Sunday round-up style, here’s some dishes I didn’t share as I ate them, but I’ve taken these photos over the past two weeks.
Green beans and parsnips; acorn squash stuffed with turnip, carrots, and apple from Passionate Vegetarian.
Yellow and green squash and onions over couscous and tofu with Trader Joe’s Mango Chutney.
Buttercup squash with cinnamon and maple; rainbow chard; Field Roast Celebration Roast. (Thanksgiving trial.)
Emanu is an East African restaurant in town I’d been wanting to go to for a very long time. On the few nights we go out, we typically chose to visit places we’d already been instead of trying the new place. Thankfully, Emanu is no longer new, and I can’t wait to go back.
If you’re familiar with Ethiopian food, this should look familiar:
This was the food for both of us, served on one plate on injera. Injera is like a fluffy crepe made from fermented teff, which is a fine grain grown in Ethiopia. The striking flavor of the injera, to me, is how it resembles a fluffy sourdough pancake.
In addition to the injera under the food, you get rolls of injera to use to pick up and eat the food. Although they provide utensils, traditionally you pick up bites of the food with the bread and eat with your hands.
As for the meal, we got two orders of what amounts to the combination platter, hiwswas (beyaynetu). As shown below, from bottom left to right, this includes: spiced lentils stewed in red sauce; green beans and carrots; spiced cabbage cooked with onions and peppers; collard greens; and, yellow lentils.
Each of these vegetables was really good. I particularly liked the green beans and carrots, which were sweet and crisp with charred roasted bits. The collard greens were also really good, as were both lentil dishes. Everything was good.
We also ordered the vegetarian appetizer, vegetable sambussa. These were deep-fried pockets of vegetables, onions, and herbs. This is a close-up, they were pretty small and just enough to get introduced to the Ethiopian flavors that were new to both of us.
One thing to know about Emanu is that they do not have a liquor license and instead allow you to BYO. The menu is small, but I will certainly be returning for these vegetable dishes. By the end of the night, we were both full on bread and veg and very pleased with our first East African experience.
So, I hear Ethiopian food is popular these days. Did that happen five years ago for those of you who aren’t in Cincinnati? If so, I’m jealous.
Do you find yourself hungry for familiar flavors? I love trying new things, but there are some old standbys that I keep coming back to. I recently tried to choose a favorite recipe to submit to a contest and asked Alex what he thought might do well. He suggested chili, pot pie, and lasagne. All of that is stuff we’ve made dozens of times and all of those are variations of meals I grew up eating.
One thing I love in the summer is making fresh vegetables the way we would when I was growing up, with the slight variation of leaving out the animal fat flavoring. I haven’t missed it, and Alex doesn’t know any better. I told his mom that I’d never had crisp green beans before I had hers.
My plate is a little starch-heavy, but I had some potatoes I wanted to use up and the corn and squash looked really, really good. Plus, I couldn’t find any fresh beans I liked. Instead, I went with collards to get some more green on the plate.
I cooked the squash up like my mom does, although I didn’t get it quite as browned as she does. Maybe when I get older, I’ll have more patience for browning squash. It’s sliced and steamed along with a sweet onion, then mashed and pan-fried with some Earth Balance. This is the star of the plate for Alex.
I’ve made the smothered okra before. This time, Alex tried it, but he left most of it for me! I just can’t get over how sweet these fresh tomatoes taste when they’re cooked down, even when I don’t add any sugar.
I made the creamed corn by using the most pointless kitchen device, the corn zipper, to remove the kernels from two cobs of corn. Then I cooked them with some Earth Balance and soy milk.
I think I remember buying the corn zipper because it’s cute. It has a smiley face on it. It takes off two rows of kernels at a time. That is a lot of work! I can understand why I forgot about this little device when I was making my roasted tomato and corn soup and removing the kernels with a knife!
Alex doesn’t quite get as excited as I do about this kind of supper, but he enjoys it. He tells me that he never had greens before he met me, but he likes them now.
Another meal I loved growing up was called Beanie Burger Biscuit Pie. Maybe this was an early sign of my annoying love of alliteration, or maybe it was a sign of my early love of beans. My mom, who is an awesome cook, doesn’t like that I remember that as the highlight of my childhood, but maybe that’s just what kids do. I think I’ll try to make my own Beanie Burger Biscuit Pie.
How about you – what are your favorite food memories? Do you still enjoy them?
I tried a new restaurant on my recent trip to Memphis! I’m excited because I typically find my myself going back to the same favorites each time I visit. DeJaVu has a vegan section on their menu, plus lots of non-vegan stuff people are raving about on Yelp and Urbanspoon. My folks each ate a chicken dish and weren’t impressed, but Alex and I both enjoyed our meals.
