A Falafelish to Remember

MMMMmmmm... Falafelish

So, I cooked up a mess of dried chickpeas. MMMM, chickpeas. I've gotten lazy about soaking them: just throw them in a slow cooker and add water and let 'em cook all night, and there you have it, beans. I had planned to make hummus and a stew or soup, but it turns out that I had a little more than I expected when all was said and done. I asked Michael whether he wanted chick pea burgers or a soup, and his reply was "falafel."

Well, now, that wasn't a choice, in large part because I do not know how to make it.

But, thanks to the magic of the internet, I managed something falafel-ish. Falafelish.

It's based on a combination of these two recipes on epicurios.com. I'm writing my process down not because I feel I improved on either recipe, but because both recipes state that you can used canned--and thus implying cooked--chickpeas.

Yeah. You can't.

Furthermore, I am one of those folks who hate cilantro, so substitutions were required.

Here we are:

• 1 or more cups cooked chickpeas. I measured out 4 quarter cups of my cooked chickpeas, but it seemed rather like more than a cup.
• 1 small onion, diced (about 1/2 cup)
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
• 2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon carrot greens, chopped
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes (Of course I used Arwen's Dynamite for the Soul)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 4 tablespoons of chick pea flour
• enough plain breadcrumbs to be able to form patties with the whole mess above
• About 6 cups vegetable oil for frying

Throw everything but the breadcrumbs into a blender or a food processor. Whirl that shit to pieces--it's going to be too wet to stop from forming a mash, but don't turn it into baby food. Let the chickpea mash rest in the fridge for about an hour.

When the mash has finished resting, add breadcrumbs. You are going to have to add them by feel, because there is no telling how wet a particular mash is going to be. You have added  enough breadcrumbs when you can roll the mixture into a ball (about the size of a golfball, per the other recipes, but I think mine were a bit smaller) and then flatten it to a patty and still be able to get it off your hands intact.

Heat the oil in a heavy frying pan. Add the patties, cook 'em, and drain 'em.

They were oddly pleasing, with a nice soft inside and a crispy outside, and Michael keeps eating them off the plate, suggesting that I may have to make something else for dinner tonight. Because they will be gone.

It's scrambled again.

TEMPEH SCRAMBLE: as the tempeh gets older, stronger flavors develop, and I don't always enjoy them. I have found that marinating the tempeh in a combination of lemon juice and soy sauce is enough balance to counteract the aged tempeh flavor. Aged tempeh may be a delicacy in Indonesia, but I'm a Norwegian living in Wisconsin. I'm pretty sure that some of my "native" delicacies might not find favor with the Indonesians. It's a fair trade, don't you think?

Anyway, this is what this particular scramble consists of:

Tempeh marinated in soy sauce and lemon juice.
A whole yellow onion
A generous amount of olive oil
About a cup and a half of previously steamed mustard and beet greens

The night before (or a couple of days before, if you like) slice tempeh into strips and marinate it with  a soy sauce and lemon juice mixture. Cover and place in the refrigerator. When you're ready to eat, pour a generous amount of olive oil into your wok and let it start to heat while you chop up the onion. Put the onion into the oil and give it a good stir. Cut or break the tempeh up into small pieces, then toss it in with the onions and cook to your preferred level of doneness; I like the onions to be translucent and the tempeh slightly browned. Add the mixed greens and stir long enough to incorporate the green throughout the rest of the dish and heat the greens through.

Like pretty much everything else I cook, tempeh scramble is really more of a process than a recipe. The only thing sure is the tempeh. Given that I like my tempeh scramble with lots of greens in it you can usually assume that there will be some, but you can't always be sure. Sometimes I like to make it with carrot and broccoli and hot peppers. Sometimes I like just Swiss chard and almonds, and seasoning the tempeh/nut/Swiss chard mixture with Worchestershire sauce and nutritional yeast and garlic. Today's scramble didn't need any seasoning; the combination of mustard greens and marinated tempeh was fabulous on its own.

And yes, I did make that strawberry jam! I used the low sugar recipe available in the .pdf from the Wisconsin extension, here.

Curry Cocozelle, Baharat Beans, and Georgia Bibimbap

Food in jars!

 

That's right. I'm sick. But I still have to eat, so the super easy cookery came out yesterday and this is what I named the dishes at the end of the day.

Oh, man, who am I kidding? I'm always a super easy cook. It only has to be good, it does not have to be extravagant, right?

And because I am under the weather, and because I cook to taste most of the time, these recipes have only approximations. Just like Medieval cookery.  Just like the cooking you've learned from your nana.

That's me, everyone's nana.

Curried cocozelle

Chop a large onion and three-4 large, ripe beefsteak tomatoes . Peel, deseed, & chop a giant  cocozelle.   Smaller cocozelle can be used whole; chop 4-6 small ones--enough to make 4 cups of prepared squash .

Fry the onions in some olive oil. Add the tomatoes and enough water to make a broth— about ½ cup to 2 cups. Seethe the onions and tomatoes for 5 minutes over medium fire, then add the prepared cocozelle. Cover and let the mixture cook until the squash is just a little harder than you like. Add curry powder to taste. Let cook a few minutes more until squash is done and serve.

