crack the plates

Nate’s sister & brother-in-law came to visit last weekend. Like all my best friends, past & present beloveds, and intrepid family members, they got the culinary royal treatment. The weekend prior I went marketing at one of Richmond’s jewels, the Saturday morning farmer’s market, and came home with this bounty:

Highlights: Assortment of red, gold, & blue potatoes from David Reed, an elderly couple, & Earlham’s Miller Farm; onions from Preston; cabbage from a good-natured Polish woman who lived through the war (& has been farming since!); two peppers from the same, purple by way of green, with a slow-glow to red; heirloom garlic from Arden Hearth; heirloom tomatoes; squashes for a tempeh dish; eggplant for roasting; carrots from David for munching; jalepenos to give curries a kick.

Peppers after a luminous week-long vacation in the windowsill:

Incidentally, I mentioned this magic to David Reed on Saturday when I picked up a couple of big green bells from him. He had no idea! The ones he sold me for sixty cents apiece are slowly turning a lovely orange in the same spot.

Friday night I made baked tofu with sesame flavors, new potatoes in a wasabi creme gravy, peanut noodles, and edamame & fresh corn in radicchio. Tofu pressed for well over an hour + three days worth of marinating = intense saturation of flavor.

Saturday lunch was pineapple & onion burritos from La Mexicana, but that night was special. I had made fresh seitan a few days prior and whipped it out for a caribbean jerk recipe. Served with mashed roasted sweet potatoes (soymilk + earth balance + maple syrup + salt), and sweet-and-sour kale, a rhapsody in flavor:

Quite happily, this meal reminded me of one I shared with an aforementioned beloved at Calabash Vegetarian Kitchen in Atlanta. Success!

Lazy Sunday morning? Brunch! Doesn’t it look like these fluffy orange scones, studded with organic zest & dressed in a home-made citrus glaze, are about to levitate from the plate? Divinity!

The main course was asparagus & sun-dried tomato frittata, one of my favorite recipes from Vegan With a Vengeance (from whence the scone recipe comes, too!), and a sad attempt at hashbrowns. Clearly my line-cook days are too far behind me… I just couldn’t get ‘em crispy enough. Oh well, I’m not crying over one miss among so many successes! Especially when we just smothered ‘em ketchup.

Note: The scones also take a while (setting time for the glaze), but if you own Vegan With a Vengeance you’d be a fool not to try them. However! The recipe is wrong, wrong, wrong when it comes to the amount of flour you’ll need to use. Isa says 3 cups of all-purpose flour, but the dough didn’t reach the right consistency til I’d added around four cups. And when it says soy creme, you really can just use soymilk.

I hope Nate’s fam felt extra-special loved. As with Ayurvedic cooks, I deeply believe that one’s goodwill is transmitted through food during the cooking process. And while my kitchen certainly isn’t ritually clean, the intent is there. I’ve joked that cooking is the only thing I get “right”… not because of special skill or years of practice, but because from mincing to garnishing, I’m thinking about how much I like the person I’m feeding. May you be blessed with the same treatment!

I let nearly a month go by without blogging? How dumb. It’s not like I haven’t been cooking and eating… I have. (I was really sick for over a week–like, couldn’t-get-out-of-bed-for-four-straight-days sick)–& have had a lot going on thesis-wise. The good news is that with only 33 days to go til the darn thing is printed on specialty paper & bound, I’m in great shape.) So I’ll be using this week to get caught up on some of my recent kitchen adventures. When I’m not thesisizing, philosophizing, rubbing my cat’s belly or watching the queens duke it out on RuPaul’s Drag Race (an OBSESSION), you’ll find me here. So check back!

Post-illness, I itched to get back into the kitchen & prepare something more complicated than canned soup. So yesterday I cleaned out the veggie drawers of four bunches of organic golden beets, chopped up a cabbage & steamed it a la mama, whisked up some low-fat tofu & no-fat gravy, and partnered it all with an organic baked potato (and MORE GRAVY). Divine!

The beets were simply tossed in two tablespoons of olive oil, primo cinnamon & garam masala and then roasted in the oven for 40minutes at 400 (cover with foil for the first 25, remove for the last 15) . My new favorite way!

