exciting things are happening! Metro-Atlanta counties will be getting 3.2 billion for schools, Sunday liquor sales for the first time in over a century (except in Forest Park), Ohio voters ‘emphatically’ reject Kasich’s anti-union law, and the crazies in Mississippi won’t get their way.
Meanwhile, Nate and I spend the evening doing crafty things: making video game/8-bit Perler art, or “sprites“. We wanted to DO something – not just sit around and worry. Create, not imbibe. And time really flies when you’re making sprites, all the better for those of us keeping an eye on returns.
First, I cooked a mostly from-scratch meal for the first time in possibly two weeks? Intense emergency dentalwork + the worst cold in years put me out of commission… but I’ll be back in time for Crack the Plates deliveries on Tuesday, hooray! Tonight, just a simple homemade tomato sauce with sauteed seasoned soy curls over tortiglioni – easy, but still with a sense of accomplishment. Mostly, though, we made things:
Nate finishing a project.
My Mario garden. Interested in perler crafts? Learn more here.
Perl lookin’ pretty.
Taking note of her father perilously balancing a netbook, Unix decided she just had to join him. He was not so pleased.
“What, papa? Dis are problem?” “Ok, I are guess not Unix.”
And that’s how we spent election night 2011.
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Tomorrow I leave for a two-week road trip to New York with my sweetheart. Today has been a busy one, full of cleaning and roasting vegetables and picking out dresses. I’m hoping that when we return we have internet in the apartment once more, but for now, we’re at Whole Foods mapping our trip and scouting vegan places on the journey. And I’m updating my blog! I just didn’t want to leave without telling you all about my fabulous fourth.
In my last post I mentioned that I would be cooking a lot of fourth food in hopes of raising money for our trip. That hope became a reality! Not only did tons of friends and friends-of-friends order lunches, but I got a great big catering order! Thanks to your generosity, we’re no longer freaking out about having to put any portion of our trip on the credit card. I feel great.
Thursday night I made eight dozen chocolate espresso cupcakes for Nate’s officemates. Three dozen had already been “reserved” – the others were up for grabs. Nate came home with an empty tray!
I started the fourth orders after the cupcake drop. Friday morning & me: 8 blocks of tofu, cubed, fried, drenched in gravy:
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Hot-sauced-glazed tempeh from Veganomicon is a recently-tested and very highly recommended recipe. Here it is with some kale & extra-sour cornbread:
Recipe by Isa & Terry, with only very minor changes: 1 package tempeh; 1/2 cup vegetable broth, 1/4 cup of hot sauce, 2 tbsp oil, 2 tbsp soy sauce or tamari, 3 tbsp lemon juice, 2 cloves of crushed garlic, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 teaspoon dried oregano, 1/8 teaspoon cayenne.
Whisk all ingredients in a bowl large enough to accommodate the tempeh slices. Cut tempeh in half widthwise, then cut each of the resulting squares diagonally in order to form four large triangles. Poach the bitterness out of tempeh by bringing a medium-sized pot of water to a boil and simmering the tempeh for ten minutes. Gently remove the tempeh from the steaming water and plunge it into your marinade. Allow to sit at least one hour, flipping often if the tempeh is not completely submerged.
Four large triangles = four pretty thick triangles. Accordingly, I suggest marinating for 24 hours OR slicing the four triangles widthwise once more. The issue with this second option is that tempeh, a vulnerable, crumbly piece of food, can lose its shape in the cooking process. See:
Best to just marinate extra-long or be real careful handling and turning.
Since I don’t have a grill or the implements to create a grill effect inside, I kept the skillet’s heat high to kind of sear the tempeh & caramelize the outside. You can do this for about ten minutes, flipping often, pouring on more of the marinade as you go. (Whisk the marinade before ladelling it on to discourage separation & loss of flavor.)
The last pro-tip I can think to offer now is, don’t forget to shake the hot sauce bottle before you pour it into your measure. Hot sauce separates, and if you don’t shake it up well, there’ll be a lot less heat. Can you tell I made this sad mistake?
Cat perl had a bath this morning. Here are some recent pictures to honor her on her difficult day.
Perl as superheroine.
As scary monster.
As hieroglyph.
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Since the most recent move I’ve completely lost track of my camera implements–USB cord, battery charger–so I’ve been taking food pictures with Nate’s g1. It’s pretty good, but it doesn’t have a flash and you have to be super-still to get a good shot. Seeing as how I’m usually about as stable as a bag of marbles, most of ‘em don’t come out very well. But a couple did!
I found some eggplants in the fridge and decided to make baigan bharta, since I hadn’t in ages. It was great! The only downside was running out of time prior to our 7:20 showing of Scott Pilgrim vs the World, rushing out with only rhubarb soda to sustain us. Thank goodness bharta improves with a good long sit. We ate at nearly 10, greedily shoving forkfuls of mashed mad apple into our mouths as we ruminated over lost relationships. Probably would have been a lot more depressing without the baigan. Definitely.
Yesterday I made my old standby, bhindi masala. I’m almost out of amchoor powder, and since I sadly won’t be making it to the Dekalb Farmer’s Market anytime soon, I ordered from Chicago’s spice house. Only they lost my order, and now I’ll probably be out before it gets to me! I can’t win at anything.
This bhindi was possibly the best ever because of the addition of heirloom Green Zebra tomatoes from earlham’s Farm and Jan & Dan’s Arden Hearth garden. I am now addicted to green zebras and bought almost five pounds at the market today to use in everything.
We’re still getting settled into this gorgeous new house. The best part is watching the cats explore the place. They’re both mighty curious. One late night, while unpacking about 10,000lbs of textiles, Perl decided to climb into the closet. Adorableness ensued:
Oh, herro.
Whaa, you is working? I are in your way?
I are good cat, for once. Goodbye!
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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.)
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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.)
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