crack the plates

It’s good to get into the practice of reading the entire recipe completely through before starting. Doing so means no surprises partway through. A+ for mise en place: measuring all the ingredients out beforehand.

Good Ol’ Vegan Biscuits: beginner’s delight*

2 cups all-purpose flour (unbleached, organic if possible)

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons vegan shortening** (make sure it’s all vegetable, no lard! I like Spectrum organic.)

2 tablespoons vegan margarine (We love Earth Balance!)**

2/3 cup unsweetened soymilk

1 to 1.5 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (experiment with more if you like a sour, buttermilky flavor)

Pre-heat the oven to 450. Grease a sheet pan with shortening.

• *A slightly more advanced biscuit recipe may be addressed in a future post. For now, this is perfect.
• **EIGHT tablespoons of fat, you gasp? Well do you want fluffy biscuits or not? If you’re that worried about it, don’t eat ten at a time.

Step one: sift all your dry ingredients (2 cups of flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon of salt) into a big bowl:

Step two: Cut the cold Earth Balance into small pieces and put into the flour. Same goes for the shortening, though it’ll be too soft to cut. Just toss it in the bowl.

Step three: Work the Earth Balance and shortening between your fingers and palms til it looks about like this:

Step four: Make your “buttermilk!” If you’ve never made vegan buttermilk before, this is a great trick to have up your sleeve. Simply add a small amount of apple cider vinegar (in this case, at least a tablespoon) to unsweetened soymilk, stir gently with a fork, and let it sit for a minute. Voilà! Vegan buttermilk.

Step five: Make a little well in the flour and pour your wet into the dry.

Step six: MIX! Depending on the humidity, your dough may be a little on the wet or dry side. Either way, don’t freak out! If it’s a little wet, just make sure your hands are well-floured. If it’s a little dry, it’s probably fine. This is a picture of some rather wet biscuit dough:

Step seven: Cut your biscuits. Now, my mom is such a pro that she shapes them perfectly in her hands. I prefer to use a small glass to make cut-outs. Take a look at the picture below. Dust your (extremely clean) countertop with some flour. Gently knead the dough into a ball and then roll it out about a half an inch thick. You can use a rolling pin or, if you don’t have one or like me, can’t find it, just use the side of a smooth glass.

Unfortunately, I was once accused of serving (HORROR OF HORRORS) canned biscuits because mine were so perfectly shaped. Good thing I forgot who made this blasphemous accusation.

Step eight: Lay the biscuits on your greased pan. It is important that the biscuits touch one another! I can’t tell you why because I took my mom’s word on faith. You should take mine similarly. Do not space your biscuits. Do not be afraid of them crowding. Permit them to nuzzle:

Step nine: Bake for 10-12 minutes or until the bottoms are lightly browned:

Lovely. Biscuits are so versatile! You can munch them plain or with some kind of jam; put them on top of a vegan pot pie:

Or, as we’ve seen, use them to make a true breakfast treat with tempeh bacon:

See? Biscuit-making is easy.

Let’s contrast it with building a sukkah. The highlight of my day was meeting up with folks at Earlham’s Jewish Cultural Center to construct the symbolic wilderness shelter of Sukkot, a joyous holiday which starts tomorrow and goes through next Wednesday. Sukkot has been described as a happy harvest festival, a time of leaving the comforts of home to join others in eating, living, and praying in the sukkah.

My friend Aaron Miller puts it thusly: Sukkahs are temporary structures with three walls (one wall has to be open to receive guests) and a roof left uncovered enough to see the stars at night. Sukkot is a fascinating holiday, so let’s turn to Rabbi Michael Strassfeld to find out more:

“The vision of universal brotherhood (ahem–and sisterhood) is reflected in the sukkah, whose door and roof are open to all. The sukkah, in turn, evokes a vision of God’s sukkah as a house of prayer for all nations. In that future, God will spread a sukkat shalom – a shelter covering made of peace and harmony.

And yet the sukkah, while evoking the image of God sheltering us in the future, raises another, opposing image: The sukkah as a temporary structure, open to the winds of autumn, cannot help but remind us of the Jewish people’s experience of the last 2000 years of exile and wandering. Are we not the prototypical alien – the wandering Jew? Are not the forty years in the desert- the period Sukkot commemorates – the archetype of our 2000 years of wandering?

