vegetalion

how to dye a wedding dress

2012-01-31T23:14:00.001-05:00

I really loved my wedding dress. It was pretty, it was simple, and it was formal enough to match the husband's tux without being a giant terrifying pile of icing. Getting it was incredibly simple: I'd looked at it for weeks online before my mother and I had a chance to get to a David's Bridal. We sat down with the saleslady there, and she asked "What kind of dress are you looking for?"

"Style number WG3313," I said.

Her jaw dropped. "You know the number?"

So she went to find the dress, came back with the two sizes the store had in stock, and had me try one on. It fit absolutely perfectly, no alterations needed. And Bam! I had a wedding dress!

It was comfortable, pretty, and easy to dance in. Everything I wanted!

But after the wedding was over, the dress no longer had a purpose. I was a little bummed that I only got to wear this awesome dress for one day, so decided to DYE MY WEDDING DRESS. I was inspired by Sherry over at the Young House Love blog, who dyed her wedding dress an awesome gunmetal gray color. I was also aware of the fact that she'd wanted to dye it black; I was prepared before I even began for things not to turn out as I'd expected.

Here is the extent of my experience with dyeing prior to this: once, when I was Prop Master of a play in high school, I dyed a pair of white cotton gloves yellow. Which is to say, I have almost no experience dyeing things. I was originally planning to use Rit dye, just because that was the only brand I knew, but our local art store didn't carry it. I ended up going with iDye, which had the advantage of having colors for both natural and manmade fibers. (Rit is only for natural fibers.) The top layer of my dress is 52% polyester and 48% rayon. Almost all of the other layers were 100% polyester. Rit was probably not going to work. iDye recommends that for blended fabric, one should combine the normal dye with a complementary color of their "poly" dyes. I got Crimson and Red.

Let me point out right now that these are powders. As soon as I opened a packet, tiiiiny invisible particles of red dye disseminated throughout the bathroom, landing in weird places and not showing up until after our next couple showers, when the steam condensed into little tiny drops of PINK all over the surfaces of our bathroom, even the ones I had covered with a layer of catalogue pages for safety.

For polyester, you're supposed to boil the clothes in the dye for 30-60 minutes. My dress was much too big for even our largest stock pot, so instead I boiled loads of water over the stove and poured it into a storage container in our bath tub. I then added the dye, and THEN THE DRESS.

My dress is in there! Eek! Note the gloves (otherwise I'd've had blotchy red hands) and the paint stirrers: You're supposed to agitate (stir) the dress the whole time! I leaned over the bathtub and listened to an episode of This American Life. After 45 minutes, I couldn't take it anymore, so next came the final, and for me, the hardest step: rinsing the dress. You rinse the dress over and over in cold water until the water runs clear. This. Took. FOREVER. That dress held a lot of dye, let me tell you. Then I put the dress on the fire escape to dry.

While it dried I scrubbed and scrubbed the bathtub, because it had turned hideously pink.

But then, by dinner time, it was dry. AND LOOK:

The light looks dim in this one, but the color of the dress is very close to what it is in real life.

I love it! Mind you, I had expected a crimson/red dress, and this is sorta mauve with cherry red accents. And the dress was "Dry Clean Only," which all sources say not to dye... and definitely not to soak in boiling water. As a result, the heat shrunk the cloth on either side of the zipper, so the bodice shrunk by about about 1/2 an inch... which sounds negligible, except the dress had fit me PERFECTLY before. I had to wear it around the house for a couple hours breathing really deeply to stretch it back out. But it fits fine now, and above all, I think it looks great!

The color looks a little washed out from the flash in this one, but you can see the sash better. And if you look at the bottom right hem, you can see that the layer of crinoline turned cherry red!

Now I just need an occasion to wear a big puffy dress.

simple mason jar centerpieces and decor

2012-01-22T02:17:00.000-05:00

Centerpieces and table settings are things I never really thought about before planning our wedding. (Other things I'd never really thought about: wedding dresses, how kegs work, how far caterers will travel, how many weddings take place in Cooperstown in mid October, and maple syrup shots.) I mean, I know how to set tables and I have put vases of flowers, candles, or fruit bowls on a table to make it prettier. But I'd never before had to think about how to make tables for 70 people look not just pretty, but cohesive. The more I thought about it, the more I found wedding decorations as a whole to be quite daunting.

Enter my new BFF, THE HUMBLE MASON JAR. (The cage thing in the middle is for cards. We had a no-gifts wedding, but my sister us this because she said we'd get cards anyway. She was right!) Ball mason jars are inexpensive, made in the USA, and available at all hardware (and probably most grocery) stores. They're also perfect for reuse: they are all presently in my kitchen, full of food, right now.

I bought two colors of ribbon (they matched the invitations!) and tied them around the mouths of the mason jars, then put matching (I'm so [color] coordinated!) candles in each one. We had 24 jars all together.

I'm also pretty proud of my camera idea in that picture. While we had two photographers (a professional one, and our friend Michael from the Dazed and Infused blog), I wanted candids. I put a tag on my personal camera saying "Sarah's Camera/Please take lots of pictures with this," set it by the "guestbook," and ended up with almost 300 pictures of my friends and family. They were all silly and fun candids--just what I wanted!

Our professionals also took pictures of people taking pictures with it--so meta.

Our table settings looked like this:

Simple, clean, and pretty. The plates were Leafware's palm leaf plates. Disposables, I know, but they're made from fallen palm leaves and are totally biodegradeable, so we still get some green points, right?

Our favors were small bottles of local maple syrup. The husband and I spent a couple hours tying little ribbons onto them.

By the end of the night, the candles burned out completely. Removing the wax so I could reuse the jars was easy: I put the jars in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and the wax tumbled right out. I think I read about that little trick on Martha Stewart's website? You will note the maple syrup bottles in this photo have been opened. That's because a few intrepid wedding guests decided to challenge each other to shots of maple syrup.

Other than a few pumpkins and hay bales outside the venue (thanks, Dad!), the mason jars were our only decorations, but they went far in giving the already pretty venue some extra warmth. (visually, not physically. We had a fireplace for that).

Putting them everywhere drew the place together visually and made it seem like we had a plan. And the plan was mason jars. (Well, and getting married.)

easy DIY wedding invites and time capsule guestbook

2012-01-16T17:38:00.001-05:00

January is "sarah wants to write about her wedding" month! Last week I wrote about our awesome homemade vegan wedding food, and today I'll be showing you our homemade invitations and our time capsule guestbook!

Kevin (the husband) and I clean up pretty well (hee!), but we're pretty informal people. We got married on the porch (it was going to be the lawn, but it was really rainy) of a camp by the lake in my hometown, and had the reception inside right afterwards. With such an informal wedding, traditional wedding invitations, with their million inserts, envelopes within envelopes, and flowery language, didn't seem fitting. Since so much of our wedding was DIY, we opted to make our own invitations as well.

I began with a trip to Paper Source!

We were shooting for a guest list of 70-80 people, so we got enough materials to make 100 invitations, since 1.) we were sure there'd be a few mess-ups during the making, and 2.) we wanted extra invitations so we could invite more people as others said they couldn't make it.

We printed almost everything at home... except the RSVP cards. Our printer HATED the dark green cardstock we were hoping to use for them and spat it our all wrinkled and streaky, so we had to go with a beige-color at FedEx/Kinko's last minute. But that was pretty cheap, and we had to go there anyway to do all our cutting. (I would've just used scissors, but Kevin pointed out that I can't cut straight lines, and I think he had fun using the paper cutter there anyway.) Home to stamp everything, and voila!

Invitations! It's hard to tell in this light, but the birch trees on the invite are stamped in a metallic copper ink. I think it's so pretty!

And here's the inside of the invite. (Our wedding was at a private location, so I blurred out the name/s.)

One advantage to DIY invitations is certainly that you'll save money. The whole endeavor, even including our printing mishap that led us to FedEx/Kinko's, cost less than $120. But I would do the same thing even if it weren't more cost effective. We had a lot of fun putting together our invitations, and we were really happy with the way they looked. These weren't just store-ordered invites where we plugged in our names and dates. Making our own invitations really made them ours. They were as much "us" as the ceremony on the porch--pretty, simple, and informal.

AND I had enough leftover paper to do another project, the wedding DIY project I am still excited about: our TIME CAPSULE GUESTBOOK.

I got the idea from this Offbeat Bride guestbook alternatives post. They write about a Japanese product that lets guests write messages to put in a vial, then the couple burns a candle to seal the vial, then ten years later they burn the candle again to unseal it, and they can read the messages. I figured this would be an easy thing to DIY.

I cut up and stamped some of the paper left over from our invitations, and set them out with some nice pens next to an old mason jar. (We used mason jars as centerpieces, so this fit with our overall look.) I included a note next to it so guests would know what to do:

You can click to enlarge the image, but it says: "In lieu of a normal guestbook, we're collecting messages from our guests that we'll seal in the jar to be opened on our 10th anniversary. Please take a moment to record something (well-wishes, a memory, a message, a drawing, even just your name) to help Sarah and Kevin of 2021 remember that you were with us on our special day!"

People really seemed to enjoy writing messages, and I think this is a more fun alternative for me and Kevin... Because while I can't imagine us taking out and looking at a more traditional guestbook 10 years later, we're already excited to do that with this one.

The only catch: you have to have willpower. A bunch of people at the wedding said things like "you're not really going to wait 10 years, are you?" or "are you going to peek first?" No, you guys, that's the whole point! I don't want to open it until our 10th anniversary, it would spoil the fun! But if you can't trust yourself not to peek, you could seal it up with wax.

I am PSYCHED for October 2021.

homemade vegan wedding food!

2012-01-08T02:25:00.001-05:00

My awesome husband and I got married back in October, and I've been meaning to write a few wedding-related entries about ever since. Because there's nothing more fun than reading about other people's weddings, amirite?! Ha, but really, when we were planning the wedding, it was actually really helpful to see how other people did things, especially when they had non-traditional weddings. (If anyone's interested, Offbeat Bride was one of my favorite sources of inspiration/reassurance.) And it was so awesome I want to write about it.

The biggest source of stress when it came to planning our wedding was the food. As I mentioned in this entry, we had some issues finding a caterer, so my mother stepped in and offered to cook all the food for the main meal herself. She'd cooked about half of the food for my sister's wedding, so she figured she had it down to a science. And so she made a huuuuge amount of food for 70 people in less than two days! And while our wedding itself was for 70 people, there was easily enough food to feed over 100. My family thinks large when it comes to feeding people! The food was presented in a buffet line, with a couple different tables.

Here is what my mother made:

From foreground to background: Sauteed onions and peppers (for the beer brats), Tofurky Beer Brats, baked with onions, Baked tofu with Fennel Mustard Sauce (super tasty, though some of our kitchen help poured uncooked sauce over top, which was very mustardy! the baking helps subdue the mustard flavor), and Korean Barbecue Seitan, from The Accidental Vegan. (I wrote about that recipe here.)

But wait, there's more!

Butternut squash puree with pecans, creamy mushroom-and-white-bean stew (both of which are recipes my mother made up), coconut rice (to go under the stew), and ziti, topped with daiya, which, besides the sauteed peppers, was the only non-nightshade-free main dish. Everything except the pasta, seitan, and beer brats was gluten free. Everyone ate so well! And everyone loved the food. No one commented on it being a vegan wedding, no one made cracks about not having meat--hooray! Plus, my mother made so much extra food that everyone in my family ate leftovers of these things for weeks. (I think there's still some rice in our freezer now...?) Thanks, Mom!

So to help alleviate the stress of cooking all the food, the husband insisted we seek out appetizers on our own. He searched for places in Boston that could be made ahead of time that we (well, helpful family members) could bring to the venue from Boston the day before the wedding. He decided on Sofra, a Middle Eastern restaurant that was happy to make a variety of vegan tapas-type dishes. Only a couple things were nightshade-free, but everything except the bread was gluten free, and they agreed to provide ingredients cards for everything they made, so those of us with food allergies could feel safe.

The Sofra food is the stuff on the right. There was muhammarra, parsnip skordalia, pumpkin peperonata, white beans with green tahini, Moroccan carrot salad, romano bean plaki, and Persian black eyed peas. The finger-bread is above; there was a za'atar version and a plain version. In addition to the purchased food, on the left side of the table, a family friend also made a huuuge amount of delicious corn and pumpkin muffins, my aunt made a great coleslaw (not pictured), and there were chips, hummus, and a veggie platter (with cashew-tofu ricotta for dipping) provided by my mother. (There are also some plain rolls on the far right.) I don't even want to tell you how much extra appetizer food we had. I guess we anticipated our friends and family being much bigger eaters than they are!

And can I tell you about our cake? I LOVED OUR CAKE.

It's a Snickers cake from Xs to Os Vegan Bakery in Troy, NY. I love that bakery sooooo much, I strongly encouraged anyone within driving distance to GO THERE RIGHT NOW. The Snickers cake is peanut butter cake with chocolate frosting, as well as caramel in the middle. We ordered a gluten-free one, and it was incredible. I had a couple guests tell me it was the best cake they'd ever had--and these guests were neither gluten-free nor vegan, so that felt like pretty high praise for the cake!

This was one of the only things we didn't have too much of--we barely managed to squirrel away a couple pieces to freeze for our first anniversary.

Finally, even though it's not food, I wanted to make sure you knew we kept our guests well lubricated:

Cooperstown, where we had the wedding, is home to Brewery Ommegang, the husband's favorite brewery. And all their beer is vegan! We had each of their beers available (including a not-pictured keg of BPA), as well as some LaChouffe, the husband's favorite Belgian beer. My mother- and sister-in-law also dug up vegan wine, and a family friend even got some Santome [vegan] prosecco, though I don't think anyone drank the prosecco until the after party. Nonalcoholic drinks included tea, coffee, still and sparkling water, and a variety of organic sodas.

I'm planning to do a few more wedding-themed entries this month, so stay tuned for more DIY wedding goodness!

holiday meal!

2011-12-25T23:18:00.001-05:00

Happy holidays to people who celebrate them this time of year!

I have been working on a wedding food post for a long time, and I prooooomise I'll do it before the end of the month, but at today's awesome Christmas dinner at my mother-in-law's (hi Tanis!), I promised a couple people I'd post links to the sweets I made to go with our meal. So Miki and Sarge, this is for you!

A big surprise hit today was the sugared cranberries. I used this recipe at 101 Cookbooks. It's very simple, though it requires a lot of sitting time.

Tart cranberries get a sparkly sugar coating. I had never heard of this before, but apparently this recipe is a holiday tradition for some people... I might make it one of mine now. They goes well with crackers and cheese/dip/pate for appetizers as well as a side during the main meal, and are a good compliment to dessert. So basically you can eat them at any time. Plus they look so pretty and wintery!

Unfortunately, as delicious as the dessert I made was, it wasn't very photogenic. It's Martha Stewart's Frozen Chocolate Peanut Butter and Banana Loaf.

Very rich, and verrrrry delicious. Texture-wise, it's along the lines of a frozen mousse. I replaced the whipped cream in the recipe with the cashew-and-coconut-based Rad Whip from the PPK, and it worked out great.

There were other awesome vegan elements to the meal, but for the sake of this entry not taking me forever, I'll just leave you with some pictures. (Thanks to the husband for taking them, since I was busy talking. As usual.)

My carrot salad (so much tastier than the lighting in the picture suggests!):

The husband's white bean, carrot, and caramelized onion puree:

My mother-in-law's excellent mustardy shallots and green beans:

My sister-in-law's raw beet and parsley pesto terrine (with her apple-cranberry sauce, which went with sweet potato latkes, of which we didn't get a picture)...

...and her appetizer: nut pate.

I'm still full.

ALSO, before I'm done bragging about my great meal, I also want to brag about the awesome gifts my husband and in-laws got me:

I WILL BE SPENDING 2012 IN THE KITCHEN, THANK YOU.

Portrait of a Lady: European Potatoes

2011-11-30T23:33:00.000-05:00

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I mostly stick with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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People who read Henry James tend to have really dramatic opinions of him: he's either an amazing, complex writer, or he's the most boring author in the English language. I will let you all know right now that I come firmly down in the "Henry James is a genius" camp. I've read almost all of his works, and both my entrance essay and my writing sample for my master's program mentioned Henry James. 19th century realism is serious business for me.

BUT, for all the James I've read, I have always been a little embarrassed to admit I had not yet read Portrait of a Lady, one of his most well-known works. I decided to remedy that problem this fall.

The theme sounds ridiculous today, but the vast, vast majority of Henry James's fiction deals with a sophisticated Europe corrupting naive, pure Americans. An American who spent the majority of his life in England, James saw America, the New World, as having a fresh start, full of enterprising and moral people. They tend to be honest, sincere, a little awkward, and not in the least bit cunning. Europe is the exact opposite. James's European characters never say what they mean; they go through the forms of courtesy and morality but only to mask their real motives and intrigues. Inevitably, the corrupt, decaying Old World has a tragic, if not fatal, effect on the ingenue New World. They don't always do it on purpose, but James's Europeans, if not Europe itself, are downfall of his American characters.

Remember that James was writing at the end of the 19th century. The United States were still following Washington's precedent of isolationism. The Monroe Doctrine nicely kept Europe away from the Americas. We were removed enough to have our own culture, and access to culture was one based not on old, prejudicial class systems but on hard work and good decisions. James loved the idea of America, and was disappointed whenever Americans looked to Europe as an example of refinement or just of something better.

ANYWAY, Portrait of a Lady deals with these issues, but not in a dry history-lesson way like I did above. A young American woman, Isabel Archer, comes to England to meet her extended family, and while there comes into a lot of money. (Which, for James, is also a corrupting force.) Suitors are suddenly everywhere! Isabel is too innocent and pure to be protective or suspicious of herself or her money, and a few cunning, greedy people conspire to trick her out of her money, and out of her chance of a happy life, basically. There are good people, of course, who try to help her. IT'S SO GOOD AND INTENSE AND AWESOME. There's also a giant SECRET that you spend a good half of the book trying to figure out and then THINKING you have it figured out but no, that can't happen in this book, right? IT DOES. So yeah, I recommend this book, even though it's tragic. I've read reviews of it that found its ending ambiguous; let me know if you've read it, because I didn't think it was ambiguous at all and I'd be curious to hear that perspective.

So, onto the food! The best part. Okay, so James does offer a little proof that it's capable for Americans to interact with Europe without being corrupted. That proof is named Henrietta Stackpole. Henrietta is a journalist who ventures to Europe to 1.) write letters back to her paper about her impressions of Europe and 2.) try to meet European nobles. She has no interest in assimilating; she is American, and very much wants to maintain her American perspective. She does not put Europe on a pedestal like so many of James's more doomed Americans; she really believes America does everything better. She is a bit of a comic character (and has the most adorable courtship in all of James's works, in my opinion!), but she is also James's most viable option for intercultural communication without a tragic outcome.

When Henrietta first visits Isabel in England, she sits down to eat with Isabel and her relatives and starts quizzing the family about their connections to the House of Lords right away. She's not starstruck--she wants to discuss British politics. In part to shut her up, Lord Warburton (swoon!) says "Won't you have a potato?"

"I don't care much for these European potatoes," Henrietta says firmly.

Obsessed with food as I am, I had to know how European potatoes were prepared that Henrietta Stackpole's American tastes were against them, so I did a little research. While mashed (or sommmmetimes baked) potatoes were the rule in American kitchens in the 19th century, they were more likely to be served roasted at a wealthier English home. Obviously, they were talking about real (not sweet) potatoes, but since I can't eat potatoes, you're getting the sweet potato version.

European Potatoes
Only white (Japanese) sweet potatoes will work for this; the orange ones get too soft. Obviously you can also use (real) potatoes, but your cooking time might be 10-20 minutes longer. You can use any oil, but I stroooongly recommend olive since it's so tasty.

White Sweet Potatoes (Japanese Yams) - one small-to-medium potato per person
Oil (any kind works, but I prefer olive. At least 1/4 cup, but the more you use, the crispier they'll get)
Salt

Preheat your oven to 425. Fill a pot with water and set it on the stove on high. Chop potatoes into large chunks; I'd say at least 2 inches. You can peel them if you want, but I like the skins. Put the chunks into the water as soon as you chop, since white sweet potatoes start to brown when the flesh is exposed to air. Bring to a boil, and allow to boil for at least ten minutes, until you can poke the potatoes with a fork. (It doesn't have to go all the way through, though--as long as the edges are tender.)

Here comes the weird-sounding part. Pour all the water out of the potato pan, then put a cover on it... AND SHAKE IT LIKE CRAZY. The idea is to bang up all the edges of the potatoes, so they get crispy.

They'll look like this when you're done.

Now take out a deep baking pan large enough to fit all the potatoes in a single layer. I've used a roasting pan and my glass baking pans, and both were fine. Pour the oil into the pan. Here's the part where the amount is up to you: the more you use, the tastier and crispier they'll be, plus they won't stick as much to the pan. But you want at least enough to easily and completely coat the bottom of the pan. Add the potatoes, and roll them around a little (with a spoon is cleanest) so all sides have touched the oil. Sprinkle on some salt.

Bake for 20 minutes, then remove from oven and use a spatula or spoon to flip them. The down-facing sides should have browned and all the side should be starting to get crispy. Return to oven for 10 more minutes, then check again: all sides should be crispy and golden to golden-brown. Remove from oven, sprinkle with a little more salt, and serve!

(The baking time can vary based on how long you boiled them and even how much oil is involved, so you may find you need a bit more time.)

They are good for brunch or for dinner! Because of the oil, they're a little decadent and VERY filling.

Next month I'll try to get back to once-a-week posting.

how to make a dress out of a t-shirt that is too big for you

2011-11-10T22:44:00.003-05:00

Vegan MoFo kind of burned me out on food blogging, so I'm going to spend a few entries not talking about food. But I promise I'll do a "food from literature" this month, featuring James's Portrait of a Lady. I'll also do a review of our wedding and honeymoon! (I promise to stick mostly to food/crafts so I don't get too sappy.)

Anyway. I don't really wear T-shirts, mostly because I don't look good in them. Even the ones that are cut for women aren't very flattering on me. However, I own a lot of T-shirts, and I really like the designs or messages on some of them, so I try to turn them into things I do like. Last year I posted an entry on making throw pillow covers from old T-shirts; today, a dress!

Before instructions, a couple notes. First of all, I'm not great at sewing. I'm not saying that out of modesty; I mean it. I mostly sew for repairs, and I make the occasional pillow cover. So when I say this dress is easy, I mean it: YOU CAN DO IT! It takes measuring, and a lot of time to sew if you don't have a sewing machine (I don't), but it is not complicated. I give overly wordy instructions, mostly because I hate when I'm trying to do a project and annnnything is left to the imagination (In cases like that, my imagination will inevitably steer me wrong.), but don't let that fool you: this dress is easy.

For this dress, the bigger the T-shirt, the better, since it'll be longer that way. I'm 5'8 and the shirt I used was a large. It's sort of a minidress, suitable to wear to a club night without leggings, but I normally wear leggings with it. I'm sorta prudish, though, and have long legs, so bolder and/or shorter girls would be probably fine without leggings. You can also make this project with a shirt that's more your size, but in that case it'll be more of a tank top or tunic. If you want a dress, I recommend a shirt that is at least two sizes too big (i.e., if you normally wear medium t-shirts, an extra large).

