It's been a long time

I have been much too busy to explore and discuss cookery these days. It's something of a problem, as a matter of fact, because it means that I have again devolved to eating what I can get cooked quickly and everything is dreadfully bean-brown-mush looking. This is what I have had time and forethought to do.

That should be over for a while. After this morning's horrifying lunch, I really need to consider my cooking again. Pay attention. Have time.

I can say I have learned a few things:

1. I am an indifferent food blogger.
2. I don't really like fava beans as much as I want to.
3. This place is really better as a repository of failure than any kind of world-shattering tool.
4. I'm tired of brown food but my budget is so tight that there is going to be a lot more of it. Yes. Even more.

So, let's talk briefly about popcorn.

Yeah, I know, that's a change. I can eat a whole 16 cups of it at a time. I suppose I could try for more, but I would... no, I won't lie. It's the limit of my favorite pan, that's why I stop at 16. Bad home made popcorn is better than any store-boughten, pre-popped stuff. WHole grain snack goodness that I love, just plain. No butter, minimal salt--you really can't eat that much popcorn AND put all the stuff on it. I'd rather eat more popcorn and do without butter.

Based on some internet research (using the magical and TOTALLY UNEXPECTED search phrase, "how to pop popcorn"), I learned two things:

1. The way I was taught to make popcorn is apparently the best way to do it at home and the horrifying hell of microwave popcorn left a whole generation bereft of this valuable knowledge.

2. You can put salts and spices into the oil before popping instead of after.

So, I tried point #2, as I already had #1 together. Note to self--maybe consider not heating the spices with the oil, put them in right before the popcorn. Note to self 2--this leaves the pan considerably messier--salty and singed spices oh my!

Anyway, as I had a mass of popcorn for dinner last night, I'd best not eat that tonight, There is a limit to the fiber my innards want to deal with at any given time.


So let's talk about almond milk based yogurt instead:

Almande has finally shown up on the shelves of my favorite Outpost--surprisingly, I could not find it at Whole Foods when I was down there a week or so ago--and so I bought some. I have a lovely bunch of yogurt starter sitting in my cupboard, but this product got to my house before I felt the need to experiment with making it myself, so of course, I bought some.

I have mixed feelings about it. It's a ghodsend in that it's a decent yogurt product that is soy free, and the fruit flavored yogurts are fine, better that So Delicious Coconut, my former yogurt-like treat. Unlike the coconut milk yogurts, it tastes like a standard fruit yogurt, not like coconut + blueberries.

Which, I might add, was always pretty much a "meh" combination for me.

I don't have any complaints about the textures, either, as by the time I found it in Milwaukee, a number of the issues identified by earlier customers had been corrected.

But the underlying combination of sour and almond flavor in the vanilla and the plain flavors--the large sizes I would usually buy--are ... ah... odd. Not yogurty enough.

Now, I am sure that seems silly, eh? Almond milk yogurt isn't yogurty enough? Listen, my children, ever since I found Greek Gods Honey flavored Yogurt, all plain or vanilla yogurts are no longer yogurty enough. Because that stuff is my idea of what yogurt should be. Holy man.

Of course, I can hardly ever have it, which is why it's teh sadeness that the Almande, while perfectly acceptable on it's own, isn't even close to as good. However, I'll adjust. Just as I can appreciate a veggie burger for what it is rather than despair over what it isn't (a hamburger!), I will enjoy this for what it is. After all, there were a few years in which it was milk-based, soy-based, or nothing. I usually had nothing for those years.

Product Review: Living Harvest Hemp Frozen Desert

People who know me know I love Living Harvest's tempt hemp milk. It's more expensive than my usual almond milk, and it's less frequently available (when I finally ran out of my stock pile, I went to my right well beloved Outpost and hunted the aisles, only to learn that they only carry it when the state-wide, loosely associated food cooperative system has it on sale. Because they have to, then.)

So I get it once in a while, and I stock pile it, and have it as a treat.

I found another treat:


Oh, my goodness.

I tried the mint and the coffee biscotti. This was completely delicious, and even the Baby K and the Baby Ry loved it: high praise indeed. I'm glad to have found it, as it makes a wider range of non-dairy deserts available to us. It is denser that the Luna & Larry's coconut frozen desert, which is nice, but each desert has its own merits, so it is about on par for taste and mouth-feel. Yum.

