Passing on the Meat

My family recently celebrated Passover and we tried a little experiment: I would cook two vegan Seders (big, traditional dinners) and my family would go vegetarian for the rest of the holiday. Eight days without any meat in the house. My plan was to cook as much as possible, since the more I cooked, the less matzo with cream cheese they ate.

I'm pleased to report that even though the holiday ended a week ago, no meat has been consumed in our house yet and both of my parents are considering going vegetarian on a more permanent basis (they're both totally cool with keeping meat out of the house, but right now, they'd still like to eat it at restaurants on occasion). Also, I think my mother now has a bigger AR soapbox than I do. It's pretty rad.

Here's a small sample of what we ate:

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This is a Post...

...In which I prattle about my Caribbean vacation and what I ate there.
Let's get the obvious out of the way: Barbados is beautiful.

Moving on!

Their system of agriculture is VERY different from that of the US. I had a whole list of fruits I wanted to try, but only got to some because my host's friends and family didn't have any at the time. And we couldn't just go to the store and buy some. According to my friend, if you want breadfruit, soursopp, etc. you don't go to the store. You go to your neighbor, who cuts some off the tree for you. One person seemed offended we went to the coconut guy (below) instead of getting our coconut water from him.

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A Moveable Feast

I have a confession to make: Sometimes, when I'm going someplace, I look more forward to packing something to eat than to what I'll be doing. This is especially true of going to work. And so, here's a post dedicated to the food I've been packing myself for the last few days.

Behold! Today's lunch!

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Fruity Friday: Mystery Fruit

Welcome to The Ides of MoFo. In honor of this auspicious occasion, I am pleased to present Fruity Friday.

During the summer, a coworker and I went to Grand Central Market every Friday to treat ourselves to a new fruit. Toward the end, we ran out of things we hadn't tried, but were lucky enough to come across a new fruit elsewhere. One Thursday night, we went to the Vegetarian Dim Sum House in Chinatown and passed a vendor selling fruit neither of us had had before. We didn't even know what it was called (and the signs were in Chinese). So we decided to buy it and eat it the next day for Fruity Friday. Help us discover what it is!

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Hello, I Suck

At this blog thing, anyway. It's been ages, and I still haven't posted about Passover.

In short: it ruled. I cooked two totally vegan Seders and my family loved them so much they even ate the leftovers days later. Sometimes, Passover feels like a real chore and all everyone wants is a bagel or pizza, but this year, no one seemed to mind missing out on leavened things or meat. Awesome.



Pictured above (clockwise from top): Sauteed Spinach and Tomatoes, Tomato and Roasted Eggplant Stew, Sweet Potato-Pear Tzimmes with Pecans and Raisins, Quinoa Tabouli and Asparagus Spinach Dip on matzo (all from Veganomicon, except the Tabouli from Yellow Rose Recipes).

With variety like that, who needs meat and bread?

I've never really been involved in the whole Passover process before and I learned many things:

1. Always remove the thermometer from the oven before telling it to clean itself.



2. Don't leave plastic spatulas on the stove top (I've melted at least three already).



3. Produce in the suburbs is HUGE.





4. And CHEAP!



That carload of fresh produce cost $75! I usually fill up my knapsack and/or reusable Whole Foods bag with groceries for $50!

5. Happiness can be sold by the bucket.



(Those are sour pickles up in there.)

6. If you fill the kitchen with grocery bags, you will have trouble getting to the other side.



7. It's not THAT difficult to make caramel.



8. The best tasting foods are often the worst looking. Especially via camera phone.



That stuff was so good I made it twice. The second time, I substituted a pound of peaches for one of the pounds of strawberries. So. Good.


PS: Sorry for the even crappier than usual quality of a lot of these photos; they were taken on the fly with my BlackBerry.

PPS: I kind of stowed away on my mother's shopping trip and she didn't want to wait for me to get out my reusable bags, so alas, plastic.

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

My grandmother turned 82 on Wednesday. Here's her birthday cake:



Unfortunately, with all the food I made in the last few days, that's the only picture I was able to take outside. The rest were taken at the dinner table (and some things weren't photographed at all), so take a good look at that picture. The rest are going to be crap.



See?

The cake is just the Apricot Glazed Almond Cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World made into a cake, decorated with marzipan letters and dried appricots dipped in chocolate and almonds. It is tasty and moist and not too sweet, and the preserves inside make your mouth say "Why hello there!" and it's pretty damn near perfect. My whole family loved it, especially my grandmother, who normally takes two bites of cake and says she's had enough but actually ate a whole piece of this thing (and took some home with her; she normally hates leftovers. This is historic).

