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Amy’s triumphant return from Budapest brought Grab ‘n’ Growl week to an end, as well as a large bag of authentic Hungarian paprika. Given these two fantastic new developments, it was time to cook it the hell down.

We’d been searching for a good recipe for Wild Rice & Mushroom Soup for quite some time, never really satisfied. I recently stumbled upon this one from Sweet Cheeks in the Kitchen, in turn nabbed from the Candle Cafe Cookbook. It was sufficiently awesome that it required almost no modification–we added half a cup of soy creamer; that’s it. I also learned something really interesting: when a recipe calls for a dry white wine, it’s acceptable–nay, preferable–to use a dry vermouth. It’s cheaper, dryer, and saves better than an average white wine.

Not surprisingly, we rounded the soup out with breadsticks and an amazing salad based on our recently acquired paprika.

The salad was inspired by VeganYumYum’s Avocado Wasabi Salad, with paprika taking the central role in place of wasabi.

Check it:

Paprika Cashew Chickpea Salad

Cashews & Chickpeas

• 1 cup raw cashews
• 2 tbsp paprika
• 1 cup cooked chickpeas
• 2 tsp sugar OR enough maple syrup to coat the cashews
• 1 tbsp oregano
• 1 tbsp soy sauce/tamari/shoyu
• salt & pepper, to taste

You can approach the cashews one of two ways: baking or sauteing. We sauteed them, but our friend Ryan has baked them with better results. So.

Baked Candied Cashews

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a medium-sized bowl, coat the cashews in maple syrup. Once thoroughly coated, toss in 1 tbsp paprika, oregano, salt, and pepper. Bake until brown, stirring often.

Fried Candied Cashews

In a medium-sized pan over medium heat, saute the cashews in high heat oil, coating in sugar, 1 tbsp paprika, oregano, salt, and pepper. Cook until the spices and oil have congealed. Remove from heat. Note: they’ll seem soft at first, but they’ll firm up.

Paprika Chickpeas

In the same pan (if such a beast was used) as you cooked the cashews, saute the chickpeas in the soy sauce and remaining spices, until well coated and no liquid remains, salting and peppering to taste.

Salad Dressing

• 1/4 cup hummus
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp honey/agave
• water, to desired consistency

Blend all ingredients in a blender until smooth.

Finally, the salad

Toss the chickpeas, cashews, some diced purple onions, and cherry/grape tomatoes (optional) in with some fresh lettuce and enough dressing to coat lightly.

Growing up, I ate a lot of leftovers. My parents both worked two jobs so it was much more efficient to make a few big meals and then eat leftovers on off nights–especially since I could heat them up myself. Since you can’t always eke out a full meal from a single leftover, you often have to combine things or eat separate dishes. My mom referred to this as “Grab ‘n’ Growl”, a term passed down through the generations in my family’s unique (read: very bizarre) lexicon, which posits a family as a bunch of Neanderthals scavenging the fridge for food, battling over the best bits. Closer to the truth, perhaps, than we’d like to admit.

With Amy in Budapest, it’s officially grab ‘n growl week. This is sort of weird, since it’s just me, but I feel less lonely if I growl. Since I tend to do most of the cooking, the swingin’ bachelor life doesn’t necessitate eating cold beans out of cans, scratching my crotch, and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle. I may prowl the house growling, but I can still drink whiskey from a glass. What the bachelor life does invoke, however, is my occasional need to purge the refrigerator of leftovers and about-to-go-bad food. On a small scale, this is best accomplished in a single meal. But with Amy gone–taking her need for delicious, inventive cuisine with her–I’m free to do a major purge, using up everything in strange and sometimes wonderful/sometimes not combinations.  In other words, this isn’t generally the kind of food I’d foist on other people.

But from the ashes doth arise the phoenix! Behold these Curried Potato Everything Cakes aka Poor Man’s Pakora:

These puppies used up mashed potatoes, mushrooms, Brussels sprouts, kale, and a scosh of raw sushi filling, as well as some leftover Chik’n Almond Bake and crushed crackers for the breading. For combining so many different–and somewhat disparate–ingredients, these were actually pretty awesome. The cracker/Chik’n Almond Bake combo was the key.

