hotpotato

Chesapeake Pumpkin Seeds

2008-11-09T11:44:00.004-04:00

I like to roast winter squash, while the things remain in season, I roast a butternut or kabocha squash at least once weekly. And while separating seeds from strings can be a pain in the ass, I enjoy roasted pumpkin seeds enough to endure the process.

I bought, roasted, and pureed a huge cushaw squash this week, which left me with three to four cups of seeds. Looking through my parent's spice-less pantry (cinnamon, garlic salt and onion powder are the only spices my mother likes), I found a half-used tin of Old Bay. In Maryland, you can buy Old Bay potato chips - Old Bay on pumpkin seeds wasn't much of a stretch. But it does make for a tasty snack:

Chesapeake Pumpkin Seeds

Ingredients:

Seeds from one pumpkin or winter squash, washed and patted dry with paper towels
1 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp Old Bay spice mix

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Line a roasting pan with foil. Pour the oil and Old Bay on the foil. Spread the seeds over the foil in an even layer, stirring them around in the oil and Old Bay with your fingertips. Put them in the oven, stirring them every 10 minutes for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the pumpkin seeds turn golden brown and crunchy.

Pumpkin Muhmarrah

2008-11-02T12:43:00.004-04:00

Last night, I hosted a Halloween potluck. I contributed this Pumpkin Muhammarah (along with homemade Twix and miniature caramel apples), which was tasty, but not very pumpkin-y. Next time I will perhaps omit the red bell peppers to let the roasted pumpkin shine, but this dip makes a yummy snack as-is:

Pumpkin Muhammarah

Ingredients:

1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 jar roasted red peppers
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 tbsp pomegranate molasses
1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs

In a food processor, add all of the ingredients in order, allowing them to throughly mix between additions. You will have to scrape down the sides a few times.

My Mom's Birthday Dinner!

2008-10-27T20:36:00.005-04:00

I cooked from cookbooks this time (odd for me, I know), so can't take credit for the delicious results. But I wanted to make something fancy for my mother's 40-somethingth, and my meals tend to err on the simple side. So I made the moussaka from Veganomicon (pictured above) and the spanokopita from Vegan with a Vengeance (pictured below), plus grape leaves stuffed, alternatively, with TVP and a pumpkin-cream cheese mixture.

The moussaka was a win in my book, though really, I'm going to enjoy anything with roasted potatoes in it. I didn't have pinenuts needed to make the called-for pinenut cream, so I made a walnut-cashew sauce that reminded me of a sauce I ate with gnocchi in Italy. Now that I remember it, I'll have to recreate the dish!

The spanokopita were delicious, but it was my first time working with phyllo, and I struggled to keep the dough moist. I used one bag of frozen spinach and one pound of tofu (the recipe calls for two), which worked well. But I can't help but wish there was a bit more flavor to the filling - next time I will play with the herbs in the recipe and perhaps add some extra spices.

Java Green

2008-10-26T20:05:00.007-04:00

Last Friday, my sister and I headed to Java Green for a pre-theater dinner. Java Green, which describes itself as an eco-friendly all-vegetarian cafe, is the sort of place you can take a non-vegetarian without scaring them. Or so I thought.

Ashley the Anemic: I don't want to eat anything fake.

Me: Soy chicken's not fake chicken. It's flavored wheat gluten that is taking chicken's place in that particular wrap.

Ashley the Anemic: Ewwww! They make vegetarian ham!?

Luckily, my sister likes tofu (though perhaps I should've insisted that she not get soy protein, something known to inhibit iron absorption). And though her first bite of the Avocado and Tofu Wrap was "too spicy," the heat was only in that first bite. Personally, I didn't think it was hot at all, but I was also eating Californian Gimbob (pictured) doused in hot sauce. I like spice.

Java Green serves food quickly - you don't have a waiter - and the food is consistently fresh and tasty. I find the salads a bit boring, though I like the black rice and hot peppers on the Bi-Bim Bob salad. My favorite dish is the Boolgogi Deluxe, a big serving of noodles, kimchi, mushrooms and soy beef. Like I said, I like spice.

Don't get plain, black coffee - it tastes old and is often lukewarm. Java Green's also pricey - prepare to spend eight dollars or up per entree. But the cafe's eclectic menu (vegan Korean, raw soups and salads, wraps and smoothies) appeals to all types and make Java Green worth visiting.

Bonus picture of Ashley the Anemic hiding from the camera:

Vegan MoFo Survey

2008-10-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

I promise that I haven't forgotten about MoFo – a sinus infection, an abruptly scheduled endocronologist appointment, and a play that kept me out of the house well past 12 a.m. have prevented me from posting the past few days. And while I have been cooking and eating and photographing, I traveled home for my mother's birthday without bringing along the equipment I need to upload images from my camera. So just to post, I'm answering a survey from the PPK:

1. What was the most recent tea you drank?
Trader Joe's peppermint tea. It is inexpensive and yummy.

2. What vegan forms do you post/lurk on? If so, what is your username? Spill!
Vegan-wise, I post on the post punk kitchen forum as KarynMC. Serious Eaters (very, very unvegan) also know me as KarynMC.

3. You have to have tofu for dinner, and it has be
an Italian dish. What comes to mind first?
Polenta in a marinara sauce with tofu ricotta. That's my favorite meal at the restaurant Great Sage.

4. How many vegan blogs do you read on an average day?
I might check three to five over the course of the week. I was trying to keep up with MoFo, but I only have time to write or read, not both. Maybe I will spend November catching up!

5. Besides your own, what is the most recent one you’ve read?
Vegan Yum Yum.

6. If you could hang out with a vegan blogger that you haven’t met, who would it be, and what would you do?
Melisser from the Urban Housewife. I want her to make me candy corn! And she lives in San Francisco, and I want to spend more time in that city.

7. If you had to base your dinners for a week around one of the holy trilogy – tofu, seitan or tempeh, which would it be?
Tofu. It's the only one that works well in puddings and sweet pies, and I would happily eat pies for a week.

8. If you had to use one in a fight, which would it be?
If I covered the floor with silken tofu, you would fall and hurt yourself.

9. Name 3 meals you’d realistically make with that tough protein of choice!
Coconut cream pie, pumpkin pie, chocolate pie. I picked a good protein.

10. What’s a recipe in vegan blogland that you’ve been eyeing?
Avocado pie. And avocado frosting. Though right now I can't remember if those are blog recipes or PPK recipes or both.

11. Do you own any clothing with vegan messages/brands on them?
Nope. But I have a Threadless shirt of a cheese grater murdering a piece of cheese, and once people learn that I'm a vegetarian, they think it's some sort of pro-veg statement. But it's not.

12. Have you made your pilgrimage to the 'vegan mecca' yet? (Portland, duh)
1. Nope. It's not even on my "must visit" list - that honor goes to places like Barcelona and Vienna.

13. What age did you first go vegan? Did it stick?
No comment.

14. What is the worst vegan meal you’ve had? Who cooked it?
I really haven't made or tasted anything that disgusting.

15. What made you decide to blog?
101 Cookbooks, a blog that I love, posted several recipes very similar to dishes that I make all of the time, so I thought, "Hey! I can do this!" Plus, I wanted something to keep me writing while I was in-between jobs.

16. What are three of your favorite meals to make? Pie. I love rolling out the dough, I find it relaxing. I also like making chili in my crock pot and stirring risottos.

17. What dish would you bring to a vegan Thanksgiving-themed potluck?
I want to veganize my Grandma's cinnamon rolls, but I haven't gotten to that yet. Maybe I will if I get to go to a vegan Thanksgiving potluck!

18. Where is your favorite vegan meal at a restaurant? How many times have you ordered it?
I really couldn't tell you. I just don't think about meals as being "vegan," because so many wonderful foods fall into that spectrum. I love getting (and sharing!) big vegetarian platters at Ethiopian restaurants, I like vegan Thai and Indian meals. I just tried Burmese for the first time, I enjoyed that, too.

19. What do you think the best chain to dine as a vegan is?
Does Soul Veg count as a chain? I don't really eat at them.

20. My kitchen needs a………
Where to begin? I want a yogurt maker, a pressure cooker, a food processor ...

21. This vegetable is not allowed in my kitchen…..!
Not a vegetable, but lima beans.

22. What's for dinner tonight?
I made the Veganomicon moussaka, Vegan with a Vengeance spanokopita and dolmades.

23.Add a question here! What's my usual lunch?
I usually have a salad with roasted pumpkin on it and an 8 ounce cup of coffee with a teensy splash of cold soy milk.

Roasted Brussels

2008-10-21T22:20:00.003-04:00

As a child, I liked most vegetables. As an adult (haha, hahahah), I've reconciled with most of the vegetables I couldn't stand as a kid. Brussels sprouts are one case in point. My mother boiled them, then covered them in butter. My father adored them, I considered them soggy green balls of death.

Then, I discovered roasting. Slice some brussels, spray some oil, and a dash each of salt, pepper, and poultry seasoning (I use chicken grilling spices from Trader Joe's), then roast, and I am in crunchy, tender, vegetable Heaven. I now consider brussels sprouts one of my all time favorite vegetables.

Just, eh, don't expect me to stomach lima beans. I don't know what I'd have to do to make those palatable ..

French Onion Soup

2008-10-20T20:38:00.004-04:00

When I come home from work, I tend not to linger – tofu scrambles, salads and quick-cooking grains usually prove the order of the evening. I don't often make the sort of meals that benefit from long, slow simmers. Still, when I do plan ahead and make a soup, the results hit home.

French Onion soup is one of my favorites. The recipe's so simple I almost don't want to post it – the ingredients are all relative. But I promise that this simple meal will never disappoint:

French Onion Soup

Serves 4

Ingredients:

2 tbsp Earth Balance
1 tsp kosher salt
black pepper, to taste
4 very large, sweet onions (Vidalia or Walla Walla), sliced into rings
4 cups vegetable broth

2 cups crusty, artisan-style bread, like sourdough or a baguette, chopped into large chunks
2 cups vegan cheese, optional (I used Follow Your Heart Montery Jack)

In a very large skillet, melt the butter on medium-low heat. Add the onions, the salt, and the pepper. Cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they become translucent and very brown. This can take awhile, 15-20 minutes, so be patient. When the onions are cooked, pull out your crock pot. Pour in the vegetable broth, then add the cooked onions. Set the crockpot to its lowest setting, then let the soup sit for at least one hour. I tend to leave it all day.

When you're ready to eat, preheat the oven to 475 degrees. Ladle the soup into individual, oven-safe bowls, like ramekins. I used a small pyrex. Put 1/2 cup of bread into each bowl. Put 1/2 cup of shredded cheese onto each bread. Cover the bowls with foil, then leave them in the oven until the soup is bubbling hot and the cheese has melted, about 30 minutes.

Mini Apple Turnovers

2008-10-19T18:35:00.004-04:00

My co-worker Genie is a class act and a real sweetie, who also just happens to have a free source of apples and the kindness to give them away to her hungry officemates. These apples have provided me more breakfasts than I can count, so I offered to make Genie a pie.

Sadly, I only ended up having enough apples to make one pie! So I am resisting the urge to dive head-first into the gorgeous pie I made this afternoon. Hopefully the pie will survive the night intact ...

... prompting Genie to give me more apples, so I can make an apple pie for me! (I did use the end pieces of dough to make myself some mini turnovers, pictured above).

The apple pie:

TVP and Two Veg (Hedgehog)

2008-10-17T20:40:00.007-04:00

I was sick today. Truly, miserably, undeniably ill. Too ill to drive to work, much less perform my daily tasks. So after a day of pulsing temples and vertigo spells, comfort food was the order of the day.

My Grandma used to make a dish called "Porcupine," part meatloaf, part casserole. Looking at the recipe, I wondered just why I loved the meal so much. It's a '50s-style culinary nightmare, calling for eggs, milk, beef and white rice. Oh, and a can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup.

Remarkably, I managed to leave most of that out and still enjoy a dish very much in the spirit of the original. So without further ado, I present my vegetarian "Porcupine" – I call it "Hedgehog":

Hedgehog

Serves 4.

Wet Ingredients:

1/2 cup TVP, measure dry, but reconstitute before using
1/4 cup rice, cooked
1/2 cup celery, finely chopped
1 medium onion (about 1/2 - 3/4 cup), finely chopped
1/2 cup fire-roasted crushed tomatoes
1/4 cup water
1 recipe mild BBQ sauce

Dry Ingredients:

1/4 cup vital wheat gluten
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp black pepper

Reconstitute the TVP by pouring boiling over it and letting it sit, or according to your package's directions. Mix the wet ingredients together. Add the dry ingredients. Knead everything together for about five minutes, then spoon the mixture into a loaf pan. Top with ketchup. Bake at 350 degrees for one hour, or until top becomes brown and crusty. Serve with German roasted brussel sprouts and a baked potato.

Mild BBQ Sauce

2 tbsp ketchup
2 tsp maple syrup
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp hot sauce

Whisk everything together with a fork.

Pie Crust Tips

2008-10-16T20:58:00.006-04:00

I wrote this last year for the Mini Pie Revolution Headquarters, but since it's fall (the season of apple and pumpkin pies), I thought this post was worth repeating:

Basic Pie Crust for Mini Pies

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
2/3 cup plus 2 tbsp butter or other shortening
3-5 tbsp ice water
about 1 tsp salt

So you want to join the revolution, but you’re still clinging to your last box of cupcake mix. Why? Because cupcakes, you say, don’t bake in crusts. Store-bought crusts don’t appeal, and nothing seems scarier than recreating that dense, flour-dusted hockey-puck of a crust you made way back when. Never fear! Yes, pastry pie crust can prove temperamental. But a few simple tricks will have you turning out pie crusts so good, your friends will wonder just when you spent time on an Amish homestead.

Choose Your Fat Wisely

Pastry pie dough’s a simple creature. It contains flour, liquid, fat, and salt. The flour’s easy. Use all-purpose flour (some books will say to use half all-purpose flour, half pastry flour). If you’re feeling fancy, feel free to test out polenta or gluten-free flours, but when it comes to pie, simplicity never hurt anyone. I use ice water for the liquid, though you might find some recipes that call for chilled milk, cream, vinegar, or buttermilk. When it comes to pie dough, fat’s the key. Lard, shortening, or butter? That’s the question – and the answer depends on how you like your pie.

Lard’s what Grandma used. Lard, or rendered pork fat, makes for tender, flaky pie crusts. I don’t eat pigs, so I’ve yet to use lard. My mother claims she never liked lard crusts – she says they tasted too animal, too greasy. Professional food writers like lard pie crusts’ texture, but dislike it’s flavor.

Vegetable shortening’s what Mom uses. Like lard, it creates a flaky pie crust. Unlike lard, vegetable shortening won’t taste like animal product, so it works better in sweet pies. Vegetable shortening comes from hydrogenated oil, so be prepared to eat your trans fats and like them, too. Even if the label says there’s no trans fat, read the ingredient list: if the list says: “hydrogenated oil,” you’re consuming trans fat.

Butter (i.e. Earth Balance buttery sticks) is what I use. It creates a better flavored pie crust, but the flavor comes with some textural drawbacks. With butter, you’re more likely to create a soft pie crust. And if something goes horribly wrong, the crust could go greasy. Some bakers will mix butter with shortening for a flaky pie crust that tastes like butter. Personally, I just make an all-butter crust and use special fancy tricks to get a flaky texture.

You can also use chilled vegetable oil, but I have not used this myself yet - I use Earth Balance or nonhydrogenated shortening - so I can't vouch for it 100 percent. I have also heard that you can cut chilled nut butters into the flour - this idea intrigues me and I will be experimenting with it in the future.

Special Fancy Tricks

Special Fancy Trick Number One: whatever fat you choose, keep it cold. Keep the fat in the refrigerator or the freezer until you’re ready to make your dough.

I make pie crust by hand. To make pie crust, I use a metal mixing bowl, a knife, a fork or a pastry cutter, a tablespoon, and a rolling pin.

First, measure two cups of flour into the mixing bowl. Special Fancy Trick Number Two: use a new bag of flour. Older flour might have absorbed moisture, which will result in mini hockey pucks. Special Fancy Trick Number Three: don’t scoop the flour out of its bag or bowl with your measuring cup – this will pack the flour. Instead, use two measuring cups. Use one cup to remove the flour from the bag, then gently shake the flour into your second measuring cup. You want level cups, but do not pack the flour.

Put the measured flour in the mixing bowl. Pour a little salt into your palm – no more than a tablespoon, and throw it into the mixing bowl with the flour. Here, you can either sift the flour and the salt together (the proper method), or fluff the flour and salt together with a fork (the lazy cook’s method).

Chop up a stick and a half of cold butter into one-tablespoon measurements. Drop the cold butter into the mixing bowl. Using a pastry cutter or a fork, cut the butter into the flour. Really use your muscles. Work quickly - if the butter starts to melt, put the bowl straight into the freezer. Melting butter = bad pie dough. You know you’re finished when the mix looks dry and crumbly, and there are no more large pieces of butter in the bowl.

Take your ice water from the freezer or refrigerator. Measure three tablespoons of ice water into the into the middle of your mixing bowl. Now, using a rolling motion and the back of your hand, work the flour, butter, and ice water into a ball. If the ball forms easily, you’re done. If not, add another tablespoon of water. Knead the dough. If it still doesn’t come together, add another tablespoon of ice water. It should take between three and five tablespoons of ice water to make pie crust dough.

Put the mixing bowl with the dough inside in the refrigerator or freezer for ten to fifteen minutes. While the dough cools, pour a little flour onto a flat surface. Spread a little where you will roll out your dough. Lightly dust your rolling pin. Special Fancy Trick Number Four: do not over flour your rolling pin or your flat surface – too much flour will make inedible mini pies.

Take half of your dough from the mixing bowl. Plop it onto your floured surface. Starting in the middle of your dough ball, flatten out the dough. If your rolling pin picks up some pie dough, flour it again. Rotate the dough after every roll with the rolling pin. You want the dough to form a circle. If the dough becomes too thin to rotate, don’t pick it up again, but do continue rolling the dough. Special Fancy Trick Number Five: do not overwork the pie dough. Ideally, you should roll it out only once. Make the dough as thin as you can – this is especially important for mini pies.

Take a mug or a cup with a wide rim. Put it on the rolled-out pie dough. Using a knife, cut out a circle of pie dough. Put the pie dough circle in one cup of your cupcake pan's cups. Press it into the cup’s bottom. Using a fork, poke the dough at the bottom of your cup. Crimp the edges for an open-faced pie. For a double-crusted pie, scoop filling into the cup, top it with a second layer of pie dough (make sure the top crust has holes in it, too), and then crimp the mini pie’s edges. Continue filling the cupcake tin with mini pie crusts (the dough recipe I gave will make two nine inch pies and at least twelve mini pies, depending on the size of the pans used).

There, you have it. You can go on and fill cupcake tins, then the world, with mini pies!

Unless you don't trust me. Then, check out these pie dough resources:

The New York Times Recipe for All-Butter Pie Crust

Epicurious.com's Search Results for Pie Crust

I'll leave you with Special Fancy Trick Number Six: keep graham crackers in your pantry, just in case your pastry pie crust fails. No one hates a cookie crust.

Care package!

2008-10-15T18:55:00.007-04:00

I got an awesome care package in the mail today!

I was partnered with Kimber for the October PPK care package swap, and while technical difficulties (i.e. stupid post office hours), will prevent me from mailing my package until Saturday, Kimber's a bit more reliable. And let me tell you, I am psyched to dive into these goodies!

I'm having issues with blogger photo at the moment, but Kimber sent me:

1) "Just like Honey" syrup
2) Oatmeal Mint Handsoap
3) Sinner's Handwipes
4) Barley
5) Vitamin C gummy candies
6) Russian chocolate-fruit candies
7) A giant vegan cookie
8) A chocolate almond butter cup
9) dried Turkish apricots
10) spices (berbere, cardamon, gomasio, mint)
11) Maple stroopwaffles
12) Maple syrup candy
13) Roasted Raspberry Chipotle Sauce
14) Nugo dark chocolate chocolate chip bar
15) Soy nuts
16) Patchouii matches
17) A funny card

I would say that she went above and beyond! I can only hope that my package measures up!

Mom's German Potato Salad

2008-10-13T05:43:00.000-04:00

I give my mother a lot of crap about her cooking, but the truth is that she's a more accomplished cook than I am. She knows how to can vegetables, makes a perfect fudge frosting (recent caramel experiments aside, I am afraid of candy-making) and her pastry pie crusts are always perfection.

Mom's recipes are the classic kinds, the ones that you take to family get-togethers and potlucks again and again. Hopefully you'll enjoy this German potato salad as much as my family always does.

Mom's German Potato Salad

Ingredients:

1 recipe or package tempeh bacon, optional

5 large potatoes, red or white
1 tbsp oil
1 large onion, sliced
1 tbsp flour
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
black pepper, to taste
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup water

Chop up the potatoes into large but bite-able chunks, then boil them in salted water until they are tender, around 20 minutes. Drain the potatoes and put them aside.

Put the oil in a large skillet. Add the onion and a little course salt, and saute the onion in the oil until it becomes brown and translucent. Add the faux bacon. Mix together the flour, sugar, salt and black pepper. Lower the heat and add the flour mixture to the onions and bacon. Stir everything together until it looks like a brown mess, then add the apple cider vinegar and water. Increase the heat to bring the liquid to a boil, let it boil for one minute, or until it becomes very thick. Take it off the heat.

In a large bowl, combine the potatoes with the onion-bacon mixture. Stir everything together until the potatoes are well-coated in the sauce. Serve warm or cold. This makes enough salad for about five hungry people.

Vegan MoFo Seitan Smackdown #4 - Joanna's Beer Brats

2008-10-12T08:41:00.006-04:00

Sometimes pictures speak louder than words.

My friend, Omoleye, and I made these for an "Oktobeerfest" party last night, using Joanna's variation on Julie Hasson's recipe. I'm guessing that our beer (a pumpkin ale) simply wasn't stale enough, because the brats exploded during their half-hour steam bath. And, uh, hilariousness happened ...

The brats tasted well enough anyway. We even got compliments from the meat-eating quotient, after they finished laughing their asses off.

Verdict: They satisfied my once-a-year desire to eat a sausage-shaped thing covered with sauerkraut and mustard on a bun. If you do try these, let your beer sit out for a long time before mixing it with the dry ingredients.

Vegan Mofo Seitan Smackdown #3 - Julie Hasson's Seitan Sausage

2008-10-10T20:25:00.000-04:00

My friends, the hype is real.

When Julie Hasson first debuted her Spicy Italian Vegetarian Sausage, I watched the blogosphere catch on fire with a raised eyebrow. Fake meat? Yuck! Why the obsession?

Well, I have obviously come around on seitan, and Hasson's the best recipe that I've tried so far. The flavoring's wonderful (fennel seeds, mmm!), the texture's soft with a nice, chewy bite. Even better, these sausages steam up in just thirty minutes!

Verdict: *Love.*

Heinous Pictures of Awesome Folks

2008-10-09T05:14:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, some friends and I journeyed to D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood to dine at Vegetarian Soul. I'm not sure "dine" is the right word – you order in a cafeteria line, the food comes piled (and I do mean piled) in styrofoam containers. There's not much in the way of lighting or acoustics. And yet - the food is greasy, fatty, creamy goodness, exactly what your Southern Grandma used to make. Unless you didn't have a Southern Grandma. Then it's just plain diet-breaking goodness.

The spinach lasagna is nicely flavored with a very creamy, cheese-like filling. The macaroni salad is stellar. Sides, like collards and curried coleslaw, are flavorful despite their stay under the heat lamps. Choices are limited, the restaurant only serves two entrees per dinner session, and it makes its milkshakes on a rotating schedule. I have heard good things about the peanut butter milkshakes, but Saturday is mango and peach night, so I saved room for the oatmeal raisin cookie that Luciana brought me from Sticky Fingers.

Top picture: Luciana and Laura.

Below: Meghan, Macaroni and Cheese with Curried Cabbage and Collards, Laura, and Lasagna with Collards.

Why You Should Follow the Recipe (At Least Once In Awhile)

2008-10-08T05:00:00.001-04:00

My inability to follow a recipe is no big secret. Sure, I pour over cookbooks. But when it comes to making dinner, I tend to ignore the instructions on the page.

"Oh, so you put pomegranate with rice? Cool! But what if I use bulgur instead of rice and change all the spices and hey! I kinda feel like soup, so let's dump apricot tea over the bulgur and see what happens." That is the way I work, and for the most part, I don't regret it. I've come up with some pretty wonderful meals. Of course, I've also ended up with some clonkers. That is the price I pay.

But here's the thing - if you're going to write recipes, you better start reading them. Because instructions are hard to communicate. For example, let's say that a recipe calls for salsa, like Joni's Ortega Burgers (pictured above). The salsa you use – its consistency and intensity – can change the outcome. Joni was smart enough to tell me what to do with a thick salsa. I might not have been so kind to my readers.

Following a recipe teaches you how others cook. For example, you must list the ingredients in the order that you use them. Maybe some people are smart enough to get their ingredients together before they start baking, but I tend to flit and flitter around the kitchen, grabbing bowls, spoons and spices as I go. "Oh, I need cornmeal? Where's the cornmeal? Oh, and cream of tartar, better add that now ..." If I'm supposed to put in the oil first, the ingredient list better start off with the word "oil." This might seem intuitive, but if you don't ever follow recipes, you might not write them in a way that anybody else can understand (I'm looking at you, GG McG).

Reading recipes teaches you to become a better cook and baker. Take the Chewy Oatmeal Cookies from the book Veganomicon. The first time I made them, I didn't have all the ingredients I needed, so I made substitutions, and I ended up with puffy cookies. I closely followed the recipe the second time. Better, but still puffy. Then I figured out the problem – I prefer my oatmeal cookies with quick, not rolled oats. A simple adjustment, but one that made all of the difference. Tinkering with the Veganomicon recipe taught me how to approach all oatmeal cookie recipes from this point forward.

So to lamely sum up this post: I like writing and testing my own recipes, but following recipes is important, too. Plus, you get to eat stuff like Joni's Agave Mustard Balsamic Vinaigrette Marinated Grilled Portobello Burgers. The recipe's a mouthful in more ways than one!

Why I Don't Mind Kitchen Mistakes (Gluten-Free Autumn Blondies)

2008-10-07T05:00:00.000-04:00

It has been less than a week into MoFo, and I have already posted twice about mistakes. My first attempt at recreating my great-grandmother's cookies didn't quite work, my gluten-free blondies came out like goop. But I'm not crying over spilled milk, or whatever. Food mistakes aren't mistakes, but part of a tasty, tasty process.

After a batch of baked goods, I decide what I do and don't like about the results, then adjust to make cookies softer or puffier, brownies lower-fat. And if that means that I constantly have extra baked goods lying around, that just means that my friends and family will have to suffer.

After making goopy blondies, I tried again. I also wanted to make the blondies less expensive, so I used canola oil instead of Earth Balance. The results? Well, I think the texture must improved. But I'm not crazy about the taste of the flour itself. If you make these and don't mind gluten in your blondies, I would just just use all-purpose flour. My next attempt (which will wait until I get another can of pumpkin) will combine the two recipes I made - hopefully, by the end of this process, I will have terrific pumpkin blondies to show for it.

Gluten-Free Autumn Blondies

Ingredients for the blondies:

1/4 cup canola oil
2 tbsp blackstrap molasses
2 tbsp brown rice syrup
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 flax egg (1 tbsp ground flax seeds, 3 tbsp water)
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cup Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour
2/3 cup dried cranberries, plumped up in hot water
1/3 cup sliced almonds

Ingredients for the cinnamon glaze:

1/4 cup Earth Balance buttery sticks
1 tsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1-2 tbsp soy milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the Earth Balance, brown rice syrup, molasses and brown sugar together. Add the flax egg, pumpkin, vanilla, spices and salt and throughly combine. Slowly beat in the flour, then fold in the cranberries and almonds. Line a pan with foil, spray it with canola oil, and spoon the batter into the pan. Bake for twenty minutes, or until the top begins to crack. Remove the blondies from the oven and let them cool.

For the frosting, pour the powdered sugar into a bowl. Add maple syrup, vanilla, and cinnamon, then add the soy milk, a teaspoon at a time, until the icing becomes spreadable. Drizzle it over the cooled blondies.

Vegan MoFo Seitan Smackdown #2 - Lachesis' Seitan of Greatness

2008-10-06T04:00:00.000-04:00

When I looked at the recipe for Lachesis' Seitan of Greatness, I felt certain that this would be my favorite of the bunch. I dump cinnamon and allspice in everything, so I was happy to see those spices show up in seitan.

