An Omnivore Cooks the Veganomicon

Tomato & Roasted Eggplant Stew with Chickpeas

2010-10-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

On the northeast side of Indianapolis, there's a restaurant called Kabob Korner, an Afghan restaurant that has some pretty good kabobs, but also a magical soup called Aush. It is neither vegan nor vegetarian, but I mention it because trying to figure out its ingredients has become a bit of a parlor game for my foodie friends and me. It has a complex but singular flavor that is very difficult to separate into its component parts. It is also addictively good, a wonderful winter dish that nevertheless hits the spot in summer.

Can vegan food deliver something with the same mysteriously delicious impact? Let's just give away the end right now. Yes.

I approached Tomato & Roasted Eggplant Stew with Chickpeas (p. 179) with a measure of suspicion. I loathed eggplant as a kid, and even though I like it now, I mostly prefer it in formats where it ends up pureed or melted away. But this one keeps the eggplant in relatively large pieces, so I had to cook this with some faith.

You start out roasting some vegetables. You cut some eggplant quite thickly (possibly I didn't do it quite thickly enough, as we'll see), but you also need to roast some red bell peppers (orange or yellow will do as substitutes, but not green), and some garlic. Here it is as it first goes in the oven:

Regarding the parchment paper in the picture above, when I put it on the baking sheet, I didn't realize it's not really necessary for the cooking process at all. I didn't notice in the recipe that Terry & Isa go on to say that you don't really need the parchment if you don't care about how your baking sheets look. To which I say, if you care about how your baking sheets look, perhaps you have misplaced priorities in the kitchen. Don't bother.

This is how everything looks when you bring the roasting vegetables out of the oven the first time (the red bell peppers get off at this stop--everything else goes back in).

While the vegetables are roasting, start cooking the base for the soup. You're looking at onions, tomatoes, white wine, garlic, and a magical, if improbable, spice mixture of tarragon, thyme, coriander, paprika, salt, and bay leaves.

My only complaint about this recipe is this: while you're getting the base going, the eggplant and garlic come out of the oven. What T&I don't warn you about is that their instructions are going to bring your eggplant to the brink of burning, and I ended up having to toss maybe 1/5 of my eggplant slices because they were charred husks. Which means either the oven was too high (the recipe calls for 450), or I needed to slice my eggplant more thickly, or I just needed to watch the whole thing closer. In any case, I had enough eggplant to keep going.

Keeping going basically means dropping the eggplant into the stew. Also, the recipe will have instructed you to put the roasted red peppers into a plastic bag to allow the skins to steam off. This process works. Once the stew is good and simmering, it looks like this:

It needs to cook 20 minutes. After that, you'll take the garlic you've roasted and squeeze each clove into the soup, and let it stand for a while. I also squeezed in half a lemon. Let it sit for another 15 minutes or so.

Finally, serve it! On the side, I just made some kale according to almost exactly the same method as the stir-fried greens from the last post, just switching the ingredients up a bit to make things a bit more Mediterranean (added olive oil, subtracted soy sauce, added tomatoes, extra garlic). Good stuff.

And here's the final presentation. This was really excellent. The flavor was unplaceable, but really compelling, and the greens were a great side. Iv and I each took it again for lunch the next day, and it was even better. I'm going to chalk the success up to tarragon -- it's an herb I've never felt totally comfortable using because it's so very closely associated with French cooking (which I don't know very well). But this flavor combo plus the nearly-burned eggplant? Awesome. This one may be the best recipe in the book so far, and probably the first one where I really learned something new. Make this one, kids, even if you don't like eggplant.

Still not vegan with a vengeance

2010-10-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

I took a year and a half off from the blog for no reason other than the same reason there are so many other ghost blogs out there. I always roll my eyes when there's some media report or other that talks about how everyone is blogging. Sure, whatever. Everyone is blogging the same way that everyone is keeping a journal, going to the gym, or sticking to their diet.

But I've decided to give this another go, so we're back! Let's get going. We're doing a bunch of recipes together this time, trying to do a big delicious sushi bowl incorporating several elements. Kids, you'll want to open up your Veganomicons and mark these pages: 112 for Roasted Portabello mushrooms; page 113 for Easy Stir-Fried Leafy Greens; and page 128 for Baked BBQ Tofu. We're also going to use the sushi rice instructions from the Spicy Tempeh Nori Rolls on page 47.

Let's start with the Baked BBQ Tofu. I decided I wanted to do kind of a Korean take on this dinner. Not really sure why, given my previous experience with Korean Barbequed Tofu. Take a look at my impressions of another recipe I tried from the bizarre classic Tofu Cookery, which inexplicably has almost 5 stars on Amazon. I made and rejected this gem at the tender age of 12.

The first step of the recipe is to press the tofu. If you haven't done this before, let me tell you three things:

Unlike other nuisance pre-steps like salting eggplant or preheating your oven, you really need to do this.
It's worth it to do it, too. Squeezing the water out of tofu gives it a nice chewy texture. Nowhere near as meaty as seitan, but good.
It's really easy.

To press the tofu, just cut your brick of firm or extra-firm tofu into four slices. Put it on a plate on top of a generous layer of paper towels.

Put another layer of paper towels on top of the tofu, and weight it down with something heavy. I used a casserole dish filled with marinating portabello mushrooms (more on that later), and topped that with a cast iron bacon pan for good measure. Let it all sit for 10-20 minutes or more. When you're done, you'll have some wet paper towels and some dry-ish, slightly flattened pieces of tofu. I cut them again through the middle to end up with eight flat tofu rectangles.

From this point on, I took huge liberties with the recipe. It ultimately turned out to be a hybrid of the Baked BBQ Tofu recipe, the Marinated Asian Tofu on the facing page, and a Korean marinade recipe I found on the web.

First I made the marinade, taking the random internet recipe, scaling it down to just one cup of marinade, and omitting the flour. I put the tofu in a small casserole dish and poured the marinade over it, and let it sit while I cooked the portabello mushrooms in the oven (we'll get to them in a sec). I think it was 30 minutes or so.

Then I went back to the Veganomicon recipe, putting the tofu on a greased casserole dish, cooking for 15 minutes on each side, and smothering it with the marinade at the end. It came out of the oven looking like this, nice and brown and fragrant.

As all this was going on, I was doing the roasted portabellos as well. I followed the recipe almost exactly on this one, except that since I was going for Asian flavors, I used mirin instead of the cooking wine, peanut oil instead of olive oil, and rice vinegar instead of balsamic.

They come out of the oven looking like this. What strikes me most about this picture is that even though veganism is supposed to be compassionate and all, it still looks like I killed something.

Whew! We're almost done. So finally, I did the Easy Stir-Fried Leafy Greens. You can use basically any kind of greens you want for this -- I used mustard.

I like to add a little extra fire to my food, so I added one step to this. Terry & Isa will have you fry the garlic and ginger first, but I put in two whole dried Thai chilis first, cooking them in the peanut oil till they were almost black. You can use this technique to add some subtle heat to just about anything. Remember to take the chilis out before serving or you risk being smacked by your boyfriend as he asks, "For the TWENTIETH time, are you trying to kill me?" It's happened a time or two to...um...a friend.

The only other change I made was that at the end I couldn't find my sesame-chili oil, so I just toasted some sesame seeds and tossed them in instead. Mustard greens cook down a lot, by the way. The book indicates that this recipe serves 4-6, but especially as good as these are, they barely serve 2.

At last, we assemble the dish. Put the sushi rice in a bowl (the recipe Terry & Isa provide works nicely, by the way). Then top it artfully with a couple slices of tofu, some sliced portabello caps, and the greens. I also added some storebought kimchee.

This was delicious, and may become a dinner mainstay. I realize that with all the moving parts it sounds complicated, but it really only took just over an hour. These recipes are winners. I should also add that Iv said he'd just eat a bowl of the greens by themselves. They really were that good.

