crack the plates

I’m thrilled to report that the first week of meals have been delivered to fridges in East Atlanta, Decatur, and Midtown! Thanks so much to the three intrepid families who took a chance with the first delivery. I’m livin’ my dream – and totally couldn’t be doing it without you!

By now, you might have read, heard, or seen details about the delivery. It’s one thing to read about it – it’s another entirely to see the pictures. Here are the pictures!

All meals start with beautiful local produce. This stuff came from Sunday’s Grant Park Farmer’s Market!

There’s no other way to say it: donuts are one of my favorite things in the world! But not fried and glazed yeast donuts. Not donuts with cream filling. Not sprinkle-topped donuts. I live for one kind of donut, and one kind alone: all-over glazed chocolate cake!

Since I’ve been vegan for years, I haven’t eaten too many chocolate cake donuts. Last summer I went on a veritable quest for them in the bay area, finally finding some evening-discounted buddies by Pepples Donuts at Ritual Coffee. (Mmmm, what a dream team.) Four or so flavors were left and I bought every single one. Sadly, not one was a chocolate cake! Yet having determined the maker of my beloved treat, I skipped over to Herbivore for brunch the next morning and nabbed a chocolate cake. Divine!

But that was last year’s vegan road trip. More recently I gobbled several from Vegan Treats in Bethlehem, PA. I wondered how long I’d have to wait for another until…

I happened to be in Kroger, looking for very different things…

When there, on the end of an aisle…

Some department manager’s embarrassing mistake: a whole stack of doughnut pans, undesired by everyone in the Atlanta area, and marked down to half off!

Seriously, Kroger – what the hell you doin’ carrying doughnut pans? And featuring them on an endcap?! Doughnuts are great and all, but a doughnut pan is hardly a tempting impulse buy for a major chain grocery store.

Except, of course, to me. With visions of becoming the Vegan Doughnut Queen, I bought every pan. All eight of them. Sure, it set me back fifty bucks, but if I’d bought the same pans on sale anywhere else, they would have been $10 each! (I’m looking at you, Amazon.) A ten-year warranty (yes, on cake pans) sealed the deal. This is how I rationalise.

fresh out of the oven

It was only about six hours after time of purchase when I had six lovely doughnuts resting on my cooling rack. I whipped up a simple glaze of home-powdered sugar (SO EASY: just whizz good vegan organic granulated sugar in a high-powered blender), maple syrup, a little vanilla, and water. Dipped each one twice and let ‘em set. Aaaah.

I used the recipe posted on my friend Vic’s blog, The Life. It appears to be a variation on the original internet-famous vegan donut recipe by VeganYumYum, only chocolatified – thanks, Vic! ONE MAJOR CORRECTION: I’m pretty sure that where he typed “1 1/2 cup sugar” he meant to type one half-cup of sugar, or, more directly, 1/2 cup sugar. At any rate, I absolutely did not use one and a half cups of sugar – I used 1/2 cup, and it was delightful. I also re-wrote the narrative to reflect how I proceeded.

Here’s the recipe, but do be a dear and go check out Vic’s blog! He’s always coming up with interesting recipes and is super about sharing.

vegan chocolate cake donuts

1.5 teaspoon of powdered egg replacer mixed in 2 tablespoons of warm filtered water
1 cup organic all-purpose flour
1/2 cup organic vegan sugar
3/4 cup soymilk with 1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar mixed in
1/3 cup of organic, fair-trade cocoa powder
4 tablespoons vegan margarine (OR, I wager, coconut oil – gonna try this next!)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

• Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
• Grease and flour your six-well doughnut pan. (Have you not greased-and-floured before? Oh my! Just grease the pan with solid vegetable fat – I use Spectrum Organic Non-Hydrogenated all-veg shortening – and then sprinkle in the flour. Shake the pan so that the flour completely covers the fat and then gently tap off the excess. Voila!)
• In a small saucepan on med-low, melt margarine.
• While margarine is melting, sift flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt into a bowl. Pour in sugar and thoroughly combine.
• To melted margarine add soymilk mixture (soymilk + vinegar) and vanilla. When the liquid mixture is warm – not hot – pour it into the dry mixture. Quickly pour in the egg replacer and stir it all up until well-combined.
• Bake for 16 minutes at 375 degrees.
• Please! Permit the donuts to rest in the pan on a baking rack for 30 minutes. Thirty whole minutes. Agony.
• I greased and floured my pan so well that the donuts came out of the pan with no provocation, but you might need to gently prod and twist them.