Until I tasted the finished seitan. The texture's fine, a bit denser than the recipes I tried earlier, and the seitan comes together easily enough, but the flavoring just didn't work for me. It tasted a little ... sweet? Just not what I was expecting, or, it turns out, what I wanted in a seitan.

Verdict: Liked the texture, not the flavor. I could tinker with the spices a bit, omitting the cinnamon and switching out the cayenne pepper for chili pepper, but I've found enough other recipes that I like as-is that I probably won't make this recipe again.

Vegan Mofo Iron Chef Challenge (Candied Ginger Apples)

2008-10-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

When Katie at Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk proposed an Iron Chef Challenge for Vegan MoFo, I knew that she was looking to give cooks a chance to be creative and bold, to prove that exciting dishes don't require foie gras or roe. When she challenged MoFoers to create a dish using apples and ginger, she also challenged us to aspire beyond the boiled tofu on which all vegetarians live.

Except that I wanted to make the most obvious combination possible. My first thought was to mix apple cider and ginger ale, but I didn't have any ginger ale and had already finished my shopping for the week.

This was the next most obvious idea that came to mind - dumping ginger on top of apples. You could say that I suck. I am going to say that I work in a minimalist aesthetic that focuses on elemental essences, albeit with added sugar.

Candied Ginger Apples

Ingredients:

1/4 cup soy cream
2 tbsp cornstarch
1/8 cup water
2 tbsp Earth Balance buttery sticks
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup brown rice syrup
1 tsp 100 percent vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup candied ginger, minced
6 small apples

Put the cornstarch in the cream, then whisk them together with a fork. Set aside.

In a sauce pan on the lowest heat setting, melt the Earth Balance with the brown sugar, brown rice syrup and water. Let the sugar come to a boil, then stir it constantly for four minutes. Remove the sugar from the heat. Add the cornstarch slurry, salt and the vanilla extract. Put the mixture back on the heat and let it boil until it starts to become a little thicker. Stir in the candied ginger.

Line a dish with parchment paper. Put the apples on the parchment paper. Spoon the melted sugar over the apples, making sure to pile candied ginger on top. Let cool. Give the apples to your friends. Or eat them yourself. Sugar highs are both legal and fun.

Super, Super Gooey Gluten-Free Blondies

2008-10-04T05:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you fail. Sometimes you think you want something, achieve it, and then realize it's not what you really wanted. And that's a whole 'nother type of failure.

I didn't get these blondies quite right. By that, I mean that I made exactly what I wanted to create – sweet, super gooey blondies. Except that I made them too gooey. There just aren't enough solid ingredients in these things. They are pure sugar with a fragile, baked good shell.

My own impatience didn't help - I think they might have held together much better if I had let them cool. But I wanted super, super gooey blondies with a cinnamon glaze, and I wanted them right there and then. So I ended up with super, super gooey lumps covered with warm, melty cinnamon glaze. I am complaining, but maybe I shouldn't be.

Next time, however, I think I will add another half-cup to one-cup flour to make a stiffer dough, and see if that works better. These are for a gluten-free friend, so I want them perfect. Or y'know, cooked. Nevertheless, I will share the recipe ... maybe you can do better with them?

Super, Super Gooey Gluten-Free Blondies

Ingredients for the blondies:

1/4 cup Earth Balance sticks
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup brown rice syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp ground flax seeds
1 cup pumpkin
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour
2/3 cup dried cranberries, plumped up in hot water

Ingredients for the cinnamon glaze:

1/4 cup Earth Balance buttery sticks
1 tsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1-2 tbsp soy milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the Earth Balance, brown rice syrup, maple syrup and brown sugar together. Add the flax seeds, pumpkin, vanilla, spices and salt and throughly combine. Slowly beat in the flour, then fold in the cranberries. Line a pan with foil, spray it with canola oil, and spoon the batter into the pan. Bake for forty minutes to an hour, or until the top begins to crack. Remove the blondies from the oven and let them cool.

For the frosting, cream the Earth Balance with the maple syrup and vanilla. Add the powdered sugar and the cinnamon, then add the soy milk, a teaspoon at a time, until the icing becomes spreadable. Put it over the cooled blondies if you want frosting, put it over the warm blondies if you want a thin glaze. Put the blondies in the fridge to cool.

Vegan MoFo Seitan Smackdown #1 - Joni's Baked Seitan

2008-10-03T22:00:00.000-04:00

Up until two days ago, I had never made seitan (sei-TAN, not Satan) in my life. I had tasted it before, I think, in some restaurants around D.C. – Vegetate sells some mean sliders, Java Green's vegan bulgogi's worth one or two late-night trips to the fridge – but making seitan seemed like too much work. Washing the starch out of flour? Kneading? No way!

Even cheater's seitan, the type made from vital wheat gluten, takes one hour to 90 minutes in the oven or on the stove. I'm a busy girl. Quick-cooking quinoa's more my style, thank you very much.

Except that I started testing for Joni's upcoming book, Just the Burgers: 101 Ho'made Veggie Burgers. I noticed that Joni was testing a seitan slider recipe. I love all things miniature – seitan or no, I was making sliders!

And Joni's seitan – at least the two recipes I have tried so far – is tasty and savory and very flavorful, yummy both in burgers and on top of salads. It is safe to say that I am a convert – and that I now feel compelled to try out every seitan recipe I can find. Okay, by that I mean at least two other seitan recipes. I will try Lachesis' Seitan of Greatness, and the seitan from the cookbook Vegan with a Vengeance. I might also attempt a sausage or two, but we'll see if I get to that. If you have an awesome recipe to share, let me know and I will try that, too.

Caveats:

- I am quartering each recipe. I just can't eat that much seitan!
- I will announce substitutions.

I made two of Joni's seitan recipes for her upcoming book, the seitan from her stuffed seitan burger recipes (pictured above) and for her seitan sliders (skipped the called-for cayenne pepper, bad photo that I will not share). The two recipes came out similar. Both seitans had a bread-like quality, which came out more with additional simmering. Granted, these were my first seitans, so it's possible that I made a mistake that changed their texture.

Both were equally simple to prepare.I liked the flavor of each, so it's hard to decide which one I preferred. On a whim, I will say that I preferred the seitan from the seitan sliders. But it is only a whim.

Verdict: Tasty seitan. Great over roasted winter squash on salads and (doh!) in burgers. Softer texture, easy to prepare if you have time to run your oven. You probably have most of the ingredients in your pantry already. I would make either recipe again.

Cookies = Fail

2008-10-02T18:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the world conspires against you. Today (or yesterday, maybe, for who knows when the power will come back on) has been one of those days.

Headache, check. Writing about sex enhancers at work, check. Getting stuck in the rain, check. Getting on the wrong train, missing my stop, getting home late, overeating, having the power go out? Check plus plus.

And yet here I am, diligently typing out an entry for Vegan MoFo. It’s been a failure of a day, so it seems fitting to discuss a failure of a cookie.

These are not my great-grandmother’s molasses cookies. I tried to get close. I really did. But no one told Great-Grandma McGinty how to write a decent recipe. For example, pick one list of ingredient measurements. Don’t give me two lists with an “or” between them.

This was the start of the cookie recipe:

2 cups sugar or 1 cup sugar
1 cup molasses 2 cups molasses

WTF, GG McG? Look, I get variable measurements when you’re discussing fruit pie, because berry bushes can produce tarter or sweeter fruit than their neighbors. But one cup or two cups of molasses? Last time I checked, molasses is liquid. That means that the rest of the recipe will be different depending on the option you choose. Especially since you want me to use the same amount of flour either way.

And let me tell you kids, the directions only got crazier from there. I could choose between two eggs or one cup of shortening. Salt or ginger? How to decide!? Following the recipe made me feel like I was reading one of those “you determine the ending!” stories. Make the right decision, you bake soft, pillow-y molasses cookies. Choose wrongly, and a dragon eats your ass.

Oh, and the recipe also calls for bona fide illegal ingredients! Raw sour milk? Not worth the criminal record, thank you very much.

So I guessed my way towards a vegan molasses cookie. The verdict? They are okay. Tasty even. But they are not GG McG’s cookies.

I think I’ve gotten closer since I originally tried out the recipe, but until I recreate my favorite molasses cookies (and get my mother, who better remembers what the cookies are supposed to taste like, to confirm their righteousness), I’ll share these pictures of the cookies that broke this girl’s heart.

Once perfected, I will put the recipe in the mini-zine I want to give as a Christmas gift to the friends and fam. But knowing my own work ethic, I'll probably never finish the damn thing!

Next: GG McG’s brown bread. Anyone have any idea how many cups of graham flour it takes to turn six cups of sour milk into a stiff dough?

Mofo #1 - Preview of Coming Attractions!

2008-10-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

Thirty-one posts about vegan food! In thirty-one days! Excuse my overuse of exclamation points!

Contrary to often-expressed opinion, thirty-one posts about vegan food doesn't mean thirty-one posts about tofu (though the white stuff is versatile enough). Since I moved to Arlington, VA (a mere 6 miles from downtown Washington D.C.), I have found it easy – beyond easy – to eat vegan by accident. So I'm craving a Little Devil? Well, there's Sticky Fingers Bakery, where I can get a fabulous, from-scratch version. I want vegan sushi? Vegan soul food? Vegan bulgogi, brunch, or chocolate lava cake? Lazy as I am, I'm sick of typing in links, but surely you get the idea. Vegan food in D.C.. There's lots of it. It's tasty.

Anywhoo, here's just a few of the things I am planning to post about this month. I might not get to everything, but whatev.

- Recipes for the mini zine I may or may not be trying to write by the holidays!
- Vegan Halloween treats!
- Sexy shots of the burgers I'm testing for Joni!
- Potlucks and meet-ups galore!
- Yoga-talk!
- The fabulous birthday dinner I will make for my mother!
- Seitan smackdown!
- "Ask a vegetarian" column. If I don't get any real questions, I will just write in satirical fun!
- Apologies for not having anything interesting to write about!

Hope you're as excited for MoFo as I am!

Food for Political Thought

2008-09-28T21:21:00.000-04:00

I snapped this shot at D.C.'s Crafty Bastards arts and crafts fair in Adam's Morgan.

So many crafty bastards showed up, selling everything from screen-printed totes (I bought a bright yellow one with a monkey on it. I couldn't resist) to cat-print vests to plush cupcakes and moldy toast.

I especially enjoyed the "tofu for obama" toys, though as far as I know, Obama's yet to take a firm pro-tofu stance in the Senate. I guess "arugula for Obama" sounded too elitist?

More photos:

Today was a great day, since I managed to fit in yoga class, vegan huevos rancheros at Asylum, Crafty Bastards and some recipe testing for Joni's upcoming veggie burger book. But you'll hear more about that in October, when I am desperate for posting material!

Vegan MoFo

2008-09-20T10:16:00.000-04:00

I have been neglecting the blog lately, so maybe committing to posting once a day, everyday through October wasn't my brightest idea. I have a feeling you guys won't see a recipe every day, but one-paragraph posts about the weather and digestive issues until my blog degenerates into a collection of random photographs and personal anecdotes.

Anywhoo, if you are interested in the Vegan Month of Food (also known as Vegan Mofo) drop a line at the Post Punk Kitchen Blog.

Oh, and here's a random photograph of a recipe-in-progress (caramel mocha mini pies):

Kasha-Kabocha Rice Cakes

2008-09-06T18:38:00.000-04:00

Sometimes recipes twist and turn on you, becoming something new . Tonight, I attempted to make onigiri – a Japanese staple of shaped white rice wrapped in nori seaweed and filled with umeboshi plums or salmon. Somehow I ended up with baked buckwheat risotto cakes. I'm still not quite sure how that happened, but these cakes are too cute (and too tasty) for me to complain!

One caveat: these are time-intensive. You need roasted squash ready to go, though you can cut your prep time by opening up a can of pureed pumpkin (do not use pumpkin pie mix). You also need to let the kasha-rice-pumpkin mix cool before you shape the cakes. And then you have to bake the cakes. A quick weeknight meal, these are not.

Okay, two caveats: these cakes are messy. Your hands will get covered in grainy goop. I confess, however, that I have not perfected my molding technique, so that probably contributed to the mess.

I am planning on taking these to a potluck tomorrow, where I will serve them with a cilantro-yogurt-orange dipping sauce. Hopefully I will hear no complaints!

Kasha-Kabocha Rice Cakes

Ingredients:

1/2 cup kasha
1/2 cup white short-grain rice, like arborio
3/4 cup roasted kabocha squash, mashed
2 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tbsp raisins
2 tbsp slivered almonds
1 portobello mushroom cap, chopped finely
3 large shallots, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic
1/2 inch fresh ginger
olive oil for spraying

spices:

1 tsp sugar
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cumin
black pepper, just a sprinkle

Measure the kasha and the arborio rice into a saucepan. Add three cups of water and the salt. Bring the saucepan to a boil, then cover the pan and reduce the heat to low. The rice and kasha will cook in ten to fifteen minutes. When the kasha becomes mushy and the rice is tender, stir in the sugar, rice vinegar, and kabocha squash.

In a skillet on medium-high heat, cook the shallots, garlic and ginger in olive oil, black pepper and salt. Add the cinnamon and cumin.When the shallots become translucent and brown, add the mushroom cap, almonds and raisins. When the mushroom cap is cooked, stir in the shallots and mushrooms into the kasha, rice, and kabocha. Let cool.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil and spray it with olive oil.

Using an onigiri mold, press the rice mixture into shapes, then arrange them in a single layer on the baking sheet. If you do not have onigiri molds, shape the rice into balls with your hands.

Spray the pan with olive oil. Bake the rice cakes until they become brown and a little crispy on the outside, anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes depending on your oven and the size of the cakes.

Coconut Curacao Cream Pie

2008-08-24T17:10:00.000-04:00

This pie was an experiment, albeit a tasty one. I wanted to make an easy summer dinner for my family. I needed something light, summery, flavorful.

My parents consider Maui their favorite place on Earth, so I decided to make a Hawaiian-inspired dinner. Tropical fruit-filled summer rolls made an easy dinner, but what about dessert? I decided to take coconut cream pie for a spin, using blue curacao (a prime ingredient in my father's favorite cocktail) to jazz up a coconut milk-tofu pudding.

The filling proves light and cooling. On its own, the coconut pudding tastes a bit bland, but it works perfectly with the chocolate cookie crust and chocolate ganache top to create a creamy, soothing summer dessert. Or dinner. Or breakfast. There is no bad time to eat a pie.

The coconut flavor is pretty subtle. For a stronger coconut flavor, I would use coconut liqueur instead of curacoa.

Coconut Curacao Cream Pie
Serves 6.

Ingredients:

1 can coconut milk, light or regular
1 pack extra-firm mori-nu tofu
1/4 cup blue curacao liqueur, divided
8 ounces (1/2 bag) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut
1 chocolate cookie pie crust
1/4 cup arrowroot flour
1 cup plus 1 or 2 tbsp vanilla soy milk
3 tbsp agave nectar

Beat the arrowroot flour and the soy milk together with a fork. In a blender, whiz one-half of the blue curacoa with the tofu. In a saucepan on medium high heat, bring the agave nectar and the coconut milk to a simmer. Pour in the arrowroot mixture. Whisk the mix constantly until it boils and really starts to thicken. Then, mix in the tofu and the shredded coconut. Pour the mixture into the pie crust. Chill in the refridgerator for one hour.

Over a double boiler, melt the chocolate chips with the soy milk. Spread a thick layer of chocolate over the pie filling. Sprinkle with coconut. Put the pie back in the refrigerator to chill overnight. Serve extra filling with crushed up cookies for an easy, sweet dessert.

Dolmades (Lentil-Stuffed Grape Leaves)

2008-08-10T18:15:00.000-04:00

My landlord grows grape vines for decoration. I see grape vines everyday. And it took me until now to – dur – to remember that grapes vines provide more than mere grapes: the leaves are edible, too.

I have always avoided making stuffed grape leaves at home, not because I don't like them, but because paying for a tiny can of oil-packed grape leaves at Whole Foods looked beyond my budget. But stealing grape leaves from my landlord? Free. And priceless. At least until he deducts their value from my security deposit.

My first time making dolmas went well. These are a bit too work-intensive for everyday, but if you have the grape leaves blanched and ready-to-go they will pull together in a snap.

Dolmades (Lentil-Stuffed Grape Leaves)

Ingredients:

16 grape leaves, blanched until tender
1/2 cup lentils, cooked
1/2 cup brown rice-wild rice blend, cooked
1/4 cup sundried tomatoes, sliced
2 tsp tomato paste
1/2 cup onions, chopped
1 cup bell pepper, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
juice from 1/2 lemon
fresh mint (several sprigs)
fresh thyme (several sprigs)

spices:

chili powder
cumin
cinnamon
dried oregano

Sauté the onions, garlic, peppers and spices in olive oil or water until cooked through. Use salt and pepper to taste. Add the sundried tomatoes, tomato paste, rice and lentils. Stir together. Add water if needed. When the sundried tomatoes are soft, add the lemon juice, thyme and mint.

Take one grape leaf. Put a spoonful of the lentil-rice mixture to the base of the leaf. Fold the leaf's edges in as you roll the leaf into a cylinder. If you've made a burrito before, you understand the basic concept. Repeat with all of the leaves.

I had extra filling, which I made into a lentil salad with blue scheese, mushrooms and balsamic-dijon dressing. Yum!

It's Not Chicken

2008-08-09T10:27:00.000-04:00

This is not chicken. I'm not even convinced that it tastes like chicken – it has been, after all, awhile since I ate the stuff. But for some reason, this baked tofu dish reminded me of chicken. Weird, because I marinated it in ume and more tofu. Something like chicken should not have happened.

But anyway, here's the recipe. I will be making this again tonight - I guess I will see if the chicken-ness is all in my head!

Ume-Marinated Tofu (Vegan "Chicken")

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Ingredients:

1 pound extra firm tofu, pressed and chopped into cubes
1.5 blocks fermented tofu
about 6 tbsp ume vinegar
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup scallions
1 tbsp ginger, minced
1 clove garlic, minced
olive oil or canola spray

Put about half of the ume vinegar in cup. Add the fermented tofu. Use a fork to break up the tofu in the vinegar. Add the lemon juice and the rest of the ume vinegar. Put the scallions, ginger and garlic in a ziploc bag. Add the fermented tofu mixture and the tofu. If the marinade does not cover the tofu, add a bit of water. Give the tofu a few shakes and let it sit for at least an hour.

Put the tofu on a foil-lined pan. Spray it with oil. Roast at 450 degrees, stirring it every ten minutes or so until it is golden brown. If it starts to get crispy corners, reduce the heat to 350 and continue baking until all of the tofu becomes light brown.

How I Learned to Like Fu Yu (Fu Yu Mash with Kimchi Tofu)

2008-06-22T19:17:00.000-04:00

I like to try new things. But I cannot say that I like every new thing that I try. I learned about fu yu, or fermented tofu, on the Serious Eats website in an article called "Chinese Cheese." The author implied that fu yu compares to dairy cheeses, like feta orchevre, getting my lactose-intolerant attention. On my next visit to the Asian market, I picked up ninety-nine cents worth, enough, I think, to last a lifetime.

Picture this: I am making a salad. I want cheese on my salad. But I decide to experiment. I open up the fu yu jar.

It's the scent that gets me first. Rank, salty. Ugh. But I continue, spooning out a solid, gelatinous blob. I pause. I glance between the blob and my salad, a beautiful blend of pan-fried eggplant with tomatoes and peppers over romaine. Beautiful vegetables, meet blob. Blob, meet vegetables.

Wait, is putting an untried foodstuff over a lunchtime masterpiece really the best idea?

The blob goes in my mouth.

Salt. Tang. And the unmistakable, rank dampness of a soy bean long decayed.

The lid went back on the fu yu jar. The fu yu jar got shoved to the back of the fridge. And it stayed there, patiently fermenting, watching as other, more palatable condiments were bought and used then bought again.

Until tonight.

Sometimes a girl just needs to make a relaxing, Sunday night dinner for one. For me, that means working on whimsy. Last week's successful Sesame Baked Tofu inspired me to bake up some more bean curd, this time with lemon juice and kimchi (Korean fermented cabbage). I didn't feel like noodles, but craved buckwheat, and decided that it would compliment whole mung beans in a miso-flavored mash.

But my miso is missing. Either it has been shoved aside, and is hiding behind my landlord and roommate's month-old science experiements, or my landlord and roommate threw it out. But the fu yu remained.

I sighed. Took a breath. Resolved to try fu yu again.

But no spoon-in-mouth action this time. I broke off a third of a block with my spoon and stirred it into my kasha-mung bean combo. I tasted the mash. The fu yu lent the mix a salty, almost lemony, and tantalizing touch. Only the mush needed more! I added the other two-thirds of the fu yu, stirred it in and mashed it against the side of my pot with a spoon.

I don't know if my manic, allergy-afflicted tastebuds suddenly changed their minds. I don't know if it was the texture, not the taste, of the fu yu that originally gave my stomach the shudders. But I do know this – the Fu Yu Mash, combined with briny, spicy kimchi, sesame-flavored vegetables and golden-brown tofu made for a delicious Sunday-night indulgence. I might just use up my fu yu after all!

Fu Yu Mash with Kimchee Tofu

For the Kimchee Tofu:

1/2 block firm tofu, pressed overnight, then chopped
2 tbsp scallions
1/2 tsp tamari soy sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1/8 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tbsp kimchee
juice and zest from 1/2 lemon
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp fresh ginger, minced

Put all of the ingredients in a resealable plastic bag. Shake the bag. Let the tofu marinate for at least one hour, shaking it around whenever you feel like it.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line a baking pan with foil. Pour the tofu and its marinade on to the foil. Spread the tofu in an even layer. Stick it in the oven for one half hour. Remove the pan from the oven and (safely) flip the tofu squares over. Put the pan back in the oven for another thirty minutes, or until the tofu's outsides look golden brown and crispy. Remove the pan from the oven (for reals this time) and let the tofu cool a bit.

For the Fu Yu Mash:

2 tbsp kasha
1/4 cup cooked mung beans
1 block fu yu (fermented bean curd)

Put the kasha in a saucepan. Cover the kasha with water. Bring the water and kasha to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and cover the saucepan. Let the kasha simmer for ten minutes, or until the individual grains absorb the water and turn into mush. Add the mung beans and let them heat through. Add the fu yu. With a fork or wooden spoon, stir the mung bean-kasha-fu yu mixture, pressing it against the pan until the fu yu is evenly mixed into the beans and buckwheat. I left some grains and beans whole. For a smoother mash, a blender, food processor or immersion blender would probably do the trick.

For the vegetables:

2 tbsp scallion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp ginger, minced
1/2 cup bell pepper
1/2 cup frozen stir-fry style vegetables (no sauce)
1/4 cup cauliflower
1/4 cup kohlrabi
1/4 cup dried shitake mushrooms, reconstituted in warm water
1 small head baby bok choy, separated into stems and leaves (about 1/4 cup of each)
1/8 tsp toasted sesame oil
1/2 tsp tamari soy sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar
juice from 1/2 half of a lemon

Put a nonstick skillet on medium high-heat. Add the scallions, pepper ginger, and garlic. Sauté them in water or oil until you can really smell the garlic and the pepper begin to brown. Add the mixed vegetables, cauliflower, kohlrabi, mushrooms, and baby bok choy stems. When the vegetables become crisp, add the bok choy leaves. When the leaves wilt, add the lemon juice, vinegar, soy sauce and oil.

To serve, heap the mash and the vegetables in a bowl. Put the tofu on top. Add kimchi to taste.

Salad with Sesame Baked Tofu and Half-Mashed Mung Beans

2008-06-16T19:23:00.000-04:00

I will not apologize for loving “rabbit food.” I’m not talking about alfalfa pellets, but salad. Yes, salad.

You probably know salad as baby spinach covered in ranch dressing, something to eat with your breadsticks while you wait for your meal. But salad can – should – be allowed to shine as dinner’s main event.

Let’s consider. How long does it take to make a salad? Even my most complicated (and this is one of them) take little more than a half hour. Take-out takes longer. It’s June. Most farmers’ markets are open. No one’s sick of zucchini yet (the asparagus-weary can just skip the springtime stems) .

Here in Northern Virginia, it’s sticky and humid. I can handle the stove or the grill, but I’m not in the mood for stews or warm pastas. Salad makes for a filling, refreshing dinner. And with a few pantry ingredients, I can make the same vegetables form new and novel combinations.

The key to tossing a satisfying salad? Forget that thing with ranch dressing. Forget every sad green thing you’ve ever been served. And remember: you can put anything you want on a salad.

Quinoa and chilled chili? That’s my Incan Salad, perfect on a humid evening. Switch out the quinoa with corn and add salsa for an Aztec-inspired variation. Sauteed artichokes over romaine, ume and edamame with avocado over bok choy, strawberries with basil ... hell, skip the greens altogether and mix snap peas and strawberrieswith grilled sweet potatoes and dijon mustard. It’s your salad.

I like salads that mix cooked and raw vegetables, that play with textures and flavors. In this Salad with Sesame Baked Tofu and Half-Mashed Mung Beans, earthy mung beans, crunchy baby bok choy and baked tofu, with its crispy exterior and tender innards, combine with just about every vegetable in my fridge to sate both tastebuds and tummies.

So raise your forks ! Salute your salad! And when someone asks you what you’re eating, shrug and say “rabbit food.” No one else has to know how good this is!

Salad with Sesame Baked Tofu and Half-Mashed Mung Beans

For the salad:

1/4 cup sesame baked tofu
1/2 cup cooked mung beans, half-heartedly mashed with a fork
1 head baby bok choy (around 1 cup, chopped)
1/4 cup mixed color bell peppers
1/4 cup mixed stir fry frozen vegetables
1/4 cup eggplant, sliced
1/4 cup scallions, snipped
1/4 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/4 cup carrot, sliced
1/4 cup asparagus. chopped
1/4 cup white mushroom, sliced
1/4 cup zucchini, sliced
1/4 cup green beans, chopped

For the dressing:

1/2 tsp tamari soy sauce
1/8 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tbsp rice vinegar

In a skillet on medium heat, dry fry the eggplant. Add the frozen vegetables. Wait until they're cooked through. Chop the raw ingredients into a bowl and top with the cooked vegetables. Add the mashed mung beans and Sesame Baked Tofu. In a separate container, mix the tamari, rice vinegar and toasted sesame oil. Pour the dressing over the salad.

For the Sesame Baked Tofu:

1 package extra firm tofu
1 inch ginger, minced
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 tbsp scallion, chopped
1/8 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tsp tamari soy sauce

Open the tofu package and drain the water from the container. Wrap the tofu in paper towels, then put it on a flat surface between two cutting boards. Pile heavy objects _ – The Joy of Cooking, bowls of fruit – on to the top cutting board. Leave the tofu to press for a few hours or overnight. After pressing the tofu, chop it into one-inch squares.

Put the ginger, garlic, scallions, toasted sesame oil, tamari, and rice vinegar into a plastic bag. Dump the tofu into the bag. Seal the bag and put it in the fridge for at least one hour. Make sure to rotate the bag a few times, so the marinade evenly coats the tofu.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Line a shallow baking dish with foil. Pour the tofu and its marinade in the baking dish. Bake for one hour, or until the outside of the tofu looks golden brown. You might want to turn the tofu over after 30 minutes to ensure even browning. And to sneak a few taste tests.

A Very Belated Mother's Day Feast

2008-05-26T10:10:00.000-04:00

It's Memorial Day, not Mother's Day, but I'm dealing with a car in the shop (how can simple things like oil changes go so wrong?) and looking forward to heavy traffic going home – so what better time to reflect on an enjoyable dinner? And if moving, work, a busted oven, and a half-assed attempt at an anti-allergy diet (I'm eating lots of salad!) limit me to bi-monthly posts, I might as well supply three recipes at once!

Here's what I wrote on Mother's Day, with every intention of posting the following Monday:

Mom’s Day Feast

When cooking mistakes happen – and they will – don’t admit to them. Pretend you wanted your gnocchi to look like boiled funnel cake, or that you intended to make scorching-hot chili, and you will escape food disasters surprisingly unscathed.

I don’t say this because I ruined my Mother’s Day Dinner (I didn’t), but because I magically prepared an unplanned side. (Coconut milk does not, by the way, work like coconut oil. Silly things happen when I cook through a severe sinus-headache). But I wanted to make mashed, not fried, plantains! I did!

To keep my mother from the kitchen, my Dad gave me money, then let me trot off to the grocery store (okay, stores), to put together a dinner on-the-fly. My mother, while not an ethnic food or spice fan, loves her Tex-Mex, so I went with a vaguely Mexican-style meal.