Vegan incidentals

2009-05-24T18:46:00.001-07:00

So I've frankly been distracted and I haven't cooked anything from the Veganomicon for a little while, a luxury I have what with the not being vegan and all. But it does occur to me that even when I'm not working on this project, I'm doing a fair amount of unforced vegan cooking.

Case in point, this recipe for bibimbap from last week's New York Times. An easy recipe for the Korean hot rice salad that happens to be relatively low fat and vegan --- and did I mention not requiring any compromises on the palate?

The recipe is pretty forgiving. I don't have the patience to julienne on a weeknight -- shredding in your Cuisinart will be fine. I didn't have time to hit the grocery that stocks fresh shiitake mushrooms -- just soak some dried ones in hot water and you'll be all set. No short-grain rice? I used long-grain jasmine. Trust me, you'll be fine. Just remember not to regard the steps of the recipe as strictly sequential. You pretty much do steps 2-6 while the rice is cooking.

The Veganomicon Goes to Church: Mushroom and Walnut Pate

2009-02-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

Iv has been dreading this day. In A Word of Introduction, I promised that I would be "exposing my social network" to the joy of vegan cooking, and one aspect of my social network I was eager to try was coffee hour at our church. "You're going to inflict this food on those poor people?!" Iv would exclaim every time I made the threat. But this time, there was no stopping me. It was going to be a vegan coffee hour.

(Or at least the stuff I made was going to be. Iv sought to undo the fallout by making cookies loaded down with cream cheese, butter, and eggs.)

Anyway, for my part, I made hummus (not the Veganomicon recipe, which is adequate but unimpressive) with carrots and celery, and the walnut and mushroom pate (page 64) with baguettes.

With this proposed menu began Iv's litany of objections:

Iv: Really? You're going to use that cookbook?

Me: You remember we really have had some good things from it, right?

Iv: Yeah, but pate?

Me: We're Episcopalians. Pate is normal.

Iv: For coffee hour? Without wine?

Me: Well we don't have to call it pate. We can call it a dip.

Iv: Well you can't call pate a dip. It's too thick for that.

Me: How about spread?

Iv: Fine. Whatever. At least my cookies will be there to rescue you when everyone spits your food out.

Having worn him down, I proceeded with the recipe. I started off toasting some walnuts on the stovetop. Keep a close eye on this, because I burned my first batch. Just do it over medium heat until the nuts are fragrant. Any longer than that and you'll have some scorched nuts on your hands.

You run the walnuts through your food processor till they're chopped finely. Just leave them there, we'll come back to them. Meanwhile, you saute some onion and garlic til the onions are translucent. Then add salt, pepper, thyme, and tarragon, and cook it for just a minute longer, till the herbs are fragrant. Dump in a pound of coursely chopped mushrooms and cook for a few minutes longer, until the mushrooms have released most of their liquid and they're really soft. They should go from light grey to a medium brown in this process.

Once that's done, let it cool slightly and add it to the food processor, along with about half a can of white beans (the recipe calls for cannellini, but I used great northern), and a little bit of balsamic vinegar. The recipe suggests using vegetable stock to thin the puree out a little bit, but it seemed like a waste of time to thaw a few tablespoons of stock for this purpose, so I just used water and the results were fine. The result is a nice thick puree, which you then chill till it sets a bit.

So how did the pate go over at church? Memo to Iv: I told you so.

While the pate comes out kind of a dull grey mush, it has a nice, layered flavor, with the mushrooms having the starring role, but with the walnuts providing some depth and the beans adding body. The balsamic vinegar adds sweetness and just a bare hint of acidity (incidentally, the recipe calls for one teaspoon. After tasting I used just a little more).

But who cares what I think? It was a hit at church, with more than a few coming back for seconds and one choir member coming back for thirds. When asked, I forthrightly explained what it was (though never advertising its vegan-ness), but it sure doesn't look like anyone felt deprived. The hummus sold well, too, and in all fairness, only one of Iv's 96 cookies was left over.

I totally forgot to take a camera to church with me, so photographically all I've got to show you is the little bit I managed to reserve and bring back home. I know it doesn't look that appetizing, but pate never really does. In any case, immediately after I took this picture, I hoovered it up with a stalk of celery. I didn't save any for Iv on account of his bad attitude. Serves him right.

Samosa Stuffed Baked Potatoes

2009-02-01T13:53:00.000-08:00

Samosas may be the perfect food, what with the deep-fried crispness of the dough and the potato-and-pea filling. It's just a Bollywood dance number of starchy and fatty goodness. And if you're ever resourceful enough to get yourself to a place that will serve you samosa chaat (like my special boy Iv did for me during the early days of our relationship), you are in for some awesome saucy spicy crispy goodness. Making samosas always daunted me due to a lack of patience with pastry, but my patience has been improving in recent years, so I finally dove in on New Year's Eve, making cauliflower and pea samosas from Lord Krishna. They were not terribly hard, and the results were fantastic. Regrettably, the secret ingredient was yogurt in the dough, so let's check out what Terry and Isa have to offer us. A baked potato? Um...ok.

The samosa-stuffed potatoes (page 60) promise a quick and easy way to get at the flavor everyone loves about samosas without the effort or the deep-fried bad-for-youness, taking another form everyone loves, the twice-baked potato. With just 3 tablespoons of oil in the recipe, it's reasonably healthy, if a bit starchy.

You start out by baking four large potatoes, and letting them cool. What you'll do next is scoop out the flesh, and you cut them in half lengthwise for this purpose. I found that I had the easiest time scooping out the potatoes when I cut them on the narrower axis (so you end up with two relatively flat halves). T&I suggest holding the potato in your non-writing hand, and scooping with a teaspoon with your dominant hand. This worked pretty well, but it's still a little tricky. Ideally, you want to get out as much potato as possible while simultaneously keeping the skin intact. I mangled a couple skins before just deciding I'd leave about 1/4 inch of potato in each one, which worked pretty well. A little more practice might get me better results.

Once you've got all this done, you just mix a little water into the potatoes and mash them. Now the pretty easy work of the filling starts.

Here's the mise en place. You've got some black mustard seeds and crushed coriander plus three dried red chiles, onions and carrots, garlic and ginger, and a spice mixture of turmeric, cumin, salt, and pepper. The recipe doesn't call for the dried chiles or the pepper. I added the chiles in an effort to infuse a subtle spiciness into the mixture. It didn't work, so I wouldn't bother with them. As for the black pepper, it's a standard component of a lot of Indian spice mixtures, and I'm not sure why T&I didn't include it. I like pepper, so I'd keep it. You can do what you want.

The method's pretty simple, but the first step of pulling it together may throw some people who haven't worked with mustard seeds before. They pop like crazy, so take the suggestion to have a pot lid handy seriously. They fly all over the place, so be warned. You can just slam the pot lid down while they're frying till the popping subsides, about a minute. It's a lot like popcorn, but with really tiny corn where the seeds don't puff up so much as just turn kind of a dull grey color.

From this point, you just add the onions and carrots, cook till they're soft, then toss in the garlic and onion, and then the spice mixture. T&I say to add a little water with the spices, but I'd do it a little differently. Go ahead and add the spices and stir rapidly for about a minute. It'll look pretty dry, but that's ok, you really want to get the spices toasty. Once you're getting a pretty good fragrance off the spices, toss in the water, then add the potatoes.

For my part, the potatoes ended up a little underdone when I baked them, so I added a bit more water and went at them with the masher to get everything nice and mixed up. Then I dumped in some peas and lemon juice, and let the whole thing get heated through. I also tossed in about 1/2 teaspoon of garam masala. That's not in the recipe, but it adds a nice depth of flavor.

