sometimes I lose it

One of my favorite parts of every week happens tomorrow night.  Yes, it's Friday, but it's not my non-stop, can't-slow-down social life that has me to excited: tomorrow night I get to plan my new menu.  Yes, I know that makes me a total dork, but I'm actually okay with that.  I truly enjoy sitting down with my cookbooks and thumbing through, thinking of new ways to wow the Mister and get the most out of the money I plunked down at some point for the cookbook.

It's really a soothing, creative process for me.  I have a whole ritual!  Here is how tomorrow night will go, give or take an exciting detour I may take on my way home from work:
Come home and make dinner
Clean up dishes
Open wine while dinner photos import
Post something fun and entertaining about dinner or how relieved I am that the week finally ended but OMG I can't believe the week is already over and next week is Thanksgiving and there's only one full week left of November
Whew!
Then, finally, I will pour [another] glass of Beaujolais Nouveau (which just hit stores today!) and sit down to plan the new menu, including my part of Thanksgiving dinner.

The longer I spend developing my menu and poring over recipes, the more courageous I become.  The wine might help, but I've noticed this phenomenon even without my dessert buddy.  As I work my way through cookbooks I've perused possibly hundreds of times, my eyes urgently scanning the pages for one recipe I haven't made yet that doesn't contain an ungodly number of things Mister hates or might kill him, I become enveloped in adventure and make, at times, outlandish decisions I might have otherwise passed over.  As a result, at least once a month, I end up in my kitchen, staring at my menu and thinking, "Really, Natalie?" or "What was I thinking?"  I end up saving the "weird" recipe until I have run out of other options, and finally...

I make Curry Fennel Cauliflower Bake from La Dolce Vegan, and wonder when I became so self-doubting.  I mean, really, isn't it possible that I know what I'm doing by now and I can just trust the part of me that thought this recipe was a good idea in the first place?

It was every bit as good as it looks.  The spice blend melded with the cauliflower and rubbed itself into the tofu while it baked, creating a savory meal complete with the perfectly conflicting textures of cauliflower and tofu.  The peas provided a nice squish of sweet in an otherwise umami-dominated dinner and the rice balanced out the light heat from the pepper that made my lips tingle and burn toward the last few bites.

That's all for now, folks - tomorrow I'll be wading through the wealth of amazing recipes suggested by VegNews to round out the perfect vegan Thanksgiving.  I'm still overwhelmed by the volume of recipes collected in the email I received, so if my brain is spectacularly broken by tomorrow evening, I may save my poking around until Saturday.  Sleep sweetly, MoFos!

biryani in a hurry

So, I have this weird thing that happens when I eat an apple.  I'm starting to think I may be the only person alive afflicted in such a manner, so please, if you also suffer from the problem I'm about to share, please let me know.  I feel so alone...  ;)

Anyway, I eat an apple and I'm full and happy because apples taste good and take a little while to eat.  It's apple season, so I'm presently chomping my way through at least one a day.  Here is my problem: I am ravenously hungry within an hour of eating an apple.  Not just a little hungry - so hungry I can't make dinner until I stuff an olive in my mouth to pretend I'm eating.  It's bizarre because it's not just that the apple has apparently digested quickly and abandoned my stomach - it's as though in the process, it hijacked everything else I ever ate and went hiding somewhere.  It feels sometimes like I'm actually hungrier after eating an apple than I might have been if I hadn't eaten anything at all.

Anyone else or am I just a freak who should consider a new favorite fruit?

I have another Biryani recipe, which I mentioned when I laid out this week's menu.  It was the first biryani I made and I proudly made it for anyone who would eat it because I thought it was so spiffy.  That recipe, though, is better relegated to Special Dinners, as it is quite time consuming.  Compared to tonight's Vegetable Biryani from La Dolce Vegan, my original recipe has far more ingredients and requires a great deal more effort, since there is sauteing and simmering and baking before the eating.  Tonight's biryani simplified the process, which I dearly needed by the time my hungry self got home.  A few simple but complementary ingredients, set to simmer together on the stovetop for about 20 minutes, which gave me a little time to heat up the oven, set off the fire alarm, and make some garlic naan.

Laborious and burdensome though it may be, I am trudging on through my taste-testing for the chocolate round-up I hope to publish this weekend.  It's difficult, eating square after square of high-quality vegan chocolate.  I do it all for you, dear readers. 

Okay, I guess I do it a little for me.  You can see, however, that the chocolate always seems to be propped up against a glass of red wine, which is my reward for putting myself through these vigorous tests... and dark chocolate and red wine are such great friends, each enhancing the other's best qualities, while affording me the feeling of luxury if only for a fleeting moment.