I made a very thick chili, then stuffed it into acorn squash halves, borrowing flavors from pumpkin chili. I mixed red and white quinoa together, then added cilantro and lime. Mashed plantains made with coconut and almond milk, while not what I intended, tasted more than good enough to make again. I wonder if I can manage to make them on purpose!

Chile-Stuffed Acorn Squash

Serves four, with lots of extra stew. Reduce the amounts if you’re not trying to give your mother a week’s worth of leftovers!

Ingredients:

1/2 tsp canola oil
2 cups canned tomatoes
3 large onions, chopped
1 can black beans, rinsed
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
5 oz. cremini mushrooms, sliced
4 acorn squash halves
2 large cloves garlic

spices:

whole cumin (some)
whole fennel seeds (some)
chili powder (lots)
cayenne pepper (a little bit)
cinnamon (lots)
1/2 tsp cocoa
paprika (lots)
salt
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line a roasting pan with foil. Salt and pepper the acorn halves and put them face down on the roasting pan. Stick them in the oven.

Put the oil in a nonstick skillet on medium-high heat. Add the onions, bell pepper, garlic and spices. When the onions become translucent, add the canned tomatoes, black beans and mushrooms. Lower the heat and let the stew simmer until it looks thick.

Take the acorn squash halves out of the oven. Flip them over. Fill them with the black-bean mixture. Put them back in the oven for another 30 minutes, or until they become fork-tender.

Squirt them with lime juice before serving.

Chunky Mashed Plantains with Raisins, Peanuts and Cashews (pictured with fajita-style vegetables and sliced limes for the beer).

Ingredients:

3 very ripe plantains, peeled and sliced
small handfuls raisins, peanuts, cashews
1 tbsp coconut milk
1/2 to 1 cup almond milk
canola oil

spices:

salt
cinnamon

This is how I will make them next time:

Put the canola oil in a medium-hot skillet. Add the plantain slices in a single layer. Salt them lightly. Wait for the plantains to brown on one side, then flip them over. When the plantains are cooked on both sides, simmer them in coconut milk (a little bit) and almond milk (as needed). Add the cinnamon. Use a fork or wooden spoon to mash the plantains into the skillet. Add the raisins, peanust and cashews. Mash until you get the texture you want, then serve.

Cilantro-Lime Quinoa

Ingredients:

1 cup red and white quinoa, mixed
1/4 cup cilantro, minced
2 limes, zested and juiced

spices:

salt
black pepper
tumeric

Rinse the quinoa. Put the quinoa in a pot with salt, black pepper and tumeric. Put the pot on low heat. Stir the quinoa until it smell toasty, like, popcorn. Then add 2 cups of water. Bring the water to a boil, then cover the pot and set it to a simmer. After 15 to 20 minutes, when the quinoa absorbs the water, fluff the grains and add the lime zest, lime juice and zest. Fluff it a few more times, then serve.

All of these recipes, with their mixture of Vitamin C, healthy fats and legumes prove appropriate for Ashley the Anemic, too, though she stayed at college over Mother's Day.

Fava Farfalle

2008-05-09T19:45:00.000-04:00

Let’s talk about pasta.

This is not pasta.

And before bunny fans start smiling, I’m going to go ahead and say that this isn’t pasta either. Or at least not good pasta.

I don’t know why so many single girls insist that pasta-with-powdered-cheese-mix is the best they can do for dinner.

Pasta – just the plain stuff – isn’t hard to make, and it’s certainly not hard to make taste good. Single, broke gals need to think beyond powdered cheese or jarred sauce. To make delicious pasta, you only need salt, boiling water and a few pantry ingredients.

I love whole-wheat farfalle for its pretty shape and somewhat nutritious-looking profile, but any short pasta will work in this recipe. I used small fava beans in my sauce, because I love fava beans almost as much as I adore alliteration.

I made this pasta dish using mostly ingredients from my pantry and freezer (as well as the few remaining veggies in my fridge), making this dish as easy on the wallet as it is tasty on the tongue.

And yes, it’s tasty - I’m under-the-weather at the moment, and this pasta-with-veg hit the comforting, nutrient-rich spot (iron and calcium and Vitamin C, oh my!) without upsetting the tummy.

So. Pasta. Not this. This:

Fava Farfalle

Serves 1 hungry person.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup whole wheat farfalle pasta
1/2 cup fava beans
1/4 cup onion
1/4 cup green bell pepper
1/4 cup canned, diced tomatoes
1/4 cup zucchini
1/4 cup eggplant
1/2 cup green beans
1/2 cup mushroom cap
1 cup mixed frozen vegetables
1 tsp sundried tomato paste
1 tsp raisins
1 tbsp hot cherry pepper
1/4 cup flat leaf parsley
1 clove garlic
2 tsp balsamic vinegar

spices:

cumin
coriander
cinnamon
nutmeg
dried oregano
dried basil
kosher salt
black pepper

I would say this probably comes in at under 400 calories.

Cook the pasta according to its package directions. Drain it and put it aside.

In a skillet on medium high heat, sauté the onions, garlic, pepper and spices until the vegetables become soft and brown and you can smell the spices. Add the frozen vegetables, zucchini, greenbeans and eggplant. When the squash become soft, add the tomato paste, fava beans, tomato sauce and golden raisins. Add the mushrooms. Bring the skillet's contents to a simmer, then reduce the heat and stir in the parsley. When the parsley wilts, add the pasta.

Put in a pretty bowl and enjoy!

Iron-Pumping Lentil Stew

2008-04-20T21:40:00.001-04:00

I will now refer to my sister as “Ashley the Anemic,” for an obvious reason - she’s anemic. Okay, mildly anemic. But too anemic to give blood, and that’s too anemic in my Worried Big Sister book.

Next year, Ashley the Anemic will have a kitchen for the first time. To save money, she will occasionally need to use the stove, oven and/or broiler. The problem? Darling Ashley has never made more than Amy’s Cheddar Bunnies. She thinks “cooking” means “nuking canned soup.”

Because I’m a busybody with a sense of humor and an endless need to waste time, I’ve decided to write Ashley the Anemic a little cookbook full of easy, iron-rich recipes, which I eventually plan to pair with a “Your First Kitchen”/ “You Sickly Anemic” care package.

So. For Ashley the Anemic:

Iron-Pumping Lentil Stew

This is a clever, clever recipe. Clever because, according to the recipe analysis feature on calorie-count.com, this meal provides thirty-nice percent of a person’s daily iron needs.

What contains iron? Lentils. Dried fruit. Dark greens. Hey, wait! This recipe uses lentils, dried fruit, and dark leafy greens*! Neat!

But iron’s only half the story. To avoid anemia, people can’t just eat iron - they also have to absorb it. What aids iron absorption? Vitamin C.

This stew proves heavy on the vegetables. It contains tomatoes, a great Vitamin C source. Iron-Pumping Lentil Stew’s RDA for Vitamin C? One hundred and fifty-four percent. Boo-yah. I told you this recipe's makes smart coo ... er, stew.

Iron-Pumping Lentil also contains protein, fiber, calcium, and potassium, in case you worry about constipation, osteoporosis, or muscle cramps. Avocados do all sort of good, heart-healthy things. Carrots aid your night vision. Panch phoron makes you invisible.

Kidding.

But did I mention that the stew tastes pretty darn good? And that even the slowest cook can make it in thirty minutes? And that it only uses one pot?

Eat enough of this yummy stew, and you'll be pumping iron like a pro, not a pale and sickly invalid!

*I used spinach in this recipe because the grocery store didn’t carry frozen kale or collards. It’s hard to absorb iron from spinach, so aim for greens like kale, collards and mustard greens. I like kale in lentil stews.

Iron-Pumping Lentil Stew

Serves one.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp masoor dal (red split lentils)
2 tbsp avocado
1/4 cup onion, sliced
1 tbsp hot cherry pepper, minced
1/4 cup green bell pepper, chopped
1 tbsp ginger, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup spinach, frozen and chopped
1/4 cup crushed fire-roasted tomato
1/2 tsp tomato paste
1/4 cup carrot, sliced
1/4 cup zucchini, sliced and halved
1/4 cup eggplant, sliced
2 tsp craisins
juice from 1/2 lime

spices:

1/2 tsp panch phoron
big dash cinnamon powder
little dash chili powder
kosher salt
black pepper

Put a nonstick skillet on medium-high heat. Pour in a tiny amount (maybe one-half of a teaspoon?) oil into the skillet, if you want to use oil. If not, put the onions, peppers, garlic, and ginger in the skillet. Add the spices. Wait until the panch phoron makes popping noises, then add some water to the vegetables.

When the onions become translucent, add the cauliflower, zucchini, eggplant, and carrot into the skillet. When the squash become soft, add the tomato paste and the lentils. Add enough water to cover the lentils.

As the lentils cook, they absorb water. Keep on adding water to the lentils until they start to look mushy. Add the craisins. Then add the crushed tomato and the chopped, frozen greens. Stir the stew a bit and wait until it looks as thick or as thin as you want.

To serve, garnish with chopped avocado. You can dust it with more cinnamon or chili powder. Squeeze a lime half over the stew.

More cleverness: if you have leftover avocado, pour any extra lime juice over it to keep it fresh in the fridge.

Curried Ratatouille

2008-03-28T20:35:00.000-04:00

You will see this recipe again. I might be sneaky about repeating this recipe. I might use different spices. I might bake the stew it in the oven, or grill it in a foil packet, instead of stirring it on the stove. I might serve it with bulgur, basmati, kamut, potatoes, or penne. But I will make and blog about ratatouille again.

Ratatouille is a simple, peasant food. It cooks up quickly. In the summer, when summer squash, tomato, and eggplant prove plentiful and budget-friendly, it becomes one of my weekly staples. No matter how you flavor it, ratatouille tastes good. It remains good hot or chilled. Simply put: ratatouille’s good eats.

Ratatouille’s also versatile. While I’ve never seen a recipe for an authentic Indian ratatouille, the dish’s main ingredients - eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes - appear in many recipes. I felt sure that Indian flavors could only benefit European peasant fare.

I’m not always right. Until middle school, I thought the word “pretty” would look better with two vowels (preety) and worked hard to change the standardized spelling. Luckily, I was very, very right about currying ratatouille.

Panch phoron - the wonder spice blend - worked with cinnamon, tumeric, ginger, and garlic to create a subtle warmth. Kidney beans lent a meaty, protein-rich heft. My success here will no doubt lead to many different ratatouilles - Thai, Persian, Greek, Who Knows? But keep mum, will you? I’m more than a one-dish pony!

Curried Ratatouille

Serves one.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup kidney beans
1/2 cup pumpkin, mashed
1/2 cup spaghetti squash, baked
3/4 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup eggplant, chopped
1/2 cup tomato, canned and diced
1/4 cup summer squash, sliced
1/4 cup celery, chopped
1/4 cup mushroom, sliced
1/8 cup red bell pepper, chopped
1/8 cup carrot
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
1 tbsp shallot, minced
1 tsp ginger, minced
1 tsp garlic, minced
juice and zest from one lemon

spices:

1 tbsp panch phoron
cinnamon
tumeric
kosher salt
black pepper

calories: 215

In a skillet on medium-high heat, dry fry the spices, shallot, ginger, and garlic, celery, and bell pepper. When the spices pop and the shallots become translucent, add the eggplant, summer squash, and cauliflower. Add water if needed to keep the vegetables from sticking. When the squash becomes brown, add the kidney beans, tomatoes, mushroom, and parsley. When the mushroom browns and the parsley wilts, put the rataouille on your base of choice. Add the lemon juice and zest. I used pumpkin and spaghetti squash, but this ratatouille works well with basmati rice, too.

Bulgur-Stuffed Bell Peppers

2008-03-23T20:07:00.001-04:00

My family headed to Disneyworld for spring break, leaving me to watch the house and the petting zoo (a dog, cats, a chinchilla, parrots, a gecko, and eight hamsters, oh my!). This meant that my mother, upon returning Saturday, was too tired to shop, cook, stuff, bake, and steam. Easter dinner became my pleasure to prepare.

Vegetarian meals often lack "centerpieces" - I find it hard to picture a large salad eliciting the "oohs" and "aahs" of say, a Rockwell-esque Butterball. But putting together an attractive, flavorful, nutritious, vegetarian meal does not require a Ph. D.. Prepare enough colorful, vegetable-laden dishes, and the table becomes an edible art display worthy of any holiday.

This Easter, festive bell peppers provide a colorful punch. A bulgur salad with dates, caramelized onions, summer squash, tomato, lemon juice, and pomegranate molassas created an earthy, complex pepper-filler. The baked results tasted bright and warm. They looked pretty. They garnered "rave reviews" (and it's a good thing too, because I confused the amount needed for five people - I made enough bulgur to feed a vegetable-loving army).

Along with stuffed artichoke-bottoms, deviled eggs, roasted asparagus, olives, and a large salad, the peppers created a charming Easter dinner. Luckily, these stuffed peppers are no real indulgence - from what I can figure out, each serving clocks in at 150-160 calories - and come together easily. Holiday dinner or weeknight staple? These tasty peppers prove a bit of both.

Bulgur-Stuffed Bell Peppers

Ingredients:

For the bulgur salad:

1/2 cup dry bulgur (I cooked 2 cups, which proved way too much, so I adjusted the amount here)
3 white onions, chopped
1/2 a medium zucchini
1 medium yellow summer squash
1/2 cup diced canned tomatoes
1/2 tsp pomegranate molassas
the chopped-up tops from the peppers (sans stems)
1/2 teaspoon oil (I used toasted hazelnut oil)
5 dates with the seeds removed, chopped
juice and zest from 1/2 lemon

spices:

larger amounts:

cinnamon
chili powder

smaller amounts:

allspice
cumin
tumeric
dried oregano
nutmeg
kosher salt
black pepper

Toast the bulgur with the spices. Cook according the bulgur package's instructions. Add the dates.

Put the oil in a large, nonstick skillet on medium-low heat. Add the onions. Add kosher salt and black pepper. Let the onions sit. Really sit. Don't stir them at all for fifteen or twenty minutes. After that, stir the onions only occasionally. You want them to become soft, translucent, rich in color, and to reduce in size. Caramelizing the onions is probably the most time-consuming part of this recipe, but it's worth the effort!

When the onions are caramelized, add the squashes and tomato. When the squash becomes soft, stir in the pomegranate molassas.

Add the vegetable mix to the bulgur. Taste and adjust the spices. Add the lemon juice and zest.

For the peppers:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cut off and save the bell pepper's tops. Rinse out the peppers to remove the seeds. Put the peppers in a microwave and oven safe baking dish. Pour a little water into the dish. Nuke the peppers until they become soft, maybe twenty minutes.

Spoon the bulgur into the peppers. Bake the peppers for one hour, until the peppers are very soft. Serve.

Shroomer's Pie

2008-03-18T17:58:00.000-04:00

I am the direct descendent of a horse dealer named DeLaverne McGinty. Let’s just say that, with a name like “McGinty,” my great-grandfather wasn’t exactly British.

I wonder if Del gave me my love for shepherd’s pie. I find even the idea of shepherd’s pie enchanting. Mashed potatoes? As a pie topping? Amazing! Inspired! Delicious!

I never ate shepherd’s pie growing up, and I recall only ever eating the “real deal” once, at a friend’s house. But since going mostly-vegetarian, I’ve made vegetarian shepherd’s pie after vegetarian shepherd’s pie. My desire to bake vegetables, then top them with mashed potatoes, proves almost compulsive.

Luckily, St. Paddy’s Day provided the perfect excuse to bake and enjoy mini shepherd’s pies. I like lentils in my sheep-friendly shepherd’s pies - they provide the nice, earthy flavor and “filler” normally provided by ground lamb.

Mushrooms provide a low-calorie, ultra-healthy protein. I used four different mushroom-types (and would’ve used five, if I had remembered to presoak my dried shitake mushrooms at the same time I boiled my potatoes). My pies proved shroomer’s pies, their purple sweet potato topping more Honah Lee than Emerald Isle.

Still, Shroomer’s pie proves delicious and filling. They get cute points. You could even pack-them in a St. Paddy’s Day Bento, if you’re into culinary fusion. If not, throw back a Guinness, eat some mini shroomer’s pie, and dance to Flogging Molly. You’ll be seeing rainbows ere long!

Shroomer’s Pie

Makes four mini pies.

Ingredients:

For the potato topping:

1/4 cup purple sweet potato
1 tbsp unsweetened almond milk
1-2 small sprigs of thyme
nutmeg
salt
pepper

For the mushroom-lentil filling:

2 tbsp brown lentils
1/2 tsp tomato paste
1/2 cup white mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup portabella mushroom cap, chopped
1/2 cup enoki mushroom, chopped
1/4 cup oyster mushroom, chopped
1/4 cup onion, finely chopped
1/4 cup sweet pepper, chopped
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup canned diced tomato
1/4 cup parsley, chopped

spices:
cumin
nutmeg
dried oregano
chili powder
cinnamon
dried sage

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Chop the purple sweet potato into small pieces. Put the sweet potato in a saucepan, cover them with cold water, and add a small palmful of salt. Bring the water to a boil. Boil the potato pieces for 15-30 minutes, or until a fork can easily pierce them. Drain the potatoes. Add the nutmeg, pepper, and thyme. Mash the potatoes with a fork against the side of a pan, adding a teaspoon of almond milk at a time until they look smooth. Spoon the mashed purple sweet potatoes into a pastry bag with a wide tip.

In a nonstick skillet, fry the onion, garlic, celery, peppers, and carrot with the spices. When the onions look brown and translucent, add the tomato paste, tomatoes, and lentils. Add enough water to cover the lentils and bring the water and lentils to a simmer. When the lentils become soft after fifteen to twenty minutes, stir in the mushrooms and herbs. When the mushrooms become brown and the water has been absorbed, spoon about 1/2 cup of the lentil mixture into individual cupcake foils.

Using the pastry bag, accent each mini lentil pie with mashed purple sweet potato. Put the mini pies in the oven for thirty to forty minutes, or until the sweet potato turns a more vibrant purple and feels slightly crust-like.

The mini shroomer’s pie end up being around 61 calories each. I ate mine with chopped, raw cabbage, but boiled cabbage or steamed kale would also prove nice sides. I think these would be cute at a St. Paddy’s Day Party (and with these mini pies’ diet-friendly nutritional profile, you can drink your Guinness and enjoy it, too!).

Winter Citrus Salad (How to Use Up Winter Vegetables)

2008-03-14T13:34:00.000-04:00

I did not mean to take a hiatus in March. I planned to keep up my once or twice weekly postings. But something happened. Something beyond my control.

The weather warmed up.

No, it's not ninety and humid. It drops below freezing at night. But the days creep towards sixty degrees. I sometimes see the sun. The warmer weather makes me anxious, alert, and antsy. I want to eat cool, liquid things. My desire to eat locally? Gone the minute imported asparagus started selling for less than four dollars a pound.

I recently looked at my "food diary," a black-and-white composition notebook that records my notes from work, my "to do" and shopping lists, and one-word descriptions of my weekly dinners. The last two week follow this basic pattern: salad, salad, lentil salad, salad, salad, spaghetti squash, salad.

My salads prove intense and complicated. They contain raw and cooked elements, beans or nuts, sometimes cheese, avocado, or olives. My salads rest on beds of butter lettuce, romaine, bok choy, kale, or cabbage. They look colorful and pretty.

I haven't bothered writing about them. No one cares about salad. Salads are easy. They defy recipes. No one needs a guide: "chop up vegetables and throw them in a bowl."

Still, for lack of options, I will share my Winter Citrus Salad:

Ingredients:

1/4 cup chickpeas
Muscat orange vinegar

Raw vegetables:

2 cups romaine lettuce
1 cup mushrooms
1/2 cup celery
1/4 cup zucchini
1/4 cup cucumber
1/4 cup carrot

Roasted vegetables:
1 small meyer lemon, thinly sliced
1/4 cup leek, sliced
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced into rounds
1/2 cup buttercup squash (I baked this earlier, then threw it it with the roasted vegetables to warm it up)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put the meyer lemon, leek, parsnip, and buttercup squash in a roasting pan. Sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and dried oregano. Put them in the oven, stirring every ten minutes until the leeks are brown on the edges and the parsnips prove tender.

Chop the romaine lettuce into a bowl. Add the raw vegetables. Add the roasted vegetables and meyer lemon slices. Drizzle with orange vinegar. Dig in. You now have room to fill your fridge with spring vegetables!

Not-So-Boring Winter Soup (Flower Bean Curd Soup)

2008-02-25T20:37:00.000-04:00

Tofu invokes hostility. It’s synonymous with “bad taste,” with “hippie food,” with the bland health-orientated plant-based diets hated and lambasted by everyone from that chain-smoking girl at work (“Soy? Ewwwww.”) to Anthony Bourdain.

But tofu isn’t some newfangled product. It’s history seems longer and more venerated that that of, say, the much-loved American grilled cheese sandwich (white bread, Kraft cheese, etc.). We’re talking about the difference between the eighth and eighteenth centuries, or thereabouts. Nor is tofu a strictly vegetarian food - look in Chinese or Japanese cookbooks, and you’re bound to find recipes that call for tofu and meat. Together.

So enough with the anti-tofu establishment. Recognize tofu for what it is - a nutritious and versatile ingredient that can act savory or sweet, that can form firm squares or soft puddings, that can act equally at home in a stir fry, clay-pot stew, or smoothie.

Or a soup.

I bought silken tofu, a soft moisture-laden tofu with a yogurt-like texture, on sale. I wanted to use it in something savory. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes From the Hunan Province provided my inspiration. She describes “‘flower bean curd soup with preserved mustard greens,’” a recipe she claims to have been taught by a monk. “Flower bean curd” is silken tofu. Silken tofu soup? This seemed like a meal I could do.

I don’t keep preserved mustard greens around, and I like my soups hearty and full of vegetables, so I took some liberties with the basic “flower bean curd” soup idea. A made a dashi-like broth (I didn’t have bonito, or dried fish flakes, but you could use them) with kombu, fermented black beans, and the soaking liquid I had used to rehydrate dried shitake mushrooms and black fungus.

I briefly pan-fried some flavorings and vegetables in hot chili oil, then simmered them in the dashi. When the vegetables became tender and soft, I crumbled the silken tofu into the broth.

The soup tasted delicate, subtle, yet full of flavor. The leftovers proved even better. The black fungus and shitake mushrooms (and a healthy bit of tamari) provided depth, while the silken tofu created a soothing smoothness, a nice balance to the crunchy mung bean sprouts and celery, the cabbage-like baby bok choy.

This recipe provides a nice base for future experiments. Puréed eggplant or winter squash would create a thicker texture, beans could add greater earthiness. Add some udon or soba noodles, and this soup could easily become an entree.

Flower Bean Curd Soup scores for tofu in a big way. After all, if there's one thing Westerners love, it's Chinese food.

Not-So-Boring Winter Soup (Flower Bean Curd Soup)

Makes three one-cup servings.

For the broth:

1 cup dried shitake mushrooms
2 tbsp black fungus, broken into pieces
1/2 tsp fermented and salted black beans (rinsed)
1 small piece of kombu

For the vegetables:

1 cup eggplant
1 cup bok choy, chopped, with the leaves and stems separated
1/4 cup parsnip
1/4 cup green bell pepper
1/4 cup mung bean sprouts
1/8 cup shallot
1/2 inch ginger, minced
1 clove ginger, minced
1/2 cup silken tofu, crumbled
1/4 tsp chili oil

spices:

black pepper
red chili flakes
Chinese Five Spice
tamari

Soak the mushrooms and the black fungus in warm water until they soften, which will take twenty to thiry minutes.

Put the rinsed black beans in a pot. Add the kombu. Add water (I eyeballed). Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Let the broth simmer until the kombu looks like something a sea otter would play in (ten to fifteen minutes). Remove the kombu and black beans from the broth (I used a colander). Add the mushrooms and the black fungus, with their soaking liquid, to the broth.

In a separate pot, shallow fry the shallots, pepper, garlic, and ginger together with the spices. Add the eggplant, celery, parsnip, and baby bok choy stems. When the eggplant and parsnip brown in spots, add the broth. Let the soup simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes. Stir in the mung bean sprouts, baby bok choy, and silken tofu. Add tamari and chili flakes to taste.

Boring Old Vegetable Soup

2008-02-22T19:17:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for a culinary roller coaster, look again. But if you want something quick, easy, and warming, this soup will satisfy in a big way.

I made this soup in a busy kitchen, after having returned from the doctor's with my upper arms as swollen and misshapen as overgrown yams, thanks to four shots of straight-up allergens. Stirring or whisking or waiting to eat seemed out of the question, so I turned to a time-honored cooking technique: Dumping Things Into a Pot.

Dumping Things Into a Pot has worked for me in the past, and it didn't fail me tonight I chopped up some winter vegetables, threw them into a pot, and let them simmer. Then I stirred in tomatoes, greens, and beans.

The end result tasted slightly spicy. Large slices of parsnip and cauliflower provided some chew, while the tomato base tasted as rich and as spicy as the best minestrone broths. Pasta or bread would have made nice additions, but I was lazy, and the soup stands (or sits? ladles?) nicely on its own.

Boring Old Vegetable Soup

Ingredients:

1/8 cup Christmas lima beans, cooked
1/8 cup red kidney beans, cooked
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1/4 cup kale, chopped
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced
1/4 cup carrot, sliced
1/4 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/4 cup red bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup crushed tomato
1/4 cup onion, sliced
1/4 cup flat leaf parsley
1 clove garlic, minced
A few leaves rosemary, chopped
Juice from 1/2 lemon

spices:

larger amounts:

chili powder
oregano

smaller amounts:

nutmeg
coriander
kosher salt
black pepper

Put the onion in some water or oil (I actually used bean stock) in a thick-bottomed pan. Fry the onion and the spices on medium-high heat until the onion begins to brown. Add the garlic and give the mix a few good stirs, adding more water or oil if needed.

Add the celery, cauliflower, red pepper and parsnip to the pot. Let them brown a bit on the edges, then add broth or water. Let the vegetables simmer in the water for five minutes, then add the crushed tomatoes and the beans. Let the soup simmer until the vegetables become tender, then stir in the kale and parsley. When the greens wilt, remove the soup from the heat.

Pour the soup into a bowl, then add the lemon juice.

This comes to around 200 calories.

Mini Pie Roundup #2!

2008-02-14T21:35:00.000-04:00

This past month-and-a-half or so has been rough personally, professionally, and physically. I'm very sad to report that, this Valentine's Day, I'm eating trail mix and apples, not the chocolate-cardamom-coffee tarts I had planned. Such is life.

Luckily, my fellow Revolutionaries (and Anne of Redacted Recipes) more than picked up my slack. Their mini tarts are so beautiful, I'm even feeling inspired . . .

Spaghetti Squash Love

2008-02-12T17:07:00.000-04:00

Spaghetti squash - the stringy winter squash that serves up like pasta. It sounds great, but I’ve always found the reality disappointing. Low-calorie? Sure. Heart-healthy? Of course. But also bland, unexciting, and without pasta’s carb-heavy comforts. So I wrote spaghetti squash off, until an impulse buy left me with a pound-or-so of bulbous yellow disappointment.

Normally, I poke holes in the spaghetti squash and put it in a 350 degree oven for an hour.

This time, I sliced the spaghetti squash in half and removed its seeds for toasting. I put the squash face-down on a baking stone in a 425 degree oven for twenty minutes, then let it bake at 350 for an hour.

The halved-and-baked spaghetti squash tastes deeply sweet and caramelized. At less than fifty calories per cup, it isn’t just a dieter’s spaghetti substitute, but a warming meal worth eating on its own.

Such a good spaghetti squash deserved a little fancying-up. My usual lentil pasta sauce, embellished with sundried tomato paste and roasted garlic, proved warm and "hearty" (see photo). When I crave pasta, I will eat pasta. But having made this dish, I think I prefer spaghetti squash!

Spaghetti Squash Love

Ingredients:

3 tbsp masoor dal
1/2 teaspoon sundried tomato paste
1/4 cup canned whole peeled tomato
1/4 cup leek, sliced
1 tsp sultanas
2 cloves roasted garlic

1/4 cup fennel, sliced
1/4 cup red bell pepper, slice the bottom into rings to make "hearts"
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced
1/4 cup apple, chopped
1/2 cup mushroom, sliced
3/4 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup spaghetti squash, halved then baked

spices:

larger amounts:

ground mustard
cinnamon
chili powder
oregano

smaller amounts:

nutmeg
fresh rosemary, chopped
thyme

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Put the vegetables (except for the spaghetti squash) and apple from the second list into a foil-lined pan. Roast them in the oven for thirty to forty minutes, until the vegetables become crispy.

