Dancing Down the Moon

Vegan MoFo: What's a Mulligan With You?

Not to thump a subject too terribly hard, but in my reading about Indian cuisine I came across a food philosophy that had never occurred to me but sounded like a great idea.

In India vegetarianism is seen as normal; most people have at least one veg meal a day if not more.  Few are full-on vegan what with all the yogurt and paneer, but still, when cooking vegetarian, the Indian cook's aim isn't to replace meat, or substitute for it.  There's no "this is a vegetarian version of such and such."  Veg food is just veg food, and doesn't attempt to be like anything else; as such the plant foods are given a chance to shine without being compared to critter-based cuisine.

A lot of meat analogues exist in America, ranging from the ordinary (veggie burgers) to the downright weird (vegetarian shrimp?!?).  Such things would be given funny looks over in India where the idea of not eating meat is, well, not to eat meat.  Why eat something that looks and tastes just like what you don't want to eat?

Now, I love a veggie burger, and I'm quite fond of a few other analogues, but I think it's dangerous to consider them "substitutes" for meat.  That leaves people with the idea that there's something fundamentally lacking in a vegetarian diet, which simply isn't true.  I think the idea of focusing on vegetables as an end in themselves is an excellent one.  Sometimes I think if I see one more recipe for vegan macaroni and "cheese" I'll go stark raving naked.

The power of food to connect us to our family and history, however, means there are exceptions.

I thought about this recently when I was looking back at foods I ate as a child.  We all have those comfort dishes Mom used to make that make us feel loved and cared for, and it's always delightful to find compassionate versions of those foods that evoke the same emotions.  There are, however, some things I ate as a kid that I wouldn't even try to veganize.

For example, I grew up eating this concoction called Mulligan Stew.  I have no idea where my mother got the recipe, but it's good old fashioned down-home working-people not-quite-payday food.  It consisted of a sauteed onion, a can of Ranch Style beans, and a can of diced Spam simmered until it formed something stewlike.

Yes, I ate this.  In mass quantities.  Sometimes over Fritos.

Needless to say there is no way in hell to veganize this in an appetizing way.  Ranch Style beans are made with beef, and while I've seen veg versions (there's a very close cousin available at Whole Foods, I think they're called Ranchero Beans or something similar in the store brand), the only thing I can think of to sub for the Spam would be tofu, and can you imagine?  GROSS.  There are few things in this world less appealing to me than tofu pretending to be Spam, because Spam, like Velveeta, is already pretending to be food. 

So I won't be attempting to recapture that childhood memory.  Fortunately there are better candidates.

One of my mom's tried and true side dishes is what she calls Potatoes on the Half Shell; it's simple, economical, and goes with everything.

Take Russet potatoes and wash them, then slice them longways in half.  Make several slices down the inside of each (don't cut all the way through).  Lay the potatoes out on a baking sheet (with sides) and spread Earth Balance buttery spread over each, then salt well.  Bake at 450 for 45 minutes. 

What you end up with is a baked potato, yes, but the "butter" bakes into the crevices you created with the knife, and creates a golden brown veneer over the top of the potato as well as dripping down just a bit onto the peel.  I mash them up in the middle and add a bit more butter; others in my family add sour cream, chives, fakey bacon bits, whatever you'd put on an ordinary baked potato.  You can eat them skin and all.  I guess you could substitute olive oil or something healthier for the butter, or use less to make them lower in fat, but this is Southern cooking at its Paula Deen finest.  When I want healthy I make regular roasted potatoes; when I want the comfort of my childhood kitchen memories, I turn to Potatoes on the Half Shell.

I suppose the point here is that not every vegan dish can be a meat-free version of something omni, nor should it.  The world of plant-based food is so diverse and delicious that we do ourselves a disservice by trying to stick to the critter-laden Standard American Diet, even veganized.  I think "substitution" recipes work best for newcomers to veg cuisine, and for those recipes that mean more to us than just dinner on the table--those dishes that bring back fond memories for which there is no substitute.

Vegan MoFo: A Shortcut to Mushrooms

Wow, that didn't take long--the third day out on the MoFo and I've already missed a post.  I can claim extenuating circumstances, however; H1N1 has stormed the gates of Austin and my best friend has been very ill, which led to my developing a fever that, thus far, hasn't turned into anything dramatic but has had me beached at home.

At any rate, here's a quickie recipe. It's hard to find good single-serving recipes; usually eating solo either means having tons of leftovers or doing a lot of math. This entree is easy, fast, and oh so tasty.  When I made it this past week I served it over a boxed rice pilaf (cheating, I know, but I don't really like rice and had had the box for a long time so I wanted to use it up). I also hate vinegar, but in this case the stench was totally worth it.

