly, to get soymilk.

I made a couple of dark-chocolate-bottomed peanut butter silk pies (with a couple teaspoons of agar-agar; recipes modded from Vegan with a Vengeance). Here’s one:

Sing with me now, isn’t she lovely?

Sorry if three pictures is overkill. I rarely bake.

Did I mention I have another cat, now? Her name is Perl, but Nate & I have been calling her Perlba recently (Perl+[goom]ba). She’s not much like a cat, actually. She was abandoned as a kitten & very likely orphaned, so she wasn’t socialized by/with other cats til adulthood. She didn’t learn how to drink water properly til a few months after she moved in, & she’s not yet totally clear on cleaning herself or using her claws, either. It’s sad. The upside is that she kind of acts like a dog, lolling on her back, showing her belly, never getting upset like a normal cat. She likes to sit on computers and in her raspberry box. She’s mostly looks up to her “big sister” Unix, but she eats waaaay too much.

I made the quintessential vegan summer food, The Grit’s vegan chicken salad. A hellish recipe, consisting of separately cooked tofu, gravy, home-made vinaigrette, and vegan mayo, apart from the ingredients in the actual chicken salad recipe. In short, the reason I make it once a year. This time I tripled the recipe so it’d last a week & we’d have enough to share.

And finally, a couple trips to see my lovely Jina Beena in Ann Arbor. I spent a fair amount of my mornings getting caffeinated at Zingerman’s:

A view of the cafe.

The best part was our picnic at Pickerel Lake. Jina is the queen of picnics!! We raided the People’s Co-op for our favorites: baba ghanoush, watermelon, peaches, and a new wonder, coconut milk ice cream!

Sorry the photo is a bit blurry. It’s hard to hold still when you’re witnessing such beauty.

A close-up of our Zingerman’s bread and assorted treats.

Okay, that’s enough for now! There’s a blue-tongued skink upstairs that needs a piece of watermelon! (No, really, I’m helping skink-sit.)

I had my friend Donnie over for dinner last night. A great cook in his own right, he keeps a blog at http://blackveganism.blogspot.com/ and promises to start updating again soon. (In the meantime, get caught up on his back issues!) It was the first time we’d managed to get together this summer, so I wanted to do something nice. Tofu or tempeh, he said. My planned tofu dish (the Grit’s mock chicken salad) took much too much time, so I settled on an as-yet-untried Veganomicon recipe for cornmeal-crusted tofu. Paired with organic mashed potatoes and creamy spicy-sweet corn pudding, it was perfect:

Donnie was happy, and in the end, that’s what matters:

Oh! I guess I should also mention that I made the sauce topping the encrusted tofu. That’s actually a home-made vegan chipotle mayo. The chipotles in adobo came from a can, but the mayo was home-made for a tempeh chick’n salad from last week. Recipe courtesy Bryanna Clark Grogan, it incorporated dry mustard, apple cider vinegar, and AGAR-AGAR! Check it out here. I just thoroughly mashed about a half a cup with two largeish chipotles for a tangy cream accompaniment.

Tonight I just made plain ol’ bhindi masala, which you’ve already seen on this blog a million times. The highlight of my day (which was by anyone’s count a pretty damn good one) occurred around 9pm, when I walked out the front door to see my friend Jabani zooming past on his bike. Jabani! I called to him; My Secretary! he joyfully replied. (Long story short, I’m our church office manager.) He’s been out of town recently, and in that time, our mutual friend Matt informed me that OKRA is one of most beloved foods. So I rushed up to him and in, what must have sounded like very garbled English, declared that I had made something special for dinner and wanted to share leftovers with him.

You should have seen his face when I emerged with a huge container of bhindi masala. Taking note of the okra, the tomatoes, the onion, the color, and the general stewed texture, he pronounced it “a real Nigerian recipe” and gave me the best hug I’d had in a while. (He is Nigerian, and while my recipe is Indian-ish, it is rather similar to this one.) It needs some salt, I cautioned. He vowed to spice it up.

Now I can’t wait to cook for him again, and with fresh, in-season, local okra!

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged in a week. What makes it even worse is the fact that SO MUCH AMAZING FOOD has been created in my kitchen recently. (Including two different kinds of barbeque! And tempeh chicken salad! And scones! PIE!!) I don’t know what my problem is, but I hope I can get on the ball soon. It’s July, for goodness’ sake.

But let’s start with the most recent. A couple days ago Nate expressed interest in learning to cook. This was weird for me, because in spite of the fact that tons of people love for me to cook for them, almost no one has taken me up on the offer to teach them how to do it themselves. Lazy Bs! (Just kidding.) For Nate, it’s clearly about self-improvement & empowerment. Since he only knows how to make three dishes–a simple spicy red lentil dal, a brown lentil broccoli concoction, and a nice homemade tomato sauce with chickpeas–he feels a little helpless when hungry. Since there are rarely leftovers (we eat a lot) and we don’t really buy (expensive) vegan convenience food that often, he usually depends on me to feed him dinner. And he’s not entirely comfortable with this fact.

After mulling it over for a few moments, I suggested we do our “cooking class” in the following way: we’ll pick two consecutive nights a week to do the same recipe. On the first night, he shadows me, helping out to a limited extent. But he has to pay close attention and really take it all in, for on the second night, he’ll have to re-create it all…flying solo! Pleased with my cleverness, I felt relief at his enthusiasm in proceeding this way.

And so we did! Last night we made Isa’s famous “Chickpea cutlets” recipe from Veganomicon with homemade no-fat savoury brown gravy (Bryanna Clark Grogan’s recipe), baked potatoes, and steamed peas. I thought this would be fun because gravy is seriously one of his favorite things in the world, and I wanted to demystify the process for him and show him that honestly? he can have gravy whenever he damn well pleases. The chickpea cutlets are also kind of like the “chick’n fried ‘steak’” we had at Chicago Diner, and who doesn’t love fried things?

Here’s last night’s plate, made together:

As Isa says, it’s vegan food you can eat with a knife and fork.

And here’s what Nate created this evening:

Seriously, my Southern grandparents would love this meal.

He was so adorably worried that the cutlets came out too thick, but he did an amazing job & I showered him with praise. Strangely, the most important compliment seemed to be “it tastes just like last night’s.” I think since he holds my own skill in such high regard, this meant a lot. But I hope our cooking classes can continue to show him that with a little practice, anyone can make a legendary vegan meal.