Cooking with ghosts.

Late October and early November tends to be the time when the religions typically practiced in North America tend to remember the dead. This is my mother, more than 10 years gone now, the auburn haired girl that stands beside her own mother, who is holding my aunt in her arms.

I didn't deliberately focus on a dish in remembrance in my mother while I was cooking last night, but it came to me, as I was cooking, that I was doing something that my mother would often do in her later years, make a soup for supper that used a commercially prepared beef base and whatever vegetables were in the house. She generally did this because she was, by that time, permanently disabled, and food stamps only go so far. It is one of my great regrets that I could not be financially stable enough to be of any help to my mother, despite my education, until after she passed. But that's a story for another day. This story is about this soup my mother would make.

In earlier years, she would make meatball soup, something that I would eventually take over, and this was her way of making it when she did not have any meat. Last night, we had a plenitude of veggies needing to be used and a man, Miguel-san, who has been very sick for a week. I found myself cutting all the veggies up and tossing them into a pot, with the intention of adding vegetable bases rather than beef base, and rice noodles and peas for the "complete protien" component. A mild, healing soup for dinner for the sick man.

This is what I got:



The contents are carrots, celery, peas, potatoes, onions, cloves of garlic, a packet of onion/mushroom soup, a tablespoon of vegetable base, olive oil, and rice noodles. Michael liked it just the way it was. I peppered it up for its initial serving; later bowls, after the soup had cooled and the rice noodles kind of took over the pot, I needed soy sauce to counteract the flavor of the rice starch. This was my first time cooking any rice-type noodle, and I did not know what happens when you let them stand in liquid. Next time, I'll make some sort of pad thai-inspired dish.

As I ate it, I thought about standing in my mother's kitchen, listening to her describe how she had made the soup, watcher her smile as I told her that I liked it. It is poor folks food, no doubt, and the addition of the olive oil was my little stab at trying to address the one problem of the dish, as I remembered it--the lack of fat made it less flavorful. When I make it again, I'll likely use wheat noodles--and, in truth, the dish will be a little different every time, just as it was for my mother. In a strange way, it was like my mother stood beside me as I stirred, and this living recipe is like another way my mother lives on now that she is gone.

Aunty 'Rouda's ROUS pie.

Okay. So, for the duration of the reign (which means nothing if you are not in the SCA but is an important referent for what I am about to say, so, in the event that there is a non-Scadian reading what I am about to write, at least understand that what's about to follow is not true at all in the real world ;-) ... the Royal whim has been proclaimed, and for the duration of the reign, The Princess Bride is considered documentation for any A&S project. On the Northshield mail list, Gabriella asked for suggestions for altering her feast dishes in ways that might work with this theme. This was my reply:

For instance, you have rabbit, which you are thinking of as the last dish in your first service. And you want this to be your ROUS. Well, then, if you are swapping out the earlier stew for a sandwich--a decidedly post medieval dish--you can balance that by making a ROUS with ROUS. ;-) The soteltie is traditionally the last place in the service order, and so that would work nicely. :-)

ROUS-- a presentation version of the dish, a standing pie that has been decorated and disguised as a Rodent Of Unusual Size. This takes a trip around the feast hall for the Ooohs and Ahhs and then is served to the head table.

A dish of ROUS (Rabbit, Onions, Unguent [the sauce or gravy], Spices) served as simplified standing pies to the remaining tables.

There would be a lot of different dishes you could make with ROUS as the initials--you could be even more clever with a pie made with Rarebit, Oysters, Unagi (Eel!), Squid or shrimp--essentially, a seafood pie in a savory cheese sauce. ;-) An illusion food that completes the illusion by not having any rodent in it. ;-)

Since I have spent much time working on cheese-like sauces, and I love seafood, I think that Aunty 'Rouda's ROUS pie is going to be a dish in development Real Soon. Mixed seafood pies are pretty findable in medieval cookery, so it's a really do-able project. And I'll likely do the other version, too, but it's probably going to have to be red beans or roasted veggies or rice for the r, rather than rabbit. That'll be the totally vegan version.

Geeze Gravies and Grocers, part 1: Grocery stores.

Milwaukee is not a small place. I have occasionally forgotten that, because I grew up in Chicago, which, in all its immensity, easily dwarfs large numbers of the world's cities. I was reminded of the fact that Milwaukee is not all that small when I was hunting for a particular product.