ALSO, until someone complimented this dress, I didn't realize anyone else would want to make it, so this tutorial is written a while after the fact. Soooo you get cartoony illustrations instead of pictures of the first part. (The second part--straps--is easier for me to recreate for photos, since I always have extra sleeves lying around.) In my illustrations, it's a black T-shirt, and the green circle is just to show the location of a design if there is one on your shirt. Red lines mean you should cut there, and blue means sew.

Start with a T-shirt that is too big for you.
Cut away the sleeves, including the seam where it attaches to the shirt. (Save them! We will make straps out of them!)
Cut off the neck and shoulders.
Cut away the seams, if they're there, or just cut the sides open, if it's seamless. If you don't want it fitted, you can just cut straight lines. If you don't want it fitted (that is, if you want it to be be more of a tube dress), move on to #5.
a.) If you wanted fitted, like I did, measure yourself: bust, waist, low waist, and hip/bum. Make a template of your torso (I used a taken-apart paper grocery bag). Remember to halve your measurements on the template (i.e., if you have a 28" waist, you want to draw a 14" waist, since front 14" + back 14" = 28"). Use it as a stencil on the center of your cloth. Turn the cloth inside-out so your marks won't show in case you make a mistake! Also, as you trace your stencil/template, try to leave an extra 1/4-1/2" on either side to leave room for mistakes/sewing. (You can draw your torso right on the dress if you want to skip the template step, but I'm not that good at eyeballing my shape.)
Turn the front and back pieces inside out, if you haven't already, then pin them together so they don't slip apart and become unsymmetrical while you're sewing. Sew up the sides. If you have a sewing machine, this will probably take you like 2 minutes. If you're like me and are doing it by hand, put on a movie and curl up on the couch with your needle and thread, because this is going to take a while. I use a backstitch, but a running stitch would be fine, or a whipstitch if you didn't leave yourself that extra room for mistakes/sewing.
Take one of the sleeves you cut off in step #2. Cut away the seam so that the wider side is even.

How thick do you want your straps? T-shirt material rolls at the edges when cut, so they'll be narrower than what you measure. I wanted straps that were thick enough to cover a bra strap, so I cut out about two inches. You should measure a section almost twice as wide as what you want, so if you want thin of even spaghetti straps, cut it an inch wide. Decide what you want, and cut accordingly.

Cut away the seam. You should now have one strip of cloth.

Repeat with the other sleeve.
Try on your dress and figure out where you want the straps to hit. Like I said, I wanted to make sure it covered bra straps, so I centered the straps over where my bra showed). Pin in place. The straps will probably be longer than your shoulders; cut away the extra material before you pin.

Attach to dress. I used a whipstitch, but it would also be cute to use buttons or broaches or just hold it in place with a series of safety pins.

Note: If you want adorable and/or contrasting straps, you could attach ribbon or something instead of using the sleeves.

You're done! Enjoy the fact that you just turned a T-shirt into a dress.

last day of VeganMoFo!

2011-10-31T23:36:00.000-04:00

Happy Halloween! Though this picture is from a couple years ago, I'm wearing the same thing today:

The husband and I just got back from our honeymoon in New Orleans, and while we had an awesome time, and ate a lot of awesome food, coming home was really nice. (Even though our heat is broken...) Especially nice was being able to have a big healthy meal; while all our restaurant meals were great-tasting, I never feel quite as healthy eating out as eating at home. So when we got back from the airport, I made us a big greens-and-tofu dinner. I was too hungry/distracted to take pictures, but this is another home-from-travel meal I made a while ago: a big salad with chickpea salad on top.

It feels good to sort of detox with greens after decadent eating for so long. But expect a New Orleans food post soon!

Happy Halloween, and happy last day of VeganMoFo! It's been a really busy month, but I'm glad I was able to participate. I am sorry I couldn't read more blogs, though--I guess I'll have plenty to catch up on in the (hopefully) slower month of November.

Sunday Brunch: pancakes and crepes

2011-10-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

My "blog photos" folder is going to be so empty after this month! Which is a good thing, since I tend to stockpile pictures for too long. Since there's only one day left after today, this is probably the last "epic post," and it's a delicious one.

Pancakes! I've gotten over my hatred of making pancakes; I'm much more patient now and don't burn them. Above, pancakes with blueberry sauce and cashew creme. Below, pancakes (I think they were lemon-flavored?) with a raspberry sauce.

And these are red, white, and blueberry pancakes!

Topped with soyatoo whipped topping.

This is the coconut pancake recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance topped with simmered peaches and hazelnuts.

You may have noticed a trend by now: I like to have fruit with pancakes. Unless they're SAVORY pancakes!

These were mirepoix pancakes (carrots, onion, celery) topped with gravy.

And finally, a sort of pancake: crepes!

These aren't filled with anything too exciting: fruit, cashew cream, and each one has a different seasoning. (I think I went cinnamon/blueberry, nutmeg/clove, and ginger/raspberry.)

So that concludes our "Sunday Brunches" this month. What are your favorite brunch foods that I didn't mention?

Saturday Snack: popsicles

2011-10-29T11:00:00.002-04:00

I'm writing this ahead of time, but when it actually posts, I will be on my honeymoon in New Orleans! It's gotten chilly in Boston, but New Orleans is still quite warm, so it's not entirely unseasonal to write about one of my favorite warm-weather snacks: Popsicles!

I like popsicles, but they're usually too sickly sweet for me by the end, which is why I love making them at home. I can control how sweet they get. The one above is just chocolate soymilk, and tasted just like a fudgesicle, but not quite as sweet--perfect for me! I also freeze juice and smoothies in my popsicle molds.

I did find some store-bought popsicles that are really good without being too sweet.

Smooze! They're a combination of coconut milk and fruit juices. And they're like push-pops!

Yummmm.

pasta salad with beans? be careful

2011-10-28T11:00:00.000-04:00

When I want to make a meal that will provide enough leftovers to have lunch for the week taken care of, I usually pasta. Basically I make a warm pasta salad for dinner, then eat it cold for lunch over the next few days. To make it a complete meal, I usually toss in a generous amount of vegetables and either beans or nuts as some sort of protein.

Since I'm obsessed with chickpeas, they are my go-to legume. Unfortunately, sometimes I do not have any chickpeas, like the time I made this pasta dish:

It's za'tar-spiced whole-wheat orzo with pinto beans, broccoli, roasted sweet potatoes, and probably onions, since I love onions. It tasted great the first night!

Buuuut as it sat in the fridge over the next few days, the beans got this weird slimy texture. They weren't going bad or anything, they were just continuing to absorb moisture from the other ingredients, and getting increasingly mushy. The taste remained the same but by the second lunch of leftovers the texture was awwwwwwful, ugh.

So! a word to the wise: if you're making a bean-and-pasta dish that will result in leftovers, go for a firm-skinned bean like chickpeas, cannellini, or kidney beans. Because maaaaaan is it gross otherwise!

a LOT of stuffed squash

2011-10-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

For me, this has been the VeganMoFo of epic posts. I had an epic pizza post, an epic soup post, a long socca post, and each of my Sunday brunch posts have a bunch of one thing per day. I tend to stockpile pictures for future blog posts that never quite get written, and VeganMoFo is a great way to get all those pictures/posts out.

I really like squash, and one of my favorite ways to cook with it is to stuff it with other food and then roast it. Sometime's it's simple, like the above squash stuffed with greens, raisins, and pepitas. But mostly my stuffings consist of grains flavored with herbs and spices and mixed or topped with a protein like beans or nuts.

This one has chickpeas, spinach, and... some grain, it's hard to tell. I often also mix in nutritional yeast or miso to give it a cheesy flavor.

Lentils and bulgur!

Topped with Your Vegan Mom's Vegan Parmesan.

I don't remember what's in this one, but the picture is making me want artichokes.

I can see pecans and chard in there.

Lentils, peas, and spinach. Protein and greens, whoo!

Zucchini is a summer squash, so it still counts, right? I know there's quinoa in it, because I always make more filling than I have room for stuffing, so I always end up with a side serving of the filling as well.

I think that's all the stuffed squash pictures I have stockpiled...

BUT WAIT!

A stuffed onion! I made a "cheesy mushroom" mixture with a nutritional-yeast-based cheese sauce and mushrooms, and had my grain on the site this time. Not squash, but still fills my obsession with stuffed vegetables

ras el hanout quinoa pilaf

2011-10-26T15:00:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of pet peeves. I will spare you a list, but one of the ones that surprises people the most, considering that I have a food blog: I hate food trends.

It's not the food that bothers me. I know that disliking trendy foods is like shooting the messenger. What really bothers me is the fuss foodies and food reviewers make about new foods, and how quickly those foods spread around stores/blogs/cookbooks as "the next big thing."

What bothers me is that food trends exoticize food and cooking, make it sound like you don't know about food or cooking if you haven't used Himalayan salt, tasted macarons, or shaped cake pops. They make cooking at home sound difficult, expensive, snobby. Cooking can be (is) simple, quick, cheap, and will still be delicious. I am a food troglodyte; I don't want trends for my food the way there are trends for fashion. My forebears did without food trends; so can I!

But like I said, it's not the food that bothers me. Fancy cupcakes, for example, were a maaaaajor food trend for a while, and I stubbornly held back, resenting the trend, until I actually ate a cupcake and was like "oh yeah, I forgot how amazing cupcakes are." Similarly, I resented seeing "fleur de sel" in ingredients lists for a year or so before I broke down and bought some--and it really does add a nice touch to main dishes. I love food, I just mind when there's fuss around it.

The whole point of this story is that a while back I heard of Ras El Hanout seasoning from a bunch of food blogs and got all obstinate and thought "ARRRRGH NOT ANOTHER FOOD TREND." I intentionally did not read many of the reviews, and after a while the trend disappeared.

But then couple months ago, my mother got some for her store, and started singing its praises, too. My own mother! But she's not an obnoxious foodie, she's my mom! I thought. Maybe this stuff is worth a try. So I "let" her give me a bottle (thanks Mom!) of Frontier's Ras El Hanout spice blend.

I'll be honest here and say this is another food I was a jerk for resenting. Ras El Hanout (which means "top of the shelf/shop") is a spice blend native to North Africa that consists of warm spices, most of which start with C: coriander, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, clove, cubeb/black pepper, nutmeg, sometimes cayenne. Every blend is a litle different, so nightshade-free people should read the labels for cayenne/chilis, but Frontier's is nightshade-free. It is very potent, and it is delicious! If you like North African and/or Middle Eastern food, this is a must-try.

Many recipes involving Ras El Hanout use it as a meat rub. You could definitely do a tofu or seitan rub out of it, but I was making quinoa for dinner a little while ago, and decided it would also be excellent in a quinoa pilaf.

Quinoa, raisins, carrots, some chopped cauliflower, and ras el hanout. And hoooooo boy is it strong! I added a teaspoon or so of it to about 1 1/2 cups of uncooked quinoa and 3 cups water, and it was allllmost too flavorful--I was glad we had a plainer side salad to eat with it. I could have halved the amount of ras el hanout and still gotten the right amount flavor. So err on the side of "subtle" when you're trying out this spice blend for the first time!

Ras el hanout would also be good mixed with other grains, sautéed with chickpeas, roasted with nuts, or used in a sauce. Obviously I didn't make my own at home, but if you're interested in trying out ras el hanout without not being committed to buying a whole jar, the ingredients are pretty common to anyone who does a lot of Indian or Middle Eastern cooking, so it'd be pretty easy to mix at home. Have you ever tried it? What did you do with it?

Are you secretly a curmudgeon about something people think you'll like? How do you feel about food trends? Are there any in particular you love or hate?

sushi and vegan mofo survey

2011-10-25T17:01:00.029-04:00

Some quick sushi, and then onto a survey!

Sometimes making sushi at home is a casual affair, just chopping up some veggies and rolling them up (and using leftovers to make rice bowls).

OTHER times I like to go all out and make crazy rolls. This usually means I have ingredients allllll over the kitchen.

But it makes for tasty sushi!

I always go for brown rice at home.

I found this Vegan MoFo survey over at Vegan Megan's blog, and it came at just the right time; we're going on our honeymoon this week and I'm feeling overwhelmed by how many posts I have to do in advance. I could use a "nothing" post or two! It has a couple questions in common with last year's survey, but my answers have changed, so it's not repetitive, I promise!

1. Favorite non-dairy milk?
Earth Balance's unsweetened, unflavored soy milk. Organic Valley's is okay but has a vanilla-y taste that doesn't work for savory things.

2. What are the top 3 dishes/recipes you are planning to cook?
Only 3? And is this for MoFo? I won't have time to cook any of these for MoFo, but they've been on my list forever: skillet chocolate chip cookie, agave popcorn balls, and homemade inari.

3. Topping of choice for popcorn?
My Cracker Jack-ish popcorn, but if I'm with the husband, who doesn't like sweet popcorn, nutritional yeast, salt, and kelp flakes.

4. Most disastrous recipe/meal failure?
UGH I tried to veganize my mom's old creamed beef recipe, but I accidentally curdled the soymilk when I added it (at the end, mind you, after adding all the other ingredients) and it smelled and tasted like some dead rotting fish, so I had to throw out the whole recipe. I think we ate pasta that night instead, and it was a bitter meal. (Because of the earlier failure, not because the pasta itself was bitter.)

5. Favorite pickled item?
Pickled radishes! I have some radishes in my fridge right now that I want to pickle. They are so tasty.

6. How do you organize your recipes?
Um... you're looking at my organization system. I blog about them. Also, I have a "recipes" folder in my browser's bookmarks section.

7. Compost, trash, or garbage disposal?
Does it have to be "or"? I tried composting last year but it wasn't very successful (probably because we live in a small apartment?). I use most of my food scraps to make veggie broth, then throw out what needs throwing out. The garbage disposal gets its fair share of work, though.

8. If you were stranded on an island and could only bring 3 foods.what would they be (don't worry about how you'll cook them)?
Chickpeas, sweet potatoes, garlic.

9. Fondest food memory from your childhood?
My mother is an awesome cook, so many fond childhood memories are around food. But if I had to choose one... when I was 3 or 4, my family lived with my grandmother. I never slept through the night, and my grandmother was an insomniac, so when I woke in the middle of the night, I would waddle out to the kitchen, where she would usually be sitting at the table. She'd make a bologna-cheese-mayo-lettuce sandwich on white bread, and we would sit at the counter and share it. Everything would be dark and quiet except the kitchen. It was like we had the whole world to ourselves, like we could have done anything or gone anywhere, and we were just choosing to eat a sandwich together instead.

10. Favorite vegan ice cream?
So Delicious's (coconut milk) cookies and cream! Oh wait or their chocolate peanut butter swirl. Both? Can it be both?

11. Most loved kitchen appliance?
My food processor, probably. Especially now that I have a nice new one, and not the old one I had to stick a knife into to make work. (Seriously.)

12. Spice/herb you would die without?
I probably wouldn't die without black pepper, but I'd be really sad. Also, sage. I don't use it all the time but I looooove it.

13. Cookbook you have owned for the longest time?
I think Vegan Planet, because I think that was the first cookbook I got when I got a kitchen of my own.

14. Favorite flavor of jam/jelly?
Marmalade! Though mint jelly is really cool; I just don't know enough uses for it.

15. Favorite vegan recipe to serve to an omni friend?
Hm. Probably the Guttonous Vegan's smoky sweet potato soup (I use liquid smoke in place of the paprika); it has great complex flavors, and with a side of roasted chickpeas and bread, it's a really filling meal.

16. Seitan, tofu, or tempeh?
Tofu! Whooooo! (That's my tofu cheer.)

17. Favorite meal to cook (or time of day to cook)?
Oh, definitely dinner. I like cooking in the late afternoon/early evening.

18. What is sitting on top of your refrigerator?
We store our plastic bags (for reuse) on top of the fridge.

19. Name 3 items in your freezer without looking.
Veggie broth, black beans, leftover wedding food.

20. What's on your grocery list?
We're going on our honeymoon this week/end, so I'm trying to use up everything in our fridge. Which means my grocery list is tiny this week... bread, oats, some fruit. Clif bars for the trip.

21. Favorite grocery store?
My parents' store, Cooperstown Natural Foods! It would be my favorite even if they weren't my parents, I swear.

22. Name a recipe you'd love to veganize, but haven't yet.
Ooo this question was on last year's survey, and I still haven't veganized it yet: croissants. At this point I've seen a bunch of great recipes for vegan croissants, I just haven't had the time to make them.

23. Food blog you read the most (besides Isa's because I know you check it everyday). Or maybe the top 3?
Because blogs have been blocked at work, I don't get to read as many as I'd like as consistently as I'd like... but when I get a chance to check up on blogs, I always read the food blogs on my links page. I've also been reading Bonzai Aphrodite pretty regularly.

24. Favorite vegan candy/chocolate?
At first I was going to complain about how hard this question was, but then I remembered: the peanut butter pitbull bar from Rescue chocolates. A vegan coworker from the New York office sent some to me when he found out there was another vegan in the company, and I ate them embarrassingly fast.

25. Most extravagant food item purchased lately?
Our wedding cake (from Xs to Os Vegan Bakery in Troy, NY)? I'll post pictures of it when we get them.

26. Favorite pumpkin thing to eat?
I prefer savory pumpkin recipes to sweet ones, so coconut-milk-pumpkin stew! But pumpkin muffins are pretty tasty, too.

epic soup post

2011-10-24T22:58:00.001-04:00

I used to hate soup. It's a between food, and I don't like between foods. "Between foods" are things like soups, stews, chili, slushies, and smoothies--things that aren't exactly drink, but aren't quite solids... they frustrate me.

But I discovered a few years ago that if the between foods taste amazing, I can deal with my aversion to their texture/form. So there are smoothies, stews, and soups that I put up with for the sake of their flavor--I just have to find which ones they are. This post is dedicated to soups I have enjoyed!

Curried things are always good, like this yellow split pea soup, seasoned with curry powder (homemade, of course, to omit the cayenne):

Or the curried corn chowder from Appetite for Reduction:

Appetite for Reduction also has a good butternut squash and apple soup:

I have to admit that I could only get over my soup aversion for one bowl's worth of this one--the husband had to have the leftovers because I was souped out.

In the same vein, here's a chickpea and carrot soup that was great because it tasted like falafel. (I added shredded lettuce at the end, which is why there are unflattering green lumps. But the lettuce added to the "falafel sandwich" taste!)

We had it for dinner last night, and I had it again for lunch today... and about halfway through my lunch I was like "I CAN'T EAT SOUP ANYMORE! IT IS SO ANNOYING." So the husband gets all these soup leftovers.

You know what soup I never get tired of?

FRENCH ONION SOUP, BABY. I use a Mark Bittman recipe, and homemade veggie stock, "beefed" up with some tamari for extra umami. (Good stock is a must!) Here I topped it with bread and daiya.

I also love The Gluttonous Vegan's sweet potato soup.

I think I've written about my love for it many times here.

And one thing I discovered while preparing for this entry is that apparently I really love cream of broccoli soup.

I mean, I knew I liked it, but in the past few months I made it three times, all from different recipes, and I liked them all!

I think #1 had a cashew base, and #2 I cheated and used mimicreme, and this one below had a chickpea flour roux base?

Served with the tasty butter dip biscuits I discovered on The Kitchn.

Finally, a German-style cabbage soup that I served with seitan sausages.

This soup is one of those recipes that make me sad I don't write things down. It started as a basic boring cabbage soup recipe from the internet, and when I tasted it, it had ZERO FLAVOR, so I just started adding different things to my liking, without paying attention to what/how much I added... and it turned out to be AMAZING. But for the life of me, I cannot recall what I did to make it so good. Alas!

Do you like soup? How about other "between" foods? What are your favorites?

Sunday Brunch: scrambled tofu

2011-10-23T21:28:00.000-04:00

I had a scrambled tofu post last year, so I think I've said almost everything I have to say about it. But it's our default brunch at our house, because it's quick, easy, filling, and variable enough that we don't get sick of it, as we change up the ingredients and spices almost every time. So here are a couple pictures of recent scrambled tofu brunches!

With a mix of garnet and white sweet potatoes.

This is what we had this morning. We were in a hurry, as we wanted to go to some open houses.

This is from a while ago. Sometimes I want to make our brunches look snappy.

Saturday Snack: french onion dip

2011-10-22T19:18:00.000-04:00

Long before I was vegan, I used to looooooove French Onion Dip. You know the kind: it came in the Lipton packets, that you just stirred into sour cream? I loved chips, and I loved that dip.

It seems like it should be easy to make that vegan, right? Just use vegan sour cream? Lipton packet are not so natural in their ingredients list. (Also, Lipton did animal testing a while back--just to try to substantiate their claims that their tea would make you live forever or whatever stupid claims they were making. Last winter, various news sources said they stopped it last year, after PETA arranged letter-writing campaigns. I can't get behind a lot of what PETA does, but it's pretty cool that they stopped that.) There are alternative versions: Simply Organic makes a French Onion Dip Mix. But I haven't seen that around here (and I'm always a little suspicious of dextrin/maltodextrin, since it can come from potatoes, and I'm allergic to potatoes), so I make my own.

Also, because we prefer a whole-foods-based diet, I'd prefer not to buy vegan sour cream, so I make a cashew sour cream at home. For dip, I change it up from my normal sour cream by adding some oil and water to help get it to the right texture.

Using the food processor my awesome in-laws gave me for my birthday!

While that's going, I caramelize some onions:

Then I mix everything together, adding some crispy fried onions (I opt for the organic and natural ones from the co-op, but French's work, too), onion powder, garlic power, pepper, and salt.

It's better after it sits for a while so all the flavors can meld, but we usually just dig right in.

People who can't potato chips like me: try cassava chips! (Pictured above.) Especially if you can find the ridged ones. They are very similar to potato chips, and so good with this dip!

noooooooooooooooooooo

2011-10-21T23:59:00.001-04:00

I just got back from watching The Thing with friends, only to discover it's after midnight! I MESSED UP POSTING EVERY DAY!!! noooooooooooooooooooooooo

Today's post was going to be quick anyway: mac and cheese!

Almost instant. That is, almost as easy as instant. It's whole-wheat elbows cooked with the cheezy sauce from the Veganomicon, topped with breadcrumbs. It isn't exactly like kraft, but it satisfies the comfort-food craving!

I'm cheating and back-dating this one. I wrote it at 12:45, before I went to bed, so I'm counting it as my 10/21 entry. Try and stop me! (Or don't, because you're captivated by tasty mac and cheese.)

burger time!

2011-10-20T20:58:00.000-04:00

Did any of you ever play Burger Time?
It was an old arcade game I used to play as a kid that I recently rediscovered in an arcade. You are a chef who is trying to stack burgers, but certain ingredients--chili peppers and eggs!--keep trying to get you. It's a fun game, but, as with all those old arcade games, it is hard and unforgiving.

Unlike real burger-making! I don't find it so hard to avoid chili peppers or eggs in my burgers. We don't eat burgers that often, but I find I've been stockpiling pictures of them, so I figured I'd have one big burger post!

My favorite burger recipes come from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. While some of his recipes call for eggs, he always provides a vegan version. His recipes are simple, and very forgiving. For instance, he has a recipe for burgers made from corn, but I was out of corn, so I substituted frozen peas.

It still made adorable burgers!

