holiday meals

Normally my family uses tofu turkeys for their holiday entree, which are simple: you just take them out of the box and bake them. If you haven't tried tofu turkeys, they're simple marinated/seasoned tofu shaped like a happy turkey. They're gluten free and come with an easy-to-make gravy. And they're just so cute!

However, my sister-in-law is sensitive to soy,  and I wanted something we could all have. Many vegan entree options have gluten, but half the people at our meal were gluten-free, so I was pretty much left with one option: THE VEGDUCKEN. This recipe (and similar ones) was circulating around the internet for a while, just calling to be veganized. First, I have to tell you, this recipe is good, but poorly written. Or, at least, poorly organized--the list of ingredients isn't in any particular order. I ended up rewriting the whole thing in a Word doc just to make it make more sense.

Here's what I changed: I used vegan butter (homemade, but Earth Balance would work) and halved the butter for the layering/sauce, and never used any mint. This turned out just fine, and we had plenty. I used two flax "eggs" (2 Tbsp flax meal mixed with 6 Tbsp water) to replace the eggs, and to replace the parmesan cheese, I just used 2-3 Tbsp light miso. (Because of the miso, this means the recipe wasn't completely soy free, but you could use a soy-free vegan cheese like Daiya to make it so.) I used gluten-free breadcrumbs--the Hannaford store brand is just corn, sugar, and salt. Oh and my mushrooms were reconstituted dried. Finally, because I am allergic to nightshades, I replaced the eggplant layer with lightly steamed sliced celery root.

And here's the thing: even with all these (in some cases rather dramatic) substitutions, it tasted great. And went together really easily.

Here it is before putting the sides together and baking:

And here it is, baked and with some slices taken off.

I recommend carving it at the table and serving it one piece at a time; when we tried to cut several slices in advance they fell apart and were not as pretty to serve.

It serves a lot! I actually made two because there were 11 of us eating and my family are big eaters, but we never ended up finishing the first, let alone cutting into the second. And everyone really liked it!

We hosted Thanksgiving so we wouldn't have to travel with the baby, but our dining room is small so half of us ate in the dining room and half of us ate in the makeshift second dining room (the living room).

My side of the family! My brother is holding the baby in the back.

Christmas dinner was a much smaller affair, with just us and Kevin's mother, so we cooked the meal together. Our entree was Elizavegan's vegan tourtiere, made with sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes, and phyllo dough instead of pastry crust--which was a delicious substitution! The crisp of the phyllo went well with the sweet potato and made up for the lack of starch the white potatoes would have provided.

For Christmas dessert, I wanted to make something special. Inspired by The Great British Baking Show, which I watched in less than two days during my first week home with the baby, I decided to try my hand at a Swiss roll (also known as a jelly roll). And it went GREAT!

The cake is the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, spread out on a baking sheet and baked for only 10-15 minutes. I cooled it just enough to handle, then rolled it in a tea towel and let it cool completely.

After that I unrolled it, spread it with strawberry jam and Coco Whip (I didn't have time to make frosting), rolled it back up and decorated it. It was huuuuge, so I only used half of it to decorate and serve (halved, with edges trimmed off for neatness, it served 5 people). I couldn't believe how simple and yet elegant it was! I'll definitely make Swiss rolls in the future, hopefully with yellow cake that I can decorate with batter like they do on the show.

I also dressed my baby as a reindeer.

Finally, New Year's brunch is a big meal in my parents' house, with loads of food and plenty of relatives to eat it all. With a baby in the house we were lucky to make it till midnight, and were not up for making a huge brunch the next morning, but we did something a little special: Kevin made a delicious fruit and nut coffee cake (from Angelica Kitchen) and I made tofu florentine with a hollandaise sauce from Vegan Diner. I usually make the one from Vegan Brunch, but I don't find it too flavorful. The Vegan Diner one has a lot of flavor, but I think the wine comes through a little too strong. Still a delicious New Year's brunch!

Now the holidays are over, we're back to simpler meals... more on those later!

uzbek dinner! plov and tashkent salad

A while back, a friend linked to one of those buzzfeed posts--you know the ones, "the top 20 things you have to eat in [city name]" or "30 signs you're [insert age]." But the one my friend linked to was about food. And I often click the food ones. I don't even remember what the list was, but at the side, another recommended article was "16 Delicious Uzbek Dishes You Need to Try Immediately." I love delicious food, and knew NOTHING about Uzbek cuisine, so I clicked--and discovered a whole list of very non-vegan things. (There is actually one vegan thing: a tomato salad, which, since I'm allergic, was sad.)