Portabello Mushrooms with Balsamic Awesomeness

• 1 portabello mushroom cap, sliced thinly
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• salt to taste

1 - Heat the oil in a skillet for a couple of minutes, then add the shrooms and cook about 5 minutes until they give off lots of water and start looking kind of slimy, as mushrooms are wont to do.

2 - Add the remaining ingredients and cook another 4-5 minutes.  Serve over rice, on a salad, on a baked potato...whatever sounds good. See how easy that was?

Vegan MoFo: Ambiendi Aloo Mattar

Welcome to Vegan Month of Food!  For the month of October I'll endeavor to post every weekday on the subject of vegan food--recipes, recollections, reviews, all sorts of fun stuff about cooking and eating (with a minimum of creed-thumping, I promise).

(For a full list of MoFo participants, check out Kittee's big list.  Everyone needs more awesome food blogs to read.) 

You can check out last year's entries for an idea of what to expect here in 2009.  Don't worry, there will be other posts going on during October that have nothing to do with food, but in a wild departure from my usual once-or-twice-a-week blogging habits you should see at least five posts per week until November.

Today, a recipe of sorts to start things off, born of a dilemma:

It's 12:15 on a Tuesday morning.  You really should have been in bed two hours ago.

Say you're a young woman with chronic insomnia who has taken her nightly sedatives, and though they've kicked in enough to make you do weird stuff, they haven't actually knocked you out yet.  And say you're hungry, but there's basically nothing in the house to eat except some frozen vegetables, a few canned goods, and your savior: a lone Russet potato that weighs in at over a pound.

Time is of the essence.  You know that within twenty minutes you'll be on the ground drooling, much like at the end of your last birthday party, but this time without the aid of twelve Rum & Diet Dr Peppers and a strapping Viking lad to grope from the passenger's seat on the way home.  Plus, you're lazy and don't want to put forth a huge effort for a midnight snack.

You've also spent the evening reading a massive tome on the history of India as well as watching the over-the-top Bollywood-styled spectacle of Bride & Prejudice.  Obviously there has to be curry.

You gather together:

the giant potato
a handful of frozen chopped white onion (rinsed, since it's been in the freezer awhile and might have the Freezer Funk)
1 T garlic-infused oil
1 tsp cumin seeds (all spice measurements approximate)
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp curry powder
1/2-1 tsp salt, to taste
1/2 to 2/3 cup frozen green peas

First, you whip out your trusty serrated peeler and denude the potato of its outer vestments, because you're just pervy like that.  Chop the potato into bits about 3/4" in size; the smaller the bits, the faster they'll cook.

You dump the potatoes into a zip-up plastic steamer bag (a box of which you keep around for just such an occasion, because hell if you're heating up the stove to boil water, and people can bitch about using plastic in the microwave all they want, but the same people who do that also tend to eat hormone-laced meat that wastes resources and clogs their colons, so they can jolly well shut up and let you use one damn plastic bag now and then, after all you use organic cruelty-free cleaning products and reuse sponges and rags and shopping bags and drive a fuel-efficient car and don't even wear makeup, dammit, everybody's got to pick their battles, and if it's a difference of one plastic bag between you eating healthy veggies and ordering pizza, well, plastic bag it is! and everyone can just kiss your dimpled yet shapely white ass, and...oh, the delicious savory taste of self-righteousness!  Wait...potatoes.  Yeah.  Potatoes taste way better than self-righteousness.).

Anyway, mumbling ironically about "freakin' hippies," you put the potatoes in the steamer bag and nuke 'em for 8 minutes.  If you had an aversion to said bags you could always stovetop-boil the potatoes, which would take twice as long but cost fewer karma points.

You are briefly distracted by the cat, who jumps onto the counter while your back is turned and lays waste to your spice rack. 

After standing the bottles back up and hosing down the cat with the spray bottle, while a string of obscenities hangs in the air between you and the cat's retreating backside, you heat the oil in a frying pan and add the onion, mustard seeds, and cumin seeds, stirring until the onions become

translucent and the house begins to smell like curried paradise.  The potatoes will be a bright yellow, as if someone had sauteed Big Bird, but of course you wouldn't do that, because Muppets are not vegan.  Add the remaining spices and stir-fry another minute.  Then, you dump in the potatoes and mix it all together, letting the taters get a tad brown around the edges in the oil mixture.  When the taters start getting some nice color, add in the peas and cook the whole mess two or three more minutes.  Salt to taste.

Now, if you were an enterprising young gal with some form of flatbread available you could make quite a handsome wrap out of this stuff, or spoon onto one side of a tortilla and fold over, then fry lightly in the pan for a non-queso-quesadilla.  You could serve this with a variety of other dishes including various forms of tofu.  You could even stuff it into a blanched bell pepper and bake the whole shebang together for a delicious entree, garnished with chopped cilantro and perhaps some cashews. (It would probably serve two, depending on what you do with it.)