In a nonstick skillet, dry fry the leeks and spices together. When the spices smell, add the tomato paste, roasted garlic and canned tomato. Break up the tomato with a wooden spoon, then add the masoor dal and sultanas. Add the dried herbs. Cover the dal with water and let it simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the dal absorbs most of the water.

To serve, put the spaghetti squash on a plate. Cover the spaghetti squash with the lentils, then top the plate with the roasted vegetables.

This meal contains around 243 calories.

"Freedom" Cassoulet

2008-02-10T19:03:00.001-04:00

Some meals fill you with warm feelings, others beat the chill with chilis. This dish, a New World spin on vegetarian French cassoulet, does a bit of both.

You have to hand it to the French: they know how to make a peasant dish sound glam. “Ratatouille” sounds so much better than “stewed squash.” “Cassoulet” sounds sexy, but the original whatever-meat-and-white-bean stew proves as upscale as johnnycake. Still, on a blustery winter day, a casserole often makes for the perfect dinner.

I decided to make cassoulet. But I saw no reason to be boring about it – I looked at the ingredients in my fridge and decided to translate it into American flavors. Yucca and sweet potatoes replaced the red potatoes, tequila the wine, cornmeal the bread crumbs. I used black beans and kidney beans instead of boring old navy. Because it is cold outside, I decided to add habeñero and green bell peppers. The habeñeros made me sniffle, but my “Freedom Cassoulet” imparts a warn-from-the-inside-out feeling well worth the heat.

One caveat: I just added the cornmeal to the top of the casserole, hoping it would toast. It didn’t. Next time, I’ll either use polenta or mix the cornmeal with oil to get a crust. When I’m long on time, I might let the casserole stew for a good hour or two in the oven.

But for a quick afterwork dinner, “Freedom Cassoulet”’s hard to beat. The yucca and the sweet potato provide starchy sweetness, the beans an earthy depth. And the meal proves warm, warm, warm – I might just need some after-dinner sorbet to cool back down!

“Freedom” Cassoulet

Ingredients:

For the topping:

1 tbsp cornmeal
oil

For the cassoulet:

1/4 cup yucca or cassava root, sliced
1/4 cup sweet potato, sliced
1 cup broccoli, chopped
1 tbsp kidney beans, cooked
1 tbsp black beans, coked
1/4 cup whole canned tomatoes
1/2 cup green bell pepper, chopped
1/4 habeñero pepper, minced
1/4 cup onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp tequila
1/2 cup celery, sliced
1/2 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in water

spices:

chili powder
oregano
cinnamon
saffron (soaked in water)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Put a large nonstick skillet on medium-high heat. Add the spices (except the saffron) celery, onions, peppers, and garlic. Wait until the onions caramelize, then add the tequila. When the tequila evaporates, add the tomato, broccoli, beans, yucca, and sweet potato. Add the saffron in its water and let the vegetables simmer until the sweet potato and yucca turn soft. Let most of the water evaporate, then add the cornstarch slurry. Simmer until the remaining liquid thickens.

Put the vegetables and beans in a casserole dish. Mix the cornmeal and oil together and pour it on the top of the cassoulet. Bake the cassoulet for twenty to thirty minutes, or until the cornmeal mixture toasts. Remove from the oven.

Serve with quinoa and plenty of cerveza!

My “Freedom Cassoulet” comes to around 400 very healthy (and warming) calories.

Chickpea and Potato Curry

2008-02-07T22:36:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of recipes out there. Good ones and bad ones, classics and clichés.

But when I’m tired, and I want to eat quickly, only a few few dishes immediately pop to mind. I make and remake my favorites, and delaying shiny new ideas for other days.

My favorites change. Right now, I turn to masoor dal and kasha once weekly, bulgur more often than that. I eat winter squash mashed into rice, oatmeal, wheat. But a few months ago, stovetop paella, scattered sushi, and ratatouille formed the regular rotation. Before that, Greek salad and the epic polenta craze. And sometime before that: this curry.

I created this curry when I first started cooking. It’s a pastiche, jumbled together from that pan-fried eggplant, this spicy-chickpeas-in-sauce. For awhile, I ate it weekly, before other ideas, other ingredients, other seasons, turned my attention elsewhere.

Cauliflower and carrots made me remember “that curry I used to make.” I’m glad that I gave it another go – it hits the “sweet,” “salty,” “crunchy,” and “gravy” buttons. It’s good. It’s quick. It gives you plenty of vegetables and makes them tasty to boot.

The basic idea: slice potatoes or sweet potatoes into semicircles, then dry-fry them in a skillet. When the potatoes become crispy, toast some chickpeas. In the meantime, make a curry, which contain must include onions, bell pepper, cauliflower, and tomato. Eggplant and mushrooms make good additions, as does zucchini in the summer. I sometimes it it over rice, but usually enjoy the curry alone – it’s one of those light, comforting meals that lets you save some room for dessert.

Chickpea and Potato Curry

Ingredients:

1/4 cup chick peas
1/2 cup sweet potato, chopped into rounds, then halved
1/2 cup whole tomatoes in juice (about 1 tomato)
1/2 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup kale, chopped
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced
1/4 cup carrot, cut into strips
1/4 cup green bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup celery
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 inch ginger root, minced
1 tsp sultanas
juice from 1/2 of a lemon

spices:

larger amounts:
cinnamon
chili powder
cumin

smaller amounts:
mustard
turmeric
coriander
nutmeg
fenugreek

salt
black pepper

251 calories

Wrap the chickpeas in a paper towel.

Place the sliced sweet potato in a small skillet. Dry fry the sweet potato with salt and pepper, flipping it over when the first side gets crispy and bumpy.

When the potatoes finish cooking, use their skillet to toast the chickpeas. You can toast the chickpeas with or without oil. Just put them in a medium-high skillet with salt, pepper, mustard, and cumin. When the chickpeas turn golden and become crisp, remove them from the heat.

While the potatoes and chickpeas cook, make the curry. Fry the onions and spices in water or oil. When the onions look translucent, add the garlic, ginger, carrot, parsnip, celery, cauliflower, and bell pepper. Wait until the pepper becomes spotted and brown, then add the tomato, sultanas, and some water. Break up the tomato with a spoon. Let the vegetables simmer in the water and tomato juice until a sauce forms.

Put the sweet potato in a bowl. Pour the curry over the potato. Top with chickpeas and kale. Stir everything together before eating , so that the kale will wilt. Squeeze one-half of a lemon over the curry. Enjoy!

Christmas Lima Bento

2008-01-31T21:06:00.000-04:00

As a kid, I hated brussel sprouts, asparagus, and lima beans.

I wasn’t a vegetable-loather. I liked peas, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and green beans. I adored winter squash, sweet corn on the cob, tomatoes, and spinach.

But brussel sprouts? I remember colorless, soggy orbs on the side of some awful Germanic roast.

I first tried asparagus at an Easter dinner with my father’s parents. I followed my
family's “try everything rule” with a brave bite of stem - which promptly separated into strings, choking me.

Things change, tastes evolve. Roasted brussel sprouts are a wonder (and a current addiction). Asparagus, once I tried it properly prepared, became a spring favorite: with baby spinach, strawberries, feta cheese, and dijon-balsamic vinaigrette, few vegetables taste better.

But lima beans, with their pale, moth-colored skins and their chalky insides? Yuck! Ew! Gross! Blech! When I need to use frozen “mixed vegetables,” I sort every baby lima from the peas, cubed carrot, and corn.

I’m a rational adult. I understand – I used to hate brussel sprouts and asparagus because (sorry, Mom) I never saw them cooked correctly. I refuse to accept the same about lima beans.

Lately, I’ve been cooking dried beans. They’re simple (if long-cooking), tasty, and cheap. So while I was looking at adzuki beans and turtle beans and chick peas, I saw a bag of red-and-white Christmas Limas. “They taste like chestnuts!” read the bag.

Huh.

I love chestnuts, and would celebrate Christmas all year long if it meant a constant influx of chestnuts ripe for the fresh-roasting, so I had to give Christmas Limas a try. I waited until I saw them in bulk, bought a small bag, and test-cooked them this Wednesday.

Christmas Lima’s don’t taste like chestnuts.

Luckily, they don’t taste like frozen baby lima beans either. I never knew beans could be “creamy” without added cream. Christmas limas, which cook up large and plump with subtle stripes, possess a creamy, almost potato-like texture. Combined with bittersweet roasted endive and red peppers, they make for a simple bento-boxed lunch, not to mention a lima worth liking.

Christmas Lima Bento

Ingredients:

1/4 cup Christmas Lima beans, boiled
1/2 cup pumpkin, baked and chopped
1/4 cup leek, sliced
1/4 cup fennel, sliced
1/4 cup broccoli, chopped
1/4 cup red bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup Belgian endive, sliced
1/ 8 tsp roasted hazelnut oil
1/2 tsp muscat orange vinegar

spices:

kosher salt
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Pour the oil and vinegar onto a foil-lined baking sheet or pan. Add the chopped vegetables to the pan. Stir the vegetables around in the oil and vinegar, then sprinkle them with kosher salt and black pepper.

Put the baking pan in the oven. Stir the vegetables every ten minutes or so for thirty to forty minutes, or until the leek has caramelized and the fennel looks soft.

Add the Christmas Lima beans to the roasted vegetables. Taste, adding more salt and pepper as needed. If you want, you can drizzle the vegetables and beans with more oil and vinegar. A mild blue cheese, like cambanzola, also works nicely.

Pumpkin Notchili

2008-01-23T16:48:00.001-04:00

This is my entry for HotM 11: Soup.

Few meals prove as divisive as chili. Food fights erupt whenever the Big ChiliQuestion #1 comes up in conversation: meat, beans, or both?

I consider bean-less chili unnatural. Even when I ate meat, I liked chili only for itskidney beans – soft and earthy and suspended in a sauce so thick it glued spoon to bowl. I don’t eat meat analogs – so for me, chili means beans. Beans.

Big Chili Question #2: How do you flavor chili? Fresh hot chilis, cumin, beer, adobe, chili powder, oregano, chocolate, garlic . . . chili cookers each use their own favorites, and every chili cooker sticks to their own ideals. I like spices. Many spices. But I firmly believe that all chilis must include chili powder, garlic, cumin, oregano, and cayenne pepper. ‘Tis the rules, my friend, as dictated by God to one of his wingéd secretaries. The tablets will surface any day now. Maybe in Texas.

Sadly for me, my mother hates cumin and cayenne, and threw a temper tantrum the last time I made "real" vegetarian chili. To keep the peace, I omitted the cumin and cayenne, adding warm-sweet spices (nutmeg and cinnamon) in their stead.

Big Chili Question #3 involves vegetables. Common chili ingredients include onions, hot peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes, corn, carrots, pumpkin . . . . Chili must include onions, tomatoes, and peppers. I cannot compromise on this point. Pumpkin does not go in chili. Pumpkin goes in chili’s city-slicking cousin. Pumpkin “chili” should be eaten from teacups. It should be slipped to ladies’ fluffy lapdogs with silver teaspoons.

Yet, eight cups of diced pumpkin somehow slipped their way into the chili pot. I'm not sure how this happened, but if you buy too much pumpkin, you'll find it jumping into many dishes, whether or not you really want it there.

I looked down at my pot, and realized that I was not cooking chili, but soup. A thick soup. A soup filled with onions, tomatoes, peppers, and beans. But not chili.

So be it. I told the family they would just have to eat Pumpkin Notchili tonight.

My mother sniffed the Pumpkin Notchili. She swirled it around with her spoon, creating reluctant eddies in her bowl. "I don't know," she said. "I'm not sure I can eat this tonight, my stomach's upset. Maybe I should make something else . . ."

Then, "This is good. Really good."

And the best complaint a cook can hear: "Why didn't you make more?"

I ate my Pumpkin Nonchili plain, the rest of the family ate it with skillet cornbread and applewood smoked mozzarella - either way it proves warm, protein-rich, and almost fat-free, as thick and as tasty as the chili it fails to be.

Pumpkin Notchili

Makes nineteen one-cup servings.

Ingredients:

8 cups black beans, cooked
8 cups pumpkin or winter squash, chopped
1 large bell pepper, chopped
2 medium onions, roughly diced
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 pounds canned, diced tomatoes
1/2 small habeñero pepper
1 cup apple cider
1 tsp chili-infused macadamia nut oil

spices:

coriander
nutmeg
cinnamon
chili powder
tabasco sauce
oregano
kosher salt
black pepper

In a large nonstick skillet, sauté the garlic, onion, peppers, and dry spices and herbs in the oil. Add a little salt to taste (if you plant to serve it with bread or cheese, keep in mind that these ingredients will contribute salt). When the onions look brown, add the cubed pumpkin. Let the vegetables cook until the pumpkin becomes tender. Douse the vegetables with tabasco sauce (to taste, of course).

In a large saucepan, combine the apple cider, tomatoes, and beans. Add the cooked vegetables. Bring the mixture to a boil, then cover the pot and reduce the stove's heat to the lowest setting. Let the Pumpkin Notchili simmer for at least one hour before serving.

The chili alone comes to 164 calories per one-cup serving.

Tasting Purple (Moody Blue Lentil Salad)

2008-01-20T18:35:00.000-04:00

People might enjoy edible paper and pinenut foam – they’re new! exciting! avant garde! – but at the end of the day, parents don’t power up centrifuges to prepare the family dinner.

Ovens and stoves, pots and pans, perhaps a food processor or two, these are the tools in the homecook’s arsenal. The meals made seem as humdrum as the tools used to prepare them - macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, tomato soup. Classic dishes, comfort foods, family “faves.” These meals know staying power.

Rustic dishes, as a rule, are tasty and simple to prepare. They rely on a few, simple ingredients and never fail to satisfy. On a bitter cold day, after a long shift at work, I never come home determined to create a post-post modern buffet, to freeze some caramelized onions in liquid nitrogen, or to question the boundaries between low and high cuisine by topping Hostess HoHos with shaved truffle. I opt for soups, salads, risottos, and stir fries, for simple foods that fuel. I often crave my favorite lentil salad.

My lentil salad always contains onions, potatoes, and lentils. It usually balances an acidic element with something sweet and something herbal. But even working within a classic formula, I’ve found endless ways to make this salad. Just because something’s classic doesn’t mean it also can’t be fun. To give you a, er, taste:

Lentil salad with puy lentils, white potato, apple, and celery : a terrific light lunch.

Beluga lentil salad stuffed into a pumpkin - presentation makes things new!

Lentil salad with sweet potato and chevre : a sweeter, more autumnal lentil salad.

And now tonight's dinner: Moody Blue Lentil Salad.

I buy vegetables like most girls buy shoes -I could not resist the purple potatoes and purple cauliflower sold at the local organic market. Considering the beluga lentils in my pantry and the blue cheeses in my fridge, I knew I was going to ignore the "five color" rule – who wouldn't love a purple dinner?

The salad's flavors live up to their royal hue. The roasted purple potatoes (which taste like any low-starch tuber) provide the usual comforting touch, but with a more vivid visual. The pear and dried cranberries balance a little sweetness with the beluga lentil's and mushroom's earthy flavors, the muted, resin-like rosemary.

Regarding the cheese, I wanted the cambanzola's creamy texture, but with a stronger blue cheese flavor. I didn't have a strong, creamy blue on hand, so I mixed Danish blue with cambanzola. Just call me the cheese D.J., because after the success of this experiment, I'm going to be sprinkling "remixes" over many a salad.

I wouldn't call my lentil salad a revelation - it is, after all, a classic dish filled with homey flavors. I would say that, as I ate it, I couldn't imagine a better, more satisfying meal.

Here's to a colorful twist on a classic!

Moody Blue Lentil Salad

Serves one homebody.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp beluga lentils (puy or French lentils would work, too)
1 tbsp cambanzola and Danish blue cheese, mixed
1/2 cup purple potato, diced
1/2 cup purple cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup cremini mushroom, sliced
1/4 cup fennel, thinly sliced
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/4 cup green bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced
1 tsp dried cranberries
1/8 cup pear, chopped
1 tsp red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 tsp extra virgin olive oil

spices:

dried bay leaves
dried thyme
dried oregano
dried sage
dried coriander
chili powder
kosher salt
black pepper
a few fresh rosemary needles, finely chopped

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spread the pear and vegetables in a single layer on a foil-lined flat tray. Toss the produce in olive oil and sprinkle it with kosher salt, black pepper, and chopped rosemary. Put the tray in the oven, stirring the vegetables every ten minutes or so. Remove the vegetables after forty minutes, or when the onions look brown and the potatoes prove fork-tender.

In a saucepan on medium, heat the garlic and spices (but not the salt, rosemary, or bay leaves) in the olive oil. When the garlic and spices begin to smell, add the lentils and dried cranberries, and enough water or vegetable broth to cover them. Add the bay leaves Bring the water to a boil, cover the pot, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Let the lentils cook for twenty to thirty minutes, or until they absorb the broth or water. Wait to add kosher salt until the end of the lentils’ cooking time to avoid “toughening” the legumes.

Combine the roasted vegetables with the lentils. Add the red wine vinegar and give the mix a stir. Top the lentil salad with blue cheese, sit back, and taste purple (purple tastes good!).

This salad comes to around 279 calories.

Adzuki-Miso Soup with Mochi Dumplings

2008-01-16T10:28:00.000-04:00

This is my entry for The Well Seasoned Cook's Legume Love Affair.

As much as I like to talk about taking pleasure in eating alone, I admit that group-dining has advantages – extra mouths help move food from your fridge.

I wanted my New Year’s mochi gone from my fridge. I wanted an excuse to go back to the local Asian market. I needed to finish off some mushroom broth. My mother did not want to make dinner, and I took advantage.

The mochi gave me the idea. It only took a google search to learn that in traditional Japanese cuisine, mochi and adzuki beans make a terrific match, albeit for dessert. I figured “not Hamburger helper” would be a hard enough sell – I didn’t think my family would enjoy sweet beans. I opted to make another traditional soup, miso, and add adzuki beans and mochi.

How did it go? I did run into a magically-disappearing-pantry-supply snafu (my mother owes me kombu).

How did the soup go over? Except for my father, the family passed on the mochi dumplings (too weird) but enjoyed the miso. In my fathers words: “Your soup is good, Karyn.”

Only the tastebud-dead could hate this soup, with its flavorful leeks and shitake mushrooms suspended beneath a steaming, milky surface. For me, the mochi dumplings provided an addictive, one-bite, granular density, but the soup stands fine on its own.

My soup’s warm. It’s healthy. And today, I saw snow flurries – “wintery mix” weather conditions surely make a case for broth and dumplings!

Adzuki-Miso Soup with Mochi Dumplings

Makes around six one-cup servings.

Ingredients:

1 cup dried adzuki beans, cooked (around three cups)
1 cup dried mushrooms (save their soaking liquid)
1 large leek (around two cups sliced)
1/4 cup sweet white miso
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp ginger, minced
2 cups mushroom stock
2 cups water or vegetable broth
1/4 tsp toasted sesame oil
Juice from a lemon half
Without the mochi, 183 calories per cup
With 1/12 piece cut from a mochi package, 333

Soak the shitake mushrooms in warm water for twenty minutes.

In a large skillet, sauté the leeks, garlic, and ginger in the toasted sesame oil. I wanted the leeks soft and caramelized, so I let them brown, adding water when they started to stick. More oil would do the trick, too. I also added the juice from one half of a large lemon.

Dump the cooked beans, shitake mushrooms (in their soaking liquid), and leeks into a medium saucepan. Pour in the stock, broth, or liquid of your choice. Bring the soup up to a boil, reduce the heat, and let the soup simmer for ten to twenty minutes (or until you finish cleaning up after yourself).

Remove one cup of broth from the simmering soup. Add 1/4 cup of white miso to the broth, using a fork or whisk to make the miso dissolve. Pour the miso-broth back into the soup. Take care not boil the soup again.

You could probably cook the mochi dumplings in the soup, but this was a “there’s soup on the stove when you’re hungry” night, and I didn’t want the mochi overcooking. I boiled some water, cut the mochi into small squares, and cooked the mochi like gnocchi (I threw them into the water, waited for them to float, removed them to a plate using a slotted spoon).

To eat, ladle soup into a bowl or mug. Top with mochi dumplings. Sip, soothe, enjoy.

The Mini Pie Revolution Event #2 - Small Tarts Have Big Hearts

2008-01-15T14:49:00.000-04:00

It's Valentines in February. For some, it's a day to date. For many others, it's a day to sit around in pajamas eating popcorn and mourning the universe. For Anne of Redacted Recipes and myself, it's a day to bake "sweet" mini tarts. Mini tarts serve one person each, so they're perfect for couples and single twenty-something girls who wouldn't mind a bitty Valentine's Day pie.

Check out the rules here.

Curry-Stuffed Apple

2008-01-12T21:46:00.000-04:00

Somewhere, sometime, the once-novel curried apple became as humdrum as a baked potato. It’s a blog, recipe book, and grocery-store flier cliché, a modern aspic in a Jell-O Mold.

Taste buds don’t lie – apples do taste good with curry, Thai, Indian, or otherwise. But I eat curry with rice fairly often, and apple curry often enough. I wanted the same meal to feel different.

When you’re cooking for one, and using the same ingredients often, avoiding culinary boredom becomes crucial, less you give up and start settling for corn flakes. Changing a meal’s flavor profile works. So does changing a recipe’s shape.

Take an easy cheese polenta. Stuff it in a poblano pepper. Instant excitement! Ratatouille? In an hollowed eggplant, it becomes magical. Lentil stew in a pumpkin, walnuts and gorgonzola in a mushroom cap – the simplest meals become fantastic the minute you stuff one foodstuff within another. How else do you explain that, every Thanksgiving, we hear (again and again) about that blasted Turducken?

Back to apples in curry. Or curry in apples. Oh yes, it sounds better already.

I made some kalijira brown rice with sultanas, cashews, and curry powder. I sautéed leeks, mushrooms, and parsnips, added it to the rice, and spooned the mix into a Pink Lady Apple. Into the oven it went. I added kale and cauliflower to the leftover rice (I made enough to stuff several apples). Forty-five minutes later, I experienced bliss with a fork.

The creamy, sweet baked apple worked well with the nutty, buttery cashews, the aromatic and spicy rice. I ate fruits and vegetables and grains in a single meal. This single girl won’t be eating corn flakes for dinner anytime soon!

Curry-Stuffed Apple

Ingredients:

1 medium apple, cored
3 tbsp brown kalijira rice
1 tsp cashews, roasted
1/4 cup leek, sliced
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced
1/2 cup mushroom, sliced
1/2 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup kale, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp golden raisins
fresh mint
fresh parsley

spices:

curry powder
dried ginger
cinnamon
nutmeg
kosher salt
black pepper

Cook the kalijira brown rice as directed. Add golden raisins and curry powder.

Sauté the leeks and the garlic in olive oil or water. Add curry powder, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and black pepper. When the leeks brown, add the parsnips and mushrooms. Add the cooked vegetables to the rice. Add the cashews.

Stuff the rice mixture into the hollowed apple. Put it in a 400 degree oven for thirty-five to fifty-five minutes.

In the meantime, sauté the cauliflower and the kale. Add it to the remaining rice mixture.

To serve, spoon the curried rice into a bowl. Put the stuffed apple on top. Add chevre, yogurt, or chutney, if desired. Garnish with chopped mint and parsley. I think the stuffed apple would also be good with curried coconut rice or peanuts instead of cashews.

This meal is skinny-jean friendly at 338 calories.

Simple Soup (Mushroom-Lentil-Barley Soup)

2008-01-08T18:56:00.000-04:00

Back in my Girl Scout Days, my mother and I decided to attend a mother-daughter weekend camp-out. The camp would provide our other meals, but we were expected to brown-bag our first dinner. "What do you want to bring?" Mom asked my child self.

"What are my choices?"

"Anything you want."

We might have drawn a few stares when Mom pulled out shrimp and chocolate mousse cheesecake from her industrial-strength picnic cooler, but Mom and I ate happier than the other girls with their PB&J.

I offer the memory as evidence - when it comes to food, I’m almost pathologically complicated. I might use simple techniques, but my ingredient lists tend to run on, and on, and on. Why roast just brussel sprouts when I can toss them with fennel, pineapple, apple, cauliflower, kohlrabi, tomato, and quince? Why use black pepper and salt, when I also own coriander, cumin, garam masala, panch phoran, and Chinese Five Spice?

But sometimes simple food trumps the fancy-pants stuff. This simple staple-food soup warms the soul, fills the stomach, and takes little innovation to create. In other words, it makes for the perfect I’m-tired-I’m-hungry-and-I-want-to-eat-NOW dinner.

I sautéed garlic and olive oil, cooked some barley and lentils, and added soaked dried mushrooms with their broth. The result tasted soothing and warm. The earthy lentils and chewy barley satisfied my need to eat with my teeth, while the flavor-rich broth provided ample excuse to slurp from my spoon.

My simple soup makes for a meal I will eat again and again. Though next time I might add kale, or tomatoes, or bread, or kidney beans, or tabasco, or peaches, or Cheerios . . . .

Simple Soup (Mushroom-Lentil-Barley Soup)

Serves me.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp pearl barley
2 tbsp lentils
1/4 cup dried wild mushrooms
1 cup cremini mushrooms
1/4 cup onion
1 clove garlic
1/4 tsp extra virgin olive oil

spices:

black pepper
kosher salt
thyme
oregano

Rinse the dried mushrooms and soak them in warm water for twenty minutes.
Heat the olive oil on medium-low heat in a small saucepan. Sauté the onions and the garlic until the onions turn translucent and start to brown. add the salt, pepper, thyme, and oregano.

Add the barley and masoor dal. Stir the dal and the barley in the onions and garlic until the grains and seeds begin to toast. Pour the dried mushrooms and their broth into the saucepan.

Let the soup simmer, uncovered, for twenty minutes to a half hour, until the barley proves tender and the lentils begin to break down. Stir in the fresh mushrooms and let them brown. Add water or broth as necessary.

Ladle your seat into a bowl, grab your spoon, and take stock of the simple things.

The soup contains around 247 calories.

Ugly Baby Curry

2008-01-05T14:53:00.000-04:00

Watch any cooking show, read any cook book, and you’ll hear the old adage, “We eat with our eyes first.” This might prove true - Bobby Flay managed to popularize the lowly squirt bottle, and mothers everywhere garnish their meatloafs with parsley and ketchup – anything to achieve gorgeous “presentation.”

But if we’re speaking in clichés, it’s worthwhile to remember the one about plain brown wrappers – this curry comes in the plainest, brownest wrapper you'll want to eat.

I (more or less) started making Ugly Baby Curry this summer, when I first discovered the D.C. FreshFarm Markets and the striated baby eggplants sold there. Sure, my summer curry didn’t contain butternut squash or brussel sprouts, but the idea – onions, tomatoes, and masoor dal stuffed into baby or Thai eggplants – remains more or less the same, and more delicious with each tasting.

I might love this curry, but my camera sure doesn't. Here’s the picture I took this summer:

My photography has improved, but rest assured that my Ugly Baby Curry looks as bad as ever. Yesterday, as I photographed my eggplant arrangement . . . .

My sister, Ashley: Why are you photographing your food?

Me: It’s what I do (yes, I’m still in the food-blog closet). You have to admit it looks . . . awful.

Ashley: Yeah, I was just about to say, why would you record having made that.

But take one bite, and Ugly Baby Curry will win you over – it delights the taste buds even as it assaults the eye. The lentil stew tastes sweet, slightly spicy. The eggplant creates a pleasing creaminess, complimenting the forbidden rice’s al dente “bite.” The raisins provided a plump, chewy sweetness. I love this curry so hard, even if it takes some willful blindness to enjoy.

Ugly Baby Curry

Serves one.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp black rice
2 tbsp masoor dal
3 Thai eggplant
1/2 cup crushed tomatoes
1/4 cup kohlrabi, finely chopped
1/4 cup brussel sprouts, halved
1/4 cup butternut squash, finely chopped
1/4 cup spinach, frozen and chopped
1/4 cup onion, finely chopped
1 tsp golden raisins
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 inch ginger, minced

spices:

equal amounts:
coriander
fenugreek
cumin

a pinch:
panch phoron
cloves
cardamom
red pepper flakes
cinnamon

Cook the black rice according to the package directions.

In a nonstick skillet on medium-high heat, cook the spices, onion, ginger, and garlic. Add the kohlrabi. When the onions turn translucent, add the squash and the halved brussel sprouts. Wait until the squash starts to turn tender, then add the raisins, tomato sauce, and the lentils. Cover the lentils with water. Cook them until they start to fall apart, adding more water when needed. Let the lentil mixture become thick.