 

The center and the right to jar above contain this soup . It's a bright orange not because of the  turmeric  in the curry powder, but because of the tomato mixture I used. One of the joys of using your homegrown tomatoes is that you get to experience a wide variety of tomato tastes and colors! So yesterday I used an Aunt Ruby German Green tomato, a Crismon Cushion tomato, and two Amana Orange tomatoes. It's definitely a tomato flavor, without being the typical red sauce you get from the store.  Also, the curry mixture I used was Capricorn Moon from Auntie Arwen.

 

 

Pinto Beans in their own Bayat Baharat gravy

 

Take dried pinto beans and boil them in enough  vegetable stock (or water, or combination of both) to cook them to the al dente stage.  Add salt, pepper, and continue to cook until the beans are quite soft and beginning to break down into the cooking liquid. Add a Baharat powder to taste  and cook down until the bean broth is the consistency of gravy.

 

 

I used Arwen's Ibraham's Mom's Bayat Baharat blend. This blend has a strong cinnamon component, which is very good with cooked grains or injera.  It appears in the picture above in the smaller jars.

Georgia Bibimbap

Heat olive oil in a wok. Chop a large onion.  Chop green tomatoes, as many as you like. sauté the onions and the green tomatoes in olive oil; cook until the tomatoes are soft enough to eat.  Add  soy sauce as needed, a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, and mix. Set aside. Scramble an egg (or otherwise prepare an alternative protein). Set aside. Place cooked rice (preferable a day old, but just made is fine) in a bowl. Arrange the egg, the green tomato mixture, and some collard kraut on top of the rice. Serve with more soy sauce and hot pepper sauce.

Bibimbap is a classic Korean dish. I have been making all kinds of  versions of bibimbap  since the early 80's, something I learned to do while in the Army. This version, however, features items reminiscent of classic Southern cooking and a homemade kraut made with Georgia collards .  When you get your bowl of rice covered  with vegetables and proteins, you mix it all together.  It ends up looking pretty much like fried rice.

 Other cooking notes

 I made a batch of rhubarb chutney with the last of this year's rhubarb. this year, instead of using canned tomatoes, I used tomatoes from my garden. I used  2 fresh fish peppers from my garden instead of the pepper flakes, and I used coriander seed from my garden. Fish peppers? Strike me as hotter than jalapeno but not as hot as habanero. The chutney is a little spicier this year because of it. And coriander seeds, dried in your garden  instead of out of the jar that's been sitting in a spice warehouse for a couple of year, are uber dandy. I actually went to the trouble of puréeing the end product of this year, as I intend to give a few jars away, and I don't want people to be reluctant to try it because it's chunky.

I've canned tomato sauce this year, much more than I did last year .

I canned strawberry jam this year, and homemade strawberry jam is much better tasting than commercially produced.  However, its shelf life, once opened, is also a lot shorter. Next year, I can half- and quarter pints, not pint jars.

I have resorted to drying turnip greens for winter use this year, as my freezers are now full. For this same reason, I expect I will be making kale kraut and am planning to try fermented green tomatoes.

Oh, and tempeh scramble! Whee, my new favorite breakfast. Jodi turned me on to making my own tempeh, which is much nicer than store boughten, and if I felt well enough to cook it today, I'd take a picture of that and talk about that, too. But I don't. So I won't.

Summer stuff in my Tsardust Fried Rice.

I made a variation on the Tsardust theme, and Michael mentioned it especially tonight. "Did you write that down?" he asked, and so here I am.

Olive oil to saute a poblano pepper, chopped. When the pepper is al dente, toss in some chopped fresh cabbage, a 1/2 cup of drained collard kraut, and a cup of cooked dandelion greens. When heated through, add 2 cups of cooked rice (I had leftover jasmine rice, this time) and a quarter to a half cup of whole raw almonds. Saute this mixture a bit. Throw in a tablespoon of Magi seasoning, a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, and a heaping teaspoon of Tsardust Memories.

I was particularly pleased that he liked this, because it contains dandelion greens and collard kraut. This batch of collard kraut is a little too salty-fermenty for most people straight out of the jar, but I have found that when drained and tossed into a dish, no one realizes that it's a home ferment. Awesome.

I used the recipe here to make the kraut, sort of. What actually happened is that I used leftover brine from making watermelon pickles and a tablespoon of sugar, so this is probably why it is a little salty. The brine is way more than the teaspoon of salt the original recipe calls for.

For my reference, in case the original site ever goes away, here is the original recipe, as referenced above:

Collards, desired amount. Cut real fine, pack in quart jars, add 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. sugar in each jar. Pour boiling water in each jar. Run knife on each side in jar to get the air bubbles out. Make sure the jar is full of water; seal and it should be ready in 2 weeks.

I let it ferment until the collard kraut settled down to clear again (while fermenting, the liquid gets cloudy) and then put it in the fridge to stop the ferment.

Gawrsh, it makes me happy to eat my yard on such a snowy day.

Howdy!

I decided to follow eRecipecards because I would like to see how he does with his "52 Ways to use a rotisserie chicken" project. I have a similar frugal struggle going on, but it's more like "Ways to use EVERY LAST BIT of what you bought."

So, when I cook greens, I drag out an empty peanut container, and pour the potlikker into it. Why? Because empty peanut jars are usually only empty of large piece of peanuts. There is usually a bit of salt and a palmful of small peanut pieces, which, with the potlikker, makes a nice base for cooking rice or other grains. You get a little salt for flavoring, you get a little peanut for flavoring, and you capture all the vitamins and goodies from the greens.