I enjoyed this with leftover Avocado Wasabi Salad ala Vegan Yum Yum:

Remember that Roasted Poblano Chili? The leftover beans (I still haven’t mastered the exact yield of dry beans when you cook them) were a perfect base (along with rice, obviously) for beans and rice.

On Saturday, I made a green Thai curry out of a small smattering of frozen veggies (ack! I know), tofu, and the leftover raw Siamese Dream Soup.

And finally, last night I made a version of Zuppa Toscana, using up the rest of the mashed potatoes; some dilapidated turnips that didn’t make it into the Potato, Turnip, & Rosemary Soup; and the unused tempeh (we get it in bulk) from the Smoky Tempeh Hummus Wraps.

That’s a lot of food! As I’ve chiseled away at out leftovers (and this post), it’s become clear to me that we both cook and shop for our palettes, not from our resources. Forgive me if I’m stretching here, but this, in a general sense, is one the key problems with the American food industry. You can get as much of anything, from anywhere, at any time, as you want.  The variety comes from the store, not from your kitchen and brain.

Equally problematic is the amount of time between trips to the grocery store. Like most Americans, we tend to go once a week, if that. We task ourselves with predicting what our future selves will want to eat–based on what? How can we know what we’ll want to eat 3 days from now? This means that as the week wears on, we become less satisfied with our choices and less likely to cook with what we bought. Scanning our half-full fridge, nothing looks good. So we either (a) settle on something merely “acceptable” or (b) give up completely and go out for dinner. I’m not against going out to eat, but I think it should be a deliberate choice–because you want to, not because you need to. But (a) is a bit of a crapshoot; on nights when I’m feeling creative, it’s a fun challenge and usually turns out pretty tasty. On off nights, it’s a burden and “edible” suffices.

One solution to this is to shop more frequently and buy less. This also helps ensure the freshness of your food. The other solution, I’m afraid to say, may be getting comfortable with “pretty good” some of the time. Maybe it’s been a good week for culinary creativity, but I feel like I’ve eaten pretty well with nary a thought of hitting up the grocery store (okay…that’s not entirely true…when I ran out of soy sauce, I felt a ripple of panic). This may owe, in part, to the very fact that I’ve used up almost everything in the fridge; my choices have dwindled as the week wore on. While some choice is certainly good, a lot of choice, it turns out, is actually rather bad (think about your occasional trip to an all-vegan restaurant–it’s almost paralyzing; you’re not accustomed to so many choices). The problem with too many choices is our tendency to weigh any single choice against the combined best parts of all the other choices. While this doesn’t actually change how good any single choice is, it does change how satisfied we feel.

So my final thought, in this lazy cognitive meandering, is that our enjoyment of our food is often based on our frame of reference. Given my limited options, what I came up with seemed really good–as soon as I’d eliminated the other possibilities. This is the fulcrum on which “leftovers” become “leftover surprise”.

Rrrrrooaawww!

Amy left last week for a return trip to Budapest to finish a video collaboration, make new work, and prepare for an opening there (if you’re in or around Budapest, be sure to check it out). She’s kicking so much ass it’s hard not to feel ineffectual!

Since she was flying at night, we had time for a nice dinner. Here main requests were “protein power and potatoes”. After rummaging around the intertubes for a while, we decided to kick it eclectic-style and settled on:

• mashed potatoes
• sauteed mushrooms
• Vegan Dad’s Crispy Cajun Chickpea Cakes
• steamed broccoli
• carrot, beet, and lettuce salad, tossed in a light vinaigrette

Chickpea Cake Mixins

Bright, crispy, and delicious

If you’re like us, you often feel nostalgic for things that maybe aren’t that awesome. But there’s a context, a larger experience that imbues them with something better, gives them a prominent place in our happy memories. The Olive Garden is one of those for us. For both of our families, it was one of the “going out to eat someplace ‘fancy’” defaults. When we (independently of each other) became vegetarian, it became an even better option, since there were still many things on the menu we could eat. Once we became vegan, though, things got a little dicier. Depending on who you ask, the minestrone, breadsticks, capellini pomodoro, and salad are or aren’t vegan. The pasta may or may not have eggs. The marinara may or may not have meat broth. The salad dressing definitely has cheese in it–there are no vegan dressings.