Then you just take the mixture and restuff the potatoes, and bake them for 20 minutes. They smell great while they're baking.

Once they were out of the oven, I squeezed a bit more lemon juice over them, and drizzled some mint and tamarind chutney over it, just to get a bit more samosa flavor in them.

The result was very good. A nice and easy Sunday lunch, and I wrapped up the leftovers to take for lunch during the week. Unfortunately, during the initial test, I just about killed Iv. I stopped by the Indian grocery to pick up those chutneys, and didn't really taste them before smearing them on the potato. So from Iv's perspective, the first bites were part samosa, part thermonuclear device. The potato itself was minimally spicy, so don't be deterred from the recipe for that reason. Just remember to taste your condiments.

So are these potatoes good enough to satisfy a serious samosa jones? Unfortunately, if measured on that score, this recipe continues the grand vegan culinary tradition of awkward substitutions and unsatisfying compromises. But judged on their own merits, they're pretty good and would play well as a side dish with just about anything. And I also think I know how to turn these into baked potato nirvana --I'm thinking a modification of Bittman's curried lentil and potato with coconut milk recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian could make this into a twice-baked potato for the ages.

Manzana Chili Verde

2009-01-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

I don't speak Spanish. So my first exposure to the word manzana was on a trip to Mexico some years back when I discovered the delightful Manzana Lift, a carbonated apple soda manufactured by Coca-Cola. I drank it constantly while I was there, and on returning to the States, promptly started e-mailing Coca-Cola to see why it wasn't available here. I actually got a message back, stating that there wasn't sufficient demand to justify its distribution here, which just seems silly to me. After all, you have however many million people of Mexican descent in this country, yet only 50-odd thousand in Greenland. Greenland gets Coca-Cola, but we don't get Manzana Lift...what gives?

I digress. My point was that due to my positive association with Manzana Lift, I have always been drawn to the word manzana, so the Manzana Chili Verde recipe (p. 171) immediately caught my eye.

It's essentially a white bean and potato chili with tomatillos, poblano peppers, and apples. It's quick and easy to prepare, and has become one of my favorite recipes from the Veganomicon; I've made it a number of times.

So the method is this -- you cut up some potatoes and set them boiling in a pot of water to tenderize. While this is going on, you saute some onions, jalapenos, and your cut up poblanos together. T&I tell you that you can use green bell peppers in place of poblanos if you have to, and it might work, but I'd really work to get the poblanos instead. They're a mild pepper that lacks the bitterness green bell peppers would have.

So once all that is soft, you add some garlic and herbs, then shortly thereafter, some white wine and tomatillos. The recipe calls for fresh tomatillos, and it is better this way, but I've used canned tomatillos, too, with excellent results, so if you can't find fresh, you'll still be fine.

Then you add two sliced granny smith apples, which add a nice layer of sweet-tartness, scallions, and vegetable stock, along with plenty of cilantro, and let it simmer for a while. Then take out your immersion blender and puree it till it's just a little chunky.

Then toss in the potatoes and a can of white beans and heat for a couple more minutes till everything is nice and hot. Then just add some more cilantro and lime juice, and serve it with sliced avocado.

Don't skip the avocado! This stew is plenty good without it, but avocado adds a nice creamy texture that just makes this super-awesome. Obviously don't bother if you can't get ripe avocados, but if you can...oh man. No one will care that this is vegan. They won't even notice.

Technique Check - Roasting Garlic

2009-01-18T15:37:00.001-08:00

I roasted three garlic heads today in preparation for the Spinach Marinara Lasagna, which will be the subject of an upcoming post (but which I'll tell you know involves THREE POUNDS OF TOFU, just to whet your appetite). Anyway, T&I suggest the roasted garlic variation for the marinara sauce, so I figured this was as good a chance as any to check their garlic-roasting technique.

If you haven't ever had roasted garlic, you should. Roasting it softens the cloves, and mellows the flavor out to a nice, soft sweetness. I had actually never roasted garlic before, but I did crosscheck the Veganomicon against Bittman just to see how much of a difference there was. I can report that the principle is the same, but that the Veganomicon's method is simpler.

Bittman is a little clearer, though. You start off by slicing the top off a head of garlic. And I'll bet I'm not the only one who actually wasn't completely certain which end was the top. Bittman tells you it's the pointy end...T&I assume you know this.

Then you pour just a little olive oil over the garlic head, and wrap it in aluminum foil.

You roast it by putting the little foil packets in the oven at 375 for 25-30 minutes. Just put them straight on the grates -- they'll be fine. The garlic gets super-fragrant before it's done, filling the kitchen with garlicky goodness.

Pull it out of the oven, and let it cool down till you can handle it. The cloves pop out of their skins easily, and they're soft and ready to spread on bread (like buttah! or margarine, whatever), throw into some hummus, or mix into a marinara sauce that has a hot date with THREE POUNDS OF TOFU. Did I mention the nutritional yeast in the lasagna? Mmmm.

Snacktime Special: Hummus and Mediterranean Style Cashew-Cucumber Dip

2009-01-18T05:52:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone! Things kind of got away from me in December, so even though I actually have been continuing the project, I haven't been super-diligent about updating. But let's just say that I have a little inspiration to be a bit more serious here, because the financial crisis basically ruined any semblance of a fitness routine, and I've put on a little weight. Ok, enough weight that my pants only barely fit. And while I'm aware that some of the recipes in this book are a wee bit heavy on the olive oil (or, egads! margarine) and hence may not be quite the thing for weight loss, I suspect diligent and careful incorporation of vegan cooking (along with a return to the gym, recently begun), can help my clothes feel comfortable again.

But before we get all low-fat up in here, let's have a snack. Maybe two.

First, does anybody not already know how to make hummus? I guess you need a recipe if you're writing the ultimate vegan cookbook, and Terry and Isa tacitly acknowledge this by titling theirs "A Hummus Recipe". There's nothing particularly unusual about it -- chickpeas, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, etc. Throw it all in a blender, and you've got hummus.

A couple additions I made -- a dash of cayenne to give it just a little bite, and a drop or two of soy sauce, which is completely inauthentic but contributes a nice smoky flavor. Also, it makes a lot of sense to cook the chickpeas yourself (which T&I suggest). I hadn't used canned chickpeas for a while, and this hummus, while good enough, had a decidedly metallic tang.

Onward to the next recipe -- Mediterranean Style Cashew-Cucumber Dip (page 66). This purports to be similar to tzatziki sauce, and there's a reminiscence, I guess. In any case, my notes on buying cashews still apply.

You start by peeling and seeding a couple cucumbers, then grating them. Squeeze as much water as you can out of them. Combine half the cucumber with some cashews, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt, and white pepper in a blender, and puree it till smooth (this may require the addition of a bit more lemon juice or olive oil). Scoop it out, and add the other half of the cucumber and some dill.

Then you're ready for a presentation like this.

There's nothing revelatory about these recipes, but they're satisfying, and they make enough that I took them to work with some pita bread for lunch a couple days. The hummus is a no-brainer, obviously, but the cashew-based recipe is a clever concoction. It doesn't taste even a little like yogurt, really, but it's creamy and satisfying on its own.

Bonus Recipe! Stir Fried Sweet Potatoes

2008-12-02T18:14:00.000-08:00

Alongside the Hot Sauce-Glazed Tempeh, I served some boiled kale and stir-fried sweet potatoes. I thought I'd share the sweet potato recipe with you. It's of my own creation, but is inspired by a recipe in the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook (which is simultaneously hopelessly out of date and quite strong on technique).

Here's what you need:

1 lb sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into large dice
1/2 cup vegetable stock or water
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon minced ginger

1. Parcook the potatoes in boiling water for 10 minutes or so, until soft but not too much so.

2. Meanwhile, mix the stock, soy sauce, and sugar together.

3. Heat the oil in a wok or large skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, add salt, then ginger, and stir-fry until the ginger just starts to release its fragrance, 30-45 seconds.