He also has a recipe for autumn burgers that I thiiiink call for sweet potatoes instead of beets? But once I was out of sweet potatoes, so I made them with beets and they were tasty.

For me, it's not a burger if it's not on some sort of bread. Above you can see I used part of a baguette, but I really like making buns for the burgers!

I almost always make my own; my pizza crust recipe will give you sixish rolls, and the ones you don't use freeze well.

To get them big and puffy like the ones above (note that the first picture of rolls is slightly flatter), I toss in an extra Tbsp or so of gluten, and make sure I leave plenty of time for rising.

This batch was great; I used 1/4 chickpea flour, 1/4 whole wheat flour, and 1/2 all-purpose flour, with a couple tablespoons of gluten. That way it rose, but we got extra protein and fiber!

The texture and taste weren't any different from a wheat roll.

Anyway, back to the burgers. Mark Bittman also has a really simple nut burger recipe. In the cookbook he adds that to make a vegan version, use the miso and/or nut butter instead of the ketchup or tomato paste, and add a little extra liquid, and you don't miss the egg at all. True! I've tried that recipe with pecans for pecan burgers:

...and with walnuts for paler walnut burgers:

...and both were great. The best part is that each recipe makes at least 4 burgers, and one is quite filling, so I can freeze the leftovers.

DId you notice the roasted celeriac fries in the walnut burger picture above? I love having some sort of "fry" with my burger. I think fries and salad are the best burger accompaniments, so I try to have both every time I have a burger.

For example, this pecan burger got roasted zucchini fries, which were a little limp but quite tasty.

This portobello burger has white (Japanese) sweet potato fries, which I first coated in cornstarch to get them crispy. It worked really well!

FInally, that old processed standby: the boca burger! Because once in a while it's a great relief just to take dinner out of a box.

With sweet potato fries. At least I fried up some mushrooms and onions to go on top... that's not out of a box! Normally my toppings are just lettuce and avocado if I have it.

Do you like burgers? What toppings do you prefer? What sides do you eat with them?

pumpkin soup, maple syrup vinegar, and forgotten vanilla

2011-10-19T21:47:00.000-04:00

I got our final CSA share of the season today, and upon discovering leeks and pumpkins, I decided to make Leek and Pumpkin Soup from this recipe.

I topped it with leftover cashew-chive sour cream from yesterday's turnovers. We had it with red kale and garlic-and-nutritional-yeast bread. It tasted like fall!

But the real focus of my evening was making Maple Syrup Vinegar. I read how to make one's own vinegar in this Popular Science article. It gives a fascinating breakdown of how to make your own vinegar at home, as well as a really simple recipe for Maple Syrup Vinegar. The only catch? Well, there are two. The first catch is that the recipe calls for 4 cups of maple syrup. BUT you can scale it down. The second catch is that it has to age for at least 4 weeks. So if you want to make it for holiday gift-giving, as I do, you'll have to start now!

As you may remember, I got married this past weekend! For our favors, we had little bottles of maple syrup from my home town:

Just behind it, you can see our centerpieces: mason jars with candles. Not only do I have all the mason jars left (24!), but we have a bunch of favors left... so it seemed like the perfect time to try out the vinegar recipe.

Here are the ingredients you need: rum, vinegar, maple syrup, and water. You combine all the ingredients, then while the recipe says to pour it into one jar... See all those mason jars in the back? I have plenty to use.

Rubberband cheesecloth over the top, to let it breathe, and put it in a dark, undisturbed area to age for 4 weeks.

They're like little ghosts in the back of my cupboard!

I'll check it in another 4 weeks to see how it's progressing.

While I was digging around for space in the back of my cupboard, I found this:

Oh yeah! I put some old, already-used vanilla beans in vodka a while back to see if it could draw out whatever's left of the beans, then forgot about it for 4 months. It's still pale, but it looks better than it did when it started:

I'm putting it back in the cupboard to take out for good when I take out the vinegar. Check back here in 4 weeks!

crispy apple-onion "turnovers"

2011-10-18T23:07:00.000-04:00

While searching for fall recipes this afternoon, I found the Kitchn's recipe for Crispy Turnovers with Apple, Bacon, and Caramelized Onions. I was intrigued by the combination of apples and onions, and never one to be deterred by bacon in a recipe, I decided I could adapt it for us.

I didn't want to make puff pastry, and I'm trying to make more room in our freezer (it is filled BEYOND capacity with leftover wedding food!), so I dug out an old package of mostly-used-up filo dough we had in there. I halved the recipe to fit how little dough I had, and replaced the bacon with a tsp each of tamari and liquid smoke, plus a handful of chopped roasted pecans at the end for some extra fall flavor and protein.

So my recipe was actually very little like the one from the Kitchn, but it was delicious! We had it with a homemade cashew sour cream that I thinned with water and vinegar, and to which I added chives from our little garden. Even though they were small, with a side salad, one was filling enough for dinner.

I got married! (and brown rice ramen noodles)

2011-10-17T23:16:00.000-04:00

You guys, it's hard to keep up with Vegan MoFo when you're getting married... but we did it!

I wanted to write a post about the food we had at the reception, but things are still kinda crazy around here, so instead I'll post a quick review about a quick food:

King Soba's Organic Brown Rice Ramen noodles!

I haven't had ramen in soooo many years, but putting these in/with all of my stir fries lately have brought the memories right back. They're gluten free, simple to make, and go well with every dish I've tried them with. The texture is exactly like I remember cheap grocery store ramen to be. I'll have to get another bag soon!

Sunday Brunch: Egg, Ham, and Cheese Sandwich

2011-10-16T09:00:00.002-04:00

GUYS I GOT MARRIED YESTERDAY.

This means that I am currently in upstate NY helping my family clean up the wedding venue and saying goodbye to the last of our out-of-town guests. I wrote this post ahead of time and have it set to update automatically. But if you're reading this--I GOT MARRIED YESTERDAY!!!

Obviously I will post some pictures of the wedding when I have them, but in the meantime, it's Sunday, and that means Sunday Brunch!

Today's Sunday Brunch is one that's dear to my heart. I made it early on in my relationship with the ~~fiance~~ husband (!!!omg!!!), when he only ate at my place once or twice a week. I always wanted those 1-2 meals to be really special and really interesting and really awesome, because I hoped they would reflect that I, therefore, was really special/interesting/awesome. I think it worked.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time on this one, having prepared all my ingredients a day in advance so it would seem effortless and amazing. It wasn't effortless, but it WAS amazing:

Vegan Egg Ham & Cheese Sandwich

It's made up of a nutritional-yeast-based cheese sauce, scrambled tofu (with spinach), and tofu ham, all on an awesome bagel. By the time we set to eating this, I forgot all about wanting to impress the (at the time) boyfriend and was impressed with myself! I went vegetarian long before I'd had an opportunity to try a breakfast sandwich like this at a restaurant, and I was psyched to be able to make one of my own.

The tofu "ham" was an invention of my own, one that I'm quite proud of:

It's tofu baked with olive oil, soy sauce, and liquid smoke for a hammish flavor. (Is hammish a word? It should be; it's fun to type and to say). But color was key to me! I wanted it to look like those reddish-pink patties that always seem to be in meaty breakfast sandwiches. So before I baked/seasoned it, I let it sit for a while...

...COVERED IN SHREDDED BEETS! I was shredding the beets for a different recipe when the idea hit me. The tofu didn't really soak up any beet flavor, but did soak up the color. I scraped away the beets to use in the other recipe, and baked the tofu with above-mentioned seasonings. The baking process gave it its slightly more tame color.

I only made that labor-intensive breakfast sandwich that one time... but I guess it served its purpose, since I am now a happily married lady!

Saturday Snack: Socca

2011-10-15T11:00:00.010-04:00

Today is our wedding day! So obviously I wrote this post in advance. But wish us luck! The weather (two days ahead, when I'm writing this) is supposed to be "chance of rain."

I bought my wedding dress back in August, and it fit perfectly, off the rack, no alterations. Hooray! The only problem with a dress that fit absolutely perfectly was that if I gained any weight between August and today, I'd be really uncomfortable in my dress (and it would be too last-minute to alter it). So I've been trying to keep my white flour intake low the past couple months. Not really a problem; we always have whole grain toast in the mornings, and all our pasta is whole wheat. but I like to have something bready with some meals, and sometimes the co-op doesn't have any whole-grain bread in the bakery section. so to prevent myself from gobbling too much sourdough to fit into my dress, I've been making socca to go with our meals!

That's one's with sliced onion. I wrote an entry on socca a little while ago, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I love this flatbread-style chickpea pancake. It's been doing a great job replacing bread as a side for our meals.

It's just as filling, but this way I'm getting protein instead of empty carbs from white bread. And it's really tasty toasted the next day as a snack, too. So thanks, chickpea flour, for helping me avoid white flour this month!

And thanks to socca for being so delicious.

And hooray for our wedding day!

Korean Barbecue Seitan

2011-10-14T10:00:00.015-04:00

A very brief post, written in advance, because I am currently in Upstate NY getting ready for our wedding! As you read this, we are probably getting our marriage license!

I spent a long time trying to find a vegan-friendly caterer for our wedding. I eventually found a few names, but our wedding is going to be so small that it wasn't worth caterers' time to 1.) make the trek out to Cooperstown and 2.) work with my allergies. We were turned down by a number of caterers. We didn't want to settle with crappy food, either, so we found ourselves at a loss for what to do.

Enter MY MOTHER! She'll be cooking all of the entrees and side dishes. She's a great cook and sooooo wonderful to do this for us. She and I talk at least three times a week, and every time we talk lately, she's been running recipes by me. "What about this dish?" and "How about this?" and "Do you really think one serving of seitan is 4 ounces?!" Over the past few weeks, she's been perfecting the recipe she's going to use for the wedding, which means my family might be tired of our wedding food before the wedding even happens! As you read this, she is probably chopping and stirring our food right now.

One dish she'll be making at the wedding is a "Korean Barbecue Seitan" recipe she found in a cookbook of hers. While she was describing it, to me, it sounded so good that I made it for dinner myself, shown here with kimchi and rice noodles.

I overcooked ours a little. Good thing my mom's doing the cooking for the wedding and not me!

The "barbecue" sauce is a marinade consisting of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and molasses. I used low-sodium tamari, so I didn't notice as much, but Mom said using regular tamari was way too salty. She'll be using Bragg's Aminos instead for the wedding version, since they have much less sodium. But it's a very tasty recipe!

Without my mom to help, we'd've had to settle for cruddy food, most of which I'd be allergic to. But thanks to her, tomorrow we will all eat well!

Vegan Cordon Bleu take 2

2011-10-13T10:00:00.001-04:00

Yesterday's post featured the chocolate mousse I made for the fiance's birthday last year. But I didn't mention what the meal was! He requested my Vegan Cordon Bleu again this year; I think he wants it to be his special birthday meal every year!

This year I used Daiya instead of Follow Your Heart cheese, and while it had a better taste and texture, it was a lot messier while try to assemble the rolls. I'd love if Daiya came out with block cheese sometime!

I didn't even bother with my beurre blanc sauce this year; the flavor of the vegan cordon bleu was enough.

Tonight we head to upstate NY for our wedding weekend! eeee

Kevin's Chocolate Mousse

2011-10-12T20:55:00.000-04:00

Vegan chocolate mousse is one of those recipes that, when you first go vegan, every non-vegan in your life sees in a magazine or on a blog or something and gives to you, thinking 1.) it has a block of tofu in it, so they're not going to use it but 2.) you must need it because you're vegan. I mean, we've all seen this recipe, right? One block of aseptic-pack tofu (like Mori Nu), almost equal parts (10 oz) melted chocolate chips, mayyyybe some vanilla or sugar as the recipe varies. It sounds so simple, and so tofu-y, that I felt insulted the maaaany times someone was like "Oh. you're vegan? I saw a chocolate mousse recipe you'll love." So even though I've seen it at least 20 times since going vegan in 2005, I never made it until a year or so ago, when I needed a quick dessert.

The recipe is so simple and ubiquitous that I don't think I need to write it out. When I make it, I skimp a little on the chocolate chips, and add a couple Tbsps cocoa powder and a touch of instant coffee. Both of those things make it richer and darker, though in that case I add a bit of soymilk and agave to help keep it from getting too bitter. Put in cute cups, leave in the fridge for an hour or two, and bam! Firm, rich chocolate mousse. This is a delicious, basic recipe that tastes way more involved than the sum of its parts. It makes you look like a good host(ess) instead of a lazy one! And the fiance loves it. He loves it so much, he wanted it instead of cake or cupcakes of cookies this year for his birthday!

I've been thinking of trying it with various liqueurs, too, for a little kick. Citrus zest would also be a nice touch.

vegan yum yum's No Name recipe!

2011-10-11T11:00:00.005-04:00

This week will be a little light in terms of posts, since the wedding is Saturday (!) and we're a liiiiiiittle bit busy with all that. But I thought that for the rest of this week, it would be nice to post foods that relate to our relationship.

(Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY WONDERFUL MOTHER!)

Before I met the fiance, I'd never dated another vegan. And then for our first date, we went to a vegan restaurant and shared our food. I hadn't realized until then how important it was to me that I could share meals with the person I was with, but it was great! As were all of our dates. (Awwww.)

ANYWAY, if you're vegan in Boston long enough, you're bound to end up at Grasshopper at some point. We went there for a few of our earlier dates. It's inexpensive, greasy vegan Chinese food, and sometimes that's what you really crave. Their appetizers are really great (most of them are deep fried, which is why they're so great), but most people who love Grasshopper love it for one particular dish: the No Name. The No Name is basically sweet-and-sour seitan, but their sauce is really good. Gluten-free people are in luck: they make a tofu version as well. However, night-shade free people are not so lucky; the sauce contains ketchup, so the No Name was out of the question for me.

Until! Vegan Yum Yum posted a recipe for Crispy Sweet and Sour Seitan, which is basically the recipe for No Name!

I made it with tofu, and replaced the tablespoon of ketchup with some tamarind. I was so happy to be able to have the No Name! I actually cut down a bit on the sugar, and it was still sweet enough for me... and my sweetie. ;)

(Sorry, I promise I won't be so sappy after this week.)

So thanks to Vegan Yum Yum for recreating the No Name!

Veggie Galaxy's lemon meringue pie

2011-10-10T20:03:00.000-04:00

Last month, Veggie Galaxy, a new vegetarian restaurant, opened up down the street from where we live. It has a diner-style menu, and the desserts and baked goods are all vegan. We've been there a few times so far. People with food allergies might have some problems, since MANY of their ingredients are prepped/made in advance, but the food is really good and pretty inexpensive, and the employees were committed to helping me find something I could eat.

I'll write more about them later, but the main reason I wanted to talk up Veggie Galaxy: their Lemon Meringue Pie.

That's right. Vegan Lemon Meringue Pie.

Some more meringue-y goodness for you.

The desserts and baked goods are my favorite part; everything tastes really good, and the baker/pastry chef is really serious about making really good baked goods that "just happen to be vegan." The whole place is like that. If you're in the Boston area, definitely check them out, and save room for dessert!

Sunday Brunch: Tofu Benedict/Florentine

2011-10-09T11:00:00.031-04:00

Did I ever mention that I have a garden? I have a container garden out on our fire escape. I kept meaning to take pictures of it and to write about it this summer, but I guess I just never got around to that. Well, there was a cold snap in Boston earlier this week, and my basil decided it was time to pass on. I've been harvesting as much of my little garden as I can this week, but I managed to snap a quick picture this morning.

It's not as abundant as it was in the summer. The dill went to seed a while back, and the chard is actually replacing the cilantro, which lived its life and died over the course of the summer. Container gardening is actually pretty easy, it turns out, as long as you don't forget to water the plants every other day. That almost killed my garden a couple times this year.

ANYWAY, early on in the summer, when the garden was just starting up, the fiance requested tofu florentine for brunch. Not having spinach (which, I discovered, turns "benedict" into "florentine"--I had no idea), I used some tiny new arugula from our garden just to top the potatoes--microgreens!

You know how food people always say arugula is a "peppery" green? Meaning it has a little kick to it like pepper does? For some reason, I've always tasted that kick as being rather sulfury, and therefore eggy. So for me, arugula is the perfect green to serve with brunches involving tofu eggs. Arugula has a really short growth cycle; it takes less than a month to mature. So I've replanted every three weeks, and we had arugula all season.

I made tofu florentine again this morning, and we had what is probably the last batch of arugula for the season on top.

(Mmmm and the cheesy sauce is still steaming.) Goodbye, little container garden! And thanks for adding so much green to our meals... including our Sunday brunches!

popcorn and some obscure horror movie recommendations

2011-10-08T22:57:00.001-04:00

When the fiance and I have a weekend evening at home, we like to watch movies. Usually two. First, we put on a "serious" movie--that is, something we actually want to see, usually from our Netflix queues. The fiance usually goes for anything involving spaceships, memory loss, time travel, science gone wrong, and/or romance. I usually go for anything involving claymation, Udo Kier, existentialism (especially if French, Swedish, or Danish), and/or pre-1940s filming. So the first movie fits in one of those categories. For the second feature, we scan Netflix's Instant Streaming lists for horror movies.

If you don't have Netflix, you might not know that in addition to really popular movies, the most common things on instant streaming are obscure low-budget, and/or foreign (all of which means it was cheaper for netflix to get the rights). As it turns out, obscure/low-budget/foreign are all of our favorite adjectives for horror movies. So many innovative movies! So many absurdly derivative ones! So many frightening ones! So many unintentionally laughable ones!

To really enjoy watching horror movies, you need two things: darkness and popcorn.

Popcorn is pretty healthy for you, as snacks go. It's whole-grain and low in calories. You can make it in a microwave, in an airpopper, or on the stove. We don't have the former two appliances, so we do the last option!

Making popcorn on the stove isn't hard, though it may seem intimidating at first. And if you ever mess it up and burn it, the clean-up after isn't much fun. So don't mess up! Follow these steps:

Measure out your popcorn. A medium-large batch (like the one in the metal bowl below, which makes 2 gigantic servings or 3-4 normal ones) is about 1/3 cup. Pour into a large pan for which you have a lid.
Add oil. Canola/olive/vegetable, whatever you've got. Coconut is good too, but you have to be ready for that distinct flavor. Depending on how much popcorn you use, you'll want around 1 tablespoon. You want enough that it coats the bottom of the pan, as well as the kernels when you swish them around.
Swish around all the popcorn kernels until they're coated with oil.
Cover the pan, then turn the burner on medium heat. Swish/swirl the pan around often, not moving it far from the burner. Resist the urge to peek; doing that releases heat and makes everything take longer. Keep swishing/swirling every minute or so until you start hearing popping. Get out a large bowl and have it ready near the stove.
Once you start hearing popping, now swish/swirl the pan around constantly over the burner, giving it a good shake (holding down the lid!) when you can. Any popcorn that sits at the bottom/against the side of the pan too long risks burning, so you want all that popcorn to keep moving! And this way the unpopped kernels sink to the bottom, where they'll heat up.
If it sounds like it's getting full (you can sort of hear the popcorn rubbing against the lid), quickly open the lid, pour half the popcorn into the bowl, then re-lid and return to the burner.
The popcorn is done when the popping stops. Turn off heat, remove lid, pour popcorn into bowl, and top with whatever you want.

The whole process takes less than ten minutes, and at the end, you have popcorn! I love my homemade Cracker Jack-y popcorn, but the fiance doesn't like his popcorn sweet, so we usually go for some combination of salt, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, herbs, and/or the nori flakes I found at a Japanese grocery store. Stir well. If you used plenty of oil in step 2, the toppings should stay on pretty well, if not, a small drizzle of oil, soy sauce, or liquid aminos should help the toppings stick.

Now that you've got your movie-watching snack, you're all set to turn off the lights and watch something scary! Here are some of my favorite lesser-known horror movies, all the better for you to enjoy your October!

The Eye--The original Chinese version, not the Jessica Alba version. So many creepy moments.
Thirst--Korean vampires might just be the best vampires.
Suspiria--This one is a little more "weird" than "scary," but it's also a fundemental 70s horror movie. And Udo Kier is in it, SO YOUNG AND DASHING.
A Tale of Two Sisters--We like to try to figure out what's going to happen in movies. We thought we had this one all figured out, and then it went haywire.
Pan's Labyrinth--The best horror movies, to me, have supernatural elements, but recognize that the real horror is in how people are capable of treating others. Guillermo del Toro gets it.
The Devil's Backbone--Tragic and scary and everything I said above about Pan's Labyrinth.
The Orphanage--Ditto Pans Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone
[Rec]--Another movie where we tried to figure out what was happening and DID NOT HAVE A CLUE.
Phone--A Korean movie that sounds boring, gets interesting. Had a lot of turns we didn't expect.
Pandorum--Space horror! Not usually my thing (but totally the fiance's; see above), but I liked this one.
The Watcher in the Woods--I watched this often as a kid. It's still creepy today.
House (Hausu)--It's so absurd that it isn't scary at all, but you can't miss this one. It is so absurd.
Poltergeist--I know you've probably seen it, but I feel like this movie doesn't get the love it deserves. I love it so much I will even watch Poltergeist 2 and 3.
The Ring/Ringu--I like both the American and Japanese versions. Most people have seen this, but if you haven't, do.
Paranormal Activity--Again, you've probably seen this. But if not, do.
Ernest Scared Stupid--Do you remember the Ernest movies?! This isn't actually scary, but come on. Jim Varney! Halloween!

Do you have any horror movie recommendations?

attempting homemade bubble tea

2011-10-07T09:00:00.001-04:00

I feel like I mention bubble tea rather often. I was a bit of a latecomer to tbe bubble tea trend, so I assume mostly everyone but me has had it before, but just in case you haven't: it's ice tea with big tapioca pearls. The tapioca pearls are usually cooked in a sugar solution, so they're slightly sweet, and often the iced tea is mixed with milk or cream and/or lots of sugar. The liquid is sometimes blended with ice to be slushy/shake texture. Vegans can order it without milk (or with soymilk, if the place has any!), and people like me who don't like sweet drinks can often order it without sugar. While many bubble tea places use pre-mixed powders to flavor the tea, my favorite places to get bubble tea brew their own iced tea.

A while back I thought, hey, I've made tapioca pudding before, so why not try my hand at bubble tea? The bubbles are bigger, but that doesn't make them harder to cook, right?

I bought a package of large tapioca pearls at an Asian market, and looked up recipes online: boil the pearls in simple syrup until they are cooked through. Different internet recipes made this sound like it could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 6 hours, depending on the recipe I consulted. I figured I'd be able to tell just by the texture of the tapioca pearl. I dove right in.

After 2 hours of first boiling, then simmering in a slightly weak simple syrup (using lots of sugar kinda freaked me out, so I cut back), the tapioca pearls started to get gelatinous and dissolve. I was worried they'd all dissolve and I'd end up with one big pot of gel, so I decided they were done. Drained and strained!

However, if you look closely, they look a little like frog's eggs; the middle is still opaque, which means it's not done yet. I took them out too early. Though tapioca starts to look like it's losing its shape while cooking, it maintains is structure pretty well--and once in cold water (and stored in the fridge), it firms right up. And was a little too firm when drinking it.

It still tasted good, so the fiance and I still used it for bubble tea, but the middles were a bit crunchy.I think from now on I'm going to stick with buying my bubble tea.

grilled endive

2011-10-06T10:00:00.002-04:00

We've been getting endives in our CSA share pretty often this summer. They're awfully cute, and the leaves hold their structure well enough that they make great little boats for serving small portions.

