crack the plates

This post is brought to you by our friends the adjectives – as in, let’s see just how many modifiers I can fit into a single subject line!

Turns out, quite a few!

Last night’s dinner was boss. No two ways about it, just crispy deep-fried tempeh surrounding a bed of sweet and sour greens, topped with the now infamous greens-ribs relish:

It started easily enough – cubed two blocks of tempeh (I used a multi-grain variety) and threw it into some bubblin’ coconut oil. I recommend chopping the tempeh carefully, with a very sharp chef’s knife while cold for a clean cut. Tempeh can crumble, yanno, and nobody likes crumblies in the fry pot.

Cook til brown, turning every couple of minutes.

The greens came together rapidly since I had cleaned and chopped them the previous night. I offered my own (possibly confusing) annotated instructions for this recipe in the last post on kolhrabi, but just for reference, here is the original recipe from Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Andrew Weil:

ingredients

• one pound of greens (I’ve used kale, collards, turnip, kohlrabi, bok choy…)
• 2 teaspoons of canola oil (I use coconut oil only!)
• 2 large cloves of garlic, minced (I use a lot more than that!)
• 1/4 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes (ditto!)
• 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard powder (pretty much the only thing I don’t change!)
• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar (or apple cider vinegar!)
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce (or wheat-free tamari!)
• 1 teaspoon light brown sugar (now you know I use more sugar than this!)

Wash and drain greens, remove any tough stems, slice leaves into 1/2-inch shreds. If using bok choy or Chinese cabbage, trim off the end, slice stems 1/4 inch thick and leaves 1/2 inch thick.

Heat the oil in a skillet (or a large covered pot! Less messy this way) over medium. Add the garlic and red pepper flake and stir-fry 1 minutes.

Add the greens along with the mustard powder and stir to coat with spices.

Combine the rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sugar and add to skillet/pot. Stir thoroughly! Cover! Cook covered over medium heat til greens are tender, about five minutes (more for collards, etc, yaddayadda).

***

Okay, back to the tempeh.

Drain the cubes on paper towels, sprinkle with salt immediately (Bryant Terry tells me that you have a very short window of time for the cooked tempeh to absorb the salt – don’t challenge him on this!). Transfer to a big bowl. Add freshly-cracked black pepper and nutritional yeast to taste. Toss merrily! Ok, done.

To plate, make a pretty little bed of cooked greens in the middle. Surround with tempeh. Top with greens relish, if desired – recipe to come in a future post. This is a great recipe for a date at home or meal-in-lieu-of-dinner-out. Dressed to impress, it looks special, tastes delicious, and makes you feel all-around fancy.

Please let me know if you try the greens recipe, and especially if you fuss around with the measurements. Andrew Weil calls it “Hot and Sour Greens” — I have willed it into Sweet and Sour Greens. Which ingredient will you highlight? Do tell!

I grew up in the country, in a town of just over two hundred. As I child, I sometimes rued the isolation of our rural plot–but now I see how lucky I was. My sense of compassion for the earth and non-human animals was nurtured as I gardened with my parents & made best friends with chickens. I witnessed firsthand the passionate desires of the land and its animals for harmony & stability. These desires resonated; we were easy allies.

I was also lucky because foodwise, my momma went easy on me. If I absolutely refused to eat something, she didn’t press the issue. But she never quite understood why I wouldn’t eat her meatloaf. “Just smother it in ketchup,” she’d urge. An excellent cook, she probably thought meatloaf was one of her tastiest dishes. Everyone raved about it–so why wouldn’t her darn kid eat it?

To start, I hated watching her make it! I remember looking up at her working the ground animal in her rough, wizened hands and thinking, I’m never going to do that. Was I simply grossed out by the texture, the color, the sounds? Did I despair over its origin, a life-loving creature like myself? Honestly, I can’t say. But to this day I’ve never cooked with animals. Going vegetarian at 14 meant I never had to suffer that feeling in my hands: I depended on my mom for meals pre-veg & figured out how to cook for myself afterwards. The closest I came to touching blood & guts was while passing poorly-packaged meat products over my scanner as a grocery cashier.

One of the reasons I LOVE being vegan is because I can make all of the dishes I enjoyed as a non-vegan, except they’re tastier and free of cholesterol, saturated fat, and cruelty! Traditional southern recipes, soul food, I rise to the challenge: I once made a pot of fordhook lima beans that were so flavorful & “authentic”-tasting that my mom couldn’t believe they were vegan. But for obvious reasons, meatloaf was never anything I wanted to veganize. Sure, I saw the recipes in my cookbooks… but the childhood trauma lived on!

‘Til recently, that is. Having made peace with the fact that it’s still going to look disgusting, I tried the recipe from the Grit cookbook. And oh lawdy, it’s a winner. Made with tofu, veggie ground crumbles, walnuts & nutritional yeast, and seasoned well enough to please a roomful of Southern grandparents, I’m glad to add it to my repertoire. Best of all, Nate rechristened the dreaded dish “meetloaf”. Only one letter difference, but I love it because it makes me think of meeting up, hanging out, loafing around–things all mammals, not just we humans, enjoy!

A regular blue-plate special, this one:

I baked it in my big cast-iron skillet (the same that sauteed the veggie ground “beef” and peppers, if you check out the recipe) and served it to Lindsey & Chris for our first Thursday evening co-op dinner. They gobbled it up. Here’s the recipe, with some minor modifications. Thanks, the Grit!

• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1 small onion, minced
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 or 2 small bell peppers, minced
• 2 cups vegetarian ground “beef” — I re-hydrate the dry stuff from Dixie Diner because it’s more economical than getting Boca Brand (or something similar) frozen at the grocery store.
• 2 tablespoons vegan Worcestershire sauce (Kroger’s is naturally vegan, or you could make your own)
• 1 15-oz block firm tofu, crumbled (the more-common water-packed kind)
• 1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats
• 1 cup walnut pieces
• 4 tablespoons ketchup
• 1/2 cup nutritional yeast
• 1/2 cup soy sauce (you can use low-sodium, I suppose)
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon or so freshly ground black pepper
• 2 teaspoons rubbed sage
• 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon celery seed, if you just happen to have it hanging around.

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a large casserole dish OR just plan to use the same large skillet that you prep the “beef” and peppers in, as I did.

Heat the oil in large cast-iron skillet and add onions, garlic, and peppers. Saute five minutes or so, stirring often. Add the vegetarian ground beef (re-hydrated in “beef” or veg broth if you’re using dry) and Worchestershire sauce. Cook on medium heat, stirring often, 5-10 minutes (20 minutes if you used frozen crumbles).

In a food processor (I know, Sorry!), combine remaining ingredients and process til fully blended. Combine ALL ingredients and mid well. Pour and press into your casserole or skillet. Bake 15 minutes, remove from oven, turn in batches, return to oven, bake 15 more minutes. Bake an additional 10 if you think it needs it. Let cool for five minutes or so and then serve to smiles!!!

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.”