Now that we have the important stuff out of the way, it's story time. Because if I've made a cake, you can be pretty sure there's a story involved. Probably one involving some kind of destruction.

Once upon a time (AKA last Wednesday, AKA Grandma's birthday, AKA day before Thanksgiving), I took the day off to cook. As an added bonus, in order to keep myself (and my friends) entertained (and distracted), I set up a webcam in my kitchen and broadcast my wacky shenanigans live to the whole Internet.

This cake was the very first thing I made, bright and early Wednesday morning. Everything went fine until it was time to decorate. I toasted and chopped my almonds, melted my chocolate, dipped my apricots and everything was fine. Then I popped the top of my can of marzipan to discover it was...Chocolate Schmear. What the crap is Chocolate Schmear? I didn't know, didn't want to know and just wanted it the fuck out of my kitchen. There was much swearing and stomping around, until I remembered I keep an emergency tube of marzipan on hand (when the world comes to an end, I'll be ready to bake. Will you?), grabbed it and made with the decorating. The marzipan letters were great in theory. In practice...not so much. I couldn't get the marzipan out of the damn cookie cutters without poking it with something, which is why all the letters are nicked and strange.

But let's be honest. That's hardly up to my usual standard of cake tragedy. Something else had to go wrong, right? Much to the amusement of my friends quietly watching from their offices, it did.

When the cake was done, I got out my Official Food Photography Table and showed it to whoever was still watching, before taking it outside to take pictures. Somehow, the table slipped out of my hands and INTO THE CAKE. Suddenly, my beautiful cake said "HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRAND*CRATER*"! After the obligatory freakout, I picked the crushed letters out of the cake, moved the rest of them over, made a new "MA", picked one of the apricots off the side of the cake, used it to cover the crater, then redistributed the apricots so it wouldn't be so obvious one was missing. Viola!

In retrospect, I'm pretty pissed at myself for not taking a picture of the cake with the visible crater. I need to get better at documenting my failures.

I usually share the story of how my cakes go wrong while we're eating them, but I didn't this time. Now the whole Internet knows what happened to the cake, but my family is none the wiser. Let's try to keep this between the 7382193719037812738 of us, OK?

And we'll all live happily ever after, the end.


PS: Chocolate Schmear tastes like ass.

Bittersweet

Last Sunday was bittersweet. My friends and I got together, which is always fun. It was a happy time because it was a birthday. It was a sad time because the birthday girl is moving home (Barbados) next week and will be missed.

For dinner, I brought the Fresh Mango Summer Rolls from Vegan With a Vengeance. For dessert, I brought a big fruit tart. She loves them, but they can make her sick because she's lactose intolerant, so she asked me to veganize them. I did:



First, I made Betty Crocker's Baked Pie Crust and sealed it with an apricot preserves glaze. I filled that with the pastry creme filling of the Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (yes, the stuff with the amazing, non-dissolving agar flakes. This time, I doubled the recipe and got the flakes dissolved in about an hour. That's comparatively no time) and topped that with kiwi, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries and more glaze. Viola!

I was lazy about skinning the kiwi, so I just cut the sides off, not realizing it would leave me with rectangular kiwi slices. I felt really stupid, but put them on the tart anyway. My brother thought it was an intentional design and he liked it, so I played along.

No one brought candles, so here's everyone getting ready for the birthday girl to blow out the matches on her cake (store bought, non-vegan, red velvet) and tart:



The Fresh Mango Summer Rolls are very nice, but the Thai Peanut Sauce is really what makes them pop. I had to omit the cilantro, which undoubtedly left them a little less flavorful (and colorful) than they should have been, but they were still very nice. And I want to put the accompanying sauce (which is incredibly fast and easy to make) on everything.

Catching Up

Last week, I did a whole mess of cooking for the holiday of Shavuot (Jewish people celebrate being given the bible. It's customary not to eat meat because supposedly meat wasn't eaten until after we received the rules for kosherness in said bible). I was also commissioned to make my boss' birthday cake. I don't have any pictures of the holiday food, but here's the cake (frankly the best part anyway):



I tried to convince my family to go vegan for the holiday (it's only fifty hours), but it didn't work so well. One of the few things my mother actually cooks is a cheese dish that she only makes this time of year and she insisted on making it. Also, someone gave her a baked ziti, so she wanted to serve that. However, it turned out to be crap, so they stuck with her dish. I made the rest of the food for the holiday and it was all vegan.

Blintzes are traditional, so I made the Veganomicon crepes and made some of them into Potato-Mushroom Blintzes. My brother hates mushrooms, so I halved them and made plain potato blintzes as well. I also stuffed some with the Tofu Ricotta, also from Veganomicon. I made the Cherry Compote from Yellow Rose Recipes for dipping.