But as cute as endives are, they are very bitter, so there are only so many salads I want to use them in. You may remember from my June post on Grilled Romaine Hearts that I like everything better grilled, so I decided to use the same method on endives. (To see how to do it yourself, check out the grilled romaine hearts entry. It's the same, though I found the endive took about a minute longer to cook.)

I thought some of the bitterness would cook off, but it does not, so I recommend either drizzling a creamy or sweet salad dressing or sauce over it, or serving it alongside something bland and/or something sweet, to help cut the bitterness.

Endive is bitter, especially this late in the season, but it's also a really interesting flavor, one that can add a kick to your meal. Just make sure you play it off more neutral flavors!

Garden of Eden: Pesto-stuffed Tofu

2011-10-05T09:00:00.002-04:00

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I mostly stick with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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I never would have heard of Hemingway's The Garden of Eden if I hadn't found it on the "free" table on our street. It is not among his better-known novels--and for good reason. His estate published it posthumously, editing it down from about a thousand pages (in three different editions) to a mere 250 pages. It's not, to be honest, very good. In part, that's probably because Hemingway wasn't done with it, but also because he may never have wanted to publish it. It's not a great plot, and the narrative is really unbalanced (though these issues might have been repaired had Hemingway been alive to do it himself). So you wouldn't want to read it for the story. But the novel is also a really interesting perspective into the author's lief (several critics have said it's semiautobiographical) and the social mores of ex-pats in the early 20th century. If you liked A Moveable Feast, or even Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, you may like The Garden of Eden.

The plot centers around David, a newly wed writer, and his wife Catherine, a fun/crazy/young woman who comes from money. They hadn't known each other long before they got married, and now they're taking a long (as in MONTHS long) honeymoon around Europe. David is insecure about his writing and about taking money from Catherine, who could easily support them on her inheritance, and Catherine is uncomfortable with who she is, wishing she could spend half her life as a boy and the other half as a girl. Through David, we see Catherine go from being the whimsical and original girl he met to the destructive and psychologically troubled woman he married. She makes a lot of aggressive moves in their relationship, including bringing in another woman. The ways in which the three of them deal with each other, and how society does/doesn't see them, is the really interesting part of this book for me. Catherine's psychological decline over the course of the novel is subtle but chilling. And, because Hemingway had not yet pared the language down to his usual brusque diction, the narration flows in a stream-of-consciousness, emotionally-rich river of words. It was a very fast read, too (I read it in pieces throughout one day, but I think it took me less than 4 hours).

Food and drink play a gigantic role in this book, perhaps because so much of the novel is sensual (as in "sensory," not "sexy," though I guess that would apply too). The characters all drink a massive amount of alcohol, which plays a double role here of stimulating the characters' senses and deadening them, depending on what they need or want. And because the characters aren't getting the sustenance they need from their interactions with others, food takes center stage in certain scenes.

Nothing they eat is vegan. It's caviar and brioches and fish, eggs, and/or bacon for almost every meal. But I was inspired by how elegant and yet basic their meals were. A protein in a rich sauce, vegetables on the side. So I came up with this meal:

Pesto-Stuffed Tofu
This dish calls for pesto, but you should use your own favorite pesto recipe,as I don't have any set way of making pesto to advise. (I change my recipe up every time I make it). Pesto from a jar is not quite as tasty, but would work, too. Serves 4.

The ingredients you need:
1/3 cup prepared Pesto (homemade, storebought, whatever you've got)
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup vinegar (or lemon juice; see below)
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 block (14 ounces) extra-firm tofu

Blend your pesto with the garlic, oil, and half the vinegar in a blender or food processor until creamy. It should still have bits and pieces of basil visible, but you want it to be a spreadable consistency. This is because you want the pesto to do two things: 1.) to be a spreadable consistency, and 2.) to be have sharp enough flavors to sink into the tofu. However you normally make pesto, add extra acid. I recommend vinegar above, but if you usually like lemon juice in your pesto, add that instead. I like using vinegar so I don't end up with lemon-pesto-tofu, but it's your call. Anyway, if the pesto is still not creamy, add the remaining half of the vinegar a little at a time. You can then add a bit more oil and/or water if necessary to make it creamier. You'll end up with less than a cup of pesto.

Now you prepare your block of tofu. Set it up on its side, and measure where you'll make your slits. I only made two slits above, but I recommend making three cuts instead, since otherwise the pesto flavor doesn't permeate the entire block. Anyway, make your slits in the tofu, leaving 1/2 to 1/4 of an inch on either end NOT SLICED.

Like so. Note the creamy consistency of the pesto to the side!

Now spoon pesto into the slits. It takes a couple spoonfuls; you want it full and sort of oozing out a bit, but not uncontrollably. Use the dull edge of a butter knife to push the pesto all the way to the edges of the slits.

Now smooth off the excess pesto. Marvel at how you just stuffed some tofu!

Put it in a baking pan or on a baking sheet, lighty greased. Bake at 425 for 10-15 minutes, until the edges have browned and dried out a little.

Remove from the oven--but you're not done yet! Take some of your leftover pesto mixture and smear it along the top and sides.

I left the sides with the slits uncovered this time, but intend to cover them next time. Return to the oven for another 10 minutes.

Cut into 4 long slices. Eat with a simple salad and roasted vegetables while looking out at the Mediterranean and contemplating how your childhood elephant hunt has affected your current choice of partners. Or if you're not a Hemingway character, just enjoy with a simple salad and roasted vegetables.

another VeganMofo pizza post (with calzones!)

2011-10-04T11:00:00.000-04:00

During last year's Vegan MoFo, I wrote a big pizza post, which included my standard pizza dough recipe, as well as a recipe for my zucchini pepperoni. Ever since then I've been amassing pictures of pizzas, waiting for this year's Vegan MoFo, because I'd like to make my big pizza post a yearly tradition.

I love pizza. I have standard favorite toppings (onion, fennel, olives), but I've also made curry pizzas and fig-jam pizzas. I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to pizzas. Being allergic to tomatoes means I almost always have white pizzas. I could make my nightshade-free marinara sauce to go on it, but pesto or oil and garlic/herbs are almost always enough for me!

You'll notice below that I experiment with cheeses. Cashew ricotta, crumbled tofu mixed with herbs and nutritional yeast if I'm lazy, daiya cheese when we make a whole foods run (they don't sell it at our co-op), and my new favorite: nut cheese made from the part of the nut you strain away when you make nut milk (I use bonzai aphrodite's recipe for nutmilk). I mix these blended nutty bits with miso, nutritional yeast, and Italian herbs and spices. Depending on the nut, the color can be kind of funny (note the brownish/purple cheese immediately below; cashews can be so weird!), but it's one of my favorite homemade "cheeses."

On with the pizzas!

Afore-mentioned nut cheese pizza topped with artichoke hearts, olives, and onions. A side of sauteed carrots. This is probably going to be the only pizza in this entry whose side dish wasn't a salad. I always associate pizza with a side salad.

Someone on the PPK forum recommended cooking pizza in a cast iron pan to make it a deep-dish pizza. Really bready crusts are my favorite, so this was a big hit! Topped with daiya, garlic, and onions. I think I baked seeds into the crust? I forget.

This is the quintessential vegetalion pizza. Fennel, onions, olives.

Sometimes I get lazy with my approximation of cheese. This is the crumbled tofu concoction I mentioned above. With fennel stems and onions.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I am only now realizing I never make pizza without onions. I knew it was one of my standards, but I didn't realize it was a constant...

Cashew ricotta (from Veganomicon) pizza topped with crumbled chick'n nuggets from Trader Joe's (bought back before they discontinued the vegan ones. Boo, Trader Joe's!). Surprise, there are onions, too!

You wouldn't know it from this post, since there's plenty of daiya here, but we eat almost entirely whole foods. So I'm sort of embarrassed about this pizza, where nothing is from scratch: store-bought crust, daiya cheese, and Yves veggie ham. (And onions, of course.) I think I made the pesto, at least. We had this on a really busy night, I swear!

I use my pizza dough recipe to make calzones, too. The amounts I give in that recipe is enough for 3 huge or 4 medium calzones. I opted for the huge ones.

After the first rising, I shape the calzones into rounds, fill them (here with daiya, basil from my container garden, olives, and--this is getting silly. Onions.), fold them up, and bake them!

I bake them at 425 or so for about 20 minutes. They're done when they're golden brown and they sound hollow when you knock them on the top.

The only thing missing was a good sauce to dip it in. I should have made that tomato-free marinara before I began them!

Your Vegan Mom's Kimchi Grilled Cheese

2011-10-03T21:30:00.000-04:00

The fiance and I figured that planning a small wedding with a short engagement would be easy. It turns out that planning a wedding is a little stressful and very time-consuming, regardless of the size! Add to that our busy work schedules and our attempts to still, you know, have a life, and we've ended up with very little down time in the last few weeks. Which means little time to experiment in the kitchen! I've been focusing on fast meals lately. And comfort food, to help with stress!

Enter grilled cheese. I never particularly cared about grilled cheese one way or another as a kid, so I didn't miss it when I went vegan or anything like that, but we've bought Daiya fairly recently for pizzas (it's been a comfort food kind of month, I'm telling you! I'll write about the pizzas tomorrow, probably), and it's just expensive enough that I like to use it all before it molds. Voila, grilled cheese!

Plain grilled cheese doesn't really do it for me, but Your Vegan Mom recommended kimchi with grilled cheese as a graet comfort food. Since I've just made another batch of my nightshade-free kimchi, I had to give it a shot.

IT IS SO DELICIOUS.

As you can see, we've made it twice now; once with the "cheddar" daiya and once with the "mozzeralla." I think I like the cheddar better, but the difference in flavor could have been the kimchi, since I used different batches on each occasion.

My mother pointed out that grilled cheese and sauerkraut would probably be just as tasty, for those of you who don't feel like making/acquiring kimchi.

Thanks, Your Vegan Mom, for a little tip on reinventing comfort food! And readers, what's some of your favorite comfort food? With 12 days left till the wedding, I could use some new comfort food ideas!

Sunday Brunch: Omelettes

2011-10-02T23:58:00.000-04:00

A quick post, since we spent most of the day at a friend's wedding. I was worried I wouldn't get home in time to post! But phew, just in time (it's 11:55pm as I write this).

On Sundays, the fiance makes brunch! (I usually make it on Saturday.) When he asks for a request, I almost always demand the omelette from Vegan Brunch. It's really tasty, and a good way to use up extra veggies as fillings!

This one is stuffed with the fiance's famous tofu bacon (I'll try to get that recipe up this month!), daiya cheese, and some veggies, with sauteed carrots on the side. Yummmm.

Welcome to Vegan MoFo! Saturday Snack: Cool Fruits

2011-10-01T00:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the first day of Vegan MoFo, also known as the Vegan Month of Food, where bloggers are encouraged to post as much vegan food as often as they can! I'm trying for every day this month, even though my October is pretty booked, as I'll be getting married AND going on my honeymoon!

Some bloggers take on a particular theme for VeganMoFo, but I was worried I wouldn't have time to stick to one theme, so instead, I'll stick to a couple structured days, like I did last year with "How to Replace Nightshade Fridays" and "Weekend Brunch" posts. This year, weekends will feature Saturday Snacks and Sunday Brunch posts!

It's Saturday, and that means Saturday Snacks! Anyone who knows me knows that I am a snacker. I get hungry every 3-4 hours throughout the day, and have always been that way, and when I get hungry... well, you wouldn't like me when I'm hungry.

Only known photo of a HungrySarahMonster

To prevent myself from turning into the above HungrySarahMonster, I have snacks with me at almost any given moment. My usual morning snack is fruit. But pictures of fruit are boring, right?

Especially apples, right?

BUT WAIT.

Do you see this?

This is a Pink Pearl Apple. Its peel is yellow and its flesh is PINK. I first saw them on the Kitchn blog and thought they were weird, but then our co-op started to carry organic ones and I had to try them for myself. They taste like normal apples. They are a bit tart and sort of mealy.

Another interesting fruit I picked up at our co-op was the Candy Stripe Fig. I love fresh figs, but they were hard to find around here this year, so I was excited when I saw these. They're so cute, too!

The fiance and I wanted a more substantial afternoon snack, so in addition to the figs we had bread and some leftover daiya, because figs, bread, and cheese sounded like a very sophisticated snack.

That's all for today's Saturday Snack. Stay tuned for more VeganMoFo posts throughout the month!

Their Eyes Were Watching God: Tea Cakes

2011-09-24T01:02:00.001-04:00

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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Today marks the start of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week. I wrote about my feelings on banning books in last year's Banned Books Week entry, so I'll spare you a second diatribe, but if you care about intellectual freedom, first-amendment rights, or just about being able to read some really good books, I strongly recommend you participate. There are lots of ways to show your support for not banning books. The easiest, and in my opinion, the best, is simply to find out which books are most often banned, and borrow or request them from your library. Libraries can use records of how often a book is checked out to help support the argument against banning that particular book, so not only do you get to read a good book, but you support intellectual freedom! If you're handy with a camera, and have always wanted to read, say, the opening passage from Nabokov's Lolita to an audience, another way to show your support is with the Banned Books Week virtual read-out. You can upload yourself reading passages of your favorite banned books on their YouTube channel! Finally, your local library may be having Banned Books Week events, and I'm always a fan of supporting local libraries. Get involved!

Every time I look at a list of banned books, I'm startled by the titles I see: with some, I can't even begin to imagine how they're controversial; with others, I can't believe parents want to deny their existence to their children. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is in the latter category. That is, I get why some people find it controversial: not only is there racism, but the book admits the existence of sex. But there's nothing graphic, and both those themes get the serious treatment they deserve. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a beautifully written, moving book about the importance of being true to yourself, to your feelings, and to your goals and desires. It's about working for what makes you happy, and it's about how love can change and transcend any situation.

Granted, I'm a little biased--I love this book. When I first found it, I read the line "There are years that ask questions, and years that answer" and I was a goner. (I was in the middle of a year that asked questions, and the next time I read it was a year that answered.) Even beyond its well-composed plot and interesting characters, this book resonates with anyone who has longed or searched for something. Janie, the main character, is a black woman who wants to find love. She wants a relationship in which she's treated as an equal, in which she desires and is desired, in which she is able to be herself and is appreciated for that self. Apparently, if you're a pretty black Floridian woman in the early 20th century, that's asking too much. Other characters try to point out to her that she should be happy as long as she has safety or stability or money or anything good at all, but for Janie, that's not good enough. And we understand through Janie that when we long for something--anything, not just love--nothing else will come close. We can't settle, and we shouldn't have to. The book emphasizes how important it is to our psyches to pursue our dreams, even if they can't last.

Also, there's a lot of food in this book, and I'm down with any book where food matters. When picking something to make for this entry, I had quite a few recipes to choose from, but I settled on the most obvious choice: Tea Cakes.

Tea Cake is the man whom Janie loves. His real name is Verigible, but Tea Cake is a nickname, one we can presume the ladies gave him for, well, how sweet he is. "Are you as sweet as all that?" Janie asks, upon meeting him, and with that comment starts up their whole romance. Non-human Tea Cakes are basically sugar cookies, but southern. There seems to be some controversy over whether they should be flat and crisp or puffy with soft insides. The recipe below is for the flatter and crisper variety, but you can roll them thicker than 1/4 inch if you want them softer. You can glaze them, ice them, or create sandwich cookies with them by spreading jam in the middle, but their real raison d'etre is to be eaten plain alongside a nice cup of tea, whose flavor they won't overpower (hence the name).

Confession! Because I am a yankee and didn't know about tea cakes before this, I wanted to turn to an expert for a proper recipe. The following is an adaptation (and veganization) of Paula Deen's Southern Tea Cakes.

As Sweet As All That Tea Cakes

Makes 1.5-2 dozen, depending on how thick you roll it and how big your cookie cutter is. This recipe can scale up if you want to make a lot, in which case I recommend using a mixer.

1/2 Cup sugar
4 Tbsp (1/2 a stick) margarine, at room temperature
2 Tbsp soy yogurt
2 Tbsp soymilk
1/4 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 Cup flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder

Cream together the sugar and butter with a fork (for those of you who don't know what "cream" means, mix them until creamy or well-combined). Mix in the soy yogurt, soymilk, and vanilla. Add the flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix until it forms a soft dough.

Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30-60 mins. You can skip this step if you want, but you'll have to use a lot more flour rolling it out, since it's such a sticky dough.

On a lightly-floured surface, roll out the dough to about 1/4 inch thickness. Using a cookie cutter, biscuit cutter, or an inverted drinking glass, cut into even circles. Gather up the scraps, reroll and cut, until you're out of dough. (Like Janie when Tea Cake went gambling with her money!)

Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes, until the edges are very lightly browned.

If you want to enjoy these in the style of the characters in the book, eat with tea while telling your life story to a neighbor on her porch.

Or move to the Everglades with them. Whatever you like to do with your Tea Cake is none of my business.

What are your favorite banned books?

more end-of-summer stuff... and vegan mofo!

2011-09-19T22:47:00.000-04:00

October is coming quickly! This is a little stressful for me, but also really great, because we're getting married next month! And going on a honeymoon! And I'm still signing on for the Vegan Month of Food, aka Vegan MoFo!

For those of you who are new to the idea of Vegan MoFo, bloggers sign up to post as much as they can throughout the designated month. For a lot of us, that means we're going to try to post every day! I'm already a little overwhelmed at the thought, but I've been a slacker with blogging since the start of summer, so it'll be good to have a reason to force myself to update more.

Summer got away without me ever doing a hot-weather-snacks post. I was obsessed with popsicles this year, and have a few to write about. I guess popsicles can be an any-time-of-year food, right, as long as you eat them indoors? Another thing I think of as a warm-weather snack, but something that could really be enjoyed year-round is bubble tea!

I've already written about Dado, our favorite Boston (Cambridge) bubble tea place, in my post on vegan eating in Boston. It's our favorite bubble tea place! They have soy milk available instead of milk, or you can have it with no "milk," and they let you specify no sugar. The fiance likes Thai tea (on the right) or black tea; I usually mix it up. Their matcha-mint tea is good, as is jasmine (which will ALWAYS be my favorite tea flavor), and Earl Grey seems well-suited for bubble tea. Yum!

Annnnd since summer's really over, I'm almost out of flower pictures to show you, especially with the first frost on its way. But I still have a couple bouquets left to report on from my flower share! This is one big bouquet:

There were too many flowers to fit in my vase, so like last week, I had to divide it up.

Those gladioli were SO gorgeous. And long-lasting, too!

Whatever that red flower is, it is NOT long-lasting. Or maybe it just didn't last long because the cats kept trying to attack it?

Sigh. I'll miss you around the house, fresh flowers.

salted caramel sauce (from design sponge)

2011-09-14T22:51:00.000-04:00

As you may know from my links page, I love home design blogs. I usually read them for decorating and DIY ideas for around the house, but often design blogs also delve into food. Apartment Therapy, for example, has the Kitchn section, where I've gotten plenty of recipes. Their vegan ones are often uninspired, but maybe that's only because I already read so many vegan blogs and own so many vegan cookbooks that I feel like I've seen it all. However, since I don't read many non-vegan food blogs, nor do I read many non-vegan cookbooks, I find them useful when it comes to finding new things to veganize.

This Salted Caramel recipe is an example of that. I found it on Design Sponge, a design/DIY/occasional recipe site.

The original recipes calls for lots of butter and cream. I used Earth Balance and some Mimicreme instead. It turned out great!

This caramel is thin at room temperature, but thickens to a sort of paste-y texture once stored in the fridge, so it should really be called Salted Caramel Sauce or Spread. Mine was a bit grainier than the one in the recipe, but that was entirely due to me allowing the sugar to crystalize (oops) while it was cooking, not due to veganizing.

One note about stirring melted sugar: the recipe warns not to overmix, or the sugar could crystalize. I have never had sugar crystalize on me until I read this warning and tried not to "overmix." By not stirring often, I found it crystalized much more than when I do my normal amount of (frequent) stirring. So if you are a beginner, ignore when it says not to overmix.

I served it with fruit slices to my omnivorous book club and they gobbled it up. I also drizzled it over chocolate cupcakes as a glaze, which was a wild success with my omnivorous coworkers--it doesn't taste like a veganized version of caramel--it just tastes like caramel. It would be delicious over ice cream, or spread over some dessert bread, maybe? Ohhhh man like a chocolate bread. I'm making myself hungry just thinking about it.

In other news, I know summer is really over... because my flower CSA share is coming to an end. But I still have some flower pictures to share with you!

The gladioli are always so gorgeous! But really hard to carry home with me on the T; I keep worrying I'll smack someone in the face with a flower.

Sometimes there are too many flowers to keep in one vase, which means I get to scatter them throughout our apartment! I love this delicate-looking (but long-lasting) purple flower. I don't know what kind it is though--anyone know?

I also love THESE expressive flowers! They remind me of brains, so I think of them as "brain flowers," though I'd love to know their real names.

Indian breads

2011-08-31T22:25:00.002-04:00

I love Indian food. Because I grew up in a small town, I never tried it until I was 18 or 19, when I went to college and joined our Hindu Student's Association--we'd go out for Indian food as a group on our occasional mandir visits, and we'd have it for every event we hosted. My friends in the group introduced me to different kinds of Indian food, and I loved it all. I was already vegan at that point, and it is such a vegan-friendly cuisine--when I lived in London, and later when I went to Ireland, I ate a LOT of Indian food because that was often the best option for me there.

And then, by the time I was 22, I developed my full-blown nightshade allergies, rendering Indian food among my greatest culinary enemies. Indian food that doesn't contain hot peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant is very hard to find! Especially since most Indian spice mixes involve cayenne or hot pepper of some sort. (Do you know what my FAVORITE Indian dish used to be? Baigan bharta, which is spicy eggplant in tomato sauce. All nightshades!!! I miss it.)

So I can't go out for Indian food anymore. But I can--and do--adapt some of my favorite recipes for myself at home. I make my own curry powder , and I make a lot of chana and chole dishes (because of my love for chickpeas). Many recipes are easy to adapt to nightshade free cooking just by leaving out the hot peppers.

But I miss the breads. Warm, oily breads right from the oven or fryer--those are much harder to replicate at home than curry or rice.

But I live for a challenge! Here are some Indian breads I have made at home!

Naan is the usual bread you get at Indian restaurants; it's a soft, flat, oven-baked bread. Most recipes call for yogurt, so it's rarely vegan. Definitely one advantage to making it at home!

Served here with homemade dal, a tamarind sauce, and fruit. I didn't use a specific recipe for it; I just googled "naan recipe" and read a bunch of the results, then took the amounts and techniques that appeared most often across all the recipes. It took a bit of time to make (since the dough sits over night), but surprisingly little work. I'll definitely make it again!

Bhatura was a bit more of a challenge for me, since it involves deep frying and I'd never had it before, so I didn't know if I'd gotten it right at first. It's a soft, delicious bread, with a slightly crispy outside because it's fried.

I got the recipe from the Cookery Corner blog. I went with all all-purpose flour, and used soy yogurt in place of the regular yogurt. It also takes some time (has to sit for at least 4 hours), but it is such a delicious recipe.

