The Airy Way

Mini-meal in the oven

2012-01-29T08:19:00.003-07:00

Over the last year or so I've been half-intentionally assembling a collection of miniature casserole dishes, frying pans, and miscellaneous mini-cookware. I live by myself, and dislike the thought of eating leftover casserole for a week (unless it's something really stupendous like lasagne, in which case I like the thought very much but will probably eat the whole thing all in one day...). They're fun to buy, and my family has caught on now, so my Christmas stocking this year was bulging with adorable little ceramic pieces...

It's like a 7-year-old's dream! But since unfortunately I don't have any 7-year-old girlfriends to ask over for supper, I use them myself.

Another sometimes problematic aspect of cooking for one is the use of the oven. Putting a single 1-cup casserole dish into the middle of a great big oven all by itself not only looks utterly pathetic but is a colossal waste of energy, so when I use the oven, I tend to multi-task.

For instance, my lunches these days consist of a grain salad with beans, the dressing of the day, usually a few cooked beets and a bit of spaghetti squash, cucumber, tomato, lettuce, and whatever other vegetables I can cram into a container. I love this salad, but have to say that the beets and spaghetti squash just make it. For some reason, they're magic. So every week I bake a spaghetti squash and roast beets (just peel and chop the beets, put them into a ceramic container with a lid, and bake them at 350F for 40 minutes or so to get full flavour, no added calories from oil, and just generally maximize your beet-y goodness). The point is, all this takes up about half my oven space. So half of it remains in a state of empty, echoing potentiality.

This is where all those little dishes really shine!

Remember the super-easy, super-fast filo pie? You can make this really big, medium-sized, or really little. Here it is in a 1-cup container:

I'm using fairly old scraps of filo that I've been keeping in the fridge and that have begun to stick together a bit. One of the joys of this recipe is that you just need to line the bottom, the sides, and the top, with 4-6 layers of filo, and it doesn't matter if it's messy. The filling is chopped onions, garlic, mushrooms, and eggplant, sauteed with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, adding lots of minced parsley at the end, and all mixed with some of the Vegan Brunch omelet mix from the fridge. That would be 1/4 of an onion, one garlic clove, 4 mushrooms, 1/4 medium-sized eggplant, and 1/2 cup minced parsley. Fold over the top and brush with olive oil:

And cook it at anywhere from 350-375F for about 25 minutes. Generally I start with a piece of tinfoil laid lightly on top to prevent the filo from burning, then take it off about 5 minutes before the dish is done:

...and, if there's time, let it cool to room temperature before eating.

Also in the oven I made a dish inspired by one of Robin Robertson's recipes in Vegan Planet. Cut up some winter squash (this is butternut) in large pieces to cover the bottom of a casserole dish in a single layer. Splash with brandy, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with chopped onions, a dash of brown sugar, and salt and pepper:

Cover tightly, and cook until the squash is tender and beginning to brown. Meanwhile, assemble a mixture of chopped green apple, more brown sugar, a little olive oil, and some finely-chopped peanuts:

Spoon this mixture over the top of the half-baked casserole:

...and continue to bake, uncovered or mostly uncovered, until the apples are soft and the whole is nicely browned:

With roasted tomatoes, and some collards and carrots drizzled with balsamic reduction, a lovely feast for one:

...and a lot of little dishes to wash, true, but I don't do this every day and once in a while it's so worth it!

Happy Chinese New Year (I hope!)

2012-01-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

It doesn't look it, perhaps, but I've just discovered I may have started the Chinese New Year off all wrong.

My private New Year feast looks pretty good, and it tasted good too. It's mapo doufu, with braised kabocha squash, noodles tossed with a little thinned out Chinese sesame paste and miso, and a mixture of Chinese cabbage and bok choy quick-fried with garlic and fermented tofu.

I don't know much at all about Chinese festivals or customs generally, but any excuse for a little celebration is nice, I think...unless it perhaps results in a curse.

Well, let's see how it goes. The University of Victoria, my alma mater by the way, has a nice little page on the New Year. On it is the remark that "The first day of the Lunar New Year is 'the welcoming of the gods of the heavens and earth.' Many people abstain from meat on the first day of the new year because it is believed that this will ensure long and happy lives for them." Excellent! So far so good. Let's make the mapo doufu. Another dish you don't really need a recipe for...

Start by sauteeing a little garlic and ginger in a bit of sesame oil. After a few seconds, add just a tablespoon or two of crumbled seitan, a little bit of chopped scallion, and a minced mushroom or two. My seitan looks very colourful as it was part of a (failed) experiment some of you may remember in beet- and carrot-themed seitan. Anyway, crumbled up, it's fine, if a little dry. Stir fry until everything looks nice and toasty:

Add about half of a finely chopped eggplant and continue to stir fry for a few more minutes. I like my eggplant quite tender, so I covered it and let it cook on medium heat for about 5 minutes:

Add some chili paste and chopped...tofu...oh, no! According to the UVic website, "Fresh bean curd or tofu is not included [among festival foods] as it is white and unlucky for New Year as the color signifies death and misfortune." I did not know! So...am I finished, or what? A long and happy life for the veganism v. death and misfortune for the tofu. Sigh. That probably leaves me about neutral, more or less where I was before. I'll be smarter next year.

Anyway, at least I got a decent meal out of it. To finish it off, you need a little sauce made with about 1 tsp each of miso, soy sauce, sherry, and cornstarch, mixed with about 1/4 cup water. Pour it in:

...and continue to stir fry until everything is steamy and the sauce is thickened:

Serve immediately. Every mapo doufu dish I've seen pictures of or made myself has looked different from every other, but they've all been very tasty indeed!

A very happy New Year to all of you. A chance to start over once again if you've been slipping up on your resolutions already, but make sure to check out the taboos. I'm completely doomed, I washed my hair and everything today, and my online Chinese horoscope for the coming year (I'm a Green Rat, born in the year of the Green Dragon, you'd think all that green would be auspicious, but no) indicates that I'm going to be sued, lose my job, make bad investment choices, and my house will be burgled. Why, why did it have to be tofu today?

Going to scuttle into bed now. But I'll check the locks first.

Braised cabbage with seitan

2012-01-17T19:36:00.002-07:00

Mmmm...seitan...this is some homemade chicken-style okara popcorn seitan (see sidebar for recipes) and it is so good that I ate about half a huge batch when I first made it and that pretty much did me for a couple of months. Now I'm back into it, and rather strangely, because it is so very simple, one of my go-to recipes for seitan these days is the Braised cabbage with seitan from Vegan Appetite. Non-glamorous as it is, this is one of my favorite recipes from a cookbook I respect, and I've made it many times.

Today's post isn't about that recipe, however, but about one of my riffs on it, not necessarily better--the original recipe is very good, especially in the winter when people (me and it seems so many of my favorite bloggers) are craving cabbage, but just sort of expanded to include--guess what?--kabocha squash!! Okay, what isn't better with kabocha squash?

This is another one of those meals you don't really need a recipe for. Start by frying up some tasty seitan in a little canola oil until golden. Add garlic to taste, along with a dusting of thyme and some red pepper flakes, and continue to fry until the garlic is fragrant. Add vegetable broth or (as I did) water + a tablespoon or two of Bryanna Clark Grogan's "chicken-style" broth powder and your squash:

Oh, yum, this is looking propitious already! Now fill up the pot with chopped green cabbage:

...and continue to cook, covered, until the cabbage and squash are tender, 15 minutes or so, then taste for salt. I had some broccoli flowers whose stems I had used for juice, so I added it right at the end:

A super-simple recipe with only about 10 minutes of action required, and so tasty! Thanks again, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, for the inspiration ;-)

Kolokythopita (Greek winter squash pie)

2012-01-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

The Vegan MoFo 2012 Iron Chef Challenge for January is squash. I am so all over that that I gave myself a secondary challenge, which was to make my dish out of as many little bits and scraps and containers of leftover things as possible. What I had:

1/3 of a large, uncooked hubbard squash
4 oz firm tofu
some Vegan Brunch omelet mix
some leftover filo dough that had been in the fridge for quite some time

Hubbard squash, pictured at the top of this post, looks kind of like the big brother of kabocha squash. Apparently it comes in many sizes and colours, but mine was a rich dark green striped with lighter green, very shiny and pretty. The outside is bumpy and gnarly but the skin is smooth-textured. The inside is bright yellow-orange. It comes to points at the top and bottom, and so won't "sit up" on its own. Baked, the flesh turns even brighter and more orange:


Gratuitous educational photo, nothing to do with the recipe in this post

The rind, unlike that of kabocha squash, is very hard and not edible. The flesh is fairly moist and soft, and has a mild sweet flavour, making it a very good squash for mashing and roasting. I made a squash risotto out of part of the baked half above and it melted into the rice beautifully, and tried some raw in chunks in a stew, where it held its shape--barely, deliciously.

For the kolokythopita, you need to peel it and grate it. I find that the easiest way to peel hard squashes like this is to scrape out the seeds, cut the squash into wedges, lay a wedge on its side on a cutting board, and hack off the rind with a large, sharp knife. You get peeled slices like this:

By this time I was rather weary of manhandling this squash, so I used a food processor for grating:

Kolokythopita
makes 1 8-inch pie

1 1/4 lbs winter squash, peeled and grated
1 medium onion, peeled, sliced in half, and then into thin slices
1 tsp olive oil
4 oz or about 1/2 cup firm tofu, mixed with enough light miso and lemon juice to form a sharp-tasting "feta" (or any other vegan feta-type ingredient)
1/2 cup Vegan Brunch omelet mix (or other vegan omelet mix)
Spices of choice (optional)
Salt and pepper
Filo pastry (you'll need about half a package for this size of pie; scraps are fine)
Olive oil for brushing

Start by sweating the onions in a tsp of olive oil in a non-stick pan:

When they're translucent, add the grated squash and continue to stir and fry over medium-high heat, until the squash is tender, about 10 minutes. My squash was rather dry at first, so I covered it for part of the time. If yours is watery, you would want to boil it down. There should be no liquid at the bottom of the pan when you're done. Take it off the heat, and stir in the vegan "feta", the omelet mix, 1/2 tsp salt, black pepper, and any flavorings you like (or none). Since this is my own recipe and not attempting to be authentic, I put in a tablespoon of rasam podi, for the flavour, and also for the additional protein and the thickening effect of the dals in the blend. Just a dusting of nutmeg or cinnamon would also be nice:

Mix it all up and taste for salt and sweetness. Some kolokythopita recipes call for sugar; I didn't feel my mix needed it because my squash was sweet enough on its own--though a really delicious sweetening option would be golden raisins...

Prepare the filo pie (instructions for the super-easy, super-fast method here, along with a link to a video of Jamie Oliver, from whom I took this method, putting something similar together). Will I ever make filo pie any other way, ever again?

The finished pie:

Bake it at 400F until golden, about 20 minutes:

You can eat it hot, if you must, but if you have the time, this, like all filo pies, in my opinion tastes best just warm or at room temperature. A closeup of the finished pie:

The whole meal:

The two salads were also lovely:

Chopped salad, with cucumber, red and orange sweet peppers, green onions, radish, and tomato, very simply dressed with lemon juice and sumac (sumac, the red spice in the salad, is soon to be featured on its own in a future post).

A surprisingly good eggplant raita-type thing, with soft baked eggplant mixed with soy yogurt, red onions, more red and orange peppers (mostly for colour), grated ginger, tomato, cayenne, fresh cilantro, and a dusting of garam masala.

Altogether a wonderful meal, of which I ate way, way too much!

Spiced lentils with pumpkin

2012-01-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

Can you stand another stew? This one was just so good...I've made it several times now, usually with variations, but the basic recipe comes from The Food of Morocco published by Murdoch Books. There it's called Tagine 'adess bil gar'a hamra, which, ahem, I believe just translates to "a stew of spiced lentils with pumpkin." Someone else reproduced the recipe first so I don't have to.

Start with onion, chopped and sweated in a little olive oil. When the onion is soft, add garlic, harissa (or cayenne), cumin, turmeric, and paprika.

Continue to stir and fry for a minute or two until the garlic and spices are golden and fragrant. Add chopped tomatoes (or diced canned or grated fresh tomatoes), tomato paste, parsley (my parsley was frozen but that's fine), salt (or in my case, broth powder for extra flavour) and pepper:

Continue frying for a little longer until the new ingredients are fully incorporated:

...and scrape this spicy, heady mixture into a pot of lentils that you have providently been gently boiling all this time. Add cubed squash (mine was kabocha, but of course any sweet winter squash, peeled or skin on, would be good):

Simmer until the squash and lentils are tender--in my pot this took about 20 minutes. Just before serving, add coriander to taste. It wasn't part of the recipe, but about five minutes before taking the pot off the stove, I sprinkled in a few tablespoons of whole wheat couscous and ended up with this:

Otherwise, you'd want to serve the stew with bread or rice. This was a lovely, nutritious meal in a bowl, something that, with my seemingly bottomless love of winter squash, I expect to make many more times this winter...especially with the cold weather finally coming on. Doesn't it just look all warm--and I can assure you that the flavour, even with that small amount of harissa, is pretty hot! Stay tuned for further squash experiments--there's a big green hubbard and a little red kuri squash on my table looking very inviting...

Making your own spice blends + Rasam Zoa

2012-01-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Making your own spice blends is easy, allows you to customize the flavours in your dishes according to your own taste, adding more of the things you like, and less (or none) of those you don't; you can enjoy so many different blends that are unavailable pre-mixed; and they save time--if you've ever been daunted by the simple physical effort required to find and assemble all the different spices for an Indian recipe, you know what I mean. Often those lists of spices can simply be bracketed out of a recipe if you have a spice mix on hand that you know you'll like in a given dish, or you can add just a few more spices along with the mix if the dish you're making has a special flavour that you want to accent.

This blend is the Rasam podi from Neelam Batra's large and wonderful 1,000 Indian Recipes which is in stores now so I won't reproduce her recipe, but there are plenty of similar ones online, for instance here. The typical rasam podi ingredients in the image above, for the curious are, starting with the easily identifiable curry leaves in the upper left, curry leaves, hot pepper, black pepper (an essential ingredient in rasams), coriander seed, chana dal (dried, split, hulled chickpeas), cumin seed, fenugreek, black mustard, [and spiraling into the middle beside the curry leaves] toor dal (dried split pigeon peas), asafoetida, and turmeric.

To make the blend, simply collect them all in a heavy (cast iron preferred) frying pan, and roast them over medium heat until they're fragrant and beginning to change colour, about 3 minutes. You'll hear various snaps, crackles, and pops which tell you that some of the seeds are exploding into added flavour. I guarantee that the smell alone makes creating your own spice mixes worthwhile.

The roasted spices will look like this:

Let them cool, then blend them up into powder:

Beautiful, yes?

Rasams are generally thin, very spicy soups, and this powder is hot. Good for what ails you in general, and a perfect food if you're cooking with a cold...though if you're making this spice mixture with a cold you're going to want a supply of tissues handy, for you will sneeze.

A very plain rasam is thin enough to be drunk, and might be composed simply of a small amount of dried split dal, tomato or tamarind, the rasam podi powder, and a few additional spices, but of course there are infinite variations. I didn't follow a specific recipe for mine, but plumped it out with lots of vegetables and thickened it with red lentils and the very non-Indian quinoa. There are no rules outside the composition of the spice blend itself. Here's what I did:

Start with frying half an onion, two cloves of garlic, and about two teaspoons of minced ginger in a little vegetable oil. When they're softened and beginning to brown, add a quarter cup of red lentils. You can also add about a tablespoon of the rasam podi at this stage, along with any other dry spices you're using, and roast them for a few minutes.

...before adding say three cups of water or vegetable broth (I used water with vegetable broth powder, which worked well). Let those simmer together for 20 minutes or so, while you chop your vegetables:

As you can see, I used some of those adorable little eggplants whose adorableness I retained by leaving them whole, but quartering them right up to the stem. Add the vegetables to the soup along with a cup of canned diced tomatoes with their juice, about a quarter cup of chopped cilantro, including stems, some more finely chopped curry leaves if you have them, a tablespoon or two of tamarind paste (or to your taste, obviously; the bottled stuff is much stronger than the reconstituted-from-squished-tamarind-blocks-and-pushed-through-a-sieve that I use). I also very untraditionally added three tablespoons of quinoa at this time, as I was not going to serve this, as would be traditional, with rice or flatbread and other foods but was making a single-pot meal:

Let this simmer until the vegetables and quinoa are just tender, then, right before serving, stir in some fresh spinach and a little more cilantro if you like:

So good! So fresh-tasting, colourful, and healthy as well as fun to make and, if you have the spice powder already, comes together in about half an hour in a single pot.

New Year's determinations + Soup for one

2012-01-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

Well, happy new year, everyone! I see with pleasure that several of my favorite blogs are going light and super-healthy in January, which makes me happy because I'm doing the same thing and we can all play together!