The sukkah, then, evokes opposing sets of images: rootless and home, wandering and return, exposure and shelter. From exile to eternity and back again – this, too, is contained in the four walls of the sukkah.”

Awesome, eh? And I was lucky enough to get to help build one!

Collecting branches back campus.

After sawing, drilling, and doing a bit of affixing, we set the frame upright.

Sizing it up.

Reinforcing the frame.

Gazing upon it a bit more.

Laying boards across the top to support the branches; securing them with twine.

Throwing branches over the top.

The view from below. Will definitely be able to see stars.

Sorting out the sheets.

All done! Good work, friends.

Now go make some biscuits.

I found this entry in my drafts section, where there are a number of others like it: all pictures, no text. I might as well post them and just try to re-create the context as best as possible.

It appears that on this particular night I went a little insane. Thinking back, it must have been the very last vegan co-op dinner of Earlham Animal Advocates United faithfuls: Benji, Jenny, Suzanne, Erinn, Hannah, & Tamar. The menu was comfort food; on the eve of summer, the last big heavy meal of the season. Benji & Jenny were the only two to make it, but they ate EVERYTHING.

The main course: no-chick’n pot pies. An original recipe and one of the best things that comes out my kitchen, it’s also super labor intensive.

• First, chop all the (organic organic organic) onions, carrots & celery quite small and saute them in the skillet with oil. Do the onions & celery first, then add the carrots and spices–a mixture of organic marjoram, thyme, oregano and whatever else sounds good. I’m partial to the first two.
• For protein, re-constitute some large-chunk TVP or used cubed extra firm tofu. If using TVP, chop it into bite-sized pieces: this helps it absorb the flavor & is more appealing to your delicate guests. Saute protein of choice in a skillet with a little oil, tamari, black pepper, & nutritional yeast.
• Prepare a vegan brown gravy. Make something easy like Bryanna’s no-fat, or go all out and do the Grit’s: up to half a container of earth balance, full-fat soymilk, lotsa tamari, nutritional yeast–tons of flavor.
• Finally, mix all this together in a big ol’ bowl:

Ta-da! That’s a lot of the recipe, but not everything.

Pour the filling to pie plates or casseroles. I doubled this recipe (because I THOUGHT I was feeding 8), so I had a lot of filling to go around:

Make the biscuit crust. Find a great recipe & go for it. Roll out the dough and use a small glass (not drinking-size, but one down) to cut out pretty little circles. Start from the middle and go outward so you don’t waste as much dough. I suppose if you wanted to be heart-breakingly lazy you could just lay the rolled-out dough over the casserole like a pie crust & do it up that way. But if I recommended that, I probably wouldn’t take so much time cutting up pretty little circles, now would I?

Apply the crust:

It looks about like this when you’re all done:

As is evident, you can use the little pieces of extra biscuit dough to fill in the corners/edges. Or, you know, just eat them.

Bake it! 350 for… half an hour? Twenty minutes? Check & see when your biscuits start to look a done. Because the filling is already cooked, it’s not necessary for it to be in the oven for ages. You’re really just trying to get the biscuits cooked through–crusty on the outside and soft within. Like this:

Ah, the macaroni and cheese…it’s all coming back to me now. This is possibly the best ever macaroni recipe. Forget it Daiya fans–this stuff’s tops, the monarch of Macs. Brian gave me this recipe in 2008 & it’s still my favorite based solely on the number of people (emphasis on PEOPLE-veg & non) it’s made deliriously happy. It’s worth buying the new Farm cookbook just for this recipe, though increase the amount of nutritional yeast from one cup to two. Jenny, take note.

I mean, look at this.

And here’s some boring boring skillet corn. Seriously, scrape the corn off the cob, add some earth balance, add some soy milk, add some white pepper, add some salt, heat. the end.

Cutting into the pot-pie:

Worthy of a deep-south diner, or, as it were, a last meal.

Apart from taking half a day, this meal is super rich–which is why I only make it a few times a year, usually for special events & non-vegetarians. That’s right, flesh-eaters, you betta watch your waist around this bitch. It tastes soooooooo good because it has 60 grams of fat and three days’ worth of calories. But all you’ll hear is my sweet little southern accent: “Go on sugar, have a second helpin’. I got chocolate cake in there for dessert.”