At long last! It’s finally tomato harvesting time! We got tons of lettuce, are still getting kale, and have been getting green beans and cucumbers for a few weeks now, but there’s something momentous about that first big batch of tomatoes. Something that says, “your garden has arrived.” Everything leads up to tomatoes; they’re the climax. The winter squash and fall kale are the denouement, with canning, perhaps, as an additional baby climax.

My friend Simon (fellow vegan, drummer for Ineffable Robot [new tracks up soon!]) was in over the weekend and we ate largely from the garden. The first night, we had Shells al Pomodoro and Cucumber Salad.

Shells al Pomodoro

• 4ish medium-sized tomatoes, gutted and diced
• 6 cloves of garlic, diced
• 1 small green bell pepper
• 1 fresno chili, seeded and diced (optional)
• 1 large handful of fresh basil, chopped
• cooked shells (or noodle of choice)
• salt & pepper, to taste
• olive oil

In a medium-large pan, saute the garlic in olive oil for a few minutes, until it just starts to brown. Toss in the tomatoes and peppers, cooking until tender. Salt and pepper to taste. A minute or two before serving, stir in the basil. Serve over pasta. Easy! Delicious!

Cucumber Salad

• 2 – 3 cucumbers, cubed
• 1 tomato, gutted and cut into medium-sized pieces
• rooster (Sriracha) sauce (to taste)
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 – 2 tbsp olive oil
• toasted pita or tortilla, chopped (optional)
• salt & pepper, to taste

Toss everything together. That’s it.

Be forewarned: this was not one of my best efforts. We had something similar a few weeks ago at an Indian restaurant and I really liked it, so I thought I’d attempt my own version, what with all of those cucumbers to use up. It was a little spicy, because I went overboard with the rooster sauce. I think I also over-soy-sauced it, so add everything little by little. I’ll have to return to this at some point to perfect it. We have a LOT of cucumbers.

The next day, we biked 20 miles (and 20 miles back) to a neighboring town to try out the Red Pepper, a raw vegan restaurant. After the ride there, we were mighty hungry. We got the Italian Pizza and the Raw Tacos, both of which were quite good. The pizza’s crust was probably its standout feature. The tacos were made with a seasoned walnut “meat”. It was pretty amazing. The “shells” were just lettuce, though, so this was a bit more like a salad than tacos. We got some energy shakes for the ride home, which were also good, though I was a little over-full, and thus kinda sluggish for the ride. 40 miles of super hilly terrain is a lot harder than I thought it would be (we biked 25 flat miles two days later, and it was a cinch, comparatively). We were so pooped when we got home that we couldn’t be bothered to cook, so it was vegan pizza time.

We made homemade brats (the best batch ever!) the next night, but that post, friends, is forthcoming.

The next night we rocked this Tempeh & Kale Stew (we’ve also got tons of kale right now):

This stew is very much like the Spicy Potato & Kale Soup, but with carrots, and minus the spicy and parsley. It was pouring out, so this was something of a summer rarity, but very appropriate.

Slimetime’s since hit the road, but I still have lots of maters to use up, so last night I rocked a chili.

There’s no chili better than one made from your heirloom tomatoes, especially if you’re growing multiple varieties. The freshness and variation in flavor really take the flavor in interesting, often inimitable, directions. This particular batch was made with Black Krim (our favorite–dense, not too sweet, not too acidic, very flavorful), Supersonic Orange (a new one this year–very tangy), and Oaxacan Pink (gigantic, fairly sweet). It made for a somewhat sharp, but slightly sweet chili–a perfect chili for crackers. Outstanding!

Once again, Amy has left me for the (always) sunnier climes of Philadelphia for an artist residency at the Philadelphia Art Hotel. I’ve been feeling a little uninspired in the kitchen lately, but for some reason–probably missing her–I felt an overwhelming need to cook it down last night. Strange how sometimes cooking is a burst of creative energy, and others it’s a quiet therapy. Some people use TV to keep them company. I crank up the stereo and cook.

Because (a) any period of extended bachelorhood should start with a giant mess of rice and beans, and (b) the summer makes me crazy for Mexican food, it only made sense to pressure cook a vat of black beans. From there, I made variations on both our Mexican rice and refried beans, coming up with this:

Please forgive the terrible photo! Amy absconded with both the good camera and the great camera (oh, the dictates of art!). So hold on to your seats, the next 3 weeks will be a little bumpy. In the meantime, check in on her blog for great art and great photos.

Pardons aside, what you’re looking at is refried black beans on a toasted tortilla, with avocado and tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and Mexican rice with fresh purple pepper, jalapenos, and tomatoes from our garden.

The refried black beans are made the exact same way as standard refried beans, but subbing black beans for pintos. This version of Mexican rice was made the standard way, but with:

• 2 small purple peppers, seeded and chopped
• 2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and diced
• 1 medium-sized yellow onion, diced
• 2 medium-sized tomatoes, cut into large-ish pieces (not de-boogered)
• 4 cups of veggie stock
• 2 cups of brown rice

Stay tuned for possible variations on the above!

Dear Peoples: It’s almost summer! Time to dust off the grill, as well as those grilling recipes. We posted last year about making your own black bean burgers–since then, we’ve gotten a pressure cooker and started cooking our own beans. Man, what a difference! This latest batch of black bean burgers was the best we’ve ever made! I can only guess, but I’d wager that not sitting in a can of liquid for weeks/months/years helps these guys stay way more solid.