Susan Voisin in particular has articulated her KISSS plan clearly (or technically it's KISSAS, the perfect acronym for a diet, in my opinion, though Susan has chosen not to use it) and although I haven't read Eat to Live and 6-week-type plans don't work for me, free spirit that I am, eating like that is how I lost my weight last year and also pretty much what I'm doing now.

Do I make New Year's resolutions? You bet! I love them. There is nothing like the feeling of a shiny new year, a fresh start, however symbolic, new beginnings, something to enliven the doldrums of January and, if you make it that far, the desperate dreariness of February and March that is weather in Edmonton. But this year I don't have any plans for self-improvement important enough to be called resolutions, so I've made what are more like New Year's determinations. This year, I am determined to:

1. Use up a significant amount of the contents of my deep freezer, pantry shelves (kitchen and basement, I could stock a dry goods store with the stuff I have down there), refrigerator, and auxiliary mini-fridge. I absolutely love buying food but it's getting to the point where there is simply no place to put it all. Grains, pasta, sauces, spices, nuts, condiments, pickles, and I don't know what all (actually I do have pretty good tabs on it, but still, there's so much). How many bags of fereek does one person need?

2. As a sub-determination of (1), to buy fresh food in small quantities. I live alone with several good grocery stores within easy reach, which I visit often. Why then do I feel I have to stock up on everything every time I go, just because it looks so good and buying fresh stuff is such a pleasure, to the point where when I start actually cooking I have to ask myself, hmm, what needs using up today? so though I shop for groceries probably twice a week I'm always ending up cooking with stale vegetables? Why? Why?

3. Really, truly practice cooking for one. One of the items taking up space in the freezer is containers of stews and soups of various kinds that are delicious, but left over. Man, I hate leftovers. To the point where I'll replicate an entire dish two days later rather than simply thawing the leftovers from the first one out. Once in a while I'll start a project, such as painting my house, where I have no time, space, or inclination to cook, and then I'm glad of them. Or have company on very short notice. Or I'm too depressed to cook. But I only paint once every several years and my friends are generally quite considerate about giving notice, and knock on wood I'm a pretty happy gal these days, plus cooking cheers me up so I'd have to be really depressed to dig down in the freezer for leftovers and that would for me usually mean I'm too depressed to eat anyway.

All these three determinations interlock. If I have carrots going wilty in the bin, I'm not going to want to just use half of one in a soup, I'll use all five, which is the first step in the Recipe for Disaster.

Phew, I'm feeling better already!

So to begin this overarching personal culinary economic revolution, I've been scouring out the fresh contents of the refrigerator(s; yes, I've had to resort to a creating a sub-depot in the mini-fridge downstairs). Soup is a very good way to do this, plus I love creating soups and stews, and having to use up odd bits of things is a good way to force oneself to be creative.

Start with a medium-small saucepan. You are cooking for one, so you are determined that this time you will not be pouring the contents into a larger saucepan later on. Measure out your high-calorie, starchy things. In the picture at the top of this post, you see 1/4 cup of dry black-eyed peas (just washed, which is why the skins are a little wrinkly), plus 2 tablespoons of pot barley, plus a single millet grain that got in somehow. It doesn't look like much, maybe, but it will expand. Cover generously with water or vegetable broth (you can add more later, or let it boil down if there's too much, so don't sweat the amount), bring to a boil, then turn down and simmer for about 40 minutes while you go do something else.

Now fry some onions in a little oil, and when they're soft, add garlic, mushrooms, and celery. You can of course just add all this to the soup pot, but frying is just one more pan, and the added flavour is worth it.

Add diced parsnip and herbs, tarragon and fennel in this case, and fry a little longer, not to cook them through, just to toast everything a bit and mingle the flavours:

Deglaze the frying pan with white wine, and scrape the contents into the soup pot. Mmmm....

Simmer until the vegetables are tender, and just before you're ready to eat, add some finely chopped broccoli:

Okay, I snuck some kabocha squash in there as well because I'm addicted to it. But yes! I kept within the confines of my pot, ate it all (and was very full and satisfied afterwards even though the entire pot contained only about 400 calories), plus I finally made something with black eyed peas for New Year's, which I have been meaning to do for years but for one reason or another never managed. I'm ready for my abundance and wealth now. Is it ready for me?

Green bean salsa

2011-12-31T13:27:00.001-07:00

Actually, this is a vegan take on the Thai salad called som tam--or rather, the dressing for that salad, which is supposed to be served with shredded green papaya. I didn't have any papaya, but I wanted to try the dressing anyway because of its peculiar (to me) use of raw green beans as an ingredient. Here you see all the ingredients for the dressing, which are:

4-6 green chilis (depending on the heat of your chilis and how hot you like your dressing)
2 cloves garlic
1 cup (100g) green beans
3 tbsp tamarind paste or lemon or lime juice
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp roasted peanuts
2 medium tomatoes.

All you do is coarsely chop the chilis and garlic and blend them up in a food processor:

Add all the other ingredients except the tomatoes:

And, finally, add the tomatoes and process. My recipe didn't specify what the texture of the final result should be, so I left it a little chunky. It made about two cups:

Now, this stuff is really good--the green beans add a very unexpectedly nice freshness that is complimented by the acid from the tamarind and the tomatoes--but it didn't scream salad dressing to me. What it really tastes like is salsa. Nevertheless, I had it for lunch in a salad of shredded vegetables and shirataki noodles. This whole giant bowl of salad, including the dressing, has about 100 calories:

When you stir it all together, the shiritaki noodles take on a lovely colour from the beets:

...and it was quite good, and very filling if you eat enough of it. I did eat enough of it and was ready for a little less raw roughage for supper, so I made a thick soup out of some of the vegetables I had around.

Here you see Step 1, onions, garlic, mushrooms, parsnip, thyme, marjoram, and fennel seed sauteed in a little peanut oil:

Stir fry these until they begin to be tender. Step 2 is the addition of savoy cabbage:

...then bean stock and water, some vegetable broth powder, kabocha squash, lima beans, and 2 tbsp brown bulgur wheat. Season with salt and pepper. Cook until the bulgur and vegetables are tender (the lima beans fell apart and gave this stew its substance):

And I added some of the som tam dressing as a topping. This is where it belongs, at least in my kitchen! This soup was stupendous, a little over 400 calories for the whole thing (two really big bowls). In fact, it was so good I think I'll make another variation on it tomorrow...

After the fall...

2011-12-29T23:27:00.002-07:00

Happy holidays, everyone. While it's delightful to get together with family and friends, there's something about waking up on Boxing Day after an extra long weekend of festive fun, games, and overindulgence in food and drink that makes one feel...well, seedy and heavy and just wanting to curl up in the dark under blankets for another hour or ten.

Live alone & can do whatever I want, did that, rejuvenated myself with the help of the gym and the steam room, long walks, couch, quilts, cats, William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal and Anita Amirrezvani's The Blood of Flowers in audio form beautifully narrated by Shohreh Aghdashloo (the actress who played the wife in the movie House of Sand and Fog)...so now I don't feel seedy anymore, but I sure do feel heavy. In fact, this whole last month or two have been a slippery slide into bad old habits. So before I slide any further, I'm taking the opportunity of The End of Holidays to recoup a weight gain of several pounds, but I know a lot more than I did last year and instead of just disappearing for a few weeks thought I'd share what works for me in the way of strategies and actual dishes, in case any of my readers is interested...and of course you all are.

Early last year I lost about 30 pounds and have, mostly, kept it off since then, which is my sole credential for giving dieting advice. Over time, I've learned a few more tricks for losing weight and keeping it off, and this is what I do:

Apart from the obvious (count calories, exercise, ahem, eat less):

1. Don't go too fast. I did, because I wanted to "get the weight off and worry about maintaining later," which is all very well, except that it all seemed to come off my arms and bust which were not huge to begin with and not the hips and thighs I was targeting, so I ended up losing all the weight I wanted to and still looking embarrassingly freakish, because I lost muscle too, to the point where even though I was "thin" I didn't look or feel all that great for another few months until it all balanced out. I would have been better off just going more slowly and steadily, which is how I do it now.

2. Have fun! Can dieting be fun? Sure. Cooking diet food is like learning to cook vegan, disconcerting at first until you get into it. Try new vegetables, go out and buy different teas and finally learn the difference between gunpowder and oolong, slim down your favorite recipes or experiment with dishes and techniques from other cultures. Exercise? Is it ever fun when you're not a jock? Not really into music/can't work out to Stravinski and Wagner isn't your thing/heard your favorite tunes so many times they make your head ache? I listen to audiobooks at the gym and that sweetens it for me.

3. While you're losing, cut out all simple sugars and starches. This means white bread, white pasta, white rice, alcoholic beverages, any kind of actual sugar. Not only are these foods fattening without a whole lot of nutrition, they magically make you ravenously hungry no matter how much of them you eat. How many pierogies can you eat? Have you ever had enough? Lasagne, anyone? To more or less quote Louis J. Aronne in The Skinny on How to Lose Weight Without Being Hungry (who gives the science for all this) why do you think restaurants offer free bread before you order? So you'll fill up right away and order less? Somehow it doesn't work that way. And a drink before dinner is guaranteed to turn me into an unstoppable Eating Thing. The hardest thing about dieting for me, by far, is to refrain from drinking wine while I cook. If you must consume these items, consume them with or after other foods.

4. Weigh or measure high calorie foods like grains, potatoes, beans, tofu, seitan, and oil, but don't skimp on vegetables, herbs, spices, or flavorings. Some dieters consider vegetables "free"--I don't, I count them, but on the whole you can eat an awful lot of food if most of it is veggies. The whole big pot of deliciousness shown at the beginning of this post contains about 400 calories, and it includes 85 grams/160 calories of surprisingly high-calorie commercial "flavoured" tofu that I happened to have in the fridge and needed to use up.

5. Unsweetened almond milk has only 35 calories per cup and it's actually pretty tasty.

6. Shirataki noodles. They take a bit of getting used to, but give them a chance. I love them. I eat them often even when I'm not reducing.

7. Apples have a low glycemic index rating. This means that even though they're sweet they don't have the evil enravening magic of white bread.

8. You can eat peanuts and not gain weight! I've actually found this to be true by eating a lot of peanuts. Really a lot of peanuts, okay, you'll gain, but even then, not as much as you might think. It's a scientific fact (go on, google it) but no one really knows why this is. Plus, they do fill you up. Even a tablespoon of peanut butter in your morning (whole grain, not instant) oatmeal will keep you going for hours.

9. Go ahead and fry in a small amount of sesame oil. It's not against the law or anything. Sesame oil isn't just for drizzling.

10. Give yourself twenty minutes after eating before you do the dishes or put away the leftovers. Just walk away and do something else for a little while.

This is one of the simplest lo-cal dishes to make, and one of my favorites. It's so versatile it doesn't require a recipe, it's quick, it's tasty, and best of all, you can pretty much eat as much as you can stuff into yourself, guilt-free. For the oriental version, just fry some onion in a teaspoon of sesame oil, add garlic and ginger and hot pepper, and when the garlic is fragrant, add vegetable broth (or just water and a bit of soy sauce) and, one at a time, longest-cooking first so they're all done together, whatever vegetables you like, as well as a protein item such as tofu, beans, seitan, Soy Curls. Here you see turnip, celery, oyster and shimeji mushrooms, kabocha squash, Brussels sprouts, tofu, green onions, and cilantro. Served over shirataki noodles (cooked separately), of course. Fresh and pretty now, it will be gross tomorrow, so either eat it all today, or, if there are leftovers, you can do what my Grandma Dee always did and give them new life by pureeing them with a little [soy or other vegan] milk and reheating them as a cream soup.

What do you do to recover from the effects of your holiday festivities?

Two great stews

2011-12-17T07:05:00.002-07:00

As readers of this blog may know, I've been in a Middle Eastern food phase. Beans are frequent players in peasant and street dishes throughout the Middle East, and I've been eating a lot of them lately.

I've also learned something recently that was sort of shrouded in confusion for me in the past, and that is that you don't have to soak your beans before you cook them. Half the people on earth probably don't soak their beans, but I always did, thinking in a vague way that the soaking water ("Never, never cook your beans in the soaking water," how many times have you read that?) was mildly poisonous or something, that beans would remain tough in the centre if you just tossed them into boiling water, that precious enzymes would not develop if the beans weren't allowed to soak overnight. Bryanna Clark Grogan has an enlightening discussion on this topic in her World Vegan Feast, and comes to the conclusion that there are a lot of different ways to cook beans, but soaking is totally optional. I've been playing with this novel concept of not soaking, and as usual she's right. So far I have not been poisoned or blown up with gas: my beans take a little longer to cook, but that's it. Not even that much longer, to be perfectly honest.

How liberating to know that you can cook with bean mixes like the one shown above with impunity. Because you can't soak these bean mixes overnight as they contain red lentils and barley and split peas, which will decompose in the soaking water. (Then why do they sell them like that? The whole issue, as I say, has been a snarl of contradictions for me, which I am happy to have finally unraveled.)

This particular bean mix is a mixture of mixes, kind of a button box of beans where I put odds and ends and trouble beans like those innocent-looking white kidney beans that would not soften no matter how long I soaked them, cooked them, etc. I had been reduced to picking them out of cooked dishes in the past but, frugal as I am, didn't actually throw them out, thinking that one day I would find a way to make them as tender and tasty as other beans...and I have. The slow cooker will do it.

I had the day off work and a million things to do and no time to hang about the kitchen watching pots, so I washed two cups from the bean box and put them into the slow cooker on high while I shopped, cleaned house, went for a long walk, wrapped Christmas presents, and completed all the 999,996 other urgent missions on my list.

After a few hours, when the beans were tender--even the white ones, to my joy--I [took some out to freeze for another day and] fried up onions, garlic, eggplant, sweet pepper, cinnamon, turmeric, salt, and pepper:

and added that to the slow cooker, along with tomatoes, some kabocha squash, chopped parsnip, and a handful of dried apricots and prunes:

This soup is loosely based on the Iranian bean and vegetable soup in Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, in which she remarks that "It is the type of soup you will find in the bazaar at the earliest hours of the morning, dished out for breakfast from huge cauldrons in which a sheep's head and feet have given their special richness, and where all the vegetables in season find their place." I skipped the sheep parts and added some additional broth powder, swapped TVP for the ground meat in the recipe, and, near the end, added a dusting of bulgur to thicken it, which it didn't really need, I just wanted to try it. In fact, I just kept adding bits of this and that until the slow cooker was full, went off to do some more errands, and by suppertime it was a great big slow cooker full of fragrant flavour. The eggplant, kabocha, tomatoes, and most of the beans melted into silky nothingness, the dried fruits were plump and sweet and wonderful...mmmm...

So what I did with it was take as much out as I wanted to eat that day and put it in a little pot and wilted in some spinach and cilantro, topped it with red onions and tofu yogurt, and it was one lovely meal, ready in only 12 hours from start to finish:

What to do with the other five quarts or so? Well, I froze most of it in batches, but saved some in the fridge. Ms. Roden further remarks that "In Iran it is served with bread and bunches of fresh herbs such as cress, mint, cilantro, and also scallions, radishes, and pickles." Doesn't that sound good? Language like that I find intoxicating and I was looking forward to mixing and matching all those lovely fresh ingredients with the stew (leftovers, yes, but you can do something different with them every time).

So last night I got home late, and had planned just to have the stew again, maybe with scallions, etc., this time, but looking for a salad recipe in another book, was struck with cyclonic force by a recipe that is going to change my culinary life, the Pumpkin and sweet potato stew from a book called The Food of Morocco, one of those big picture books they sell in Chapters/Indigo ("recipes by Tess Mallos" in tiny little white letters practically dissolved in the photograph of a silver serving dish behind them--not even on the cover but on the inside title page, and the name of Jane Lawson, the supposed author according to Amazon, doesn't appear anywhere at all--what's the deal with that, anyway? Most of the books in this series don't actually even have authors, though the recipes and the writing in general are in my opinion both good, and the pictures are superb).

Anyway, my lord! The recipe is here--this is pretty much the exact recipe, except that mine doesn't call for saffron or give the option of ground cinnamon (don't use ground cinnamon, it will muddy the look of the dish). Using cooking pumpkin or butternut squash would likely give a more chunky stew, as kabocha tends to melt under any kind of heat, but kabocha is so...absolutely...wonderful...sweet and melt-in-your-mouth buttery soft...you may have noticed I've been putting it into everything lately. It's my favorite food so I'm sure it's a superfood ;-)

Start with browning onions in a large pot. If, like me, you pour the oil off the top of your jar of peanut butter rather than stirring it in, this is an ideal time to bring out that roasted peanut oil. You don't need much, but it adds a perceptible layer of flavour to the stew. When the onions begin to turn golden, add garlic, ground ginger, turmeric, a cinnamon stick, harissa or cayenne, the chopped sweet potatoes and squash, and a handful of raisins. I did not add any sweetener--the dish was sweet enough without it.