It is, however, past midnight, you have no pants on, and we all know you're going to eat it from the pan standing over the stove.

Or, if your meds are working by now, you can dump half in your trusty Buddha bowl and the other half in a container for tomorrow's lunch along with a hastily-browned Boca Chik'n patty to help power you through the workday.

Regardless, you fill your belly with curried aloomattar goodness and fall asleep sitting up in your chair while watching season 3 of Bones.  You know, the one with the guy from the Whole Foods-type chain who ends up baked in a giant compost pile?  Yeah, that one's cool.

Radioactive 'Fu and Rice of Blah

There's a lot going on in my life, at least internally, at the moment.  For the last couple of weeks month my eating habits have been fierce wretched, and I've been stuffing myself with fast food and junk and avoiding exercise to a pathological degree.  This week I've pulled things back together and am now off caffeine, off sodas (for the moment), way down on sugar, and hauling my ass back toward veganism.  I'm also doing an herbal cleanse--nothing extreme, just a detoxifying kit I've done before with good results.

Meanwhile I'm trying to cook again, and let me tell you, it's hard. It amazes me how quickly my conditioned response to "what's for dinner?" becomes "drive thru." I have to physically force myself not to look at fast food joints as I drive past. 

Wednesdays are a free night for me; I don't go to Nia, I don't usually have any plans, so I have the time to make a more complex dinner if I want instead of throwing something together before I fall over. Tonight I decided to try two new recipes, one I'd been eying for months and the other that was, well to be honest, Sleep Cooking.

(For more on Sleep Behaviors, read this post at Dancing Down the Moon wherein I discuss the pros and cons of Ambien.)

I've had Nava Atlas' Vegan Express for a long time and only tried a handful of recipes out of it, but the Thai Pineapple Fried Rice has intrigued me since I first bought the book.  It has a fairly long ingredient list for me (usually if it's more involved than "potato, salt, pepper, heat" I shy away), but I figured, what the hell? 

It's similar to a Pineapple Cashew Quinoa recipe in Veganomicon, which I think I'll try next.  I'm an oddball in that I don't especially love rice--with the exception of the heavenly basmati they serve at the Clay Pit here in Austin, and a couple of recipes I've used to enormous success, it's just not my thing. And, as I suspected, if I were to make this again, I'd cut way back on the rice and leave the veggies at the same portions. 

(Both cookbooks, incidentally, are available via my Amazon affiliate store, Shopping Towards Ahimsa.)

As you can see, the rice is beautiful, featuring a rainbow of tasty colors.  It also smells fantastic.  Unfortunately it turned out painfully bland, which I think was due to my own error as well as a total lack of added salt in the recipe.  (Two tablespoons of soy sauce in a whole dish is just not enough salt for a NaCl slut like me.)

I also think my curry powder might be partially to blame, and next time I'll invest in better quality. There are as many formulas of curry powder as there are recipes using it, and the run-of-the-mill McCormick stuff is, well, CRAP.  Do yourself a favor and buy curry powder from either an online shop or an ethnic market, or at least someplace like Whole Foods with more than one variety.

Thirdly I accidentally bought an 8oz can of pineapple instead of a 16, and believe you me, it makes a  huge difference in the flavor. And don't skimp on the cashews, either; they make the dish much more satisfying.

Here, then, is a recipe for Thai Pineapple Rice, modified for those of us who want a higher veggie-to-starch ratio. 

What You'll Need

A
1 c basmati rice, rinsed
1 1/2 c water
1/4 tsp salt

B
1 tablespoon olive oil
3/4 c diced onion (or just dice up a medium-sized onion and don't screw around with measuring)

C
2 c broccoli (small florets, frozen is ok)
1 c diced carrot (that's like 2 carrots, or a handful of baby carrots)
1 diced red bell pepper

D
1 can petite diced tomatoes, well drained
1 16oz can unsweetened pineapple chunks, well drained

E
1 c light coconut milk
2 T soy sauce
1 tsp curry powder
2 tsp fresh minced ginger (jarred is your friend)

chopped cashews

Let's Get it On!

1 - Combine (A) in a saucepan, bring to a boil. Back heat down to a low simmer and cover, cooking until the water is absorbed, about 20 minutes.  If you suck at rice like I do, keep a sharp eye on the pan so it doesn't stick or something else terrible.

2 - About ten minutes before the rice is done, heat the oil in a great big freaking pan and cook the onion until golden.  Now, you could leave the oil out to lower the fat, which I did, but I think that was a mistake; that little bit of healthy fat distributed throughout the whole recipe is not that much but it adds a nice depth of flavor.