Canned veggies or sea creatures? Pour that canning broth into a jar and save it, and yay, you've got the salt and flavoring base for a pot of beans.

I have not had to buy stock for a while. That is the nature of my project: all the ways the bits left behind can be made to serve. Or made, to be served up. ;-)

Other odd frugal things: replant the root base of onions and leeks into your garden, and ta-da, you get more onions and leeks. I anticipate a greatly reduced need to buy onions and leeks. :-)

But that isn't strictly cooking, so I will move away from that to a squash dish I made the other day:




SPICED ZUKES

1. Chop about 4 cups of fresh zucchini. Sauté in about 2-4 tablespoons of olive oil.
2. When the zucchini has begun to soften, add two chopped tomatoes, lightly sauté, and then add enough water to lightly simmer--1/4 to 1/2 a cup.
3. Add 1 tablespoon of Auntie Arwen's Sheik of the Desert Ras el Hanout.
4. Cover and let simmer until sauce is reduced and zucchini is cooked through to your liking.

Simple. Good.

Rhubarb Chutney

What the hell is this, you might ask?

I'll tell you what it is, it's goddam deliciousness in a jar, that's what it is.

I've harvested the rhubarb and have been wanting to try a recipe for "rhubarb catsup" for some time. Since I have more than enough on hand to make several different things, I tried it. The original is here. My changes are below.

4 cups diced fresh rhubarb
1 large onions, chopped
1 cup white vinegar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup sugar
1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes, undrained
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon Coleman's ground mustard
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon Auntie Arwen's Dynamite for the Soul hot pepper flakes
1 bay leaf, crumbled as finely as possible.

Throw it all in a crock pot. Let it simmer until the rhubarb has disintegrated and the liquid has cooked off to a point just a bit thinner than you like your chutney. This will thicken as it cools. This quantity makes about 5 cups, depending on how much you boil off.

I let mine cook overnight.

It's spicy and bar-be-cue-y. I told Michael it was chutney because I was not sure he would try it if I called it "catsup." Besides, It's chunky. I can't be bothered with mashing the chunks away. Michael loved it.

I told him what it was called. Michael tasted it again and said, "Ketchup? No way, this is a chutney, you called it right, sweetie."

Ah, what a lovely al freco dining experience.

Injera.... of the wheat-based, North American sort.

I have a great love for sourdough; it's a fabulous flavor addition that also keeps me from having to buy bread yeast. For years, I have been working at making various kinds of pan-baked flat breads from my sourdough, and would eventually come up with a bunch of varieties that I like. Most Americans think about the sort of thing you can get at IHOP as the only sort of pancakes, but actually, there are lots of different kinds of pancakes, as evidenced by this article in Wikipedia.

Injera is sometimes described as a pancake, sometimes as a flat bread, but whatever you call it, it is a quintessential element of Ethiopian cuisine, and I love it. As I have to regularly feed and eat my sourdough, I decided that an injera (of a sort) was an excellent project.

It took me a number of years to get a reliable rate of return on my experiments. This is not a perfect injera, as it is wheat based and does use a little more leavening than just the yeast in the sourdough, but the results of just sourdough, white flour, and water are too gummy to work well. This method will, however, produce a yummy injera that will work under any stew, or wat, or, really, whatever you might usually eat with bread to soak up sauces in any style of cuisine. Actual working time is not that long, but it is a process, so you'll have to plan for it.

Injera is a process, not a recipe!

1. Feed your sourdough starter the night before. I have a well established sourdough starter that I keep in the refrigerator. Take it out, pour off the liquid that has accumulated at the top (this is the alcohol that the fermenting sourdough has produced. You can stir it back in, but it will make a very sharp flavor that many people don't like. It will also make your starter more liquidy, and will require you to adjust the amount of liquid you add later), and scrape the rest into a plastic, ceramic, or glass bowl with plenty of room. Feed the starter one cup of flour and one cup of warm (but not too hot) water. Stir it up with a non-metal utensil*. Don't worry about lumps, just get it all moist. The bacteria and yeast in the sourdough starter will take care of the lumps. Cover the bowl, set it aside, and go to bed.

The amount of activity you get in your sourdough will relate to the temperature in your kitchen. Heat directly affects how fast the sourdough will rise and fall, with warmer kitchens producing faster rises, but 7-8 hours is usually enough in most North American kitchens to get it into the useful cycle without getting it past the useful stage (where you start producing significant amounts of alcohol).

In the morning, return 1 cup of the starter to a jar and place back into the fridge. The remainder in the bowl is what you have to work with for the injera.

If you don't have an established sourdough starter, you can get one either by following these classic instructions, or by purchasing one of the commercially available starters. Or you can get one from a friend. :-)

2. Measure out your remaining sourdough. I usually end up with between 1 to 1.5 cups. From this point, you must recognize that you are working with an ingredient that will never be as predictable as purchased yeast and be prepared for some flexibility.

3. Gather the things you need: a pan for baking, a liquid, and a baking mix. I have a dedicated, round, non-stick, flat griddle/pancake pan. A round frying pan of any sort will work, but this really works best with some kind of griddle pan, preferably something that won't require you to add a "lubricating" ingredient, like butter or oil.