Then you just cook it down, which takes about 15 minutes:

Words just don't do justice to how good this is. You can't stop eating it, and what a colour! It's like a bowl of sunshine. Most definitely something to serve on the winter solstice if you celebrate it (and if you don't, you should start, just so you can serve this stew). I cooked the kabocha with the skin on, but you don't have to, and of course if you're using another kind of squash that might not be practical. I really wouldn't have thought of combining orange squash with sweet potatoes, but the mixture is peculiarly divine, and the raisins add sweetness and a tangy, tart edge, and it's hot from the harissa too...sigh...maybe I'll have it again tonight...

Continuing the sunny theme, I served it with some sauteed peppers and red onions with fennel seed that I saw Michael Smith do on the Food Network (monkey see, monkey do, especially when the monkey sees it at the gym in a state of semi-starvation):

The whole meal? Why, it looks a lot like most of my other meals, a big colorful mess...

In this case, the parts are greater than the whole, at least visually, but where is it written that you can't serve two stews in the same meal?

Meatballs with eggplant sauce + rice pilaf with bok choy + tomato-chili salsa

2011-12-11T08:24:00.001-07:00

Eggplant sauce as a concept used to seem odd to me, not quite right somehow, until I reflected how delicious creamy, falling-apart-tender eggplant is in stews and soups...you don't need a recipe to make an eggplant sauce that can be served with pasta, as a bed for steamed or roasted vegetables, or, as in this case, as a warm bath for spicy vegan meatballs.

The whole key to a great eggplant sauce is grilling or roasting the eggplant properly, if in the oven on the highest shelf under the broiler, turning at least twice, until the skin is blackened pretty much all over and the inside is squishy-soft. This would be even better grilled over an open flame, but we don't have one of those here at The Airy Way.

Take it out, let it cool (you can store it in the fridge for later use if you want), and when you're ready, slice it open and scrape out the soft insides. Here's where the flavour is, in that lovely caramelized white flesh:

You can chop the flesh if you like your eggplant sauce chunky, but I wanted mine to be relatively smooth, so I put in in a bowl and processed it for a few seconds with an immersion blender. While I was at it, I did the same with my peeled tomatoes:

Yes, you can leave the sticker on, so long as you peel them in the end!

Canned tomatoes would work fine in this recipe, and be easier, but my free fridge space is limited for the leftovers and I did have these nice ripe fresh ones. For a sauce like this, you really do want to peel them. This is easiest if you just cut a shallow cross into their bottoms, drop them (carefully!) into a pot of boiling water, and boil them for a minute or so until the skin starts to peel back. Drain, cool a little, and then the skin comes right off.

To make the sauce, start with sweating half an onion, finely chopped, in a frying pan with a little oil. Once the onion is translucent, add some minced garlic to taste. I like garlic, so I added two big cloves:

When the garlic is fragrant, pour in the tomato puree:

Season with salt and pepper, and let it reduce a bit, then add the pureed eggplant:

Everything's already cooked at this point, so all you're doing is heating it to let the flavours meld and to reduce to the texture you want. Once that's been achieved, you can add your meatballs:

Hmm, there really are meatballs in there...

Gluten-based meatballs, the kind you steam, are pretty robust and can stand some simmering, but the TVP based meatballs I've been experimenting with lately are delicate and should only be warmed up very briefly in the sauce, unless you want them to fall apart, in which case you'll end up with an eggplant-TVP sauce, also good ;-) I used this latter type, from the freezer, which were very spicy, one reason why I didn't add much seasoning to the eggplant sauce.

Mmm, served here with a rice pilaf, a sort of spanikorizo made with Shanghai bok choy rather than spinach and cooked in vegetable broth on the advice of my aunt Katee, who is an expert at this dish. The bok choy adds a buttery flavour and retains a little crunch. Also seen here is an easy and very fiery salsa made with chopped tomatoes, red onions, turmeric, one powerful fresh red chili, salt, pepper, and a little lemon juice.

Some meals are best savoured in little bites of one item at a time. And some, like this one, are best in a state of entropy:

20-minute Monday - (Vegan) eggs in purgatory, deconstructed

2011-12-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Delicious, single-serving comfort-type food that really did come together in 20 minutes, from scratch. This is the vegan poached egg, but instead of trying to make it into any kind of egg shape, I tore the microwaved tofu into pieces and poached it for just a few minutes in a very fresh tomato sauce (just raw canned tomatoes whizzed together with an immersion blender with some garlic, salt, and pepper--add olive oil if you're not serving it with a rich additional sauce like my egg yolk-- heated for a few minutes in a little pot). The yolk part I made separately and drizzled onto the finished dish. Served on jasmine rice with a side of fried mushrooms and garlic, the whole thing sprinkled with black salt.

30-minute Thursday: Quinoa bowl with root vegetables

2011-12-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

I was wanting something light and plain as well as fast, and this was perfect. A bowl of quinoa with steamed baby potatoes, rutabagas, parsnip, cauliflower, green beans, black-eyed peas, topped with red onions, capers, and the Green goddess dressing from Appetite for Reduction. Sometimes simple really is best.

20-minute Monday - Green split pea dal + braised carrots and parsnips, etc.

2011-11-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

It was 20 minutes because I had the split peas pre-cooked, and although there would have been time to steam some plain rice, this fancy dish was leftover Shirini polow (sweet rice with carrots and orange peel) from Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. The rice recipe is similar to this one, and I used Soy Curls in place of the chicken, but next time I'll leave them out--the rice is superb on its own.

And for the green pea dal, I had one eye on this recipe from the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, but changed it around by having the dal pre-cooked, adding all the spices and whatnot with the tarka at the end, including an onion in the tarka, and leaving out the coconut milk.

There was all this wonderful spicy caramelized stuff left in the pan after the tarka, so I braised a little cabbage in it to take advantage of that.

And, finally, you see carrot and parsnip coins braised in a speck of Becel Vegan and the juice of a clementine.

Not exactly a one-pot meal, but it came together fast, I can say that ;-) And it was very, very yummy!

Sultan's Delight

2011-11-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

I have been having some seriously amazing food days lately. This is partly due to the fact that I lost control recently and have bought a whole bunch of cookbooks, mainly omni cookbooks whose styles aren't at all what I've been used to cooking, so I'm in a veritable froth of eagerness to try every single recipe in every book, with various veganizing challenges to give spice to the process; and partly because I recently discovered a Middle Eastern grocery store within easy walking distance of my house. When I lived in Montreal many years ago, my apartment was in the neighborhood called Outremont, at a sort of ethnic hub of Arabs, Hasidic Jews, North Africans, and Greeks. The grocery shopping was heaven, but my favorite place by far was the Arab store. This one in my Edmonton neighborhood now has been there for years, in a crappy little strip mall, and the reason I never went in before was that its name is Halal Meats. So I figured it was a butcher shop. And it partly is, but that part is tucked away out of sight at the back. Recently the mall was bought by a big company that's been doing renovations, and Halal Meats for some reason has replaced whatever was in its windows before with giant appetizing pictures of vegetables and naturally that sucked me in like electromagnets. And the name of the store is actually Halal Meats and Grocery. And lo, inside is all kinds of wonderful stuff, plenty of which you'll be seeing on this blog in days to come. Zatar, sumac, fereek, split hulled fava beans, Turkish "pale" style bulgar, oh my good lord!

And to top it all off, Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. Once again, I have discovered the true cuisine of my heart! Every single recipe makes me want to cry with joy when I read it, the way some of Blake's poetry does, or Shakespeare's. And it's got stories, it's got explanations of ingredients, it's got medieval recipes and quotations from personal histories, it's got a bibliography, for pete's sake. I love it. Family, I want all of her other books for Christmas except the one on Spain, because I bought myself that one too--in fact it was the first one I bought, so enchanted by it in the bookstore I paid full price instead of waiting to get it discounted online.


A near-random picture of some clementines, to break up the monotony of all this text

Today's offering is the veganization of a Turkish dish called Hunkar begendi, which is in its omni form a lamb stew with a creamy eggplant bechamel. There are large salad and vegetable sections in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and I'll be cooking from them a lot, but today I wanted to spend time in the kitchen and make something special with ingredients I had in the fridge, and/or needed to use up and/or wanted to try, and picked this one mainly for the intriguing eggplant sauce. I ended up following the recipe for the sauce but running more with my instincts for the stew. The original recipe is pretty much exactly the one given here. What I did for the stew was cook up the onion/garlic/tomato part (with some finely chopped mushrooms just because they were in the fridge and/or needed to be used up and/or I thought they would add a nice flavour), along with just a dusting of cumin, coriander, and nutmeg for spices, then adding large TVP chunks. This was actually the first time I've ever cooked with the chunks, and I was pretty impressed. Here's the stew shortly after tossing them in, in their dry unrehydrated state--like the TVP crumbles, you might as well just add them to what you're cooking so they can absorb those flavours:

And this was okay, but it was looking a little meh to me, so I added a big handful of red split lentils to thicken things up a bit and add more flavour. I had to add quite a bit of water, a little at a time, and then ended up cooking it down into a wonderful silky softness:

Very, very tasty, and quite beautiful too, in its way. You serve this on a bed of eggplant puree added to a thin bechamel flavoured with nutmeg and a little finely grated cheddar-type cashew cheese:

...and that may not sound superfantastic, but believe me, it was. The only thing that kept me from scarfing down the entire potful was that I want to try it cold tomorrow.

The whole meal is shown at the top of this post: the stew on its bed of eggplant puree, roasted beets, a baked purple yam that I had no idea whatever would be purple inside until I cut it open after it was cooked but what a thrilling colour bonus, some steamed snap peas, a cucumber salad with mint, lemon juice, and orange flower water, and a cute little clementine.

I have three pounds of clementines. They were like kittens, too adorable and little and helpless to leave in the store. Any ideas? Seriously, especially for savory dishes...?

Whole wheat vegan spaetzel

2011-11-25T20:13:00.001-07:00

...dare I say it...of genius? Maybe I should just come out and say that urad flour has been very, very lucky for me.

So I'm at the gym after work, pounding out my cardio and feeling rather faint with hunger, so that I'm automatically translating into veganese anything I'm seeing on Food TV and wanting it all right now, and Michael Smith comes on and he's making a sort of pot roast and spaetzel to go with it.

Well, I veganized the pot roast in my mind instantaneously and have an idea for creating one of my own with okara seitan rolled around a Middle Eastern-style stuffing made with dried fruit, but as I don't get home from work until after 6:00 there wouldn't be time today. The spaetzel, however...by the time the bus ride was over I was practically running to get into the kitchen and put my plan into action. Here's the recipe I used:

Whole wheat vegan spaetzel
serves 1

1/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp All-season blend (see sidebar; you could substitute plain nutritional yeast or black salt or a mixture of both)
1 tbsp urad flour
pinch nutmeg
enough soy milk to make a sticky, soft, but not runny batter

Have a big pot of salted water rapidly boiling. Mix the ingredients together. The batter should be soft enough not to hold its shape, but thick enough not to be actually dripping off the spoon. There is probably an easier way to do this, but I did what Michael did, and forced batter with a wide spatula through the large holes in a grater from the inside. The grater here is used just for its holes, not for grating anything. You put a glob of batter into the grater and squish it out with the spatula into the boiling water. In my kitchen, this got a little messy. Little blobs of dough fall out of the grater and into the water, and after a few seconds they rise to the top. They're done! Scoop them out with a slotted spoon into a colander to drain.

They're done, but not quite cooked. They need a little more in a non-stick skillet with a tiny bit of vegan margarine (I used Becel Vegan):

Ooh, I was stoked! Aren't these cute? And they tasted as good as they look. The All-season blend has nutritional yeast in it and a little bit of turmeric, which gave them their yellowish colour and a lovely brothy flavour.

This was served with meatballs made from leftover port wine uncheese (from Joanne Stepaniak's The Uncheese Cookbook) which is excellent but a little too salty for me--her recipe called for "sweet miso" but I'm not sure what that is, and so used regular white miso. Anyway, I cut it with some tomato sauce, TVP, and a bit of oatmeal, formed it into balls, baked it for a while, and rolled it in mushroom gravy. Also featured are some wonderful braised kabocha squash, green beans, and for a tart flavour balance, sliced tomato. Great supper!

On edit: I did a little more research after the fact, and here are some links to other vegan spaetzel recipes:

You can get at the Urban Vegan's recipe on Google Books if you don't already own her book (no pictures though)--it's like a runny basic dumpling recipe
The queen of links on technique, of course, is to Bryanna Clark Grogan's blog: though it does not include a recipe, there are lots of pictures and sub-links of various machines and contrivances you can use to make spaetzel
Tofu666 makes his with tofu
The Village Vegan uses a bit of soy flour and has a picture of spaetzel made in a ricer (long and skinny as you'd expect); she suggests serving them with lentils, onions, salt and pepper--yum!
Veggies Have a Heart uses EnerG and pressed her dough through a colander
The Vegan Epicurean adds herbs to her tofu-based spaetzel

...and they all look just as good as mine. I think it's wonderful that there are so many inventive vegans out there, experimenting away...

30-minute Thursday: A great big plate of deliciousness

2011-11-24T20:03:00.001-07:00

Heavens, is this not stupendous? And it contains so many treasures! The main idea was suggested to me by my friend Jeanne, who came up with the salad as a creative use for red rice. Check out her website, which is gorgeous, though it's about her writing, not food. She wrote to me:

So I had it for lunch today. It's a little dry and requires some effort to chew, so I added juicy things--celery and pineapple--and also green onions (still have them in the garden), some toasted cashews, and a few slices of avocado. I mixed up some mayonnaise and lime juice for dressing (I have a ton of limes and lemons right now), and sprinkled everything with salt and pepper. It was good--might have been even better with some curry powder and some currants.

Jeanne, as you might imagine, does not live in Edmonton, Canada, but in California, and has a large and productive garden (we actually met online on a gardening mailing list). While my garden is producing nothing but snow these days, I do have access to excellent grocery stores, and had all this stuff (and more) in my pantry and refrigerator. How could I resist?

There is only 1/2 cup cooked red rice in here, the dressing is about 1 1/2 teaspoons of Vegenaise along with about twice that amount of lime juice, so it was very tart and hardly sweet at all. I mixed in celery and green onions and cilantro, and I did adopt Jeanne's suggestions and added some Sri Lankan curry powder (from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, a great all-purpose non-sweet curry powder) and a few currants, and roasted a few cashews for sprinkling.

So that took about 10 minutes to put together, since I had cooked my red rice yesterday and just warmed it up a little in the microwave today. With 20 minutes to go I decided to try frying the pineapple chunks, which I did in just a few drops of oil and some of their own juice. Yum! And then there was some good caramelized stuff left at the bottom of the pan, so I tossed in some lightly steamed cauliflower and the juice of half an orange and some finely chopped hot red chilis and stir fried it on high heat for about 5 minutes. Check the closeup:

Tantalizing, isn't it? And no extra oil!

And finally, an experiment from yesterday that went right--vegan tomato aspic:

I'd never eaten aspic before, though my mom makes it every holiday. Before I turned vegetarian I was a child and thought it was gross, and then afterwards, well, it isn't vegetarian, so...but yes, you can make an absolutely perfect vegan aspic with agar. Bryanna shows you how. I find agar tricky because there are so many different kinds. I'd say, don't trust recipe authors for agar amounts, since they may not be using the same type you have; just use the recipe as a guideline and follow the ratios on the packet your agar comes in, and you'll be fine. Oh, and this was made in a silicone muffin cup that I found at Safeway. Genius for jellies! I made four of them and they all came out beautifully. Bless you, Ricardo! I feel I ought to know who you are but I don't, but these little cups are a lot of fun. I've tried the aspic right out of the fridge and today took some for lunch where it warmed to room temperature in my desk drawer before lunchtime, and it was brilliant both ways.

Altogether, this was such a nice meal, very quick, it used up lots of stuff I had in the fridge, pretty, light, healthy, and plentiful. I feel like I've just ingested a sunny day. And in chilly November, that's worth quite a bit.

Shakshouka

2011-11-23T06:37:00.001-07:00

This was supposed to be my 20-minute Monday dish, but it took longer than 20 minutes to cook, so I didn't count it.

It's going to be my temporary mission to attempt to make veganized versions of egg dishes like these both delicious and aesthetically pleasing, because they are so good and because we should be able to do it!

I had something entirely different planned for Monday, but Laura Calder was making something like this on French Food at Home, which I usually catch most of at the gym on work days, even though her dishes are appallingly meat-, grease-, and sugar-heavy (I know, this is the French way, though I am hardly an expert on French cooking or Laura Calder, having been introduced to her even as a concept only a few weeks ago). In any case, I was pretty stoked that she was cooking something vegetarian for once, though she did manage to meat her version up by actually serving it on a bed of prosciutto "to make it taste better." Sigh.