Slice an “x” into each eggplant. Using a spoon, fill each eggplant with the lentil-tomato mixture. Put the eggplant in the skillet, cover the skillet, and let them cook until they’re fork-tender, around fifteen minutes. Stir spinach and parsley into the curry.

Spoon the rice into a bowl. Top with the eggplant and lentils. Garnish with italian parsley, Thai basil, or cilantro. Herbs won’t help the curry look any better, but they taste good.

This comes to around 320 ugly calories.

Winter Tabbouleh

2008-01-02T19:07:00.000-04:00

So you haven't heard of tabbouleh? Well, it's time to get out from underneath you rock and start chopping mint and parsley.

Tabbouleh, a Middle-Eastern bulgur wheat salad containing onion, tomato, parsley, lemon juice, and mint, seems as common in grocery stores and deli counters as chopsticks in China. Good tabbouleh, however, means summer tabbouleh. Simple meals require high-quality ingredients, and nothing tastes better than tabbouleh made with fresh-picked tomatoes and herbs.

I would love to live in a Mediterranean climate, but for now I'm stuck in Maryland, a state with growing seasons. In December, tomatoes remain a distant memory. My herb patch looks muddy and bare. Does this mean that I must wait until summer to eat tabbouleh? Or that I should shell out eight dollars for its pre-packaged approximation?

I think not! No, pineapple, pinenuts, and brussel sprouts don't appear in traditional tabbouleh, but after tasting my winter tabbouleh, I think the regular dish could use some fennel.

My winter tabbouleh proves a winter produce extravaganza. Celeriac, fennel, brussel sprouts, sweet potato, green pepper, and mushrooms roast to carmelized effect. Pomegranate molasses nods to tabbouleh's Middle-Eastern origins. Dried persimmons, dates, and golden raisins provide sweetness, raw pineapple and mint create a brightening acidity. I topped my winter tabbouleh with chevre, but feta or yogurt-cheese would create a similar creamy contrast.

With Christmas gone, and nothing to celebrate until spring, winter starts to feel less magical, more dreary. Luckily, this bulgur salad, with its winter vegetables and herbal freshness, makes even the dampest day seem just a little bit sunnier.

Winter Tabbouleh

Serves one.

3 tbsp bulgur
1 tbsp goat cheese
1 tbsp pinenuts, toasted
1/3 cup portabello mushroom cap, sliced
1/4 cup sweet potato or winter squash
1/4 cup brussel sprouts
1/4 cup celeriac
1/4 cup fennel
1/4 cup onion
1/4 cup green bell pepper
1/4 cup fresh pineapple
1/4 cup fresh mint
1/4 cup fresh italian parsley
1 tbsp fresh rosemary
1/8 tsp hazelnut oil
1 tsp golden raisins
2 dates, seeded and chopped
1 slice dried persimmon, chopped
1/4 tsp pomegranate molassas

spices:

corainder
garlic salt
red pepper flakes
fenugreek
cinnamon
paprika
allspice
tumeric

400 calories

Preheat the onion to 400 degrees.

Line a baking pan with foil. Pour oil on the foil. Add the chopped vegetables and the rosemary to the pan. Stir them around in the oil. Dust the vegetables with the spices (except the tumeric) in roughly equal amounts. Stir the vegetables every ten minutes or so for forty minutes, or until the sweet potato and celeriac prove fork-tender.

Put the bulgur in a saucepan. Add the spices (include the tumeric) to taste. Cook the bulgur according to the package directions. Add the roasted vegetables to the cooked bulgur. Stir in the pineapple, pinenuts, mint, and parsley. Top with chevre or feta.

New year, new foods

2008-01-01T22:14:00.000-04:00

“I think that unadventurous eaters are unadventurous in life,” said Becky, my former college roommate.

I later learned that Becky practiced anorexia and bulimia. She went on a “vegan” all-pear diet whenever she thought her face looked “too puffy.” When I returned to our room, Becky never asked me how my day went, or what was said in class, or whether or not I met a cute boy at the organic food co-op.

Becky sat primly at the end of my bed, folding her hands in her lap. “So, Karyn,” she said, “Tell me what you ate today.”

“Uh, a salad,” I stammered. “With a pita and hummus.”

“Pitas have a lot of calories, Karyn.”

My point? Becky probably feared food on a more fundamental level than most. And yet, she firmly believed that what you ate reflected your approach to life. Boring eaters, in Becky’s book, were boring people. And many kitchen professionals would agree with Becky.

Television hosts and authors make their case clear: unless you’re willing to eat bull testes and guinea pig brains, your life is not worth the offal that should fuel you. Food allergies? Excuses for hypochondriacs. Intolerances? Entirely psychosomatic. Vegans? Soulless plant killers without palates.

If you are what you eat, then you had better be a culinary Evel Knievel, and your food stunts better center around meat – the intestines and eyeballs and tongues (or entire bodies) of calves, lambs, and ortolans.

But does a plant-based diet guarantee limited variety? Are all vegetarians health-nuts, avoiding all but the blandest foods? Do vegans deaden their taste buds with tofu boiled three times a day? Do all omnivores really eat without fear?

My mother, sister, and brother all eat meat. They also all prove picky eaters. My mother hates a long list of fruits, vegetables, and spices. My sister hates seafood – she only likes chicken prepared in conventional ways - roasted, grilled, or baked into pot pies. My brother won’t eat a non-candy meal unless it contains bacon, beef, or both. So who’s soulless and without a palate? The people who eat pre-frozen fish sticks and crinkle-cut fries, or the person who savors things like teff and roasted vegetables with white beans and fresh chevre?

Now, what we eat may say something about us – but what it says might prove unexpected. My brother, sister, and mother all have cautious personalities. They don’t jaywalk, go to ethnic restaurants, or buy toys from China.

And yet, when someone hears that I don't eat meat, they often assume that I live on tofu and baby carrots, that I’m boring and bland and own five cats. The first question they ask? “What do you eat?” When I ask them that same question, most people respond, “Good food. Chicken, potatoes, and macaroni.” Mashed potatoes? Really? Look out, Andrew Zimmern. One woman told me, “I could never go vegetarian. I like food too much.” So as a mostly-vegetarian, I must hate food. Or is meat the only food that counts?

I don’t hate food. I dislike bad food. I do not sample the factory-manufactured “pastries” they sell at my workplace. I don’t eat Oreos (which are vegan), but I’ll happily bake up fresh chocolate chip cookies or biscotti. I disdain Swiss Miss, but I’ll pull out my espresso machine and steam milk for 70% hot cocoa on any cold winter’s night. You couldn’t stop me from trying Ethiopian honey wine or an authentic Spanish tapa, should I ever travel beyond the D.C. suburbs.

People choose to eat foods for different reasons. My sister, for example, experienced food-related migraines as a child. Her first food experiences did not go follow the usual equation : cheddar cheese (or chocolate, citrus, cream, MSG) = good. She learned chocolate = good + forty-eight hours of excruciating pain. So I understand why she hesitated to try falafel, a dish she now loves. When food leads to pain, you learn to distrust foods you don’t know.

It’s easy to see why people evolved both picky and indiscriminating palates. If you’re willing to eat anything, you’re less likely to starve. If you avoid new foods, you’re less likely to die from experimenting with sautéed nightshade on penne. But there has to be a “happy” medium between the human garbage disposal and the person who eats only crustless Wonderbread sandwiches.

Try new foods – providing you don’t have food allergies, the worst possibility is a bad bite. That’s what napkins and dogs are for.

Today I listed the new foods I’ve tried since September:

Produce: apple bananas, dragon fruit, kohlrabi (bulbs and greens), quince, figs, winter squash (blue hubbard, carnival, delicata, cushaw, kabocha), swiss chard, mushrooms (chanterelle, beech, oyster), fairy tale eggplant, apples (Honeycrisp, Mutsu, Jonagold, Lady), Asian pears, baby bok choy, leeks, fresh papaya, parsnip, lychee (in a sorbet), pomegranate, Thai basil, celeriac, persimmon.

Proteins: masoor dal, moong dal, puy lentils, beluga lentils, chestnuts, almond butter, fish sauce, and garlic black bean sauce.

Dairy: Goats’ milk yogurt, applewood smoked mozzarella, cambazola cheese, panquehue cheese, sheeps’ milk feta, goats’ milk feta, goats’ milk yogurt.

Grains/ Pastas: teff, kasha, bulgur wheat, Israeli couscous, steel-cut oatmeal, rice paper, vermicelli noodles, kalijira rice, mochi, wheat berries.

Other things: dried shitake mushrooms, goji berries, pomegranate molasses, roasted hazelnut oil, macadamia nut oil, and Thai green chili paste.

When I went pescetarian (for compelling reasons that I will not discuss here), I didn’t know an eggplant from a poblano pepper. Since then, I have experimented with many different grains, spices, whole foods. If I see something new, I try it. Along the way, I have discovered terrific flavors, textures, colors. No, I’m not about to devour venison rectums in brown butter sauce , but I see every meal as a chance to “play with my food” – to experience and learn and (hopefully) taste something that rocks my world.

It’s a new year – pursue the new!

The Mini Pie Revolution: The Results!

2007-12-31T21:01:00.000-04:00

In an article published not-so-long-ago in the New York Times, respected New York University professor Marion Nestle said something to make this girl's heart stop:

". . . in the modern age, the cupcake may be more American than apple pie -- ''because nobody is baking apple pies."

The article went on to explain why cupcakes prove popular - they're cute, they're small, they're portable, they're easy, everybody gets one . . . .

Reading that, you'd think that chocolate chip cookies take hours in the oven, or that brownies prove as difficult as puff pastry, or that pies can only satisfy a crowd.

Well, I'm here to tell you that pies cook up as easily as cupcakes, and with the same cute, one-person appeal. Want proof? Check out the Mini Pie Revolutionaries, the bold bakers who took a stand against the bland cupcake, who reclaimed muffin tins everywhere in the name of mini pies!

Looking at the results, you'll see savory pies, sweet pies, vegan pies, fois gras pies, American pies, British mince pies, and Peruvian peanut-butter fudge pies . . . there's even an apple pie or two in the mix. Marion Nestle, the proof's in the pudding - cough - pie: it's time to eat your words!

Thanks to everyone who participated, and to Anne of Redacted Recipes, I'm more of a theoretical Revolutionary - Anne's the one who makes things happen! Give her kudos, and many, many mini pies!

And do stay tuned. We're planning a Valentines Day event called Mini Tarts Have Big Hearts - it promises to be a blast!

Let's make 2008 the year of mini pies!

Soba Cha Ochazuke (Kasha-Tea Soup)

2007-12-28T19:48:00.000-04:00

Normally, I fear restaurants with too many items on the menu. Kung pao chicken with mozzarella sticks or onion rings on the side? I’ll pass and maybe call the health inspector. But when my boss proposed that we lunch at Teaism, a D.C.-based many-menu-items chain, she mentioned a dish called “ochazuke.” “It’s salmon and rice,” she said. “And then you pour green tea over it to make a soup.”

Green tea soup? Count me in!

I can’t say anything about Teaism’s naan, scones, lentil stew, or tofu scramble, but the Plum Ochazuke does make for a novel, filling meal. Panera-style, you exchange money for a ticket number, the ticket number for a tray. You sit down with a large bowl full of rice, vegetables, fish, or beef, depending on your order, and a teapot filled with sencha green tea. You pour the tea into the bowl, stir in wasabi and soy sauce, and call it a meal.

Traditionally, Japanese diners make ochazuke with white rice and green tea. Common ingredients include salmon, pickled plum, dried seaweed, salted fish, and rice crackers. But the basic ochazuke formula (grain + topping + tea = ochazuke) seems endlessly adaptable. Plum tea soup with arborio rice? Thai shrimp and jasmine rice in ginger tea? Millet and red rooibos, teff and honeybush? The soup can be as creative and as versatile as your grocery store's tea section allows.

My sister gave me a loose-leaf teapot for Christmas, but no tea. So after lunch, I went to the Teaism shop for tisanes. Soba cha – a Japanese buckwheat tea – caught my attention. I bought four ounces, took it home, and combined it with kasha to make a buckwheat-infused soup.

My soba cha ochazuke makes for an easy, comforting, one-dish meal. Black beans and winter squash, a common combination, receive an Asian-inspired twist: black soy beans, kabocha squash, and baby bok-choy make for a colorful, calcium-rich meal. The soba cha creates a light, sweet, semi-addictive broth: this is one soup that makes me wish I owned larger bowls!

Soba Cha Ochazuke

Serves one.

3 tbsp kasha
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp black soy beans
1/2 cup kabocha squash, baked and cubed
1 baby bok choy, stems and leaves
1/2 cup mushrooms
1/4 cup leek
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 inch ginger, minced
2 dates, seeded and chopped (optional)
1 tsp soy sauce (or to taste)
1 tsp wasabi (or to taste)
1 cup soba cha tea

Brew the soba cha tea according to the package directions.

Put the kasha in a saucepan on medium-low heat. Add the garlic and olive oil. Stir the kasha and garlic in the olive oil until the kasha begins to brown. Add water to the kasha, cover the saucepan, turn the heat to “low,” and let the kasha cook for ten to fifteen minutes, or until the kasha absorbs the water. Add the chopped dates.

In a nonstick skillet, sauté the leeks with garlic until the leeks brown. Then add the kabocha squash. Add the bok choy’s stem. When the bok choy becomes tender, add the mushrooms and the black soy beans. After the mushrooms brown, add the bok choy leaves. When the leaves turn bright green and begin to wilt, remove the skillet from the heat.

Combine the kasha and the vegetables in a bowl. Pour one cup of soba cha tea over the kasha. Add wasabi paste and soy sauce to taste.

This comes to around 270 calories.

Didn't-Make-it-to-The-Derby Mini Pies

2007-12-24T21:25:00.000-04:00

I baked these in the name of the Mini Pie Revolution (the best part about being a Revolutionary Leader? I don't have to follow my own deadlines! Plus, y'know, pie).

I may live below the Mason Dixon, but I hail from Massachusetts. I take oatmeal, not grits, for my morning porridge. I prefer my sun tea sans sugar, and I cook my greens in olive oil instead of pork fat. Still, I have to admit that Southerners do know their way around two things: Thoroughbred horses and baked desserts.

True story: when two family friends toured the Kentucky countryside, they happened across an ornate mansion. Thinking that they had found a unique, Civil-War-era Southern home, they stopped to photograph the building. Mid-snapshot, a groom lead two horses out of the "mansion'"s doors – the women had been admiring a horse barn.

The animals housed in such luxury represent the best in breeding, money, and luck. Should a Thoroughbred chip a nail, Kentucky's home to a state-of-the-art equine hospital. The horses eat fifty-dollar-a-bale organic, imported alfalfa (horsey fois gras). Horse dentists keep Thoroughbreds' teeth in better condition than most human Kentuckians'. In short, if you're considering reincarnation, you might want to consider the pampered-racehorse lifestyle.

But most Thoroughbreds live less pristine lives. They race in low-grade stakes or claiming races. They might make money for their owners for a few years, before they're retired at age five. They might fail on the track, in which case they're sold as hunter-jumper prospects, or put into rescues, or sold into less savory circumstances.

My horse, Flash, was one such failed racehorse. He turf-raced in Florida with some success, failed to run on Pennsylvania dirt, and ended up with me and my dreams of 3-Day Eventing glory. We never accomplished much in the arena. I lacked money, and Flash likes to find injury-causing trouble, so I spent more on grain and vet bills than riding lessons and entry fees. But Flash taught me a lot, and I love him a lot, and that seems worth more than ribbons.

The Kentucky Derby has its own pie, a copyrighted concoction of a torte-like chocolate, bourbon, and chopped pecan filling in a short crust shell. It's sweet, thick, and rich. I don't really like it. Sure, the chocolate-booze combo shows potential, but why mar the mess with so many overly-sweet pecans?

Flash, and the loser-horses like him, deserve miniature pies (they're in the small time, after all). Walnuts might not taste as sweet as pecans, or victory in the winner's circle, but combined with 62% bittersweet chocolate and Kentucky bourbon, they create what can only be described as a winning combination.

Didn't-Make-it-to-The-Derby Mini Pies

Makes 12 small pies (It would've made more if I had not overfilled my pie shells).

Ingredients:

12 mini pie shells (recipe here)
1/2 cup melted, unsalted butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup plus 1/2 cup semisweet or dark chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups walnuts, chopped
2 tablespoons Kentucky Bourbon

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Melt the butter in the microwave. Let the butte cool, just enough so that it's not piping hot. Crack two eggs into a bowl. Slowly add a little bit of the melted butter into the eggs. Beat the eggs and butter together with a fork. Continue to slowly add the melted butter to the eggs, and keep beating the eggs and butter together until they combine.

In a separate bowl, stir the flour, salt, and sugar together in a bowl. Add the flour mixture to the eggs and butter. Beat the mixture into a dough. Add the bourbon.

In double boiler, melt one cup of chocolate chips. Slowly add the melted chocolate to the dough. Whisk everything together until the dough becomes a uniform color. Fold in the chopped walnuts and the remaining chocolate chips.

Spoon the chocolate filling into the pie shells. Bake at 350 degrees for thirty minutes, or until a toothpick slides cleanly from the pies' centers. Soothe your disappointment with mini pie and bourbon-whipped cream.

Snazzy Snowballs

2007-12-24T12:42:00.000-04:00

I'm entering this in Food Blogga's Eat Christmas Cookies Event.

Everyone has a food vice – a not-so-healthy foodstuff that they can't leave alone. Some people lean towards salty snacks like potato chips and beer-battered cheesy fries. Others desire sweets like Baci balls and Shrek-colored Snickers. Whatever the food vice, it defies moderation. Eaters consume their vices' bags, bottles, and tins in single sittings.

What can't I keep from eating? Around cakes and cookies, I'm safe. I might nibble a bit around corners, my finger might find itself dipped in a little frosting, for quality-control purposes, but I'm usually happy to savor a single sweet treat. Around salty, greasy snacks, I retain self-control. But around nuts? Around almonds, pistachios, walnuts, and filberts? I'm an addict. I crave dry roasted peanuts. I consider cashews god-derived ambrosia. Pinenuts make me swoon.

But what if I could make the ultimate nut? What if I could combine almonds, cashews, walnuts, and coconuts into a round little nibble? What if I threw in cranberries and dates, just to keep things seasonal?

Christmas provided me the perfect excuse to bring out my food processor. I have a raw vegan coworker. So far as food choices go, well, to each their own. But I'm not about to exclude a friend from my Ultimate Christmas Calorie Give Away. I've baked Russian teacakes, chocolate chip cookies, gingerbread cookies, sugar cookies, and biscotti. Throwing a few raw vegan "cookies" on the plate didn't seem a hardship.

I turned to the posters at the postpunkkitchen. One person told me to pulse dried fruit (sticky) with ground nuts or seeds (tasty) to make healthy, raw "cookies" with the sweet appeal of their baked brethren.

I measured equal parts cashews, walnuts, and almonds into a food processor, added flax seeds, craisins, and dates, and pulsed the mess together until I created a "dough."

I made twenty little balls. I rolled them in coconut. The result? If you like nuts, you'll find it tough to leave these Snazzy Snowballs alone. One nibble tastes like almonds, the next reveals walnuts' greater presence. After you pinch a bite off for yourself, you can roll the cookie back into a ball. No one will notice if the snowballs don't look completely uniform . . . .

Snazzy Snowballs

Makes twenty "cookies" - the perfect addition to a butter-laden office cookie plate!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup raw cashews
1/4 cup raw walnuts
1/4 cup raw almonds
1 tbsp flax seeds (I used whole flax seeds, thinking my food processor would grind them. It didn't. Use ground if you have them)
1/3 cup whole dates
1/4 cup dried cranberries
Dried, unsweetened coconut for rolling

If your food processor isn't so powerful, put the nuts in a Ziploc bag. Hit the bag with a rolling pin until they break into small pieces.

Put the nuts and the flax seeds in the food processor. Grind them into a course meal. Add the (pitted) dates and the dried cranberries. Pulse until the mix starts to come together. If the dough feels too crumbly to roll, add more dates. If it's too sticky, add more nuts.

Roll the nut-fruit mixture into one-inch balls. Roll them in coconut. Eat up!

Christmas Carnage (Cookies!)

2007-12-23T19:55:00.001-04:00

What the heck, I'm entering this in Food Blogga's Eat Christmas Cookies Event.

According to movie Babe, Christmas means carnage. I'm going to modify that phrase: Christmas means cookie carnage.

Cookie carnage can mean one of two things. First, cookie carnage can happen when you bake cookies, and everybody eats them, and loves them, and rips apart the poor baked darlings until plates everywhere are littered with naught but crumbs.

When she heard that I wanted a penguin cookie cutter, the (amazing, generous, wonderful) french tart mailed me a lovely little metal penguin. I should name him Adam because, miraculously, he's fathered many penguin cookies this Christmas. But even Adam's prolific breeding can't create a sustainable penguin cookie population.

Gingerbread Penguin Cookies

Notice that some of the male gingerbread penguins have chicks. Nevertheless, global warming and looming predators spell doom for these cookies . . . .

Penguin Sugar Cookies

Notice that even my, er, not-so-professional decorating skills can't keep penguin cookies from looking cute. And edible. I just decorated these little guys this evening and already, their population's pretty much decimated (I did preserve a few in a zoological park, which will lose its funding (and be presented to my coffee shop coworkers) on Christmas.

I also made tiny chocolate chip cookies (pictured below) using the family recipe. They're always among the quickest cookies to go.

Cookie Carnage

The second kind of cookie carnage happens when you try to bake cookies, but something goes horribly and inexplicably wrong. The cookies burn, or poof into shapeless blobs, or dissolve into nothingness when you transfer them from baking pan to cooling rack. And I have to confess: I've seen horrible Type 2 cookie carnage this Christmas.

I've loved Russian teacakes since I was a little girl, when my mother, considering my sister's unexplainable nut-hatred, baked them without walnuts ("They're Christmas snowballs," she said, as I picked up a delicate, sugary round). To this day, only a butter-ball recreates my childhood belief in Christmas magic – I always eat a Russian teacake with eggnog or cocoa on Christmas Eve. In the morning, I wake up bubbly and ready to open stockings.

I always bake Russian teacakes, but I don't always make them correctly. This year, my first batch spread into a crumbly, baking sheet-sized, inedible wafer. But why? The answer is simple and sad : I mistakenly trusted a recipe.

For Russian teacakes, I turn to Betty Crocker. Betty Crocker, however, has questionable motives: after all, if she gives us recipes that we can make ourselves, we might just stop buying that blasted Funfetti. Her cookbook therefore contains enough duds to keep us buying "backup" cake and cookie mixes.

There's nothing wrong with the Betty Crocker cookbook's ingredient list. You might need to add a little flour, depending on your measuring cups, but for the most part, Betty gives you the correct proportions. Her directions, however, cause Christmas cookie carnage. And not the good kind.

Betty tells you to use room-temperature butter. The problem? Russian teacakes need to be rolled. Just as an experiment, I'm going to suggest that you find some room temperature butter, cut it into pieces, and attempt to roll it into bite-sized balls. What will happen? Well, the butter will stick to (and moisturize) your hands. No cookie-shaped things will ever form.

So here's Betty Crocker's Russian teacake recipe, with my instructions. Hopefully, my post will prevent bad cookie carnage everywhere. At least until I attempt macaroons . . .

Betty Crocker's Russian Teacakes

Makes four dozen cookies.

(My edition of the book calls them a 'favorite with men.' I insist that Russian teacake-appreciation knows no gender).

Ingredients:

1 cup butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (I used somewhere between 2 1/2 cups to 2 3/4 cups)
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup chopped walnuts
Extra powdered sugar for rolling

You have two choices. You can either use room temperature butter, then stick your dough in the freezer for an hour or so, or you can use your butter straight from the refrigerator. I go for option two – a KitchenAid mixer can make any dough come together!

Anyway:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Mix the butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla together.

In a separate bowl, fluff the flour and salt together with a fork. Stir it into the butter, sugar, and vanilla. When the dough comes together, add the chopped walnuts.

Roll the dough into one-inch balls. If the butter was cold, it might take a little extra rolling. You want smooth dough-balls – they shouldn't feel rough or choppy. Notice the dough's texture. If the dough feels like, well, butter, you probably need more flour. To make sure, test bake one or two cookies. If they become pancakes, not snowballs, add a quarter-cup of flour. After adding the flour, you should feel a textural difference in the dough. Try to remember how the right dough "feels."

Set the dough-balls a couple of inches apart on a baking sheet. Cook them for eight to twelve minutes (my cookies baked in eight, Betty says ten to twelve). Wait for the cookies to set, but do not let them brown. At all.

Let the cookies cool for a few minutes (if you try to handle them right away, they will crumble into dust). Roll the cookies in powdered sugar while they are still warm. Let the cookies cool, then roll them in powdered sugar again.

Set the Russian teacakes on a plate with eggnog nearby. Let the (good) cookie carnage begin!

Almond Alfredo

2007-12-18T19:16:00.000-04:00

This is my last-minute entry for HotM 10 – Quick and Easy.

Confession: When I stayed in Rome, I skipped the trip to Alfredo’s, the birthplace of the fettucini dish so popular on Olive Garden menus. I didn’t refuse Alfredo’s for health reasons, or because I don’t like starch and fat. I visited Italy during a cold, cold winter – I sampled many cheesy, salty, starchy dishes, from eggplant parmesan to ribolleta to gnocchi drowned in walnut-gorgonzola goodness. No, I passed on Alfredo’s because I didn’t want fettucini alfredo. I’ve never really been a fan.

Still, when you’re sick, and hungry, and cold, and grumpy from a day spent swiping gift cards into a temperamental register, it’s hard to deny that fat plus noodles equals good. And fat plus noodles can prove quick to prepare and mindless to cook, exactly the kind of dinner holiday stress and a busy schedule require.

The basic process:

Cook udon noodles, check.

Put vegetables in the oven and let them do their thing, check.

Thin almond butter in a skillet, check.

Mix everything together. Dinner, check.

My almond alfredo’s only looks like fettucini alfredo. It’s vegan, actually – there’s not a bit of cheese involved in its making. But the texture’s pretty similar, and it hits “the (creamy, fatty) spot” smack-dab between the eyes. Yes, almonds contain fat. But almond fat’s a bit heart-healthier than that saturated stuff from Bessie – it can even improve cardiovascular health. In adding fruit and vegetables to my pasta, I also added vitamins, calcium, and fiber. My almond alfredo pleased my stomach, and my heart has no reason to complain. Not bad for a half-hour spent on a pre-holiday dinner.

Now if I can just leave those one-pound butter Russian teacakes alone . . . .

Almond Alfredo

Serves one.

Ingredients:

1 ounce (1/2 cup cooked) udon noodles (or any long noodle)
1 1/2 tsp roasted almond butter
1 tbsp sliced almonds, toasted
1 tbsp plain soymilk (I used Silk)
1 cup brussel sprouts, halved
1/2 cup small cremini mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup apple, cubed
1/4 cup delicata squash, cubed
1/4 cup fennel, sliced
1/4 cup leek, sliced into rounds
1 tbsp parsnip, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced

spices:

cinnamon
nutmeg
salt
black pepper

Cook and drain the pasta.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put the vegetables in the oven on a foil-lined pan. Dust them with spices. Coat them in a small amount of oil or you can be like me, not care, and just dry-roast the suckers. Do stir the vegetables every ten minutes for twenty-thirty minutes. When the vegetables and apple are fork-tender, remove them from the oven.

In a small, nonstick saucepan over low heat, heat up one half teaspoon almond butter. Add the soy milk and whisk the almond butter and the soy milk together until they combine into an even mixture. Taste the mix, if you want a stronger almond flavor, add almond butter one teaspoon at a time until the sauce tastes right. Dump the cooled noodles into the skillet with the almond butter. Add the slivered almonds. Toss everything together. You could stop here. But if you want a one-dish dinner, add the roasted vegetables and apple to the noodles. Stir everything together, put your almond alfredo in a bowl, sit in a comfortable chair, and enjoy your dinner.

This comes to around 291 calories, so it's not so bad for your thighs, either.

Ethics on the side

2007-12-14T09:08:00.000-04:00

When I try to remember Grandpa, I see glimpses, dash-like imageries. Blue eyes. Large ears. He called me "Niblet," which I hated, and "Buttercup," which I loved. I remember, with almost photographic clarity, that he drove his red tractor in front of the farmhouse and asked me if I wanted a ride. But I, at age six, and tired from a trip to BJs with my mother, wanted juice and cookies more than a three miles-per-hour race around the cornfield. I remember the sun shining on the tractor, the thirst clawing at my throat. I can't see Grandpa's face, in that memory, or in any other.