For some reason, rather than deciding Uzbek cuisine was not my thing, all this started me on a quest to try to make some vegan Uzbek food at home.

Vegan Tashkent salad, "roasted" garlic (I'll explain later), and Plov!

The most obvious dish to start with: Plov, which is essentially a rice pilaf. After a long internet-rabbit-hole search, I decided to mainly stick with this recipe from Olga's Flavor Factory (ironically, the blog is Russian, not Uzbek, but I swear, this was the most promising recipe to start with). Traditionally, plov is made with lamb or beef, for which I substituted chickpeas. (Chunks of seitan would probably be better if you wanted it to be really authentic, but since I'm vegan and nightshade-free, I never really bother with authentic, and chickpeas are what I had on hand.) Her recipe is also enormous, so I halved it. So here are the ingredients I ended up with:

Chickpea Plov

Serves 3-4, depending on how hungry you are!

2 Cups (or 1 can, which is a little scant but fine) Chickpeas

2-3 Tbsp olive oil

1 red onion, chopped

2 carrots, shredded

salt

1/2 tsp pepper

2 bay leaves

1.5 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp turmeric (this was to substitute in color for the paprika she uses)

A generous shake of ground allspice

1.5 Cups rice (I used brown basmati for extra flavor)

3 Cups water

1 head garlic, most of the papery skin peeled away (as much as you can with just rubbing it)

I sautéed all the veggies and spices together first, until the chickpeas started to brown, to give everything lots of flavor:

From there I followed the directions from the original recipe: add the rice, stir to mix it all together, then add the water, lower the heat, and cover.

And here's the coolest part, the "roasted" garlic. In the last 10-15 minutes of cooking (so if you're using white rice, pretty much as soon as you cover it--if you're using brown rice, after about 15-20 minutes), you put an entire head of garlic right in the center of the pilaf, so it steams and gets soft and creamy on the inside--just like roasted garlic from the oven, but less messy and in way less time! I could not believe how cool this was, and have done it with other dishes now.

There it is! Hidden in the center of the plov! At the time I was really worried about the garlic burning or sloughing off its skin into the rice, but it all worked out just fine.

The tashkent salad (or is it supposed to be salad tashkent? I do not speak Uzbek so I have no idea) was a veganized version of this recipe from Tasty Arbuz. Tashkent salad is basically a creamy slaw made of radishes and tongue, which, you know, super not vegan. (Have any of you read Hugo Hamilton's memoir The Speckled People? There is a tongue-as-food-related scene in it that is incredibly well written... and it describes how gross the whole family found it. If I were still doing my "food from books" series, this would be such a good one!) But I had some leftover baked tofu from a previous dinner, which, thinly sliced, was a perfect tongue substitute. And I used vegenaise instead of mayo, and everything was fine! 

Verdict: I would definitely make plov again, and am so excited about this "roasted" garlic technique. As for the tashkent salad, it was fine, but essentially a radish slaw, for which I don't really need a specific recipe in the future.

Have you ever had Uzbek food? Is there any dish from that buzzfeed list you'd like to make/veganize? Keep me posted!

fava beans

Have you ever had fresh fava beans before? I have had them in restaurants, and have had canned fava beans (which are brown), but until last month I never had them fresh. My friend Michael at the Dazed and Infused blog and I split a CSA share from Waltham Fields Community Farm, a great organization in our city, and they had pick-your-own fava beans for a while. So I decided to try them! They turned out to be more labor intensive than I'd thought.

First, you pick them and bring them home and wash them:

Clean and shiny. THEN you remove the beans from the pod (which is inedible unless it's really young):

But wait! You're not done! The beans have a thick coating that is not pleasant to eat, so you have to PEEL EACH BEAN.

Unpeeled, half-peeled, peeled. It is really hard to peel them raw, so you blanch the beans, then slit the skin, then poke each bean out. And only THEN can you actually prepare the beans.

I cooked them with some garlic, olive oil, and a splash of cooking sherry, then mashed them to top some toast (pictured below with a salad).

They're tasty beans, but I didn't think they were worth all that work! From now on I will probably only buy prepared fava beans, either at restaurants or in a can.