Anyway, I was starving and her dish looked great and was the type of veganizing challenge I like. She called it Basque eggs, but it's a popular dish all around the Mediterranean. I know of it as the Italian uova in purgatorio ("eggs in purgatory"), and it's also called shakshouka in the Arab world, and it probably has many other names as well. Basically, it's eggs poached in a tomato or tomato-pepper sauce, and the non-vegan version can be gorgeous, with the egg whites melting into a softly bubbling red sauce, and the yolk resting creamy and bright yellow in the middle. This, vegans, is not something I think we can realistically replicate. Delicious as vegan "eggs" might be, they're always going to look a little funny. I actually dreamed about this dish last night and have some ideas for tidying it up, which, I hope, will work, and then I'll post them. But it will still taste the same. For now, the dish is worth making even in its chaotic form, for its ease and quickness and all-round deliciousness. You don't even need a recipe. Here's what you do:

Fry up some onions (any kind) until they're soft:

Then add garlic and sliced red peppers--and I added mushrooms too, though this isn't traditional, but neither are vegan eggs:

Continue to stir and fry until the mushrooms release their juices and begin to brown and the garlic is fragrant; then add tomato wedges. My proportions in this were one small red bell pepper and two tomatoes:

I also wanted mine to be a little spicy, even though this dish is usually quite mild, so I added some Jamaican curry mix I had made some time ago (from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian). Cook that until the tomatoes begin to release their juices, add salt and pepper to taste, and then add your egg replacement. This is about 1/4 cup of the ubiquitous Vegan Brunch omelet mix stirred together with about the same amount of finely-grated tangy cheddar-type cashew cheese and a little extra water to make it pourable. Pour it over the back of a spoon into the dish so that it sits on top rather than sinking to the bottom. Don't stir!

Cover this and cook it gently, because you don't want the bottom to burn, for about 20 minutes, until the omelet mix sets up. Here it is, nearly ready:

Sprinkle with cilantro or parsley and black salt if you have it and serve with bread. The cashew cheeze "melted" a bit into the sauce; the omelet mix on its own wouldn't do that.

So this falls into the "glorious mess" category, and is truly tasty, but I want it pretty too, dang it!

30-minute Thursday: Orzo with sauerkraut and spiced seitan; vegetable slaw

2011-11-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

...but on Friday, because my schedule was moved around this week. The title says it all. The orzo was inspired by this post over on i eat food, though I didn't have Renae's recipe before me when I was cooking, and ended up doing something quite different with the seitan, which is more of my disaster seitan, spiced up considerably with onions, garlic, cayenne, dill, nutmeg, pepper, tomato juice, and soy sauce. The orzo was boiled in water flavoured with All-season blend (see sidebar for recipe), then drained and mixed with the sauerkraut.

The salad was simply raw beet, zucchini, daikon radish, and carrot grated and mixed with a little chopped parsley and minced red radish on top, served with an absolutely delicious dressing of Vegenaise mixed with lime juice, lime zest, and tarragon. M-m-m! A dressing with three ingredients that takes less than a minute to stir together and is really one of the best there is.

Here it is again, all messed up:

20-minute Monday - Wonderful quinoa bowl with tahini-miso dressing

2011-11-14T19:39:00.002-07:00

Quinoa cooked in broth, steamed sweet potatoes, cabbage, kala chana, edamame beans, and broccoli, topped with chopped avocado, red onions, and cucumbers, and dressed with that splendid simple sauce of 3 parts tahini to one part miso with enough water to thin, and finally dusted with cilantro and shichimi togarashi--sometimes simple is just the best!

Seitan-stuffed tomatoes with Moroccan spices

2011-11-12T19:38:00.005-07:00

This is sort of a making-lemons-into-lemonade type of post. Yesterday's seitan being pretty much of a disaster, it all went into the food processor to be ground into bits. Here's a good use for some of those bits.

This is my entry into the Vegan MoFo November challenge, which is to make something original involving breadcrumbs as an ingredient. Thanks to the organizers for keeping the spirit of MoFo alive during the 11 non-MoFo months! I did not make a breadcrumb-themed three course meal, but these were pretty good, and a great way to salvage misbegotten, tasteless, generally old or texturally peculiar seitan.

Seitan-stuffed tomatoes with Moroccan spices
(I'm not giving a serving size, and the reason will become evident below)

2 tbsp almonds, roasted and ground
1 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, chopped
2 large cloves garlic, chopped
200g (about 2 cups) crumbled seitan
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp dried ginger
black pepper

2 fresh tomatoes
1 tsp harissa (substitute red pepper flakes or hot sauce if you don't have harissa or the time to make it)
2 tbsp soy sauce

1/4 cup currants
2 tbsp chopped parsley
2 tbsp chopped coriander

1 cup cooked rice or other grains (any kind)
1/2 cup fresh breadcrumbs

Start by roasting your almonds and grinding them up in a food processor to a granular consistency (you can just leave them in the food processor when you're done).

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet and, when hot, add the chopped onions. Stir and fry for a few minutes, until the onions are translucent, then add the garlic, the spices, and the seitan:

Stir and fry for six or seven more minutes, until the spices are fragrant and the seitan is beginning to brown. The mixture will be dry.

Meanwhile, cut the tops off your tomatoes and set them aside (you'll need them later). Scoop out the tomato guts and chop them; place them in a small bowl with the harissa and the soy sauce. Mix this all together. The reason for this is that harissa is super-hot and also rather thick and will need to be incorporated--I assure you, no one, even the most dedicated chili-head, wants a mouthful of harissa:

Add this to the seitan:

...and stir and fry for a few more minutes, just to warm everything up. If it's still dry, add a tablespoon or two of water. Then take it off the heat and let it cool a bit. When it's cool enough, add the rice and the currants, parsley, and coriander, and run it all through the food processor to make a coarse paste. Add the breadcrumbs:

...and mix everything up together:

Now taste for salt--depending on your seitan, you may have to add a little more soy sauce, or just plain salt. You should have a nice thick mix, easily moldable into, for instance, balls...because, as you have probably already guessed, you're going to have a lot more mix than will fit into two tomatoes. This mix could have myriad uses, but I am very into Moroccan cuisine at this moment and have specific plans for it that involve its intermediate metamorphosis into meatballs. So, if you're me, you'll stuff your two tomatoes (putting their little hats back on afterwards):

...and make the rest into these:

The ones in the back are rolled in seasoned flour, because I seem to remember reading somewhere that this would make them look awesome when cooked.

Okay, I was wrong about that. Probably it was awesome when fried rather than baked, which was what I did, at 375F for about 20 minutes. Anyway, these flour-coated balls will be great in a stew, just wait and see!

Meanwhile, put your tomatoes in at 400F for about half an hour. Watch them, and don't let the little fellas collapse:

Hey, they rose in the oven! Cool!

Meanwhile, in true Moroccan fashion, I was steaming couscous:

...in my homemade couscousiere. As you can see, I have cleverly Photoshopped out the messy kitchen background. That aside, even using just a colander and a pot, once you've tried steamed couscous, you'll never want to cook it any other way.

So the whole meal?

The stuffed tomatoes, some zucchini-lemon couscous of my own devising (just mix the steamed couscous with some lightly stir fried zucchini, lemon juice, lemon zest, and salt and pepper); and an orange-radish salad with mint, cinnamon and a few drops of orange flower water. Yes, I cooked with orange flower water! First time, and absolutely delish. I bought it years ago to use in handcreams or some such thing, never guessing how handy it would prove to be in the kitchen. Seek it out, peeps, it made this salad amazing. Mmmmmmmoroccan!

Dang!

2011-11-11T18:50:00.002-07:00

A tragic day in the kitchen. Needless to say, I did not succeed in creating a white seitan. Not by any means. I didn't even succeed in creating a very tasty seitan.

Look for a lot of posts involving crumbled seitan in the future, is what I'm saying.

Sigh.

To the left are images of my carrot- and beet-based experimental seitans, pre-steaming. They look rather promising, but the result was pretty bready and unappealing. It was a learning day.

For the sake of others and their experiments, these vibrant colours fade in the steamer. Also, rice flour is not a proper ingredient for steamed seitan, no matter how white it is. Boiled, okay, but not steamed.

ON EDIT: There was definitely something wrong with this batch of gluten flour. Further experiments with recipes I've made before proved that it was adulterated with starch. I did manage to make some excellent okara popcorn seitan with it, however (see sidebar for recipe), which worked equally well steamed and (surprise!) baked, but dissolved when boiled. I guess the moral of that story is to bring some water with you when you go to buy and, if you can, moisten a little of the gluten flour between your fingers to ensure it glutenizes immediately instead of just turning into a floury paste.

I had high ambitions for today's meal. It involved the beet risotto from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which she describes as "jewel-like". This had its moments:

...but the end result was like something you'd find on an operating room floor:

Fairly tasty, however, though nothing like yesterday's mushroom one. Check the beet and carrot spiral seitan! Too bad it wasn't more delicious, or more brilliant, or something. Zoa creeps away to her secret lab to try, try again. Maybe I can figure out a way to isolate some soy protein or something...

I promise to post on the braised yuba in the very near future, as I've got another packet that I'll have to use soon. Too humbling that some little dish I toss together in a hurry with miscellaneous bits of stuff turns out stupendous, while this agonized-over spread was so very...blah...

30-minute Thursday: Mushroom risotto + spinach salad

2011-11-11T07:31:00.001-07:00

More mushrooms, shown here in my adorable new baby cast iron pan (almost as cute as a kitten, isn't it, and I have an oval one too! Shopping for Christmas presents, I nearly always find some little treat for myself; too much altruism in a shopping trip just isn't healthy). This is almost the last of the mushrooms...but while I had them I thought I would try the mushroom risotto from Jamie Oliver's Meals in Minutes.

I don't make risotto much, but that is about to change. This was fun and easy, and you get a great big bowl of warm, comforting deliciousness for a measly quarter cup of rice.

I used, by the way, sushi rice rather than arborio. I think I have some arborio rice, somewhere, probably at the very bottom of the freezer, but it would have taken me longer than 30 minutes to find it. In any case, the sushi rice worked fine, and the risotto turned out soft and creamy (or oozy, as the recipe puts it).

This is Jamie Oliver's meal, slightly veganized, and without the dessert. His recipe can be found here, with a video here, and the Web Goddess has done a very detailed step-by-step of the whole meal here. I subbed almonzano (see sidebar for recipe) for the parmesan, and my salad was made with mixed greens, roasted red peppers, and pumpkin seeds because that's what I had around, rather than spinach, oil-packed sundried tomatoes, and pine nuts. Andrea had suggested the pumpkin seed substitution; I liked it--the taste is milder than that of pine nuts and not as overpowering, and what I really wanted to taste in this meal was the risotto.

Which was incredible. The genius part of it was that you start by grinding up a few dried mushrooms in the food processor (Jamie used porcini, but every dried porcini I've ever found has been full of grit so I don't cook with them anymore and only use them for stocks that I can strain--I used a mixture of dried mushrooms from here and there, mostly oysters). So you get the dried-mushroom flavour, and the flavour from raw mushrooms that you stir into the risotto while it's cooking, and the grilled mushrooms that go on top as a garnish, so the whole dish is a soft, fragrant, mushroomy extravaganza! (Sorry, mushroom haters; this recipe is not for you.)

The salad was basic but good...and I wanted something more with this meal. The protein in it comes from the parmesan and the nuts in the salad and the hazelnut-cheese-based dessert, which I didn't make. I felt like a few slices of tofu would have rounded it off nicely, something like this:

...which is basically one of the braised seitan marinades from Bryanna Clark Grogan's Authentic Chinese Cuisine, but with fresh yuba rather than seitan--and which will definitely be the subject of a future post very soon. This was a Chinese-type meal from a few days ago, also mushroom-based.

But enough of mushrooms for now. Today I'm taking some time to experiment with seitan, specifically to experiment with staining it with beet and maybe other vegetable juices, and to create if I can a tender steamed white pork-type seitan that can be, for instance, marinated in Korean barbecue spices and grilled or braised--that braised yuba is the kind of thing that makes me nearly swoon with its beauty and I'm eager to explore the technique. Ooh, I'm excited!

I've been on holidays all this week, shopping at all my favorite food stores, stocking up for the winter which is fast approaching, making arrangements for the next steps in my home reno, getting ready for the holiday season (our family gets prepared for this stuff way early so we can just enjoy it later, stress-free) and generally doing all kinds of nesting-type activities. Really, my ideal job would probably be as a housekeeper in some upper-middle-class Victorian household--if you hear of any openings, let me know--

Super-easy, super-fast mushroom filo pie

2011-11-09T07:12:00.002-07:00

Fancy mushrooms have been on special at the oriental market lately, so I've been stocking up, but you don't need anything so tony as these oyster, crimini, and king mushrooms for this dish--just plain buttons will be fine. This is actually made with the leftover Vegan Brunch omelet mix and filo pastry from the other night's 30-minute meal.

Well, I have extolled the virtues of that omelet mix over and over again. When I actually make omelets with it, I thin it down a little with water, but for pies, obviously you want it rather thick, so I followed the recipe exactly, making it in a food processor rather than the Magic Bullet, and this pie uses a little more than half of one recipe. Among the other delightful things about this omelet mix is that it will keep in the fridge for a few days, so if you think you might be wanting an omelet or another pie or one of the other multitudinous dishes you can use this for later in the week, you can save some.

The method for this pie is from Jamie Oliver's Meals in Minutes, but the recipe is all mine, and it is so simple and fast you could chuck it together any night after work. Also, the leftovers are delicious at room temperature or even cold...I've been eating pieces of this for lunch every day since I made it.

This pie is made in a 7-inch cast iron frying pan, but if you're not concerned about doing more dishes than you absolutely have to, of course it can be cooked in a casserole dish of comparable size. If you want to see the original recipe, it's (among other places) over here, and to see a video of Jamie Oliver actually putting his pie together, it's here.

Super-easy, super-fast mushroom filo pie
makes 1 7-inch pie

1 tsp olive oil
1/2 small onion
1 1/2 cups chopped fresh mushrooms (any kind)
2 cloves garlic
2 big handfuls of arugula or other greens
1/2 tsp dried dill
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
3/4 to 1 cup Vegan Brunch omelet mix
1/4 cup almonzano (see sidebar for recipe)
pinch of nutmeg
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Start by heating the frying pan. When hot, add the oil, and when the oil is hot, add the onions and fry until translucent. Add the mushrooms and garlic, turn the heat up to medium-high, and cook until the mushrooms have released their liquid and most of it has evaporated away, and the mushrooms are just beginning to brown.

Toss in the arugula or other greens, and stir fry until they are wilted and have released any of their own water. Add the lemon juice, and stir to caramelize a bit. Remove from heat, pour the vegetables into a mixing bowl, but don't wash the pan.

While the vegetables are cooking, prepare the filo. Take a generous-sized sheet of parchment paper and crumple it up. Mostly uncrumple it, and spread it out on a cutting board or counter. You will probably have to cut your filo--how big is a bit of a judgment call; just remember that you need the sheets big enough to spread over the bottom and up the sides of the pan and partially overlap the top of the pie. Lay three (for a small pie; four according to Jamie, who was making a larger one) sheets of filo, one after the other, over the parchment paper, overlapping at the edges in various ways - you want the top to be irregular and a little messy, not a neat square:

Brush the third sheet with olive oil, and add three more sheets. Again, brush the top with olive oil, and do it one more time, so you end up with nine sheets total. If you're using scraps, just make sure they're layered in various different orientations to each other. This is a great dish for using up filo scraps. Transfer everything, including the parchment paper, carefully to the frying pan, and mold it around the bottom to create a hollow for the filing.

The filling is just your vegetable mix added to the omelet mix with 1/4 cup of almonzano for a little bite. Stir that together, add a pinch of nutmeg, taste for salt and pepper, and pour it in on top of the filo:

Now just take those overhanging edges of filo and fold them onto the top of the pie. No coordination whatsoever is required, and you don't have to be neat, just cover the top of the pie with the filo and brush with olive oil:

Bake this for about half an hour (Jamie Oliver bakes his for a shorter time in a hotter oven, but because of the omelet mix I opted for a slightly longer cooking time).

Ooh, it's done! Is this impressive for about 20 minutes' total work, or what?

You can lift the pie out by the parchment paper and either slide it off the paper and onto a plate, or serve it right off the parchment on a cutting board. It's best if you let the pie cool a bit before serving--these spanikopeta-type dishes really are best just warm.

The texture of the filling was perfect. My pies have tended to be flakier than the ones I've seen elsewhere, and I'm sure that's because I'm using less oil than other cooks. Nothing wrong with a nice crunch, though!