4. Add the sweet potatoes and stir until coated with oil.

5. Add the stock/soy sauce mixture and stir. Reduce heat to medium, cover, and let cook until most of the liquid has evaporated and sweet potatoes are tender.

6. Serve, accept compliments with grace.

Hot Sauce Glazed Tempeh

2008-12-02T17:24:00.000-08:00

I have never understood the appeal of tempeh.

Tofu, I get and I like. It can be creamy or chewy, and absorbs damn near any flavor you put near it. Tempeh, on the other hand, reminds me a bit of a Duraflame log. Only made of fermented soybeans and a lot less flammable. For the record, I have cooked with tempeh before, and haven't managed to find the recipe to convert me.

But vegans seem to like tempeh, and the Hot Sauce-Glazed Tempeh (p. 129-130), which meets my pro-spicy sensibilities and was endorsed by the omnivorous Nadine at Culinate, seemed like a decent recipe to get going with.

So here's the method. You cut your package of tempeh into eight wedges, then simmer it in hot water for 10 minutes. This turns out to be an interesting step, because the tempeh expands pretty dramatically. Terry & Isa say that boiling it helps make the tempeh more receptive to receive the marinade.

Sounds kind of sexy.

Anyway, the marinade is made up of hot sauce, wine, olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, garlic, cumin, oregano, and cayenne. On that last one, Terry and Isa say, "we know, with hot sauce? Yes." They're right, and let's pause for a minute and consider why. It's easy to think that the only flavor peppers impart is heat, but if you think about it, you'll know that's not right. You can think of bell peppers as super-mild hot peppers, and you know that green bell peppers and red bell peppers taste different. Granted, those are the same species of pepper at different stages of ripeness, but that should get the point across. Once you get beyond the heat, different types of peppers taste, well, different. So -- the dominant flavors of Cholula are hot, vinegar, and salt. For 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne, it's not really adding heat in competition with 1/4 cup of hot sauce, and it's not adding acid or salt, either. It's just giving you a piquancy that the Cholula leeches out of its peppers. If you're using sriracha, your results may vary, but I'm pretty sure Terry & Isa are referring to your standard vinegar-based sauces.

Whatever. Just use the cayenne. Anyway, so you let all this crap marinate for an hour.

It was far too cold to grill, so I chose the pan-frying method You just add a bit of oil to a hot pan, then put the tempeh wedges in, turning it frequently and spooning the marinade over it to keep it from drying out. This method seems to work pretty well.

So finally, I pulled this off and served it alongside some boiled kale and stir-fried sweet potatoes (bonus recipe!).

Pretty, but a little spare. The verdict around the table was, frankly, mixed. Iv thought it was unbearably salty. E. thought it was crazy spicy, but he's a wimp. I liked it. But I also agreed with Iv that the salt was insane, but at the same time, the marinade actually brought out what's good about tempeh for me for the first time. Bittman refers to it as having a "haunting" flavor, and I've never gotten what he's talking about, but having the marinade acting as an extreme contrast brings it out. The marinade doesn't totally penetrate the tempeh, so the exterior is spicy, while the interior has an almost creamy, mild nutty flavor. It's nice.

But we've got to deal with the salt. It's the heat that brings out the contrast, not the salt. So the better way might be to take a look at some of the recipes for homemade Tabasco that you can find online and use one of them as the base for your marinade. A project for another time. For now, I recommend this recipe, with the reservation that you make your own hot sauce, or at least seek out a low-salt alternative.

Thanksgiving post mortem

2008-11-30T07:28:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is not an even remotely vegan affair for my family. Which is fine, since I'm not even vegetarian. Amazingly, though, besides the turkey, the star of our Thanksgiving dinner is the consolation prize I always made back when I was vegetarian, and have continued making ever since. Matar paneer (homemade cheese cooked with tomatoes and peas) has become a family tradition, to the point that my cousins who weren't able to come this year asked for my recipe (for the record, I use Julie Sahni's, with a few alterations borrowed from Lord Krishna). Searching the vegan blogosphere, by the way, I find that most people seem to have success subbing tofu for the cheese, or you can try this vegan paneer recipe, whose quality I can't vouch for.

This is all an aside before getting to Friday night, when Iv and I were over at my aunt's house with a number of other relatives, and I noticed that my aunt owns both the Veganomicon and Vegan with a Vengeance. So my aunt and I spent much of the evening discussing vegan cooking over a plate of my uncle's unbelievably melt-in-your-mouth ribs.

Vegan readers may see my description of this as smirking irony at best and outright offensive at worst, but I'd call this progress. The fact of the matter is that I do not agree with the idea that eating animals, much less drinking milk or eating honey, is immoral (though this article should give us all pause). But what my aunt and I do agree on is that eating less of these things -- whether for health, solving world hunger, environmental or humane reasons, or just for fun and variety -- is a good and necessary thing.

So, I think vegans and vegetarians alike should be encouraged that even though not many of us omnivores are considering giving up animal products, some of us are taking your arguments and your cooking seriously. And whether those conversations are taking place over a conversation of ribs or ribz, I think that's a good thing.

Spaghetti & Beanball Update

2008-11-22T17:26:00.001-08:00

I returned to the spaghetti and beanballs this evening, this time using pinto beans instead of chickpeas. I ran into some problems, though. The recipe said you want to start with about 3 cups of beans, which prompted me to use two 15-oz cans because the can said each can yields 3.5 1/2 cup servings. So I stuck with the rest of the recipe, with two minor exceptions. I added a little bit of minced onion (a follow-up on my idea from last time), and again, we still don't have any steak sauce, so I used ketchup in place of that.

But here's the problem. I think 3 cups is the wrong starting number, because the beanballs completely fell apart on me. The problem? 1/4 cup of wheat gluten is too little to seitanize three cups of beans.

The good news is that the beanballs taste much better with pinto beans than chickpeas. And I also chopped up some of the roasted bell peppers we had in the freezer and threw them in the sauce, which gave a nice, smoky flavor.

Mixed results, all in all. But I think I should have either halved the beans or doubled the wheat gluten.

Pumpkin Baked Ziti with Caramelized Onions and Sage Crumb Topping

2008-11-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

Straight up now tell me

Will you cashew me forever?

Oh oh oh

Or is this tofu gonna run?

Straight up now tell me

Can garlic and basil together

Oh oh oh

Make a ricotta approximation?

I regret to inform you that the Amish CSA is taking a few months off as a theme for the blog, as we recently received our last shipment of vegetables. In it were a couple of acorn squash.

I am generally unfamiliar with the squash genre of vegetables. I grew up detesting zuchinni and yellow squash -- texture violation issues, generally -- I still prefer them a bit firm. But finally I came around, and have been cooking with summer squashes regularly. I'm still generally a bit unsteady with winter squash.

But here we had these acorn squash, sitting nice and pretty on the counter, and we had to do something with them. Enter the Pumpkin Baked Ziti with Caramelized Onions and Sage Crumb Topping (p. 194). I decided to substitute the acorn squash for the pumpkin.

But before we get to that, let's talk about one of the components of this dish: the Cashew Ricotta (p. 206). First, if you try this dish, you will be making it a lot. Which means you may need a supply of cashews. And for all y'all budget-conscious vegans who shop at Ye Olde Natural Foods Warehouse, the prospect of buying cashews may fill you with dread. But fear not! Your local Indian grocer is your friend! I bought 3 pounds of cashews at International Bazaar on Lafayette Road for $12! Remember, you're not looking for whole cashews because you're just buying them to grind up to make awesome fake ricotta anyway, so don't pay more than you have to...bits and pieces are fine.