There isn't much cookery going on right now, as mentioned in last post, but that has got to change. I have to eat, and when I saw my food bill this month, I realized that I can't keep this restaurant eating thing up. Sure, I have no time to cook, and yes, it's given me a reason to try a number of restaurants I've been meaning to try, but the plain fact is that I am a social servant in this culture, and so I never have the luxury of spending all the money I might feel like spending.

For a very long time, I have been trying to make a vegan, no-soy-cheese substitute sauce that will stand in for cheese in pre-1601 recipes. The standard vegan substitute in this situation is nutritional yeast, and, while the nootch certainly does impart a flavor that works and is distantly like Parmesan cheese, my blackened Laurel heart will not rest until I can come up with a sauce that will be cheese tasting and comprised of verifiable pre-1601 ingredients. You can make an argument for nootch based on the idea that yeast was certainly used for cookery in period and that it is occasionally written about in a way that you can pretend implies adding it strictly for flavor, but the plain fact, as far as I can tell, is that nootch as a specifically produced food is pretty recent on the "inventions in cookery" timeline.

This is not true of fermented tofu. Somewhere out in the world there are a bazzillion cooks who, when presented with the same challenge, might have said "Oh, yeah, I know just what to do!" and reached for their jar of doufu-ru, but I had to learn it existed. Tofu is not something I ever loved even when I was eating whatever soy jumped on to my plate, so the chances of me stumbling on this stuff became tiny, tiny, tiny the moment I realized I was going to have to cut unfermented soy out of my diet. 99.99% of the tofu on the American market is your garden variety bean curd that, as useful as it is to the general vegan/non-ovolacto piscetarian, is something that anyone with thyroid issues is not going to be able to touch.

Fermented tofu, according to this article, appears in the written record in China in 1578 CE. And so, having stumbled across the existence of the product thanks to surfing teh internetz, I stumbled around the Milwaukee area trying to find it.

And that brings me round to the point.

I suspected I could find the product in one of the many Asian markets in the area. What I wanted to know was if I could find it elsewhere--the Asian markets most likely to have a wide selection of products tend to be more on the north end of the metro area, and thus, a bit out of my way.

In Outpost? Nope. If it's not at Outpost, then there is little point in trying the more standard grocers in the area, although I did give my favorite Sentry a brief run through, just in case. Nope.

However, there is a grocer in the Milwaukee area, a place of legendary status in this metro area, a place that is considered so upscale that a number of my former acquaintances will only shop there because they imagine it adds to their "high-class" cache: Sendiks. I've only shopped there a few times, never particularly impressed either positively or negatively.

I have an impression now, though.

Sendik's sucks.

It sucks like a suck ass sucking thing of suckiness.

I swear to dog, it has got to be by the good will and generosity of the people of Milwaukee that this local chain continues to thrive--kind of like the same way people kept buying Van Heusen shirts because they were "American made" long after it had become very clear that Van Heusen had shipped its manufacturing overseas. Only a willingness to believe the bluff could explain why anyone thinks this is a chain full of unusual and finer foodstuffs for the tony crowd. That may have been true a long time ago, but it is not true now. Is there a place for Sendiks in the Milwaukee market? Sure. If they are offering a selection of things Joellen Average will never otherwise try at a price that isn't too much for her family to bear, great: I'm all for wider experiences for everyone. And if she gets her little ego boosted, well, as long as she doesn't cross my path, it's all good. But is it the establishment it's reputed to be?

Oh, hell, no. I saw nothing there that I could not find elsewhere--with one exception: the despair-inducing deli section.

Well, let's be fair--I'm not going to like anything with mango in it. I'm especially not going to like it if the "crab" turns out to be that shitty fake crab crap with the allergy-provoking egg ingredients in it. So if your special crab salad has eggs and mangoes in it, I'm going to get sick eating it.

Which I did.

If that was all, I'd shut up. But the cabbage salad sucked. The sushi--not something you'd even begin to expect would be fabulous in a grocery story--was just sad, and that was just a vegetable roll. What the hell would it have been like if there was seafood in it? I have long understood that too much wasabi ruins the balance of delicate flavors an amuse-bouche of sushi can provide, but for the first time ever, I was extraordinarily grateful for the wasabi--it changed the awful vegetable roll into a nice crispy crunchy base useful for transporting the fabulous flavor of horseradish into my mouth.