I am so off to the store to stock up on more filo. This is actually easier than an omelet in that you don't have to be always standing there fussing over it (particularly if you're cooking for more than one), it cooks by itself so you have time to do other stuff while it's in the oven, all or some of it can (but doesn't have to) be made ahead of time, and lusting over the leftovers will keep you up at night.

Bon appetite, my friends!

20-minute Monday - Lime-cilantro rice, chick'n tofu, steamed vegetables, green goddess dressing

2011-11-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Well, the title says it all. The rice is from Viva Vegan, the tofu from Bryanna Clark Grogan, the Green Goddess dressing from Appetite for Reduction, and the rest...that's to say the steamed vegetables and the garnish of red onions, cucumber, and radish, from me. A successful group effort, culminating in a wonderful, very quick meal!

Botanical balls, improved

2011-11-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

I've blogged these before, where I made them according to the recipe in the Rebar ModernFoodCookbook, in their original incarnation as botanical burgers. Click the link to see the Rebar recipe.

The original burgers look peculiarly like ground beef patties, which I suspect was one of the main reasons for the recipe being written as it was, with mashed potatoes, rice, and bread crumbs as binder/base. This makes for a meaty-looking but mushy burger (unless, I suppose, you added a whole lot of breadcrumbs, which in my opinion makes a bun superfluous and far too much starch-on-starch going on in the recipe). The idea of them, however, with their gorgeous and tasty vegetable palette, the insanely fragrant combination of roasted hazelnuts, dill, and tarragon, haunts my dreams.

Here's an altered version which ups the protein content considerably, gives a crunchy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside texture, and will freeze beautifully.

I'm also confident that you could use pretty much any combination of dryish squashes and/or root vegetables in this recipe and it would still be delish. Think of carrot-parsnip-butternut, for instance, or zucchini-potato-rutabaga with walnuts in place of the hazelnuts, and a nutmeg-based spice mix...yes, you'll probably see all that and more here, in time, because I really, really love this template.

Botanical balls, improved
inspired by Rebar's Botanical burgers
makes about 50 balls

1/2 cup hazelnuts
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large yellow or red onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup grated carrot
1 cup grated turnip
1 cup grated beets
1 cup grated zucchini (give this a good squeeze over the sink to remove some of the water)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried dill weed
1 tsp cracked pepper
1 cup cooked white beans (I used limas)
1 cup cooked rice, any kind (I used a rice/grain mix)
2 tbsp peanut butter, almond butter, or tahini (optional)
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp nutritional yeast

2 tbsp dried tarragon
2 tbsp minced parsley
1 cup (or more) dry TVP

A food processor is your friend in almost every step of this recipe, so if you have one, you should use it.

Start by roasting the hazelnuts in a large, dry skillet over medium-low heat while you chop and grate the vegetables and assemble the other ingredients; no need to remove the skins. Once the nuts are fragrant and turning brown, remove from the skillet and set aside to cool. Add the olive oil to the skillet and, when hot, the onions. Fry the onions over medium-high heat until they begin to brown at the edges, then add the garlic and the other vegetables, sprinkle with the salt and the dill weed, and continue to fry, stirring often, for about 10 minutes, until there is no more water in the bottom of the pan and the vegetables are beginning to want to start to brown. Remove from heat and let cool a bit.

While they're cooling, grind the hazelnuts finely in the food processor, then add the beans, rice, and peanut butter (if using). Pulse it all together until well combined and most of the rice and beans are broken up. Tip into a large bowl:

It's kind of mauve from the red rice in my mix and some residual beety-ness in the food processor

Add the cooled cooked vegetables to the food processor and pulse them too. Add them to the bowl with the rice mix and the remaining ingredients except for the TVP, and mix well:

Subbing beans for mashed potatoes, this mix is much more red and less "beefy" than the original

The mix will be quite soft and moist. The fragrance of the hazelnuts and tarragon will fill your kitchen with intoxicating aromas, even raw like this. Now you need to add something here to soak up some of the moisture and make the balls firm up and hold their shape during cooking. The Rebar recipe uses breadcrumbs, and you could too, or oatmeal, or those crumbs at the bottom of a package of Soy Curls given a quick whiz in the food processor, or oven-dried okara, or, my choice, dry TVP. Start with a cup and see how it feels. If it's still moist, continue to add more in 1/4 cup increments until the mixture seems fairly firm, like it would take molding into balls without sticking too much to your hands. I ended up adding about 1 1/4 cup. Now set the bowl aside for the TVP to absorb some of the moisture from the other ingredients for about 20 minutes while you tidy up the kitchen and/or work on other dishes.

Form the mix into balls and place on a lightly-oiled baking pan or a silicone mat:

I forgot the trick of rolling them in whole wheat flour, which makes them look better once they're cooked, but you can do that if you like. These balls are lightly sprayed with canola oil; however, on the second tray I tried them without oiling them at all, and they turned out exactly the same in looks, texture, and taste, so from now on I won't bother.

Bake in a 375F oven for about half an hour, turning them at least three times so that they'll brown more or less evenly. Here's what they look like when they're done:

Beautiful firm texture and lovely colour inside! Nor did they threaten to squash or fall apart or stick to anything in the oven. These are really wonderful. I served them with some of the Super-quick tomato basil cream from Vegan Yum Yum, but actually, as nice as that sauce is (and it is nice), it's better with pasta, and the botanical balls are so flavourful and rich-tasting on their own that they're best with a simple side of some yogurt- or sour cream-type substance, either incorporated into a warm sauce, or just alone, straight from the fridge.

Also seen here are some mixed mushrooms fried up with garlic, steamed green beans, and mashed sweet potato. Next time I'll try coating the balls in something before baking them, or serve them stirred up with a sauce, but here you see the naked thing in all its honest splendour.

30-minute Thursday: Spinach & feta filo pie + experimenting with faux shrimp

2011-11-03T20:33:00.003-06:00

More from Jamie Oliver's Meals in Minutes, this is the Spinach and feta filo pie menu, with its cucumber and tomato salads. I subbed the omelet mix from Vegan Brunch for the eggs, a mixture of kale, bok choy, and arugula for the spinach, the faux feta from American Vegan Kitchen for the feta, and it was still oh, wow! I had the omelet mix and faux feta already prepared, and it did come together in just a little more than 30 minutes. Astonishing. Even more astonishing is that other than the bowl you mix up the omelet in, the whole thing gets made in a single cast iron skillet--you roast the pine nuts, cook down the greens, and then cook the whole pie in it without ever needing to wash it. Nice!

And, yes, you read right. I have jumped back on the horse and ate:

Pine nuts. From a different source and a different store. If I get pine mouth from these the love affair is over forever. If I don't, Viva Kirkland! You read online that the pine nuts that are the culprits come from China or Korea, but every package of pine nuts I have seen since (and I've been checking) is from China.

The tomato salad was supposed to be resting on a blenderized mixture of basil, olive oil, garlic, and white wine vinegar, but big bundles of basil aren't easy to come by around here, so I subbed cilantro, and would have eaten my cats if they'd been dunked in this. But then I have a serious weakness for salsa verde.

I have some big new-cookbook love going on for Meals in Minutes. Plus the fact that I actually saw Jamie Oliver making one of these meals on his show while I was at the gym yesterday. I don't have a TV, so other than downloading shows from iTunes or other places, don't watch it except, starting very recently, at the gym. The one I saw him doing was the Curry rogan josh--and I only caught the last 15 minutes and so didn't realize until I got home and read the whole menu recipe that it was actually vegan except for the yogurt. The book is very vegetarian friendly, and in the index the vegetarian recipes are indicated with a "v". I believe all of them are available online as well. But the book is very kewl, very beautiful, very inspiring.

Any experienced vegan cook delights in converting omni recipes, and that's what I did with my "shrimp."

I know what you're thinking. I wasn't too sure about them either. Here's the label:

So I'm standing in the store reading this, and going "Curdlen? What the...?" Isolated soy protein, okay, wheat fibre, fine, konnyaku is what gives shirataki noodles their peculiar chewy texture, so I'm good with that too, but I'd never heard of curdlen. Calgary, Alberta, where this product is made, is very local, so this is a Canadian product. Apparently curdlan is a food additive derived from certain kinds of bacteria. According to Wikipedia:

Curdlan (or beta-1,3-glucan) is a high molecular weight polymer of glucose. Curdlan consists of β-(1,3)-linked glucose residues and forms elastic gels upon heating in aqueous suspension.
It is produced by Agrobacterium biobar, a non pathogenic bacteria. The production of curdlan by Alcaligenes faecalis is being developed to be used in gel production as well.

Clearly nothing to be wary of. It's used to add texture to foods, to sort of curdle them (curdlen, curdlin', get it?). And apparently it is quite safe. So they say.

Having put that little matter behind me, I opened the package, expecting a fishy taste I was fairly sure I wouldn't like, at the very least the fishy odour of raw shirataki noodles. But no. These little guys had a pleasant, fresh taste, kind of like a cross between tofu and cooked shirataki noodles, which is essentially what is is, and no smell whatsoever. They'll take on the flavour of whatever they're cooked with. Next time I buy them (and for sure I will buy them again) I'll marinate them in something before cooking. This time I made a shrimp curry based on the recipe at Padma's Kitchen, just subbing out the shrimp with the "shrimp."

What really sold me on this recipe was that it called for a whole bunch of curry leaves all sliced up, which give the dish a lot of its flavour, and I am a curry leaf ho--one of the great culinary regrets of my life is that I only discovered them in the last two years or so. Buy them fresh, freeze them, and they'll keep for a good long time.

The whole meal:

Crazy good! It includes a cauliflower-butternut curry with chickpeas and spinach, a carrot-ginger salad, a lemon pickle you make in 10 seconds (not kidding, 10 seconds), jasmine rice, tofu yogurt, and pappadams. I discovered on my own that you don't have to deep fry pappadams--you can just brush them with a little oil and bake them in a 350F oven for 30 seconds or so and they're just as good. Probably you all knew that before, but I didn't, and this knowledge has made me very happy because I love pappadams.

So all happy and everything, I leave you--

Pineapple sweet & sour + helpful reflections on moderation

2011-11-02T09:44:00.003-06:00

Pineapple sweet and sour, courtesy Bryanna Clark Grogan's Authentic Vegan Cuisine (I added no sugar, but tipped a little of the pineapple juice into the broth and it was most definitely sweet enough for me), plus some reheated multi-rice-and-grain mix from the fridge. 15 minutes, 1.5 glasses of wine (the .5 was with supper). I had to work late and was starving by the time I got home. This was perfect.

Okay, I can't resist, even though I always regret giving advice...but this is more advice to my future self than anything. Here's what I did right yesterday, in the spirit of maintaining a healthy moderation where food is concerned:

I was hungry so I cooked fast. Seven o'clock at night after a hard workout is not the time for experimenting. This was a quick, easy meal I've made many times before, that's healthy, and that I really enjoy: I should keep a list of these so I don't spend too much time thinking about what to have or flipping through cookbooks, sipping cool white wine all the while and becoming more and more ravenous and uninhibited.
I used some cooked grains from the refrigerator that I keep on hand for lunch salads and to heat up in the microwave for meals like this--but nothing too appetizing. Cooked jasmine rice and pasta are not items that will keep long in my fridge.
I got straight up from the table and went to the computer to download, review, and edit my photos of this meal--before I did the dishes or put any leftovers away. This is a surprising benefit of food blogging. By the time I'd done that, and left a few comments on other blogs, my stomach had had time to tell my brain that it was full and I stood a better chance of calmly putting the kitchen in order without losing control and gorging on everything in sight.

Anybody want to share their own tips and tricks?

And, finally, the last entry in my mystery pictures series for Vegan MoFo 2011, was indeed, as all you vegans guessed:

And tonight...I have the day off work, so I will be experimenting and taking one giant step out of my comfort zone with...my fingers tremble slightly as I even type it...faux fish!

MoFo Mystery Picture the Thirtieth and a New Year's Resolution

2011-10-31T20:47:00.004-06:00

For the last mystery picture of Vegan MoFo 2011, I've chosen something very, very vegan. Vegans will get it right away, omnis...well, go ahead and guess!

So, farewell to another MoFo, and Happy New Year if you are wiccan. I am not wiccan, but this really does seem to me to be the ideal time for the year to begin, like seeds planted in the ground that need some germination time before they can sprout forth.

I've made a resolution! Some of you may know that near the beginning of 2011 I lost quite a bit of weight. Well, to my horror, I find that despite working out every day like a mad fiend, it is starting to creep back on. Noooooooo!!!!! No no no no no! However, the reason isn't a mystery, it's because I like to drink wine while I cook. I won't go into the gory details, but that's it in a nutshell. The only really feasible way for me to drink less is to make cooking last a shorter time, which is what I did when I was dieting, but what I ate when I was dieting was pretty samey and boring.

So...my resolution is that on Mondays and Thursdays (at least), I will be cooking superfast but interesting meals and, I hope, blogging them. To that end, welcome to The Airy Way's inaugural 20-Minute Monday! Since my own cooking style is leisurely in the extreme (especially after a few glasses of wine), I thought I would consult an expert for tips and tricks, and have chosen Jamie Oliver and his Meals in Minutes. I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Jamie Oliver--he looks like someone's brother, and wears hoodies, he gardens, and he appreciates vegetables not just as colorful stuff to put beside a hunk of meat, but as having beauty and dignity and a general awesome deliciousness on their own. This cookbook looks amazing, and is filled with gorgeous step-by-step photos. It is not a vegan cookbook, but contains many vegan and vegetarian recipes. It's organized into menus, and the instructions are for the whole menu, to make the cooking go as fast as possible. He asks in the introduction that you don't mess with the menus, picking and choosing and changing things, at least at first, but I'm going to do just that (sorry, Jamie) in order to:

1. Make them single-serving-sized;
2. Veganize them;
3. Lower the fat content somewhat;
4. Skip the dessert.

Otherwise, I'll try to follow along as faithfully as I can.


First step: get your ingredients together, and broccoli is, of course, the subject of yesterday's mystery picture

This is the very first menu in the book: broccoli orecchiette, zucchini and bocconcini salad, and a prosciutto and melon salad I didn't make. I subbed the faux feta from American Vegan Kitchen for the bocconcini, and almonzano (see sidebar) for the parmesan in the broccoli (and, see, I'm weighing my pasta, another diet tip that I faithfully adhere to at all times these days).

The genius part of the broccoli orecchiette is this:

You puree the stems of the broccoli along with garlic, red pepper, and a few other things, and fry this in olive oil and a little pasta water while the pasta boils to make a sauce. Is that brilliant or what?

The zucchini salad was wonderful, and very simple to put together, with a dressing of mint, chili, lemon juice, and lemon zest. I served it with tomato drizzled with balsamic reduction:

Yum! This was really, really good, and once all the ingredients were assembled did indeed come together in 20 minutes. This is one resolution it shouldn't be hard to keep.

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-Ninth

2011-10-30T20:18:00.000-06:00

We all know what this one is, but what I really want to know is what are those white specks, which are invisible to the naked eye? This is, unfortunately, the best focus I could get in my current lighting conditions...but this vegetable was washed pre-photo...and, um, it's now been eaten, specks and all!

Iron Chef Challenge #4 - Carrot and oatmeal...balls

2011-10-29T21:06:00.006-06:00

Today I'm taking a break from mystery pictures to participate in the Vegan MoFo 2011 Iron Chef Challenge #4.

The pictures on this post may not be superfantastic, but the recipe really is! For those of my readers who are not all into Vegan MoFo, the challenge was to come up with an original recipe two of whose ingredients were carrots and oatmeal.

Well, I've been experimenting obsessively lately with "meatball" recipes inspired by Jennifer McCann's The Magical Loaf Studio, where you can input your ingredients of choice and come out with a recipe for a loaf (or in my case, balls) of protein-rich awesomeness. So far, everything I have made has totally rocked, so check it out for yourself and go to town.

Just for the record, what I really like about the recipes that come from The Magical Loaf Studio is:

1. The high protein content (from nuts, beans, AND powdered beans of one kind or another; plus my own original addition of TVP);
2. The texture: my versions at least have a perfect, firm texture that holds together through baking, saucing, and freezing; and of course:
3. The versatility: use the spice mix of your choice, more or less heat, different vegetables, etc. The recipe I'm going to give here is basically original; you can't generate it from The Magical Loaf, but it's based on those proportions.

Today I made two kinds of balls, the first based on carrots, to satisfy the Challenge, and the second based on beets, just because I love beets. Both were great; honestly, some of the best balls I've ever made. Today I'll focus on the carrot ones.

