crack the plates

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!

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.)

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!

Saturday afternoon: in a blithe, baking, birthday mood, monogrammed peanut butter chocolate chip cookie sammiches were born! Saturday being my dad’s 54th birthday, Mellukah, and close to my dearest Monica’s big day, too, I was inspired to make some scrumptious sweets. It started off simply enough with Isa’s recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance for big gigantoid crunchy peanut-butter cookies, when halfway through baking I decided they’d be cuter with some carefully-placed chocolate chips. And having done that, I mused, why not just whip up some vegan chocolate buttercream & make gigantic cookie sandwiches? And then roll the sides of the cookies (where the buttercream hung out) in festive sprinklies to make it sparkle? Hell yeah that sounds like a happy birthday! Check ‘em out:

The first two batches rest sweetly by the Good Luck Cooking Witch.

Note: I have some big ol’ hands.

I couldn’t resist a close-up…

…or the fantasy of cookies for miles…

M is for cookie, for Moskowitz, for Monica, for Mel!

Detail on the sprinkle apocalypse…

These friends were as fun to make as they were to look at. Easy, too! First, follow the great recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance for the aforementioned cookies. Instead of using vanilla soymilk as Isa suggests, I tried So Delicious’ new vanilla coconut milk. (Richmond folks–Kroger has it on sale now and with a manufacturer’s coupon, so you can try a half gallon for $1.75, as I did.) Perfect substitution! Bake cookies for about 10 minutes, pull ‘em out, dot with chocolate chips (pointy side down, if I may), and bake another four minutes.

The cookies need a good amount of time to rest, so cool yer jets and whip up a frosting. I mixed 2 cups of sifted vegan powdered sugar with about, eh, 1/3-1/2 cup cocoa powder & a pinch of salt, set aside, and in a large mixing bowl creamed a couple tablespoons of room-temp eBal (earth balance). I added the sugar mixture back to the eBal bowl and used my hand-mixer to blend it along with another tablespoon of vanilla coconut milk & some vanilla extract. Note: since you’re using this as a filling, don’t let your frosting get too runny! Add liquids extremely slow & cautiously, & err on the side of stiffness.

My kitchen was blazing hot, so I had to let the cookies firm up in the fridge. Once they were ready I smeared one side with a generous amount of chocolate buttercream, mashed ‘em together, and rolled the sides in a handful of sprinkles. If you eschew AC too, pop ‘em in your fridge til you’re ready to make someone’s day!

PS. To my dad, Adjua, Benji & my little brother’s gorgeous future wife: I didn’t forget your birthdays, it’s just too hot to mail these cookies! Consider this note a baked goods IOU.

PPS. Oh, and this:

So this is a little bit of a vintage post for y’all, seeing as how I made this dish with my pal Seth about three weeks ago. It nevertheless counts as a “WAWWA” post because it is what I ate. I just didn’t eat it very recently.

First things first: you’d think a veg of eleven years would have made home-made seitan a long, long time ago. I am, in fact, more than a little self-conscious that I hadn’t. So why now? There are a couple related reasons why it took me so many moons to get my act together. I waited much longer than I ought to have on a delinquent friend who promised and promised, season after season (literally), to midwife my seitan-making. As with so many other things, he never came through. (Burn!) Eh, I’m not really holding a grudge…but I will say this. When I bought the vital wheat gluten that was eventually used to make the seitan, it was over a year in-date. When Seth and I finally made it, it was three months expired. Thank goodness it was frozen for most of its lifecycle, so it didn’t matter at all. Still. I got my B face on.

I really wanted someone to walk me through my first time, and the prospect of making seitan with someone who had so successfully, deliciously made it before was appealing. The main reason I hesitated? I am almost completely unfamiliar with a crucial step of seitan-making: kneading. Yep, despite however highly you may regard my cooking skills, I honestly don’t have much experience with recipes that require kneading. The only non-sweet bread I make requires little more than pouring a can of beer into the dry and mixing. Yet seitan simply doesn’t happen without lots and lots of good firm kneading. It’s a pretty simple process, isn’t it? But the prospect of somehow getting it wrong was weirdly dissuasive.

As it turns out, the most important ingredient in seitan is not experience, but enthusiasm. And Seth had that:

A fellow virgin seitan-maker, but with slightly more kneading experience, he vaulted at the challenge. Check out this gorgeous lump of gluten and spices he tamed:

Actually it’s kind of hideous, isn’t it? Like a couple colors of Playdough teamed up with some silly putty & moonrocks and did the meiotic mambo. That’s about what it felt like, too. But don’t let that dissuade you! Just roll it out into a log and cut, with a serrated knife if possible, into six equal pieces. Then simmer it in veg stock for quite a while:

Once it’s simmered the appropriate amount of time (check your recipe) it’ll need to cool completely. To hasten this process and get it off our minds, we put it on the front porch while we, along with Nate & Michael, watched the second half of Tron.

While the boys gabbed about object-oriented programming in the front room, Seth smashed a wine bottle and I whipped up the marinade for “Ethiopian Seitan and Peppers” from Isa’s Vegan With a Vengeance. About 25 minutes later, we feasted:

Ethiopian Seitan and Peppers goes delightfully with RuPaul’s Drag Race. Since the recipe requires a half a cup of red wine, go ahead and pour yourself a glass! As we learn from the gals in the Interior Illusions Lounge, you throw funner shade when you’re sauced.

To friends with enthusiasm. *clink*

PS. Seth has a blog, too, and it’s a good one. You should read it.