Observe–these suckers aren’t even baked yet and they’re almost solid enough for the grill! After baking lightly and then grilling, they were perfect. (We doubled the recipe and froze the rest.)

We ate them with this kale (sans sesame seeds, and with S & P). ’twas a well-rounded, satisfying meal! Huzzah!

The universe favors parsimony. Remember this. You exit through the turnstile as someone enters. The universe smiles. Ralph Nader weeps tears of joy. All is efficient, all is bright.

Which is a fancy way of saying, I love to work with leftovers (as you’ve probably noticed).

Tonight’s challenge:

• leftover beans (kidney and black) from that chili a while ago
• quinoa from a party/potluck a few nights ago
• seitan chik’n cutlets from that gumbo a week back
• locally grown spinach (this is about the only local green we can get right now, so we’re all over it)

I wish this were a bit more genius, but…well…, pretty much just mix everything together. Specifically, you’ll want to cut the chik’n cutlets into short strips and saute in Earth Balance ™ in a large skillet over medium heat until they’re brown on one side. Flip them and toss in the spinach, dousing with a bit of olive oil. Meanwhile, drain and rinse your beans, then dump them in too. Finally, add the quinoa, stir well, and cover, cooking until everything is as hot as you want it.

These are the approximate amounts:

• 2 seitan chik’n cutlets, cut into short strips
• 1 – 2 cups chopped spinach, chopped coarsely
• 1 cup kidney and/or black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1.5 cups dry quinoa
• 3 cups veggie stock (cook the quinoa in veggie stock instead of water)

Ralph Nader will be over at 7pm.

This is going to seem weird: baked potatoes slathered in Earth Balance ™, topped with homemade chili, topped with homemade tempeh soysage. Behold, the Li’l Spudley!

But furrealz, is it any weirder than chili cheese fries? I think not. Amy’s had a taste for some kind of chili potato for the last few days, so I thought I’d surprise her by acquiescing (note 1: I was the initial hater). Sadly, I hadn’t though in advance to soak cashews to make sour cream and we were out of silken tofu. But chili and potato somehow wouldn’t be enough…so why not move in the entirely other direction?, thought I: tempeh soysage. Amy has highly skeptical of this twist (note 2: Now Amy’s the hater). Luckily, our friend Maddog was here and was game for my experiment, putting the pressure on Amy to indulge my strange flight of culinary fancy. As it turns out, this was pretty awesome (note 3: It’s awesome!). The buttery potato brings out the sweetness of the chili, while the soysage brings out the spice. It’s just right.

All you need is:

• baked potatoes
• Earth Balance ™, optional
• chili: Roasted Poblano Chili or Standard Chili (I recommend the Poblano for this)
• tempeh soysage (you could also use tempeh soyrizo, for a switch)
• green onions (optional)

We had this again a few nights later, with green onions. Unlike Amy, I’m a potato musher-downer. Deal with it.

Fantastic!

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!

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!

Perusing Chow Vegan, we stumbled on this post about chili fries. This seemed like just the thing on an unseasonably warm fall day.

Unlike Chow Vegan, we love beans, so we pressure-cooked some up and made our own chili. We followed the recipe for Spicy Baked Potato Chips, but cut the taters into fry shapes and left out the cayenne, since the chili had enough kick on its own.

We topped it with Follow Your Heart cheddar which, while helping to scratch the cheese part of the chili cheese fry itch, wasn’t ideal. Don’t get me wrong–these were awesome–we just don’t eat a lot of processed stuff and these types of cheeses always feel really processed to me. A homemade nacho cheese probably would have been a better choice, but we’ve been a little nooched out lately and most faux-cheese recipes are centered around the nooch.

Cheese aside, the awesome thing about these is that, though they felt like a total indulgence, they’re actually not bad for you. The fries (a bit of a misnomer here) are actually baked (using a high heat oil–safflower) and the chili was made from scratch with canned tomatoes, freshly cooked black beans, carrots and celery from our garden, and onions from a local farm. Once you get over the psychosomatic “I destroyed myself” feeling, you realize you actually feel pretty good after eating this. Huzzah!

There are countless tofu scramble recipes out there…and they’re all roughly the same. Sautee some tofu with turmeric and nu yeast. Add sundry spices. Vary by adding other vegetables.

For those in need of a recipes, allow me to muddy the scramble-y waters:

Tofu Scramble

Required!

• 1 lb tofu, drained
• 1 small – medium onion, diced
• 1/3 cup nu yeast
• 1 tbsp turmeric
• 3 sprigs fresh / 2 tsp dry rosemary
• 3 sprigs fresh / 2 tsp dry oregano
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 tsp chili powder
• cooking oil

Optional! (any or all of the following will enliven your scramble)

• 1 small bag / 1 – 2 cups chopped spinach
• 1/2 can black beans
• 1 handful chives / 2 stalks green onions, chopped
• 1/2 green bell pepper

In a large pan, sautee the onion (and green pepper, if using) in oil over medium. When the onions just begin to get soft, crumble in the tofu. Mix well, breaking up the large tofu bits with your spatula. Add in the spices. Cook for about 10 minutes, then add in the remaining optional ingredients, if it suits your fancy. Cook for about 5 more minutes, then reduce heat to low. Serve when the mood strikes you and/or the bagel/toast is done.