In a child's mine, supernatural is as supernatural does. Jesus might save Grandpa, but so might good behavior or the larger piece of a wishbone. I remember praying to God and wishing on stars: let Grandpa live. Make his cancer go away.

Grandpa died, in a hospital, of lung cancer, when I was seven. He had smoked in his youth, as had all men his age, but had given up the practice when things like "surgeon general warnings" came out. He lived a farmer's life, healthy, hard, and active. My mother said, "I think it was those chemicals he used, on plants, before he knew they were bad."

Grandpa raised cows on his dairy farm in upstate, New York. And yes, he acted pragmatically, and according to the best knowledge of his day. A cow that couldn't produce milk couldn't be kept. He sprayed his plants with chemicals that no doubt leached into the ground, and weakened songbird eggshells, and maybe killed him. But Grandpa respected the animals he raised, the animals his family depended on.

Growing up, my mother drank whole, raw milk every day. Everyone did. No one worried about antibiotics in the milk. The cows ate grass all day, every day, during the summer. In the winter, they ate the corn and hay Grandpa grew himself. They roamed outside until the temperature dropped too low – they only camped in the barn to avoid frostbite.

No healthy cow received medicine, and Grandpa promptly removed any sick cow from the milk supply. He milked the cows only twice a day, unlike some farmers, who tried to increase their yield with three milkings. "He said it would be too hard on the cows," says my mother, the glow of Daddy-worship in her dark eyes, "The health of the cows always came first."

My sister's best friend in middle school, a whiplash farm girl, who admonished us for drinking one percent milk (you're starving the farmers! they're paid for butterfat!), was horrified to hear that my sister and I, as children, would run into the dairy barn and pour unpasteurized milk straight from the cooler. "You never do that! It's dangerous!"

Sometime between the early and the late 1990s, dairy farming had changed. The dairy product changed along with it. The milk my mother drank, from grass-fed cows, contained Vitamin D, Omega 3, and calcium. Today, if milk contains Vitamin D and Omega 3 acids, they were probably added to the milk sometime during its manufacture. And milk is manufactured now, in dairy farms run like factories. Cows remain inside. They're fed corn or soy mixed with chicken fat (chickens, in turn, eat cows), bovine growth hormones, and antibiotics, without which they couldn't survive.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "cow fan." I'm not about to wax poetically about the beauty and brains of the noble bovine. They are, for the most part, dull, stubborn, head-butting, and kicking creatures. But it does seem to me that the modern dairy industry has tried to make an animal into a cog, a tiny wheel helping to power a big machine. And while I'm not about to deny that having food is good, it seems that the more we ignore the truth – a cow is an animal, designed by Nature, and meant to live in a certain way – the more we hurt the cows, our environment, and ourselves.

A few years ago, in Western Maryland, you couldn't look at the landscape without seeing a cow. A dairy farm even surrounded my high school – and let me tell you how special that made damp, spring mornings, when scents clung to the air in a visible mist. Now, there are one or two independent farms left. Most of the land has gone to developers. My sister's old friend? Even her family's industrial methods could not sustain them. They now farm pumpkins and Christmas trees – things the neighbors won't complain about. Farmers have everything stacked against them – communities don't want them nearby, government subsidies ensure they work without profit, and Higher Powers, in the form of droughts, floods, and storms, hurt their yields.

Others understand the issues better than I, and write better about them. But my question is: how do I respect farmers, like my Grandpa, and their right to make a living, while rejecting the industrial agricultural model?

As a thrifty college student, I simply gave up meat – I've never liked it, and I couldn't afford the organic-grass fed stuff. But what about dairy products? If I buy what I can afford (organic products from large producers), do I hurt the independent farmer? If I reject dairy all together, do I hurt the farmers who, like my Grandpa, respect their animals and their land?

Should I buy local, even if it's not organic? When it comes to produce, I try to buy local – I can wash off pesticides, and the product's always better. The issues becomes more complicated when animals are involved. Does the local dairy farmer give his cows hormones and antibiotics? Do I support him at the expense of my body?

I drink Silk. I have to, due to lactose intolerance. But when it comes to cheese and yogurt, I simply have to do my best. If I see local products, I try to but them, especially if they come from free-range, grass-fed animals, or use vegetarian rennet. But it's not like I can personally inspect the places from which my cheese comes.

I think dairy farming needs to go back to the old model, when farmer's recognized that the health of their cows determined the heath of their businesses, their families, and themselves. In the meantime, I can only suggest that we weigh the issues and try our best.

Santa Baby Biscotti

2007-12-11T18:16:00.000-04:00

This is my entry for Food Blogga's Eat Christmas Cookies Event.

Confession: I'm a Grinch.

I cringe when I hear Christmas music, I view the upcoming gift-fest with trepidation, and when I see holiday lights, my heart hardly fills with yuletide glee – instead, I worry about energy waste and An Inconvenient End to white Christmases everywhere.

But there's one thing I do love about the holidays: baking. It's not Christmas until I've fed everyone I know the fattiest, sweetest, most butter-laden treats I can think to bake.

I don't experiment - I rely on my Grandma's recipes, which my Grandpa made into a book shortly before his death. My mother's bound first-edition, printed on computer paper and punch-holed into a three-ring binder, contains my baked, fried, and yeast-risen family history.

Flipping through the book, I find recipes from World War II, which contain no eggs, dairy, or sugar, but lots of lard. I find old earache medicines, the measurement-less recipes from my great grandmother, a tiny woman with a large goiter and legendary pie-baking skills. I find the slightly less heirloom recipes from my father's mother, who thinks cans come from the store, not the garden (true story: when Mimi was trying to quit smoking, oh, a decade or so ago, my mother hid her cigarettes in a large mixing bowl. Mimi only found them last year).

The book contains Christmas. Christmas smells waft from the butter-stained page containing Grandma's cinnamon roll recipe, complete with my mother's sloppily written amendments (Grandma, not one to have her cinnamon rolls bested, didn't write down the recipe quite correctly).

Grandpa did not illustrate the book, but when I see the recipe for Sally Hume's Christmas cookies, I picture the cookies Grandma kept in the freezer for us kids, yellow, pony-shaped sugar cookies with Red Hot eyes. From iced, cherry-centered bonbons to cream cheese brownies, the book makes me remember the people I love and wonder about the people I never met – their lives, their kitchens, and their Christmases.

But as much as I love my Grandma's cookbook, I'm not one to stick to tradition. New Christmases bring new traditions. And the best new traditions contain alcohol.

I wanted to make cranberry orange biscotti, but when I checked my pantry for walnuts, I realized that my mother had, at some point or another, snacked through my entire supply. She left the empty walnut bag behind, of course, so I, seeing the walnut bag, would assume I had walnuts right up until I went to bake something, lifted the bag, and felt its emptiness. She's a sneaky wench, my mother.

I decided to use coconut instead of walnuts. A conceptual leap, no? Well, coconut's pretty and white and flaky, and therefore seasonal.

Coconut makes me think about tropical tiny–umbrella–type drinks, so I looked through the fridge for rum, only to find that my father had finished off the last three bottles in the fridge. My parents own plenty of cheap tequila, but no rum (but why is all the rum gone?).

In addition to the tequila, I noticed Blue Caracao in the fridge. And what’s Blue Caracao? An orange liqueur. Instantly, I knew I had stumbled upon the stuff of holiday baking legend. Cranberry orange walnut biscotti? Puh-leeze. My crunchy, not-too-sweet, coconut-orange liqueur-cranberry biscotti update the classic flavor profile in a big, Christmas-colored way.

Christmas-colored means green. With red dots. And pretty white sprinkles. Hey, I might be a Grinch, but if the stomach leads to the heart, these naughty-and-nice biscotti could make anyone feel a three-fold increase in cardiovascular capacity.

Santa Baby Biscotti

Ingredients:

2 cups shredded, unsweetened, dry coconut
2/3 cup dried cranberries
1 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp Blue Caracao liqueur

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a small bowl, beat the eggs and the vanilla together with a fork.

In a mixer, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and sugar. Set the mixer to “stir” and let it work its magic. While the mixer’s stirring, slowly pour in the egg and vanilla. Increase the mixer’s speed and let it blend the ingredients together until they form a dough. Add the cranberries. Add the coconut one cup at a time. Between cups of coconut, use a wooden spoon to force the dough back into the bottom of the mixing bowl (a rubber spatula proves no match for this dough, believe me). When the coconut’s mixed in, add the Blue Caracao. Mix the ingredients together until the dough becomes a uniform, green color.

Wet your hands. Divide the dough in half. Roll each section into a ten inch log. Sprinkle the logs with a little more coconut. Place the logs four or five inches apart on a baking sheet. Bake the logs for 35-40 minutes, or until their tops look very golden brown.

Remove the logs from the oven and let them cool for a few minutes. Then, use a serrated knife to cut them on a bias. Arrange the sliced cookies on a baking sheet. Cook them for ten to fifteen minutes on one side. Take the biscotti out of the oven. Turn each cookie over. Put them back in the oven for an additional ten to fifteen minutes, so that the biscotti look golden and feel hard on both sides.

Enjoy your biscotti with a good cup of coffee, straight from your French Press.

Latke Pie

2007-12-07T23:01:00.000-04:00

Chanukah food celebrates oil – after all, it was the oil that miraculously replenished itself, allowing those candles to keep burning. But I’m not Jewish, so I see no reason to stick to tradition.

I’m not much for hashed browns or french fries, but I’ve adored latkes since I first tasted them in preschool, in a class lesson about – what else – Chanukah.

I've eaten latkes rarely since. My mother thinks latkes need too much work, my half–Jewish roommate (although she insisted she knew the best latke recipe ever) never pulled out skillets for much more than Bisquick pancakes. My own aversion to frying (I don’t like dealing with used oil) always stopped me from making latkes myself. So when I started seeing recipes for oven-baked latkes popping up, well, everywhere, I decided to give this baked latke thing a try.

But did I stop there? Uh, no. The spaghetti squash in my fridge called to me – I decided spaghetti–potato latkes would prove light, tasty. Most patties use eggs as a binder, but I didn’t want to use one whole egg (which could make four to six latkes) for one little pancake. I boiled some kasha – another traditional Jewish foodstuff – into mush. Two tablespoons formed a good latke glue.

I made more kasha than I needed, and I don’t like to waste food. A few nights ago, I mixed red lentils and kasha to a thick, earthy, sticky consistency. At the time, I thought it would make a wonderful, vegetarian “shepherd’s pie” filling. Thus a new, genius idea – latke pie – came into being.

Applesauce and latkes go together like peanut butter and bananas, so I added chopped McKintosh apples to my lentil stew. The resulting sweet, savory, winter-warming stew provided a wonderful contrast to the my pie’s crunchy, latke topping.

As much as I enjoyed my latke pie, I plan to play with the recipe. Next time, I might make a latke bottom crust and fill the pie with apples. Or I might work with the latke – I could add grated parsnip, sweet potato, or apple. I could do something freaky and follow the traditional recipe. I could eat latkes apart from a pie. Possibilities abound.

Latke Pie

Serves one. Otherwise everyone would fight over the latke crust. If you increase the recipe, you want to make more one-person pies, not one, large pie. I wouldn't want to be responsible for knife-and-fork stab wounds.

Ingredients:

For the latke “crust”:

1/4 cup white potato, grated
1/4 cup spaghetti squash, baked and separated into strands
1/4 kasha, cooked into mush
1/8 cup yellow or white onion, grated
1/4 tsp extra virgin olive oil

For the pie filling:

1 clove garlic, minced
1/8 cup onion, chopped
1 small apple, chopped
1/8 cup parsnip, chopped
1/8 cup carrot, chopped
1/4 cup fennel, sliced
1 cup button mushroom, sliced
1/2 cup portabello mushroom cap, sliced
2 tbsp masoor dal (red split lentils)
1/4 cup kasha, cooked into mush
1 tsp dried cranberries

spices:

cinnamon
nutmeg
cardamom
coriander
chili powder
allspice
fenugreek
dried oregano
kosher salt
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.

In a saucepan, heat two tablespoons of kasha in salt and water. Really let the the kasha boil. When the kasha grains dissolve into mush (maybe ten minutes?), remove the saucepan from the heat.

In a bowl, combine the spaghetti squash, potato, onion, and (cooled!) kasha. Oil a foil-lined baking pan. Mold the vegetables into a patty and plop them onto the pan. Put the pancake into the oven for twenty minutes, or until the top looks golden brown and feels slightly crunchy to the touch. Remove the pancake from the oven, but don’t let it wander too far.

In a saucepan, sauté the onions, garlic, fennel, and the apple with water or oil. Add the spices, excepting the dried oregano, to taste. I used only a little fenugreek, chili powder, coriander, and allspice. When the onions look soft, add the parsnip, carrot, and mushrooms. When the mushrooms brown, add the lentils, any leftover kasha that you didn’t use in your pancake, and the dried cranberries. Pour enough water into the skillet to cover the lentils. Lower the heat and let everything simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the lentils absorb the water and the mix starts to look very, very thick.

Spoon the vegetables and lentils into a pyrex or another oven safe bowl. Remember that potato–squash pancake? Carefully lift it from its foil with a spatula. Carefully flip the pancake and put it on top of the lentils, exposing the pancake’s raw underbelly. Dust the pancake with dried oregano and cinnamon. Put the pyrex in the oven for another twenty minutes, or until the top of the latke looks golden brown.

Take a spoon, pop a movie (Waitress was tonight’s choice) into your DVD player, and sit down with your latke pie. Feel free to top it with pecorino romano, nutritional yeast, sour cream, yogurt, or apple sauce.

According to calorie-count.com, this comes to 360 calories per naked latke pie.

Cereal for Dinner (Oatmeal with Almond Gravy in a Winter Squash Bowl)

2007-12-05T22:23:00.001-04:00

In my post about eating alone, I told you to save your Cheerios for breakfast.

Maybe this confused you. Maybe you think I don’t eat cereal, or that I don’t eat cereal at night, or that I’m a crap American who eats French things for breakfast, like croissants and brioche and crepes suzette.

To the contrary, I love cereal. I don’t eat Twinkies or Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese, but I can’t escape my American yen for the flaky, the crunchy, and the machine-processed. I love Smart Bran, and Grain Shop, and Alpen muesli. I could write an educated op-ed about every Nature’s Path granola flavor (love the pumpkin, avoid the pomegranate).

When I said don’t eat cereal for breakfast, I was not expressing a hate on for puffed rice or flaked corn. You can eat cereal for dinner, you should eat cereal for dinner – if you can commit to your cereal.

Don’t eat dinner just to avoid passing out at tomorrow’s dance practice, or to pad your stomach before a keg race. Take every meal as a chance to explore and to savor. Eat your cereal. But only if you’re willing to enjoy it.

Tonight, I ate cereal for dinner.

The weather people mentioned we might get one or two inches of snow. D.C. did receive a few inches of that pretty, fairy tale white fluff, which sticks to tree branches and eyelashes but leaves roads well enough alone.

Frederick, though only a few hours west from D.C., experiences lower temperatures: I got off the train to find my Prius quilted in snow (which frostbit my fingers as I scraped the windshield), unsalted roads, and crazy, aggressive, panicked drivers speeding down ice-covered roads.

I came home late, cold, wet and hungry. I wanted something quick, something comforting. Steel cut oats, squash, quince, apples, and dried fruit came together with toasted almonds and an almond gravy to a make a meal somewhere between a creamy risotto and the cinnamon-scented porridge Mom used to nuke on Massachusetts mornings.

Halved, baked lady apples provided a not-so-ordinary side. I licked their sweet and creamy stickiness from my fingers.

Hey, I never said anything against finger food.

Cereal for Dinner (Oatmeal with Almond Gravy in a Winter Squash Bowl)

Serves one.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp steel-cut oats
1/2 small acorn squash, baked and kept warm
3 lady apples, halved and baked
1/4 cup quince, roasted and cubed
1 tsp raisins
1 tsp dried cherries
1 tbsp almonds, sliced and toasted
1 tsp almond butter
2 tsp plain soy milk

spices:

cardamom
nutmeg
cinnamon
kosher salt
black pepper

Measure steel-cut oats into a heavy saucepan. Add the spices. I used more cinnamon and cardamom than nutmeg. Cook the steel-cut oats according to package directions. When the steel-cut oats finish cooking, stir in the dried fruit and chopped quince.

Pour the soy milk into a saucepan or skillet on the lowest heat setting. Add a teaspoon of almond butter. Whisk the soy milk and almond butter together until the ingredients form a thick sauce that looks like gravy. Stir about one-third of the almond sauce into the oatmeal.

Spoon some almond “gravy” into the bottom of the baked winter squash. Heap the oatmeal into the squash’s empty cavity. Top the squash with slivered almonds and the remaining “gravy.”

The whole meal comes to around 220 calories, about the same as a half cup of dry granola. Which dinner provides greater appeal? You tell me.

Nooch Cavatappi

2007-12-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

Mention "nutritional yeast," or "nooch," as its known at The Post Punk Kitchen, and you're most likely to meet raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses. The stuff, which looks like sawdust and dandruff's love-child, surely belongs in the grocery store's bulk food section, where only the occasional vegan might venture. That's right. Nutritional yeast proves a vegan pantry staple – let's call it "pretend parmesan cheese." Like Play-doh cheese, except that people actually eat this stuff.

Certainly, no cheese lover should be caught dead buying, much less eating, anything called "nooch." But as much as I like cheese (and I do - I can wax like Nick Park's Wallace all day long), cheese doesn't always like me. Thick, rich, cream or cheese-laden foods make my stomach cramp after a few bites. Can I eat frozen yogurt? Sure. But I can't eat homemade ice cream, and I really can't eat the family meal-time all-American staple: mac n' cheese.

Growing up, I ate, and hated, the blue-boxed stuff. But my sister's palate, for one reason or another, determined our family dinners. And Ash adored Kraft mac'n'cheese. My mother tried to serve the "real" stuff once. I loved it, Ash thought it a disgusting traitor to the mac 'n' cheese name. Mom never made real macaroni and cheese again.

My point? My family loves cheese. I can't eat cheese. And while I often eat alone (and enjoy it, too), I sometimes like to cook for (appreciative) others.

I figured vegans might know something about non-dairy "dairy," so I paid sixty-nine cents for nooch (nutritional yeast is, if nothing else, much cheaper than the aged ambrosia provided by Bessie and her artisan farmer friends), read a few vegan pasta recipes, and ignored almost everything I read except the basic concept: start with a roux.

I pulled out my skillet and experimented several nights in a row. I forced nearby people and animals to taste-test. This recipe, with its light, nutmeg-kissed sauce, a combination of two previous not-quite-there attempts, won.

Does my nooch cavatappi taste anything like mac'n'cheese? No. Still, it's a comforting meal, the perfect, quick-to-create treat after long day spent at work.

Whole-wheat cavatappi, which I find prettier and more interesting than macaroni, provides the perfect sauce-carrying medium. Broken chestnuts make for a more sophisticated "bread crumb." Roasted vegetables contribute iron, calcium, and a sweet, rich flavor. Plus, I enjoyed corrupting a normally kid-friendly, mac 'n' cheese-type dish with brussels sprouts, the bane of children everywhere.
,
But what about the nooch? Honestly, I'm not sure it added more than a slightly salty taste. Next time, I might just skip adding the nooch to the sauce, which I couldn't keep myself from tasting – constantly – as I cooked.

Still, I have more nooch and cavatappi to play with, and winter's pasta season. Who knows, I might just invent a whole line of family-friendly mac 'n' nooches.

Nooch Cavatappi

Vegetables:

1/2 cup brussels sprouts, halved
1/4 cup parsnips, sliced
1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
1/4 cup sweet potato, grated ( I grated the sweet potato to make it look like cheese)
1/4 cup leek, sliced
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp crushed chestnuts, crushed into large pieces

spices:

garlic powder
rosemary
kosher salt
black pepper

Sauce:

water
1/4 tsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp flour (I used whole wheat)
1/2 tsp miso
1/2 tsp tahini
1 tsp tomato paste
2 tsp soy milk
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp nooch (nutritional yeast)

spices:

oregano
chili power
cumin
cinnamon
nutmeg
tumeric
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Put the chopped and grated vegetables into the oven for forty minutes, stirring them every ten minutes or so.

Cook and drain the pasta according to package directions. Reserve the pasta’s cooking water.

Heat up the oil in a nonstick skillet with the minced garlic, cumin, chili powder and tumeric.Whisk the flour into the oil. The flour might clump up. This is okay. Continue adding the tomato paste, miso, and tahini. Add a little water too, while you’re at it, and whisk some more. When the ingredients form a paste, pour the soymilk into the skillet one teaspoon at a time, until the paste forms a thick-looking sauce. If the sauce looks too thick, just add more water or soymilk. If it looks too thin, increase the skillet’s heat - the sauce will thicken again quickly. Add the nutmeg, cinnamon, and dried oregano. If the sauce doesn’t look yellow enough for you, add more tumeric until you reach your desired hue.

Dump the drained pasta into the sauce. Add some of the pasta’s cooking water and the nutritional yeast. Stir the nutritional yeast into the pasta until you can’t see it anymore. Mix the vegetables into the pasta and sauce in the skillet. Fork up!

This comes to around 320 calories per serving.

It's The Mini Pie Revolution!

2007-12-01T13:00:00.000-04:00

Remember when I posted about mini pies? Mini pies that you bake in cupcake tins?

Well, Anne of Redacted Recipes and myself decided to jump start the Mini Pie Revolution. How? We're hosting a blog event at our new blog, The Mini Pie Revolution Headquarters!

Maybe you've always preferred pie to cake. Maybe you like tiny things. Maybe you feel, in your gut, that the cupcake's so last year. Well now it's time to preheat your ovens, fill your cupcake tins with mini pies, and aim your cameras at the delicious results. If you're not with us, you don't get any mini pie.

Your Mission

Bake a mini pie from scratch. Mini pies should be baked in a cupcake or muffin tins, but we'll let you get away with other pans if the resulting pies remain miniature. Just how small are mini pies? Aim for mini cupcake or cupcake-sized pies. No mini pie should serve more than one person. Still, we're no size-ests here at The Mini Pie Revolution HQ. We're not going to pull out tape measures.

We prefer that you use legal ingredients, as clever as "pot" pies might sound. So no endangered animals or mind-enhacing drugs, people! Your mini pies can be sweet or savory, single-crusted, double-crusted, open-faced, baby-faced or ugly-faced. We only ask that the pie has some sort of crust (pastry pie dough, as in apple pie) or other topping (mashed potatoes on shepherd's pie, cornbread crust on Mexican pot pie, etc.). No completely naked pies, as that is indecent and illegal we'd have to call the pie authorities.

Really, the sky's the mini pie limit. Have you always wanted to make sushi pie? Here's your chance! Eggplant custard pies? We won't say "no." Do you want to miniaturize your favorite tried-and-true gooseberry pie recipe? Go ahead! Simply put, your mini pie can be anything and everything you want to bake.

The Strategem

Create your mini pies. Photograph your mini pies. Write about your mini pies on your blog. Then:

E-mail Ann (at redactedrecipes@gmail.com) or Karyn (at Kosmicfish27ATaolDOTcom) the following:

1) A 100 X 100 mini pie portrait
2) A brief description of your mini pie (just the name of the recipe is fine)
3) The title of your blog and a link to your blog
4) A link to your mini pie entry
5) Make sure your e-mail's subject head is "The Mini Pie Revolution"

Please send us your entry by Midnight EST on December 25, and we will post the results by January 1, 2008. Let's make 2008 the year of mini pies! The winning mini pie baker will be chosen by Ann and Karyn and will receive a fabulous prize. So get baking!

Double Berry Salad

2007-11-26T21:05:00.000-04:00

I know and trust the cardboard box. As a small child, my favorite oatmeal and cereal came from boxes with cartoon drawings and colorful labels. As an adult, I bought boxed pasta, rice, and Swiss muesli. There’s something reassuring about the cardboard box, something that says “Your tapioca’s never been touched by human hands.”

But I recently discovered the bulk food section at my local organic market. There, you can buy grains and pulses that usually come in boxes – couscous, bulgur wheat – for less money and in one-person amounts. If I want to try a new grain, bean, or Scary Vegan Product, I can enough grain, bean, or Scary Vegan Product for one recipe, eliminating the risk that I will be left with a whole box of some disgusting new food.

On my last trip to the grocery store, I decided to try wheat berries. Wheat berries are whole wheat – when we buy wheat flour, pasta, bread, etc., we are buying processed, refined wheat berries. I’m always looking to try new whole grains, and I adore bulgur wheat, so I guessed that I would like whole wheat berries.

So you want to try wheat berries? I hope you’re patient. Wheat berries must be soaked overnight in cold water before you can even think about eating them. After soaking, wheat berries still need another fifty to sixty minutes in cooking time. Still, good things do come to those who wait. Like pearled barley, cooked wheat berries possess a chewy, toothsome texture. Unlike pearled barley, wheat berries look pretty – their sweet little red-brown selves give a festive look to any salad.

I reheated cooked wheat berries in mushroom broth, then combined the berries with roasted vegetables, kale, and dried cherries. For crunch and protein, I topped my salad with slivered almonds. For sweetness and color, I added fresh red raspberries. I like blue cheese, hence the purely optional cambanzola, which I crumbled on top of the wheat berries for a silken, rich finish.

The salad tasted good and looked pretty. Wheat berries will almost certainly join the ranks of dried goods taking up too much space in my pantry – but at least I won’t be wasting extra cardboard.

Double Berry Salad

Serves one.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup red wheat berries, soaked and boiled for 40-60 minutes
5 red raspberries, chopped
1 tbsp sliced almonds, toasted
1 tbsp cambanzola cheese, or another good blue melting cheese
2 tsp dried cherries, minced
1 cup baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup kale, sliced
1/4 cup leek, sliced
1/8 cup parsnip, sliced
1/8 cup carrot, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup mushroom broth

spices:

nutmeg
chili powder
fenugreek
coriander
cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Toss your chopped and sliced vegetables (except for the mushrooms and the kale) into a flat, foil-lined pan. Stick them in your hot oven for forty minutes, giving them a good stir with a long-handled instrument every ten minutes until the vegetables prove fork–tender.

In a heavy bottomed saucepan on medium high heat, sauté the minced garlic and the spices in a little broth. When the garlic becomes softer, add the wheat berries, the dried cherries, and more broth. Let the wheat berries simmer for ten to twenty minutes. The wheat berries will absorb some, not all, of the broth. For this reason, it’s good to add the broth gradually: you might not need a whole half cup. Unless you want soup. Then you’ll want to double your broth.

When the wheat berries have simmered, add the mushrooms to the wheat berries. When the mushrooms look brown, add the kale. When the kale looks bright green, remove the saucepan from the heat.

Combine the roasted vegetables with the wheat berries, cherries, mushrooms, and kale. Spoon your wheat berry salad into a bowl. Top the salad with sliced raspberries, almonds, and cambanzola cheese, then eat up!

This comes to around 340 worth-it calories.

The Same Thing I Made Before, Only Completely Different (Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew)

2007-11-26T19:41:00.000-04:00

“Hey,” you say. “This recipe’s a rip off. It uses nuts, carrots, raisins, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon – same as that Thanksgiving Pongal. To you, I reply: “That’s the point, you son-of-a-hamster.”

Let’s say you’re me. You’re not easily mistaken for Kate Moss, but you’re not chopped celeriac root, either. You’re smarter than the average parsnip, and you can cook just like your grandmother taught you. Still, you’re single, and you eat many dinners with only a novel or crossword for company.

Eating alone can add a twist to grocery shopping. If I buy a fennel bulb, or a butternut squash, or a banana bunch, I need to have to have a few meals in mind. I can only eat so much cauliflower at a time – unless I want to eat cauliflower gratin every night for two weeks, I better know how to make cauliflower “new” again.

When I want to make old ingredients taste new, I pull out my mental atlas. See, people have been eating since the dawn of time. And almost universally, people don’t like to eat bad food. People evolved big brains and opposable thumbs just so they could stop eating grubs and start eating panna cotta. Indians, Arabs, Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Americans all developed ways to make similar things – squash, tomatoes, pulses – taste good. When in doubt, look up generation-tested recipes and flavors.

For tonight’s dinner, I turned to African-inspired ingredients: peanut, sweet potato, teff, millet, and greens. Teff is a tiny, coffee-colored grain. It tastes slightly bitter, but in the same, complex way that dark chocolate tastes bitter – it won’t exactly pucker your lips. When combined with millet, teff creates a thick, earthy-tasting porridge, the perfect base for a light peanut stew.