Since (a) we’ve never been able to get a straight answer and (b) we now live in an area with other family-suitable options (namely, Chinese), we don’t eat at the Olive Garden any more. But every once in a while, we get the hankering for the enveloping warmth of minestrone and hot fresh breadsticks–and a big ol’ vegan salad. So last night, we created some real “hospitaliano”–vegan style.

The minestrone was only slightly modified from this excellent recipe.

Olive Garden-style Minestrone

• 1 medium-sized white onion, diced
• 4 – 6 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
• 1 stalk of celery, diced finely
• 1/2 medium-sized zucchini, cut into small one-inch pieces or half-moons
• 1 small carrot (or half of a large carrot), grated
• a large handful of Italian/Spanish-style green beans (the flat ones–you can sub normal green beans in a pinch), cut into one-inch pieces
• 4 large stalks of kale (the curly kind), cut from the stalk and chopped coarsely
• 4 cups (2 cans) of cooked kidney beans
• 2 cups (1 can) cooked cannellini beans or white beans
• 4 cups (1 large can or 1 large jar) cooked tomatoes, with their juice
• 4 cups veggie broth
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 cup small shell pasta
• 2 tbsp fresh parsley, minced
• 1.5 tsp dried oregano (1.5 tbsp fresh, minced)
• 1/2 tsp dried basil (1.5 tsp fresh, minced)
• 1/4 tsp dried thyme (1 tsp  fresh, minced)
• salt & pepper, to taste
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup red wine (optional)

As you’d expect, saute the onion, garlic, and celery in a large pot over medium heat–in the oil of your choice (I recommend choosing safflower). When the onion has gotten soft, add in the broth, water, tomatoes, carrots, and herbs/spices. Bring it to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. In a separate pot, cook the shells. When they’re done–but al dente–remove from heat, strain, and blanch with cold water. This will help prevent them from getting as bloated and mushy in the soup. A lazier person may decided to add the shells directly to the soup. But you wouldn’t do that. This is hospitaliano.

Once the 20 minutes is up, add in the remaining ingredients and cook until the zucchini and green beans are tender. It’s this crucial step that allows you to trump the Olive Garden–you can add veggies in at the end, ensuring their crispness, a paean to non-flaccid vegetables.

Now let’s trump their bread.

We used this recipe, unmodified, but reposted here for your convenience.

Breadsticks

• 1 1/3 cups of water
• 4 tsp melted Earth Balance ™
• 4 cups of flour
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp yeast
• additional melted Earth Balance ™, for brushing on top
• additional salt, for sprinkling on top
• granulated garlic, for sprinkling on top

Combine all of the dry ingredients, minus 1 cup of flour, ideally in a mixer, using the bread hook attachment.

(We like to keep a giant thing of flour on hand so we can make bread any time we want.)

If you don’t have a mixer, you can theoretically mix by hand and then knead (we just got one for christmas and this was it’s maiden voyage–it was awesome). Combine the wet ingredients in a separate bowl/cup and then add slowly to the dry, while mixing. Now add in the remaining flour. Once the dough is mixed well (about 2 minutes in the mixer), roll out in to 16 long pieces. (We made about 12 and they were slightly fatter than the Olive Garden’s, but still awesome.)  Cover them and let them rise for at least 45 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees, Fahrenheit. Brush the bread with Earth Balance ™ and sprinkle salt on top.  Bake for 15 minutes. When you take them out, brush with Earth Balance ™ again and then sprinkle with granulated garlic.

And finally, the salad.

The salad, to be faithful to the OG original, should have lettuce (obviously), croutons, purple onion, roma tomatoes, black olives, peppers, and shredded carrots. We didn’t have any fresh tomatoes or black olives (which I don’t like) on hand, so we had to make due with some sliced zucchini instead. We made the croutons fresh, from a piece of bread cut into squares, lightly doused on olive oil, salt/pepper/garlic-ed, and toasted. The original salad should also have some sort of cheesy mayonnaise vinaigrette dressing, which we didn’t deign to copy. Instead, we made this vinaigrette, slightly modified.