3 - Add (C), crank the heat, and cook about 4 minutes until the carrots are starting to soften and the broccoli is insanely green.

4 - Add (D), cook another minute or two. While that's cooking combine (E) in a measuring cup and whisk with a fork until blended.  This will keep the curry from clumping up on you, and makes it easier to mix into the rice.

5 - Stir the rice into the pan, then pour (E) over and stir the whole thing carefully (face it, no matter how big your pan is there will be rice and bits of carrot everywhere) until everything is all mixed up.  Taste for salt.  Seriously. 

Serve sprinkled with chopped cashews.  Makes enough for six or so.

Really, this stuff would be a meal in itself, but the other night while I was high on Ambien I decided to marinate some tofu, using the Curry Tofu recipe from Veganomicon.  It's been hanging out in my fridge since then, so I browned it in a pan with a tablespoon or so of olive oil.  It was fabulous, but as it was cooking it seemed to get yellower and yellower and yellower, until I had...

RADIOACTIVE TOFU OMG!!!

  I think next I'm going to try the aforementioned quinoa recipe and see if I like it better...of course, it's going to take me eighty years to eat all of this rice, and by then I'll probably be sick to death of Thai Pineapple Anything.

Oh--and just FYI--on a completely unrelated yet still foodish note, asparagus roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt/pepper is the awesomest awesome that ever awesomed.  Pair it with some roasted red potatoes and possibly an Italian marinated 'fu dish, or a fakey meat of some kind, and you've got a little slice of heaven that will make your pee smell funny.

Vegan MoFo Day 19: Hangover Food

You see, there was this bottle of rum...

And the next day, there was a hungover and hungry Sylvan who wanted something warm and comforting, but is trying very hard to cut the dairy out of her diet (and didn't have anything cheesy in the house anyway), and so, after standing and staring into her fridge for fifteen minutes, she threw together a rather tasty casserole.

My mom used to make stuff like this when I was a kid--in fact casseroles are such a big part of Southern cuisine that it's hard to imagine a pantry that isn't stocked with at least three cans of cream of mushroom soup, the major player in nearly every casserole I grew up with.  Cream of mushroom, cream of chicken, cream of celery...yuck.  All that fat and sodium!  Between that and the standard topping of Velveeta cheese, it's amazing anyone in the South lives past 40 without bypass surgery.

I haven't tried that many vegan casseroles, but it's getting to be that time of year when baked and stewed foods are exactly what you want at the end of the day.  So I took the basic idea of my standby enchilada chili, a pack of tortillas, and turned it into a sort of Mexican lasagna.

Actually, the original version of enchiladas wasn't a rolled dish, but a stacked one like this; layers of tortillas, cheese, sauce, and usually beef. 

This isn't exactly rocket science or haute cuisine, but it's good for what ails you.

Hangover Enchilada Casserole

What You Need, More or Less

1 can mild enchilada sauce
1 can refried beans
1 can black beans (drained)
1 can diced tomatoes with green chiles (also mild, also drained)
8 or so corn tortillas
about half a bag of frozen bell pepper/onion stir fry, or one green and one red bell pepper and about half an onion

Let's Get it On (Quietly, Please, oy my head)

1 ~ Sautee the onions and peppers in a teeny bit of oil, or use a nonstick pan, until softened.

2 ~ Pour a bit of enchilada sauce into the bottom of an 8x8 Pyrex baking dish (that you've sprayed with nonstick spray).  Break a couple of the tortillas into quarters and cover the sauce, overlapping the edges slightly. 

3 ~ Spread half the refried beans over the tortillas.  Scatter half the onions/peppers, half the tomatoes, half the black beans over that.  Cover with another layer of tortillas and repeat.

4 ~ Add one more layer of tortillas and pour the rest of the enchilada sauce over the whole thing.  Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes or until hot all the way through.  It's best to let the whole thing sit for about 15 minutes before serving, to give the layers time to bind up.

You could also add black olives, frozen corn, or whatever else you like to the layers.  Traditionally this sort of thing has cheese in, so if you like fakey cheese feel free to throw some of that in there too.  In place of the black beans you could cook up some veggie crumbles as well.

Hopefully I'll have some weekend cupcake pics tomorrow.  :)

Vegan MoFo Day 14: Cookbooks and Pudunkadunks

Just about every Wiccan I know has had the Book of Shadows dilemma.  Having a private book of rituals and formulas, as well as a magical diary, is a provocative idea that appeals to the creative spirit in all of us--but how to go about it?  Should I keep a separate diary and BoS?  Should I compile it online, on Word, on paper?  If on paper, should it be a bound book, a binder with dividers?  A printout with elaborate fonts?  Handwritten is more mystical, but is my handwriting legible by candlelight?  What if I want to change something or move pages around?  But a binder is so...ordinary! 