This facsimile of ricotta cheese is made of cashews, tofu, garlic, basil, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. You just throw it all in a blender, and voila! ricotta-like goo. And I have to tell you, this is the first recipe that Iv and I have licked off the spatula. This is some mighty fine stuff.

So onto the rest. I made Iv peel the acorn squash for me because it was a major pain and he's good at that kind of stuff. Though not without swearing. The skin on this sucker is tough. Anyway, he ultimately triumphed, and I finally cut them in half.

And then cut them into little cubes, tossed them with a bit of olive oil, and roasted them at 400 for 20 minutes until they caramelized a bit. They should look like this when they're done.

So once this is done, you mash the roasted squash with a potato masher, then mix it with the cashew ricotta and the onions you've been caramelizing over low-medium heat while all the rest of this excitement has been going on. Then you mix it all up with some cooked ziti, and lay it out in a greased casserole dish.

Then, you create the bread crumb topping. Now, I have to tell you, this recipe calls for margarine. But I am here to say that you don't have to use it. Here's what I did. For breadcrumbs, I bought 3 multi-grain rolls at Kroger, tore them into bits, and ran them through the food processor. I did the same thing with the walnuts.

Then I just mixed the bread crumbs and walnuts with the herbs and fried them in the equivalent amount of olive oil and let them cook until the breadcrumbs were nice and crispy.

Seriously, folks, you don't need margarine for this.

Finally, you just layer the breadcrumbs over the rest of the casserole, then stick it in the oven, and wait for the goodness to emerge.

And oh man, is this good. It's garlicky, salty, and sweet from the squash, with a nice sagey crunch from the breadcrumbs. If you didn't know this was vegan, you wouldn't know this was vegan -- though you might wonder a little bit about why it doesn't hold together as well as baked ziti usually does. But whatever. It's moist and delicious and so on. Make this. It's very good. And it's awesome the next day, too. Iv took some for lunch, where he was brown-bagging with one of his coworkers, and was moved to pity him for his wretched peanut butter sandwich. Yes, this recipe has the power to move you to condescend to your less fortunate friends. All bow to the Pumpkin Baked Ziti!

Technique Check - Roasting Bell Peppers

2008-11-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

Between our garden and our CSA, Iv and I found ourselves overrun by more peppers than we could possibly use before they went bad. I opted to store them by roasting them, then wrapping them up in freezer bags and storing them like high-falutin' acorns.

This seemed like an apt opportunity to check the Veganomicon's method for roasting bell peppers (p. 33). It's easy enough. Preheat the oven. While you're doing that, cut the peppers in half, and seed them. Then put them on a baking sheet, coat lightly with oil, and pop them in the oven.

Terry and Isa suggest leaving them in the oven for 20-25 minutes, but at least in our electric oven, that wasn't quite long enough to get the nice charred skin. Still, they wound up soft and flavorful, and we now have a colorful collection of peppers in the freezer to see us through winter.

Spicy Peanut and Eggplant Soup

2008-11-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

As fall sets in in newly blue Indiana, soup starts looking better and better. During one of his recent farmers market forays, Iv brought back a late-season eggplant for me, which I turned into the Spicy Peanut and Eggplant soup (p. 147).

You start out by sauteeing some sliced shallots in peanut oil, an idea I was immediately on board with since crispy shallots are a frequent addition to stews in southeast Asian cooking. Once the shallots are brown, but not yet crispy, you remove them and add some cubed eggplant.

I have to take issue with the way Terry and Isa suggest dealing with the eggplant:

Peeling eggplant is pointless. Don't bother.
Brining eggplant is not completely pointless, but I've never found it to be worth the effort. The idea is to reduce some of the eggplant's bitterness, but I've always found that if you're cooking the eggplant long enough and/or putting it in a highly flavored dish like this one, the bitterness cooks away. Don't bother.
The one advantage brining the eggplant brings is that much of the water will already be leached out, so the cooking time on the stove will be a bit shorter, which means you can actually get away with the 1 tablespoon of oil Terry & Isa suggest. You'll want at least two tablespoons when you're starting with raw eggplant cubes.

Anyway, you cook the eggplant. It will look like this when you're ready to pull it off the heat.

Finally, you add a bit more oil to the pot, and add your onions, ginger, hot pepper, and spices. But let's stop here for a minute, because you don't want to follow the book's directions, here, either - and this spot's a bigger deal than the eggplant brining issue. See, Terry & Isa suggest starting out frying the ginger and chile for 30 seconds, then adding, the dry spices and cooking for another 30 seconds, then adding the onion and cooking until soft. If you do it this way, you will curse them, because you're dealing with a relatively high quantity of spices (~1 1/2 tablespoons, all told), a relatively small amount of oil, and relatively low water content in the ginger, pepper, and onion. So what you'll end up with doing it this way is a dry mixture that sticks to your pot while you're trying to cook. Even if you end up not burning the spices, cooking them this way adds significantly to their intensity, and you run a pretty strong risk of an excessively bitter dish, which may not be the result you intend.

Do it this way instead (this is my preferred technique, learned from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking):

Fry the onions till soft
Add the ginger and chile pepper, cook for an additional minute
Add the dry spices, cook for an additional 30-secs to one minute -- you just want them to get very fragrant

Then, and you need to be speedy here, add the diced tomatoes. Terry and Isa tell you not to drain them, but do it...just reserve the juice. You'll cook the onions, spices, etc. with the tomatoes till they get a bit saucy. Then, you can add the juice, the vegetable stock, tomato paste, green beans, eggplant, etc.

And now we're back on track with the recipe. Whew!

After all this mix has boiled for a few minutes, you take out a bit of the broth and emulsify it with 1/2 cup of peanut better, then add it back to the pot and stir it in. This step may look a little unintentionally evocative.

You cover this and let it cook for 30-45 minutes, then serve in bowls with cilantro, lemon juice, and roasted peanuts.

This is good, rich stuff, ideal for a cool night. Nicely spicy, but not too much so. The eggplant retains its form, but virtually melts in your mouth. The peanut butter adds a nice, deep creamy texture, but the quantity is small enough relative to the other ingredients that the peanut flavor is actually pretty subtle. It was even better for lunch the next day.

Spaghetti and Beanballs - Bittman/Veganomicon Mashup

2008-11-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

Looking for something quick I could make for lunch today in advance of an Obama volunteer training session, I settled on the Spaghetti and Beanballs recipe (p. 189).

Last night Iv asked me if I was going to ever cook a recipe from this cookbook as written -- do I really want to get attacked for not following the recipes exactly like that woman in Portland? Today I decided the answer was that I don't care about following recipes precisely, and I'm trusting my readers (whom I know to be few) not to flame me for trying to make good food. Because really, the Veganomicon is a great resource for fun and interesting ideas, and occasionally has some interesting techniques, but there are times that I just don't have an ingredient and can't be bothered, or that I just know that my way is better - and in those cases I'll tell you exactly what I did, and you can try it by the book, then try it my way, and tell me who's right.

In any case, both the lack of appropriate ingredients and ad hoc adjustment issues came into play with this recipe. The beanballs are supposed to be made with canned kidney beans. We have some dried ones, but I was under a tight enough deadline that I didn't have time to pressure-cook them, so instead I just thawed some chickpeas I had in the freezer.

You start by mashing the beans till they're mostly smooth, but still retain a bit of texture. Then dump in some garlic, soy sauce, olive oil, bread crumbs, wheat gluten, oregano, thyme, lemon zest. You're also supposed to add steak sauce or tomato paste. We didn't have either in the fridge, so I used ketchup.

After mixing all this up, you form them into balls. I ended up with 13.

This is where I started straying from the method. What the Veganomicon calls for is making a batch of their marinara sauce recipe, cooking the beanballs, then coating them with a half-cup of the sauce, and cooking for a while more, then just topping spaghetti with the marinara and beanballs.