Stay tuned - this weekend should finish things up and see the round-up come to fruition!

one, singular sensation

I can't believe it's only Tuesday - I'm exhausted and would like to go to sleep now.  Instead, I'm posting about one of my favorite meals!

I will never stop loving Punjabi Peppers and Tofu from La Dolce Vegan, but I have to admit, I loved it more tonight than I've loved it in nearly a year.  Why, you ask?  Well, because I got to sprinkle my newly acquired McCormick Gourmet Garam Masala all over it and it tasted so much better than my normal attempts to compensate for blends I don't like as much.

The recipe was contributed to Sarah from the creators of Matt & Nat handbags, which meant very little to me until a local eco-fashion boutique started carrying their line of bags.  I make this all the time so it comes together very quickly, which Mister and I both needed tonight.  I noticed something I've never noticed before, though, while I was explaining to Mister why it's so easy to whip up (besides remembering the steps after so many makings).

There is one of every ingredient.  1 Tbsp of olive oil.  1 of each color pepper.  1 tomato, and on it goes.  All the spices are 1 tsp.  Now that I've made that connection, it should be even easier to make because I have the ingredients committed to memory already and the steps are common sense.  It cooks up very fast because you are essentially layering your prep.  Get the rice steaming, then start the tofu sauteing while you chop the peppers and tomato.  Once you add the veggies, sprinkle on the three 1 tsps of spices, give a good stir, cover and leave it alone for about five minutes.  Voila!  Super Simple Sensational Supper!

viva espana! (and a bunch of other places)

There are so many things to love about Veganomicon - probably too many to count.  For one thing, it's huge and full of just about any recipe you could imagine wanting, as well as several that never occurred to you until someone else said "blueberry brownies" and you thought back to that dark chocolate bar with dried blueberries your darling husband gave you as a gift on some random Monday.  Another great thing about this book is the center section where they keep all the slobber-inducing photographs of amazing looking, cruelty-free food (unless, of course, you take into account the inexcusable cruelty that those pictures don't pop out to create those very meals all by themselves on your dining table).  And of course, there are the sarcastic, wry recipe intros, such as:

If these chickpeas could talk, they'd probably be a little fresh and need at least a PG-13 rating due to extreme sauciness.  (On the other hand, if chickpeas could talk they probably wouldn't be vegan anymore.)

 In addition to all that awesomeness, there's one more thing: the incredible multi-ethnicity our authors bring to the proverbial table.  Isa Chandra Moskowitz, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn with an Indian name and a penchant for chickpeas, and Terry Hope Romero, a lovely latina married to a man so Greek, his mother brought her fresh oregano from Greece (way to go, Terry!).   The way all of these cultures mix and marry and rebound off of one another culminates in some of the most innovative and tastebud-challenging dishes I've had the pleasure of making and eating.

Tonight, I finished our recent tour of Veganomicon by making Chickpeas Romesco on Garlic Saffron Rice.  In case you're super curious by now, since every time the past 10 days that I've mentioned this recipe I've crossed out the Saffron, Mister and I are not big fans, so I leave it out, to no detriment that I've noticed.  I've made this before and I think I thought "Romesco" was a made-up word (not that Isa would ever do that), but this time around my curiosity got to me, so I checked it out.  Turns out Romesco sauce is a real thing!  Appropriately enough, it was born in Spain - for some reason, I had gotten the impression that this recipe came from Terry's mind, which makes sense (if it's true), since she has recently released her own solo cookbook, Viva Vegan!

After filling up on dinner, Mister decided to invade Angst's personal space by lying down on the floor to digest.

As long as Mister was willing to pet him, he didn't mind so much. 

Mister?  Where ya goin'?

In other news, I chopped up an Anaheim chili to saute with the shallots and garlic and I really thought it would pack a little more heat than it did.  I am quite a bit trepidatious to put this out there, but I might just be willing to start experimenting with jalapenos again sometime in the nearer future (heck, I've taken an 18 year break, why not?).  If I find that courage hiding somewhere in my purse or the back of a cupboard, I'll let you all know how it turns out!

nothing like some audience participation

My home stinks tasty.

By way of introduction, I grew up in a church headed by a charismatic Irish preacher.  He told a great many stories, in the pulpit and out of it, even publishing a memoir dedicated to his mother and memories of growing up with her.  One of the stories that has stayed with me through the years, because it's just so darn funny, went something like this:

When he was entering adolescence, Pastor initiated an interest in the ladies, like most "men" at that age.  The day he decided to start wearing cologne happened to coincide with a flamboyant friend of his mother coming to visit for an afternoon.  As he was walking out the door to spend time with a co-ed group of friends, his mother's friend embraced him and exclaimed, "Boy, you sure stink pretty!"