Of course, now that I've been on the path for fifteen years I no longer really need a Book of Shadows.  Like a great many longtime Pagans I've learned to improvise, to go with my spirit and instinct when it comes to personal ritual.  I've used my favorite herbs for so long that I'm well versed in their magical properties, so I can't remember the last time I turned to my BoS (version 8.0 or so).  Mostly I just keep the one I have because it's pretty.  I handwrote it, illustrated and illuminated it, and it's a work of art, but I don't need it day to day.

One of these days I'd like to be the kind of cook who doesn't need a recipe book.  Today is not that day.

I find myself in the same quandary when it comes to collecting recipes.  On the one hand, recipes I use often I don't want to have to hunt down in their original books--and a great many of my favorites came from websites anyway--so having them all compiled in one place makes life a lot easier.  On the other, I have yet to settle on a way to keep my recipes that's convenient, organized, and pretty enough for my art snob tastes. 

Over the years I've had a card file, a binder of cards, a binder of clippings, a handwritten book, and a small binder of computer-printed recipes I saved in Microsoft Publisher.  The latter is what I've been using lately--I found a beautiful binder at Borders designed specifically for recipes, with a bowl of eggplants on the cover and dividers inside.  The only problem is that when you're a veggiesaurus, a regular recipe binder isn't designed for your needs.  Over half the dividers are useless to me--meat, fish, egg dishes--so I'm left with Starters, Vegetables, Baking, and Desserts.  Personally I need at least three or four more dividers.  That means making my own, which I'm planning to do out of cardstock. 

The binder also came with a vinyl page cover to lay over whatever recipe you're using, so it'll stay un-splattered longer; eventually, though, the pages are going to get messy, which is why I stopped using a bound book that I'd handwritten in.  One accident with a bowl of frosting and that page was a smeary mess.  This binder also has a couple of pockets in back for recipes you've clipped from magazines, and I inserted a few of the card holders that I used to use in my recipe card folder so I could keep a few of my old nonvegan recipes around until I figured out ways to veganize them.

(Of course, since I got my new kitten Owen, the binder now has tooth marks in the cover from his insatiable need to gnaw on things, but I still love it.)

As I was paging through my recipe book looking for something to post today, I realized that I wanted to talk about the care and feeding of one's recipe book itself, and how it's a golden opportunity to bring the sacred into the kitchen.  What could be more evocative when looking up a recipe than to open a Kitchen Witch's Book of Shadows, finding pages of pressed dried herbs among the pages, the scents of spices infused into the paper itself. 

Imagine when someone asks, "Can I have a copy of your pumpkin muffin recipe?" and you say, "Yes...it's in The Book."  They open the book and are amazed at the drawings, the photos, the natural objects tucked in among the prized recipes of your own mystical cooking tradition.  Imagine having a page of all those little cooking tips your grandmother used to give you--or her picture alongside her award-winning cheesecake recipe, which on the opposite page you've veganized so that her cooking tradition can live on even as it evolves. 

A cookbook can be like any other ritual tool--it is the lorebook of your kitchen rituals, the way you nourish those in your care, whether that's just you, or you and a mate, or a full family, an extended family, or a houseful of chosen kin.  Your personal recipes become your Cookbook of Shadows, your tradition to deepen and pass on to those who learn at your side before the stove or with their arms deep in a bowl of bread dough. 

That's what I want my recipe book to be.  It's my next project--a sort of concrete symbolism of my reclaiming my hold over my eating habits, over my ethical stand, and over my own power to nourish myself and thrive.  I'm going to start with this binder.  Each recipe that is given its own page will be one that is tried and trusted in my kitchen, one that I'm willing to experiment with and transform slowly until it becomes my own creation, or at least the perfect version of it's creator, envisioned for my kitchen.  It's hard to know at what point a recipe stops being someone elses' and becomes so different from the original that it's yours to call your own. 

At any rate, my plan is to have my binder of My Recipes that I use regularly, and also a binder of magazine and newspaper clippings of recipes I want to try, glued onto cardstock.  I also have a list of the recipes in my favorite cookbooks that I want to try, kept in the clipping binder.  When a recipe passes my rigorous exam schedule to earn its right to a page in the binder, it becomes part of my cooking repertoire. 

But aside from straight up recipes, I want my recipe book to have other things--herbal recipes, prayers and invocations, quotes and poetry that illustrate the kind of peaceful, nonviolent world that vegan eating helps create.  I want it to be my Kitchen Book of Shadows, or perhaps, my Book of Feasts. 