As for liquid: I use almond milk, as this adds more flavor, more body, and more nutrition than water. Soy milk should work, but I haven't tried it. And for the baking mix: I use Bisquick's Heart Healthy mix, as it lacks milk and egg. There is some soy lecithin in it, but as of this time, it hasn't been a problem for me. If it ever gets to the point where it is, I'll just have to mix my own baking mix. There are plenty of instructions for a homemade baking mix online, so I won't go there now.

4. Add the milk and baking mix to the sourdough in the ratio 1 part sourdough to 1.5 parts milk, 1.5 parts baking mix. Let it rest for 15-30 minutes, to allow the sourdough to begin rising.

5. Heat your pan. Just like regular pancakes, test for heat by shaking a few drops of water on the griddle; they should roll about and jump and dance. Reduce heat slightly if needed--if you are the sort, like me, who heats on high, you'll need to cut that back when actually cooking the pancake. Medium to high-medium should do you for the baking of the injera. When the pan is heated, pour a small amount of the batter on to the hot pan and cook (as described below, beginning with #6).

This is where you must remind yourself that you are working with what is an ever-changing ingredient. What will work perfectly on day 1 will not work perfectly on day 2. The heat in your kitchen, the heat in your pan, the time you let the sourdough rise over night, the time you let the mix rise, et cetera, are a delicate balancing act.

When you finish cooking that test injera, eat it as soon as it is cool enough to eat. You are looking for it to be too thick or too gummy. "Gummy" can't really be described well, but if you ever ate a gumdrop, you know it. This method of making injera should produce, when right off the griddle, a very thin and flexible flat bread with a slightly gummy texture, but that texture should be something that you would eat even if a little gummy--you know, that "It's not perfect, but it's tasty and I can manage" sort of moment. If it's too thick--which is usually evident in the pour--add a little more liquid. If it's too gummy, add a little more baking mix and a little more liquid, and set aside another 10 minutes or so. Keep making little text injera until you are either at the point where you are satisfied with the texture, or you have invested as much of the ingredients as you are willing to invest and are accepting of the fact that this will not be a perfect batch (don't worry, though, you can still eat them, more on that later). Remember, though, the more baking mix and almond milk you add, the less intense the sourdough flavor will be.

6. Pour enough batter on the griddle to make a single, thin (about 1/8 inch) injera. Usually, your batter will land in the center and you will swirl it around to make a thin, even layer. Watch for the injera to start cooking and bubbling even as you swirl it around the pan; that's a good sign. Your pan is hot without being too hot and your batter is probably of a good consistency.



7. Let the miricle of heat, steam, and leavening do its magic. You will watch the injera carefully--small bubbles will appear and pop all over the surface. Let it all cook merrily until the top of the injera is dry. You'll recognize it. The above picture is of a dry injera. Spots that were still wet, still needing to cook, would appear brighter. It doesn't actually take very long to get to this stage.



This is a closeup of the surface, with the contrast slightly enhanced, to show you what the surface will look like. The tiny bubbles, like this, are perfect. Larger bubbles are not a problem, but the more little bubbles you have the spongier the texture will be at the end. If you have larger bubbles, try stirring down the batter to reduce the amount of air in the mixture (remember, the yeast is not the only leavening agent at work here, so it's not a tragedy if you stir it down a little). If that doesn't work, make the batter a little thinner with a little more liquid.

8. Flip the injera. Traditional injera is finished at this point, but this recipe is better with a little heat applied to both sides.



You can see the path the batter took when I swirled it in the pan along the pattern in the injera. I usually leave it flipped just long enough to let steam start penetrating this side for 5-10 seconds. Not long, just long enough to let steam start working merrily. (Note that this is the point at which you eat your test injeras, otherwise, proceed)

9. Flip the injera again and move it to a covered dish. I usually place it on a ceramic plate, fold it in half (so that the brown side is out)and cover the plate with a glass frying pan lid. Why? Because you are going to let the residual heat and steam finish cooking the injera--that's what will move the texture from slightly gummy to spongy.



Stack the cooked injera into the covered dish as you cook them. When the last one is done, set them aside and let them completely cook to room temperature. You might want to remove the lid from the dish and shake off the condensation once while it's cooling, but if you forget, it's usually no big deal. Cook up a stew and have a delish dinner.


If your Injera isn't perfect

So you let steam get you to the end and you can't stop yourself from a nibble and decide that, well, this batch came out differently than you hoped. All is not lost, so don't put that stack of food that you spent money and time to make into the garbage yet.

First, cook up the stew you were going to make and try it anyway. Very often, what doesn't work plain will be just fine once it absorbs the sauces from the stew. You can also reheat this on the griddle, and that extra bit of heat will sometimes help.

If that doesn't fix it (and it's rare for me that thiese simple steps won't rescue an imperfect batch) then you can...

• toast them in the oven and eat with sugar, butter, jam, syrup, et cetera.
  
• Slice into strips and marinate with a sauce for a very soft noodle.
  
• cut up and fry with za'atar and olive oil, or some other favorite thing, like pesto or garlic or whatever.

Only my first batches, before I stopped stirring the two-week old hootch back into the sourdough or significantly under used baking mix, were ever so awful that I couldn't finish eating what I'd made. I find this to be usable all the time, these days.

Let me know how it goes!


Note:
Sourdough should not be mixed with or rested in metal utensils--the actions of the yeast and bacteria symbosis can pick up flavors from the metal.