Because I don't like to deep fry (more for reasons of mess than of health), this is a special occasion food, but ohhhh my goodness, it does indeed make an occasion special. This is now my favorite Indian bread.

Next up, Paratha! If you've never had paratha before, it's basically a whole-wheat tortilla with a little more oil. (I think it's the same thing as Roti. I can't tell the difference, anyway, but maybe I am a philistine for thinking this?) It's quite good, and I've made it plain a couple times, but the real reason I'd got through the effort of making paratha is to stuff it! You can stuff it with any number of fillings, and it's always excellent.

For the dough, I use a recipe out of Yamuna Devi's Lord Krishna's Cuisine cookbook. You can find it online on A Cook at Heart's blog. (I used canola oil for the ghee, by the way, and like the blog writer, didn't use a full 1/2 cup in the dough. I think I used 1/3?) I made up my own filling--it's sauteed onions, spinach, and garam masala.

I know this picture is badly lit, but I like that you can see the whole process: the empty-rolled out dough, the bottom layer with the filling on it, my filling pan, a bag of flour, the rolling pin--it tells you everything you need to know! Hee. The next step is to put it in a well-oiled pan over medium heat, then brush oil over the top.

The sides cook pretty quickly; a couple minutes on each side. Then it's ready to eat!

Finally, though Pappadum isn't really a bread, and I didn't actually cook it so much as heat it up, pappadum is one of the other things I miss about Indian restaurants. So crispy and light! And perfect to dip into the sauces they always have at the table (ohhhh do I ever miss that oniony sauce, and the tamarind sauce...).

Pappadum, with an omelet (from Vegan Brunch) and sweet potatoes. These come in a box, and all you have to do is fry them or heat them over an open flame. I think you can microwave them, too, but I don't have a microwave. Though there are many different brands that are all good, I like this brand (Sharwood's), because they're very plain--no suspicious "spices," which, because this is Indian food, inevitably means hot pepper of some sort.

Those of you who aren't nightshade-free can probably get many of these things already at Indian restaurants, but I do have to say that it feels awesome to make them yourself, too. I recommend trying it! (And then you'll feel even more grateful when you order them out, because you'll know how much work went into the awesome food in front of you.)

Hershey Park!

2011-08-18T23:49:00.000-04:00

The fiance and some friends and I like to travel to one theme park per summer for some prime rollercoaster riding. This year, the trip was to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania.

I'm not a big fan of candy, so it wasn't a magical wonderland of sweets for me, but I was surprised by how much of Hershey Park is doable for vegans. In the candy category, Jolly Ranchers and Twizzlers and I think a couple other iconic Hershey candies are vegan, so they've got you covered if you're into the whole candy thing.

Beyond candy, the biggest reason to go to Hershey Park for me is the ROLLER COASTERS! They have eleven. The fiance and I made it to ten of them, but opted out of the one where people can squirt you with water jets as you go.

Any sort of trip leaves me anxiously wondering "What will I eat?" Hershey Park has a strict "no outside food" policy, so I was a little worried about finding actual food for myself there at first. But the Hershey Park website is a vegan/allergic person's dream come true. On their "Food" page, they list the ingredients for all of the food served in the park. Which meant, from a brief visit to the website, that I knew exactly what I would be able to eat, from meals to snacks to vending carts. (Especially exciting: chocolate-dipped bananas, pretzels, sugar-glazed nuts, and kettlecorn.)

With the help of their website, eating vegan at Hershey Park is pretty easy-- you'll end up with a decent selection of places to eat. Being vegan and nightshade-free, however, you have pretty limited options. Koshermart is your best bet--it's a kosher food stand that serves falafel and some other vegan (as well as non-vegan) fare. It looked okay on the website, with the exception of "spices" in some of the foods, which can contain nightshades. I emailed Hershey Park's to ask about it, very quickly received an email from the food concessions manager promising to look into the "spices" for me! Within a few days, he had talked to the vendor that provides that food and could assure me that there are no nightshades in the "spices" I'd asked about. But the vendor didn't tell him what the spices were exactly, and he was concerned it might not be a good enough answer for me, so he offered to write me a letter of exemption allowing me to bring food into the park. He was so nice! I told him I would be fine the falafel, thanks. The next day he emailed me back because he remembered I said I'd be there "on the weekend," and wanted to make sure I knew Koshermart is closed on Saturdays--he was worried I would go on Saturday and end up with nothing to eat. (My friends and I went to the park on Sunday to avoid lines, so no problem.) The level of attention, concern, and willingness to work with me that I received from Hershey Park staff members even before my arrival made for really safe and happy eating when I did get there.

Falafel! They give you a lot of litle ones--one of my friends on the trip called them "falafel tots." The pita bread was vaguely sweet, which made it unexpectedly delicious. The tahini "sauce" is actually almost as firm as hummus--that's the ball on top of the pickle slices. It was tastier than it looked. It wasn't a gourmet meal or anything, but it was good. And I knew I wouldn't be poisoned by my meal!

The menu claimed they only sold half-pickles, but they gave me A HUGE WHOLE ONE. Yessss.

So, the moral of this story is that with a small amount of advance research on the Hershey Park website, a vegan, even one with unusual food allergies, can eat there easily. And if you have any questions or concerns about the food, the employees seem really committed to helping you work something out.

Also, the rollercoasters are great.

welcome to summer

2011-07-27T18:48:00.000-04:00

I've been trying my best not to feel guilty about ignoring my blog, since I've been enjoying summer to the fullest. It's been a really busy summer so far! The boyfriend and I got engaged (so now he's the fiance!), for one, but also I've been to the beach, to an amusement park (more on that in my next entry), to upstate NY, to outdoor movie nights, to friends' pools, and in general just away from the kitchen. It's been so absurdly hot lately that I haven't been tempted to try too many new things when it comes to cooking, so today I'll be featuring other people's recipes.

The second-best thing about this summer (after the engagement, which has really got to be number one) is that I signed up for a CSA share through Red Fire Farm, a local, organic farm! A co-worker and I split one share. The boyfriend and I could probably eat an entire share's worth, but it's done by delivery to my office, which means the farm picks out what to put in my share--which means we get plenty of nightshades. So my coworker and I have an agreement that she will always take all the nightshades. (This works great for her as well as for me, because who would turn down fresh, local, organic tomatoes if they weren't allergic?!) In addition to the half vegetable share, I signed up for a flower share! So I get a pretty bouquet of flowers every week.

Week 1 had some sweet basil flowers in it; it smelled wonderful.

I love flowers, but it can be tough to keep fresh flowers around if you strive for ethical, environmentally friendly living. Many flowers available at flower shops are imported from places where workers are exploited, so they're not the most ethical way to decorate your home. (1800Flowers, by the way, often offers at least 1 or 2 fair-trade bouquets on their website.) Even if they're fair trade, though, they've come a long way to get to your vase. And even if you get domestic flowers, because flowers aren't food crops, there are no regulations on the spraying of pesticides or herbicides, which directly affect our environment (and possibly our health). But flowers are really pretty, and if you ask me there are few things as nice as having fresh cut flowers to decorate your home.

Week 2 -- Sunflowers!

SO finding out that the farm that does my CSA shares offered organic flower shares was the awesome!

Not that I'll ever turn down flowers of any type, but it's nice to be able to have fresh cut flowers in my home without any slight nagging guilt.

Check out the bright red stems on the red flowers! And what are those weird tall green flowers? They look like sea creatures.

Like I said above, I've been spending less time in the kitchen lately. I cook as much as ever before, but I am not in the mood for puttering around or innovating--I want to make recipes that I know will work the first time around. So I've been making recipes from blogs I trust.

This AMAZING chocolate tart came from Hot Polka Dot. It's not originally a vegan recipe, but I veganized it by using Earth Balance in place of the butter, flaxmeal mixed with water for the egg, and Mimicreme for the cream. I'm thinking it would also be REALLY tasty with coconut milk in place of the cream and coconut oil in place of the butter. Also, she used cherries, but the fiance (!) is allergic to cherries, so I went with strawberries. I cannot say enough about how delicious this recipe is.

Next up, homemade almond milk! I take my directions from Bonzai Aphrodite. I've used it several times for making homemade almond yogurt, but I always have to drink a little bit of it first, since it's so tasty and creamy.

Look how creamy and milky! Yum almonds.

Another tasty recipes I got from the internet was a Breakfast Beer Bread recipe from La Vida Veggie. I bookmarked it back in November, and finally had a chance to make it. It was great!

Very healthy, very hearty, very simple to make.

Finally, I've written about making C'est La Vegan's Cashew Goat Cheese, but I want to reiterate how fantastic the recipe is. I made two logs of it for a PPK potluck I hosted last month, and it was a giant hit.

I served it with crackers, and with a fig-almond spread based on a recipe from the BBC for Fig and Almond Balls. I made a bunch of changes in the recipe--I swapped dates for apricots, I added a lot of water because my figs were dried out, we didn't have any brandy so I put in a couple dashes of orange bitters, and I didn't age it at all. But it was DELICIOUS. And great with the "cheese."

I'll try to update again this week, if I can sit at my computer long enough to type out more entries--it's hot! I want to be like our cats Molly and Fritz and sprawl on the floor in front of the fan:

They love this spot because they are right between two fans.

...or in the shade like Vascha.

Under the cabinet behind the couch.

It's always so funny to me when I come home from work and find these lazy kitties spread out all over the floor to cool off.

I hope you're all enjoying your summer so far!

"Food from Literature" is on summer break. Here are some pickles!

2011-06-30T22:17:00.000-04:00

Last month I promised you two "Food From Literature" posts in June... and I have not followed through. While I've been doing a lot of reading, the heat has meant that i haven't been as interested in trying new, long-cooking recipes. I've felt so guilty about falling behind on that, though, that I got stressed out and stayed away from my blog altogether.

And then I realized: it's summer! There is no reason to be stressed, nor is there any strong argument for sitting in front of my computer typing blog entries when I could be enjoying the weather! Plus, this time of year is when students take breaks from academics--so I am declaring a summer hiatus of "Food From Literature." We will resume in the fall! In the meantime, I won't feel guilty for post content/lack thereof.

I think I write about pickled vegetables a lot, but I love them. I love them so much that when my parents accidentally ordered a case of half-gallon jars of dill pickles for their natural food store, they gave two to me and the boyfriend, and it took us surprisingly little time to go through them.

One half-gallon jar of pickles.

Once, when I was making the Beer Battered Tofu recipe from Vegan Brunch,, I had some leftover batter. I don't like throwing away food if I can help it, so I looked around the kitchen for what else I could batter and fry. And then it hit me: PICKLES.

They're on the left; the tofu is on the right. Deep-fried pickles are a special treat, obviously, but ohhhhhh man if you have the opportunity to try them, you should.

I love summer, and I love almost everything that comes with it. (The one exception being how hot our apartment gets. But I'd rather be hot than cold, so it's tolerable.) One thing I'm really looking forward to this summer is when the farmer's market starts selling local watermelons! I love watermelon, and I recently ran out of my stash of Citrus-and-Spice Pickled Watermelon Rind. I made them two summers ago, and as you can see, I had quite a few:

And this was after I halved the recipe! I got the recipe from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen, and I LOVED it. The pickles don't taste like watermelon, but the syrupy, spicy brine (spiced with cloves) does taste like sweet, down-home pickles my elderly Scottish and Irish great-aunts used to make and bring to family events. Basically, they taste like summer, and like childhood. I love Bryant Terry's book, but if you can't get it, you can find the recipe here.

Whew, and now onto July! Maybe our hot apartment isn't the one thing I dislike about summer; I also dislike how quickly it goes by!

nightshade-free kimchi

2011-06-23T22:44:00.000-04:00

I really love Korean food. Let me rephrase that: I really loved Korean food before I developed an intolerance for nightshades and could no longer eat many of my favorite Korean dishes. It's possible (and easy) to find nightshade-free vegan Korean food (like tofu bi bim bap, my favorite dish to order at Korean places), but I really miss the pungent, spicy hot sauces and condiments characteristic of Korean cuisine. In particular, I miss kimchi.

If you've had kimchi before, I don't need to explain; you understand how sad it is not to be able to have it. If you haven't had kimchi before, it's a standard--no, the standard Korean condiment or side dish. It is very spicy fermented/pickled cabbage, with other vegetables and seasonings thrown in. While many restaurants' kimchi has fish ingredients in it, all the Korean places I've been to have also had fish-free kimchi if you ask for it specifically. However, the point of kimchi is to be spicy, so while it can be easy to get vegan kimchi, nightshade-free kimchi has been a longtime unfulfilled fantasy of mine.

Well, readers, it is a fantasy NO LONGER! It is A REALITY. I am seriously excited about this, if you can't tell from all those capital letters. This recipe has been years in the making. Over the last three (almost four!) years, I've scoured cookbooks and the internet for dozens of kimchi recipes, and took a little from here, a little from there, picked and chose the methods I thought would work best, experimented with fermenting and pickling other foods, and brainstormed. When a big old napa cabbage came in my CSA order a couple weeks ago, I knew it was time.

Kimchi is very easy to make, but it sounds intimidating because 1.) it takes a lot of time, and 2.) you ferment stuff. Do not let this intimidate you! (It intimidated me, which is part of why it took me years to actually make some.) If you can have nightshades, feel free to add a diced hot pepper or two. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how spicy my nightshade-free version is, though! Raw garlic, ginger, scallions, and generous sprinklings of sichuan and black pepper give this version enough heat that even my pour-hot-sauce-on-everything boyfriend thought it had a good kick. We had some with dinner last night and my mouth burned a little and I was halfway through a spontaneous happy dance before I even registered I was dancing. That's how good kimchi is. And it's BACK IN MY LIFE.

Blog readers, I present to you my baby. Some notes before you get started:

You don't need to have a large mason jar to make it, but you do want a large glass sealable container of some sort.
Because you're fermenting things here, you're going to want to sterilizer said glass container. You can do this by submerging it in boiling water for 10 seconds.
Use the freshest ingredients you can. Your tastebuds and stomach will thank you.
Making the kimchi is a two-day process, then you store it for 4 days, so if you want a meal with kimchi, you'll have to plan ahead!

Vegan Nightshade-Free Kimchi
Makes a lot of servings.

1 large napa cabbage
salt
4-5 scallions (I used a whole bunch but found this to be too many; I'd say half a bunch, which I estimate to be 4-5, will be best)
6 cloves of garlic
2-inch chunk or a little larger of ginger
2 (small) carrots or 1 large one
black pepper, and sichuan pepper, if you can get it, ground

Get a large bowl and fill it with very salty water--I'd say 1/2 cup of salt for 4-6 cups of water. Dissolve the salt in the water.

Wash your cabbage well, then chop into 2-inch chunks. Put the cabbage into the salt water. To stop it from floating, put a plate on top of it in the bowl,, then put something heavy on top of the plate. Like so:

Let this sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours. (I did it in the evening, then came back to it the next day after work.) Then drain the cabbage, but save some of the brine.

Rinse the cabbage really well under cold water.

If you're like me, you'll be shocked at how much it reduced. Now get all your other ingredients.

Grate the carrots into a large bowl, preferably glass. Then chop up the garlic and ginger as tiny as you can. A garlic crusher might be good in this situation if you have one (I don't), as would a ginger grater. Chop the scallions however you like; I did inch-long segments, split down the middle, but I think I'll do smaller next time.

To these ingredients, generously add freshly-ground black and sichuan pepper. Then add the napa cabbage, and mix it all up really well. It's easiest to do with your hands. This is kimchi! Or it's going to be soon. Put it into your glass container.

REALLY pack it in there. It's going to seem like it can't fit, but it can! There will be some juice in the jar; if it isn't enough to cover the top of the kimchi, add enough brine just to cover the top.

Now this part that sounds tricky, but isn't really. Because everything's fermenting, any bits of vegetable that are floating above the liquid could end up with mold on them, so you want everything to be submerged. Easier said than done though, right? A simple way to keep things from being exposed to air is to stuff a ziplock bag in on top of the kimchi. Fill the ziplock bag with water until the water-filled ziplock bag fills the empty space in the kimchi jar. Fold the sides of the plastic bag over the sides of the glass container, and close the lid, around the plastic bag.

Voila! Refrigerate for 4-6 days. If your place is cool, you can leave it in a cool, dark place out for a day first, to speed along fermentation, but since it's June in Boston, that was not an option for me.

After 4-6 days, remove the zip lock bag and enjoy!

Kimchi with tofu fishsticks (the boyfriend says I make this dish more often than any other. If this is a bad thing, I don't want to be good), wasabi sauce, greens, and miso-sesame mashed sweet potatoes.

Kimchi is good as a side for many Asian-themed meals. It is also delicious as a topping for plain rice, a last minute stir-in for stir-fries, over noodles, and in soups and stews.

grilled romaine hearts

2011-06-12T23:24:00.000-04:00

It's grilling season! Just like I believe all vegetables get tastier when roasted, I believe that all food is better grilled.

Grilled tofu, corn, and bread with a (not grilled) salad, from last summer.

I'm a big fan of the smokey flavor charcoal/wood-burning grills impart, but I take what I can get. Being city dwellers, we don't have a grill, nor do we have a place to put one, but we have a cast-iron grill pan, which is the next best thing. I like that grill pains allow you to control the temperature (and therefore cooking time) a lot better than a real grill can.

Grilled romaine hearts are delicious, quick, and simple. They are, in fact, so easy to make that I almost feel embarrassed giving you a recipe. It's been a while since I've posted an actual recipe, though, so I'm going to do so anyway.

Grilled Romaine Hearts
If this dish is a side to a big meal, one romaine half per person will do. If it's a small or simple meal, use one heart (two halves) per person.
2 hearts of romaine
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste (a few shakes of each)

Heat your grill. If you're cooking with a grill pan, you want to heat it on medium. While it's heating, pull away any outer leaves on the romaine hearts that look limp or are falling away from the rest of the heart. Cut the hearts down the middle, length-wise, so you have two long, matching halves.

Brush each side of the romaine hearts with olive oil, then set them down on the grill, cut side down. Shake a little salt and pepper over the side that's facing you.

Cook for about 2 minutes; the edges should look a little wilty in parts and brown in others. (If your grill/pan isn't totally hot yet, this could take 3-4 minutes, but watch it closely.) Flip the hearts, sprinkle this side with a little salt and pepper, then cook till that side is brown/wilty, another 2 minutes.

That's it! The only garnish you need is a little more salt and/or pepper, if you are so inclined. The grill turns what is essentially salad into a sophisticated-tasting side dish.

You'll have to cut it with a fork and knife, but that will give you a reason to use all those steak knives you have in a drawer and rarely have a reason to use. I like to think it adds t the sophistication. Serve with whatever else you have on the grill/pan, like here with grilled tempeh on a bed of grilled onions. Grilled avocado is also a great topper, to keep with more side-salad-like ingredients.

Golden Beets

2011-05-31T23:49:00.000-04:00

I tried to get a "food in books" post up and running for you for this month, but it looks like we'll just have to double up next month, because I haven't had time. BUT sneak preview: I'll be cooking from Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and if you've read the book I bet you can guess what I'll be making. If you haven't, you're in for a (mushy) treat.

This entry is devoted to yellow food that isn't usually yellow. Namely, the Golden Beet. It may just be that I like yellow better than pink, but I personally think that golden beets taste better than their red counterparts--a little milder, so the flavor really stands out. You may remember that I used them in the Wild Rice Salad with Oranges and Roasted Beets in my last entry.

I really love them roasted, especially on salads:

Chopped small on a side salad (chickpea cutlet in the back! whoo!).

Making a nice beety halo around a wilted greens salad.

And my faaaavorite way to eat them: as raw ravioli with nut cheese!

Confession: in this picture, the beets had been roasted. But I've made this dish twice, and I swear the first time they were raw! And having bread on the side made the meal not raw anyway. The raviolis are filled with a thick almond/cashew cheese, which is watered down a little and given italian herbs to make the cream sauce. Yum!

Finally, while these aren't golden beets, they're a golden version of something else that's usually gold: carrots.

Have you ever tried yellow carrots? They taste exactly the same, but make me feel like I'm eating a different vegetable. I imagine eating purple carrots would be the same...

Appetite for Reduction

2011-05-25T08:27:00.000-04:00

At first, I was hesitant to buy Isa Moskowitz's Appetite for Reduction. I love all of her other cookbooks, but I figured a weight-loss-oriented cookbook was not going to be my thing. But then I started seeing recipes on other people's blogs, and my brother tried and loved the OMG Oven Baked Onion Rings, so finally I was won over. (Plus my wonderful mother gave it to me.) Since getting the cookbook, I've only made a handful of recipes from it, but I have really enjoyed all of them. I won't bother to link to the recipes, as they are all readily available online (including through the Amazon product page, where after reading the recipes I recommend you buy the book).

I love onion rings but don't deep fry at home, so I was excited to try the OMG Oven Baked Onion Rings (recipe here). And they are AWESOME. I use large bread crumbs, though, so I ran out... then again, I think I took more rings per onion than Isa's recipe called for. I didn't take a picture--we ate them pretty quickly.

The salad dressing recipes in Appetite for Reduction are one of its major selling points for me. I love salad dressing, and use homemade dressings almost exclusively, but I hate how much fat and oil dressing recipes call for. Appetite for Reduction's recipes use small amounts of oil and tahini for richness.

The Caesar Chavez Dressing (pictured with bread with toasted homemade "cheese" on top) was delicious. I never had "real" Caesar salad before going vegan, but I always get excited when restaurants offer vegan versions, and I'm on a quest for the perfect homemade vegan Caesar salad. I really liked this one.

While I'm hunting down the best homemade vegan Caesar dressing, the boyfriend is on an eternal quest for the perfect homemade goddess dressing. So I made him the Green Goddess Garlic Dressing, below.

Topped with some beans, veggies, and homemade croutons to round out our salad as a meal. The dressing was delicious, but didn't have quite the distinctive bitterness the boyfriend and I associate with goddess dressings. I'd make it again, though.

I also really liked the Wild Rice Salad with Oranges and Roasted Beets..

I used golden beets, and spinach instead of red-leaf lettuce, so it's not the right colors, but was just the right taste. The orange-sesame vinaigrette is fantastic.

Appetite for Reduction is a lot more than salads. In addition to the onion rings, I've made a couple of the heartier entrees, including the Chickpea Piccata. Busy Vegan Mama made it a while ago, and her picture of it made it so appetizing I had to try--I've since made it twice. It is a lot more delicious than the sum of its parts, if that makes sense. It is simple to make but tastes complex.

I am saving the best for last: the Baked Falafel was AWESOME.

I'm a big fan of falafel, but again, not of deep frying at home. Also, falafel frequently has nightshades. (This recipes does, too, but easily replaced: it calls for 1/2 tsp of paprika and 2 tsps hot sauce. Substituting black pepper for the paprika did the trick, and 1 tsp of vinegar to replace the hot sauce--the black pepper added some heat, so the vinegar was just to add pungency.) Making it at home, without frying, was a really appealing idea--and the taste makes it even more amazing. These are delicious, and I know I will make them many times again. Served above with a ranch-type salad, and bread with some nutritional yeast and oil. (Not traditional, I know, but we wanted something carb-y and we didn't have pitas.)

I'm excited to try more from this book. Have you tried anything from Appetite for Reduction? Any favorites, or recipes I should avoid?