Zoa's carrot-oatmeal balls
makes approximately 30 balls

1/2 cup uncooked jasmine rice
1 + 1/4 cup carrot juice
1/4 tsp turmeric
1 small carrot, grated
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1 tsp vegetable oil
1 onion, diced
2 large garlic cloves, minced
2 cups cooked lima beans
1 tsp tomato paste
1/4 cup oatmeal
2 tbsp urad flour
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp coriander

1 tbsp lime juice
1 tsp salt
2 tsp All-Season Blend (see sidebar)
1 cup dry TVP

For the beet version, make the following changes:

use plain cooked jasmine rice (i.e., you don't need to cook the rice in beet juice)
add 1/2 packed cup of grated raw beet to the onions and garlic for the last five minutes or so of cooking
use besan flour instead of urad flour
leave out the turmeric and the lime juice, but add a pinch of allspice to the spices
if you need to add extra liquid and don't have access to beet juice, then vegetable broth or carrot juice should work fine and/or add more grated beet to the onion mix, and/or a little raw finely grated beet at the end (I did, however, add 1/4 cup of beet juice to the mix which is I think what turned the beet balls their blinding violet hue)

Start by cooking the rice. Pour 1 cup of the carrot juice into a small pot, add the turmeric, the rice, and the grated carrot, and bring to a boil.

Turn the heat down to simmer, and cook covered for about 12 minutes, until the rice is done. Remove from heat and let cool a little:

This is really delicious, as is.

Meanwhile, sweat the onion and garlic in the canola oil until translucent.

In a food processor, grind the almonds into a sand-like consistency. Add the cooked carrot-rice, 2 tbsp of the oatmeal, the urad flour, lima beans, the remaining 1/4 cup carrot juice, and all the spices, and pulse to mix well. Turn into a bowl, and add the second 2 tbsp of oatmeal and the dried TVP. Stir to mix, and set aside for about 20 minutes to allow the TVP to absorb some of the moisture from the surrounding ingredients. The final mixture should be quite stiff:

Preheat the oven to 350F while you form the mixture into walnut-sized balls and place them on a cookie sheet lightly oiled or covered with a silicone mat. Brush or spray lightly with canola oil:

These are the beet balls, but the principle is the same.

Bake for about half an hour, turning at least three times to get them evenly browned.

Served above with a bechamel sauce, and steamed green beans and sweet potatoes and tomatoes with some leftover carrot-ginger dressing from the other night. So, so good! The carrot (or beet)/almond/jasmine rice/oatmeal combination made them sweet and savory all at once, and the texture was perfect, crunchy on the outside, soft but still firm on the inside. In fact, I would class both kinds of balls, beet and carrot, as "of genius" if I could take total credit for them myself.

As for yesterday's mystery picture, those of you who guessed dried fruit of some kind were right on; it was golden raisins, way close up:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-Eighth + Dan dan noodles

2011-10-29T08:01:00.000-06:00

This little item went beautifully translucent under my bright lights!

And I had Bryanna Clark Grogan's Dan dan noodles for supper last night. I've posted about these before, with a version of the recipe that's online but taken without credit from her Authentic Chinese Cuisine. This is one of my go to recipes--I make it often and absolutely love it. If you're fast-moving and well-prepared, you can have this meal ready in 20 minutes or so.

This time, instead of using the dried mushrooms and white onions the recipe calls for, I used red onions and those adorable little beech mushrooms:


Why they don't sell these everywhere I can't imagine! Click for a closeup ;-)

The red onions turned the TVP-based topping a gorgeous colour:

...and here it is in all its glory, resting on soba noodles in a bath of peanut-butter infused vegetable broth!

So good! It looks like a lot of food, and it is, but this is a single serving, and, all-inclusive, has only about 500 calories, according to the book. Actually, though, it's less, because I took a couple of shortcuts to lower the fat:

1. If you're cooking dishes involving frying something that also call for a drizzle of sesame oil, like this one, you can actually stir fry in the sesame oil and just leave out the initial frying oil;

2. I buy the "natural" type of peanut butter which is just 100% peanuts with no additives. This tends to separate in the jar, so some of the oil floats to the top. Instead of stirring it in, I pour off this oil, save it, and use it for cooking and salad dressings. This oil is delicious, and gives a light peanut flavour to a dish. You may ask, doesn't that make the peanut butter at the bottom of the jar get all hard and tough? A bit, sure, but have you ever tried that stuff on toast? It's like peanut butter fudge! I do the same with almond butter...

As for yesterday's mystery picture, to my surprise, many of you did get it--this one would have stumped me, I think: it was indeed corn silk:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-Seventh

2011-10-27T20:21:00.000-06:00

Wow, October is nearly over, and so many pictures remain to be taken! Good luck with this one, which is totally fair, totally kewl, and I bet no one gets it!

As for yesterday's, Cara was closest: it was a piece of a plum (the pit plus some of the torn off bit around it):

Not easy, but neat-o...

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-Sixth

2011-10-26T21:31:00.000-06:00

A little harder today...

Yesterday's? Stacy and j and s got it -- it was nori:


I do not, however, recommend this brand; it looks good, but something in the	packaging makes it taste like plastic.

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-Fifth

2011-10-26T07:21:00.000-06:00

I fear this will be an easy one, too!

And, yup, yesterday's was indeed garlic:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-Fourth

2011-10-24T19:16:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's mystery picture was indeed cracked black pepper. I don't know what that crystal sappy stuff is either...maybe really come kind of sap or resin?

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-third + all kinds of awesomeness

2011-10-23T19:41:00.001-06:00

Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

You use it every day--who knew?

In more current news, here is tonight's supper:

Whoa, this was good. It's a combination of some balls inspired by Jennifer McCann's The Magical Loaf, except that I have an irrational prejudice against loaves, and so made balls, with several of my own additions, the Tahini creme with peas and morels from The Artful Vegan (made with beech mushrooms instead of morels; check out the recipe on Google Books), a baked sweet potato, and the Brussels sprouts roasted with plums, maple glaze, and pine nuts from the Zesty Cook. Yeah, he totally sold me with his enthusiasm! Except that, having suffered from pine mouth all last week and figuring it was a symptom of some terminal disease until I discovered what it really was, I subbed the pine nuts in this recipe for cashews. It will take some courage for me ever to eat pine nuts again...

So...want to know the recipe for these delicious balls? Here it is:

Zoa's Magical Balls

makes 24 balls

1/4 cup peanuts

1 tsp olive oil

1/2 onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 large carrot, grated

1 cup mushrooms, cleaned and chopped

1 cup cooked split peas (I used mung beans)

1/2 cup cooked brown rice

2 tbsp chana flour (besan)

1 tsp spice mix I made up from some Gordon Ramsay (I think) recipe on the Food Network and never written down; just use your favorite; curry powder or sambhar will be fine

1 tsp All-Season Blend (see sidebar for recipe)

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp pepper

1/2 cup dry TVP

Grind the peanuts to a coarse meal in the food processor.

Saute the vegetables in the oil until soft, then add to the food processor and grind coarsely.

Tip the contents of the food processor into a medium bowl and add the remaining ingredients; mix well. Form into walnut-sized balls and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Brush with canola or peanut oil.

Bake at 375F for about 40 minutes, shaking or turning them once or twice so that they are evenly browned.

Enjoy!

And yesterday's mystery picture? I'm totally disgusted that Cara got it right away. Stacy was right on in her estimate of my present wariness of starchy foods, but I do eat them, carefully measured; woman cannot live on green veggies alone, I'm finding, without encountering all kinds of problems with gastric distress (more on which in a later post).

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-second + a little haute cuisine

2011-10-22T21:19:00.002-06:00

You guys are getting too good at this! Before the confirmation of all your guesses, behold my supper tonight. I've been messing about again in The Artful Vegan, mixing up recipes from various pages to suit me. Surprisingly though, perhaps because I was determined to be organized today, or because of the particular recipes I chose, it didn't take all that long to put it together.

Here are the pieces:

Here you see, clockwise from the upper left, a baby bok choy split in half for braising, the Roasted beet lasagnette filling (basically raw beets mixed with a kind of spicy vinaigrette which will be oven-roasted), some okra stuffed with a spice mix from Asian Vegan Kitchen (I had the spice mix left over from another dish and of course, had some okra lying about), polenta firming in a little pan, Carrot-habanero sauce, and finally tofu marinating in a Tamarind-cardamom glaze.

And here's the whole finished thing, plated...except the okra, which I forgot in their little frying pan:

Pretty! Colorful and fun to do as well. The Tamarind-cardamom glaze and the Carrot-habanero sauce especially were quite wonderful; I believe the whole of The Artful Vegan is up on Google Books if you want to look them up for yourselves.

And for anybody who didn't get it, the answer to yesterday's MoFo mystery picture was cloves:

Tomorrow, something diabolically difficult...

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twenty-first

2011-10-21T21:12:00.002-06:00

Good luck! There are clues in here, but still, this one astonished even me...

And yesterday's was, as so many of you recognized, okra. Those round little seeds do give it away!

So cute!

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twentieth

2011-10-20T20:59:00.001-06:00

Wow, almost every picture I took of this item turned out fantastic. This is just one random shot among many...maybe y'all can guess it, maybe you can't...

But many of you did get yesterday's mystery picture. Of course it was:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Nineteenth

2011-10-19T21:24:00.000-06:00

A little easier?

And yesterday's, which stumped everyone? This is, I promise, the most obscure food I will post this month!

Shimeji or beech mushrooms. So little, so cute!

MoFo Mystery Picture the Eighteenth

2011-10-18T19:55:00.000-06:00

Oooh, super tricky!

Wow, I'm, like, a day behind! I'll have to make up for it tomorrow with a super-splendiferous post.

Nobody ever did guess yesterday's, though! Score!

Here's what it was:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Seventeenth

2011-10-16T18:44:00.000-06:00

Okay, the last few have been way, way too easy. Here's a harder one (at least in my opinion)!

And yesterday's? Y'all guessed it right away, but you have to admit, it was a very cool image ;-)


Background Photoshopped in my pathetic, inept way, but not the main image...

MoFo Mystery Picture the Sixteenth

2011-10-16T06:51:00.001-06:00

Yesterday's? Many of you guessed it right! The inside of my favorite squash, kabocha. While I will sometimes eat the skin, even I with my great passion for kabocha compost the seeds and the pith.

MoFo Mystery Picture the Fifteenth + Kung pao tofu

2011-10-15T07:49:00.000-06:00

So pretty, for something most of us just compost...

What I had for supper yesterday was so pretty too, I thought I'd post pictures, though without a recipe. This is the Kung pao tofu from Bryanna Clark Grogan's Authentic Chinese Cuisine. I couldn't find the recipe online and since Bryanna is so very generous with giving away recipes for free, let's let this post stand as a tribute to my stained, crumpled, warped, and dog-eared copy of Authentic Chinese Cuisine. Bryanna's books are so packed with information they're fun to just read, until you get too hungry...here's the method. For the recipe, you'll have to buy the book, or adapt one of the many Kung pao tofu or Kung pao chicken recipes online.

Once you have everything ready (and for these Chinese stir fry dishes, you must have everything ready ahead of time), the dish itself takes just a few minutes to put together.

Start by putting some cashews on to toast. I just use medium-low heat and let them brown slowly while everything else is cooking:

Now cut up some firm or extra-firm tofu into long thin pieces and stir it up with a mixture of cornstarch and a little soy sauce (this, to me, is the genius part of this recipe):

The mise-en-place for the vegetable additions (I doubled the vegetable amounts):

Now in a wok or skillet, heat up a little oil and, when it's all hot, add the tofu mixture, and stir fry until golden. This goes fast, two minutes or so. There really is just a teaspoon of oil in this; it's the cornstarch that makes it all crispy and glistening:

Add the vegetables, and stir fry on medium-high heat for a very few minutes more:

The vegetables should be crisp-tender, but showing little brown/black bits. Now add the cooking sauce, and stir fry for another minute until the sauce turns translucent:

Sprinkle on, or stir in, the chopped roasted cashews, and serve immediately. I had it with another quick stir fry of long beans, shimeji mushrooms, garlic, chili, and sesame oil:

...and millet, since to me these dishes seemed to cry out for it:

So tasty!

And now, the key to yesterday's mystery picture, which one person finally guessed, near the end. Click for a closeup on the center part and you'll see what I did:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Fourteenth

2011-10-13T19:56:00.000-06:00

The colour may give it away...

...and yesterday's? Why, yes, it was a beet!

MoFo Mystery Picture the Thirteenth + Sunnyside hazelnut-squash-tofu balls

2011-10-12T20:22:00.000-06:00

Why you should always, always, wash your vegetables

Well, my friends, besides the rather gruesome mystery picture of today, I had the day off work and was inspired by the gloomy, cloudy, rainy weather of fall to create my own farewell to the sun. I was also inspired by the flavour palette of Jeni's recently posted Mini carrot and squash roasts from Heathen Vegan. Jeni's doing an all-orange-all-the-time Mofo theme, and this particular combination of hazelnuts, squash, and mushrooms wouldn't leave my feverish brain (your brain might be a little feverish too after looking at 25 takes of the thing at the top of this post).

So in a spirit of sane and sunny cheer, I give you:

Sunnyside hazelnut-squash-tofu balls
makes 24 balls

1/4 cup hazelnuts, roasted and ground
1/4 cup jasmine rice
1 tsp peanut or canola oil
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
2 oz/50g white mushrooms, finely chopped
1/2 cup mashed orange squash (I used kabocha; buttercup or butternut or pumpkin would also be good)
4 oz/100g extra-firm tofu
1 tbsp tahini
1 tsp lemon juice
1/8 tsp turmeric
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp ground coriander
2 tbsp wheat germ
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp salt

Start by putting the hazelnuts on to roast, in a single layer, in a 300F oven, for about 20 minutes, until the skins begin to crack:

Place them in a cloth or sturdy paper towel and rub them vigorously against one another until the skins loosen and (mostly) come off. A few pieces of skin left is okay:

Perfection never was my middle name...

While the hazelnuts are roasting, put the rice on to cook in a scant 1/2 cup water. You can also start the onions and mushrooms sweating in the oil:

I used white shimeji mushrooms: click for a cute closeup!

When the rice and onion-and-mushroom mix are done, remove from heat and let cool a little bit. Put the hazelnuts into a food processor and grind to a coarse, sandlike texture. Add the squash, tofu, tahini, lemon juice, and about 2 tablespoons of water and pulse to get a more or less pastelike consistency. Not too pastelike--a little texture is good.

Now turn it out into a bowl, and add all the rest of the ingredients:

Mix well, and taste for salt and spices. Form the mixture into walnut-sized balls, and place on a non-stick cookie sheet or a silicon mat:

Are these cheery and sweet, or what?

Brush with a little oil, and bake in a preheated 375F oven for about 20 minutes, turning them every five minutes or so so that they brown as evenly as possible.

There's probably some room for improvement--maybe to incorporate corn or cornmeal?--but I loved these!

Take a look:

Served here with long beans, the rest of the shimeji mushrooms fried up with garlic, cold beets, and some Roma tomatoes I roasted with the tofu balls. The sauce on the beans is just tofu yogurt (see sidebar for the recipe) with dill, cayenne, and garlic. I'm back to work tomorrow, but at least I go satisfied!

And for those of you dying to know what yesterday's mystery picture was, here's the key. It was, as many of you suspected, tea--black tea to be exact:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Twelfth

2011-10-12T07:21:00.001-06:00

...something I would guess the majority of us consume daily. Click for an extreme closeup!

And the key to yesterday's. Yup, coriander seed:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Eleventh + turkey pie

2011-10-11T07:58:00.003-06:00

I've given you one and a half to make this one a little easier...you'd get it right away if the whole one were in focus!

So...eleven days into MoFo and I haven't posted a single composed food shot! This is partly because I've been insanely busy painting my house, organizing the basement, getting the garden ready for winter, and other related matters, and eating out of the freezer to the point where there is now actually room in there for some new stuff (ooh!), partly because I've been surfing the MoFo-verse and slavering over all the wonderful food in other kitchens than mine, partly because when I do cook all I want is stew. Now, I love stew, but how many stews are on this blog already I don't even want to speculate.

With that in mind, er, here's one more! This meal was inspired by two posts on other blogs, one from Tami at Vegan Appetite for her Gobbler slices, a recipe that will be finding its way into her and Celine Steen's new sandwich book. Check out the link, which contains a recipe and a gorgeous photo. I love that Tami will often post some of the best recipes from her books on her blog (I'm thinking especially of you, All-American Incrediburgers).