Mortified by her comment, he didn't really absorb it.  All he heard was "you stink."  What apparently took him years to learn was that when she said "you stink pretty," she was paying him a compliment on his newly pleasant scent.

So, my home stinks tasty.  It stinks like I imagine Polish kitchens to stink, but not quite the way an Eastern European kitchen might stink - I feel like that would require garlic to enter the bouquet of food scents currently inhabiting my 4x6' kitchen (and spreading through the rest of our tiny home).  Surprisingly, I was able to refrain from adding garlic, in the interest of remaining faithful to the recipe, created from Dynise's childhood memories of plentiful cabbage and Polish family.

In case you can't guess, tonight's dinner was Red Cabbage with Caraway Seeds from The Urban Vegan, served up with sauteed slices of Tofurky Kielbasa.  Dinner was almost Chickpeas Romesco, but Mister intervened by enthusiastically requesting the cabbage dish.

I would say that I only select our dinner autocratically about 50% of the time.  I like to get Mister's input (as well as feedback) and he is usually hesitant to provide either (which drives me a little crazy sometimes).  When I haven't decided ahead of time exactly what I'm making, I'll usually show Mister the weekly menu and ask him if anything jumps out at him.  At least 90% of the time, he just smiles or shrugs and says "Whatever you want, baby."  Sometimes I try to at least narrow him into a cuisine (there's a pretty considerable distance between Italian and Polish influenced flavors!) and other times I just figure out what I'm most in the mood to make or eat.

On the rare occasions that he excitedly points at something and says, "Ooh, ooh!  Make that!" I find it more or less impossible to refuse whatever he wants.  So, while I was gearing up to make Chickpeas Romesco, he peeked over my shoulder and saw Red Cabbage with Caraway Seeds and made his fervent request, so I pulled the head of cabbage out of the crisper.  I thought he was excited about the kielbasa, but he was actually more excited about the cabbage.  I was most excited about the caraway seeds.

It came out really well.  It yielded a huge amount of cabbage, even after it cooked down a little.  I sliced four kielbasas on the diagonal and it seemed to be the perfect amount, but my need for larger pots was definitely reinforced by tonight's cooking experience.  The cabbage almost did not fit into my 6-qt stock pot - fortunately, that's the next piece of cookware in line to be replaced!

The cabbage cooked up with a hint of sweetness that was enhanced dramatically by the savory nature of the sausage.  Neither overwhelmed the other, rather they each provided the other with the perfect flavor foil, calming and complementing each ingredient's best features.  Additionally, the cabbage maintained just enough crunch through 15 minutes of cooking to add a fun texture against the chewy tenderness of the kielbasa.

Well done, Mister.  But now my kitchen reeks.

Time for the new menu!  We still haven't gotten to Chickpeas Romesco with Garlic Saffron Rice from Veganomicon, so that will carry over into the new week, probably kicking off tomorrow.  The rest of the week will be divided between these treats:

1. Cajun Spice Baked Tofu on Cajun Red Beans and Rice, both from The Accidental Vegan.  The Beans and Rice recipe is currently holding the title of Favorite for that category, but I've never made the baked tofu and I'm really looking forward to seeing how they work together.

2. Punjabi Peppers and Tofu from La Dolce Vegan, served with garlic naan.  I'll admit, I went into this book specifically for this recipe.  In addition to the two bottles of McCormick Garam Masala I picked up in California, my mother gave me a bottle she used for the one time she made this recipe, so I can't wait to make this again with my favorite Garam Masala!  Fortunately, while I was in the book, I also came away with...

3. Curry Fennel Cauliflower Bake which sounds fabulous and combines a bunch of things Mister loves (cauliflower and curry) with a few of my favorite things (tofu and fennel seeds).  With the help of the pre-cut cauliflower florets I picked up at Whole Foods, it should come together quickly as well.

4. Vegetable Biryani, also from La Dolce Vegan.  I've been hesitant about this recipe in the past because I have a biryani recipe I love from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, but this one is stovetop and requires a lot less time, effort, and ingredients.  Considering this week begins the busiest six weeks of my year, that's a good thing.

give me $5 and I'll feed the world

Okay, that might be a little ambitious.  Why don't we start with the city or a very large family?

