My Thanksgiving

This is a typical Thanksgiving, for me. For the past seven years or so, I’ve pretty much done small Thanksgivings, either by myself (yes, really) or just with a few other people. This year, there were four of us - my parents, Alex, and me, at my house in my tiny kitchen.

It’s good when the plate is loaded with a variety of tasty eats, and this is one time of year that I don't mind my foods touching. I made many of the things my family typically enjoys, with a few changes to accommodate Alex’s requests, and of course everything was vegan. Clockwise, starting at 12:00 on the plate, we had:

• Cornbread dressing, made with cornbread, biscuits, celery, and onion
• Paula Deen’s corn casserole with vegan analogs (Better Than Sour Cream, Earth Balance, no cheese)
• Broccoli Casserole with a Daiya cheeze sauce similar to what I used as the macaroni and cheeze base, with cashew cream in place of soymilk
• Roasted sweet potatoes with maple and pecans
• Roasted Brussles sprouts
• Tofurkey with vegetables accompanying it during the roast (onion, carrot, celery)
• Cranberry relish
• Mashed potatoes, mushrooms, and mushroom gravy

All four of us enjoyed the meal. My parents even enjoyed the Tofurkey – my dad went back for seconds! I had offered to get some (pre-cooked) turkey for them, and thankfully they declined.

The cats are not enjoying the company; they’ve hidden themselves out of sight and are keeping each other warm in a bed built for one and have only come back into the open now that my folks have returned to their hotel:

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving, or a wonderful Thursday. I’ll share the details on the Derby Pie tomorrow – it was delicious! Right now, I have a lot to be thankful for, but on a lighter note - I’m thankful I’m not a Bengals fan. Cincinnati sports teams have broken my heart one too many times.

Restaurant food at home: 2 of 2

I really enjoy eating out. Yesterday’s pasta was a dish ordered out of desperation, on vacation. When I find a good restaurant, I love love love eating out. I’m not quite ready to say that my favorite dish is whatever someone else cooks*, but I still love not having to cook - on occasion. I go out usually once a week, sometimes twice. I’ve found a generous handful of local restaurants I like, and there are more I’m eager to try. So tonight, I share with you something I’ve enjoyed when eating out but have never made for myself. It turned out pretty well.

I have eaten wheatberries only two times before this. That is inexplicable, because although I enjoyed them, I had not eaten them again until just now. My first time was at Third Avenue Cafe in Louisville, and the second was at Myra’s Dionysus here in Cincinnati.

So I buckled down and halfway recreated something I had at two restaurants at home.

My home version isn’t quite as chock-full of goodness and the Third Avenue version that included celery, onion, and carrots, or the Myra’s version with black eyed peas, dried cranberries, onion, garlic, mint, and lemon tahini dressing. Mine, though, was still absolutely delicious.

I didn’t measure, but here’s the ingredients:

• Cooked wheatberries
• Cooked edamame
• Apple
• Dried cranberries

This is dressed with lots of apple cider vinegar and a little olive oil. It was delicious. I actually didn’t look back at the previous salad ingredients until I was composing this post. This salad is best enjoyed at room temperature, but it’s okay chilled as well. I know I couldn’t wait to eat my leftovers and it was pretty good straight from the fridge.

*I heard Mario Batali say this on The Splendid Table. I understand the sentiment, but I don’t agree.

Falafel Feast and Quinoa Tabouli

The other day, I was having a serious craving for tabouli. This traditionally Middle Eastern salad is something I’ve only recently come to enjoy. I think I had a bad first experience with tabouli in a Lebanese restaurant where it was nearly entirely parsley and was just too much to chew.

Falafel feast with dilly tzatziki, hummus, quinoa tabouli, whole wheat pita, and fresh sliced cucumber, carrots, and celery.

Alex and I talked about going to Myra’s for dinner to enjoy some tabouli, but after having seen several bloggers making falafel recently, I decided to try this at home and make my own feast of falafel, hummus, and tabouli.

The first thing I did was to make tzatziki, and I adapted a recipe so much that I am putting my on tzatziki recipe below. This is something I came up with on my own that was good, though. Really good. I used dill, and I’m not sure that’s entirely authentic, but that’s a whole ’nother question about whether I can make any authentic food. Let me tell you, though, I bought a big bunch of fresh dill and I loved the smell. I think I’ll have to try growing dill next year.