DeJaVu has two locations in Memphis, one downtown and the other newly opened in Hickory Hill. We visited the Hickory Hill location. It’s the larger location and even has space for live music on the weekend. Our visit was for a late lunch on Saturday and the place had a few leisurely diners scattered, televisions mounted on the wall showing ESPN bowling, and music playing over the speakers. The place felt cool, clean, and bright.
They brought out glasses of ice water, a bowl of lemon wedges, and corn muffins. The corn muffins are not vegan, but I hear they’re good. The restaurant has traditional New Orleans food (gator stew, anyone?) as well as Southern Soul standards and a handful of vegan entrees.
All of the vegetable side dishes are vegan. If you’re not familiar with Southern cooking, that may sound confusing. I think it’s remarkable, because it can be tough to even get vegetarian vegetables when everything is “seasoned” with ham hock, fat back, bacon grease, or chicken stock. All unnecessary – diners at DeJaVu may not even notice that the meat is missing in their sides. All the ones I tried were good, too, and I think if I go back I’ll get a 4-veggie plate. And I’ll be sure to try the grilled cabbage.
I chose the mock chicken salad. This was good, but messy. That can’t be a complaint. The salad was tasty and the portion was generous. I chose collard greens and smothered okra for my sides. The greens were good, tender and salty. The smothered okra was my favorite, though, even though it was a little on the sweet side (pictured above, under the sweet potatoes). I love okra, but I don’t eat it much since it scares Alex. And as I found out during lunch, my mom doesn’t like it with tomatoes, so this dish was unlike anything I’ve had before, even though it’s not uncommon. Given different circumstances, this could be a staple. I think I’m going to make something like this at home.
Alex chose the veggie rolls. These were delicious, if heavy, deep fried eggroll style. They were stuffed with curried cabbage, carrots, and raisins and served with a spicy-sweet sauce. The cabbage and carrots were delicious together. He chose spinach and sweet potatoes for his sides. These were both good, and the sweet potatoes were sweeter than most desserts, but he has a sweet tooth and cleaned his bowl.
The only other side I tried was the red beans and rice, which was good and even got the stamp of approval from my mom. These red beans were just spicy enough and in red gravy, topped with fluffy white rice. She also got collard greens, like me, and my father only chose one side: spinach. He liked that so much it was gone before he offered a bite to my mom.
The good news for me is that this place is right around the corner from my grandparents, so I’ll plan to drop in whenever I visit them. That’s not the only reason, convenient as it is, so even after they “leave town” as Papa says, I’ll stop by when I’m in town.
I’ve been busy with the kinds of things that keep me from eating like I want to. I was out of town over the weekend and spent half my time being hungry and politely declining food I didn’t want, and the other half eating pizza (which, after a few slices, I didn’t want).
So when I got home, I was hungry, and hungry for something green. I had the night to myself and cooked up a three-pot supper that hardly required any attention or effort, until it’s time to do the dishes.
Menu: 1/2 bag of frozen black eyed peas, boiled in just water and salt, for about an hour. I think these guys taste just fine without any pork fat, thank you. Next: brown basmati rice, left to simmer on its own for about 40 minutes. Finally, collard greens cook for about 20 minutes in vegetable broth and finish with a splash of vinegar.
Nothing needs much attention, and it’s tasty. Funny, though, that this is the kind of food I eat alone. I used up the last of my sweet & hot pepper and onion relish, though, so I’ll have to find some more.
In addition to my infatuation with my new cookbook (you’ll keep hearing more about that, I promise), I’ve been bookmarking recipes online and waiting for the right time to try them. I had a really good polenta salad at Honey and was eager to try this recipe I found for Fried Polenta with Sweet Garlic Greens.
This was a really quick and simple recipe, but one that requires two pans. I actually made it as a lunch, so that shows how quick and easy it is with a prepared “tube” of polenta and some bagged baby spinach. In one pan, cook sliced red onions and garlic, then add the spinach, cranberries, and pine nuts. In the other skillet, brown slices of polenta.
I think I’m going to try cooking with polenta again. I can’t say that I really liked this mixture. The cranberry and garlic were overpowering. I think I might have to find a way to imitate one of my favorite frozen meals from Trader Joe’s – the polenta with peas and spinach. And if I can’t get the polenta to work the way I want to, I’ll at least have some yellow grits.
Can anyone suggest a good way to try polenta?
Okay, so remember when I tried making vegan sausages by writing down the recipe from Vegan Crunk’s cooking demonstration? And they were a little gummy but the flavor was right?
Well, I now own the cookbook she used: Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. And the cookbook says you might want to cook them in a skillet prior to eating them.
So I thawed the two big sausages I’ve had in my freezer for a couple of weeks and sliced them, then browned them on each side to go in some red beans and rice. Success!