Product Review: So Delicious Coconut Yogurt and Milk/Beverage

I miss yogurt so much. There are plenty of soy-based substitute products, and rice based substitute products, but, of course, what I have been looking for is an almond based substitute. And, when I was dragging myself around Outpost the other day, not only did I find the Coconut Bliss, I also found this:


This product is not as new to the market as I thought, but it's certainly new to me. And it was good. I tried several flavors, the sharp, berry-based flavors I tend to prefer. The texture was smooth, thick, and the sweet of it is acceptable, although maybe a little more than I'd like.

However, its cost makes it something that I do not expect to eat regularly. That is a problem. Given that it's price puts it in the "treat" range, and regular yougurt is cheaper, I'm not sure I am going to be buying this often.


Also tried, by this same company: So Delicious Coconut Milk. It's not bad, but it was thin, and had a sharp taste to it; I don't see myself switching to this from almond milk. I didn't care for it on my cereal and it didn't cook as well as almond milk in any form--cold case, UHT packaged--or easily, locally available brands--Blue Diamond, Silk. It also is not as lovely as Living Harvest's Hemp Milk, which is only occasionally locally available. It was, however, much better than any rice milk I have tried. It is also far more reasonably priced than the coconut yogurt, so price was not an issue here.

FWIW, my preference is for Blue Diamond Almond Milk. You may have noticed. The coconut beverage will not be replacing, or even supplementing, it. However, if my only choices are the So Delicious or Rice Dream, it's So Delicious for the win.

I'm going to have to get to work on a recipe for almond based yogurt. Just as other bright people came up with a coconut milk creamy desert, surely someone else out there has already tried.

Product Review: Coconut Bliss

I totally frakkin' love ice cream and frozen custard. I have not tried the soy frozen deserts because, well, they're unfermented soy, and one single go round with rice-based cheese was enough to make me scream yuck and swear off rice-based "dairy" forever and ever amen. There are some frozen deserts that I have once in a while--fruit juice bars, some brands of gelato--but nothing quite takes the place of something creamy.

After a while, it seemed to me that making my own with a pudding recipe and coconut milk would be a quick fix. And then I found this recipe, proving yet again that great ideas never occur in a vacuum, and even better, she figured out the steps, saving me the trouble of doing so myself.

Well, today I took a quick trip to my favorite local grocery, my well beloved Outpost Coop. I just wanted a bundle of vegetables for supper, but I was so hungry! Never a good idea to shop when hungry. But I'm not sorry I wandered around, because, first, I didn't spend st00pid amounts of money, and second, I found this:



Pricey, of course. But less expensive than the Turtle Mountain version. And it has a reference to the moon! And neato graphics! Whee, such decision making! I bought the Chocolate Hazelnut flavor, figuring that if the coconut flavor was noticeable, it would work well. And I totally love chocolate with hazelnuts.

And I have to say, it's nice. It doesn't have the same sort of body that ice cream has, but it is creamy and delicious. And yes, my first impression was that of chocolate coconut with some crunchy nuts. The texture is pretty light, but there is plenty of coconut fat in it, and that's completely what makes it a win as a frozen, creamy dessert. I'd like to try a few other flavors, too. At some point, I'll want to make my own, but this will be quite nice for my replacement frozen dairy craving until that point in time. Might even try it to flavor coffee. That might be a win, too. Yay, win!

Some simple cookery notes, because it's only simple cookery going on right now.

I've been hurt since late December or so, and it waxes and wanes in terms of the injury's ability to interfere with what I am doing, and right now, it's a great big wax--I'm hobbled right now, hardly moving. Some notes based on things I've started but have not been able to follow on through as much as I have wanted.

Lima Bean Spread: I love lima beans, frozen, but have noticed that the big lima beans that come dried are a different beast all together. I don't really like them as entities that one can cook up for a larger dish, like a lima bean stew or something. What I have noticed: they cook from dried to mush pretty quickly, and so with the addition of just enough flavoring to mask the faint hint of lima bean, you can make a pretty decent protein spread for a sandwich. It's not as good as hummus, of course, but then, chick peas have a nice flavor that works with vegetables and breads and whatever else. The Lima Bean spread, however, isn't lima bean-ish enough to be really distinctly delish for lima bean lovers, but sufficiently lima-beanish to make it less than invisible, like a sandwich spread based on white beans. My fist solution: a couple shakes of liquid smoke, which worked very nicely. I will be playing with that, because it was nice just served on flat-breads, but it needs a little more to really make it something I am going to be handing around as a recipe. Dried lima beans cooked to mush and a little smoke flavor certainly produces an acceptable spread, but my suspicion is that it can be something more without needing to go quite as complex as hummus-from-dried-chick-peas.