I had a bit of an adventure making this, which resulted in kind of a cool result that some of you might be interested in. I had all of the ingredients for the Gobbler slices on hand except the minute tapioca. But I did have some large pearl tapioca, so I thought, well, hey, I'll just grind that up into little pieces and that will be the same thing. Apparently this is not the case. Instant or minute tapioca is very different in structure from the pearl kind--like Minute Rice to regular rice (Ellen's simile from the link above), or, I suppose, couscous to cracked wheat. Anyway, what I ended up with was a slice with little visible flecks of clear tapioca that looked exactly like those tiny lumps of fat you see in sausages and in some meat slices. No picture, friends, because it was a little bit gross, not in Tami's recipe, and I didn't want to prejudice her recipe, which is a good one, and produces a mildly fragrant, very slice-able roll (in fact it slices incredibly thin), perfect for when you want something substantial for a sandwich that doesn't take over the whole thing (as the chorizo-type seitan sausages tend to do, for example). But if you're looking for a more realistic meat-sausage analogue, you can do what I did and achieve it with ease. The roll has a perfect texture for slicing, and was reluctant to crumble even when I spoke to it sternly. That's a good thing in a slice! Nevertheless, I applied some force and fried some up:

I was aiming for a riff on one of my pre-vegan post-Thanksgiving favorites from my mom (and even post-vegan favorites because my mom is nice and makes me a vegan version), turkey pie. Also, there were a bunch of bits of things in the fridge that needed using up. So I fried the seitan and set it aside, while I cooked up a mixture of onions, garlic, potato, celery, long beans (ahem!), corn, parsley, etc. in a chickpea-flour based roux:

Then I wanted to see how my dumplings of genius would hold up to baking like biscuits, but, you know, that must have been in a moment of insanity because you don't need biscuits to hold together like golf balls which is the genius part of my dumpling recipe, so if you're inspired to replicate this dish, use some other, real biscuit recipe that will give you light, airy biscuits instead of golf balls.

But it was pretty good anyway:

The dressing on the tomatoes is Bryanna Clark Grogan's Almost-bleu-cheese dressing. I'd been wanting to try this for a while, but was really inspired to do it yesterday by a recent post and discussion about Chinese fermented bean curd on Stacy's blog Shorty Can Burn.

I've posted about fermented tofu before. There, I called it slimy (which it is) rather than stinky (which really, it shouldn't be, I do think Stacy got a bad batch, or some kind of weird chemical-based fermented tofu--my kinds don't have scary warnings on them). Anyway, I liked this recipe a lot, though I did end up doubling the miso (on purpose, to make it saltier and more tart). As Bryanna herself says, it isn't exactly bleu cheese dressing, but it is good! So as the unofficial Defender of Fermented Tofu in the West (in the East it's hugely popular and doesn't need defenders, unofficial or otherwise), I say: Go forth and try it, try it, and it may grow on you as it did on me. I use it in all kinds of things now where I'm just looking for a bit of an edge...

...and the klew to yesterday's mystery picture (y'all guessed it pretty quick):

MoFo Mystery Picture the Tenth

2011-10-10T07:01:00.002-06:00

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, everyone!

...and, from yesterday...looks like a beet, but not quite a beet:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Ninth

2011-10-09T05:39:00.003-06:00

Part of my supper last night...

Yesterday's was...long beans:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Eighth

2011-10-07T19:47:00.002-06:00

And the answer to yesterday's:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Seventh

2011-10-06T19:08:00.003-06:00

An easy one, but nonetheless kind of trippy, like something out of Alien, only vegan. Click on the image for a closeup and check out the cell action. I don't have more than Grade 9 biology, but I think those are cells!

The answer to yesterday's mystery picture, which several of you guessed in comments:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Sixth

2011-10-05T18:45:00.001-06:00

Something I eat almost every day...

...and the answer to yesterday's:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Fifth

2011-10-04T20:02:00.002-06:00

Kinda gross, but you've all seen this...if you're like me, you've (gulp!) even eaten it!

And yesterday's?

MoFo Mystery Picture the Fourth

2011-10-03T19:35:00.002-06:00

...and yesterday's, by a really intuitive guess:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Third

2011-10-02T22:41:00.003-06:00

Okay, this one's freaky, even to me. Again, it's an unretouched photograph of a very common food item, though admittedly, unlike the others so far in this series, when you learn what it is, you are unlikely to go "duh!" It's more like..."uh!"

...and here's the answer to yesterday's mystery picture:

MoFo Mystery Picture the Second

2011-10-02T06:31:00.005-06:00

...and what was yesterday's? I don't think anybody ever got this in comments, perhaps because the coloring was a little off--the inside of a cardamom pod:

MoFo Mystery Picture the First

2011-10-01T08:29:00.002-06:00

Take a guess...

...and the answer to the teaser of yesterday, is:

A can of beer and Vegan MoFo 2011 - Mystery Pictures!

2011-10-01T03:18:00.002-06:00

I am such a busy bee these days, embroiled in garden projects, renovations, and now, Vegan MoFo. Lordy! How will I do it all?

The veganic gardening experiment of the last few years has had to come to an end. Gardeners, I have learned, must be cruel once in a while, if they wish to maintain some kind of order in the plant world. My soil had become so compacted that a few extremely hardy species had finally come to flourish at the expense of all the rest (yes, I mean you, creeping Jenny, and you, lilies-of-the-valley). How sad is this picture? You see here two enormous "compost" piles of plants I have taken out, covered in two layers of plastic, and am hoping that the seven months between now and Spring will convert into compost. Next year, vegetables!

While the flooring guys were doing their thing, for a day and a half I worked in the garden, splitting out perennials to give away, doing genocide on most of the creeping Jenny, replacing my broken-down 20-year-old composters with these beautiful new ones my parents and sibling gave me for my birthday:

I also re-made the bricked area in front, shown here still covered with loose sand.

...and just generally tidying up.

So...after the second day of gardening, I was extremely weary, it was nice outside, I thought I'd have a beer. For one reason or another (the main reason being that I've been drinking wine instead) I haven't had even one beer this whole summer. I popped the can and took a sip and...decided I'd rather have wine instead. Sometimes beer tastes simply heavenly, and sometimes it just doesn't. Oh, well. Still, it would be a shame to waste good beer. So here are riffs on two recipes from Terry Hope Romero's Viva Vegan, both of which use beer as an ingredient.

First up, a variation on her Drunken beans with seitan chorizo. This is not actually Terry's recipe and has a number of substitutions and changes (black beans and black bean broth from the freezer for dried pintos and water, asafoetida for epazote, fresh chiles for roasted, no tequila, etc.), but I was looking at it as I cooked. The amounts were improvised, which is easy to do with a simple stew like this one. Start with frying up diced seitan, onions, garlic, asafoetida, and fresh hot chiles in a little oil until the seitan is a little browned and the onions are translucent:

Add canned diced tomatoes, cumin, and oregano:

Add yer black beans and black bean broth and some beer:

Cover loosely, and cook the whole mess down until it's nice and thick and stew-y:

I still had some beer left over, so I did the same sort of improvisation on the Pan-grilled vegetables in chile-lime beer, only as I'd eaten all my summer squash I used a mixture of eggplant, corn, and yellow beans and instead of marinating and grilling them (this was one of those days when I was just starving and had no time or energy to fuss with much more than chopping up stuff and throwing it into pots) I just chopped up the vegetables, threw them into a pot with the marinade, and braised them. This worked well!

It turned out to be a pretty respectable meal, after all:

I forgot to mention the onion garnish for the beans, direct from Viva Vegan,
quick and delicious (and pretty!)

And now, without more ado, I am pleased to present my Vegan MoFo 2011 project. What with housepainting, carpet and closet door replacements, and long hours at work, I won't have the time to do a whole lot of elaborate cooking or experimenting in October, but I really do love MoFo, and have come up with a creative compromise. In addition to occasional recipes and food porn, every day in October, I'll be posting a food-related mystery picture. Here's an example, a simple one:

What is it? Go ahead and leave a comment if you want to guess! At the end of the month I'll post the key to all the mystery pictures. Meanwhile, while I'm not posting recipes and dishes of my own every day, I will be enjoying browsing through the MoFo offerings of others. Merry MoFo, vegans!

Bagare baingan (cashew-stuffed baby eggplants in a tamarind sauce)

2011-09-25T07:51:00.002-06:00

This is an impressive-looking dish, but surprisingly easy to make, and definitely the best use I've ever found for those adorable little baby eggplants that are so in season right now in the northern half of the world. I've made it several times and in fact can't believe I've never blogged it before. The recipe I'm giving is based on several others; it's a popular Indian dish and googling the recipe will give you several variations. Some opt for a more soupy, watery sauce but I prefer something that stays together a little better on a plate, so mine is drier.

Bagara baingan (cashew-stuffed baby eggplants in a tamarind sauce)

Serves 1 or 2

2 tsp canola or peanut oil

2 dried red chilies (broken in half and squeezed a bit to remove the seeds)

8 cashew nuts

1 tsp coriander seeds

1/2 white onion, chopped

2 tbsp dried coconut

2 tsp sesame seeds

1 garlic clove

1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger

salt

1/4 tsp turmeric

1 tbsp tamarind paste (not concentrate)

200 g (about 4 small) baby eggplants

Heat 1 tsp of the canola oil in a small frying pan. When hot, add the chilies, cashews, and coriander seeds. Stir and fry for a minute, then add the onions. Continue to stir fry until the onion begins to brown, then add the coconut and sesame seeds:

When the coconut begins to brown, add the garlic and ginger and stir fry for 30 seconds more. Cool this mixture slightly, then grind to a paste in a blender (or if you have one, a Magic Bullet is perfect for this), adding the turmeric, salt to taste, and enough water to allow the mixture to blend. You want a thickish paste that more or less holds together, but it doesn't have to be too dry:

Now get your tamarind sauce ready. Put the tamarind paste into 2/3 cup water and microwave for one minute. The paste, which starts out quite firm and solid, will soften up and you can stir it into the hot water. Strain out the solids and set the tamarind water aside.

Cut a each of the baby eggplants into four, stopping at the stem, and stuff them with as much of the cashew paste as you can. You'll likely have some paste left over. This is okay. It's also okay if you don't.

Heat the remaining tsp of oil in the same pan you used to fry the paste ingredients to medium-high heat and, when hot, add the stuffed eggplants, and fry for a few minutes, turning them gently:

Now add the tamarind water and any leftover stuffing paste:

Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until the eggplants are tender, about 10 minutes or so. I was cooking from Monisha Bharadwaj's India's Vegetarian Cooking and she suggests serving this with another recipe in her book, lemon rice. I took her suggestion, but changed the lemon to lime and added a little lime zest. Here's an online recipe which is pretty much exactly what I did. Basically, you fry cashews, black mustard seeds, curry leaves, pre-soaked channa dal (yellow split peas, not shown here because I forgot to add them and had to fry them up separately) and peanuts in a little oil:

Add turmeric for that magical colour and haunting flavour:

And fold this mixture, along with lemon juice (or in my case, lime juice and a little zest) and a little salt into freshly cooked basmati or jasmine rice. Heavenly! Seriously, there is something truly divine about the addition of citrus to jasmine rice...Viva Vegan has a great recipe for lime rice as well, and if you haven't tried it, well, you should!

Here's the final plate, with the addition of those unsung heroes, steamed yellow beans and broccoli:

Corn with cauliflower

2011-09-18T19:59:00.000-06:00

This post is sort of all over the place, because every aspect of this meal was equally delicious. What you're seeing here is the corn with cauliflower (phulaar makai nu shaak) from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, along with the curried black chickpeas (kala channa masala) from Monisha Bharadwaj`s India`s Vegetarian Cooking, the zucchini-lemon couscous from Donna Klein`s The Vegan Mediterranean Kitchen, some diced tomatoes (from My Mom and Dad`s Garden), along with the Bulgarian-style tofu yogurt (vegan recipe of genius courtesy of Bryanna Clark Grogan, see sidebar for recipe). So the whole meal is a sort of Indian-Italian-NewAge-Vegan fusion type of thing. But oh, did it work!

I can`t blog everything, but with a nod to the kala channa:

I crave this at times like Rapunzel craved campion...

...and the zucchini-lemon couscous:

...I`ll concentrate on the cauliflower and corn. It is corn season here in Alberta, Canada, where I live, and we are getting all kinds of wonderful fresh corn in our markets. I picked up some peaches-and-cream corn the other day, cooked up a few cobs, ate most of them right out of the pot they were so sweet and wonderfully delicious, but managed to save some kernels for this dish.

You will, I believe, have to acquire the cookbook for the exact recipe, but here`s the process:

Start with heating a little canola or peanut oil in a skillet. When hot, add a little cumin:

Give it a quick stir, then add cauliflower:

Stir-fry this for a bit, then add onion:

...turmeric, corn...

...a paste of ginger and hot green chili, and finally, cilantro:

This can be served hot, at room temperature, or cold. I served it hot, right out of the pan. Madhur Jaffrey calls this dish superb, which, in fact, it is. Lord, I love cauliflower more and more each day!

Purple enchiladas with green tomato sauce

2011-09-14T21:41:00.001-06:00

I made my own birthday supper this year (I am 47!), a Mexican-themed meal mostly from Terry Hope Romero's Viva Vegan. One of the things I made were her enchiladas, straight from the recipe, an experiment in that I had never made enchiladas before and had rather a limited idea of what they actually are, and also because I made her pine nut crema for the first time, for guests.

The recipe for pine nut crema did not initially float my boat. Actually, it sounded kind of gross, like some of the cashew-based toppings I've tried in the past and disliked. But I tried it anyway. Oh, what a good intuition that turned out to be! My omni guests had seconds of the enchiladas (even after I had explained that the topping was made of pine nuts and tofu) and picked away at the leftovers all during the after dinner talk. The recipe is quite similar to the pine nut cream in Veganomicon for those of my readers who have one of these cookbooks but not the other (and for those who have neither, both recipes are available on Google Books). Anyway, though I didn't blog it because I was fearful the whole recipe would fail/be awful/because I was cooking several other dishes and needed all my powers of concentration to make it all come together, everything was awesome and the supper was a success.

I had some of the crema left over, however, so today I did another take on the enchiladas, just for me, with somewhat different ingredients. Terry Hope Romero uses white waxy potatoes and chickpeas in her filling. I used purple potatoes, beans, and black beans in this one. Otherwise, it's pretty close to 1/4 of the enchilada recipe in Viva Vegan. Here's a photo essay of the process.

First (as shown above) peel the potatoes and dice them into approximately 1/4 inch pieces. Put them in a little water, just to cover, and add one very small beet, also diced into 1/4 inch pieces:

If you play your cards just right, by the time the potatoes and beets are tender, there's very little water left in the pot.

In a small skillet, fry a little red onion, garlic, hot pepper, cumin, oregano, and epazote (okay, I subbed asafoetida) until the onion is translucent and tender:

Add the potatoes, black beans chopped up, and some vegetable broth:

Cook and stir until the mix is moist but not watery, and add salt and pepper to taste:

You may or may not find this appetizing-looking. If not, just imagine
waxy white potatoes and chickpeas and you'll get more or less
the same taste...

Now, if you're wise, you have already prepared your green tomato (or tomatillo, should you be lucky enough to have tomatillos) sauce. Pour a little of this into a plate, and soak your tortilla (or chortilla, shown here) well on both sides. The purpose of this is to soften up the tortilla so that it will be flexible enough to be rolled around the filling without cracking (ahem, not a problem with chortillas!):

Once the chortilla is good and coated, lay a line of filling along one end:

...roll up the chortilla, and place it in a casserole with a little of the green tomato sauce in the bottom:

Do the same for all the chortillas (in this case, three), and spread a little more of the sauce on top:

At this point, you can refrigerate the casserole for a while if you like. When you're ready to cook, glop on the pine nut crema (pine nut crema!!!):

A nice thick layer!

Preheat the oven to 375F, cover the casserole with aluminum foil, and bake for 25 minutes. Then remove the foil and bake another 10 minutes or so. If the crema hasn't browned and speckled by then, you can broil it for a few minutes. Then it's done. It should cool for about 5 minutes before you serve it:

Don't bother trying to separate the rolls - if you've used tortillas (or even chortillas) the chances are you won't be able to do it. Just treat it as a kind of Mexican lasagne and cut it. Mmmmm.....

I served it with a simple saute of zucchini, garlic, oyster mushrooms, and some absolutely awesome slow-cooked tomatoes my mom brought over this afternoon, the recipe for which I will be blogging very soon, and with baked acorn squash. A great meal, though messy! I'm not completely enchanted with the color combination, but have been dreaming about it pretty much non-stop since my birthday (and I do have those pesky purple potatoes to dispose of), so I thought I'd give it a try...

Cover your eyes!

2011-09-10T19:02:00.000-06:00

Mom and Dad, seriously, what kind of fertilizer are you using?

Okra with Soy Curls, sausage, and tomatoes + chortillas

2011-09-10T09:36:00.003-06:00

Chortillas? Wait and see, they are an original invention of genius for the corn-tortilla challenged, like me.