Roasted Cauliflower. And Leftovers.

Yah, I eat a lot of earth-toned food. Yes, yes I do. And I never think about a photo until its impossible to get a good one.

Be that as it may, this piece of a picture features a couple of things I do all the time (1. make something via the fried rice engine, this time, using carrots, onions, and mushrooms and 2. make lentils) and one new thing. It's the new thing I want to mention.

I tried roasted cauliflower. It was wonderful. I did look over multiple recipes, as there are tons of them, and decided that this one was the starter recipe for me.

Except I subbed nootch for Parmesan cheese. And I left off the vinegar. It's all good and stuff, but I was just wanting the veggie and the spices. My modification:

* 8 cups 1-inch-thick slices cauliflower florets
* 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
* 1 tablespoon fresh marjoram
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* Freshly ground pepper to taste
* 1 t nutritional yeast
* 1 t garlic


Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 450°F.
2. Toss cauliflower, oil, spices in a preheated, great big, cast iron frying pan. [Don't burn yourself!] Spread on a across pan and roast until starting to soften and brown on the bottom, check and stir every 15 minutes until done.

Yum. This was certainly Cauliflower FTW! and I expect the regular recipe is quite nice, too, but I wasn't interested in missing the flavor of the spices by tossing with my exceedingly expensive and super flavorful 18-yr-old Balsamic.

Beer and Tsardust

or, The Fried Rice Engine.


... what was I wanting to share about beer? I forgot. Other than I collected a multiple number of beer based recipes that I want to try, of course.

Anyway, I took a run out to Penzey's. Very soon I'll be off to Pennsic, and so I don't want to invest in too much as far as cooking spices go (saving my money for Auntie Arwen), but I did feel the need for smoked paprika, based on one of the beer recipes I've got hanging around. While there, I found a spice blend with the enchanting name of Tsardust memories. The ingredient list read like a typical period receipt (salt, garlic, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, marjoram--so, salt, garlic, marjoram, and poudre forte, all found in medieval European cooking) and so I had to bring a jar of it home with me.



This is what I did with it, that first try, and I quite enjoyed it. I do tend to throw vegetables into leftover rice for a quick meal--really, really often, as it happens. Like any bit of cooking that's really more a process than a measured out recipe, it's a little different every time, and, frequently, once the brassica family gets involved, so does some sort of oriental sauce--schezuan, usually, just a little something drizzled over the stir fry.

The usual sauce mix for it involves:

1 T nutritional yeast
1 T Maggi seasoning (or soy or worchestershire--vegan or regular)*
1-3 T olive oil

Into this goes an onion (and thence, sauteed), the rice, and whatever vegetables I decide will complete my meal today. Today, I tossed in a couple teaspoons of the Tsardust memories. It was nice! Nice enough for me to write it down to make sure I try it again.... and can find what I did when I am ready to try.

Many a tasty dish is lost to me because I forgot to write it down.

Roasted Eggplant

Briefly, a note about a portion of a recipe that worked well:

I ran across several recipes I would like to try on EatingWell.com, and I decided to try this one: Spiced Eggplant-Lentil Salad. Unfortunately, it depends largely on a fruit that I pretty much hate: mango. Still, it seemed easy enough to just leave the mangos off and go from there.

Unfortunately, the lentils got cooked way past the "individual lentils" stage, and so that got carried on into the usual lentil stew I make myself. Good thing I like them that way!

What I did get to try was the roasted eggplant bit:

# 4 tablespoons peanut oil or olive oil, divided
# 2 teaspoons chili powder
# 2 teaspoons curry powder
# 2 medium eggplants (3/4 pound each), trimmed and cut into 1-inch cubes

# Preheat oven to 500°F.
# Combine 1 tablespoon oil with 2 teaspoons each chili powder and curry powder in a large bowl. Add eggplant and toss well. Spread the eggplant on a large, rimmed baking sheet. Roast, stirring once halfway through, until tender, about 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, my oven takes far longer than 15 minutes to roast eggplant cubes to what I consider done, so in future, I'm going to have to remember to throw some potatoes and other vegetables in there, as well. It's a shame to waste all that fuel on a couple of eggplants.

The eggplants were very good, though, and I think I would like this even better if I subbed out the spices listed here and subbed in some of my many, many spice blends.

ETA, much time later: I tried the above with Auntie Arwen's "Sheik of the Desert Ras el Hanout" blend instead of the listed spices. OMG. So good. Must remember that.

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.

Short note to myself: More on Fava Beans and Grit brand gravy.

So. Fava beans have to be soaked for a couple of days to really get them ready for cooking. I finally cooked some up with the skins on. 2 days soaking, long enough for them to get nice and plump and have just the hint of the little white sprout break through the brown skin. Into the pressure cooker with a little salt and a smidge of oil, and they were cooked to bursting. I was pleased that they tasted far better cooked this way than going through the misery of peeling the skins. It's still a process to prep them--but soaking them for 48 hours is a darn sight easier than soaking them for 48 hours and then needing three days to peel them.