I love the Veganomicon crepes. I'd been nervous about making crepes because everyone always talks about how delicate and easy to ruin they are, but I had been practicing making them for something else and these are really easy. At first, I was annoyed that the batter had to be refrigerated for an hour before using it, but now I love that I can make the batter the night before I want to make the crepes and just get right down to the cooking when I'm eager to get down to the eating. I don't even have a crepe pan. I use a regular little non-stick pan and it works quite well.

The potato-mushroom filling is amazing. Everyone (except my brother) loved the blintzes. And he said his plain potato ones were some of the best he'd ever had. The filling couldn't be more simple, but it's one of those things that come out tasting very restauranty and people are impressed.

The Tofu Ricotta has the ricotta texture, but definitely not the taste. Everyone liked them, with the "This tastes nothing like cheese" caveat. To me, they taste strongly of nutritional yeast, so I was surprised my family liked them as much as they did (they liked them enough to honestly say they're enjoyable - they don't spare my feelings - but not enough to take seconds).

Making the blintzes themselves takes a bit of practice. I couldn't get a nice shape going, even at the end (I made about fifteen), but only one lost structural integrity and fell apart, so that's not too bad.

The Cherry Compote is very nice. My father has been putting it on everything. It's a bit more sour than I expected it to be, so I probably just used too much lemon juice. It went quite well with the cheese blintzes. I think I'll make it again next time I have a container of vegan ice cream in the house.

My mother requested something with eggplant in it, so I made the Eggplant-Potato Moussaka with Pine Nut Cream, also from Veganomicon. Dudes, that pine nut cream is so rich and awesome and...creamy. I'm always amazed by the ability of nuts to act like dairy. It's so weird. This cream is double great because it doesn't require overnight soaking or anything like some of the other nut "dairy" recipes I've seen. If you don't like eggplant and zucchini and whatnot, just make the cream and put it on...everything. I also got many compliments on the sauce. The shallots make it stand out a bit from jarred stuff. And, of course, there's nothing to not like about eggplant, zucchini and potatoes, so this recipe is a total winner.

I also made Potato Spinach Wedges, a test recipe for Isa Chandra Moskowitz's upcoming brunch book. Isa describes them as knishes without the dough, and that's basically what they are. They're tasty and easy. It's great that you can just throw it in a baking dish and be done, instead of making little, individualized items.

Dessert is the most important part of any holiday and I didn't pull any punches. I made Pain Au Chocolat (another brunch tester), Chocolate Almond Cheezecake with Graham Cracker Crust from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and Strawberry-Rhubarb-Peach Pie from Vegan With a Vengeance.

Everyone went nuts for the Pain Au Chocolat. I stuffed them with raspberries, strawberries and blackberries and served them warm. The chocolate oozed all over everyone's faces and made a wonderful mess. This dessert is wonderful and best eaten 1. warm and 2. with other people. Make them with a few different kinds of fruit, share them around and laugh at the chocolate on each other's faces.

The Chocolate Almond Cheezecake was sort of like a really firm chocolate pudding pie. A really good, a really firm chocolate pudding pie. Serving it with cherries somehow enhanced the almond flavor. It would probably go nicely with a vegan whipped cream, but I haven't mastered one of those yet.

The Strawberry-Rhubarb-Peach Pie was amazing. It really hit the spot, serving it on the first hot days of the season. This was my first time having rhubarb and it really heightened all the other flavors. I love this pie. There have been requests to make it again and I will not hesitate to fill them.

Some of you may remember my birthday cake from last month. If you don't, that's OK because my boss and office manager did. It was Blackout the Forest Cake: a cross between blackout cake and black forest cake. To make it, I adapted parts of Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting and Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance. They requested I make the exact same cake for the office celebration of my boss' birthday. Taking advantage of any opportunity to feed people yummy vegan food, I complied. The only change was to the decoration: I halved the cherries and removed the pits so people didn't have to spit while enjoying the cake. I liked how the stems looked like candles on my cake, but I think it was worth sacrificing that for the convenience of a spit-free party. Unfortunately, I made it and carried it to work when the temperature was over eighty degrees. Ganache doesn't like to behave at temperatures like that, so it looked a little funny, but everyone agreed the taste more than made up for it.

All is Full of Brunch

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. Mine was great. I spent most of it cooking, then had a nice brunch picnic with my friends for Memorial Day.

SPOILER WARNING: The following post contains pictures and descriptions of testing recipes from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's upcoming vegan brunch book, Crack of Noon. If you want to be surprised by the book, don't click!