While this method is adequate, I thought I'd try the method from How to Cook Everything (page 152), which works fantastically for real meatballs. The basics of this method are to brown the meatballs, remove them, then make a quick tomato and onion sauce, then drop the meatballs back in and cook for another 15 minutes. I thought there was little reason wouldn't work equally well for beanballs. One of the specific advantages I thought this would have is that braising the beanballs in the sauce would help the wheat gluten to seitanize a little bit, giving the beanballs a meatier texture.

So I browned the beanballs in the oil left over from the broccoli and millet croquettes for about 15 minutes. The texture while I was doing this was alarmingly mushy. I was a bit concerned that the beanballs wouldn't hold together, but I pressed on. The beanballs absorb the oil really well...this wasn't shaping up to be a low-fat dish.

Then I removed the beanballs and kept them on a plate in the warming drawer in the oven. Enter Bittman. I dropped in one medium chopped onion, and fried it for a few minutes until it was just turning brown. At the same time, I took a 28-oz can of whole tomatoes (undrained), and tore the tomatoes apart with my hands. Once the onions were slighty browned, I poured in the tomatoes with their juice, and simmered it for about five minutes, until the tomatoes were just starting to break down.

At that point, I added back the beanballs,and let them cook for 15 minutes, along with some salt and pepper, stirring just occasionally to make sure nothing was sticking. Meanwhile, I cooked the spaghetti. Once the spaghetti was drained, I removed the beanballs, and tossed the spaghetti and sauce together. I divided the spaghetti up among three plates, placing some beanballs atop each.

The verdict was positive. The sauce was great, and the beanballs were very flavorful. Fortunately my intuition about the effect of simmering the beanballs in the sauce was correct, and they did have better structural integrity than it appeared, though they were still smoother and mushier than I'd prefer...a bit like hummus balls, which would be an argument for definitely sticking with kidney beans next time. Some other traditional meatball ingredients, like parsley and finely chopped onions, might also help with this issue. I also suspect a temperature factor might have bean at play. Since I thawed the frozen chickpeas on the stovetop, the mixture was pretty warm when I started frying them, and starting with cool ingredients, or refrigerating the mixture before cooking, might also help.

All in all, the dish was a winner, though. Nice, hearty, and satisfying - not usually the sort of description associated with vegan cooking.

Broccoli-Millet Croquettes, modified

2008-10-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

Iv and I are members of an Amish CSA, which has been great this summer, as we've gotten some incredible produce. But to be honest, we've had a problem from time to time because we get vegetables in unpredictable quantities, and sadly, some food has gone bad before we've had time to get to it. In an effort to stem the problem, I looked in the bag Iv brought home this week, and spied a nice head of broccoli, which naturally led to the question of what to do with it.

Since I just made the butternut squash spring rolls a couple weeks ago, the Broccoli-Millet Croquettes, which appear on the same page (51), came to mind.

So Wednesday I resolved to make these. The only ingredient for this dish I didn't already have in the house was millet, plus canned navy beans for the accompanying sauce. At the store, I discovered, however, that my Kroger, despite having a fairly sizable natural foods section, does not carry millet. I was left to improvise -- abandon ship, or come up with a millet substitute? (The possibility of driving 16 miles round-trip to the nearest Whole Foods for millet crossed my mind, but the incremental expansion of my carbon footprint seemed antithetical to the project.)

I recalled a mention in the recipe suggesting that the millet should cook to a risotto-like consistency, so I picked up some arborio rice. Upon coming home, I re-read the recipe and saw the consistency should in fact be polenta-like, but I'd come this far, so there was no stopping me now.

So you start by chopping your broccoli into pea-sized pieces.

Then you fry some garlic and herbs, drop in the dry arborio rice, and fry it for a few minutes until it achieves a measure of translucency, then dump in some vegetable stock and cook the rice for a 10 minutes.

Add in the broccoli, stir it up, and cook it for a while more. During this process, I found that the amount of water the Veganomicon suggests for millet is too little for arborio, so I added water periodically throughout the cooking process.

In any case, the end product of the rice and broccoli cooking together, ended up as a nice mix, with the rice fully cooked and sticky, and the broccoli retaining just a slight bit of crunch.

From here, you let the mixture cool for a while, and then put it in the fridge for 45 minutes or so.

While this cooled off, I started on one of the sauces Terri and Isa suggest for it, the white bean aioli. It's just canned navy beans, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and a few cloves of garlic sauteed in a hefty amount of olive oil. Put it all in a blender, and puree until smooth. I doubled the amount of lemon juice called for, because I like a bit of extra acidity.

Once the rice and broccoli mixture had cooled, I formed them into little patties, ready to be fried. The mixture was still a bit warm, but the end result was ok, so don't freak out if this happens to you. The method the Veganomicon suggests -- forming into a golf ball shape and mashing down a bit, works nicely.

So then, I just poured a thin layer of olive oil into my favorite cast iron pan, and fried these babies away. Probably 4-5 minutes on each side over medium heat.

Terry and Isa said to serve these things immediately, so I took them at their word. Here they are, piping hot, in the company of the finished aioli.

This, it turns out, is the first recipe where Terry and Isa really sell themselves short. They say, "They are delicately flavored, so definitely include a sauce when you serve." Which I took to mean...they're pretty but about as interesting as a Miss America contestant. But this turns out not to be true. The combination of garlic, tarragon, and red pepper gives these a really nice flavor on their own, and the texture is decidedly akin to a crab cake. The thing I can't tell you is whether this is dumb luck due to using arborio rice instead of millet, but I really liked these a lot. The crust turned out nice, slightly chewy, with a pleasantly caramelized flavor in the darkest spots. The white bean aioli also turned out to be a nice complement, with the flavor of the garlic intensified after spending 30 minutes in the fridge.

The other nice thing was that while Terry and Isa say you have to serve these immediately, they actually work really nicely the next day for lunch. They were little worse the wear for coming out of the microwave at the office the next day.

No question, these are great, at least using my variation. I'll let you know when I actually try them again using millet. But my variation using supermarket ingredients worked very nicely.

Revenge of the Frozen Chicken (aka Quesadilla, hold the Queso)

2008-10-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

Iv was going to cook dinner tonight--he picked up a chicken and was going to roast it, but when I got home the chicken was sitting in the bathtub and was still largely frozen. But he'd already peeled sweet potatoes to accompany it. What to do?

Veganomicon to the rescue! Tonight we're doing the first recipe for blog purposes that I've made before, and it's a good one. Bring on the Sweet Potato and Black Bean Quesadillas.

This is a variation on the Grilled Yuca tortillas on page 49. The recipe as written is for a quesadilla-style tortilla filled with mashed yuca, lime, and bell pepper. This mixture is supposed to be the base for the variations, but instead of adding sweet potato and black beans to the yuca mix, I've always just omitted the yuca and increased the sweet potatoes, which works well.

The way this works, then, under my modifications. You saute some garlic, bell pepper and jalapeno, then add it to some boiled sweet potatoes and mash it all together with some lime juice, salt and pepper. The recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of lime juice, but I suspect it's supposed to be 2 tablespoons. Just keep adding lime juice till you've got the acidity you like...you'll do fine.

Add the black beans, then spread the mixture on half a tortilla.

Grill it in a cast-iron skillet over medium-low heat until both sides are nice and crisp, cut in half, and eat.

While this lacks the structural integrity of a real quesadilla, where the meltiness of the cheese holds things together, these are really, really good. Iv says if these were served at a restaurant -- any restaurant -- he would go just for this. But he doesn't have to go to a restaurant, because he has me and my crazy project! I can just make these and then we'll plop down on the sofa and watch Dexter!