What I was really happy about, though, was their compatibility with another gravy recipe from the Grit. I stumbled on the recipe a few days ago, and thought to try it as it was a little less fat and milk intensive. Sage and Onion gravy, to be precise. I'd love to show you the picture of the dish in the completed stage, but it was impossible to get a nice looking photo. It's such a brown dish. Really brown. Next time I make this gravy, I think I may cut back on the salt in the soy sauce--when you just don't add salt to your food, things like soy sauce can be overwhelming, and I'd hold off on the added salt in the gravy, as well--there isn't any nut milk to counteract the saltiness. I used olive oil instead of margarine. Other than that, it's a very nice and reasonably compatible dish. The nootch and soy are going to prevent it from ever being a period-like dish, but I think it could certainly be served as a compatible vegan entry at a feast that would be perfectly acceptable to an omnivore's palate. There are a few fava and onion and sage dishes out there in period literature; I may pull it together for a post on Cook-A-Long. And I'll get a picture that is far less brown. ;-)

Sourdough Pancakes, and grit yeast gravy saves a pie.

Two sorts of sourdough pancakes

I needed to use up the last of the sour dough I had prepared, and so two batches of sourdough pancakes seemed to be the solution. Fox a New Year's present, my dear friend Ghita gave me some duck eggs. Ah, duck eggs. Yum. I love eggs, and can only eat duck eggs, and so if they come to me as presents once a year, you can be sure I will eat every one. However, I did not want to spend ALL my eggs on pancakes, so I tried two different recipes. The first, the pancake on the left, based on this recipe, was very, very simple:

2 cups “heart smart” bisquick mix
1 1/2 cup almond milk
1 cup sourdough starter

Mix this all together, set aside to rise 15-30 minutes, and cook on a griddle pan.

This was actually an excellent compromise between my favorite vegan pancakes and standard sourdough pancakes. They are slightly "gummy," as sourdough can sometimes be, but I think a little more milk and flour might change that--if I bother to try. These were really quite good just the way they are, and I did not find the lack of the perfect pancake texture to be a problem at all. Very easy. Very tasty. Less need for bisquick and almond milk. I used my sourdough after it had been fed for a week; it'll be interesting to see what it's like after one day out of the fridge.

The second pancake, on the right:

1½ cups of starter with
1 duck egg, slightly beaten
1 Tablespoon of canola oil
2 Tablespoons of almond milk

2 Tablespoon of sugar
¾ Teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon (generous) of baking soda


All ingredients were at room temp. Mix all the wet ingredients, then add the dry ingredients, and stir quickly to mix. Once the baking soda goes in, the pancakes have to be cooked immediately, so don’t mix that up until your pan is ready and you are prepared to cook the cakes. Once you add the baking soda, the rise begins immediately. It’s no joke, you have to cook them up straight away. I cooked them on a moderate heat griddle. I let them cook to the point where they were nearly dry on top—like injera—before flipping. These are thin, liquidy—you have to let them cook enough to be set.
My previous experiences with classic sourdough pancakes have not been great—gummy, with too much alkaline flavor as a result of the rising agents used. This was really good, though—I ate them straight out of the pan, with no syrup, et cetera. They make a thin pancake, and yes, with a slightly gummy quality, but it seemed to me merely to be the nature of a heavy, moist bread. Much better than eating something that tastes like the gel inserts for your shoes. "MMMM, I'm gellin'!" should not apply to pancakes. ;-)

A Vegetarian Shepherd's Pie I like!

And so, with tons of grit yeast gravy left over and a yen for Shepherds Pie that is now a year-old monster craving, I decided to give it a try. Oh, what a WIN. This is mostly a note to myself that quorn crumbles, grit yeast gravy, and sauteed veggies all mixed together will be so very tasty that the lesser quality of mashed potatoes made with vegan spread and almond milk instead of butter and whole milk will be unnoticeable, and this returns to me one of my absolute favorite comfort foods. Ah, Shepherd's Pie, how I have missed thee. You don't taste the same this way, but the difference is not worth worrying about. Yay!

Sourdough biscuits & gravy

Today's breakfast: Sourdough Biscuits with Grit Yeast Gravy
Most of the time, I consider how likely an ingredient or process was to have existed before 1601 when I am cooking for experimentations' sake. The primary reason I took to sourdough baking was to make period bread--active dry yeast was simply not around back in the day. Usually, when I make sourdough bread, I make a loaf and eat it. That hasn't worked well recently because I just haven't been eating much bread, and I have not had time to wait for the rise. It's a process, after all. Feed it the night before, prep it the next morning, spend time as needed for the rise, and then spend time as needed for the bake.

Sadly, I had let my starter languish in the fridge so long that I was wondering if I had killed it. I just had not had time to do a traditional loaf of bread. However, I need that starter to live. On Monday, I pulled it out, poured off the liquid that had accumulated on top (it was tooooo sour for my taste), and began feeding it daily for a week. I planned on doing individual rolls that could just serve me as single servings of bread when needed.

Then I thought about the delicate balance of prepping, timing, and baking all those rolls. Nope. I didn't want to do that. But now I had a crap ton of sour dough to use up. It seemed to be time to try sourdough biscuits again.

Now, the last time I made them, they were okay, but I wasn't wild about them. I used a different recipe this time. I based it on the recipe found here, and when you compare the two, you'll note that my modifications are extremely minimal:

Sour Dough Biscuits:

Mix wet:
2 cups active sourdough starter
1/4 cup olive oil

Mix dry :
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbl baking powder
3 tbl white sugar
1 tsp salt

Combine the wet mix with the dry mix. Form into golf-ball sized pieces, and arrange into oiled cast iron pan or oiled clay baking stone to rise for 15-30 minutes. Brush tops with oil or melted butter-substitute. Bake at 400F after the rise, 15 minutes or until golden brown.