Today’s was even better. I wanted to do something with the bag of Dixie Diner no-chicken breasts I bought last summer with our annual TVP order & only just rediscovered a couple weeks before the expiration date. Lucky! I thought I’d just do something simple, like boil, sautee, and pair with last night’s leftover gravy, but I was soon taken by more exciting possibilities. Basically I thought, hell, I’ve got the resources, time, & enthusiasm–why not just go all the way & make a vegan chick’n parmigiana for the first time? And so I did. Here’s a shot of Nate’s plate:

In hindsight, this was actually kind of a lot of work…but in the moment, it didn’t seem like a big deal at all. First, simmer the chops in chick’n flavored veggie broth for 25 minutes. Then, make a seasoned breadcrumb mix (breadcrumbs + cracked black pepper + powdered garlic + nutritional yeast) and dredge the cooked “breasts”. Spritz with Bragg’s and bake in a 450 degree oven for 12 minutes.

baked cutlets: your non-vegan momma would never know the difference.

cutlets and sauce

Meanwhile, heat up tomato sauce (I cheated & used Kroger’s organic Italian herb, snagged on manager’s special for .99/jar) and make the Cheezy sauce. I use “The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook” recipe with some changes:

1/2 cup nutritional yeast flakes + 1/2 cup flour + tsp salt + 1/2 tsp garlic powder + 2 cups water + 1/4 cup margarine + 1tsp wet mustard (I used dijon)

Whisk the dry ingredients in a big bowl and then dump in your large (10-12”) skillet; whisk; whisk in water. Cook over med-ish heat, whisking constantly, til it starts to feel thick and bubble slightly. Cook at this state for under a minute; remove from heat, whip in margarine and mustard. Whisk thoroughly. The Farm recipe adds that it will thicken as it cools.

Nate is absolutely ga-ga over this cheeze; I think it’s pretty good (and certainly went well in this recipe) but, to be honest, it is not my favorite thing in the world. So it depends!

I prefer skinny noodles to shaped pasta:

The end!

Yowzah–today I was thrilled to learn that I actually have some happy, regular readers who are interested in what I have to say! Because I haven’t been picked up by google (yet?) and don’t get a ton of comments, I tend to think that this is just an exercise for myself–to see (especially in VeganMoFo) if I have what it takes discipline-wise to keep a blog. How refreshing and encouraging it is to hear, either through the grapevine or directly, that I’m reaching folks! So whether you’re an occasional reader, a frequent reader, a non-commenter or an avid one, thanks! The thought that you’re there gives blogging zest.

On the flip-side, it makes me feel guilty about not having blogged in a couple days. (Not that you’re out there chewing off your fingers waiting for something new to read, but it does add a measure of responsibility, knowing you’re there.) The disappointing truth is that there wasn’t much extraordinary coming out of our kitchen this weekend. Saturday and Sunday were rather glum because of work we did towards recovering the stolen bike. (It seems very unlikely that we will recover it, but we did the flyer/walking around the neighborhood/talking to the neighborrhood-alliance President thing anyway.) We ate a lot of pre-packaged food: a Kashi pizza, heat-and-eat dumplings, and more veggie patties of various stripes than I care to mention. Sunday I made raspberry muffins for a Process Theology conversation group–muffins, my culinary summit for Sunday. :-/

Tonight, though, was book club! Each month a group a small group of friends gathers for a pot-luck and conversation (with tons of unrelated gossip) around a featured piece of lit. Because October is my favorite month, I claimed it months ago. We read in common Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Since I’m too tired to write my own description, here’s a link to the associated wikipedia page. Basically, Ray interweves a story of South Georgia land, its plants (long-leaf pine & wiregrass) and its creatures (assorted) that is centuries older than she and her people are (the ecological narrative) with her own memoir of growing up in on this radically-altered landscape; specifically, in a junkyard with fundamentalist parents. It is a beautiful story that can be difficult to bear at moments, especially if you have bipolar disorder in your family; nonetheless, as I noted at book club tonight, it was not the tragic moments that coaxed tears from my eyes, but the soaring ones that stole my heart and infused it with rapture.

Appropriately, the theme of the food was “that which evokes your childhood/homeland.” I made my momma’s sweet tea–

• 8 tea bags steeped briefly,
• squeezed and poured over nearly two cups of sugar that waits in the bottom of the gallon jug
• then topped off with water

Sinfully sweet. I also served some good ol’ deep-southern buttermilk cornbread, cooked in the skillet with drippings from my vegan gravy; cabbage a la mamma–

• slice off a half of a big cabbage; core it; cut into bite-sized pieces
• put a little water in your pan
• add some eBal (Earth Balance), salt and white pepper
• add cabbage, stir well; steam til the cabbage is delectable mush!

and finally, a pot of Grit collards. The collards were the only thing that weren’t really like my mom’s at all, because when she makes collards she doesn’t have much “pot likker” (pot liquor; the juice from the cooked collards that lots of folks like to sop up with savoury cornbread). I use a recipe from Athens Georgia’s famous vegetarian restaurant, the Grit, which always renders a ton of tasty pot likker. It went especially well with tonight’s cornbread.

I was grateful that B brought mashed potatoes, H, a gorgeous blueberry cobbler, J, a lentil bake, E, a mashed carrot-and-potato dish that seemed to be infused with dill and chives, and K, a perfectly-pureed pumpkin soup. We ate like queens and gossipped like songbirds. Looking forward to next month!

This just in: the katzerole Unix in a box:

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.