Yes, I'm back. I have missed blogging! While I've been away, reading but not responding to the very kind comments posted here, I lost a bunch of weight and have successfully kept it off for over five months. I'm looking so great, feeling so fantastic both mentally and physically, and have so much energy that I'm highly motivated to maintain my current weight and fitness. I also really, really love to cook and eat. This isn't a "my weight loss journey" type of blog, but if you read over my old posts, you'll see that in the past I've been a healthy though high-fat and enormous portion kind of cook, the kind that starts every meal with a generous pouring of oil into the bottom of a frying pan, more oil if things look dry, plus a little drizzle for flavour at the end, the kind of cook who makes enough for four because she's too lazy to divide recipes, then eats it all because she doesn't want leftovers (you all don't see that part...). So I've had to make big changes in the way I cook and eat and think about food, and this has taken some time. As the song says, old habits die hard.

An example of the new style - steamed mixed grains, cauliflower tabbouli,
black-eyed peas with greens

So the focus of the new "airier" Airy Way is on the creation of delicious single-portion (I live alone) low-fat vegan meals that are yet delicious and filling, the creative use of leftovers, veganizing non-vegan dishes, and tips on cooking for one. I've been winging it on my own so far, but there are a number of books out there on cooking for one which I hope to look into in the near future--and the fact that such books are being published is I hope an indication that my new direction may be of interest to some readers. Surely the demographic of single vegan hedonists who love to cook, hate leftovers, and are trying to stay slim must be significant! But if you're, like, cooking for two, no worries, you can just double the recipes. And if you're not into low fat cooking, just do what I used to do, and add fat.

And more - butternut squash curry with coconut and
fresh peppercorns

So, anyway, on to the real subject of today's post. Yesterday in Superstore there was this huge flat of fresh okra. I've never cooked with fresh okra, so I got all excited and bought some, and used part of it in this dish.

First, though, the chortillas. I don't know how many of you have tried to make corn tortillas without a tortilla press. I've done it a few times, without notable success. My corn tortillas are a nuisance to roll out, and always seem to turn out dry, crumbly, and not very tasty. My chapati, on the other hand, rock. So my brilliant idea was to try a flatbread that was half chapati flour and half masa harina, and lo, chortillas were born! They worked great, were a dream to roll out (no waxed paper required), and were as thin and pliable as chapati but tasted like corn. Perfect! Here's what I did:

Chortillas
makes 3 seven-inch chortillas

1/4 cup chapati flour
1/4 cup masa harina
pinch of salt (optional)

Mix the flours and salt, if using, together in a medium bowl. Add enough warm water to make a stiff dough. It should be stiff, but not crumbly, and should not stick to the counter when you knead it. Knead for about two minutes, until the gluten in the chapati flour begins to develop and the dough can be moulded without cracking. Divide into three and form each piece into a flattened ball, like this:

Now cover the pieces with plastic wrap or a plate to keep them moist, and let them sit for at least ten minutes. This sitting period is important for chapati as well as chortillas--it allows the dough to relax so it can be rolled out more easily, and also just makes them cook better.

When you're ready to cook, heat an ungreased skillet (cast iron works best if you have it) to medium. Roll out one of the balls to about a 1/8 inch thickness--nice and thin without actually being transparent. You'll probably have to dust the rolling pin and rolling surface with a little chapati or masa flour. Flip the rolled chortilla back and forth between your hands a few times to knock off any loose flour, and place it on the hot skillet and cook it on one side for a minute or two. It should bubble up in parts. If it starts to burn right away, your skillet is too hot! Flip it, and cook the other side. You should get some nice golden speckling, like this:

It's done--move it to a plate and cover it with another plate or a bowl to keep it moist. You can briefly reheat it in the microwave or oven just before serving, if you like. Do the same for the other chortillas.

Now, for the:

Okra with Soy Curls, sausage, and tomatoes
serves 1

1/4 cup dry Soy Curls
1/2 tsp olive or canola oil
1/2 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 oz seitan sausage (about 1/4 cup), preferably a chorizo (spicy) kind, chopped
1 fresh hot pepper (like Thai, ring of fire, etc.), minced, or 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
1 tsp paprika
1/2 cup sliced raw okra
2/3 cup canned diced tomatoes, with juice
Salt and pepper

First, rehydrate the Soy Curls in some kind of broth or hot, flavoured water. I used hot water with a teaspoon of Bryanna Clark Grogan's "chicken-style" broth powder (see sidebar for a link to the recipe).

Tell me this doesn't look strangely appealing..

This will take about 10 minutes. While the Soy Curls are reconstituting, chop up the remaining ingredients:

Now heat a little oil in a non-stick skillet, and add the onions. Stir and fry for about five minutes on medium-high heat, until the onions are translucent. Add the drained and squeezed Soy Curls, the seitan, garlic, and hot pepper (if using), and continue to stir and fry until the onions and Soy Curls are beginning to brown:

Add the paprika, the diced tomatoes with their juice, and the okra:

Bring to a boil, add a little vegetable broth or water if it looks dry, cover, and cook until the okra is tender, about 7-10 minutes. Add pepper and taste for salt, and serve with, in this case, chortillas, steamed broccoli and cauliflower with the Green Goddess dressing from Vegan Appetite, and some steamed beet greens:

Yum! I did have two chortillas left over; however, I've got plans for them...

Fresh fava beans

2011-04-20T19:10:00.001-06:00

Why yes, this picture is taken in the light of the...uh...it'll come to me...you know, that big round yellow shiny thing that now and then, lately very rarely, shows itself in the sky--oh, the sun! Sun sun sun sun sun! Dear Sun, lovely Sun, welcome Sun, warm Sun, late Sun! Please stay! Please warm this place and melt the two feet or more of snow that still blanket most of my garden, though in the area where it is not, crocuses are blooming, the first pretty thing I have seen outside for a whole six months! I am so starved for natural beauty! Like the rest of Edmonton, Canada, so very starved!

It was a minor joyous moment, therefore, when I found these fresh fava beans in H&W Produce today. You never know what you'll find there. These are the first fresh fava beans I have ever seen, anywhere. As you might imagine, I scooped up a pound (what you see above is one pound) and skipped home with them in high delight (and in sunlight--though it was cold, windy sunlight, whatever, it didn't matter, it was sunlight. Edmonton is supposed to be sunny most of the time, the wide open prairie sky and all that). Well.

I already knew what to do with them, because I've been reading about fresh fava beans in Madhur Jaffrey's books for twenty years. I've tried favas both canned and dried in the past. The dried ones are okay, but you can tell that they'd be a very different thing fresh. The canned ones--just don't go there, don't buy them, they're always tinny and grey and gross, at least in my experience. Fresh ones are not gross, and they're certainly not grey:

Click for a closeup. The plump, gorgeous, velvety green beans are nestled in little beds of down inside their pods. Despite best efforts, these pictures aren't doing the real colours justice. Pale early green on the edges, melting into deeper pools of colour nearer the middle, these beans are transcendently, perfectly beautiful.

One pound yields approximately four ounces of shelled beans:

But you can't use them yet. Like the dried variety, the outer shell of the fresh favas is very leathery and tough. I'm fairly tolerant of tough skins, but tried one and had to admit that it was pretty much inedible. Madhur Jaffrey wonders in World of the East Vegetarian Cooking why fresh fava beans aren't more popular in North America. I'd venture to guess this is why: in order to make them edible, you have to boil them for five minutes or so, then run them under cold water to cool them:

See how the skins are kind of loosening from the inner bean?

Then, one at a time, break one end of the leathery skin and slip the inner bean out:

Here's what you end up with:

Oh, that green! Surprisingly, because they look heavy, the skins don't seem to weigh much, so the inner beans from one pound of fresh favas still come to just under four ounces.

Also at H&W, they had some lovely tomatillos!

The beans aren't quite cooked and still have a slightly raw, bitter taste. I could have left them boiling in another five minutes, then removed the skins, tossed them with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and thyme to have them plain, which is a common way to serve them in the Mediterranean, apparently. But what I did was put them into the Chili verde con papas from Appetite for Reduction. I've been featuring this cookbook a lot on my blog lately, but this is more the luck of the draw than anything, as I've been cooking all sorts of things. At any rate, this was pretty good, and satisfyingly complex to prepare. It contains a lot of kale. It's also so lo-cal you can eat practically a ton of it and come out of the experience feeling satisfied and bursting with health. Honest to pete, I've never felt so healthy as now that I'm padding pretty much everything I eat with extra veggies, so this recipe is right up my alley these days:

It's topped with mung bean sprouts I made myself so I could at least watch something growing. Yum!

Baked falafel

2011-04-06T19:03:00.000-06:00

Cadry, who left a comment on my last post that her favorite recipe from Appetite for Reduction was the baked falafel, had me at "falafel." I had to try it, and here it is. And I admit, while it isn't exactly (or at all) deep fried, it is quite delicious, wonderfully spicy and with a nice soft texture that I think, as Isa suggests in the recipe, will only improve after spending the night in the refrigerator and being served for lunch tomorrow at room temperature.

It's served here with a chopped salad and some Aztec mix from Bulk Barn (a mixture of red and brown rice, chana dal, amaranth, and probably a few other things), as well as a tahini-lemon sauce because--even though the recipe doesn't say so--you can't have falafel without tahini-lemon sauce.

This recipe is insanely easy to make. You start with canned chickpeas, and process them with onions, garlic and parsley or cilantro (cilantro, yes!) and the secret genius ingredient, hot sauce (I used sriracha). Then add various spices (this, by the way, is a half recipe that will net two servings of 4.5 falafels each):

Mix it all together, and form into patties--I copied Cadry's idea and put them on parchment paper:

And bake 'em:

They look a little dry, but actually they're not. They were, in fact, quite delicious, and so quick that I can see myself making them very often in the future.

The tahini sauce? Well, here's a recipe, which I feel a little silly for giving as it's so simple and can be found anywhere, but it's worth being reproduced everywhere:

Tahini-lemon sauce
makes about 1/3 cup

2 1/2 tbsp tahini
juice of 1/2 lemon plus more to taste
1 small clove garlic, put through a press
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup warm water

Put everything into a small bowl, and whisk until it becomes white and creamy. Add more water, lemon juice, and/or salt until you've achieved the texture you want. This sauce is great as a salad dressing, a dip for raw vegetables or drizzled over cooked vegetables, beans, grains, or heck, just spooned up out of the little bowl. Simple and utterly delicious, it's the Mediterranean sauce.

Caulipots & chickpea piccata (Appetite for Reduction)

2011-04-03T19:51:00.002-06:00

I had a lovely day today. The sun came out in the afternoon and I was able (well wrapped in a black heat-attracting coat) to sit in it, surrounded by my yard o' snow & ice, and because it is, after all, even in this unseasonably frozen wasteland, technically April, I even got a bit of a tan.

But before that I was wandering about the neighborhood and ended up buying Appetite for Reduction today, because this morning the clever idea struck me that calorie counting would be easier if the calories were listed right with the recipe. Why didn't this occur to me two months ago? Well I guess, as Isa herself might say, I'm just imprudent like that.

Anyway, I have it now, and above you see some caulipots (a mixture of mashed potatoes and mashed cauliflower) and the chickpea piccata, as well as some stir fried baby bok choy. I've wanted to try mashed cauliflower for some time and it's actually really good, not indistinguishable from straight-up mashed potatoes, but if you like cauliflower (I love it) a very nice alternative. The dish is basically equal amounts of cauliflower and potatoes, boiled together and coarsely mashed. The boiling liquid can be economically used as stock in the piccata, so not a vitamin was sacrificed in the making of this meal.

On edit: I see the PPK has posted the recipe for the chickpea piccata here if you don't have Appetite for Reduction and want to try it.

The whole plate has about 375 calories in total, and the servings shown here are a little less than given in the book--I was surprised with both recipes how generous the servings were for the calories in them. So, yay, I got to shop for books, sit in the sun, spend time in the kitchen messing over more than one pot, and enjoy a great meal as well.

Appetite for Reduction looks fun. It is very much a lunch and supper book and doesn't cover breakfasts and doesn't include any desserts (the latter being not a defect, but a bonus, in my opinion). But there's a big section on main dish salads and lots of bean, tofu, soup, stew and chili recipes. I was surprised and pleased to see that Isa has many variations on the theme of salad dressings and sauces using nuts rather than oil, something I've been doing in some of the Asian salads I've been experimenting with, and I look forward to trying her takes. And of course, the famous OMG oven-baked onion rings, eventually…

Kobi nu kachumber

2011-04-01T20:02:00.000-06:00

One thing I have been experimenting with lately is Asian salads. I have a number of cookbooks which feature many such salads, including Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian and Hema Parekh's The Asian Vegan Kitchen. It's from the latter that this dish originates. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find this recipe or any of its near cousins online, but I'll post this anyway as a plug for Ms. Parekh's book, which I absolutely love, except for the unfortunately tiny font used for the ingredient lists. But that's a quibble. If you can get a copy of this book, you can make this dish exactly as prescribed. If you're an experimenter, you can wing it and no doubt you'll succeed very well!

A kachumber is a chopped vegetable salad, and if you search for recipes, you'll find many delicious-sounding ones online. In many Indian salads, what we would call dressing is called "tempering" because (I'm guessing) it's cooked and poured warm onto the salad as you'd add a tarka to a dal.

This lovely salad features red and white cabbage and hot green chili as the vegetable base. Shred this fine--I use the shredding blade of a food processor, put in a chunk of cabbage and don't press down, just let the weight of the lid and gravity create the finest possible shreds. As you probably know, raw shredded cabbage will keep for several days in a container, so I would make the whole recipe, but keep the vegetables and the tempering separate until just before I was ready to eat. This way, it's easy and painless to have salad for lunch at work, for instance.

Cabbage! Such a prosaic name for such a gorgeous and tasty vegetable. To make the tempering, place a little vegetable oil in a very very small pan. I have a tiny cast iron frying pan, about 3 inches in diameter, that I bought just to make tarkas in, and this is perfect. When the oil is hot, add mustard seeds:

As soon as the seeds start to sputter, you add some tumeric, asafetida, cayenne, and curry leaves and fry for just a few seconds more:

Drizzle this mixture over the salad, then add crushed peanuts, coriander, and a little lemon juice. Salad heaven! As with so many dishes in which it is featured, in my opinion the curry leaves just make this dish. However, it's certainly very tasty without, and most of the recipes online don't include it as an ingredient.

Doenjang jjigae (Korean bean paste and vegetable stew)

2011-02-21T11:43:00.002-07:00

I don't know if any of you are as addicted to Maangchi's videos as I am. In my opinion the whole world (outside Korea) owes Maangchi a round of applause for introducing us to so many Korean dishes. This is one of them. The video and recipe for it are here, and the dish comes together in not much longer than it takes to watch her make it. My version is halved and veganized, but otherwise it's Maangchi's recipe:

Doenjang jjigae
Serves 2

1 small potato, cubed
1 cup zucchini or other vegetable (I used green pepper, but green beans would also be delicious), chopped
1/2 medium white onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic
1 hot green chili
1 green onion
1 cup cubed soft tofu
2 tbsp doenjang (Korean soybean paste)
1 tbsp gochujang (Korean red pepper paste), optional
1/2 to 1 sheet nori (optional)

Put the cubed potato, green pepper or zucchini, onion, garlic, and chili into a small saucepan or, if you're fortunate enough to have one, a ceramic pot like Maangchi's, and add enough water just to barely cover. Bring the mixture to a boil:

When it's hot, add the 2 tbsp doenjang:

Stir it in and continue to boil the stew, covered, until the potatoes are tender. It will look like this:

Meanwhile, prepare the tofu and green onion:

Add them to the stew, along with the shredded nori, if using, and mix gently. The original recipe calls for dried anchovies and a few shrimp, so if you want to replicate the taste of the sea--and it does add something nice to the dish; I'm sure traditionalists will say it's essential--feel free to use nori or experiment with konbu or wakame or the sea vegetable of your choice.

Continue to cook until everything is heated through. Maangchi smears a little Korean red pepper paste on to the completed dish like a condiment, but I added a dollop directly to the stew. It's entirely optional but I liked the extra lick of fire...
While the stew is cooking, prepare a green salad, just greens and cucumber and a few green onions, along with a dressing made of:

1 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
1 1/2 tsp Korean hot pepper flakes
1/2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp sesame seeds
1 1/2 tsp sesame oil

Toss the dressing with the greens and sliced cucumber. To assemble the dish, put some rice and stew in a large bowl. What I was using for rice is a mixture of various rices and different grains, but rice or a rice-barley mix would be the real Korean way:

Add some salad:

And mix it all together (she really does this, and as mixing salad with the rest of the meal is something I also regularly do, I was pleased to copy the technique, but there's no rule that says you have to; the salad tastes very good on its own, as does the stew):

And enjoy! The stew is a little like a very thick miso soup, though doenjang has a special robust fermented taste quite different from Japanese miso and a bit difficult to describe, but delicious. This one-pot dish can be ready in the time it takes to cook rice and is perfect for a winter supper after work.