Italian Vinaigrette Dressing

• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1/2 tsp fresh dill
• 1/4 tsp dried oregano
• 1/4 tsp dried thyme
• 1/4 tsp dried basil
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tbsp agave nectar
• pepper to taste

Combine ingredients in a cruet and shake well.

When you’re vegan, you’re family!

Believe it or not, we occasionally make other people’s recipes–especially Mac & Cheese recipes.

The search for the perfect vegan Mac & Cheese is perhaps paramount even to the search for the perfect vegan chocolate chip cookie. Everyone has a recipe. Or two. Or ten. We’ve actually enjoyed almost all of the recipes we’ve tried, but never really hit upon that One True Mac. Oh, we’ve had tawdry affairs, but they never seem to blossom until full-on relationships. This dynamic is fueled, perhaps, by our waxing and waning love for nutritional yeast, a key ingredient in most vegan macs.

One of the recipes that has floated to the top in recent attempts is VeganYumYum’s VegYum Mac & Cheese. It’s actually a combination of VYY’s mac with a recipe from VegWeb, and, though unacknowledged, very reminiscent of the Mac and Cheese Florentine from Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. In the spectrum of vegan macs, this one’s pretty complex, in both preparation and flavor. In a perfect world, I might tone down the miso and nooch just a hair and let the cashews, potato, and carrot work their magic.

I’m told by my friend Kathy that the Veganomicon recipe is the one to beat, so that’s next on the list. Amy was awesome enough to get me said Veganomicon for christmas, so I’ll post back with the results soon. What’s your favorite vegan mac?

Hello!

Since we’ve been hosting scores of family and friends for the holidays, it’s been far too long since I last posted. I always feel a little sheepish breaking out the camera in the middle of dinner in front of guests; it cheapens the meal somehow. So, sadly, there are very few food photographs from the last two weeks.

Here’s a brief rundown on some of the key meals:

• Amy’s Birthday: Dinner at Eve. Although she serves a largely carnivorous menu, Eve is an excellent chef and can accommodate pretty much any diet with an awesome meal.  This is where we took the above photo.
• Christmas Eve: Tempeh Tacos and Guacamole. My mom has been making a concerted effort to integrate our holiday meals more. Aside from the chicken for their enchiladas, we shared all of the other ingredients.
• Christmas: Chik’n Almond Bake Seitan cutlets, mashed potatoes and gravy, sauteed portobellos, and salad. They had a roast which, at one point, mooed at me.
• 2 Days after Christmas (with Amy’s folks): Vegetable Soup. This one is always a hit with omnis, since it doesn’t attempt to replicate meat. Also, Amy’s parents are totally open to our diet, which makes cooking for them really easy.
• 3 Days after Christmas: Vegan Pizza! We are very lucky to live in a city where you can get vegan pizza with vegan cheese. Eat your heart out Portland! (for anyone near Ypsi/Ann Arbor–it’s College Inn)
• New Year’s Eve: Immense tubs of Guacamole and Hummus with baked pita. The guacamole was annihilated and the hummus was pretty close. I guess a gallon of hummus is a lot.
• New Year’s Morning: Tofu Mark Muffins and Breakfast Shakes. Some of our best friends are in town for a few days–so nothing but the best for them!

And, since it’s the new year and possibly a time for resolutions, maybe now’s the time to go vegan if you’re not: 21 Day Vegan Kickstart.

And now back to our regularly scheduled recipes…

Happy New Year!

Having just delivered her most recent work for the Spring 2010 Collection show at The Gallery Project, Amy finally had a little time on her hands to cook it down in the kitchen. She’d been craving a potato soup for weeks, but doesn’t care for really thick soups, and devised this tasty li’l guy. It’s got the subtlety of a potato soup, with a hint of sharpness from the celery. And it demands croutons with an iron fist. Obey or perish.