I would like to start by saying I hate McDonald's.  I hope I live to see the day they go bankrupt.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I would have to break all kinds of records (like the ones in the genealogy records of the Old Testament) to accomplish that, but a girl can dream, right?  I merely dislike Burger King - at least they don't cook their fries with natural beef flavoring and they do have a veggie burger on the menu.

McDonald's has been spending a bit of time in the ol' Limelight lately, for both good and bad reasons (although which one is which will be determined by the witness).  San Francisco has successfully begun a legally enforceable ban on including toys in children's meals (Happy Meals) that don't meet certain nutritional guidelines, although the mayor is poised to veto anything that would get in the way of a parent's right to poison their offspring.  In the opposite vein, in a mind-boggling move, the United Kingdom is going to let McDonald's help draft the national health policy, with help from other nutritional giants like PepsiCo, Mars, and other pushers of packaged crap.

In Skinny Bitch, Rory and Kim point out the tremendous conflict of interest involved in our own nation's USDA being steered by big players from the various industries protected by the USDA.  I'd like to believe the UK is involving Junk Food Giants in the composition of a policy aimed at ensuring good health as a way to proactively direct them to choose on their own a more healthful course.  Unfortunately, I think it's just the money.

The money.  That is ultimately what the problem boils down to.  Money, or lack of money, must be one of the reasons McDonald's, Burger King, and other fast food tycoons are so successful.  When I go to Essene's food bar and create my own little "value meal," I'll pay a not-so-pretty price.  The hot bar at Whole Foods is around $14/lb and you don't know how easy it is to put a pound of food into a takeaway container until you're forking over $20 for lunch.  Can I afford this?  Most of the time, yes, but I would still find a way to afford it over a $6 Value Meal at Burger King consisting of a microwaved veggie patty on a bleached white bun and an order of oil- and salt-drenched fries.  Have I eaten that?  Absolutely, and I've been quite happy to drown in my occasional puddle of fried food.  The reason I can occasionally indulge in crap like that is because it is occasional.  A "special treat" if you will, although sometimes I think the only thing about it that's "special" is my irrational desire to let all the carcinogens involved infiltrate the body I try so hard to keep healthy.

As I was walking home from the train station tonight, I passed Burger King.  Sitting outside of Burger King were two separate, homeless men, begging for money.  They may have thought they were strategically positioned, since most people would see them outside of a food-serving establishment and draw the obvious connection that they intend to use whatever money you give them to buy food.  However, if I'm going to give a hungry person money for food, I'd rather actually give them food.  Real food - not deep-fried poison.  I've been successful and I've failed, but I'll never give someone money when they're sitting in front of a place I think is trying to kill people.

Walking past those men made me sad, though.  It's easy to judge the long lines of people inside the McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts I also pass on my nightly walking-commute from the train, but what I really see when I look at the people in line and the men begging outside of BK is an indictment of our country and values.  Would people like to eat good food?  Yes, probably if given the chance, but can people afford good food?  Most marketing, in any case, would tell us NO.  Fast food places have Dollar Menus.  At a west coast chain restaurant called Del Taco, you could probably feed a family of 20 for about $5.  Why is this stuff so cheap?  Because it's just barely food - and when I say food, I mean it's edible and won't kill you immediately.

It isn't that "good food" is prohibitively expensive, but there is something to be said for covering operating costs as well as food supply.  Could I open a veggie fast food stand with prices that rival McDonald's?  Absolutely.  Could I do that for a year?  Doubtful.  My guess is that I would go out of business in 6 months or fewer, because the present paradigm of fast food is so far ingrained into our minds at this point.  Mister recently shared with me that years ago, a friend/colleague shared his "get rich quick" scheme one day: a Spaghetti cart.  It was sound logic - dried pasta costs next-to-nothing, and if you do it right, sauce costs only nominally more.  The biggest costs that could be incurred would be the actual cart and corresponding licenses and utilities.  The City would put you out of business before you boiled your first pot - it would probably take months to recoup the start up fees.  Additionally, I think the carb-crazed brainwashing that has occurred in the last decade would prevent a pasta cart from having a huge amount of success. 

Enough rambling - anyone who's still with me deserves a picture:

Can you believe all of that built up to Pasta e Fagioli?  Tonight, I opened up The Urban Vegan and made this delightful and substantial dish - after Mister and I each had two servings that would make the homeless men outside of BK blush, we still had 9.5 cups of leftovers. 

The scent of the garlic sauteing, the simple but rich taste of a sauce made with canned tomatoes, dried herbs, and broth, poured over a box of dried macaroni is the connection.  This dinner was high-quality and high-taste.  I would happily eat this any day over beef-flavored fries and bleached McNuggets, even if they are going to give me a toy with it.