Gak. Sendik's, I am so done with you.

After that trip, I abandoned the immediate vicinity search and went to a north side Asian grocer. Milwaukee's near north side is not the nicer area, but it's not bad. A lot of rural Wisconsinites find it terrifying, and people have left my place of employment after one visit to a home on the north side, too nervous to look past their lack of familiarity with the urban experience and notice that "lack of expensive houses" does not equate with "radically terrifying and vastly dangerous area of horrific poverty."

I found the above jars at Rhino Foods. I popped it open, and, yay! It does taste remarkably like bleu cheese. Yay.


I'll soon be popping some into a non-cheese sauce, hereafter described as a geeze gravy, to determine how it will work as a flavoring agent in a non-dairy béchamel--essentially, what all vegan "cheese" sauces turn out to be. Yes, every vegan food writer talks like he or she has just invented the Best. Vegan. Cheese. Sauce. Evah. whenever they bust out their recipes (hence my thinking of them as "geeze" gravies), but all this tells me is that American cooks really lack in some basic skills. I am eternally grateful to my Junior High School Home Ec teacher for teaching me to make a white sauce. Little did I know at 12 years old that I was being given a key to a cookery kingdom.

Chianti? You think?

There are a limited number of bean varieties available to the average American consumer in the average grocery store. Furthermore, there is plenty of misinformation to be found on teh internetz: one of my favorite falsities is a statement made in some news paper story on the resurgance of the fabulous fava bean that flatly proclaimed that no other bean was ever eaten in Europe prior to the arrival of New World varieties.

Well, there's a food writer whose going to have an "eh, ah, OOPS!" moment one day.

Fava beans are something that I have had some difficulty in finding around here. I keep looking for canned broad beans or fava beans or whatever, but they just have not been about in the stores I frequent--and don't even think about dried fava beans in the local Sentry.

But, as has been said before, I often shop at my well-beloved Outpost Co-op, and one day some number of months ago, I looked up in the bulk food aisle and saw dried fava beans.

At last. I found them.

So I do my research, and then I research a little more, because I've never cooked them before--I can't even be certain I've eaten them, beyond in my own home made seitan. When all my research is done, I have come to understand that the beans need to have their tough brown skins removed before eating.



It took me days to get what would evenually be about 1.5 cups of beans from dried brown pebbles to skinned beauties ready for cooking. I loved the smooth feel and the look, but other food writers were not kidding when they said the skins were tough to remove. Some of the fava beans, even after 3 days of soaking, never softened enough to be peeled.

I sorted through various bean recipies in various pre-1601 sources, and was not wildly enthused by any of them, but since it was clear that I was going to have to cook the beans first, I popped them into the pressure cooker, covered them with water, sprinkled in a little salt, and let them go.

... Just a little too long. ::sigh::

By the time I opened the pressure cooker, the fava beans had cooked to the "perfect for pureeing" stage. I sprinkled in some olive oil, some poudre fort, and mashed them.



They were okay. The dish was not a sufficient return on my effort, but it was not terrible. Fava beans were not the delish treat I had been lead to believe, but I would make this again if it did not require so much effort to prepare the beans. I put the remainder of the dried fava beans (about 3 cups worth, actually) into the freezer, figuring that it would be some long while before I would want to work with them again. The best thing that came from that experiment was the realization that I had come very close to the water:bean ratio needed for the pressure cooker--throw in pre-soaked beans and then cover with 1/2 to 1 inch water.

And a few days go by.

Now, I have not had much time for cookery--or much of anything else--in recent months, and so, when Wednesday last came along and I needed some supper, Angelique and I went off to a restaurant I had tried several years ago but never really got to know, Sharazad.

On a whim, I ordered the app combo, noting that there were quite a few vegan appropriate items thereon, in addition to the spinich pie (quite free of feta cheese). In the app was a dish called foule--a dish I'd never met, a dish of fava beans. I was eager to try it, hoping that it would be inspiring.

It was, all right. The damn brown skins were right on the beans. Frak! All that time and effort, and the skins are perfectly fine to eat.