After a lovely dinner of barbequed oven-baked tofu, Nate I are settling in to watch Disney’s Alice in Wonderland in protest of the Burton abomination presently sweeping the nation. (Has anyone I know actually seen it yet? What did you think? Or, if not, why are you avoiding?)

One of my favorite scenes.

These days I drink only a handful of times a year; tonight I’m enjoying a lovely beer called Éphémère by Unibroue, a Canadian brewing company. According to their website, it “possesses a fresh apple aroma with reminiscent notes of ‘Granny Smith’ and ‘McIntosh’ a subtle flavour of green apple is complemented by delicate notes of fruit and spice topped by a rich white head.” I first tried it in October at Chicago’s vegan bike-themed restaurant, Handlebar; Nate picked up a couple more bottles at the famous Half Time party shop in Poughkeepsie, New York, over Christmas. It’s best served in a champagne flute.

If you’re a vegan who enjoys spirits, you’ll do well to check out Barnivore: your vegan beer & wine guide. It proved an invaluable resource last fall as I bought for Nate’s Hobbit-themed birthday bash. I was surprised that every specialty beer I looked up was accounted for: Gulden Draak (more at Beer Advocate), Weyerbacher (Merry Monks; Quad), Hitachino Nest Ginger Brew by Kiuchi, Trappistes Rochefort (#10, bebe), Lagunitas (Censored & IPA), Unibroue (La Fin Du Monde & Trois Pistoles), and Rogue (Rogue’s Hazelnut Brown Nectar makes me melt!). They’re not all available in Indiana; I had to pick up the Lagunitas in Michigan while visiting Jina beena.

Speaking of, check all this gorgeous bottle opener she brought back from Greece in 2007:

Thanks, Jiji. You are one classy lady.

For our sumptuous tofu dinner I used Isa’s “BBQ Pomegranate Tofu” recipe as a guide. Have you been eyeing that one in Vegan with a Vengeance but haven’t yet tried it because it calls for crazy ingredients? Well, don’t be bullied by the inclusion of pomegranate molasses–I’ve been using plain ol blackstrap & the dish always turns out fine. I also subbed a finely-chopped onion for the shallots tonight & used crunchy peanut butter instead of plain.

Don’t have Vegan with a Vengeance? Buy a copy! It’s one of the best vegan cookbooks out there for new & seasoned vegs alike. You won’t be disappointed. (And, of course, if you’re in the Richmond area you’re welcome to use my food-spattered copy.)

(PS: I typed this entire post tipsy. How obvious?)

The first several times I made the chocolate chip cookies from Isa’s Vegan With a Vengeance I was thoroughly perplexed. Despite the fact that I followed the recipe precisely–er, at least after that first disaster of guesswork & overconfidence–the dough was maddeningly crumbly! So crumbly, in fact, that I had to Hulk Smash it between my palms to get it to hold any kind of shape–and even then it was tentative at best.

My solution was to add some soymilk as a binder. But it was no solution! It sort of helped with the shaping issue…but the cookies came out so flat & chewy that they were only suitable for cookie sandwiches. (Mmmm… cookie smammiches). I got online to see what other VWAV readers had tried–and sure enough, many of them complained about the mysteriously crumbly dough. Even a friend in my vegan co-op dinner rotation, Suzanne, mentioned that she’d attempted the repair the weird recipe by adding soymilk.

Most recently I skipped the soymilk and, fingers crossed!, gingerly placed the misshapen lumps onto the cookie sheet. Guess what? They came out perfectly:

Here’s the deal. I, apparently among many, am an amateur cookie (& food science) enthusiast–and so I totally missed the fact that the VERY HIGH PROPORTION of fat (in the form of a quarter of a container of softened Earth Balance) would actually melt & meld the cookies together in the baking process, giving them a lovely shape & texture after ten minutes. Instead of exercising patience, I felt I had to “fix” the crumbly dough by adding soymilk. Don’t make the same mistake! Just Hulk SMASH your cookies & wait for the magic!

Thanks & credit go to “el-grimlock” at deviantart.com for the awesome base Hulk image.

In my last post I mentioned that I had helped cook for the Peace Form talk by Joy Ellison, former Earlham College turn Christian Peacemaker Teams nonviolence trainer and activist. She works alongside Palestinians in the West Bank village of at-Tuwani. Because of my involvement in a local oral history/storytelling project, I was able to borrow equipment to record Joy telling some of her stories in my own home today! As a thank you for participating in the Wayne County Girls Inc.-based What Is Your Story? project, I made her a delicious simple meal. The centerpiece: butternut squash soup, take II, creamy version.

To make this soup, I took my new food processor on its inaugural voyage! Nevermind the fact that we bought it almost a month ago and it has been sitting, neglected, since then. It’s in use now, and thank heavens, for it pureed beautifully. The soup was so thick and creamy that, upon describing it to a nonvegan friend, I had to remind her that no animal products were involved in its creation: just three beautiful garden butternut squashes slow-roasted for an hour + the power of the swank Cuisinart Prep 9. Behold!:

I used Isa’s recipe in Vegan With a Vengeance (that cookery-book stalwart) and added a maple-syrup drizzle on top. The only changes were a little more salt, a little less lime, and slightly different roasting measures.

Joy took one spoonful of it and sighed, remarking that while the soup yesterday was good, this was what she wanted in a butternut squash soup. If you’re able, check out her blog at http://inpalestine.blogspot.com to learn more about her amazing work among the people of at-Tuwani!