Once they’re very cool, whip up your little instant glaze (recipe above). Pull out a piece of saran wrap and put it under your dry rack (you could also just put a paper or cloth towel under there). Once you’ve immersed the donut in glaze, let it rest on the dry rack and firm up, about fifteen to twenty minutes. Like so:

It’s totally worth it, letting them set ‘n settle. The glaze gets kind of nicely crispy in spots. It’s not a too-sweet doughnut on its own, so the glaze complements perfectly.

All hail, Queen of donuts!

Today was the closing day of the High Museum of Art’s MoMA partnership exhibit entitled “Modern by Design”. The exhibition features a selection of works chronicling three key moments in MoMA’s design collection and exhibition history: “Machine Art” (1934); “Good Design” (1950-1955); and “Italy – the New Domestic Landscape” (1972).

Despite his interest, my dad (machinist, welder, metalworker, folk artist, among others) wasn’t able to make the exhibit before it closed. So I photographed it - most of it – for him.

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Yesterday I made lunch for my newish full-of-win-and-awesome friend Lillian, who is vegetarian and a self-proclaimed “recreational eater”. We paged through the giant Alinea book and made a pact to travel to Chicago with our sigots and eat there within the next year. (A pact, right Lil??) We also gossiped about our fanciest Atlanta dining experiences to date. Lillian: Bacchanalia, Miller Union. Me: Rathbun’s (something like thirteen vegetarian courses at the kitchen-side chef’s table and service by Kevin himself); Abattoir.

Abattoir! A total reversal of the ol’ fox in the henhouse situash – a vegan in the slaughterhouse! (Eh, that’s one of the main reasons we’re vegan, right? We know approximately a trillion times more about what goes on in slaughterhouses than most folks.) Abattoir – the joint project of chef-owner Josh Hopkins, his wife Kristine, and Bacchanalia owners Anne Quatrano & Clifford Harrison – opened in spring of 2009. The early press had me fuming – the last thing we need these days is a “meat-centered concept”! EVERYTHING ABOUT DINING OUT IS ALREADY MEAT-CENTERED. Redundant at best, glorification at worst.

I never, ever thought I’d find myself there. Even if I ferreted out the few vegan options, why would I want to hang out in a meat orgy? But then I met Josh & Kristine at Truly Living Well’s farm fete for Atlanta restaurateurs. Before I had a clue as to who he was, I saw Josh gamboling towards Colleen (then farm manager) and me clutching this weird root, wondering if it could be grown there. (It turned out to be horseradish, I think.) His enthusiasm for TLW’s produce was spellbinding. As we talked, I learned how much we share in common – we both grew up in the mountains, cared for farm animals, grew vegetables, splashed in creeks and roamed forest and field. When I finally learn about Abattoir, I hang onto his words, anxious to understand how someone so deeply committed to slowness, craft, and sustainability could helm such a restaurant. And yet, across our seeming gulf of differences, we connected.

The secret was out about him – but what about me? As he reached for my card, I joked that he’d never talk to me again after reading it – hint: the word “vegan” is pretty big. He got a joke in, of course, but it was so gentle it almost didn’t register. And then he and Kristine insisted that I come in for a vegan meal. “We have the best vegetable plate in the city.” In the south, a land of meat-n-threes (or, more often, four and fives), this is a pretty tempting boast.

I needed a good reason to go, so I decided to take my oldest friend Jessica. This is Jessica:

(And a bowl of vegan won-ton soup at Harmony Vegetarian [Vegan] on Buford Highway.)

Jessica recently visited from the northeast Georgia mountains, where she lives with her husband and two adorable children, to celebrate the successful completion of her Master’s degree in early childhood education. Since we graduated high school together in 2002, she married, had two kids, worked five years as a kindergarten para-pro, weathered all manner of life’s ups & downs big & small, and earned three degrees – Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s. She’s truly an amazing woman … who I’ve had the pleasure of knowing twenty years!

Crazy, huh? We’re only 27, after all (birthdays three days apart, both pisces). I thought we became friends in third grade (Mrs. Wellsandt’s memorable class), but she says we met in second. We’ve been besties since. Third grade was great because we argued over things like like whether bangs are natural (i.e., hair just stops growing at a certain point on your face; my position) and how to correctly pronounce the word pyramid (pie-ra-mid; her’s). We bickered a lot, drawing truces to write stories (my talent) and illustrate them (hers).