I've also a batch made with canola oil in the freezer; I don't expect them to taste significantly different, given that these were perfectly pleasant. Michael found them a little too "crisp" for his taste, but the flavor was fine.

Jodi gave me the recipe for Grit Yeast Gravy last summer, and with so many biscuits, it seemed like a good time to try it. On the whole, I thought it needed to sit for an hour before serving--it's a little too heavy on the soy sauce flavor for me right off the burner. In looking for the recipe online, I noted that Jodi's version was essentially identical to this one, except she left off the vegan worcestershire sauce. Further, I used almond milk rather than soy. It was very good, and it made WAY more gravy than I expected. Michael's judgement? Pretty good for a vegetarian meal.

Praise with some faint damnation, indeed. Well, he liked it, and that's what matters. :-) Why? Because I liked it, which means he's going to have to eat it again. ;-)

Curried Beans instead of another Hoppin' John!

Now, I have a ton of cook books. Once upon a time, I looked at all the books of Medieval cookery I have and decided that I needed to try a recipe from each book I owned. I managed, and then I found that online sources tend to be more useful because I can look up a whole bunch of variations of recipes across time and space, and come up with something that represents my tastes and time interests--something I really love doing--rather than following something redacted by one cook and wondering if that dish, delicious though it might be, really represents the flavors and techniques used.

Now, I love beans. And I love rice. And I love greens. So, as I have fallen in love with Joanna Vaught's Veggie Burger Engine (which is still in my recipe books despite the sad loss of it on the internetz), and realized that I have my own Veggie Pie Engine, I'm also aware that I have my own Vegan Hoppin' John engine. Now, a hoppin' john engine is not as fabulous as a veggie burger engine, but it does indicate a cooking habit that suggests that I love, love, love dishes that are greens, rice, and beans cooked with oils and spiced to please my palate and complement the primary components in the hoppin' john*. Of course, it's meatless for me, but I'm not trying to feed it to a soul food aficionado, I'm cooking it for myself.

However, although I could eat Hoppin John and all the various versions of it from all the cultures that have taken to beans and rice as a dish with a silly regularity, I don't want it all the time. It occurred to me that it was time to try some of the recipes in my vast (or, at least, larger than most folk's) library of cook books. The first to catch my eye? "Black-Eyed Pea Curry" in a book called Hot and Spicy Cooking



I liked the dish a lot. I did serve it over brown rice, because, hey, that's how I like it. Beans and rice. It would do fine over any grain, however. I did think about serving it with corn tortillas instead, but that's for next time. The celery was very nice addition.

On the whole, though, I was waiting for the hot, and it never arrived. This is supposed to be spicy? I recollect thinking. So I spiced it up, and it was better. The primary point here, of course, is that it isn't as spicy as I thought it would be, but then, I think Tabasco sauce is a needed ingredient in most dishes. Anything you make is improved by lots of hot peppers, in proportion to their Scoville rating, so you are talking about an overall heat of 10,000 to 150,000 SU in the dish. Anything less will get Tabasco sauced. This got sauced, suggesting that I didn't find it to get to 10000 SU, despite the use of chillies.

I did not copy out the recipe. Instead, I took a picture. The original recipe is here. I did make some substitutions:

Ghee => Olive oil
4 Chopped Tomatoes => Tomato sauce. Non-awful fresh tomatoes can not be obtained this time of year.

And that would be about it for the subs. It worked out well and I'll likely make it again, next time treating it as a taco filling or some such and adjusting the SU as I may. :-)

Vegan Leek and Potatoe pie, and what appears to be the birth of the Veggie Pie Engine.

Some while ago, I made a parsnip pie in a reproduction 16th c. frying pan, which I really enjoyed.

This time, I tried a potato & leek pie in a geeze gravy and a "fake stone" 10 inch pie plate. I wish I could remember the brand name of the pie plate, but I took the label off and have not seen such a thing since. The only thing I can say about it is that I think it's some kind of cast ceramic, maybe cordierite. The point, of course, is that it's a cast stone material that is supposed to make crusts extra special crispy. I've had it for a while, and it was time to put it to use.


Leesie's Leek and Tatie Pie.


It worked nicely as a savory dinner pie, and with a salad & a glass of Shiraz, it was an easy meal. It also demonstrates the value of having a few simple recipes under your belt, because if you know how to make a basic white sauce, a basic oil-based pie crust, and perform a few simple things like prep and saute vegetables, you can easily assemble any variation on a savory vegetable pie you want to assemble.

Generative cooking, if you will, based on the concepts of the generative learning model.

This used:

• 1 recipe of basic oil pie crust: use your favorite to make a double crust pie for a plate as described below.
  
• 1 recipe of geeze gravy: use your favorite fake cheeze sauce to produce about 2-3 cups of sauce.
  
• A mess of potatoes
  
• 2-3 bunches of leeks
  
  • in short, all the leeks I had in the house plus enough potatoes to slightly overfill a 10.25 inch diameter, 1.75 inch deep pie plate
  
  
• garlic to taste--cloves if possible.
  