(all outdoor photos below this point were taken by my friend Adrienne)

For me, the most important part of brunch is potatoes. I was tempted to bring three different types, but behaved myself and stuck with two:





First was Red Flannel Hash: a nice, smoky mix of potatoes and beets, sauteed, then baked. I still don't know if I like beets (I have trouble getting past the garden smell), but I've liked them whenever I've used them in one of Isa's recipes and that's good enough for me.

We also had Samosa Mashed Potato Pancakes, which are basically just flat, doughless samosas. All the goodness of the filling, none of the hassle of making dough. Win! They're one of those recipes that I have trouble believing came out of my kitchen because it tastes so professionally restauranty. Technically, the pancakes are fried, but don't let that put you off; look how dry my pan is:



The oil is pretty much a non-issue.

No brunch would be complete without pancakes, so we had Gluten Free Buckwheat Pancakes:



They're thick and hearty and kind of healthy. Lovely topped with agave nectar and fresh berries. As you can see at the link above, you need four different kinds of flour to make them, but don't let it put you off. They're worth it and you never know when you're going to need quinoa flour (seriously).

For protein, we had Spicy Pinto Sausages and Beer Battered Tofu.





The sausages are an adaptation of the Spicy Italian Vegetarian Sausage recipe from Everyday Dish. It's super cool. You make a seitany dough, divide it up, wrap it up in tinfoil so it looks like a bunch of Tootsie Rolls, throw it in a steamer for a while, and viola! Sausages. It couldn't be any easier. And it's even forgiving of the occasional cock up (I was short one half cup vital wheat gluten). The texture is great, and the spices are serious.



The Beer Battered Tofu is a vegan twist on the fish part of fish and chips. Yup, deep frying for brunch. These were great with a bit of malt vinegar (and even without).

For something a bit more like a "normal" breakfast, we had a Mexicana Scramble. It's great, but very vegetabley. I usually think of scrambles as having more tofu than vegetables, but this is so tasty, we'll let it go.*



I felt like we should have one straight vegetable dish, so I made Poblanos Stuffed With Coriander Seed Mushrooms. If you like spicy, you'll like this. Personally, I can only eat them cold, when some of the spice is held at bay.



I also grilled up some tortillas, in case people wanted to make breakfast burritos.

For dessert, we had Pain Au Chocolat and Orange Pecan Crumb Cake.

I'm an idiot and forgot to photograph the Pain Au Chocolat. It's the easiest thing in the world to make, and it's amazingly tasty and elegant looking. It's one of those desserts that's bound to impress if you don't tell people how you did it. I filled ours with berries and I think my face died and went to heaven when I ate it.

I don't like citrusy cakes much, but the pecans and nutmeg in this one balance it out nicely. It's pretty light, so most people were able to eat a piece, even after all that brunch. Now that I'm writing about it, I'm really looking forward to the leftovers when I get home.

I used the wrong sized pan, so the shape is messed up, but you get the idea.





I had some leftover beer batter and vegetables, so I fried up some shiitake mushrooms, cauliflower and broccoli. Yum!




* After eating the Mexicana Scramble and Beer Battered Tofu, people commented that I got the texture of the tofu really firm and nice. Slimy tofu is the worst feeling in the world. The secret: if a recipe calls for either firm or extra firm tofu, go with extra firm. And if it tells you to press the tofu, press the crap out of it. Seriously. For at least an hour. If you don't have to press it, just shake it out lightly and squeeze it between your hands a bit to get out as much of the moisture as you can.

Passover, Post the Second

After I finished making everything I did on Friday, I pretty much fell into a coma and didn't wake up until around 6 PM Saturday and did nothing but eat and read for the rest of the day. Awesome. I got myself all rested up for the cookfest that was Sunday.



The first thing I realized was that I hadn't done anything with all those portobello mushrooms from Thursday night/Friday morning; they were still marinating. I grabbed them from the fridge, and at first I thought they'd frozen because the contents of the container was one solid block. Then I thought they went bad. Turned out the oil I used had solidified in the fridge. Whew! I stirred it all up a bit and it all broke up and was fine. Not realizing the Yellow Rose Recipes recipe makes way more marinade than the Veganomicon one does, I followed the Veganomicon instructions for roasting portobello mushrooms, doubling the cook time because the oven was set to 250 F and I couldn't change it. About halfway through, I realized I was being dumb and that the mushrooms would never really roast while sitting in the soup they were in. Maybe they'd boil, but not roast. So I ladled out about half the marinade, which improved things.

The texture of the mushrooms came out very good, but the taste was a little weird. Kind of sour. I love sour food, so that's fine. My parents tried them and decided to leave it all for me, though.