My pugnaciousness and audacity tried her timid heart. She recalls a time I “conned” her into thinking that it was totally okay to mark with crayons on a laminated piece of instruction paper, an incident that landed us & another classmate in time-out. After writing penitent letters to our teacher, we spent class time with our heads down on our desks. She fumed as the girl to her right cried over the punishment and I furtively read a book, snickering. She’s still unsure if I was tickled by what I was reading or if I relished the fact we were in trouble.

We argued even more in middle school, mostly about boys. I told some pretty unforgiveable lies about my non-existent involvement with certain mutual crushes, and yet, she loved me anyway. Gossiping in general came as naturally as picking out toe nail polish. She, way more fashionable, put up with my weird proclivity to wear four pairs of socks at once (for color!) and picked out church-appropriate outfits. We felt sophisticated drinking her mom’s Celestial Seasonings mint tea and ogling packages of chocolate and other goodies from Omi & Opa.

High school took us in different directions – International Baccalaureate for me, working nearly full-time (out of necessity) for her. I became vegetarian and she loved me anyway. We stayed up late planning her wedding and eating too much sugar. Our love of Italian food tested the boundaries of reasonableness.

College brought our first (and sadly, enduring!) experiment in physical separation. As she was raptured into marriage & homeownership in the bucolic mountains, I moved to Agnes Scott. Tried by Kantian metaphysics, a horrifying introduction to the fact of white privilege, and vegan radicalisation, she loved me anyway. We kept in touch with voluminous letters (read: 12+ pages, always in longhand) because we were poor and sad and every letter in the mail was like a present that only cost forty-two cents to send.

If we’re lucky, family members play this role in our life – there forever, loving us even when we’re awful. I hoped to demonstrate just a glimpse of my gratitude for Jessica’s steadfast love by taking her out for our most lavish dinner yet, a true multicourse chef’s tasting menu of beautiful organic, hyper-local produce in an elegant setting. Atlanta has one totally vegetarian fine dining option (which is still, let’s be honest, pretty casual), and I’d taken Jessica there plenty of times already. I wanted something different.

And so we went.

our table

the menu

first course: crispy cecis (chickpeas!)

second course: roasted baby beets, cayenne shallots, arugula, beet jus vinaigrette

up close and beet-utiful

third course: grilled asparagus, torpedo onions, thyme & mint

Jessica had a bit of trouble finishing her wines. I helped.

fourth course: a squash trio – pickled, roasted, tempura

Lovely and light, but would have been more delicious with a cashew-cheeze filling

a simple, tasty melange

Pickles, which needed a bit longer to cure – overwhelmingly pungent vinegar & cilantro flavors

fifth course: roasted mushroom succotash with turnips, carrots, and field peas.

A chef’s joke, a play on textures, flavors, appearances…

I dubbed it “steak and potatoes”. Thomas Keller would totally approve.

Sixth and final course: sorbets of strawberry, fennel and plum

strawberry sorbet with seeded cage

salted plum chutney with hibiscus paper

A puff of fennel atop orange marmalade

espresso & pâte a fruit, a perfect ending for a very drunk Adrienne :)

Thanks, Kristine & Josh, for such a beautiful evening. The food was fabulous – some of the best I’ve ever had. But my favorite part, the thing I’ll remember forever, above the savory mushrooms and crispy hibiscus paper and the thoughtful wines and the kind service and the gossip – was when the smartly-dressed couple next to us, who had been eyeing our food all night, finally leaned over their charcuterie and confessed with gusto, “Gee, I wish we had your menu!”

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Atlanta Vegan Drinks‘ third meet-up was held Monday August 15 at a “sunny place for shady people” – East Atlanta’s own Graveyard Tavern (1245 Glenwood Ave). Thanks to affable Chef Justin Bright and the rest of the kind folks at the Graveyard for showin’ us vegans a good time.

The vegan wingz, a Tuesday night fixture, were a crowd favorite:

And why not? Pure vegan junk food deliciousness: crispy on the outside, tender on the in, drenched in homemade sauce and balanced on a sugarcane stick! Wings were served with an option of buffalo, BBQ, teriyaki, or lemon-pepper sauce. Click “more…” to see them with the vegan buffalo, and to keep reading this post:

Friday I had a fancy dinner party for my fancy friends.

I served figs…

…drizzled with agave and pomegranate molasses, and dotted with fennel pollen.

I also made cashew brie and wrapped it in organic phyllo.

As you can see below, it was paired with fig preserves from my family tree and homemade groundcherry preserves from the Crack in the Sidewalk folks at the East Atlanta Village Farmer’s Market.

A lovely peanut noodle in endive and radicchio kept folks cool,

while jerk seitan skewers with sweet onions and organic sweet peppers warmed things up.