Socca! or, an ode to the chickpea

2011-05-12T00:30:00.000-04:00

...or, here's more proof that I love anything involving chickpeas.

Chickpeas are my favorite food. Ever. Even above chocolate. If I were stuck on a desert island and could only choose one food to bring with me for the rest of my days, I would pick chickpeas. They're so delicious and versatile, whole, mashed for chickpea cutlets or chickpea salad, ground for hummus, or powdered to make chickpea flour. They're full of protein, fiber, folate, some other nutrients and did I mention deliciousness? Anyway, long story short, I recently discovered a simple chickpea recipe that I had to share.

Chickpea flour, water, oil, salt, heat. This combination of ingredients goes by different names across different cultures: socca if you're French, farinata if you're Italian, chilla if you're Indian. Whatever you call it, it is delicious. Socca (I'm half French [Canadian], so that's what we'll call it here) is a sort of chickpea flatbread, flaky and delicious, great hot or cold, as a side dish or a snack.

I first read about socca on the kitchn website, which isn't a recipe but a review of a recipe from David Lebowitz's blog. I later discovered that Mark Bittman has a simpler version in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and on his Minimalist blog. Everyone seems to have their own variations, but the end result is the same: thin, flaky, salty flatbread with only the slightest of chickpea tastes.

I have three notes about making socca:

Shortly after mixing the ingredients, you have to cover them and let them sit. Lebowitz says at least 2 hours, Mark Bittman says anywhere from 20 minutes to 12 hours; I have tried once at 2 hours and once at 30 minutes and didn't notice much of a difference. So let it sit a while if you have time, if not, at least let it sit while the oven preheats.
Speaking of ovens, most recipes say to use a broiler. Broilers get the top of the socca nice and browned, and/or with little burny spots (which are desirable, like on a flour tortilla!). I, however, burn things when I try to use the broiler. If you don't have problems using broilers, broil instead of bake, but for 5-10 minutes shorter. If you're leery of broilers but not completely broilerphobic like me, bake according to my directions, then stick it in the broiler for a couple minutes.
The easiest way to make this recipe is in a 9" cast iron skillet, but if you don't have a skillet you can stick in the oven/broiler, David Lebowitz says his French friends make it in a tart pan. I've tried it in a pie plate, too. Whatever pan you use, just make sure you have it nice and hot before you put in the oil and socca.

Socca
This recipe makes makes 3-4 large socca pancakes, which is enough to serve about 3 people as side dish or snack (or 2 if someone's obsessed with chickpeas like me), but they're so tasty you may want to double it.

1 C chickpea flour
1 C plus 2 Tbsp water
3 Tbsp olive oil, plus more for the pan
1 tsp salt
Optional: a few shakes of ground cumin (HIGHLY recommended), very thinly sliced onions, up to 1 tsp of herbs of your choice, etc.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the chickpea flour, water, 2 Tbsp of the olive oil, salt, and cumin/herbs (if using) until smooth. Cover and let sit (see note #1 above for how long).

Preheat the oven to 450, and put a 9-inch cast iron skillet in while it preheats. If you're using onions, mix them into the batter now. Once the oven is ready, take out the cast iron pan, add the remaining 1 Tbsp of oil and swish it around till the bottom of the pan is well-coated. Pour enough of the batter to coat the bottom of the pan (about half a cup, maybe a little more?), then return the whole thing to the oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the edges are dark brown and the center is starting to brown a little in spots. Remove from oven, then slide it out onto a cutting board.

Add a little oil to the pan, swirl it around, then repeat with the rest of the batter. Cut the socca into chunks (little squares are traditional), sprinkle with salt, and eat with your fingers. They are so delicious!

roasted cabbage

2011-05-05T22:52:00.000-04:00

Tired of the same old sides? Out of ideas for cabbage beyond cole slaw and sauerkraut? I have two words for you: Roasted. Cabbage.

I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. Have you noticed that almost every vegetable becomes even more delicious when you roast it? Cabbage is no exception! It gets smooth, almost buttery, and flavorful--similar in taste to well-roasted cauliflower, but with a better texture.

I got the idea from an old Kitchn post, but that recipe calls for bacon, and to blacken the cabbage. I prefer my roasted vegetables meat-free and lower on carbon. So I made a few adjustments, including garlic instead of bacon and a shorter cooking time.

Roasted Cabbage

1 head of cabbage
5-6 cloves garlic, peeled
olive oil
salt

Preheat the oven to 450. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Core the cabbage, and cut it into wedges--at least 8 wedges, more if it's a very large cabbage. (Mine was rather small, as you can see in the picture below.)

Lay the cabbage wedges flat on the baking sheet. Put the garlic between the wedges, and drizzle everything generously with olive oil. Sprinkle a bit of salt on top of each wedge.

I also tried a few drops of liquid smoke on each wedge, but it cooked off and I couldn't taste it.

Bake for 15 minutes, then remove from the oven and flip each wedge. I used a fork to do it. The edges will be a little brown by now; the idea is to get them close to burnt but not burnt! SO put them back in the oven for 5 minutes. Everything should be brown-edged and fragrant; if they look a little pale, give it another 5 minutes.

Quick, easy, delicious, and unexpected! This is an awesome side dish for almost anything. Annnnd such a quick and easy side dish means you can spend more time outside enjoying the spring weather, like I've been doing!*

*-This is why I only got around to updating 3 times in April. Oops.

Swan boats! And cherry trees. The boyfriend and I walked through the Public Garden last weekend and saw 3 weddings, 1 proposal, and 1 one-man band; a busy spring day!

lemon cake with ginger

2011-04-27T18:44:00.000-04:00

I spend more time than you would suspect on the Martha Stewart website, browsing through recipes and craft ideas. There's something so soothing about everything on that site; it makes you feel like you feel like you could do anything as long as you follow all the step-by step instructions and pretty pictures. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, one thing I noticed while looking through a cake gallery (yes, there are galleries of cakes and cupcakes. How did you think I got sucked in?) is that a bunch of layer cakes just had icing on top. Or no icing at all, just some powdered sugar or fruit. Icing is always my least favorite part of the cake, so to me, this technique is the perfect cake decoration! I find it quite elegant, and very simple.

For an example of elegance combined with deliciousness, here is a Lemon Cake with Ginger that I made on Monday.

For the cake, I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, with the lemon variation. I made a double batch so I could make layers.

The icing is a variation on basic buttercream (also from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World), using a touch of powdered ginger and ginger juice instead of vanilla extract. And the filling is something new my mother gave me:

Ginger Spread! Have you heard of this? The only ingredients are ginger and sugar. It's like a thin jelly. So far I've only used it for this cake and to put on an otherwise-savory sandwich; it's very warming and delicious. I still have half a jar; what else should I do with it?

The Confessions: Apples!

2011-04-21T21:43:00.001-04:00

In The Confessions, Rousseau sets out to record everything that has ever happened to him. He clearly states his goal in the beginning: "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself." He wants to be completely honest, though of course he can't help but be one-sided and biased (but that can be part of the fun of reading an autobiography).

There are two reasons that I think The Confessions is important: 1.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau was himself an important historical figure. His writings influenced the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution and much of Western thought since the 1700s. 2.) The Confessions is one of the first autobiographies that was written for the sake of writing. Oh, sure, autobiographies existed before Rousseau: Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Margery Kempe, and plenty of Puritans wrote autobiographical works... But those books were all written to serve religious purposes. They were religious confessions (Rousseau’s title plays off that theme), tales of conversions, material intending to convert the reader, etc. Rousseau wrote only to explain and expose himself. Soon after Rousseau's secular autobiography, plenty of authors jumped on board with the idea--but he started it. As a nonfiction reader/writer, I find it interesting to see how he navigated previously uncharted territory. If you (like Rousseau) had never encountered an autobiography, what would yours look like?

Rousseau wrote The Confessions in installments. At first he planned to publish them during his lifetime, but he ended up wanting them published posthumously (mostly because some important ladies were scandalized by how frankly he portrayed them and their affairs [among other things], and suppressed its publication to save their reputations). Rousseau and his books were already being banned across Europe for their supposedly heretical content; it was probably unlikely that The Confessions would have been a success during his lifetime anyway.

Mostly I found The Confessions dry and slow. Rousseau stops to reflect on almost everything, and is constantly feeling sorry for himself. It's too bad his presentation is so dry, because his life was super dramatic! In between the reflections on how sad he is or how unfairly Diderot treated him that one time, Rousseau did some wild things. In his teens he ran away and traveled across Europe, faked his way through teaching subjects he didn’t know, was involved in a few tense love triangles with a woman twice his age (with many women, actually), fought corrupt consulates in Italy, had five illegitimate children with his common-law wife, dealt with an evil, scheming mother-in-law, fell miserably in love with a woman half his age, was exiled from France and from Switzerland, had a whole town turn against him in the middle of the night, told Poland how to frame their constitution--and that's not even most of his adventures. The problem for me is that all the cool stuff gets lost in the minutiae of his day-to-day remembrances, which include who he visited, how often, whether or not the other guests were witty, how long his walk home was, and how his urinary tract was that day. He talks about organizing his papers and letters a lot. He goes on walks and reflects fondly on walks from the past--which he already wrote about 100 pages ago.

But at times, Rousseau is witty and interesting, and toward the end of the book he approaches a psychotic break as his paranoia about everything and everyone increases. Rousseau’s writing also shows us that small, seemingly insignificant scenes in our lives can have profound effects on the way we live, think, and perceive. For example, as a teenager he stole a piece of ribbon from his master, and blamed it on another servant. Both he and the girl he blamed it on were fired. Though he’s writing this 40 years after the incident, Rousseau still can't get over the guilt he feels for that event, and admits that he has been so ashamed of it all of his life that he never told anyone. He doesn’t think he’ll ever live down that lie. I think we all have moments like that; negative or positive, small events can influence who we are, who we become.

The food in today's entry comes from another such incident, in which Rousseau tried to steal an apple. Rousseau doesn’t feel guilty recounting this tale; he was an apprentice to a cruel, gruff, stingy engraver who beat him regularly and gave him very little. I think a lot of Rousseau's later influential ideas of equality and justice come from his early years, this harsh apprenticeship included.

The passage in which the apple appears is cute and playfully written. Rousseau, as a boy, is not allowed in the house's pantry, but there's a lattice at the top of it, through which he can see some delicious-looking apples.

Like the ones in my fruit bowl!

He climbs up on a stool and ingeniously combines several kitchen implements to reach the apples above him through the lattice. He finally spears one--only to discover it won't fit through the bars of the lattice. He gets MORE kitchen utensils to cut it in half--through the lattice!--and finally cuts it in half... only to watch both pieces fall back into the pantry, out of his reach. ("Compassionate reader," Rousseau says here, "sympathize with my affliction.") The next day, he returns with an idea of how to improve his method. He gets back up on the stool, takes his improvised tools and sticks them through the lattice--and suddenly his master jumps out from the pantry! He'd noticed the fallen pieces of apple the day before and decided to catch young Jean-Jacques in the act. Rousseau takes a beating from this, but also some ideas of justice, such as how people are likely to rebel against overly cruel masters/governments/judicial systems.

I don't have an apple-related recipe for you today, and I'm not sorry--it's finally getting nice enough out that my metabolism is happy with plenty of raw fruits and veggies. So just enjoy the pretty apples! (And a pear.)

spring is here! and so are radishes

2011-04-12T22:53:00.001-04:00

It finally feels like spring in Boston! The weather is warm, we've been seeing the sun almost every day, and trees and gardens are bursting with beautiful, fragrant flowers. My allergies have started acting up, but it is WORTH IT. This weekend, for example, the boyfriend and I just sat in the park. Without coats! I love being able to see the sun again.

Fritz loves it too! He spends quite a while each morning basking in the sun, rolling around to soak up as much as he can. The other cats like it okay, but they are not as sun-obsessed as me and Fritz.

As if the sun, flowers, and allergies weren't enough of a sign of spring's arrival, radishes have been showing up at our co-op! Until a year or two ago, I thought I didn't care about radishes. I had only ever had them sliced over salads, and they always seemed fine, but not anything to seek out or take much interest in. But at the first hint of spring they show up in the markets, and they are so cute and fresh and vibrant at a time when most of the world is gray that I cannot help but think there's something special about them!

The trick with radishes is to get them fresh; they are crisp and moist and have a delicate, peppery flavor. The older they get, the "woodier" they get--and, I JUST discovered, they get spicier as they get older, too. So try to use the freshest possible radishes for the following recipes.

First, the classic French snack: Radish and butter sandwiches!

I made a compound butter by mixing a stick of Earth Balance with a couple Tbsps of chopped tarragon, which I think of as being a very French herb; the tarragon plays off the flavor of the radishes well. Anyway, a layer of compound butter, a layer of pea shoots (also something widely available in spring), and a layer of thinly sliced radishes. For bread, you don't want something with too hearty a flavor, since you're working with delicate flavors and textures. While I normally try to eat mostly whole grains, a white bread is probably better here. (I think I used a sourdough bread above.)

The sandwich recipe works best with very fresh radishes. But if you accidentally leave your radishes in the fridge too long and they start to get a little spicy, or you're worried they might be getting old, you can always pickle them!

I got this recipe for pickled radishes here, and I love it! It's called "Bread-and-Butter Radishes," but they aren't quite as sweet as the bread-and-butter pickles you might buy to put on sandwiches. In a good way! I went a little scant on the sugar, too. The recipe is best with fresh radishes, but it is very forgiving.

The brine wasn't quite enough to cover the radishes, at least in the jar I used, so I watered it down a little, but I wish I hadn't--the brine breaks down the radishes enough that they would've fit fine after a little while.

A warning: these smell TERRIBLE. They smell like septic. You will open the jar and think something died in there, or worse. But they don't taste like that! It's just something that happens with radishes when they break down a little. (My friend Michael, who runs the dazed and infused blog, has experienced the same thing when he's done radish infusions [like the daikon-infused vodka here].) So if you go to open your pickled radishes and you think you smell a dumpster, BRAVE ON, FRIENDS. Because the radishes themselves taste amazing, and so does the brine--I've been mixing it with nutritional yeast and vegenaise for a quick, tasty salad dressing.

The pickles are good as sides for any meal, or as toppings for salads, or on top of sandwiches, like below:

This is a sweet-potato-and-bulgur veggie burger recipe I adapted from a Mark Bittman recipe. Note the delicious and pretty pink pickles! Also the honking dill pickle on the side. I kind of love pickles.

The boyfriend's burger, with hot sauce.

So those are my two favorite radish recipes, but there are a couple others I plan to try, all from Martha Stewart (I am aware this should embarrass me, but I am not ashamed):
Sauteed Radishes.
Radish butter.
Glazed Radishes.
If you try any of them first, let me know how they are!

a preponderance of parsnips

2011-03-31T21:36:00.000-04:00

As you may remember from this entry way back in 2008, I love parsnips. Parsnips, like turnips, are underappreciated and vastly underused by most people. Recently I made Susan B's (The Fat Free Vegan) Roasted Parsnip and Garlic Soup, and was surprised to see in her write-up about it that even she does not often use parsnips! People. Use more parsnips. Especially since right now we are at the end of root-vegetable season, and you're probably sick of the same old root vegetables; mix it up a little and add parsnips to your diet.

If you're a scaredy cat and don't want to try anything exotic, the simplest way to cook them is to slice 2-4 parsnips thinly, then saute with 1-2 tablespoons of margarine (or olive oil and salt, if you prefer) until soft and lightly browned, like so:

They are also delicious roasted, and, if you're not sure you'll like the flavor, blended into delicious soups! The Roasted Parsnip and Garlic Soup I linked to above was divine, even without any mushrooms (I didn't have any at the time). Another favorite of mine is the Gluttonous Vegan's Spiced Parsnip and Coconut Milk Soup, which I wrote about in this August entry.

This soup is absolutely delicious. AND if you have any leftovers, it makes a great sauce in which to marinate and then bake slabs of tofu!

Pictured here with my beloved dduk.

A new delicious thing I discovered that you can make with parsnips is the Beet and Parsnip Salad from the Veganomicon. (A badly-spelled version of it is online here.) It's in the back here, pictured with open-faced tofu sandwiches with a pink "cream" sauce that gets its color from extra vinaigrette from the salad.

It has a VERY generous amount of vinaigrette, which I ended up reserving for other things even after the salad was gone. For example, I used it for the pink "cream" sauce above. AND THEN I decided to use it as a tofu marinade for a stir-fry:

I sauteed the tofu and some vegetables, then combined the leftover vinaigrette/marinade with some soy sauce and cornstarch to be the sauce for my stir fry.

I present to you the pinkest stir-fry you've ever seen.

While we wait for spring (I don't care what the calendar says; it's snowing as I write this, so it's not "spring" yet in my book), try to make the most of what's left of the winter produce, and enjoy yourself some parsnips!

The Way of All Flesh: Pretzel Rolls

2011-03-24T20:40:00.000-04:00

Having previously published some essays and the then-popular Erewhon, Butler was already an established author when he began to write The Way of All Flesh in the 1870s. The book spans four generations of the men in the Pontifex family, and is semi-autobiographical; the Pontifexes are basically the Butlers. It was for this reason that Butler did not want publish until after his death; he knew that his frank and brutal depictions of the Pontifex family, with their faults, foibles, and petty piousness would reflect badly on the family members who survived him. (The book was published posthumously in 1903.)

There are few Pontifexes who escape the narrative unscathed--not just by the narrative, but by their surroundings. The Way of All Flesh is a harsh invective against Victorian society and morality, showing the hypocrisy and cruelty in the supposedly refined, well-mannered middle class, and it shows us all of this through its characters. The earliest Pontifex, “Old Mr. Pontifex,” is a poor but happy renaissance man, content with his simple life. It is the advancement into the Victorian era and into enough money to make them middle class that turns the Pontifex family sour. Each generation takes out its unhappiness on the next, in a vicious cycle of cruelty and repression. Butler attacks middle-class Victorian family structures and religious beliefs and shows that the only way to free oneself from this cycle is by completely cutting off communication with those who participate in it. The book has a bit of a happy ending, but none of it is especially cheerful.

Guys, I have to confess: I did not make the food item I'll be talking about in relation to the book this week; I bought it. But reading about the cold, gray world of Victorian England and living in the cold, gray early spring of Boston was seriously making me miss warmth. And sun. And flowers. And farmer’s markets. And the food I present to you is my favorite non-plant item to get at the summer farmer’s market: PRETZEL ROLLS!

Pictured here with a tofu stir fry, which is topped with micro greens from my container garden—and garnished with a nasturtium from said garden! I took this picture last summer. I miss plants. And I miss these rolls! They are made fresh daily at a Swiss bakery in Reading, MA called, appropriately enough, swissbakers. They come out to Boston-area farmers markets and sell their breads… which include pretzel rolls, pretzel baguettes, and of course, pretzels.

I know I’m going to have trouble conveying the amazingness that is swissbakers' Pretzel Rolls. My guess is that to make them, you make dough as if you are making pretzels, but instead of making pretzels... you make rolls. Delicious, pretty little rolls. The process may be basic (I mean, "basic" for people who make pretzels. I’m a klutz and am always a little worried about any process that involves dropping things into a large pot of boiling water, so it doesn’t sound too basic to me), but the result is AMAZING. The crust is shiny, smooth, and a little salty. The inside dough is soft and fluffy. And amazing.

Okay, sorry, I was depressing myself so much with the description of The Way of All Flesh that I stopped talking about it before I could mention how the rolls relate. One of the few joys young Ernest experiences at the boarding school to which his parents send him is sneaking with other boys to buy hot rolls from Mrs. Cross, a shopkeeper who likes providing food to the boys. Unfortunately, since they’re on tight budgets, the boys often buy the rolls on credit. Over Ernest's winter holiday, his parents find out about this "terrible" behavior (the sneaking and the debts, which, mind you, the boys pay off), they promptly notify the headmaster, and the boys are all cut off from any more hot rolls. Poor kids! I feel like them, cut off, for the winter, from delicious rolls...

Have any of you ever made a form of pretzel bread? How did it go?

Are you missing warm weather as much as I am? I'll close with a picture of marigolds from my garden last year. I'm thinking of doing marigolds again, but I'm not sure--maybe I'll stick with mostly herbs instead...?

Vegan Eating in Boston

2011-03-12T17:20:00.001-05:00

I love the idea of going out to eat. It is such a treat to have a meal I didn't make myself, and I'm always intrigued to see what dishes professionals come up with. I don’t even think eating out while vegan is all that difficult, especially not in Boston. But the nightshade allergies make going out to restaurants really tricky; if it isn’t a vegan restaurant, non-vegan chefs and servers are dumbfounded by all my limitations (much more so than if I were "just" vegan) and at vegan restaurants, sauces, spice mixes, egg replacers, and fake meats/cheeses are still problematic. I’m always anxious about accidentally being poisoned because I wasn’t clear enough or because the server forgot to show my list to the cook or because the cook forgot that paprika comes from red peppers.

BUT because I like going out to eat in theory, and because the boyfriend likes it both in theory and in practice, we go out at least a couple times a month. I have two entries devoted to vegan, nightshade-free dining in NYC, but none for Boston, so I think it’s about time to do justice to my fair city.

There are plenty of great Asian, Ethiopian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian places in Boston that are great for vegans, and this list contains almost none of them; it’s just some personal highlights and lowlights. Each category is in approximate order of my favorite to least favorite.

All Vegan:

True Bistro--Tasty upscale vegan food, and they offer vegan cocktails and wine pairings. While there aren’t a lot of nightshade free options, they do have some, and the waitstaff has been really helpful when it comes figuring out what I could have. Dinners are quite pricy, but they charge average prices for lunch and brunch. (Website here.)
Pulse Cafe--Medium-range pricing for hearty, home-style food. The Pulse Café sources as many organic ingredients as possible. They used to change their menu every couple of weeks, but they’ve settled into a diner-style menu that’s been up for about 3 months now. The boyfriend and I considered this "our place" for a while--we were there when they first opened in their old location, there when they first opened in this new location, and for a while there we went almost once a week. But the new diner menu doesn’t have very many nightshade-free options. They used to be really accommodating with their old menus; they would customize almost everything--for example, they were able to make the nachos nightshade free and awesome. With their new menu, a lot of the ingredients are prepared in advance, and most of them have nightshades. Nightshade-free eaters are pretty much reduced to salad and grilled cheese, and there’s only so many times a person can eat a huge chunk of Daiya before her intestines start to hate her (TMI?). I like supporting this place, but we’re taking a break until the menu changes. If you can eat nightshades and like comfort food, it’s great. (Website here)
My Thai--Vegan Thai food in Chinatown. It’s okay. Their fake meats are apparently good, but I'm too wary of fake meats' ingredients to try--so much processing has to mean nightshades somewhere, right? They have some good basics, and I especially like the appetizers. The food is greasy, but the portions are large and the prices are low. Also, the desserts are AMAZING. (They may use powdered egg replacer, which is not nightshade free; I never asked and never had a reaction, but I haven't eaten any desserts there since a couple years ago, when I had a slightly higher tolerance.) (Menu here.)
Peace o' Pie--Boston’s best vegan pizza. If you can eat nightshades, I recommend Peace o' Pie. If you can't eat nightshades, they do have a white pizza, and they do allow you to build your own pizzas and calzones, but most of their yummier-sounding toppings have nightshades, and it would be cheaper to make a white veggie pizza at home. I also had a problem once with contamination; even though I made it very clear that I am allergic to tomatoes, they used a tomato-sauce-covered pizza cutter to cut my white pizza... which meant every piece had tomato sauce on the edges. (Website here.)
Grasshopper--Greasy vegan Chinese food. It's cheap, and the portions are enormous. They have some delicious signature dishes, but unfortunately most of them feature their sweet and sour sauce, which is not nightshade free. Nightshade free eaters are limited to simpler entrees, which are mostly stir-fried vegetables, so it's not that exciting a destination for me. Their appetizers are greasy, delicious, and mostly nightshade free, though. (Website here.)