I’ve made falafel before, but only from a boxed mix. The reason I tried making it myself again was because I figured I could bake it instead of frying it. I’m not against fried food, but it’s too much trouble for me at home, and it’s probably best it’s a special treat for eating out.

This was my first attempt in making “real” falafel, and I used a recipe I saw recently on Vegan Epicurean. This turned out wonderfully. I used a mix of garbanzo beans and soybeans and for green herbs I used both dill and cilantro, and I did use her suggestion to include raw sesame seeds. I mixed all the ingredients in my teeny-weeny food processor and it wasn’t too terribly difficult. Alex rolled them for me. He wants to make sure he gets credit.

Vegan Tzatziki

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup vegan mayo, I use Vegenaise
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• Juice from 1/2 lemon
• 1/4 cup fresh dill
• 1/4 teaspoon paprika
• dash cayenne
• 1/2 cup chopped cucumber
• 1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Method:

Place Vegenaise, garlic, lemon juice, dill, paprika, and cayenne in blender. Blend until smooth. Just before serving, mix in cucumber and parsley.

Tzatziki is usually made with yogurt, and this is one of those things that gets stronger as it ages. I made this in the morning when I realized we would be having falafel, and it was just perfect by suppertime.

I also made hummus in the food processor. Actually, I made that right before I made the falafel and I didn’t worry too much about cleaning it in between.

The final component of this feast was the tabouli. Even though I was craving tabouli and I had bulgur on hand, I decided to veer from the tradition and make mine with quinoa. I used a recipe I found online, and I used red quinoa. Even though I only used one cup of dry quinoa, this made so much tabouli that we will be eating it for days. But hey, that’s what it might take to satisfy this craving.

My biggest mixing bowl, nearly full with quinoa tabouli. I’m adding the tomato a serving at a time, though, to keep it fresh.

Even though all these components were a lot of work, the ingredients went with each other (a few lemons, a bunch of parsley, a bunch of dill, cucumbers all over the place, sesame in the falafel and tahini in the hummus, and so forth). And I’m not going to pretend that this is authentic by any means, but it’s good. Good, good food, and that is the reward for all this work.

Oh my, I feel like I’ve fallen to peer pressure. Again. Do you get cravings just by seeing what someone else is eating?

Braised Doozer Sticks

Radishes. These guys looked so good, all bright red and leafy, with little roots reaching out. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an affinity for radishes as a part of the generation that grew up watching Fraggle Rock.

Fraggle Rock was a children’s television show during the mid-1980s with lots of singing, dancing, and Muppets. All the characters ate radishes, and the littlest characters made them into sweet sticks that were good for building structures that would later be eaten. I actually searched for a recipe for Doozer sticks and found a neat compilation of dishes by the Fraggle cook, Boober.

Short of eating a slice or two raw at a salad bar, or in the guacamole along with a piece of jicama at Nada, or, the worst example, getting a dried out piece of radish in a bagged salad, I didn’t know what to do with these beauties. I did slice one up to enjoy on its own, but I wanted to play with the rest. I probably should have exampled more cookbooks, because I only found a few recipes I was willing to try when searching the web for people-recipes, not Fraggle-recipes.

Enter Rachael Ray. She has a recipe for braised radishes that looked like it was worth a shot. Of course I made substitutions for the chicken stock and butter, but I also couldn’t find shallots at my inconsistent neighborhood grocery store, so I bought a bag of pearl onions.

I blanched the onions in their skins, then chopped off the tops and bottoms to procure teeny sweet pearl onions. I set these aside because I figured they’d cook more quickly than the radishes.

I prepared the radishes by chopping off their tops and roots. (Actually, the whole radish a root. Radish comes from the Latin radix, which means root. I should go thank my high school etymology teacher). I put the radishes in some stock along with a bit of salt, sugar, and red wine vinegar, then boiled away. I guessed when to add in the onions so they’d cook just a little more.