I used just enough peanuts and peanut butter to get a slightly peanut taste – I wasn’t looking to create a thick sauce. Feel free to increase the peanut butter in my recipe, or to perhaps add tomato paste, if a thick stew sounds more appealing. I would also suggest using cayenne pepper and fresh ginger (I couldn’t find mine tonight) to create a fresher, warmer flavor.

Even with the ingredients I used, this stew tasted warm, filling – and very unlike my Thanksgiving Pongal, or my frequent lentil salads, curries, and dry roasted sweet potato fries.

Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew

Serves one hungry camper.

Ingredients:

1 tbsp teff
2 tbsp millet
1 tbsp peanuts, dry roasted and salted
1 tsp raisins
1/4 cup canned chickpeas
1/4 can canned chopped tomatoes (mine had garlic, oregano, and basil added)
1 1/2 tsp all natural peanut butter
1/4 cup yam or sweet potato, thinly sliced
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/4 cup green bell pepper, chopped
1/8 cup celery, sliced
1/2 cup carrot, sliced into rounds
1/2 cup mushroom, chopped
1/2 cup kale, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil

spices:

oregano
cardamom
cinnamon
coriander
fenugreek
turmeric
cumin
Tabasco sauce (because I couldn’t find my cayenne pepper)
ginger, dried (use fresh if you have it)
paprika
kosher salt
black pepper

Put a think-bottomed saucepan over medium high heat. Measure or eyeball your oil into the saucepan, then add the millet, teff, cumin, turmeric, chili powder, paprika, salt, and black pepper. Stir the millet and the teff constantly until the millet start to look golden brown and the spices start to smell. Then, add enough hot water or broth to cover the grains and cover the saucepan. Lower the stove’s heat. Let the grains simmer together for about half an hour (check them at the fifteen-minute mark in case you need to add more water.)

Wrap the chickpeas in a paper towel. Blot them well. Put another skillet on medium-high heat. Put the chickpeas in the skillet with salt and black pepper. Shake the skillet once in a while to keep the chickpeas from burning. When the chickpeas look light brown and feel slightly crunchy, remove them from the heat.

In a nonstick skillet, sauté the onions, celery, carrots, pepper, sweet potato, and garlic in water or oil with a few dashes of Tabasco sauce. Add cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, fenugreek, oregano, and ginger. When the onions look translucent, stir in the tomatoes. Add more water and let the tomatoes simmer until the stew begins to look a bit thicker. Add the mushrooms, the raisins, and more water. Let the stew simmer until it thickens again. Then add the chopped kale and stir. When the kale looks bright green, lower the heat. Toss in the chickpeas and the peanuts. Stir the peanut butter into the vegetables. Use a wooden spoon to break up the peanut butter until it melts into a light, thin “sauce” (for a thicker, stronger-tasting sauce, add peanut butter a teaspoon at a time until it looks and tastes the way you want).

Spoon the millet and teff into a bowl. Put the peanut stew over the millet and the teff. Pick up your fork and start savoring the “same old” ingredients made new.

This comes to around 375 calories per serving.

Thanksgiving Pongal

2007-11-23T19:32:00.000-04:00

At Thanksgiving, we celebrate bounty. Nothing says “we’re not going to starve this year” like a table spread with enough poultry (or stuffed pumpkins), sides, and pies to overstuff thirty of your closest friends and family.

But Americans (gasp!) didn’t invent the harvest celebration. All sorts of peoples have been growing things in all sort of places, and they all like to feast after their crops come rolling in.

Pongal is a South Indian harvest festival, typically celebrated in mid-January. It’s also a dish – a rice and lentil porridge. From what I can figure out, pongal always contains ghee, nuts (cashews or pistachios), rice, and lentils.

After that, the variations seem endless. I found recipes for sweet, savory, and vegetable pongal. I found recipes calling for jaggery, salt, raisins, cumin, ginger, cardamom, coconut, tumeric, milk, chili peppers, and black peppercorns . . . . No two recipes called for the same ingredients, or combination of ingredients, or amount of ingredients.

“Winging” it, therefore, became a viable option. And if I’m not going to follow a recipe, I might as well really not follow a recipe. My fridge’s stocked with autumnal foodstuffs, so I decided to fill my pongal with traditional, American Thanksgiving flavors.

To spice my pongal, I used cumin, cardamom, ginger, tumeric, kosher salt and black pepper. I sweetened my pongal with maple syrup instead of jaggery, which I don't have on hand. I tossed in some roasted fall produce – sweet potatoes, parsnips, fennel, lady apples, and carrot. I toasted the dal and the jasmine rice together in hazelnut oil, then stirred in small amounts of hot water until I achieved a rice pudding-like consistency.

My pongal, though healthy enough, became more dessert than dinner. But I’m not complaining! My Thanksgiving pongal tasted like every warm and comforting winter dish you’ve ever eaten. It filled my stomach, raised my core body temperature, and lifted my spirits. Not bad for an unauthentic improvisation!

Thanksgiving Pongal

Serves one.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp brown jasmine rice
1 tbsp masoor dal
1 tbsp cashews, roasted
2 lady apples, halved
1/4 cup sweet potato, finely sliced
1/4 cup parsnip, sliced
1/4 cup fennel, sliced
1/4 cup carrot, sliced
1/2 +1/4 tsp maple syrup
3 tbsp plain soymilk (could use dairy milk or cream)
1 tsp golden raisins
2 tbsp roasted quince, finely chopped
1/4 tsp toasted hazelnut oil, divided

spices:

cinnamon
nutmeg
cardamom
tumeric
cumin
course kosher salt
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Put 1/8 teaspoon oil in a foil-lined baking pan. Add your vegetables and the lady apples to the baking sheet. Sprinkle the vegetables with salt and black pepper. Put them in the oven for thirty minutes, stirring them with a long-handled implement every ten minutes, or until the vegetables look soft and prove fork-tender. Remove them from the oven.

Heat 1/8 teaspoon oil in a heavy saucepan. Measure the rice and the moong dal into the saucepan, stirring them until the dal makes popping noises, you think you smell popcorn, and the dal and the rice look golden brown. Add the spices (I used more cinnamon and cardamom than anything else and only a tiny bit of tumeric) and enough hot water to cover the rice and the dal. Put the saucepan on medium heat. Stir the rice and dal constantly, adding more liquid whenever the rice and dal absorb the water already in the pot.

When the lentils look broken down and the rice tastes soft (after twenty to thirty minutes), lower the heat and add the quince, soy milk, raisins, and maple syrup. Stir the pongal once in a while to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the saucepan. Add the roasted vegetables to the pongal (you might need to add a little more water or soy milk, too). Let the vegetables and pongal simmer together for a few minutes. Spoon your pongal into a bowl and top it with cashews. Enjoy!

This comes to around 372 warm, hearty calories.

Mini Pies!

2007-11-22T13:16:00.001-04:00

Who watches Pushing Daisies? Well, in last night’s episode, the show’s heroine decided to create “cup pies” – mini pies baked in cupcake tins. Which means that some striking writer in Hollywood can read my mind, because I have been talking about baking mini pies for weeks.

Here’s the genius reasoning behind mini pies:

1) Sometimes, you don’t want an entire pie slice. Mini pies provide the perfect mid-day nibble.

2) Mini pies have a higher crust-to-filling ration than normal pie. If you love pie crust, mini pies are the way to go.

3) Cupcakes might be taking over the world, but not everyone likes cupcakes. Some people prefer pies to cakes. Mini pies provide the same cute, one-serving appeal as cupcakes, but they’re pies.

Don’t confuse mini pies with tarts. Tarts are made in tart pans. Mini pies go in cupcake tins.

I made apple-honey-thyme and heart-shaped pumpkin mini pies today. They look adorable. See?

So forget cupcakes! They've enjoyed their bake-sale, PTA-meeting, and potluck domination long enough.

Join me in spreading the joy of mini pies!

Apple-Thyme Mini Pies

Makes five to six mini pies.

Ingredients:

2 cups apples, very finely chopped (I used Pink Lady apples)
1/4 cup honey
2 tsp tapioca
3 sprigs thyme
1/2 tsp cinnamon, ground
1/4 tsp fresh rosemary, minced
a little butter (less than a teaspoon)
all-butter pie dough

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Pour the honey and a small amount of water into a saucepan. Bring the honey up to a boil. Add the thyme leaves and rosemary. Stir in the apples and the butter. When the apples become brown, add the tapioca and give the mix a few good stirs with a wooden spoon.

Use a mini-cupcake pan. Line the cups with rolled-out pie dough. Prick the pie dough with a fork. Fill the muffin cups with the apple-honey-thyme mixture. Cut the leftover pie dough into strips and create a tic-tac-toe board across each mini pies' top. Pinch the dough to create a scalloped pattern around the mini pies' edges.

Put the mini pies in the oven for around half an hour, or until the pies' crusts look golden brown and the filling looks hot and bubbly. Put the muffin pan on a wire rack and let the mini pies cool.

Enjoy the mini pie with whipped cream or (my preference) a teeny slice of good, aged cheddar.

Mini Pumpkin Pies

This is my entry for Sugar High Friday November.

I used the Betty Crocker recipe, but I omitted the cloves and added a teaspoon of nutmeg and a fourth teaspoon of cardamom. Also, I mixed up the filling in a blender (my mother's lauded technique). Just measure all of the ingredients into your blender, making sure to add the pumpkin last. Let the blender work its magic. Your filling will come out uber-smooth, not to mention easy-as-pie to pour.

I used cushaw squash, which I roasted and pureéd, for the filling.

I used a muffin tin with heart-shaped cups. To remove pumpkin hearts, run a table knife around the edges of the muffin cups. Slide the knife underneath the heart, and lift it very carefully from the tin. Hearts can break, don't you know.

Homemade Teddy Grahams

2007-11-17T21:27:00.000-04:00

Don’t get me wrong – every kid loves her s’mores. Nothing says “childhood” or “summer” like that all-American squishy, sticky, half-burnt glob of graham, marshmallow, and Hershey’s Milk Chocolate. When I went vegetarian, I knew I wouldn’t miss steak or ribs or chops. But s’mores? Gelatin-free ricemallow always occupies my pantry, in case I need to feel like a child.

But few children eat s’mores frequently. They’re for summer camps and bonfires and outdoor get-togethers. The grahams my sister and ate after school, in our mother’s car, before T-ball and after playing outside, weren’t combined with fluffed-up gelatin and chocolate candy. Nor did we often munch graham squares undressed. No, the snacks we stuffed in our Pooh and Piglet overall pockets were the so-cute, so-sticky, so-far-from-healthy Teddy Grahams.

My coworkers are having a baby shower for our manager, and I thought it would be cute to bring homemade baby food. Mushed-up peas might not go over well, but teddy grahams? Who doesn’t love an edible teddy?

It took more than one attempt to create the Ultimate Championship Teddies. I made my first batch with maple syrup – the crackers tasted more like wheat crackers than grahams. I increased the brown sugar in my next batch and added both honey and molasses ('Why?' you ask. Because my Midel graham crackers listed both honey and molasses on their ingredient list). The results? Well, let's just say I'm not sure what my recipe yielded, because my father ate most of the crackers before I removed them from the baking sheet. A sign of success, I would say.

Homemade Teddy Grahams
(and Bunny Grahams, for you Organic-Lovin' Kiddies at Heart)

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups graham flour, plus all-purpose flour for rolling
8 tbsp butter, divided
1/3 cup clover honey, plus 2 tbsp water (my honey solidified in my pantry)
1/4 cup milk
8 tbsp butter (I used salted. If you use unsalted, add 1/4 tsp salt)
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup brown sugar, packed
2 tbsp molasses
1 tsp cinnamon

Put the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and brown sugar in your mixing bowl. Set your beaters for “stir” - the lowest setting. As the dry ingredients come together, drop the butter into the flour mixture one tablespoon at a time.

In a separate bowl, whisk the vanilla extract, molasses, honey, milk, and water (if needed) together. Slowly pour it into the mixing bowl with the dry ingredients. When the dough comes together, turn off your mixer.

Separate the dough into two sections. Wrap each section in foil or plastic wrap. Put the dough in the fridge and leave it there for two hours. Or, if you’re me and don’t feel like waiting, stick it in the freezer for half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Flour a flat surface. Flour your cookie cutters. Flour your rolling pin. Flour your dog, your children, your neighbor, if you think they might touch the cracker dough. Trust me, the dough is sticky, sticky, sticky. It didn't make me cry, like Grandma's buttermilk sugar cookie dough, but that dough works like super glue. It stuck my hands to the kitchen counter. By comparison, Teddy Graham dough's a breeze. Take your dough from your cooling device of choice, break off a small section, and put most of the dough straight back in the fridge or freezer.

Roll out the dough. I liked the crackers best when I rolled them out thin (around 1/8 of an inch). But the crackers will cut out easier if they're thicker. Use your favorite cookie cutters to punch out cute shapes. Teddies and bunnies and copyright infringements, oh my!

Line the crackers on a foiled baking sheet. Press little faces and belly buttons on the teddy bears with toothpicks or similar devices (I used a birthday candle stick holder). Put them in the oven for ten to fifteen minutes. This is one cookie that tastes better crispy, so let them get past the golden-brown-bottom-stage to the burnished-golden-brown-bottom stage. My teddy grahams baked in thirteen minutes.

After the crackers cool, take one teddy bear. Bite off the teddy's head so it will die a quick death. Eat the rest of the teddy, dunking its limbs in milk or tea if desired. Repeat.

I got 50 crackers. I think. If I did get 50 crackers, the grahams come to around 74 calories per cracker. When I make this recipe again, I'll try to get a more accurate count.

Heart Healthy . . . Lasagna? (Prepare to be Amazed)

2007-11-17T19:31:00.000-04:00

This is my entry for the HotM9 heart healthy holiday food blog event.

‘Tis the time of year for diet advice. Choose the stairs, not the elevator. Drink the ale or eat the stuffing, but don’t do both. Nibble the pie filling, skip the pie crust.

Hey! How about this one: eat lasagna.

I’ve always liked to think about these “butternut squash lasagna” recipes that start floating around the Thanksgiving season. Lasagna? With winter squash? Sounds special enough for a holiday.

But something always stopped me from baking up a huge pan filled with pumpkin and everyone’s favorite noodle. Namely, béchamel. Almost every recipe calls for béchamel sauce, not to mention six to eight cups of ricotta, parmigiano reggiano, and (buffalo!) mozzarella, gingersnap cookies, sausage . . . .

Um, I like pie. And I like that pie crust best. I’m not skipping pie in favor of a lasagna that looks more dessert than dinner. Neither am I going to forgo my favorite sides for a dish that will, due to my lactose intolerance, make me spend Thanksgiving evening in bed with a heating pad over my aching tummy.

No, if I’m going to eat a lasagna, I’m going to eat a lasagna that doesn’t guarantee cardiac arrest. I’m going to eat a low-lactaid lasagna. I’m going to eat a lasagna that lets me enjoy my pie, too.

When I mentioned squash lasagna to my mother, she thought it sounded fab-oo. She went to Costco. She bought a huge (and I mean huge) full-fat ricotta jar, whole-milk mozzarella ball, and Parmesan cheese can. Now, I’m always grateful when Mom buys cooking supplies, but I also want to avoid stomach cramps.

So today, I made two lasagnas. One with stomach-friendly goat and sheep’s milk cheese, one with full-fat everything. But guess what? Both prove healthier than most lasagna recipes. My secret: proportion control.

I pimped up my vegetables use. I bought whole-wheat lasagna noodles. Flavor-wise, a little cheese goes a long way, so I used less than six cups (the original recipe called for two pounds of ricotta, four cups of mozzarella, and two cups of Parmesan cheese, plus sausage and a quarter cup of butter). I did use a beaten egg in my cheese mix, but I'll omit it next time. Frankly, I don't think it adds anything but cholesterol.

I tasted both. Both scream decadence. The home-roasted squash creates a lush, creamy base - it tastes so rich, it makes the cheese seem an unneeded afterthought. Personally, I preferred the Give Thanks for Eating-My-Pie-Too Lasagna. The pecorino and chevre provided the right sharp, cheesy note, but also let the squash, greens, and pasta play ball. This was my first lasagna in two years . . . my next lasagna will come much, much sooner.

Give Thanks for LactAid Lasagna tasted more like Stouffers, the lasagna that raised me. It might appeal best to lasagna purists.

All in all, I made two vegetarian dishes that will keep your heart healthy - give thanks for Slimfast shakes some other day.

Give Thanks for Eating-My-Pie-Too Lasagna

Serves two. I had less goat cheese in my fridge, so I made less lasagna.

Ingredients:

5 whole-wheat lasagna noodles, cooked and drained
2 cups fresh spinach, sliced
1 cup blue hubbard squash pureé
1 cup portabello mushroom cap, sliced
3/4 cup baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup fennel, stalks and bulb, sliced
1/2 cup sweet yellow onion, sliced
1/4 cup mushroom broth
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil
3 tbsp chevre and pecorino romano, mixed

spices:

dried thyme
ground nutmeg
ground cinnamon
black pepper

This comes to around 219 calories per serving.

Give Thanks for LactAid Lasagna

Around 24 whole-wheat lasagna noodles (I had extra cheese, so I made one large and one smaller lasagna)
2 cups blue hubbard squash purée
1 can pumpkin purée (because I ran out of hubbard squash)
1 cup portabello mushroom cap, sliced
1 cup baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1 cup fennel, stalks and bulb, sliced
1 sweet yellow onion, sliced
1/4 cup mushroom broth
1 tsp butter

2 cups ricotta cheese
1 egg, beaten
1 cup mozzarella cheese, plus 1/2 cup for sprinkling on top
1/2 cup parmesan, plus 1/4 cup for sprinkling on top

spices:

dried thyme
ground nutmeg
ground cinnamon
black pepper

This will be about 400 calories, presuming you serve ten people very generous helpings. But those calories come with 363% of your Vitamin A requirement, 65% calcium, and 20% iron and Vitamin C. Sounds better than a Krispy Kreme, any day.

For both lasagnas:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Boil your lasagna noodles according to the package directions. If you, like me, bought 100% whole wheat lasagna in bulk at the health food store (which did not include directions), boil the lasagna for nine to ten minutes. I drained mine when the noodles, when viewed in cross-section, still had a teeny little uncooked line through their middle. Fancy-pants chefs call this "al dente." Remember, they’re going into an oven later.

Put your fat (olive oil or but-tah) in a nonstick skillet on medium-high heat. Add your onions, garlic, and fennel. Season the vegetables with black pepper and let them brown. When the vegetables in the skillet are cooked through, add the mushrooms. When the mushrooms become brown and tender, add the spinach and a teensy bit of broth, just enough to moisten your skillet. Sprinkle nutmeg on the spinach. When the spinach wilts, turn off the heat.

For the Give Thanks for Eating-My-Pie-Too Lasagna, put some squash purée on the bottom of a glass, oven-safe bowl. Put lasagna on top. Cover the lasagna with the spinach mixture. Pinch a bit of cheese on top. Repeat three times, or until you run out of room in your bowl. Sprinkle the final layer with a bit of shredded pecorino romano.

For the Give Thanks for LactAid Lasagna, mix the beaten egg with the cheeses. You could also mix in fresh herbs into the cheese - parsley and basil would both work well. Put a thin, thin layer of the cheese mixture on the bottom of the pan. Layer lasagna noodles over the cheese. Put the spinach mixture over the lasagna, and the squash or pumpkin purée over the spinach. Then put down another cheese layer. Top the cheese with lasagna. Repeat layering the cheese, spinach, squash, and lasagna until you fill your pan. Sprinkle the final lasagna layer with some extra mozzarella and parmesan cheese.

Cover the lasagnas and bake them in the oven for thirty minutes. Uncover them (let them show you their hot naked selves) and stick them back in the oven for an additional thirty minutes. After they're out of the oven, all bets are off. Dig right in!

I Ate ‘Shrooms and Saw The Light (Three Mushroom Risotto)

2007-11-09T20:41:00.001-04:00

My best recipe of 2007 (or at least the best that I blogged about).

I experienced revelation.

My spiritual journey began at the Penn Quarter’s FreshFarm D.C. Market. Every time I walk through that closed off block between D and 8th street, I eye the mushroom tent to my right like a kid eyes candy. So many new mushrooms – mushrooms that look like things from Japanese manga or Alice in Wonderland. Mushrooms with strange and wonderful names like “Pom Pom,” “King Oyster,” and “Honey.” Mushrooms big, mushrooms small – and all with hefty, hefty prices.

Those Pom Pom’s? Ten dollars for two. So I spent my money on quince, chestnuts, baby bok choy, fresh cheese, and honeycrisp apples - new things that I could try without risking my car payments.

But knowing that the market closes in one more week inspires a girl to mushrooms – specifically, a ten dollar mixed bag containing cremini, beech, king oyster, and golden trumpet mushrooms.

Now, I’m a girl who enjoys her ‘shrooms. I add sliced baby bellas and portabello caps to stir fries, curries, and salads. Those cute-as-a button mushrooms carry cheeses and sesame dressings. They add texture to tomato sauce. But all on their own, mushrooms don’t exactly inspire me to heights of delirious ecstasy. They’re like chocolate chips – tasty, but boring until they bake into cookies, or melt to cover strawberries, or combine with cream and sugar for ganache.

The weather loomed cold, wet, gloomy. I needed to warm up, and between the stoves’ heat and the aerobic stirring involved in its cooking, I knew a risotto would suit. I kept the ingredient list short and savory – rice, broth, cremini, portabello, and king oyster mushrooms seemed the absolute essentials. So I pulled out some mushrooms and a knife, and I started slicing some boring little baby bellas. As I often do, I slipped a bit into my mouth as I chopped.

I stopped. I put down my knife. I tried another bite. These cremini mushrooms tasted different. Lighter, somehow. Moister. More elemental.

I tasted some oyster – soft, clean, otherworldly. I nibbled a golden chanterelle, subtle and almost fruity. Imagine eating Chips Ahoy your whole life, then tasting your first home baked chocolate chip cookie. Or a first chew of fresh bread after decades of the stuff that comes in polka-dotted plastic. I heard colors, I saw sounds. And I tasted really tasted – fabulous fresh mushrooms.

I wanted, needed to preserve my mushrooms’ potency in risotto form. I chose brown kalijira rice, because I thought its nuttier flavor and smaller grains would better complement the mushrooms than standard white arborio. I took a note from indian khichri, adding a little moong dal to the rice to create an earthy creaminess. I wanted me some blue cheese, but I also wanted to taste my mushrooms. Cambazola, a cross between camembert and gorgonzola cheese, provided the right subtle flavor.

My risotto proved more than dinner. It proved an experience, a gateway to food-love transcendence. I’m only glad that the market does close in one week . . . had I tried fresh mushrooms earlier this season, I would have plowed through the entire stand!

Three Mushroom Risotto

Serves one. I'm not sharing my 'shrooms.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp brown kalijira rice (any shortgrain rice will work.)
1/2 cup cremini mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup oyster mushrooms, sliced
1/4 cup portabello mushroom, sliced
1/4 cup onion, small chopped
1 cup mushroom broth
1/4 cup parsley, destalked
1 tbsp moong dal, uncooked
1 tbsp cambazola cheese
1 clove garlic, minced
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil

spices:

kosher salt
black pepper

Put the chopped onion and the olive oil in a thick–bottomed sauce pan with salt and black pepper. Go easy on the salt if you use stock from a box – risottos should not taste like seawater. Keep the pan on high heat until the onion begins to look translucent. Then, throw minced garlic, rice, and moong dal into the pot. Stir the rice, onions, dal, and garlic constantly. When the rice and moong dal begin to turn golden brown, add enough mushroom stock to cover the rice. Lower the heat to medium-low.

Continue stirring. Add the tougher mushrooms (the baby bella and the portobello). When the rice and dal abosrb the broth in the pot, re-cover the rice with broth. And keep stirring. When the rice becomes very nearly soft, add the oyster mushrooms and parsley. Stir some more. Add more broth when needed.

Remove the risotto from the heat when the rice grains feel soft and stick together, and the moong dal seems broken-down. Turn off the stove unless you want to eat your dinner by way of house fire light. Break the cheese apart with your fingers and drop it on top of the risotto. Mush the cheese into the rice with your fork. Sometimes, ugly food tastes best. Then eat up and watch the pretty colors dance before your eyes. Mmmmm, pretty colors.

Vegan Kasha Varnishka (Russian for "I Love Carbs")

2007-11-07T21:20:00.000-04:00

How I taught (am teaching) myself to cook:

1) See an unfamiliar foodstuff.
2) Buy the foodstuff.
3) Figure out what the hell I'm going to do with the foodstuff.

I wanted to use some recently-purchased buckwheat kasha in an “authentic” way. Some google searches gave me several recipes for “kasha varnishka,” a pasta-and-buckwheat combo developed by Russian peasants.

Traditional kasha varnishka calls for a beaten egg or eggwhite, rendered chicken fat, and chicken stock. The egg works to keep the groats from turning mushy – olive oil performs the same role and requires less cracking. I replaced the chicken stock with vegetable stock. And let me tell you, it took me hours to figure out that substitution.

Now, my kasha varnishka looked vegan. It also looked pretty flavorless – chicken parts seem the original recipe’s only palate pleaser. So I decided to roast up a pan of farmers’ stand produce – winter squash, broccoli, green bell pepper, and tomato – with some dried and fresh herbs. The vegetables deep, carmelized flavor could only enhance the buckwheat’s nuttiness.

My kasha varnishka no longer seemed so authentic, but as a late night dinner eaten cold it proved filling and comforting in a earthy, autumnal sort of way. The kasha grains kept their texture and went well with the whole wheat bowties’ denser mouthfeel. The roasted vegetable provided a sweeter note. I only think that next time, I’ll increase the amount of vegetables in the dish – I need to use up winter squash!

This dish's fall flavors wouldn’t seem out of place at the Thanksgiving dinner table, for those enlightened people seeking vegan and vegetarian holiday side dishes. You could also add chestnuts and dried cranberries to better play up the season.

Vegan Kasha Varnishka

Serves one. Tastes fine hot or cold.

For the kasha varnishka:

2 tbsp kasha, whole
1/4 cup bowtie pasta, whole wheat, boiled and drained
1/8 tsp olive oil
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup vegetable stock, boiling
1 clove garlic, minced
black pepper

For the roasted vegetables:

1/4 cup broccoli, chopped
1/4 cup tomato, chopped
1/4 cup winter squash (preferably delicata or butternut), cubed
1/4 cup green bell pepper, chopped
7 or 8 small, fresh rosemary leaves, chopped
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil

spices:

dried sage
ground cinnamon
dried thyme
salt and pepper, to taste

Put the onion in a saucepan with olive oil and garlic. Sauté the onion on medium-high to high heat until the onion looks translucent. Add kasha to the saucepan, and stir the groats with the onion. Stir constantly. Consistently. Don’t stop stirring.

When the kasha turns golden-brown and begins to smell toasted, like popcorn, pour hot vegetable stock into the saucepan. Lid the saucepan and lower the heat to low for ten to fifteen minutes. When the kasha grains, while still separate, feel soft, and you don’t see water left in the saucepan, you can safely assume that you have cooked your kasha. Congratulations.

Preheat the oven to 420 degrees. Place the chopped vegetables in a foil-lined oven-safe pan with the olive oil. Put the pan in the oven for thirty to forty minutes, stirring its contents every ten to fifteen minutes. When the tomatoes look half dissolved and the squash proves fork-tender, you’ve finished roasting your vegetables. So what? Do you want a prize?

Mix the cooked kasha, onion, and garlic with the bowtie pasta. Add the roasted vegetables. Eat right away, or pack for a quick lunch or dinner on-the-go. Leftovers will keep in the fridge for four or five days.

This comes to around 231 filling calories.

Dry Fried Tofu in Pumpkin Red Curry Sauce

2007-11-07T20:56:00.000-04:00

My mother sometimes gifts me with foodstuffs. In large, large containers. “It’s cheaper!” she says. And that’s fine, except that, for a single person, it makes more sense to buy small amounts, less your food fuzz up in your fridge. But alas, Mom decided to give me a huge can of pumpkin purée. So in the last week, I’ve eaten pumpkin risotto, pumpkin pongal, pumpkin gingerbread cookies, pumpkin oatmeal . . . and I still have pumpkin. Pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin.