Vegetarian:

Life Alive--Healthy, mostly macrobiotic salads, bowls, wraps, and smoothies. I find them a little pricy for their portions, but the food is always good, and GOOD NEWS: because they keep things macrobiotic, there are (almost) no nightshades! The only nightshades in the whole place are sun-dried tomatoes, which are in one dish, clearly labeled, and a jar of hot sauce on the condiment stand. I feel very safe here. Website here.
Veggie Planet--Flatbread pizzas, tasty salads, good brunch options. Everything on the menu can be made vegan. The food is good and the prices are reasonable, but it's really hard for someone with food allergies; they have a tiny kitchen and cross-contamination seems almost unavoidable. I've had tiny chunks of tomato in dishes that aren’t even supposed to contain tomato, drizzles of sauce on the edge of my plate from where they were putting sauce on someone else's plate, etc. If you can eat nightshades, it is a great place for lunch; if you can't, proceed with caution. (Website here.)
Red Lentil--I have heard good things about this place, but the two times I went were bad, so I don't like it. If you are nightshade free, you are going to have some problems. The first time we went was a couple weeks after they opened, and our server recommended a seitan appetizer that, while delicious, turned out not to be nightshade free (I only found this out later, when I had a reaction to it). At the time there was nothing nightshade free there but salad, but the server said I could customize one of the entrees. So I did that; when my entree came out, it had red pepper sauce on it. The server took it back to have another one made for me. The second one came back with tomato sauce on it, but I couldn’t return it because our server never returned. She was there, in the restaurant, but she ignored us. We sat for an hour, me unable to eat my entree, with a stomachache that I thought was from nerves but turned out to be from the appetizer, until we finally flagged another waitress to bring us the check. It was a disaster. We figured it was just bad luck, so we tried again a couple months later. I called ahead of time and spoke to the chef, who said he’d make something special for me. He made vegan nightshade-free quesadillas and grilled some vegetables for me for dinner, which was fine but not exciting. Later that night both the boyfriend and I had terrible, awful stomachaches. And the boyfriend doesn't even have weird food allergies! I am never going back. (Website here.)

Omni restaurants with good vegan options:

Genki Ya--Organic sushi! They have some of the most interesting veggie rolls I’ve ever seen, including a tasty "fruit roll:" banana, mango, avocado. Some of their veggie rolls have cream cheese, but I assure you they are all still incredibly tasty if you ask to leave the cream cheese out. You can sub in brown or multi-grain rice on any roll. Omnivore friends we've brought here say that the non-veggie sushi is good, too, so this is a good place to go if you’re eating with one of those people who can't have a fleshless meal. (Website here.)
Elephant Walk--Upscale Cambodian/French cuisine. They have a very limited number of vegan options, and the nightshade-free options are even more limited (you're pretty much stuck with the lemongrass tofu entree), but the food is so good it doesn’t really matter. (Website here.)
The Middle East--A great music venue, an okay restaurant, and a cruddy bar, wrapped up in one. All the vegetarian options here are vegan. (Some have a side of yogurt, which you can request to leave off or replace with tahini sauce.) Their whipped garlic is seriously addicting; it's so good you won’t mind having the longest-lasting garlic breath of your life. Also, I have two words for you: vegan baklava. (Website here.
Koreana--Good Korean food. Specify that you don't eat fish, because some of the condiments can have fish flakes. The Tofu Bi Bim Bop here is great, and the ginger-persimmon-cinnamon tea that they give you at the end of each meal is THE BEST. (Website here.)
Chinatown--Okay, so "Chinatown" isn't unto itself a restaurant, but Boston’s Chinatown has a fantastic selection of surprisingly vegan-friendly places. The only caveat is that at basically every place you have to let them know before you order or while you're ordering that you’re vegetarian and don't eat fish. There’s a fantastic shabu place called Shabu-Zen, where they only have one veggie plate but it’s humungous and they will make any of their broths vegan if you specify no fish broth, a Korean place called Suishaya that has great food and service, a couple good Vietnamese places, and I hear there's a sandwich shop on Washington that offers vegan banh mi. Also My Thai, which I mentioned above, is here.
The Other Side--Decent prices, decent food, loud music, hipster crowd. Everyone there knows what "vegan" is. The boyfriend and I like to head down there for brunch on summer weekends, because our place is too hot to cook and they have nice outdoor seating. You can get $50 in gift cards for this place for only $25 through the Weekly Dig's Dig Deals. (Website here.)
Moody's Falafel Palace-- Moody's is open until 3am on weekends and has the best falafel sandwich I've ever had. They also have hummus and a platter of middle-easterny things, but a lot of those things aren’t nightshade free. The men who work there are awesome; super efficient when it's really busy, and apt to joke around with you if there's no one there. Once the boyfriend and I went on a slow afternoon and they gave us extra falafel because they liked us. Nightshade-free people: you have to specify no tomatoes, and I think they change up the recipe sometimes, because once in a while I have a reaction to the falafel. But it’s maaaaybe 1/3 times I go, and I love the falafel so much and we go so rarely that for me it’s worth the risk. (Website here.)
Dado Tea--Vegan Bubble Tea! Everyone always praises My Thai's bubble tea, but that kind is blended flavor powder, coconut milk, and ice, so it's really rich and thick and cloying. At Dado, almost all of their bubble tea flavors are from house-made ice tea, not from powders (except their cucumber and taro teas), and you can opt for straight bubble tea or bubble tea with soymilk. I also like that you can specify not to add sugar. I’ve never actually eaten here, but they have some pre-made vegan salads and sandwiches behind the counter; I don’t know if they’re nightshade free. (Website here.)
Picco--"PICCO" stands for "Pizza and Ice Cream CO." It does not SOUND like it would be vegan-friendly, I know, but you can build your own pizzas or calzones, and they have high-quality ingredients. If you get roasted garlic, for example, it is mashed up to a creamy cheese-like texture that works well inside calzones. Their homemade sorbets are all vegan, including the dark chocolate sorbet, which is the best ice cream I have had since going vegan. A warning for nightshade free people: they use one big oven for their baking, so cross-contamination can happen. For example, I once found some tomato sauce baked onto the bottom of my calzone. I scraped it off and it was fine, but be warned. (Website here.)
Cafe Pamplona--This place looks like a cramped hole in the wall, but has fantastic coffee and teas, always has soymilk as an option, and has vegan-friendly sandwiches, entrees and snacks. It's Spanish food, though, which means none of it is nightshade free. Still, the iced soy lattes alone are worth going for. (Wikipedia page here.)
The Friendly Toast-- All-day brunch, with kitschy thrift-store figurines and paintings everywhere. I wanted to like this place, but the vegan options are limited to tofu scramble and bagels (none of their famous homemade bread is vegan), both of which are pretty lackluster. Also, when we went there, I told my server that I am allergic to potatoes, so please leave off the hash browns (they are a standard side). When my plate came, a couple bites into my meal I discovered that someone had originally put hash browns on my plate and scraped them off, then tried to cover up the tiny leftover pieces of potato with the tofu. Which meant my entire tofu scrambled was touching potato scrapings. Poisoned! That’s enough to stop me from going back, but the food also wasn’t worth giving them a second chance. (Website here.)

Just Outside of Boston:

Julian's--(Providence, RI). We’ve been here twice for brunch, but they have a bunch of different vegan brunch options, and appear to be vegan-friendly for all other meals. Prices were decent, food was tasty, and our servers have been really nice about talking with the kitchen to figure out what I can't have. (Website here.)
Rawbert's Organic Garden--(Beverly, MA). Not 100% raw, as they also serve hot soups, teas, and hot cocoa/carob (I am an avowed chocolate lover, but their hot carob is so good!). They do raw comfort food really well; their "pasta" dishes and sprouted pizzas are great. It's a little expensive, but you will leave totally stuffed. Go with a group so you can try everyone's food. I've been three times and found them really allergy-aware and attentive/nice about finding things you can eat if you have weird allergies. (Website here.)
Garden Grille--(Pawtucket, RI). This is the boyfriend's favorite restaurant; he’s been going there since it was a hippy juice bar like ten years ago. It's vegetarian, mid-to-high-priced food, and it's pretty good quality. This is one of the few restaurants where I actually like ordering salads; they do a great job with them. There are one or two dinner/lunch entrees that are nightshade-free at any given time (I recommend the Buddha Bowl), but if you can't eat nightshades, you’re out of luck for brunch. The desserts are fantastic. They use egg replacer in some of them, so be sure to ask. (Website here.)
Wildflour Bakery--(Pawtucket, RI). All vegan bakery. When I went, the workers there knew that some of the products contained egg replacer (nightshades), but didn’t know which ones. It always bothers me when employees at an eatery don’t know the ingredients in their products. They did know that the raw foods were safe, so I ended up with a raw chocolate tart that was FANTASTIC. They have large cases full of tasty-looking baked goods. (Website here.)

you deserve a cookie

2011-03-05T14:24:00.001-05:00

I make cookies almost every week. I don't like making them as much as I like making cakes and cupcakes, because I find scooping cookie-sized amounts onto baking sheets more tedious, and also I find that the line between underdone/perfect/slightly burned cookies is basically nonexistent; for me, it's mostly luck. But cookies are the best thing when you've got guests coming or a party to go to or officemates to make happy and you want to make a lot of something quickly. And they're tasty, of course. However I feel about making them, I very much like eating cookies. I don't photograph them much, though, as cookies tend not to be super photogenic. They're basically all little brown and/or beige disks; my cookie pictures all sort of resemble one another, and never convey the tasty cookie experience. That's why while I make them often, I seldom display them here.

I recently noticed that "You [I/We] deserve a cookie" is a thing. A meme, if you will. Lots of people say it, and I don't think we can name any one particular source. It's an interesting meme--it's not flashy, it doesn't appear accompanied by cats or videos or songs; it's just something people say. Unlike some internet humor, it's not poking fun--it's nice. It's universally understandable; no mystery, no wondering if something went over your head: you did a good job, you deserve a cookie.

Well, guys, today I deserve a cookie. Yesterday I sent in my final payment on my student loans. Less than a year out of grad school, I am done paying student loans!!! There is no number of exclamation points that can convey how happy I am about this. So I present you with some cookies.

First, the prettiest cookie picture I have ever taken (due entirely to the light, not to my photography or baking skills):

Ginger Molasses Cookies with Lemon Icing and Basic Peanut Butter Cookies. I am not sure where I got these recipes, as the picture was taken before I owned Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, but that cookbook has recipes for both kinds of cookie. Anyway, these particular molasses cookies were a not sweet enough; hence the icing.

Martha Stewart's Hazelnut Cookies. I found a recipe for hazelnut cookies on Martha Stewart's website. (I think. Sometimes I just find recipes online, make them once, then I don't love them and don't intend to make them again, I don't save the link.) They are shortbready, so the only veganizing that needed to be done was substituting earth balance for butter.

These too were not as sweet as I'd anticipated, so I covered them with chocolate, and they became "nutella cookies," which my coworkers gobbled up quickly.

A BETTER hazelnut cookie was the recipe I made out of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I liked the sound of the Hazelnut Fudge Dreamies, but I'm lazy and didn't want to turn them into cookie sandwiches. (Nor, I think, did I have all the fudge ingredients on hand.) So instead I made them like normal cookies, then dipped them into melted chocolate.

I think they're cute this way! And less work.

I usually cut down frosting/ganache recipes in order to avoid having leftoves, but if you find yourself with some extra ganache, chilling then rolling it with various ingredients and shaping them into truffles always feels/looks impressive:

Left to right: Plain, orange zest, coconut, peanut butter, and coconut-orange truffles.

Also chocolaty: These are chocolate-chocolate chip cookies! The recipe is possibly from the Veganomicon but sans walnuts, I dunno.

They're blurry because I REALLY wanted to show you the ones on the left; I used up all my baking sheets while I was making these, so I put a few of the cookies into a little shell cake mold I have. They were so cute! But blurry.

Back to Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I've already admitted my predilection for citrusy baked goods, so it's probably not surprising that I loved the Citrus Glitters!

I added a little turmeric to the sugar I rolled it in, for extra lemony color.

If you don't own Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, I strongly recommend it. I find that veganizing non-vegan cookie recipes can be really tricky, and requires a lot of troubleshooting. The cookies in this book range from basic, which you can adapt to fit your own cookie needs, to complex and cool. And there are some great veganizations of cookies you probably missed since going vegan. (Like the Girl Scouts' Caramel Delites! [Samoas for you non upstate-NYers]) Like I said, I don't tend to take pictures of cookies, but I've made a lot from this cookbook. Here's a list of what I made and what I thought. You can find most of these recipes transcribed from the book on other people's blogs just by searching, but I'm too busy celebrating my newfound financial freedom to dig them all up myself.

Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies-These taste amazing and are the easiest and quickest recipe I've tried from the book.
Chocolaty Crinkle Cookies-These are my fallback cookies for when I'm baking for other people. Everyone loves them, and they take a lot less work than they look/taste. The dough is a lot more like a batter at first; I find that I have to chill it, in the fridge for 30mins or more, or in the freezer for 10-15, to make it a good texture for rolling.
City Girl Snickerdoodles-Uses a lot of margarine. Taste amazing.
Tahini Lime Cookies-An interesting tasting cookie. They have a complex flavor that is hard to identify if you don't already know what kind of cookie they are. They make you seem like a foodie.
Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies, Peanut Butter Crisscrosses, Peanut Butter Agave Cookies, Peanut Butter Blondies-I'm grouping all the peanut butter cookies together, because I'm not a huge peanut butter cookie fan and I am therefore not the best judge of them. But I made them all, mostly for other people. All kinds were well received! The blondies were really dense, almost more like peanut butter fudge, but a little drier. I love that the cookbook has an option for agave-based peanut butter cookies, since they are hard to adapt on your own.
Citrus Glitters-Picture above. Simple and sweet!
Rocky Roads-When I had stale vegan marshmallows in my fridge, I chopped them up to use in this recipe in place of white chocolate chips. I've made this recipe quite a few times, but I have very little self control and ended up eating a lot more cookies than necessary, so we are on a break.
Sweet Wine Biscuits with Sesame-Another foodie cookie. I wrote about them here.
Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Brownies-I dropped the pan when I was taking these out of the oven, so they never set right, but they still tasted great.
Pumpkin Pie Brownies-Tasty, and so cool-looking! I wrote about them in this entry.
Big Fat Crispy Rice Squares-Rice crispy treats, but without the need for marshmallows. I wrote about them here.
Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows-These were tasty and it was cool to have a cookie with a surprise inside, but I didn’t think they were quite worth the work.
Lazy Samoas-THE REASON TO BUY THIS BOOK. I missed Caramel Delites/Samoas SO MUCH, and though these are quite a few steps, the taste is spot-on and so amazingly good. I made them into heart shapes for Valentine's day for the boyfriend last year, and I think I managed to eat more of them than he did. (Oops.)
Hazelnut Fudge Dreamies-I wrote about these above. Tasty and can be made simpler if you're lazy.
No-Bake Pecan Chocolates-Really decadent, really delicious.
Cookie Dough Scoops-I dipped these in chocolate after I made them. Best. Idea. Ever.

Wide Sargasso Sea: hot chocolate on a stick

2011-02-18T17:58:00.007-05:00

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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When I was in the seventh grade (that's around age 12-13, for you non-US readers), a friend of mine and I read Jane Eyre around the same time. She enjoyed some of it; I disliked it. But we could agree on one thing: the super-dramatic, gothic twist to Rochester's life story--the fact that he had locked away a crazy pyromaniac wife named Bertha who liked to creep around the house at night--that was awesome. We both wished Bronte had given more attention to Bertha. Bertha was the most--strike that, the ONLY interesting character in the book, and there was only one good passage that actually described her.

That friend and I grew apart, but a couple years later she told me she'd read a book called Wide Sargasso Sea, which was the story Bertha's life before Rochester. She (my friend) recommended it; she’d found it depressing, but good, and really liked revisiting the story of that character we had obsessed and laughed over as preteens. I never got around to it, and since I'm perverse in my book selection, the more I heard the novel praised over time, the more I figured I wouldn't like it. After all, everyone praises Jane Eyre, and even after all the time I spent studying literature in college and grad school, I still don't like that--why would I like its prequel?

But then I found a falling-apart copy of the book in a "free" pile on my street. I thought, "okay, it's a small book, and I don't have to pay for it, so it will be neither a waste of time nor money." I read it.

Guys. I hated it.

Author Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, more than 100 years after Jane Eyre. Its main character is Antoinette, a young white girl living in Jamaica with her mother and disabled little brother. Racial tensions are high: Antoinette's family is too poor to fit in with the other white people, who are all wealthy, and the badly-treated black people in Jamaica neither trust nor like any of the whites, so Antoinette and her family become increasingly poor, ashamed, isolated, and helpless. The mother, who's already a little crazy, goes crazier when rebelling former slaves light her house on fire and the little brother dies; Antoinette's stepfather has the mother committed and sends Antoinette to a convent. Fast forward to when Antoinette is old enough to marry; Antoinette's stepfamily basically bribes a young British guy to marry her. They love each other intensely for about a week, when Rochester (her husband) realizes they don't know, trust, or like each other. So he starts to hate Antoinette, who in turn starts to hate him, then she basically goes a little crazy because her life is so terrible and losing the one person she (thinks she) loves is the last straw. Rochester takes her back to England, where we get a creepy little epilogue telling us how/why she's so creepy in Jane Eyre.

Sorry, I'm being flip because of how much I disliked the book. The book does hint at the racial, sexual, mental-health and economic issues at play in 1830s Jamaica, but really, it only hints at these things. Mostly the book doesn't cover anything in depth except all of the ways in which Antoinette's life sucks.

When I taught first-year composition classes during my MA program, I would deal with particularly difficult-to-read student essays by playing what pedagogical theorist Peter Elbow calls "the believing game." That is, read the paper with the assumption that the author knows what s/he is doing, and s/he did the things I don't like on purpose, to prove a point or to somehow further his/her argument. So here's me trying to play the believing game with Wide Sargasso Sea: Rhys is attempting to give dignity to a stock character not only in Jane Eyre but in gothic fiction. She turns Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the dark, crazy wife in the attic, into Antoinette, a shy, reflective, friendless, troubled young woman limited by resources and societal conventions. While she does become the crazy wife in the attic, she gets there because the role of a woman in 1830s Jamaica and Britain do not allow her enough of a chance to express herself or her desires.

A decent attempt, but I don’t think Rhys developed those themes enough for me; the novel didn’t seem to make Antoinette’s life story “the plight of woman” but “the plight of one really, really unlucky person.” And why does it have to connect to Jane Eyre? Rhys’s Antoinette does not have to be Bronte’s Bertha; in fact, I think Rhys trying to tie the two tales together is what bothered me the most. A few details in Wide Sargasso Sea contradict points of Jane Eyre. The name "Antoinette" alone! I get using her middle name, because not many people nowadays would take a main-character "Bertha" seriously, but still, in Jane Eyre, the middle name is Antoinetta. Rhys also changed Mason from Bertha's family name to her step-family name, and changed the way in which Rochester met/married his wife, making his story a lie in Jane Eyre. In fact, Wide Sargasso Sea makes Rochester out to be a bitter, mean, greedy alcoholic. While I didn't like Jane Eyre enough to defend Rochester's character too much, Rhys is basically retconning him to be a big, bad liar, casting his role in Jane Eyre as one that is much more manipulative and sinister, and it doesn’t work for me. Why couldn't Rhys have written a feminist novel about white women's limited roles in 19th-century Jamaica using characters who didn't already exist in someone else's story? By the time I got to the final part of the book, set during the action of Jane Eyre, it felt like I was reading messily-researched fan fiction. It's like if 100 years from now, some fan of Twilight deciding to write a prequel about the life story of that red-headed female vampire who keeps trying to kill Bella, only with a few details changed because THAT WAY IT'S EVEN SADDER AND HAS MORE LOVE STORY IN IT. It felt like writing from a fan-girl who felt like she had SO MUCH TO CONTRIBUTE.

But back to “the believing game.” Maybe part of my annoyance of it is that the novel is set in Jamaica and I'm in the Northeast during a harsh winter! There were good parts to the book. Like... the hot chocolate! Actually, nope, even the parts with the hot chocolate were depressing, because Antoinette drinks it at her mother's funeral and then right before she finds out she's supposed to marry a man she doesn't know. But the people around her know that to comfort her, a mug of hot chocolate was the way to go.

So! If a friend of yours is depressed, whether it's because of the never-ending winter or because s/he is engaged to a stranger who might eventually lock him/her in an attic, consider giving him/her hot chocolate! It's a warming and delicious way to show you care, and that you are not likely to lock him/her in an attic yourself, because people who do that only drink rum.

What is this, you ask? This is, in my opinion, the coolest way to give someone hot chocolate: on a stick!

I saw the recipe for Hot Chocolate on a Stick on the Giver's Log website, and thought it was a great homemade gift idea. (As you know from my post-holiday entry, I love edible gift-giving.) None of those namby-pamby dry mixes; this stuff is real chocolate, gently melted and mixed with cocoa powder and powdered sugar to create the perfect thing to stir into a warm glass of soymilk. I actually imagine it would work okay in water, too, but I haven't tried it. Anyway, you can see the recipe at that Giver's Log link; I didn't change anything. I do want to say that I don't find chocolate as finicky as that author does, so don’t be intimidated by her very detailed instructions. I used half baking chocolate and half chocolate chips for my meltable chocolate, and I used these cute silicone ice cube trays from IKEA as molds:

My sticks are not as pretty as the ones at the Giver's Log; I used some coffee stirrers from a cafe, a few wooden chopsticks, and a couple plastic spoons. Once the chocolate hardened, the silicone made it really easy to remove from the mold, but I imagine a basic ice cube tray would also be pretty easy. If it gives you some trouble, simply dip the base in a bowl of warm water, which should soften (but not melt) the chocolate enough to get it out.

The advantage to the cross shape, in my opinion, is that it dissolves faster, but also that you can do cute things with them, like line them up or hunch them together.

As you can maybe tell from how much one little book annoyed me, the long, cold, snowy, icy winter is beginning to get to me. At Desdemona’s recommendation, I started taking vitamin D during these darker months to stave off SAD, but of course I still miss the sun. So while I'm waiting for warmer weather, I'll keep consuming copious amounts of chocolate, drinkable and otherwise--and I'll read some better books. Those of you who read Wide Sargasso Sea and enjoyed it, what am I missing? Those of you who liked Jane Eyre, what makes you prefer that novel to, say, something from Dickens?

Before I go, I wanted to share with you one denizen of the Boston/Cambridge area who doesn't care what time of year it is: our lime tree!