Butternut Squash & Pumpkin Seed Rice Paper Rolls

2008-10-20T18:20:00.001-07:00

Nothing says Fall like butternut squash, pumpkin...and cilantro, right? Iv, who apparently has been won over to the granola-crunchy side of things, rode his bike to the farmer's market Saturday morning while I slept and tried to improve our net worth on mint.com, and came back with greens, eggplant, regular radish, watermelon radish, and butternut squash.

Tonight I decided to tackle the butternut squash, which is an ingredient I've eaten before, but never actually used. Terry & Isa have a recipe on page 50 for what is basically a traditional Vietnamese spring roll except with roasted squash subbing for the shrimp.

The squash goes in the oven for about 25 minutes, getting tossed a couple of times. Meanwhile, you cook rice vermicelli, then run it under cold water for a minute or two two bring it down to spring roll wrapping temperature. Chop up some pumpkin seeds and cilantro and you're all set.

Spring roll wrappers actually come in brittle dry sheets. This is Golden Boy brand. You have to soak them for a minute in hot tap water to get them pliable.

Place some rice noodles in the lower third of the wrapper once it's laid out, add butternut squash, cilantro, and some pumpkin seeds, and roll it up. The recipe says you're supposed to get 12 of these, but I got eight.

The rice paper is kind of tough to control. If it starts sticking to itself, just put it back in warm water; it will start to loosen up.

Once the filling is in, just roll it up.

The finished product, together with a super-easy dipping sauce of rice vinegar, soy sauce, chili oil, sesame oil, and sugar.

Iv was still under the weather tonight, so I served this alongside a chickpea stew with carrots, tahini, and lemon juice (basically hummus in soup form). It's vegan, too, but it's a recipe more or less of my own making, so it doesn't qualify for the blog. When I called him from work, he said what he really wanted for dinner was a bacon bleu cheese burger (which he'd really rather you righteous vegans didn't know about), but he sacrificed for the sake of the blogosphere.

The spring rolls were a triumph of deliciousness. There's nothing wrong with them. We should all eat them constantly. If there's a criticism, maybe they could use a little more texture, but they're just generally wonderful, so you should serve them to all your friends. Make them today!

Black Beans with Chipotle Adobo Sauce

2008-10-19T16:31:00.001-07:00

The weather in Indiana has been getting cool, meaning that today was looking like a good day for soup. This afternoon, Iv and I stopped at Saraga International Grocery, where they were offering a mountain of dry black beans for $0.59/lb, so we filled up a bag, and I settled on the Black Beans with Chipotle Adobo Sauce (page 122) for a late lunch.

I started out pressure-cooking the beans, then set them on the stove over a simmer with onion and bay leaf for a while. Turns out, this is a pretty aromatic dish while it's cooking, so the smell was wafting out of the kitchen before long.

As the beans cooked, I started the sauce, which involves a pretty simple combination of ingredients -- just onion, garlic, and canned chipotles. Saute, puree, and done. The recipe says to mince the chipotles, but since the sauce gets whirled through the blender anyway, I just cut them into a few pieces. The San Marcos brand of chipotles leaves a bit to be desired on the spelling front.

The dish took longer than I expected, mainly due to having to wait for the pressure cooker to depressurize before I could get to the cooked beans, so by the time I was assembling this, we were getting out of late lunch territory and into early-bird special.

Terry and Isa suggest that you serve the beans over rice, with sauce drizzled over them. I tried this, but the sauce is more of a thick puree rather than anything particularly drizzleable, so I sort of mounded it on the beans and tried to fancify it with a lime slice.

The end result? This was really good. The sauce has an almost creamy texture, which binds the rice and beans together nicely. It's pretty spicy, though, so beware. Iv has a cold, and it cleared up his sinuses right away, but then he headed for the kitchen and came back with a box of crackers to try to ease the fire on his tongue. I was feeling a little scorched as well, but I think I've got a slightly higher heat tolerance. In any case, be warned, and if you're timid on spices, just go easy on mixing the sauce into the beans. Still, for both of us, it turned out to be compulsively eatable, despite the sweat forming on our brows.

The recipe says you can skip the sauce if you want to and just serve the beans as they are. This is incorrect, unless you are a flavor-hater -- despite smelling good, the beans on their own are pretty bland. If you're looking for a simple, non-spicy, black bean recipe, use Bittman's black beans with cumin instead.

Caramelized Onion Marinara with Almesan

2008-10-13T17:43:00.000-07:00

So I was tired tonight and I wasn't even planning to cook for the purposes of this project, but Iv suggested spaghetti, which sounded like a good idea. Then I started thinking that it always seems that vegetarian and vegan cookbooks are so often focused on being all righteous and tofu-ey that they forget that a lot of regular foods are vegan. So before getting started, I checked to see if the Veganomicon had a regular-people pasta sauce recipe.

And indeed it does, with variations. So I went for the Caramelized Onion Marinara, which is cooked precisely how you think it is--caramelize the onions, add garlic, tomatoes, and herbs, cook down, and done. Classic, no soy products involved.

What was more interesting was what the Veganomicon calls Almesan, a concoction that is supposed to serve the same function as Parmesan cheese. It's essentially ground almonds, toasted sesame seeds, lemon zest, and salt. We were out of lemons, so I used dried lemon peel, which might not have been the right choice.

A tiny cast iron pan is essential for toasting sesame seeds. Also good for toasting cumin.

Whirl all this stuff around in a blender (being mindful not to do too much whirling, or you might end up with almond butter), and this is what you get.

I tried talking Iv into agreeing that it smelled like Parmesan. No dice. It smells like toasted sesame. Which was fine.

So here's dinner, on display on the coffee table before we watch the Project Runway we recorded while we were both out of town.

Here's the deal. The spaghetti and sauce were fine. And I should be clear, it was far better than spaghetti sauce from the store -- Iv and I haven't used store-bought spaghetti sauce since we moved in together. So I will say this: if you are buying sauce at the store, stop it right now and make your own. It's so much better, and it's super-easy. You can make it while your pasta is boiling.

And actually, the Almesan was pretty good, too. It imparts a distinct sesame flavor, though, and I think should try making it again sometime with fresh lemon peel. But this has me thinking about, of all things, Lynn Rosetto Kasper. She kind of drives me crazy, because everything's so "fabulous" and all, but every now and again, she talks about the concept of umami, or the quality of "savoriness". And the ingredients she consistently mentions as having this quality are red meat, red wine, parmesan cheese, soy sauce, and fish sauce. Exactly two of which are vegan. Anyway, the thing that's not satisfying about the Almesan is that it really lacks the depth of flavor that Parmesan has.

So I'm on a mission now, which is not really to develop the perfect fake Parmesan, but to work on ways to really get depth of flavor into vegan cooking without using soy sauce for everything. The difficulty that the vegan ethic imposes is that omnivorous cooking can always rely on beef or chicken stock as a shortcut to complexity and deliciousness, but vegan cooking doesn't provide that option (at least not in Western culinary traditions). The vegetable stocks I've made before are not a satisfactory solution.

Together we will find a way to deal with this problem. Veganism is a human ethic, not one that denies the Yum. Let's figure it out!

Hash! (Pie?)

2008-10-07T18:21:00.000-07:00

Of all things, it was browsing through the 1971 edition of the Joy of Cooking that I rediscovered the concept of hash. That version, called Red Flannel Hash, is essentially a repurposing of New England Boiled Dinner, which is corned beef, various root vegetables, and cabbage. So you chop up the leftovers, maybe add an egg or some milk to bind it together, then put it in a hot pan, fry it till it's nice and crusty, and you've got hash.