Next, I made the Broccoli Vinaigrette from The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook. Here's the weird thing about this vinaigrette: there's no vinegar in it. There is, however, plenty of garlic and a huge portion of awesome. This is another one of those did-I-really-need-a-cookbook-to-tell-me-that sort of recipes. Super easy, yet, because it's me, full of fail. I didn't have a steamer basket for Passover, so I decided to try steaming my broccoli in a strainer. A plastic strainer. Well, I hope my mother likes her new abstract strainer sculpture. Even if she doesn't, she liked the broccoli, so that's OK. My father liked it so much he asked for seconds, even though he usually can't stand to look at the stuff. My brother had to be restrained so I'd have some left to photograph. Good stuff.

Here's a mushroom, the broccoli and the Green-Wa. A very nice meal:



I also made the Diner Home Fries from Veganomicon. Those were too good. They didn't even last until I was able to use my camera! The cooked pepper made my grandmother worry about her agita again, but it didn't bother her at all and again, my brother didn't eat around the green bits. The peppers and onions cook just long enough to be tender but still maintain some crunch, which is great when mixed in with the soft potatoes. I'd eat these every day if I wouldn't have to fight my family for them.

I really pulled out all the stops for dessert.

First, there were Tea-Poached Pears in Chocolate Sauce from Veganomicon. This is the perfect dessert to make if you're cooking for someone special and/or are serving a really heavy dinner. Most people I know are impressed by desserts that come with sauce poured on the plate. There's just something classy about it (unless it's a mess). If you have the skills to make designs around the edges, even better (I don't, but when I accidentally dripped, I decided to drip all around to make it look intentional). Also, it's nice and light. It's not really rich, or fudgy or a heavy cake. It's just fruit. Really, really good fruit. It takes a few steps to make, but it's not difficult (though whoever you make it for will probably think it is).



And I made The Conscious Kitchen's truffles. They're going to get another post all to themselves, so for now, just know they're lovely. Delicious, rich, impressive-looking and easy, though time consuming.







Don't worry, I'm not done with Passover yet!

I Has a Secret

And when one has a secret, what better thing is there to do with it than tell it to the entire Internet?

My secret: I've been a vegetarian for roughly fourteen years and there are still vegetables and other vegetarian staples I don't like. Major ones.

I can't stand cooked peppers. I'd marry them raw, but I won't go near a dish that contains cooked peppers and eat around them or pick them out because their oils seem to permeate the entire thing.

Beets freak me out. I can't say I don't like beets because I don't think I've ever actually eaten one, so I'll say they freak me out. This is weird for me because I would usually try anything my parents ate and my mother is quite fond of the beet. Now it's built into my head that beets must be pretty bad if I wasn't even willing to taste them. I know that's illogical, and plan to try beets sooner or later, but here we are for now.

I don't like sweet vegetable salads. Fruit is great in fruit salads. Vegetables are great in salady salads, but I refuse to desegregate my appetizers. For me, few things ruin vegetables more than the addition of craisins and mandarin orange sections.

I refused to eat squash and gourds (except zucchini and pumpkin pie) for about ten years. This, however, was completely "reasonable". When I was a teenager, I spent the weekend at a friend's house. Her entire family was omni, but her mother knew I was a vegetarian and went through loads of trouble to make special food just for me, including a pumpkin-gourd-squash-thingy that had to have been the most disgusting thing I'd ever tasted. Her mother had gone through so much trouble and seemed so proud of it (it was presented very well, just tasted like shit) that I had to eat the whole thing. Since then, I hadn't been able to even look at squash until I recently made myself do the Herbed Winter Vegetable Roast. Thankfully, I picked the right dish to reintroduce myself to squash because now I'm hooked.

I don't like most beans, but I'm getting better about them. They just have to be seriously firm, or really mushed up. If it looks like a real bean but turns to mush in my mouth, eurgh.

I don't like most melons either. Watermelon wins but cantaloupe, honeydew and all things cantaloupe and honeydewesque kind of make me flee the area. That includes a cantaloupe and honeydewesque fragrance.

I don't like hummus. Or tahini. I love babaganoush, falafel, whole chick peas and sesame seeds, so I don't quite get it.

I know VeganMoFo is supposed to be all about the love of veganism and vegetables (and their related products), but maybe this will help me purge my demons and learn to embrace some of the vegetables I've been hating on for so long.

What about you? What vegetable aversions do you have that you'd like to overcome? Will you give one of them a shot this month? My goal this month is to make at least one thing containing beets in some capacity (and eat it, not just give it away!).