It flowered this winter! I actually took these picture a couple weeks ago; in place of the flowers, it has now started to grow a little lime. It did this once before, back when I first met the boyfriend, and we’re psyched that it's doing it again.

I'm a little worried the cats might be psyched about it, too.

food from around the world (ie, internet)

2011-02-10T21:28:00.000-05:00

I eat my lunch at my desk at work. Everyone does on my team, but even at my last job, when people would eat their lunches in the little kitchen area, I preferred to eat at my desk. When I eat my lunch, I take a little "break" by reading blogs; mostly food blogs, some design blogs. My lunchtime blog cruising has led to a stockpile or recipes I've built up; vegan ones I want to try, non-vegan ones I want to veganize, etc. Often the recipes I read about during lunch become the recipes I make for dinner.

As with the following recipes! All came from various food blogs, with the exception of the cabbage and the cheesecake, which came from recipe sites. But all came from my lunchtime internet cruising.

For the record, if you like the kinds of recipes I link to here, and if you like what's on my blog in general, you should check out my links page, which I update with my favorite blogs/websites more often than I update my blogroll to the right.
First, Okonomiyaki, large savory Japanese pancakes! Trina of Your Vegan Mom posted a recipe for okonomiyaki and some tasty sauce to put on them, and it looked so delicious (and I love Japanese food so much) I had to try it all.

Because Trina recommended okonomiyaki as a snack, I figured they might be too light for a meal, so I served them with miso soup and roasted squash. Turns out they aren’t too light; even just having one each along with the sides, the boyfriend and I were overstuffed when we finished. But in a good way.

For the record, this recipe is pretty darn foolproof. Not only did I cut my vegetables much larger than I was apparently supposed to, but I’m also one of those people who always burns the first pancake to a crisp when making breakfast—and look! My first attempt was a little brown but looked totally passable.

You can see Trina’s "inauthentic" but addicting sauce in the background. I had to put a cover on it because I was “taste testing” it entirely too much while making the okonomiyaki.

In a similar vein, a couple months ago, I tried the Korean version of okonomiyaki: Savory Tofu Pancakes from Alien’s Day Out. I had to add a couple tablespoons of water to the recipe to get the batter into a workable texture, but I may have just drained my tofu more thoroughly beforehand.

We had them with some seaweed salad and stir-fried rice noodles.

They packed up adorably for lunch the next day, too; they would make for perfect bento lunches.

For those more in favor of continental cuisine, I’ve also been crushing on the "Mastering the Art of French Cooking: the Vegan Version" blog, where Affectioknit is veganizing Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking recipe by recipe. She has some ingenious versions of some very not-vegan food. The boyfriend really likes her omelette recipe and has made it for me twice. The results are tasty. The first time he tried it, he overcooked the first omelette a little, so it’s browner than intended, but I’m posting the picture because it really gives you an idea of how eggy the finished version can look:

After the first omelette, he hit his stride. Here’s mine with fillings (note that I’d already started eating it. I have very little willpower):

Omelette filled with pesto and mixed veggies. Oh and in related non-egg news, I just bought some black salt! Normally when recipes call for it, I improvise by adding a touch of asafetida, which does lend a light sulphury (and therefore eggy) flavor to things, but I’m looking forward to trying the black salt.

What’s that to the left of my omelette, you ask? Why, it is a PANCAKE BAR.

Pancake bars are like granola bars, but made out of pancakes. I encountered the idea for pancake bars on the Kitchn website, where in turn they’d adapted it from a Martha Stewart recipe. I didn’t actually follow that recipe, but I did steal the idea. I made a double batch of “perfect pancakes” from Vegan with a Vengeance. I doubled because the recipe on that site calls for almost twice the amount of flour, so I figured I was making the amount of batter about even this way. I didn’t want to make apple ones, so I opted for cranberries; I added a cup of dried cranberries to the batter. You can't opt out of the streusel, though! If you want to eat these pancake bars on the go, or serve them at a large gathering, you can’t top them with maple syrup; this gives them a sweet topping without the mess. I ended up pouring my batter into a 9x13 baking pan AND into a loaf pan, because the total amount of vegan batter was a little more than the called-for non-vegan batter. Maybe that was still too much, as my baking time was also 10-15 minutes longer than the Kitchn website recommends. Anyway, for a single batch of VwaV pancakes, maybe try a 7x11 pan, or a 9x13 but shorten the baking time a little.

Not only are pancake bars novel and cool, but they’re also tasty and practical. I made them for a large brunch the boyfriend and I hosted, because I wanted to have pancakes but couldn’t serve normal ones because 1.) I hate standing over the stove forever making pancakes, 2.) I didn’t have time to do so with all of the other things I was busy making, and 3.) I didn’t want to have to worry about keeping pancakes warm on our buffet table. They were a giant hit.

Another interesting recipe I found on the Kitchn was for "butter dip biscuits." You know how it can be annoying to make biscuits because you have to cut in all the butter/fat? Not so with these; you melt the butter in your baking pan first, then make a butter-free dough, cut it into strips, and lay them in the butter. As they cook, they soak up the butter. It’s a very straightforward recipe to make and to veganize; substitute butter with earth balance or other vegan margarine, and the liquid milk with water or nondairy milk. They’re cute, and they taste pretty much like normal biscuits. The bottoms were a little too firm, but maybe I overcooked them a bit? The boyfriend called them "biscuit cookies" because he thought they were closer to cookie texture.

I served them as part of a tasty German meal; I made the Veganomicon beanballs with seasonings that were more German than Italian (onions, garlic, caraway seed), and included some sweet-and-sour red cabbage over pasta.

Not to be too dramatic, but I have had a lot of cabbage in my time, and guys, THIS WAS THE BEST CABBAGE RECIPE I HAVE EVER HAD. It’s incredibly simple; the recipe calls only for butter, cabbage, sugar, and balsamic vinegar (with salt and pepper to taste). but the flavors work beautifully together.

The last picture I have for you is of a recipe I made a while ago (I think last summer?), but it’s really relevant right now, since it would be a fantastic Valentine’s Day recipe:

Individual Raw Strawberry Cheesecakes from this recipe at the PPK. The recipe is for a whole cake, but you can divide it up into muffin cups. The components (cashews, coconut oil, strawberries [organic, guys! you should always stick with organic strawberries]) are a little expensive, but if ever there was a reason to splurge, this cheesecake is it. You can see I decided against the strawberry coulis, and no one missed it.

That brings me to the end of my cooking-around-the-internet post! I still owe you guys a "food from literature" post this month; I’ll do that early next week. I’ve read a book for it (Wide Sargasso Sea); now I’m deciding on the recipe. I was also thinking of posting a little house tour sometime this month, or at least a kitchen tour, so you can see where the vegetalion magic happens. What do you think?

a nightshade-free weekend in NYC

2011-02-01T23:15:00.000-05:00

Like I said in my last post, the reason I didn't post about vegan pizza this weekend was because I was in New York City. A friend of mine has a dance company and was putting on her first big show, so the boyfriend and I went to see it. We were only in NYC for 24 hours, from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, and I forgot to take ANY pictures the whole time I was there. But it was a great time, and we ate a lot of good food! NYC is full of great vegan eats, but many have small menus, and finding nightshade-free things to eat can be rough. I had fantastic meals at all three restaurants at which we ate this weekend!

One thing I recommend to everyone with unusual food allergies or intolerances is to carry a well-written, clear list of what you can't eat. Servers often have so much to remember and to write down that they may miss something; it's easier to hand them a piece of paper and ask them to check what you've ordered. I started doing this about a year ago, and it has drastically improved 1.) the quality of my meals at restaurants and 2.) my stress levels; I get so stressed out at restaurants because I'm afraid I/the server forgot to ask about some sub ingredient).

Here is my list:

I took this with my phone; sorry it's fuzzy. But it gives you an idea of what I work with. I usually give it to the server as I make my order; I tell him/her what I would like to have, then hand them the list and ask if they'd check to make sure I can have that. Sometimes servers will just look over the list and tell me themselves, but more often (and more comforting for me), they take it back to the kitchen and give it to the chef. Sometimes they return the list, sometimes they don't, but it's easy to write out another list. I usually have 2 or 3 tucked into my wallet at all times, just in case.

So! A quick rundown of our weekend of nightshade-free vegan food in New York City!

Caravan of Dreams features organic vegan quisine. We had lunch when we first arrived in the city on Saturday afternoon. The boyfriend and I split the live almond hummus as our appetizer, and we both had applewood smoked tofu sandwiches. Our waitress was pretty sure both things were nightshade free anyway, but she checked with the chef to be sure. The desserts looked delicious, but we were too full.

The boyfriend and I miss Grezzo, an organic, vegan raw food place that was in Boston's North End for a while before it closed, so naturally a visit to Pure Food and Wine was in order. Pure Food and Wine is really pricy, but their food is super gourmet in its tastes and its presentation. ALSO, they are the ultimate allergy-friendly restaurant: when I started to show my list to our waiter, he said "Oh, we have a nightshade free menu, let me go get it for you." Guys! A nightshade-free menu! When I raved to the waiter about how he made my day, he said "We have a bunch of different menus behind the counter, for all sorts of food intolerances, allergies, and avoidances." It was so great not only to know what I could have, but to have a whole menu of my own to look at! The boyfriend and I split the hazelnut crostini appetizer, and my entree was the porcini ravioli. The salted caramel tart for dessert was the highlight of my weekend, food-wise, and considering how much I ate, those are some high praises. My only complaint with Pure Food and Wine is that the portions are small for those prices, and I'm a big eater. I left feeling satisfied, but not full.

Counter does local, sustainable, organic vegetarian and vegan food. We went there with friends for brunch on Sunday, and our waiter was really helpful with finding nightshade free brunch options! Four of us split the pastry basket; the mini muffins contain egg replacer (= potato starch = nightshade), but I could have the delicious blueberry bread, the awesome chocolate pastries, and the homemade vegan nutella and soy berry butter on top. The waiter also told me I could have any of the sweet brunch things (pancakes, french toast), but after those pastries I was in the mood for savory. I ended up with the tofu scramble, which was delicious. There's a rumor on the PPK that Counter is closing at the end of February, so if you have the opportunity to go there before it closes, do it!

Eating big meals out in NYC left my wallet considerably lighter (and me heavier, I bet!), but it was worth it to have so many good worry- and nightshade-free meals.

belated vegan pizza day pizza

2011-01-31T21:39:00.003-05:00

Vegan Pizza Day was on the 29th! I missed blogging about it because I was in New York City visiting some friends, so here is a picture of some pizza in belated honor of vegan pizza day!

Toppings are onions (I love onions on pizzas); a cheese sauce made from tofu, miso, and nutritional yeast; and pepperoni-flavored carrots, a variation on my zucchini pepperoni. Guys, let me tell you, zucchini works a lot better than carrots for this recipe! Carrots are way less absorptive. They tasted good, though not much like pepperoni. Anyway the whole vegetable pepperoni thing is just to put some extra veggies on my pizza without compromising on salty-smoky flavors.

Super Sad True Love Story: Dduk bok ki

2011-01-26T13:09:00.000-05:00

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month I'll combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I usually post a warning about potential spoilers here, but since this is a recent book and you might (should) read it soon, I'll avoid mentioning specifics.

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In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, Lenny, a man rapidly approaching 40 but wanting desperately to live forever, falls in love with Eunice, a clothes-obsessed 24-year-old who thinks Lenny looks like a rhesus monkey. The book goes back and forth between Lenny's journal entries and Eunice's email and IM exchanges, showing their very different reactions to what happens between and around them as they start a relationship in a politically, economically, and technologically volatile world. It's set sometime within the next 50 years, when corporations and nations are synonymous, books are rotting and smelly, clothes are see-through, and everyone carries around devices that keep them connected to the internet (but not to each other) at all times. Basically, it's a dystopian love story in a dystopian near-future.

I really liked this book. It reads quickly and lightly, so it is mostly a fun read, but it has enough issues and ideas that it leaves you thinking afterwards. The United States of this story is one of social, political, and economic unrest. Everyone wants to be younger, thinner, more desirable, and none of them have meaningful connection with other people. International relations are strained, and some of Lenny's friends are suspected of nefarious dealings with the ubiquitous Bipartisan party. Currency is unstable but everything important in the characters' lives costs money.

One girl in my book club complained that the book takes on too many issues: she thought that any one of those themes I just listed could be a book unto itself, and the relationship between Eunice and Lenny gets in the way of Shteyngart exploring those themes, or the themes get in the way of Shteyngart exploring the relationship. I disagree with her; I think the real pleasure of reading this book was seeing how Lenny and Eunice's feelings for each other and for their families eclipse everything else in their worlds. The narration is entirely through their personal journals and emails; yuan-pegged dollars and political uprisings take a backburner to Lenny and Eunice's feelings for each other not because Shteyngart can't juggle all of those elements, but because to these lonely people, the attempt to really connect with each other is more important. The book seems to say that though the society around them discourages interpersonal connections or emotions, these things are a necessary part of human experience. No matter how strange or different society becomes, we will always have the same feelings, the same emotional needs.

My description of the book makes it sound much heavier than it is. Though there are heavy themes, the writing is very light, with a lot of humor. Shteyngart's humor is sometimes slapstick, sometimes dark, sometimes subtle, and sometimes absurd. (I had to use the word "absurd" somewhere in here; he's the author of Absurdistan.) There's a funny "trailer" for the book on YouTube, which isn't really about the book at all.

Super Sad True Love Story shows that while basic human connections may have broken down in society, people still yearn for interpersonal relationships--both romantic and familial. Both Eunice and Lenny think about and talk to their families often. Eunice and her family, in their emails, often mention her Korean mother's home cooking, which is why I decided to write about this book for this entry: one of the foods that reminds Eunice of home is dduk, which is one of my favorite foods to work with.

"Dduk" (also spelled duk, tteok, etc) is usually translated as "rice cakes," but this is misleading. Dduk is more like a thick rice pasta; it is made from pounded rice flour combined with water to produce various shapes. Usually dduk comes as slightly-larger-than-finger-sized tubes, but my favorite shape is the quarter-inch-thick ovals. You can find dduk at korean or chinese markets, usually in the fridge but sometimes in the freezer section. They are almost always vacuum-packed. The last time I looked, I even found brown-rice dduk! (This was really exciting, since refined grains are on the "sometimes foods" list for me.) Store them in your fridge, and if you don't use the whole package at once, store the remainder in the freezer. Package directions may vary, but mostly you just throw them in a pot of boiling water for 5 minutes, or if you're adding them to soup, add in the last 5 minutes of cooking.

Dduk is often served stir fried (dduk bok ki) or in soup (dduk gook). I prefer it stir-fried, because it soaks up sauces so well. For a quick meal, you can saute cooked dduk in any stir-fry sauce and add veggies. But I prefer to have dduk as a side dish. I also prefer the sliced dduk, but which kind you use is up to you.

Dduk bok ki with seitan and zucchini and a side salad.

Dduk bok ki for people who can have nightshades would include 2-4 tablespoons of chili paste, so feel free to add some if you can have peppers. It is still delicious nightshade free.

Nightshade-free Dduk bok ki
Dduk hardens when refrigerated, so you want to avoid having leftovers. This makes 2 generous side servings, or 3 medium ones (for me, "medium" is the serving in the picture with the seitan, above).

1/2 package (1 lb) dduk (I like the sliced kind, but the tube-looking ones are more traditional)
1/4 C soy sauce
1 Tbsp agave (or 4 tsp brown sugar)
1 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
1 1-inch piece of ginger, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 to 1 tsp black or sizchuan pepper, depending on how much heat you want

2 tsp canola (or vegetable) oil

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. While it's heating, combine all of the other ingredients except the canola oil in a medium-sized bowl. Mix well.

When the water boils, cook the dduk according to package directions. (If there aren't directions, plop it in the boiling water and let it boil for 3-5 minutes. Stab one with a fork at 3 minutes, and if the center is still hard, give it another couple minutes. If not, it's done.) Drain it, then run cold water over it and break up any that have stuck together.

Heat the canola oil in a wok or a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the dduk.

These are the brown rice kind; the white rice kind will obviously be paler.

Now pour the sauce over top of the dduk and cook 5-10 minutes, until all the liquid has been absorbed, stirring often. Test to see if it needs anything; you may want to add a little more sweetener or a little more soy sauce, depending on your tastes. Serve as a side dish to any korean- or chinese-themed meal, or as a delicious late-night snack.

what to do with 8 cups of pomegranate juice, brought to you by POM Wonderful

2011-01-13T10:16:00.000-05:00

By the time I was in the third grade, I had read all of the fiction in my elementary school library. The librarian, eager to support a young nerd's love of reading, recommended me to the nonfiction sections of the library that closest resembled fiction: folklore, history, mythology. Of all the books I read from the school's dusty, not-updated-since-before-I-was-born nonfiction stacks, three have still stuck with me: a biography of Lady Jane Grey, a collection of pre-1900 American ghost stories, and most influential of all, Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

One of my favorite myths in Mythology was that of Persephone. (I assumed it was pronounced "Purse-i-fone," but hey, I was 8.) No matter how many times I read the tale, I still wanted to yell at her when she was about to leave Hades's kingdom: "Persephone, don't eat that pomegranate seed!" Having read the folklore section, I already knoew that you are never supposed to eat food otherwordly entities give you, because then you'll be under their spell. Not to mention the fact that Hades had a whole FEAST in front of her, and when she finally caved and ate something, all she chose was a seed? I found it frustrating. But then, I'd never had a pomegranate. I wouldn't eat my first pomegranate for 12 more years, and when I did, I understood right away why Persephone caved and ate some. They are delicious!

So back in November, when the nice people at POM Wonderful contacted me to ask if I was interested in trying a case of their 100% Pomegranate Juice, of course I said yes. Pomegranate juice gives you all the deliciousness of pomegranates without the work, mess, or chewing. When 8 lovely 8-oz bottles of POM Wonderful's awesome pomegranate juice arrived at my door, I was really excited to try some pomegranate recipes.

But first I had to line them up and photograph them, since I'm weird and obsessive like that.

So, what to do with 8 Bottles of pomegranate juice?

Bottle 1: I just drank it. I always water down juice (I don't really like sweet drinks), so I ended up mixing the pomegranate juice with seltzer to make a spritzer. It's good stright, though, if you're into juice. If you've never had pomegranate juice or pomegranates, for that matter, imagine a darker, richer-tasting, slightly sweeter version of cranberry juice. Also, if you haven't tried pomegranates or pomegranate juice, seriously, try some.

Bottle 2: Pomegranate Tofu with Walnuts.

I was inspired by this chicken recipe.

First, I dredged chunks of tofu in cornstarch, flour, salt and pepper, then sauteed it in a tiny but of oil until browned.

The goal was to give the tofu a crispy layer that would soften and resemble a skin as it cooked. For the record, It worked, but to be honest, next time I'd do without the coating and just brown the tofu. It's easier, and no one really needs their tofu to have a skin. So the instructions below are for skinless tofu.

1 16-oz block tofu
2 Tbsp olive oil, divided
1 large onion, finely chopped
1.5 Cups walnuts, roughly chopped
1 cup fresh pomegranate juice
2 Cups water
2 tsps lemon juice
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp pepper
optional: 1 tsp cornstarch, stirred into 1-2 Tbsp water

First, press the tofu if you have time, to get out excess moisture. Cut tofu into bite-sized (or larger) chunks. Heat 1 Tbsp of the oil in a large skillet over medium heat and saute the tofu, allowing to brown lightly on each side. Meanwhile, chop the onion and the walnuts. Remove the tofu from the pan; add the remaining 1 Tbsp of oil to the pan, then add the onions and walnuts. Cook until the onions are wilting and starting to brown, stirring as often as you need to not to let the walnuts burn (but they should brown, too).

Add the remaining ingredients, and cook until the mixture boils. It will not look very pretty, but that's okay--it is delicious.

After the mixture comes to a boil, add the tofu. Now your goal is to cook it until the sauce reduces enough to glaze the tofu and thicken a bit; 10-20 minutes, depending on how high your definition of "medium heat" is. You do want some liquid at the bottom of the pan throughout cooking so nothing burns or browns. If you have a lot of walnut meal, it may thicken as it cooks, so you may need to add more water (up to a cup)--and if you want it to thicken more than it's doing, you can add the optional cornstarch mixture, then stir another 3 minutes. This serves 3-4.

If you read my edible gift post, you already know what I did with Bottles 3-6: Homemade Grenadine.

Grenadine is a great mixer for alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as a useful, beautifully colored addition to baked goods. Most grenadine you find in stores is far removed from its pomegranate roots, containing little more than high fructose corn syrup and food coloring. As I said, I got the original recipe from The Cupcake Project, but I deviated a little, so I'll give you my version here.

3 Cups pomegranate juice
1 1/2 Cup sugar
1 more Cup pomegranate juice

Put the first 3 Cups of pomegranate juice in a saucepan over high heat. Bring it to a hearty boil.

Reduce the heat to medium, and let simmer until reduced by half. Remove from heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved.

Here's where I differ from The Cupcake Project: once all the sugar has dissolved, whisk in the remaining 1 Cup Pomegranate juice. Why, you ask? Well, boiling and reducing pomegranate juice takes away much of its characteristic tartness, and gives it a mellow, thicker, cooked taste. Adding the extra cup of fresh juice gives it back the kick it lost while making it taste a little lighter, all without detracting from the new grenadiney taste.

Store in a tightly-sealed container in the refrigerator. It will keep for a long time; at least 4-6 weeks.

I like to mix grenadine with seltzer for an Italian soda, but it is most commonly used in cocktails (including non-alcoholic Shirly Temples).

Bottle 7: Pomegranate Granita

Granita is basically Italian ice. It's a chunkier, icier sorbet, and it goes GREAT as a light dessert or as a complement to cookies. It is very easy to make granita, but it's one of those things people assume you spent a lot of time on. I like pomegranate's tartness, so I didn't sweeten it very much, but if you don't want it very tart, increase the sugar to 1 Cup. If you want it tarter and with more intense flavor, add another cup of pomegranate juice.

1 Cup pomegranate juice
1 Cup water
1/2 Cup sugar

Pour the pomegranate juice into a glass baking dish. Set aside.

Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan and stir them over high heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat, pour into the glass dish. Put the glass dish in the freezer. Every 20-30 minutes, remove from the freezer, use a fork to break up all the ice that forms on the top, sides, and bottom of the dish, stir, return to the freezer. In 2-3 hours, you will have an Italian-ice-like dessert!

This serves 2-3 if you give each person a bowl of it; 4-6 if you have dainty little cups of it to accompany a richer dessert.

Bottle 8: Maple-Pomegranate Sauce.

The boyfriend made this, because he is a champion. He combined equal parts pomegranate juice and maple syrup, the seeds of one pomegranate, and 1-2 Tbsp cornstarch (I wasn't paying attention) to make the most delicious pancake topping I've had in quite a while.

And that brings us to the end of the case of pomegranate juice.

So empty, so sad.

I am a big fan of pomegranates, so I already liked POM Wonderful before they sent me anything, but I am an even bigger fan now that they gave me the opportunity to spread my love of pomegranate to you readers. I've noticed that POM now sells containers of pomegranate arils (the seeds), which saves you the work and mess of having to dig them out of the fruit yourself. So you can feel like Persephone by daintily sampling one seed any time you want!*

*-And then, if you're like me, you can feel like a nerd for remembering and being excited about emulating a Greek myth.