Over the last couple months, I have been redeploying hash in lots of unlikely ways. Iv threw a surprise NC-style BBQ birthday party for me a couple months ago, and I used the leftover pork, potatoes, collards, and whatever else to make a most excellent hash. Another time, I used leftovers from some kind of crazy Indian dinner that somehow involved beets, stewed eggplant, and something else I can't remember, mashed them all together, and made some delicious crap that tasted like something the Bollywood Waffle House would serve up.

So tonight, it was vegan hash. Kind of. I had the leftover Greek potatoes from the other night, Iv's spaghetti with homemade sauce (mirepoix, represent!), some leftover vegan cutlets, and some tomato paste to use as a binder. I mashed up the potatoes, diced the cutlets, and loosely chopped the spaghetti. I heated some olive oil in my trusty twelve-inch cast iron skillet, and dropped the mixture in.

Whereupon it immediately became clear that this wasn't going to be a hash. See, for a hash to work, there has to be little enough that you can flip it with a spatula, and after getting this stuff in the pan, I found that the mass of stuff was so big, that just wasn't going to happen. So I just spread it out so it was more like a pie, kept it on low heat on the stove so it would develop a bit of a crust, then put it in the oven on 325 for 15 minutes.

Once I pulled it out, I sliced it up like a pie, but it didn't hold together well. So, not very photogenic, which means you get no pictures. But, seriously people, this was delicious. Turned out that it was better than the potatoes, the spaghetti, or the chickpea cutlets. Vegan comfort food, people. Learn to use your leftovers.

Public Service Announcement re Miso and Sesame Sauce

2008-10-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

I want to keep expectations low here, so I won't be posting every day. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to make a public service announcement. See, I made a double-batch of those chickpea cutlets last night, thinking they'd be good in a pita sandwich with some lettuce and some of the tahini-miso sauce on page 93. This seemed like an intuitive combo to me, since I love tahini, and I always put a few drops of soy sauce in my hummus, and miso's just another salty soy product, so what could go wrong?

Nothing did, really, but I've never actually used miso before, just had it in soup with sushi. Anyway, the whole sauce comes together in an instant in a mass of ecru goodness. And cut with lemon juice, it tasted pretty good, just licking a little of it off the spoon.

But let me tell you, a little of this goes a long way. This is good stuff, no question, but this is like a double-concentrate dressing, and if you put a couple tablespoons of this in your pita like I did, you better really be into the whole miso-tahini subculture. All things in moderation, my friends. After getting halfway through my sandwich at work today, I texted poor Iv--because I made him one of these miso overload sandwiches, too. He was kind enough just to text back and say one of our friends just had a baby. So the miracle of life made all this better.

Chickpea Cutlets with Mustard Sauce, Lemony Roasted Potatoes

2008-10-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

Trying to get started with a spirit of discovery, I chose not to lead with a recipe I've made before and whose goodness I already knew. So, obscure meat substitute it was!

Terry and Isa sell the chickpea cutlets as vegan food you can eat with a steak knife. The base recipe calls for them to be pan-fried, but they can also be baked.

So you start with some cooked chickpeas. Canned would be fine, but I cooked dry ones in a pressure cooker. Then you mash them with olive oil, and add in bread crumbs, soy sauce, vegetable stock, thyme, and sage. Wheat gluten (found with all the gluten-free flours at your local supermarket) provides a meaty texture.

Knead it for a while.

Then you just divide it into pieces, flatten it out, and pan-fry. It has a not-unpleasant herbal smell to it before you start cooking, but my boyfriend -- let's call him Iv (which I don't, but a lot of other people do) -- said it smelled like dirt.

And that's it. This part was easy enough. Terry and Isa say this takes about 30 minutes. It took me a little longer, but not by much.

So then I got started on the mustard sauce. Once the cutlets were fried, I just figured I'd deglaze the pan to make the sauce (though I can confirm that there's not much advantage to be gained from that when making chickpea cutlets, other than just keeping one less dish to clean). I sauteed garlic with thyme, then added cooking sherry, soy sauce, vegetable stock, cornstarch, mustard, thyme, and capers.

Concurrently, I had the Lemony Roasted Potatoes going in the oven. This was a couple pounds of russet potato wedges, olive oil, lemon juice, tomato paste, salt, pepper, and vegetable stock.

Plated up and ready to go. I'm showing this to you on the table, but we actually ate this in front of the TV watching Survivor (they've probably got one of the best-looking casts in a few seasons, but the contestants seem a little more idiotic than usual).

The dinner review, then. The potatoes were good, though the suggested russet potatoes may not actually be the best for this dish; they seemed a bit dry, and Yukon gold may prove to the be the better bet. Iv said that the chickpea cutlets probably wouldn't fly with Joe Sixpack, though he liked them. I thought the sage gave them a faintly poultry-like flavor. As for the claim that it was vegan food that needed a steak knife? Well, if you're the kind of vegan who's really looking for an excuse to use a steak knife, then by all means, feel free. The mustard sauce was nice, but between the cooking sherry, soy sauce, and capers, was pretty damn salty, and would have been even saltier if I'd used commercial vegetable stock instead of homemade stuff from our freezer. So if you make this, which I recommend, you'll probably want to use regular sherry or white wine instead of cooking sherry, at the very least.

All in all, a successful meal, but maybe not the one you want to sneak onto your carnivorous friends. We ended with clean plates, though.

A word of introduction

2008-10-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

About three years ago, I happened to buy a copy of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the book changed my entire approach to food. While I've always been a reasonably competent and enthusiastic cook, there were certain things I never did. I had never made my own stock, always relied on storebought pasta sauces, never attempted to make bread at home, and so on. It's not that Bittman is all that amazing, really, it's just that his approach caught me at the right time.

In 2007, Bittman published a followup, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. This resonated with me because the reason I knew how to cook in the first place was that I was vegetarian from the age of 14-21 (the rest of my family was not), so I had to do a lot of cooking for myself. While I have been eating meat again for a bit more than a decade now, my old favorite vegetarian recipes still figure prominently in my cooking, there's frequently tofu in the fridge, and it still seems more natural to me to have bulgur, not beef, in my chili.

Unfortunately, most of my old vegetarian cookbooks, with the notable exception of Yamuna Devi's wonderful Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking (a complicated book Bittman gave me the confidence to return to seriously), sat gathering dust on the kitchen bookshelf. That's because the characteristic they share in common is a consistent penitential joylessness. There's a sense of self-denial running through them -- particularly a horrific book called Tofu Cookery whose worst excesses (including a quasi Jell-o salad based on tofu, agar flakes, and frozen peas) easily qualify for the Gallery of Regrettable Food. The focus was nearly always misplaced: cookbook authors seemed unable to conceive of a non-meat-centered plate, so the recipes aimed to replicate old meaty favorites, neglecting the array of non-meat ingredients.

It was also apparent that most vegetarian cookbook authors were idealogues first, cooks second.

This brings me to the Veganomicon, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. It came to my attention while perusing the reviews of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian on Amazon. I had never really given vegan cooking a second thought - even when vegetarian, it just seemed too stringent, but the reviews of the book seemed outstanding from vegans, vegetarians, and meat-eaters alike. As I've said above, I eat meat, and I'm not seriously considering becoming vegetarian or vegan. But I do agree with the premise that it is not sustainable for us to eat as much meat as we in the Western world do, and I think the idea of working within a certain set of limitations and seeing what happens is fun.

So here's what this blog's about. I've cooked a few recipes from the book, and really enjoyed them. Inspired by the outstanding Julie/Julia Project and French Laundry at Home, I'm going to work through the entire catalog of recipes. While I won't be attempting any of the amazing technical feats Julie and Carol have, I will be exposing my social network to seitan and nutritional yeast, which may be just as bold. I'm taking advantage of my indulgent boyfriend, friends, and neighbors as guinea pigs (or...whatever the not-tested-on-animals equivalent would be), and bringing you good people along for the ride. Let's see how it goes.