• salt, pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350F, or adjust according to your oven's personal foibles. The point is to have it at a temperature to bake the pie upon assembly.

Wash, clean, and slice the leeks. Set sliced leeks aside to soak in water for 30 minutes or so, to allow whatever grit may still be in them to settle out. Prepare your pie crust. Roll it out and set into a cool place to keep chilled while you are preparing the rest of the dish. Wash the potatoes, peel if desired, slice, and parboil in slightly salted water; check as needed and drain when finished. If you believe your leeks have soaked enough, saute them in some olive oil with a few cloves of garlic. Prepare your geeze gravy.

Now you are ready to assemble.

Prepare your pie pan as needed to release the pie upon completion.

Mix the sauteed leeks, the parboiled potatoes, and the geeze gravy in a large bowl. Taste for spice adjustments, adding pepper, salt, and perhaps garlic and other favorite spices and herbs, as needed. Set aside.

Place the bottom crust into the pie plate( blind bake if desired, I did not), then fill with the leek/potato/gravy mix. Cover with top crust, seal the edges, and pop into oven until done.

Serve and enjoy. This basic pie was very good with cayenne pepper sauce on it, it was good cold without additional condiments, and it was good with a pepper-heavy powder forte.

Comments on what I learned:

1. Typing it out as if it was really a recipe reinforces just how much work actually went into the dish. It's not a wonder that cooking from scratch has decreased so mightily in this day and age. They may be simple processes, but it's not really simple. It's largely why I have gotten into the habit of cooking large portions of things--that way, I have 3-5 meals for all the effort.


2. My oil crust recipe is very simple--flour, oil, liquid (usually water). I almost always use a mix of white and whole wheat flour. This time, I used straight up white flour. Ah, yeah, if it is at all possible, I will never do that again. I really like it better when it is mixed grains.


3. I really like this pie plate. The crust might have been better if the bottom crust had been blind baked slightly to decrease the inner side's moisture, but the outside of the crust was everything I expected a crispy nice crust to be, and, of course, the top crust was fine. Anyway, This is an Excellent Tool. I found it at Ace Hardware, of all places, on the clearance rack. The Ace Hardware site does not list any bakeware like it, though, so I am wondering if it is out of business. Sad.


4. It is a mild savory pie. I will be very comfortable trying a lot of spices in the sauce, to see what works, what doesn't.


5. When I made the pie, I assembled it in layers: potatoes, leeks, geeze gravy. It was good that way, or I wouldn't be recording this for my future reference. However, I would have preferred the sauce to go all through; this is the way I usually prepare savory pies. In future, mix it all up first and then place into crust.

Just as an aside, I'd like to try this with a little bit of liquid smoke--I think that it might make a nice touch. Just a very little, though.

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!

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.

Tempeh Win

Tempeh would be one of the forms of soy that I can eat--it's fermente-licious! Whee!

I usually buy it once a month and have continued to struggle with it as a meat analogue. I swear, I go places like Beans and Barley and buy a tempeh sandwhich (usually a tempeh lettuce tomato) and marvel at the magic that happened and turned that slab of fermented soybeans into slices. Taste of the sandwich? Eh, who cares, it's a bland sammy that has a reasonable protein and no cheese. However, I am well aware that if I marinate the tempeh in some tasty sauce, I'll have a much nicer slab o' protein for home use.

Two problems: I can't get it to slice like a slice of meat (how the hell do they DO that? I never get anything but crumbles) and I've yet to try anyone's marinade recipe in a way that doesn't see me choking down something I hate in order to ensure I have nutrition and fuel.

So I ignored what everyone else in the world of vegan blogging does and did what I wanted to do.

I love BBQ sandwiches, and, really, if you have a BBQ sauce that you like, putting enough on will pretty much make anything you want to be BBQ flavored taste like nothing but sauce. So the worry wasn't if I could use the tempeh to make a decent BBQ sandwich, but whether or not the tempeh could succeed without being sauced to the point that I could have just dumped a can of meatless baked beans on some toast and been done.

I'm glad to report that it worked without the use of 2 cups of BBQ sauce to 1 cup of tempeh.


Tempeh BBQ

Chop one cup of onion, 2-5 cloves of garlic. Heat approximately 1/4 cup of olive oil in a pan and sautee the onions, garlic, and one tablespoon of hot giardiniera--do not drain the oil out of the giadiniera, it carries spices that will cut the sweet of the BBQ sauce. Crumble the tempeh and saute with the onions, garlic, and giardiniera. When it is sauteed to the point of your preference, add your favorite BBQ sauce. Start with 1/4 cup and add more sauce until the dish is at your favorite stage of sauce saturation. I prefer a slightly dry mix, but lots of people love the sauce dripping out of the sandwich as they bite into the goodness.

Here it is served on toasted whole wheat bread (second slice not pictured, but I assure you, it was a sammy) with an organic avocado, organic strawberries, and organic, steamed green beans with a drizzle of fig flavored balsamic vinegar.

The figgy vinegar was good, but I think I would like to try something a little more bold with it next time.

Without a doubt, I will make this again, perhaps with a smokier BBQ sauce. When choosing, I have to recall that this is going to taste nutty rather than beefy, and choose a BBQ sauce that can work with that.

Note: This is a third coast blog, and no matter where I live, I'm always a Chicago girl. All references to giardiniera should be understood to imply the popular Chicago-style condiment.