I usually don’t use prepared foodstuffs. But I found this Kame Thai red curry sauce in a discount bin and picked it up, confusing it with red chili paste. Big difference: you use the paste to make the sauce. Still, I don’t like to waste food (or money), and the sauce tastes surprisingly good, if mild. In this “recipe,” Thai red curry sauce combines with pumpkin puree to make a thick and colorful sauce, the perfect addition to roasted fall vegetables, red rice, and dry fried tofu.

If you have not tried bhutanese red rice, do so! It’s whole grain, it’s equal parts nutty and chewy, and it cooks in twenty minutes. My kind of rice, yo. Although Thai brown sticky Jasmine rice would work just as well.

Dry Fried Tofu in Pumpkin Red Curry Sauce

Serves one lucky winner.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp bhutanese red rice
1/3 cup extra firm tofu, pressed and cubed
1/4 cup eggplant, chopped
1/4 cup fennel, chopped
1/4 cup cauliflower, chopped
1/2 cup broccoli, florets and stems, chopped
1/4 cup pumpkin purée
1 tbsp Thai red curry sauce*
1 tbsp plain soy milk*
1/8 tsp extra virgin olive oil

spices:

dried lemongrass
powdered ginger
garlic salt
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Cook the rice. Do what its package says. Unless its package tells you to go kill people. Then, ignore the package and assume that you should use one part rice to two parts water, and that the rice will cook in twenty to thirty minutes.

Line a baking pan with foil. Pour the olive oil on the foil, then toss the cauliflower, fennel, eggplant, and broccoli in the baking pan. Stir the vegetables around a bit, then powder them with the ginger, garlic salt, and black pepper. Sprinkle the vegetables with dried lemongrass. Put the baking pan in the oven. Stir the vegetables every ten minutes for forty minutes, or until the eggplant’s cooked through and very brown. Then take the vegetables out of the oven. I hope that you can handle setting the vegetables aside and turning off the oven without further instruction.

In a nonstick skillet, dry fry the tofu on high heat. This is easy. Put the tofu in the skillet. Let the tofu get brown on one side, then flip the cubed tofu squares over until both sides look golden. Lower the heat to medium-low. Spoon the curry sauce, scoop the pumpkin, and pour the soy milk into the skillet. Stir the tofu, curry sauce, pumpkin, and soy milk together until the ingredients unite. Ingredients unite! Gradually add more soy milk if you like thin curry sauce (you pansy).

Stir the roasted vegetables into the nonstick skillet with the tofu, vegetables, and pumpkin sauce. Spoon the skillet’s contents over the red rice. Eat.

This comes to around 280 enjoyable calories.

* Kame sauce contains fish sauce, so this recipe isn’t truly vegetarian, much less vegan. To veganize, use vegan curry sauce. Easy fix!
* Use coconut milk for a richer taste. You could also add coconut extract to the soy milk, but personally, I’m fine with the soy milk as is. Don’t use soy eggnog. You could try pumpkin spice soy milk. Why is there pumpkin spice soy milk?

Squirrels' Favorite Stuffed Squash

2007-11-06T10:32:00.001-04:00

Maybe I went a little overboard. But they keep forever! And I can purée and freeze them and use them all winter! Plus they’re pretty.

Rationalizations? Yes. But my garage currently contains two sugar pie pumpkins, one cinderella pumpkin, and three blue hubbard, seven acorn, one carnival, one cushaw, and one delicata squash. And I want more.

What can I say? I’m on a seasonal produce kick. And I love, love, love winter squash. Growing up, I hated mashed potatoes. My mother used boxed potato flakes, which looked – and probably tasted – like dandruff (to be fair to Mom, my sister loathed real mashed potatoes and wouldn't eat them). I would choke down the homemade stuff if asked, but I hated them for looking like the tasteless mush my mother forced down my throat tri-weekly.

But Grandma’s mashed butternut squash? My Thanksgiving plate glowed orange. I used the squash like gravy. I drowned my turkey, my stuffing, my canned cranberry sauce, in squash. Only my cinnamon roll went unslathered.

And this squash lover adores acorn squash. It grows in single-servings. Roasted or baked, its creamy orange insides come within a readymade bowl. I often sit down with half a squash and a spoon and call it dinner. Or lunch. Maybe breakfast.

Thanksgiving looms, and I might be going to visit family, and while I love Thanksgivings in upstate New York, the vegetarian–friendly dishes include, well, pie, and the aforementioned squash. So I’m sneakily planning to bring along a Thanksgiving-worthy dish. Right now, I’m playing with stuffings.

This rice-based stuffing fits the bill. It’s vegetable heavy and filled with the season’s best flavors: rosemary, sage, toasted nuts. The fennel proves key - play around with the other vegetables if you must, but do use the fennel.

Lacking Tofurkey, I stuffed an acorn squash instead, creating a warm and delicious seasonal meal. Will I take it to New York? We will see – I have quite a few more ideas (and winter squash) to play with.

Squirrels' Favorite Stuffed Squash

One squash half with all the stuffing works as an entree, if you’ve mostly eaten raw apples all day (my excuse). To serve two, divide the stuffing between the two squash halves and serve as a side, perhaps with a nice, green salad.

Ingredients:

1 medium acorn squash
2 tsp maple syrup, divided
3 tbsp brown and wild rice blend
1/4 cup apple, chopped
1/4 cup baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1/4 cup sweet onion, chopped
1/4 cup fennel, sliced
1/4 cup zucchini, sliced
1/4 cup green pepper, chopped
1/2 cup swiss chard, chopped
1/4 cup italian parsley, chopped
1 tbsp pinenuts, toasted
1 tsp dried cranberries
1 sprig rosemary (mince the leaves)
2 fresh sage leaves

spices:

nutmeg
cinnamon
chili powder
salt
black pepper
dried oregano

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Chop your acorn squash in half with a large, thick knife. It can take it. Scoop out the seeds and the stringy stuff in the middle of the squash with a spoon. Pour a teaspoon of maple syrup over each squash-half. Wrap the squash in foil and toss it in the oven until a fork can poke straight through it, around 45 minutes depending on your oven and your squash. Let your squash cool. You need to be able to touch your squash.

Cook the rice mix. The directions are on the back of the box, so you should be able to figure it out.

Put a nonstick skillet over medium high heat. Throw onions, celery, green pepper, zucchini, and fennel into the skillet. Leave them alone until the onions turn translucent and the pepper and zucchini begin to brown. Add some water and stir. Then add nutmeg and chili powder to taste. I used more nutmeg and oregano than chili powder. Add apples, cranberries, rosemary, sage, and cinnamon. When the apples turn brown and tender, stir in the swiss chard, parsley, and mushrooms. Remove the pan from the heat when the greens wilt.

Combine the toasted pinenuts, cooked vegetables, and rice. Stuff as much of it as possible into the squash’s empty seed cavity. Put the squash in an oven-safe dish. You can scoop extra stuffing into the dish next to the squash. Cover the dish with foil. Put the stuffed squash back in the oven until the whole deal heats through and you've finished cleaning your dishes, maybe twenty minutes. Remove the squash from the oven. Turn off the oven. Eat your squash.

The stuffing comes out around 300 calories. After that, the calorie-count depends on the size of your squash. The average acorn squash supposedly contains 172 calories.

Cooking For One - and why it rocks

2007-11-05T13:06:00.000-04:00

I lived with "that girl." When a boyfriend entered the picture, she cooked well and often. Our small, dingy, insect-infested college kitchen filled with coupledoms' distinct aromas: Thai-inspired chicken curries, chorizo and bell peppers, steaks diane, and poached salmon fillets made the regular meal rotation, all accompanied by good beer or dark wine.

Then, one day, the boyfriend would disappear. Within two months, I would start to find my roommate on the couch, eating Life (the cereal) for dinner. Sometimes Cheddar bunnies.

In eating poorly while eating alone, my roommate wasn't, well, alone. Somewhere along the way, someone dictated the golden rule of single girlhood: when unaccompanied, thou must eat Cheerios, grilled cheese, sometimes omelets. Nothing fancy. Nothing that needs a heating device stronger than a hotplate.

Food celebrities, Christian Values groups, and respected scientists tell us that we should avoid solitary dining. It's bad for the environment and it turns kids on drugs. Put single fork to single plate, and a butterfly will flap its wings, and the galaxy will implode.

But eating alone happens.

Sometimes you live alone. Sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you simply can't throw a dinner party. Sometimes, despite your best efforts to do otherwise, you must nuke instant dinosaur-egg oatmeal and eat every sweet, gloppy, Red 40 Lake-infused spoonful.

Wait. What? Forget that.

I don't have a boyfriend. I live on an opposite schedule from the rest of my family. So what? I can't enjoy polenta, or pasta, or the occasional swirl of black truffle oil on my mushroom risotto?

I like to cook. I like to eat. Cooking provides a moment to regroup from a long day, a soothing end-of-day ritual, an opportune time to appease my inner hedonist. And does my inner hedonist want microwaved Campbell's soup? No. My inner hedonist wants chevre and roasted kohlrabi and Moroccan tangine.

Cooking for one does present challenges. If I buy a large eggplant, I must use it in several meals unless a)I want to eat the same thing every day or b) I want a rotten eggplant. This means that I use the same ingredients in many, many different ways. That eggplant can go Japanese, Chinese, Indian. It can go Italian or French. It might go Thai.

Which brings me to the advantages of eating alone. You're only cooking to please yourself, so it's okay to get things wrong. It's okay to see what happens if you dump tahini or peanut butter in your mac 'n' cheese. If you get your dinner totally wrong, skip it. Go straight to dessert instead. It's not like there's anybody there to judge you.

Cooking for one can be fun, healthy, interesting. So put down your cereal spoons. Back away from the microwaves. And start reading up – I can't wait for us to cook alone together.

Fallen Angel Food Cake

2007-11-03T13:20:00.001-04:00

“It could be the pan,” says Mom. “It could be the temperature. Maybe its the beaters. Maybe its the rubber on the spatula.”

I crane my neck sideways and look up into the tube pan where it hangs crooked on its low-sodium-soy-sauce-lite-bottle base. A sticky, soft looking mass clings to the pan’s insides. Spongy, flat. Someone ring a bell - my “angel food cake” needs wings (an antigravity device, a voodoo-witch-doctor-miracle) to lift it from its pancake-like state.

“It could be the stars are misaligned, ” suggests my Mom, while I dolefully poke the cake’s springy bottom side. “It could be a gypsy curse.”

Cooking proves flexible. You add extra sage to a stew. So what? Well, you better like sage. But the whole stew won’t collapse, or burst into flames, or dry out, or get too chewy. Baking is different. It’s a mystic art. You bake something, especially a complicated something, and you submit yourself to the elements, to the wrathful gods of fudge crystals and fallen soufflés.

My story starts with, cough, the best intentions. I wanted to make a birthday cake for my mother. And a birthday cake for my mother means one-thing-and-one-thing-only: angel food cake. The one Grandma used to bake every October 25th. The one Grandma used to serve with strawberries and cream on the side. That glorious, amazing, special, birthday angel food cake.

Yuck.

I hate angel food cake. I’m not much for cake in general, but angel food cake really irks me. Angel food’s too sweet. It’s cotton-ball texture feels like sucking on a fluffed-up ocean sponge. Rip out some unloved teddy bear’s stuffing. Plate it with strawberries. Call it angel food cake. And excuse me while I eat something edible (rocks, laundry detergent) instead.

But for my mother, and on my mother’s birthday, I’ll make glorified sugar-sweetened fluff.

I found the perfect recipe in Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. A coffee angel food cake! My mom loves her coffee. If I suddenly disappeared, my mom would cry at the funeral, but eventually she would sell my childhood Breyers and move on. If coffee trees went extinct, my mother would seize to function. So a coffee angel food cake seemed “just the thing.”

I didn’t know better. I didn’t. This was my first angel food cake. How was I to know that brown sugar spells angel food cake doom? Mollie Katzen told me to use it (damn you, Mollie Katzen)!

Brown sugar sinks through egg whites. To the bottom of the tube pan. Where it a) causes the angel food cake to collapse and b) glues the cake to the food pan.

Bravely, I submitted my cake to my mother’s inspection. She took a nibble. “Taste’s fine,” she said. “We’ll eat it anyway. You did fine, honey.”

This is that angel food cake two weeks later:

Yes, my mom bought ice cream cake for herself, instead. Clearly, if I want to please my mother, I need to reach angel food cake perfection. Hence my second attempt.

This time, I decided to be clever. No yolk was going to sneak its way into my cake – I bought scary industrial dried egg white powder! No brown sugar this time, Bubba, No-siree. I used white sugar. Which I sifted. Five times. I used new cream of tartar. I used perfectly clean, dry cake pans. My batter came together folded, not stirred. I slayed a goat, danced in its blood, wore my pajamas inside out, and threw ice cubes over my shoulder.

And still, a pancake. A fluffier pancake this time, but a pancake still.

My mother told Grandma about my angel food cake attempts. My baking-wonder grandma, who, upon tasting one blueberry, knows exactly how much sugar to add to the pie. My amazing grandma, who bakes cakes in checkerboard patterns, who keeps her freezer stocked with homemade iced bonbons, who adds so much sugar to her vegetables that even they become dessert.

“Tell Karyn she’s crazy,” said Grandma. “Tell her to buy a box mix.”

So for Mom’s next birthday: angel food cake. Just like Grandma makes.

Fallen Angel Food Cake
(Adapted from Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites)

Here it is. After all, your pans might be perfectly clean and dry. Your folding technique might be perfection itself. Your cream of tartar might have supernatural powers. The gods might be smiling at you . . .

Serves: 12

Ingredients:

1 cup cake flour
2 3/4 cup white sugar
2 tbsp instant espresso powder
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 tbsp hot water
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp kosher salt
12 separated egg whites (or 1/2 cup scary industrialized dried egg white powder)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Sift flour and 3/4 cup sugar together. Sift the other 3/4 cup sugar separately.

Beat egg whites on medium-high until soft peaks form. Add the sifted 3/4 cup sugar a little at a time. When the sugar's mixed in, turn your mixer up to high speed. Beat the egg whites until super stiff peaks form. Seriously. You should be able to hurt yourself on them.

Mix hot water, vanilla extract, and instant espresso together. Using a rubber spatula, fold it into the egg whites. Fold the flour and sugar mix gently into the egg whites. Gently!

Put the flour-sugar-egg mix in an ungreased ten inch tube pan. Bake 40-45 minutes.

Good luck!

Nightmare Before Christmas Gingerbread Cookies

2007-10-30T18:15:00.000-04:00

Halloween gives me stomach cramps – and it's not just alcohol doing the nauseating.

My dad took us trick or treating, but my mother was the one who really embraced the Halloween season. Cobwebs decorated our house, motion-sensitive stuffed pumpkins burst into "Happy Halloweens" and "Bewares" whenever you passed them.

And every Halloween, my Mom put out a themed spread. On good years, we ate "blood and guts" soup (tomato soup with mozzarella cheese) or Frankenbrains (green meatloaf). Bad years included "bloody teeth soup" (mini marshsmallows in a Campbell's tomato base) and "worm soup" (gummy worms in chicken noodle. But guess what gummy worms do in hot soup? They liquefy.) Thank the ghouls for Halloween candy because, most years, I hit the streets hungry.

This Halloween, I wanted to express my, well, morbid (but fun!) tendencies in an edible way. And by "edible," I mean tasty, not just non-toxic.

I first saw this recipe on bakingbites.com, and it looked cute and gross and kitsch, and some evil spirit compelled me to make skeleton gingerbread cookies.

I mostly followed the original recipe. I used heaping measurements of ginger and cinnamon because I really, really like ginger and cinnamon. I created dried up little evil hearts for my scary gingerbread skeletons, fashioning the undead organs from dried bing cherries.

Impulsively, I added pumpkin puree to half the batter to make pumpkin gingerbread cookies. The pumpkin makes for a much stickier dough and a softer, milder tasting cookie. My brother and mother both said that the pumpkin gingerbread tasted fine – my brother just swallowed the cookies whole and couldn’t be bothered to taste any difference between them at all – but I want to play with the cookies a little more before posting a new recipe. (Note: for Christmas, I want a decent cake decorating set. With a tip for making thin lines.)

Still, I would judge my Nightmare Before Christmas Gingerbread Cookies a success. The cookies taste exactly like gingerbread should. And let's face it: in the looks department, they kill.

Nightmare Before Christmas Gingerbread Cookies

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup water
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp allspice

Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, and spices.

Cream the butter and sugar together until smooth. Beat in molasses, add flour mixture a little bit at a time until a dough forms. Divide the dough into smaller sections and refrigerate – I refrigerated the dough for 24 hours and it rolled out beautifully.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Flour a flat surface. Roll out the dough to a 1/4 inch thickness. Cut the dough into fun shapes. Bake 9-11 minutes, until the cookies look golden brown on their bottoms.

Let the cookies cool completely. Make or buy white icing (To make, just mix powdered sugar with a liquid – I used soy milk – until you get icing-like consistency). Decorate!

Smoky Ribollita

2007-10-27T11:29:00.000-04:00

The D.C. Metro area’s in a drought, but you wouldn’t know it from the weather – instantaneously, summer turned to cold, damp autumn. And between a nasty sinus infection, frizzy hair, and soaked feet, I’m a decidedly unhappy camper.

I need comfort food. Filling, calorie-laden comfort food. At Wednesday’s farmers' market in Penn Quarter, I bought fresh multigrain bread, apple smoked mozzarella, and swiss chard. Today, those simple foodstuffs made for some rustic “peasant” eating – a smoky, spicy, and completely inauthentic Italian ribollita.

Ribollita is a Tuscan bread soup, a remade leftover leftover. The italian nonna makes a minestrone-like soup on the first day. On the second day, she tops the leftover minestrone with bread, then bakes it in the oven. On the third day, she reboils the leftover soup and bread, resulting in a stew so thick it’s solid. This is ribollita.

I first ate ribollita two years ago, on a frigid, wet day in Tuscany. I can’t recall its ingredients, but I remember how the soup slowly obliterated the chill still set in my bones from that no-running-warm-water hovel in Rome. Tired from work and wet with rain, I needed a similar culinary band-aid tonight.

This ribollita came together in a flash. I made the soup, put it in an oven-safe bowl, and layered sliced multigrain bread with the soup. After I made sure the soup covered the bread, I sprinkled smoked mozzarella cubes on top. I kept the ribollita in a 350 degree oven until the bread expanded with the soup’s moisture and the cheese melted, around fifteen minutes.

The result was comfort made edible. The soup carried a light spiciness from the garlic and chili powder. The mozzarella added a welcome, almost barbecue-like note. My dad, who stole a spoonful, said this is a recipe I need to share. I agree – I might just make a larger batch this weekend!

Smoky Ribollita
Serves one, but it's very, very easy to increase the recipe.

Ingredients:

1 slice rustic bread
1/4 cup canned cannellini beans, in their liquid
1 cup swiss chard, chopped
1/2 cup canned, diced tomatoes (I used some with added oregano, garlic, and basil)
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/4 cup zucchini, sliced
1/4 cup green pepper, chopped
1/8 cup carrot, sliced in rounds
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp smoked mozzarella
1 tsp vegetable stock powder

spices:
dried oregano
chili powder
black pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a large saucepan, dry fry onions, garlic, green pepper, and zucchini with black pepper until the onions are translucent and aromatic. Remember, I like my vegetables a little brown. If you don’t, you can certainly sauté your onions in oil or water, instead. Add water or vegetable stock – just enough to cover the vegetables. Add carrots, cannellini beans, diced tomatoes, vegetable stock powder (if not using vegetable stock), chili pepper and oregano. Lower heat to a simmer and let sit, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are tender and the soup has thickened just a little, around 10-15 minutes. Add the swiss chard and stir until the chard wilts.

Ladle the soup into an oven-safe bowl. Cover with sliced bread. Push the bread under the soup – you really want it immersed. Top the soup with cubed apple-smoked mozzarella. Place in the oven for ten to fifteen minutes, or until you’ve finished washing your dishes. The ribollita’s finished when the bread has absorbed most of the soup’s liquid and the cheese has melted. Carefully remove the bowl from the oven, grab a spoon, and enjoy.

According to calorie-count.com, the soup with the bread and the cheese comes to about 261 calories, though this might be off, since neither the cheese nor the bread I bought came with nutrition labels.

I have low blood pressure and don’t worry about sodium (at one point, I even took salt pills!), but if you want to reduce the sodium in this meal, drain and rinse the beans (or use homemade beans cooked without salt), and use low-sodium vegetable stock. You might also want to skip the mozzarella, though one tablespoon per serving imparts a lot of flavor for somewhere around 20–30 extra calories and 37 mg of sodium.

Lies Served Up With Love

2007-10-25T18:38:00.000-04:00

Growing up, my sister hated seafood. She would eat fish sticks, grudgingly, and with plenty of tater tots. Anything and everything else gave her the creeps. If it came from the sea, she wasn’t eating it. Period.

But she absolutely adored my mother’s petite chicken cutlets. I loved them, too. They were sweet, tender, quarter-sized morsels, delicious with spaghetti or salad. We popped them like candy. We never had leftovers.

Then I saw my mother purchase the “chicken” on one tragic trip to the grocery store.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “Why does the chicken say ‘scallops’ on it?”

My mother grew quiet. She leaned down, her face serious. “Do not,” she said. “Tell your sister. Ever.”

I told my sister that night at the dinner table. “Hey Asssshley, do you know what you’re eating . . . .”

My sister set down her fork right there and then. She hasn’t eaten a scallop since. My mother didn't buy them again for the duration of my childhood. In short, everybody lost. Moral of the story? My sister sucks. Also, mealtime deception doesn’t teach kids varied eating.

The food and daytime talk show worlds are abuzz – someone, let’s say a gorgeous wife to a super-comedian – has figured out how to lie! To kids! About food!

For those living under rocks, Jessica Seinfold wrote Deceptively Delicious, a cookbook about sneaking puréed vegetables and fruits into kids’ meals. Spinach and beets enter brownies, sweet potatoes make “grilled cheese” sandwiches, winter squash substitutes for part of the cheese in good ole mac ‘n’. Mrs. Seinfield can feel great about adding teaspoons of twice-cooked puréed veggie mush into her kids’ meals. And now you can too!

Unless you want your kids to actually get any nutrients from their food. Or to learn to eat broccoli florets, not broccoli brownies. Many mothers and qualified nutrition professionals say to offer healthy food many, many times. Eventually, kids will eat it.

Or you could take one of my mother’s more successful methods. She told me broccoli florets were little trees. I pretended I was a giant dinosaur mowing down the Amazon. So lying? Not the best way to go.

Someone should write a book about kids' taste for destruction, instead.

Autumn in a Bowl (Kasha with Roasted Squash)

2007-10-24T19:23:00.000-04:00

Kasha. Say it with me. Ka-sha. It’s almost as fun to eat as it is to say. Kasha, or hulled buckwheat seeds, proves gluten-free and chock-full of delicious, earthy, goodness.

Today, I wanted something that felt like autumn – a filling but not-too-heavy meal. I also wanted to use up some of the few remaining vegetables in my fridge: delicata squash, zucchini, portobello mushroom, green bell pepper, and broccoli.

I came up with this warm grain salad, which won on all accounts. The kasha’s soft texture and toasty, nutty flavor accentuated the pinenuts’ crunch, the delicata squash’s warm, buttery quality. I used a sheep and goat’s milk feta, which I highly recommend – the cheese tastes more animal and less salty than cows’ milk feta. It balances well with the kasha, parsley, and roasted squash to create a meal as satisfying and as autumnal as an apple’s crunch, a leaf’s fall, or the soft feel of a yarn scarf tucked below your chin.

Autumn in a Bowl (Kasha with Roasted Squash)
Serves one, for somewhere in the neighborhood of 355 calories.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp whole kasha
1/2 cup squash, delicata, in 1” cubes
1/2 cup broccoli, chopped
1/4 cup zucchini, sliced
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/4 cup green bell pepper , chopped
1 clove garlic
2 baby carrots, sliced
1 tsp craisins
1/4 cup portobello mushroom, chopped
flat leaf parsley
2 tbsp feta cheese
1 tbsp pinenuts
vegetable stock

spices:
ground cinnamon
dried sage
dried oregano
dried thyme
paprika
chili powder

Preheat oven to 435 degrees. Dust cubed delicata squash with sage, paprika, cumin, oregano, thyme, salt, and pepper. Put squash on a flat pan lined with foil and place in heated oven. Every 10–15 minutes, stir the squash with a long spoon (your fingers will burn) for 30-40 minutes, or until a fork easily pierces the squash cubes.

Sauté onion, garlic, and bell pepper until soft and translucent. Add other vegetables and oregano, thyme, paprika, and chili powder in roughly equal amounts. Use a little more cinnamon and sage than the other ingredients. Cook until the vegetable prove tender. In a separate skillet, toast pinennuts on low until golden brown. Be vigilant to avoid blackened, burnt pinenuts – they’re not like marshmallows, they won’t still taste good.

Toast and boil kasha in vegetable stock according to package directions.

Toss kasha with vegetables and pinenuts. Taste, add salt and pepper accordingly. Enjoy curled up with a blanket and a good book.

Moussaka (The Middle Eastern Remix)

2007-10-23T09:02:00.000-04:00

Funny names make food fun, “moussaka” being another case in point. Traditionally, “moussaka” refers to a Greek casserole involving eggplant, ground lamb, and béchamel sauce. This recipe is not for Greek moussaka.

A few weeks ago, I bought pomegranate molasses. In fact, I took a special trip to the Whole Foods near D.C.’s Dupont Circle just to buy pomegranate molasses (of course, I also ended up purchasing coconut, puy lentils, and fresh figs because I lack impulse control). What did I want pomegranate molassas for? I didn't think that part through. So now I need to find ways to use pomegranate molasses, a super sweet, syrupy pomegranate juice reduction.

A google search yielded a recipe for Nigella Lawson’s “Lebanese Moussaka,” which looked good enough (and which Susan V. at http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/07/mussaka.html veganized), I guess, but didn't quite contain everything but the kitchen sink. So I changed things up a bit, omitting the mint and adding more vegetables, more spices, pan-toasted chickpeas, golden raisins, and capers. I decided to serve my moussaka over bulgur wheat. Like I said, I have impulse control issues.

But this time, my inability to limit ingredients worked out just swell. The moussaka tasted sweet in some forkfuls, salty in others, and the vegetables created a terrific play of textures and flavors. I wouldn’t change a thing next time – if I followed recipes, I’d follow this one!

Moussaka (The Middle Eastern Remix)
Serves one as a main dish, two as a side dish (or if you're not a pig)

Ingredients:
3 tbsp bulgur wheat, uncooked
1/4 cup canned chickpeas
1 tbsp sheep’s milk feta, crumbled
3/4 cup eggplant, chopped
1/2 cup tomato, chopped
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/4 cup green pepper, chopped
1/4 cup green beans, chopped
1/4 cup mushroom, chopped
1/4 cup broccoli, chopped
1/4 cup zucchini
1/4 cup fresh basil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp raisins
1 tsp capers
1/2 tsp pomegranate molasses

spices:
allspice
cinnamon
coriander
cumin
fenugreek
oregano
chili powder
paprika
juice and zest of one lemon

Put bulgur in 1/2 cup water. Add roughly equal parts allspice, coriander, oregano, chili powder, and paprika. Bring to a boil, then lower heat, cover, and leave the bulgur to simmer 10-15 minutes, or until the bulgur has absorbed the water but hasn’t yet dried out, burned, and scorched the bottom of your pan. Squeeze a little lemon juice on top of the cooked bulgur and set aside.

Put chickpeas in a paper towel. Put them aside and let them sit somewhere around twenty minutes.

Put a nonstick skillet on a “high” burner. Add minced garlic, onion, bell pepper, salt, and pepper. Then add zucchini and eggplant. Add all of the spices in roughly equal amounts, using slightly more cinnamon than anything else. Cook, stirring only occasionally, until the onion, zucchini, and eggplant begin to brown and you can smell the spices. Then add a small amount of water, the tomatoes, basil, mushroom, capers, raisins, and broccoli. Lower heat and let the vegetables simmer until the water has mostly absorbed. Leave a little more water for a more stew-like consistency. At the end of cooking, lower heat. Add pomegranate molasses and a small amount of fresh lemon juice. Set moussaka aside.

Remember those chickpeas? Put them in a hot skillet with salt, black pepper, and chili powder. Let them sizzle until they turn golden brown, their skins begin to pop, and they develop a crispy exterior.

To assemble the moussaka, put the bulgur on the bottom of the plate. Spoon the moussaka over the bulgur. Top the moussaka with toasted chickpeas, lemon zest, and crumbled feta, then eat your heart out!

From what I can figure out, the whole meal ends up being around 297 calories. So it leaves room for dessert. Yay dessert!