Other things I noted: I really like their baba ganooj, more than I like the same dish from Abu's Jerusalem of the Gold (which recently changed hands, totally wrecking the bizarre charm of the former interior). The adas majroush (lentil soup) is very nice, and the next time I go, I think I will be adequately fed via the app plate and the soup. There are a number of fish/seafood dishes on the menu, but I'll likely work throiugh all the vegan things, first. I can get a decent fish meal lots of places in town, but a decent vegan meal is a rarer thing.

And I'll be damned if I peel another dried fava. Feh!

Pennsic Eating When You Are Me

Gingered Pottage

I experimented with pressure cooking at Pennsic this year, and I can say with certainty that it is a partial success. The pressure cooker would come close to hitting standard pressure, but it never succeeded; I presume this is related to the fact that the prevailing winds cooled the pot in exactly the right ratio to the flames heating the pot to perfectly balance the heat on the edge of pressure. Foods cooked more nicely, as the lid reduces steam and heat loss even if it did not hit pressure. It would be worth dedicating a pressure cooker to the camping stuff if I can find a better cooker for home use.

We tried several things--a cooked turkey breast for Michael that was very delicious, and various "period in principle" vegetable pottages, where the idea is that you prepare a vegetable pottage comprised of period (or period like) ingredients and enjoy an easy lunch. The above pictured is the most successful, comprised of fresh garlic bulbs, a huge chunk of peeled and diced fresh ginger, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and a rutabaga. Oh, and a bit of salt and pepper to taste. Potatoes are barely period, arriving in the occasional euro cook pot in the 16th century, but I'm not sure about the swede. The earliest reliable reference I can find is a vague description of a seventeenth century record that implies the possibility of unrecorded earlier use.

However, it was very good, and a very reasonable vegetable pottage for a Renaissance persona. If you include the gray area in your time frame, you can eat it without feeling like your place in the space-time continuum is too wretchedly disturbed. And if you can't, sub in one sweet potato and one turnip for a similar flavor and all pre-1601 edible roots.

I generally cooked meat separately for Michael, and he would add it to whatever I made. The primary problem I faced: keeping the meat. If one leaves home with rock solid frozen meat, what one brings has to be cooked within 2 or three days, depending on your cooler. Once cooked, it's only good for 2 or three days. Thus, you can only be sure of having decent meat in the cooler for 4 days, with the expectation that you might get to 6. I am seriously considering for next year precooking meats and keeping a dry-ice cooler, a fresh foods cooler, and a small defrost cooler. As bad as that might sound in terms of gear, it's only the addition of one six-pack sized cooler. I already carry 2 medium coolers to Pennsic and have done so for years.

Most years, I just shop at Giant Eagle for food when I get there, but I did pantry shopping this year--I looked at what I had on hand and just brought food from home. This worked out fine, as well--better, in some ways, as much of what was in the fridge would have had to be thrown out upon my arrival home. This fact also makes me think that the dry ice/wet ice/defrost system is going to be a better idea.

The food court at Pennsic is always something of a challenge. There is very little there for strictly vegan fare, but you can do okay if you allow eggs, dairy, or both into your vegetarianism or your piscetarianism. I did find myself in the position of "eat dairy or starve" a couple of times, so I tried the spinach wrap at Once Again/Nobleman's Inn and the Spinach Pie at Fruity Cobbler. These are the things I ate and can recommend as edible that can fit with a picetarian + dairy food style:

*French Fries from various vendors: I found I liked the ones at Nobleman/Once Again's best.

*Spinach Wrap from the same tent.

*Falafel from Fruity Cobbler. Spinach Pie was okay, but I preferred the Spinach Wrap, above.

*Shrimp and Vegetable stir fries from Delights of Cathy--be aware, however, that they do cook everything in the same woks. Their portion sizes have also gone down.

*Vegetable dishes from Cock & Bull (sauce may be butter or margarine, I didn't ask. Having already had feta cheese by that time, it hardly mattered which was used when faced by my huge-o-matic hunger).

There were other dishes I could have tried, but generally, if I was up in the food court and faced with uncontrollable hunger, I gravitated to the french fries, being the best way to control the hunger and not have to fret about how it was cooked.

Black Beans Two Ways, and more commercial seitan sausage.

So, you know, part of buying a pressure cooker to quickly cook beans means that one will be cooking beans a. lot.

I have a wide variety of beans in my store room, and a quick look at the veggies needing to be eaten suggested the next stop: black beans.