I didn’t know how the radishes would taste or what to serve with them, so I played it safe with some mashed potatoes (always a favorite) and leftover peas from my stir-fry. The radishes were good, they had a firm texture like other root vegetables, and the flavor was very mild compared to the bite they give when raw. I’m not sold on doing this again, though, as it was labor intensive and underwhelming. I was also a little naively surprised that they didn’t stain everything reddish purple the way beets do; in fact, I’d say the pinkish hue in my dish comes from the red wine vinegar. But that’s just me making a false association between two things with a similar shape.

Am I missing out on radishes here? Or should I head directly for the daikon?

Cucumber Salad, twelve years in the making

Do you know what that is? Friends, this is chilled bowl of vinegary cucumbery goodness.

Confession: when I first decided to be vegetarian, I didn’t know what to eat. I ate Thomas wheat bagels and cucumbers. Every day. I don’t know how I held out, or why I didn’t look for anything better. For years after, I stayed away from the cucumber aside from a slice or two in the occasional sandwich. People who knew me back when I ate them all the time couldn’t believe that I didn’t like cucumbers, as all evidence pointed to them being a favorite food.

Second story: I was a waitress for precisely three days. I quit, or was fired, but in any event it was a mutual agreement. The boss was a jerk, the restaurant was a mess, and the place closed soon after. It was one of those meat-and-three kind of places you find all over the South where you can get a quick lunch because most items are prepared ahead of time. What does this have to do with cucumbers, you ask? One of the duties of the waitresses was to make the tomato and cucumber salad, which was one of the side item choices at the restaurant. Like I said, the place was a mess – literally dirty – and I lost my desire to eat the cucumber and tomato salad.

Now, though, it’s been a dozen years since any of that happened, and I was ready to try again. Well, that and I had two cucumbers I didn’t know what to do with. So I made a cucumber salad, but just with cucumber, a spoonful of sugar, and apple cider vinegar. Let the vinegar work its pickley magic on the cucumber and chill the whole thing. Tomatoes and onions are optional but make a great addition to this salad.

Thanks for reading my story. Who would have thought I’d have so much history with a cucumber? Has anyone else had a personal aversion to a food? How did you get over it?

Jacques Pepin Potatoes, via Rachel Ray (really!)

I’ve been watching a lot of television lately. Much more than normal, and branching out to programming I don’t typically watch. So, while napping on the couch this weekend, I awoke to Rachel Ray and was intrigued by her squished potatoes. Over the past few days I’ve eaten so many mashed potatoes because they are a soft, filling food, and I had half a bag of Klamath pearl potatoes left. These were perfect for pommes fondantes in the style of Jacques Pepin, or, as Rachel calls them, squished (rather than smashed) taters.

Squished potatoes with ketchup, roasted broccoli, and a patty I’ll write about tomorrow.

These little potatoes turned out perfectly. I was a little worried at one point that they would not brown, or that the liquid would not evaporate, but they were delicious. The first potato I squished, though, I pressed a little too enthusiastically, and it collapsed under the pressure of my drinking glass-turned-squisher. Other than that, it was a foolproof recipe.

To make these you’ll need:

• small potatoes, scrubbed thoroughly and bad spots removed
• vegetable broth
• oil
• salt and pepper
• fresh herbs, like rosemary, chives, or parsley, if you have any

Place the potatoes in a single layer in a pot or skillet with a lid. If your potatoes don’t all fit in a single layer, save some for later. (Or get a bigger pot!) Fill the pot with enough broth so that it comes halfway up the potatoes and add a tablespoon or so of oil, depending on how many taters you have.

Cover the pot with the lid and bring to a boil. Once it boils, turn down to a simmer and let the potatoes steam for 10-15 minutes. Then remove the lid and boil until the broth evaporates. I turned my potatoes because I wasn’t sure they would cook evenly. Rachel Ray didn’t tell me to do that, but I was paranoid about getting these taters cooked through.

When the broth is evaporated, “squish” each potato. You don’t want to smash them. I used a tall drinking glass but you can also use a mug, a ladle, or even a spoon. Just put a crack in each potato. Continue to cook them, turning once, to brown each side. With the oil they steamed in, and a non-stick pot, this really works like a charm. Season with salt and pepper, and garnish with herbs.