Here's a recipe to use to start your own Book of Feasts--a recipe for pumpkin bread or muffins that is quite possibly the most delicious thing I make.  I started with a recipe from the Joy of Cooking, but changed so much of it that I'm quite comfortable calling it my own recipe.  Take it, bake it, share it, and let me know if you love it as much as I do.  I'll be at my craft table finding the right materials for my new recipe dividers.

Sylvan's Pudunkadunk Muffins
(preheat oven to 350)

What You Need:

A:
1 1/2 c flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp clove
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder

6 tablespoons margarine

B:
1/3 c vanilla soymilk
1 tsp vanilla

C:
1 1/3 c sugar
2 tblsp molasses

1/2 cup soy yogurt
1 can pumpkin

Let's Get it On:

1 ~ Whisk (A).  Use heaping measurements on spices.

2 ~ Combine (B) in a measuring cup.

3 ~ Beat margarine in a large bowl until creamy.  Add (C), beat for about 3 minutes.

4 ~ Beat in yogurt, then pumpkin.

5 ~ Alternate adding A-B-A-B-A to bowl, beating well after each addition.

6 ~ Spoon into muffin cups until 3/4 full. These don't rise much, so don't be afraid. Bake for 22-25 minutes (mine took 23 to get to what I consider the perfect stage; if you want yours well done go to 25 and test with a toothpick). Allow to cool in the tin, because if you dump them out or handle them they'll get all deformed like mine did. Mine have a grid design on them because I was a dummy and turned them out onto a wire cookie rack. Don't do that. Flat surfaces are your friend for pretty muffins.

Now, because these are so moisty they won't last long before they mold. I assume you could freeze them if they were wrapped extremely well. Mine aren't going to last that long, so I may never know how they freeze.

Vegan MoFo Day 13: Mo'Betta Punkin Butta

I admit I kind of dropped the ball on today's post--I usually write a day ahead and set my blog to automatically post in the morning, but I got caught up in the whirlwind of the season and nearly forgot today was a MoFo day!  The shame of it!

Since I'm at work and a bit at a loss as to an informative and entertaining subject, here's a simple recipe that I've been wanting to make again lately.  It's only in the last couple of years that I've learned to love pumpkin; I have three recipes now that I love, and I'll be posting the second one soon (hopefully I'll get a chance to bake some and take a picture, although pumpkin muffins aren't the most glamorous food), but this is a crazy simple delicious recipe.

Punkin Spread
(makes about a cup, more or less)

What You Need

1 can pumpkin
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar (or more/less to taste)
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Let's Get it On

1 - Blend everything together until smooth. You might want to microwave it for about 20 seconds to make the peanut butter easier to mix in.  That's it.

Keep refrigerated--it gets better as it sits. It'll keep for a week or so, if it doesn't disappear by then.

This has a wonderful nutty Autumny taste; it's healthier (and more filling) than peanut butter alone, with lower fat and higher fiber content. You can also vary the nut butter (almond, YUM!), and add a bit of nutmeg, ginger, or use premade pumpkin pie spice instead. You could also use a different sweetener, like honey or agave nectar, or maple syrup. Made this way it takes advantage of pantry ingredients and is a good way to stretch out that last bit of peanut butter left in the jar.

What to do with it?  Egad!  Spread it on waffles, bagels, any sort of toast.  Dip fruit in it.  Make a sandwich with it and some jam.  Swirl a spoonful into your hot breakfast cereal, or throw some into a smoothie for a bit of nutritional and comforting punch.  The possibilities are endless!

Vegan MoFo Day 11: Oh, You Beautiful Dhal

I had a personal request from a lovely and dear friend to post this recipe, and of course I jumped for joy  at the chance to show off one of my best recipes (and to prove someone's reading my blog that I know in the real world!).  Maybe Nadia will give me permission to post her pumpkin chipotle chili recipe in exchange.  We can make each other locally world-famous.  :) 

One of the foods I loved most at Cosmic Cafe (you'll hear more about it tomorrow) was the Buddha's Feast, which featured a samosa, a bowl of dhal, and a side of curried veggies of the day, over perfectly cooked basmati rice.  It was quite possibly the perfect meal.  I decided to conquer the elements of the dish--the samosas  from Vegan With a Vengeance are excellent (although I want to try them with Alton Brown's pasty dough next time, just to see if there's a difference), and I can curry a veggie with the best of them.  I also found a fantastic fragrant basmati recipe or two.  The last hurdle was the Dhal itself. 

Careful combing of internet forums, cookbooks, and my own experience yielded this recipe which, if I may say so, is so awesome it'll make you forget all others.  I can't take full credit for it, I simply synthesized several recipes and matched them up to the ingredients I had on hand.  But the result...oh, the result.  Thick and aromatic, hearty yet not heavy, spicy yet not overspiced...I love the way Indian dishes layer the spice flavors over each other to achieve a perfect gustatory gestalt.