Follow me on a quick cost comparison before I go all paradoxical and end my evening with relatively expensive chocolate:

1 lb of Barilla macaroni - $1.50
28 oz can of Hunt's crushed tomatoes - $1.50
2 - 15 oz cans of store-brand cannellini beans - $.79 each ($1.58)
a few cents worth of olive oil and dried herbs

For less than $5, I made a nutritious meal with quality ingredients.  I provided my husband and I with an adequate amount of protein with a moderate amount of heart-healthy fat, as well as cancer-fighting lycopene and fiber-rich unrefined carbohydrate.  Not only did we eat until we were full, but when we got to that point, we still have enough leftover to eat it for lunch tomorrow and share those leftovers with my buddies outside of Burger King.

a whole world of difference

I'll tell you, it's really difficult eating all this chocolate to prepare for my round-up.  I mean, really, there's only so much high-quality, ethically-created, sustainably-sourced dark chocolate one girl can eat before....she moves on to the next bar.

I knew I would get chocolate tonight, because it's Friday and it goes so nicely with wine and relaxation.  I'm currently composing this post in what will surely become a fruitless effort to avoid "seconds" on tonight's Taste Test - Equal Exchange Very Dark Chocolate.

I'm not going to say much about it right now, else it would nullify the point of a chocolate round-up (coming soon, I promise!), but I want to share the thrilling experience I had actually purchasing the chocolate tonight.

There is a wonderful, independent natural foods store near my home, Essene Market.  In addition to consistently stocking my favorite brand of seitan and providing a tasty and innovative salad/hot foods bar, they have an impressive array of chocolate bars: Dagoba, Green & Blacks, Endangered Species, and Equal Exchange bars, and in every flavor imaginable!  Tonight, I went over with ever intention of leaving with a banana and a small dark Green & Blacks bar, but when I saw that Equal Exchange was on sale, I knew I had to give it a try.

Even now, it sits on my table, beckoning my return.

Before I give in to Friday, though, I wanted to share an article my mom photocopied for me from the November 2010 issue of Christianity Today about the recent obsession with quality of food.  The title of the article is "A Feast Fit for the King" and it was contributed by Leslie Leyland Fields.

In the article, Ms. Fields discusses the shift in focus lately, provoked by documentaries like Food, Inc, books like The Omnivore's Dilemma, and far-too-frequent food recalls brought on by unsafe conditions ultimately poisoning our food supply.  She examines eating as both sustenance and as righteousness.

Obviously, she can't finish the article without pointing out that righteousness can only be achieved through Christ and not of our own efforts, but there are many thought-provoking asides along the way there.  Ms. Fields notes that one of the driving forces, whether we realize and admit it or not, behind what she calls the "new food movement" is our desire to somehow make ourselves better through the way we choose to fuel our bodies.

It has long been my view that more Christians should be vegan/vegetarian, and would be if they really thought about it.  Perhaps that is why the new food movement is gaining such ground and leading to such innovation in food sourcing, eating, and cooking.  If you care about the world, God's Creation, if you will, it should be natural that you would want to protect and preserve it by whatever means necessary, short of harming another part of Creation.

Although Ms. Fields praises the new food movement for making a strong stand on eating and [otherwise] consuming ethically-sourced food, she brings up one of my favorite justifications for not making the decision to forgo meat and whatever else you'd like to lump into the Undesirable category: orthorexia.  She provides a pretty extreme example, but I really wish people would stop thinking of people who give a crap about themselves and the world around them as diseased or unhealthy.  I don't want to eat dead cow that's been injected with drugs I wouldn't take if they were prescribed to me.  I guess that means there's something wrong with me.

The bottom line of this article is that people appear to be making an attempt at righteousness through restrictive diets.  I can't stand behind that as a condemnation (only of their apparent attempts to achieve righteousness/purity without God's help).  I can only stand behind it as a cheerleader, encouraging people to actually make an effort to care about the world in which we live.  We (humans) have been blessed with so much: a huge star at just the right distance to heat us and grow us and not [necessarily] kill us; intelligent minds, capable of creations and innovations beyond most peoples' imaginations; countless varieties of food that is nourishing to our bodies and when done right, helpful to the land's fertility.  We are so fortunate that we have the opportunity to choose whether we will eat vegetables or Cheetoes, Kit Kats or lentils.  I hope you'll read the article, but what I want you to take away from it is gratitude that we can make these choices to care for our bodies and for our world, and how very wonderful it is that so many new people are making those choices every day.

Kum-ba-ya, MoFos.  Have some chocolate and smile :)