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.

Food for Michael. And me.

First;

Michael loves moussaka. I had eggplant and was thinking of making a sort of veganized version of an eggplant lasagna I had seen at this little cooking site: Feed Me Bubbe. I'd peeled 'er up and salted 'er for that de-bittering step Bubbe recommends... and Michael saw the eggplant and turned to me with these frakking eyes so huge and weepy and hopeful that they'd make Margaret Keane cry and said, "Are you making mousakka?"

Sigh. Yes. Let me look for a recipe.

I found this one: Classic Greek Moussaka with Eggplant.

It worked out okay! It'll be easy to mod for a version I can eat, I think. I didn't have tomatoes, so I subbed 12 oz of tomato paste and 36 oz of water, and ground beef for lamb. Since I was making this for Michael, I made the basic bechamel with whole eggs rather than egg yolks, and there was no real Greek cheese to be found, so we used a mix of Americanized feta and mozzarella. Next time, not so much water with the tomato paste. Michael enjoyed it tremendously and decided that I am the Bestest. Girl. Evah. He also asked for more eggplant in it next time, and lamb rather than ground beef. And then he ate every bit of it. It was *a lot,* probably 12-15 servings worth.

I was going to make a version of it myself, with a bechamel based on nut milks and possibly nut yeast and herbs in place of cheese, no eggs, and whatever fake meat crumbles were in the fridge, but there wasn't enough eggplant.

Next time, eh? And that is why this is here. This is the base that I'll build my own version upon. :-) And I made Michael happy, so it's an all around win.

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!