Provençal Potato, Leek and Celery Soup

• Four large-ish potatoes with white flesh–such as russet, red, or purple–peeled, then diced
• One large white onion, diced
• Two or three large celery stalks, diced
• Two leeks, diced
• Safflower, or another high-heat oil to taste (for sauteing)
• Veggie bouillon (I used three cubes of Rapunzel brand, sans salt)
• 8 cups filtered water
• 1/4 cup unsweetened soy milk + more to desired consistency
• 1 tbsp. Earth Balance TM
• 1 tbsp. white all-purpose flour
• 1.5 tsp. herbs de provence
• salt and pepper to taste

Combine onion, leeks, and celery in a large soup pot.  Drizzle with high heat oil, add a dash of salt and a couple of cranks from a pepper mill, and saute on medium-high heat until onions are translucent and all veggies are soft.  Add potato pieces and cover mixture with 8 cups water.  Bring to a boil.  Once boiling, add veggie bouillon cubes.  (Note: in this recipe, I don’t want the veggie stock flavor to dominate, so I use one less cube than normally required for eight cups of water; I use three instead of four).

While soup is simmering, make your roux by melting Earth Balance ™ in a shallow saute pan.  Add flour and whisk in soy milk.  Allow to heat through and thicken, stirring sporadically.  Once thick, add roux to soup by stirring it in slowly.  Add more soy milk to desired creaminess.  I keep my soup on the brothy side, not caring too much for very thick cream soups, but adding more roux and soy creamer would thicken this soup right up.  Add herbs d’provence and more salt and pepper to taste.  Using an immersion blender, blend some of the veggies to thicken the broth, or ladle a portion of the soup into a regular blender, and blend until smooth.  Add back into soup and stir.

Serve with freshly baked croutons (mandatory).

We preceded this with an awesome salad, adapted from a recipe in one of Amy’s mom’s cooking magazines.

Salad Goodness with Oranges and Candied Almonds

Candied almonds:

• 1/4 cup almond slivers
• 1 pat Earth Balance TM
• 2 tsp. sugar
• salt and cayenne to taste

Toast almonds in Earth Balance over medium heat.  When lightly toasted, add sugar, salt and cayenne and stir until coated.  Allow to brown and transfer to a bowl to cool.

Dressing (we tripled these measurements to save some for later in a cruet.  I’m so glad we did- it’s my new favorite dressing!):

• 2 tbsp. red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp. honey (you can substitute agave)
• 1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard
• splash of orange juice
• salt and pepper to taste
• 3 tbsp. olive oil

Stir all ingredients to a bowl minus the olive oil.  Quickly whisk while drizzling olive oil into the mixture.  Whisk until dressing is emulsified.

Salad:

• romaine lettuce, plus spinach, etc.
• 1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
• 1 navel orange, peeled and sliced
• candied almonds

Toss all ingredients together, coating evenly with dressing.  Serve with extra dressing, unless you accidentally drank it because you couldn’t help yourself.

Here’s the whole meal:

When I was a kid, I always thought breakfast for dinner was a top thing. Of course, breakfast in those days was 3 bowls of Fruity Pebbles ™–essentially a bowl of candy with milk on it–so you can imagine why my nine-year-old brain would have delighted at this. That being said, I think it’s more than nostalgia that draws us to the occasional dinner-time switch-em-up; there’s something taboo about eating a meal at the wrong time. Or maybe it’s just that breakfast is awesome, but we don’t take the time to go all out very often–so we occasionally have to use our prodigious dinner energies on a breakfast.

This dinner-time inversion was our famous Southwest Scramble.

Take heart fellow vegans, small victories are still possible! This year, for the first time ever, we did away with the traditional mixed Spanksgiving (omni/vegan) “Separate but Equal” dinner in favor of something more communal. You know the meal–an entire vegan feast alongside an entire non-vegan feast, a multitude of dishes that are identical, save soymilk, Earth Balance, and veggie stock in lieu of milk, butter, and turkey stock.