Yeah, so, I didn’t use any herbs, as the entire reason I tried this recipe at all was to use some potatoes I had on hand. Instead, I ate these taters with some LocalFolks Foods ketchup. To me, it’s like what you’d get if you made apple sauce with tomatoes instead of apples. This stuff is so good and so different from Heinz. Funnily enough, it’s sweeter and it tastes more like tomatoes. They use evaporated cane juice rather than h1gh fruct0se c0rn syrup* along with tomato puree, vinegar, and spices.

I’ve written about LocalFolks Foods before when I tried their mushroom patties (also delicious!) and yet again I can’t wait to try more of their stuff. Just like I’m encouraged to try more recipes in a cookbook when the first few I try are great, I’m encouraged to keep buying LocalFoods in my Farm Fresh bin.

* I get spammy comments when I spell this out!

Beet & Jicama Salad

I’ve been having so much fun trying lots of new foods. I also like to read about them and see what they look like while they’re growing, too.

My new kitchen has about one square foot of counter space, so I usually set up shop on the dining room table.

Now beets, I know, but only in one way: pickled, jarred, and sweet. And just like these raw ones did, staining everything red.

Jicama is something I found by accident by eating some and loving it. There’s a Mexican restaurant here that garnishes guacamole with radishes and jicama, and I love it and asked what it was. Like they say, there’s no stupid question, and I’m glad to have found this tasty treat. I also read about eating it raw in this article from Care2 and saved half of the jicama to eat by itself.

I read several recipes that combined raw beets and jicama in a salad and came up with a pretty good dish. I can see now why many suggest shredding the beets, as they were pretty hard to eat raw in the little chips I cut them into. I used half the jicama and two beets.

I chipped veggies dressed was made with lime juice, orange juice, cumin, coriander, and cilantro.

The jicama chips are actually white, but the beets tinted them red. It has a crunchy texture similar to a really firm apple, and it’s slightly sweet and really watery and refreshing. Peeling and cutting them was a lot of work, but it’s kept for several days in the fridge and I’m still enjoying both the jicama chips and the salad.

I think I’ve found two good ways to eat jicama, but I’m going to have to cook my beets going forward.

Carrot & Raisin Salad

Part of what draws me to certain cookbooks or blogs (I’m looking at you, Vegan Crunk) is familiar recipes, made in a new way that aligns with my health goals and values. Perhaps I should learn to make these adjustments myself, and maybe one day I will. For now, I’m doing things as the recipes suggest. I’ve tried a lot of new foods and even grown to love some new favorites, but nothing can really replace those long-time favorites, whether it’s a chewy oatmeal cookie or this carrot and raisin salad.

My grandmother would make carrot and raisin salad, a great side dish or snack that could be made with a little or as much carrot as you like and just tossed together on the spot. Grate the carrot, add a dollop of mayonnaise and a generous sprinkle of sugar, and some raisins. The carrots are sweet and the raisins swell with the juices, making this is a good, crunchy sweet salad. Distinctively Southern, Chick-Fil-A offers something like this.

I found a recipe for this salad in a new cookbook I’d been drooling over, The Vegan Soul Kitchen. In his recipe, Bryant Terry replaces the raisins with cranberries (which I did not do) and adds toasted walnuts (which I did add). He fancies it up by calling it “Carrot-Cranberry-Walnut Salad with Creamy Walnut Vinaigrette.” The vinaigrette in the recipe calls for walnut oil, which I did not have and did not buy.

What was most helpful? Replacing the mayo! Duh. I did need a recipe for this as I’ve never used silken tofu and never replaced mayo. Mayo is one of those secret pleasure, but icky-when-I-think-about-it foods for me. So I blended soft silken tofu with some cider vinegar, oil, and Dijon mustard to pour over my grated carrots, raisins, and toasted walnuts.

The dressing was really good – although I did later toss in some sugar – and I’m proud to say that I grated all the carrots by hand without injuring myself.

Holiday Eats, for Two

Although this wasn't technically the first Christmas Alex and I have spent together, it is the first year we've spend the entire day together, and to add to that, it's the first (and hopefully the last, at least for a while) that we spend alone, together. We spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what would be important for us to do to make the day feel special. Okay, I spent a while trying to think about what I wanted to do and trying to get Alex to tell me what he wanted. We ate, played video games, went to the movies, and ate some more.