A little miso action with nasu dengaku:

The star of the evening, our kunafa – shredded phyllo layered with a sweet vegan ricotta, topped with toasted pistachios and drenched in toasted syrup.

The filling station:

Thanks to the friends who shared this special evening with me. I felt so lucky to be surrounded by people who’ve known me 8, 9, 10+ years and yet still enjoy my company! :) I’m also grateful for @atlvegan Brett’s lovely close-ups of the food!

Coming up next: recipes for the vegan brie en croute and veganised kunafa!

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Saturday my parents came down from the Rome area to help with a bunch of yard work. Mom’s a horticulturist who maintains private gardens, but I hope you won’t think of her as some prim, precious lady who wears butterfly-print gardening gloves and floppy ornamented hats. Just because she’s pretty doesn’t mean she’s not tough as nails. She can operate heavy machinery (think Bobcats) and does every aspect of landscaping: yanking away invasives, mowing, weed eating, pruning, removing debris, digging, planting, weeding, even chainsawing when necessary. When she recently went in to have her chainsaw sharpened, the guys in the shop stood agog – “You mean you use that thing?!” “Uhhh, yeah. What, you think I’m running some dude’s errand? Ha.” In her words: “This may be dirty, nasty, hard work, but you don’t have to look like hell doing it.” Amen to that – there’s a reason I like to wear eyeshadow when I bake!

She and dad – artist, metalsmith, mechanic, welder, gardener, eccentric – brought a bounty from their garden. Okra, tomatoes, teensy sugar baby watermelons, and about five pounds of figs. Here’s my workstation from Sunday:

I already had some beautiful black-centered tomatoes from Thursday’s East Atlanta Village Farmer’s Market (my fave!) to use up, so I made bhindi masala.

Okra from Love is Love Farm:

Finished bhindi:

I was sad to discover that I had run out of amchoor powder before vacation, but I subbed a little organic lemon juice and it worked just fine.

My dad warned me that figs would markedly lose their quality and freshness two days after picking, so I went ahead and cooked the ones I wasn’t interested in eating immediately. I simply layered these figs on some thyme branches and brushed them with a little softened coconut fat. There was a drizzle of pomegranate molasses in this batch, too:

Cooked:

Garnished with a drop of agave, a drop of pomegranate molasses, and a dusting of fennel pollen:

This is one of my favorite recent pictures of them, taken this spring. Despite the weird proportions, I just had to find a way to get it in the frame with the figs. (Perfectionists, take note: I washed [filtered water] and dried each of them individually!)

Here’s where we spent most of Saturday (8am – 5pm). I took this picture standing on a chair on our back porch. When Nate & I were checking out apartments in late December, it was this backyard that captivated us. Hobbiton, we sighed, especially with the petite bridge (to nowhere). Sadly, when we went away for vacation, the weeds got really out of hand. Since my mom “would rather work than sit around doing nothing” (her words), they came down to help us out.

This is an after photo. It’s hard to imagine how terrible it was, but let’s try. When we started the little fenced garden was overgrown; the tree beside it was in desperate need of pruning. The bridge was obscured by a privet tree (!!) and the creek bed was choked with kudzu. Dad and Nate got down in the trenches to cut away at the roots while mom used the weed-eater on the overgrown yard and I raked up clippings on her third and fourth go-overs. She also cut the dusty “deadline” to separate the grassy area and the naturally mulched forest floor equivalent.

I celebrated our hard work with a simple pasta:

This photo of my mom sits above my stove, next to my bird-shaped dinner bells and other fowl fascinations. It’s my favorite.

Pasta and figs – perfect dinner.

Tonight I made caldo verde, only with sweet potato greens from Judith & Joe at Love is Love Farm instead of the traditional kale. The recipe is based upon the one in the vegan Bloodroot volume – the first recipe in the book, actually! I’m pretty sure the salt proportions are terribly, terribly wrong – half a teaspoon of salt instead of half a tablespoon! - but otherwise it’s a super recipe. (I also used less shoyu because of the salt mishap.) In addition to swapping sweet potato greens, I used a vidalia onion, small organic yellow-fleshed potatoes, quadruple the garlic (minced), and added a 1/4 tsp of liquid smoke. With meltingly tender greens and potatoes in a seductive broth, it’s become my new favorite! Looking forward to sharing it with fabulous foodie Miz Lillian tomorrow afternoon.

More soon!

Wanna see a cute picture of me wearing a chef’s jacket & cutting a Thanksgiving Tofurkey… at age 22?

Of course you do!

I may or may not have just signed into LiveJournal for the first time in over two years.