Oh man, have I made some yummy stuff in the past 48 hours. This post is probably going to seem ridiculously decadent. It is. But in my defense, yesterday was the first day I could cook in a week!! You may already know that I’ve been suffering in a major way on account of poison ivy. The long and short of it: last Saturday I was taking a GRE practice test on our screened-in back porch when Unix escaped (exploiting a vulnerability in the screen and tearing it further). She was gone for five hours & came back bearing the toxin urushiol… well, you know how this story ends. By Monday evening I had broken out on my wrist, hand, ear, eyelid, cheek, lips, hip, and lower right leg.
I’m still in a fair amount of pain, but it’s healing. My wrist has been the worst–impossible to cook, painful to type–but it’s looking a little better. And my appetite is coming back. Something about poison ivy just wrecks my appetite! Most days I just had a couple bowls of cereal and a bunch of watermelon for the vitamin C, if that.
So basically, I’ve been making up for lost time.
Yesterday’s late lunch was barbeque tofu & mashed potatoes. I love this picture because the taters look so ethereal… reminds me of the last scene in a favorite childhood book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
We had dinner with Lindsey & Chris at their place. My favorite part was discovering that their apartment abuts a huge children’s library! I’m praying that they ask me to apartment-sit at some point. Aren’t they cute?
Lindsey made a fabulous sweet potato dish with lots of fresh veggies from the farmer’s market. It reminded me of the sweet potatoes at Ghyslain, only better.
To thank Nate for cleaning the kitchen floor on his hands and knees this morning, I made him pancakes and tempeh bacon (recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance) for brunch.
The marinade recipe is as follows: 3 tablespoons soy sauce + 1/3 cup apple cider + 1 teaspoon tomato paste + 1/4 teaspoon liquid smoke + 2 cloves of garlic (+ one 8oz block of tempeh). I quadrupled it for three blocks of thinly-sliced tempeh. Allow the tempeh to marinate in the fridge for at least an hour or overnight.
In the pan:
On the plate:
Since I don’t keep apple cider around, I picked up a bottle of Sammy Smith’s Organic Cider for the marinade and just drank the rest last night as we watched the IT Crowd. Mmm, mmm.
While writing Liz today I was reminded that one of my favorite childhood breakfast treats was (don’t laugh!!) my momma’s fluffy biscuits with sausage & mustard. I figured some of the more thickly-sliced pieces of tempeh could stand in for sausage (the flavors are mighty similar) so I baked a pan of biscuits this evening for dinner. Our friend Patrick, who came over for after-dinner games, heartily approved.
Perfection:
For those of you looking for recipes: I’ll be doing special posts for the barbeque recipe AND the biscuits tomorrow and Tuesday.
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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!
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Let’s get this embarrassing fact out of the way: my bf & I are the kind of saccharinely sweet couple that celebrates monthly anniversaries. Groan, right? Well, generally the “celebration” just means a slight uptick in cooing at each other & maybe a vegan chocolate or two, but every once in a while we mix it up & do something interesting. As in the case of tonight’s dinner:
or
that’s
- organic vegan mashed potatoes (unsweetened soymilk, earth balance, salt, & freshly cracked black pepper)
- bhindi masala: okra with cayenne, ground mango powder, turmeric & tomato
- kitchen-sink homemade barbeque sauce (a slight adjustment to Isa’s recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, featuring blackstrap molasses, peanut butter, liquid smoke, tabasco, maple syrup, vidalia onion, and tomato) simmered long & slow and poured over thrice-baked tofu
In return, he drew pictures for me of one of my most favorite things EVER! Goombas. Yanno, dese guys:
In other news, I used a paint-brush to line my eyes with some electric teal with blue sheen eyeshadow in an attempt to achieve this look. I actually did a pretty good job! Now we’re probably gonna go raid the free kids’ section of the movie gallery. Hurrah!
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