I knew I wanted to have a special breakfast or brunch. As a kid, we always had French toast and a sausage and egg casserole my grandmother would make. I toyed with the idea of making something similar with vegetarians soysage, but simply ran out of time to plan after a busy week. As it was, I was at the grocery store on Christmas Eve during the single available hour between when I finished work and the store closed.

We had red & green (red bell pepper and broccoli) frittata for breakfast, along with some garlic cheddar biscuits.

For Christmas dinner, we snacked on mushroom bruschetta: chopped cremini and shiitake mushrooms, red onion, garlic, and thyme piled on pan-toasted baguette slices, rubbed with a bit of olive oil. Some we tried with a smear of goat cheese, others just the mushroom mix and bread.

We also ate a spring mix salad topped with pistachios, dried cranberries, goat cheese, red onion, and balsamic vinaigrette. I've said before I don't like to eat right off the stove -- I prefer to relax for a few minutes before eating -- so it was nice to have these appetizers with some Pere Jacques while our oven roasted potatoes, well, roasted in the oven.

I prepared blackened tofu from the recipe in a new cookbook, The Vegan Soul Kitchen, along with some sautéed kale and those oven roasted potato slices. I know I'll be looking at some of Bryant Terry's black-eyed pea recipes for New Year's Day.

This meal was certainly a success. and although I can't say this will become a Christmas tradition for us, it was certainly a very nice meal for our first Christmas alone together. At least Alex liked the meal better than the movie I wanted to watch (Mixed Nuts).

Vegan Mashed Potatoes, or Cashew Milk

I think I'll save the details of my Thanksgiving dishes for next year, assuming I'm still keeping up my little blog. If you're just dying to hear about something in particular, let me know, but as most of these dishes are the kinds of things I make once a year, I'm going to save it.

The exception? Mashed potatoes. I love me some potato in pretty much any form. Of course we eat mashed potatoes even when it's not Thanksgiving.



One of the (only) things I learned in my recent cooking class was how to make cashew milk or other nut milks and what they can be used for. Clearly, it seems easy enough to turn mashed potatoes vegan; typically I'll just smash them with a little margarine and not and any milk product or whip them at all, but rather leave little chunks of potato and enjoy the texture. Other times I'll buy a small container of cow's milk to use, a product I don't typically keep in the house. I've tried the soy milk we use on cereal, but it's too sweet. In my class, though, I learned a trick and it was a success!

Take 1 part raw cashews to 4 parts water and blend until it's smooth. Voila!



You can make this better by soaking the cashews overnight, but that's not necessary. This has the texture of whole milk and was frothy and slightly sweet, but it still went really well with the potatoes. I used it just like milk and whipped my potatoes with some cashew milk, Earth Balance, salt and pepper.

For the record, raw cashews aren't really raw. Cashews are seeds that have a double shell surrounding them, which has urushiol, similar to poison ivy. So "raw" cashews are typically steamed to remove the toxic casing. These are called raw because they are not roasted.

Vegetable Highligt: Cauliflower

One of things I want to do more as I cook more at home is to try new ingredients. So far, I've been doing that to an extent, but there's so much farther to go. I've never used bulgur before, or really done tofu well, or even attempted any stir-fry at all. I want to learn how to use more grains, greens, and other ingredients I haven't typically included in my diet.



I have been familiar with cauliflower in two forms: first, raw on a veggie and dip tray; second, pickled in giardiniera. Recently I had a cauliflower cheese dish, and I decided to try oven roasting it without cheese to eat as a healthy side dish. From what I can tell with quick web search, cauliflower is high in fiber, has Vitamin C and some compounds that are thought to be anti-cancer. Way to go!

I just cut a whole head into florets, tossed in my casserole dish with a little olive oil, salt, and garlic powder, and baked at 375F for about 15 minutes. The florets became tender and slightly browned. Yum, yum, yum.

I ate this as a side with barbecue seitan and frozen Mac and Cheez. What a good lunch, and a healthy take on some comfort food.