Anyway, here's the recipe...it serves at least six.

Red Lentil Dhal of Doom
(surrender now!)

Spice Blend:

2 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp fenugreek seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
5 whole cloves
4 whole cardamom pods

1 dried red chili, seeds removed, minced
(or one minced jalepeno without seeds)
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

3 tablespoons peanut oil
1 medium onion, diced
1 tablespoon grated ginger (I buy minced ginger in a jar--it's way easier to deal with and lasts in the fridge for months.)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp salt

1 cup red lentils, rinsed and picked over
2 tablespoons tomato paste
5 cups vegetable broth (for the love of god don't use canned--get a good boxed variety like Pacific.  A non-chicken would be good.)
5 plum tomatoes, chopped, or 1 can of diced plum tomatoes

1 cup lightly packed chopped cilantro
Juice of one lime

Making the Spice Blend:

1 - Toast the seed blend over medium low heat for five minutes, stirring constantly.  Keep a lid nearby for when the mustard seeds start popping, or you could put someone's eye out, seriously.  When they start to get golden brown and fragrant, remove from the heat.  Whatever you do, don't put the chili pepper in the pan, or you'll mace yourself.  If you're using a fresh jalepeno instead of dried, add it in step 3 when you saute the other aromatics.

2 - Let cool completely before adding the dried chili and cinnamon and grinding to a fine powder.  An electric grinder is best for this, but you can also have a lot of fun pissing off your neighbors by dumping everything in a thick Ziploc bag and pounding the shit out of it with a hammer.

Meanwhile:

3 - Saute onion in oil for five minutes.  Add the garlic/ginger and cook five minutes more.  Dump in the spices and salt, cook five more minutes.  By now your kitchen should smell like heaven, or at least like God's favorite Indian restaurant. 

3 - Add the broth to deglaze the pan, scraping a bit to unstick any little bits of onion garlic spice goodness.  Add the tomato paste and lentils.  Bring to a boil and simmer 20 minutes.

4 - Add the tomatoes, cilantro, lime juice, and more water if needed.  Simmer 10 more minutes, season with salt and black pepper to taste, and then serve warm with naan or pita bread, and over fragrant basmati rice.

As with most soups this dhal's flavor improves the next day, and it can be frozen quite easily for a couple of months in an airtight container. 

Tomorrow:  Austin's veg restaurants - the good, the bad, and the extinct.

Vegan MoFo Day 10: Curd Your Enthusiasm

You know, I really want to like tofu.

I want to be the sort of person who loves to just marinate and pan-cook a slab of the ol' bean curd, or grill or roast or bake it to spongy perfection and make yummy noises. 

Alas.

I've come a long way since my first stab at vegetarianism.  Like most people when I first came across tofu I thought it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen or tasted.  Over the years I've tried it a dozen different ways, and have liked some and hated others, but the sad fact is that I still don't love it. 

It's easy to find badly prepared tofu.  A lot of people have no idea how to cook the stuff--and a lot of people who try to feed it to you have no idea that just taking it out of the box and cutting it into cubes doesn't make it palatable.  Tofu is something of a diva--it needs a retinue, a support staff, to make it shine.  Otherwise it's scoogy and insipid. 

Tofu is created similarly to cheese; in fact, taking the kind of milk out of the equation they're basically the same thing, so if tofu disgusts you, cheese probably should too.  It's mostly a question of unfamiliarity for the Western palate.  In the American mind tofu still inflicts visions of tasteless "health" food or spooky foreign fare, while cheese evokes pizza, queso dip, and other comforts of home.  The process involves the culturing and pressing of milk, regardless.  The amount of liquid pressed out gives tofu its various levels of firmness.  Either with cheese or tofu, however, the whole idea is to make milk go bad on purpose and then eat what's left.

Yum, right?

Silken tofu, the creamy stuff in the sealed cartons, is made differently; the culture and soymilk are pumped into the carton so the curd forms in the package, therefore not giving it time to press like the firmer sort.  Silken tofu is a wonderful thing for those like me who want to keep the creamy textures of dairy without the dairy.  One of my favorite dessert recipes, in fact, involves silken tofu (see below).

Regular tofu, aka Chinese tofu, is the kind most people think of, and the kind most people claim to hate.  It's got a weird spongy texture and almost no flavor, so cooks often tout its ability to suck up flavor from marinades--but most of the time in my experience the marinade stays on the outside of the block without really penetrating, so while the outside tastes great, the inside is kind of like the inside of a hot dog but without the lips and assholes...and flavor.