Garlicking Up Sauces: In this old Ars Gratia Artis post, I mentioned my tendency to buy expensive Italian sauces (because it is the expensive ones that have sugar instead of corn syrup, olive or canola oil instead of soy bean oil) and then, after a few bites, garlic it up to the point that any crap sauce would do. Well, I'm running a little low on fundage right now, so I thought, well, maybe I'd try me a can of Hunts spaghetti sauce. At 89¢, it seemed like it might be worth trying despite some of the low quality ingredients--I shouldn't have the soy, true, but if I could get a decent taste out of it, it might not be too bad to use once in a while to make my moola stretch, and I have a very large amount of fresh garlic to use up.

Yeah. It was a waste of good garlic cloves. I pulled out the powder immediately, I could not get that stuff good with anything less than plenty of powder and heaping spoonfuls of giardiana. It's too sweet. Whether one calls that as a WIN or a FAIL kind of depends--if I just need a reasonable sauce to overwhelm with powerful flavors, then... well, it works, but I may as well just use some tomato paste and avoid the soy and the corn syrup.

I dunno. I read the ingredient lists on so many foods, and I'm thinking to myself that it's not really a wonder that so may people are not healthy. It's probable that we will all use *some* processed foods; it's hard to completely avoid it *all* and we'll just have to chant the mantra "everything in moderation." However, it's really easy to go to a grocery story and buy food enough for a month and come out with meals that are all technically appropriate for health according to the "food pyramid" and still have nothing but good-tasting death in your cupboard--which sort of rolls me along to the next small bit.

Real Pancakes from Scratch: Baby K loves pancakes, and wanted some for breakfast. Having none of his favorite pancake mix in the house (whatever that mix might be), I made them from scratch, via the recipe for griddle cakes in the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking. Things I noted: it's better with a smidge of vanilla added and using 2 eggs. It needs more milk than the recipe calls for. I need to stop putting cooking spray/butter/margerine on the pancake pan I have, as this burns quickly and makes the pancakes look burnt when they are not. But what took me by surprise was the realization that for him, the idea of cooking pancakes from a recipe in a book was worrisome. He knew what he was going to get from a box, and he knew that there are some kinds of pancake mixes that he does not like. But the idea that someone might make them without depending on the "magic" of a boxed mix was weird enough that he wondered if it was going to be something edible. His voice was full of joy and delight when he sang out that they were wonderful and gobbled them up, but his voise also had that tone of relief that indicated he had expected otherwise.

Huh. We never had pancakes much when I was a kid, although I was certainly aware of pancake mixes. But it never occurred to me that cooking them from scratch had become such a rarity in this culture that simply by following a recipe from the 1975 edition of a popular cookbook I was engaged in a resurrected recipe. I knew how to make pancakes from scratch, I just didn't bother. That's true of a lot of people. However, sometime between now and then, that's become more and more rare, to the point that I don't think I know anyone who *does* make them from scratch unless, like me, they have some reason for avoiding particular ingrediants in mixes (generally powdered milk, soy, and eggs), or they want something you can't get in a box (sourdough). It was a weird, weird moment. Pancakes are so simple, after all.

Vegetable Bowls I want to Remember: No pictures here, either, just a bit of recollection. 1: I often stirfry veggies as a simple meal, something I have been doing a lot of these past injured weeks. Two things I noticed: all that peanut oil that I have accumulated from pouring it off of the natural peanut butter I buy (rather than mixing it in) mnakes a very nice stir fry oil when serving the veggies over rice--I've been using olive for so long that I had forgotten about the nice qualities of peanut for anything other than the neat trick of making a chocolate cake taste like a chocolate-peanut butter cake by simply substituting the peanut oil for the "vegetable oil." And 2: I used to eat a lot of somen noodles, but had gotten away from that while with Michael. He hears somen, he thinks ramen, and that's the end of it. But I recalled my love for these, and for soba, and went and got some recently. I used to usually eat this with just some plain mixed vegetables mixed in, but the other day I tried stir-fried mushrooms, onions, garlic, eggplant, and seaseme seeds. A few days latter, I went with green beans, onions, garlic, and I liked that, too, although it takes a much larger amount of green beans:noodle ratio to make me happy than it takes mixed veggie:noodle ratio to make me happy. Not sure what's up with that, but I have plenty of time to try it all out.

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.

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.