I'd set the beans to soak before leaving for work, and they cooked up quickly in the pressure cooker. I was aiming for one of my favorite black bean recipes, Frijoles Negros. Except the peppers. Never really have green peppers around.

Of course, upon opening the pressure cooker, I found myself with lots of tasty broth and slightly underseasoned beans. Hm. I was too hungry to spend serious time adjusting the dish, so I finished up the plantains and one of the Field Roast chipolte sausages. These are both easily preparted with a little time in the frying pan.

And the beans were fine, the seitan sausages edible, and the platains were yummy. As the other half of this product review, I'd like to mention that the chipolte sausages, while edible, are still not as good as the seitan chorizo by Upton's, and no amount of spaghetti sauce in the world would make those Italian's acceptable. It is extremely unlikely that I will be trying any Field Roast products again. Every one of them has been a disappointment.

However, I still had me some black beans for dinner the next day.



This was actually the more successful meal: the re-spiced black beans with sauteed onions, garlic, jalapenoes, and napalm (a Thai chilli sauce called, properly, sriracha). On the side is quinoa cooked in the black bean broth and beets with olive oil and seseme seeds.

In that meal is the beginning of a comfort meal I think I will love, but since that used up the Frijoles Negros, this is as far as I have gotten.

w00t! Happy McPan!!!!

I close my eyes and I can still see that moment....

I'm in my grandmother's kitchen, and it's decorated like pretty much every other working class home in an area filled with depression bungalows. Creaky old stove, lino on the walls; it's a 1930's time capsule. I'm watching a pan, and the pan has a ... thing... on it. The .... thing .... jiggles every so often, and the pan hisses and spits.

This is fascinating.

"Why is it doing that, Grandma?"

And she looked at me and smiled. "It's a pressure cooker," she answered, as if that explained everything, and no more was said.

I don't know if she ever used it again. I don't remember any of the other Grand Dames in my family using it. Nonetheless, somewhere along the line, I learned a little bit about it, and since switching to a piscetarianism that is just a few fish meals and some honey away from veganism, I've wanted to pursue the interest born that long ago day. I cook a lot of dried beans. It takes an awfully long time. And it heats the house something fierce.

So, standing in the local Kame Apart (the only discount retailer that showed a preference for corporate donations to liberal causes based on the information collated by the apparently defunct buyblue.com), I noticed two pressure cookers on the clearance shelves. One of them came home with me.


I like to make a personal version of Red Beans. It's not in the least based on any "Red Beans and Rice" recipe, simply because it came about through my desire to have a kidney-bean mash and some rice without the overabundance of fake smoke flavor to be found in that atrocity served up at Popeye's Fried Chicken. I decided that this would be the first thing I tried in my new pressure cooker. It takes a long time to cook on the stove top, and even longer in a slow cooker.


There they are, the ingredients in the pan!

In it all went. I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out, because the amount of food in the pan was completely out of proportion to the amount of water the happy helpful instruction manual said I needed. 4 cups. That's right, four frakkin' cups. Anyone with even a little cookery experience should be able to infer that from the amount of ingredients in the picture, four cups was excessive.

Nonetheless, I followed the instructions, this being my first try with a pressure cooker and all, and when the amount of time that was supposed to pass passed, I opened the pan to find......

Kidney Bean Soup.



Goddamn delicious kidney bean soup.

I'm going to have to work on the liquid to solids proportion. However, I'm thinking that even a failed recipe, as long as what goes in is going to result in a pleasant combination, is going to produce a decent broth. The beans were certainly to proper mashing consistency, and the flavor was all there. 30 minutes versus hours and hours and hours, and the cooking did not make the house unbearably hot--an important consideration when the air conditioning in your home consists of one small window unit.

I have the recipe written down in my Box O' Cookery Happiness; the primary deviations from the usual template would be that I used the garlic/ginger paste I love because I had no fresh ginger, and I had about a cup and 1/2 of leftover cooking broth from the yams that I added to the mix. I'll write down exact-ish proportions the next time I make this.

Meranwhile, it's helpful to note this chart of suggested cooking times for dried beans. It's also helpful to note that my pressure cooker is medium pressure, only hits 10 psi rather than 15. It's going to require an additional 4 minutes time for every 10 in the chart--so something that should take 12 minutes will take 16; something that should take 30 will take 42.