The weekend got off to a great start when we were greeted at the door with vegan oatmeal cookies, which Amy’s omni brother deemed “perfect”. How awesome is Amy’s mom? How awesome is it that Amy’s brother, in a single phrase, eliminated any further necessity to make non-vegan oatmeal cookies?

The vegan bonanza continued through to Spanksgiving too; Amy’s mom typically makes two dressings (you know, stuffing, but not in the turkey)–one with veggie stock and one with turkey/chicken stock. This year, she decided it was too much trouble and that no one would miss the meat stock, which they didn’t. She also traditionally makes both vegan and non-vegan mashed sweet potatoes with candied pecan topping. Though she did decide to make a non-vegan version as well at the last minute, Amy’s brother–our omni-acceptability-barometer–decreed the vegan version just as good, freeing Amy’s mom from any future obligation to make two versions.

Add to this homemade bread and steamed broccoli and cauliflower (there was a cheese sauce for the omnivores), and you have quite a shared meal! The omnivores had turkey and turkey gravy, while Amy and I had Spanksgiving Seitan Faux-Turkey and seitan gravy–though Amy’s dad had some of ours as well.

While it may not always be possible to convince your friends and family of your values, it is possible to achieve acceptance, to build respect, and to erode some of the barriers that keep us from meeting halfway and enjoying a meal together–which, history notwithstanding, is what Spanksgiving is all about.

Spanksgiving Menu:

• Spanksgiving Seitan Faux-Turkey
• Dressing
• Mashed Potatoes
• Steamed Broccoli & Cauliflower
• Mashed Sweet Potatoes w/ Candied Pecan Topping
• Homemade Rolls
• Seitan Gravy
• (Cranberry Sauce – Amy’s fambly ate this)
• (Turkey – Amy’s fambly ate this)

After making chili last weekend, we had some leftover black beans to use up–but my traditional black bean soup is much too close to a chili to seriously entertain as a post-chili-black-bean-use-em-up ™. So I says to myself, “Self, let’s shake things up! Let’s make this more soupy…and tangy! Like a cilantro lime black bean rice, but a soup?!”

While it was pretty tasty, it was still too close to the chili we’d just had, and Amy wouldn’t deign to eat it, so last night, I combined it with some refried beans, cooked the liquid down, and used it like rice & beans for !taco salad!

This taco salad was amazing.

This is probably because all taco salads are amazing, and this taco salad is a subset of all taco salads. Q.E.D.

But first, you have to make the soup:

Phase 1: Tangy Black Bean Barley Soup

• 1 large white onion, diced
• 2 small or 1 large stalk of celery, chopped
• 2 medium-sized carrots, peeled and cut into disks or half-disks
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
• 4 cups (2 cans) cooked black beans (with liquid, if possible–always keep this when pressure cooking!)
• 1 tomato, diced (I used leftover tomato juice from canning)
• 6 cups (or more, to desired consistency) veggie stock
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
• 2 tsp toasted, ground cumin (or just ground, if you don’t have seeds on hand)
• 2 tsp smoked chili powder
• salt & pepper, to taste

In a large pot, begin the Traditional Ceremonial Soup Dance (i.e sautee the onions, carrots, celery, and garlic in oil over medium heat until soft). If using cumin seeds, toast them over medium high heat until fragrant, then grind into a powder using a mortar and pestle. Add the cumin, chili, and some salt and mix well. Add in the black beans, tomatoes (if using), and liquid(s). Continue Traditional Ceremonial Soup Dance by bringing to a boil and then lowering heat and simmering, covered, for 30 – 60 minutes. About 5 minutes before serving, add in the chopped cilantro, and complete the Traditional Ceremonial Soup Dance by salting and peppering to taste.

With Phase 1 complete, move in to Phase 2.

Phase2: Eat the soup.

Now let’s move to Phase 3.

Phase3: Taco Salad

We’ve already made you privy to the taco salad particulars, so the only crucial piece of information is this: In a medium-sized saucepan, combine the remaining soup with 2 cups of refried beans (i’m assuming that 2 people each ate one bowl of soup–adjust accordingly) and cook down the liquid until everything’s “all beany”.

Use in place of normal refried beans in a delicious and nutritious taco salad!