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!
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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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