Still, tofu is astoundingly good for you and incredibly versatile, so I persevere.  I'm convinced that if I can just find the right method, I'll love it.  I know that most of my aversion is mental; I have the same associations with the curd as a lot of people do.  It's the idea of it more than the actuality. 

Scrambled tofu (also called "scramfu" on the veggie internet) is one application I've enjoyed when I've had it, so I intend to try out several different recipes and play with the chunk size a bit until I get it where I like it.  Deep fried tofu is also tasty, but obviously deep frying anything makes it problematic in the health department (and since I don't fry in oil at home I can't really replicate it).  Part of the secret for me is making sure the tofu portions are as small as possible so that I don't get too much of the texture in one bite.  The smaller the tidbit, the better it cooks anyway.

Another tasty option is tofu jerky; a friend of mine gave me a recipe and I tried it out in a dehydrator.  It was salty as all hell, but I loved it.

Silken tofu shows up a lot in faux dairy, and I wouldn't be able to survive without Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese for cake frosting purposes.  The best use of silken fu, however, is in recipes like the following, quite possibly the richest and most intensely fudgy pie on Earth--so much so that I had to start making them into tiny single-serving pies.  It's fast, it's easy, it's no-cook; practically the perfect recipe, as is reflected by the fact that practically every vegan cookbook out there has some variation on it.

OMG Itty Bitty Mocha Pies

What You Need:

1 12oz bag chocolate chips
1/3 c Kahlua
1 block silken tofu (firm or extra firm)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tablespoon maple syrup or agave nectar

Wee graham cracker or frozen pie crusts (makes about 24 teeny or one big pie)

If using regular pie crusts, prebake according to package directions and allow to cool.

Let's Get it On:

1 - Melt the chocolate chips and Kahlua either in a double boiler or over very, VERY low heat until smooth.

2 - Put the tofu, vanilla, and syrup in a blender and blend until smooth.  Add the chocolate mixture and blend until a nice uniform color and texture.

3 - Pour into crusts.  Chill for 4-6 hours until firm.

I love to garnish these with a tiny sploot of cream cheese frosting and a single raspberry or strawberry, but a swirl of berry coulis would be great too.

Vegan MoFo Day 9: Soup is Good Food

Mmm, soup.

Over half of my most beloved recipes are soups or chilis--the Dhal, the Tortilla Soup, the Enchilada Chili.  Aside from the fact that I've lucked into fantastic recipes, the fact is, soup is one of the easiest and most rewarding things to cook, especially this time of year as we're heading into cooler weather and a bowlful of thick beany goodness is just what the season ordered.

The great thing about soup is that it's a wonderful way to use up that last tomato or onion, and most recipes are versatile so that you can add in whatever lonely half-dead vegetables you have laying around.  A zucchini wouldn't go amiss in this recipe either, nor would a handful of mushrooms.

Most non-cream soups have the same basic procedure: saute the aromatics (as in onion, celery, carrot, garlic, bell peppers--mirepoix, or what Emeril calls the "holy Trinity") in a bit of oil, then add everything else and season.  Bring the whole mess to a boil and then simmer it at low temperature until it's all done.  Chilis and stews are made basically the same way, just with more vegetables and less liquid.  As for liquid, you can substitute vegetable broth, water, tomato juice, or a jar of salsa.

To thicken your average vegetable soup take a handheld blender (I call mine the boat motor) and puree part of the soup for a few seconds; or, in the case of Mexican soups, add in some dehydrated refried beans or mash part of the beans already in the recipe.  Just be sure you check the label to be sure your beans are vegetarian--look for them to be labeled that way, although "fat free" refried beans are almost always veg too.  Some stores carry refried black beans, which are also tasty.  Pintos and black beans are the most oft-used beans in Mexican food, but if all you have are kidney beans, hey, go ahead.

This is one of those recipes for when you don't have anything fresh in the house and just want to throw together something warm and comforting that will give everyone happy tummies.  It's all canned and jarred pantry ingredients, but feel free to substitute a whole sautéed onion for the powder, fresh minced garlic, fresh tomatoes, whatever you have.

Embarrassingly Easy Mexican Bean Soup

What You Need:

1 can vegetarian refried beans
1 can pinto beans or black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can vegetable broth plus 1 can of water
1 can fire roasted diced tomatoes
1 or 2 cans diced green chiles
1 can corn, drained, or 1 cup frozen corn

1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried oregano
2 bay leaves

Let's Get it On:

1 - Dump everything but the corn into a soup pot.  Stir until refried beans are mixed in.

2 - Bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer 30 minutes until nice and thick.  Add the corn in the last five minutes.  Serve hot.  Please don't forget to yank out the two bay leaves.

You can serve this as is, or:

Over cooked rice or leftover Spanish rice
With crushed tortilla chips and fakey cheese
Over cornbread (or with cornbread on the side)