Jambalaya

We've moved to the South, as you may have noticed, but we still don't know Southern food. That's why I purchased Cookin' Southern: Vegetarian Style by Ann Jackson to be my vegetarian's guide to the new local foods.

Gillian thoughtfully sent us a coupon for vegetarian meat so we tried a new kind of faux sausage, Italian sausage by Lightlife. Because George and I really enjoyed them (nicely browned), I suggested we make Jackson's recipe for jambalaya. My mother used to live in New Orleans and she's always going on about how good the food was there. Now is my chance to try it, one recipe at a time—I'm sure not going to wait around for a vegetarian restaurant to open that serves traditional Southern food. Vegetarian pigs will fly first!

We had different ingredients than Jackson called for, and I hate summer squash, and George didn't want that much sausage (go figure), so we changed around this recipe. If you eat gluten-free, just substitute real meat for the fake (and filled with wheat gluten—eek!) meat. Or if you're GF and vegetarian, try crisply browned tofu and/ or sautéed shiitake or black Chinese mushrooms. Here's what we did:

Vegetarian Jambalaya

Ingredients:
1/2 Cup olive oil
3 Cups chopped onions
5 cloves garlic, peeled
2 frying peppers (we used Hungarian), sliced or chopped
2 small zucchini, chopped
3 tomatoes, blanched, peeled, and chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I use potassium chloride salt for less sodium)
1/2 of a 14 oz. package ground vegetarian sausage, crumbled
1/2 package flavored seitan, cut into chunks
2 bay leaves
3 Cups long-grain white rice
2 umeboshi (Japanese pickled plums), pitted and chopped
6 Cups water

Directions:
1. In a large pot, heat oil, and sauté onions, garlic, peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, and half the salt until everything is golden brown and sticky.
2. Add sausage and seitan. Brown them.
3. Add bay leaves, rice, rest of the salt, and the umeboshi. Cook a little, add water, stir, and cover tightly.
4. Let it cook 35 minutes WITHOUT PEEKING. Ann Jackson writes here, "I'm telling you right now, young lady or young man, if you dare to lift that lid even once during the first 35 minutes the rice is cooking, I'm going to come over there and give you a piece of my mind. Is that clear?"
5. Uncover and make sure all the liquid is absorbed. Turn off the heat. Let it sit a few minutes, remove the bay leaves, and serve.

It serves probably about 8 and tastes great next to collards or any green. We've been eating a lot of leftovers. Home-cooked food is an amazing gift.

What We Did With the Eggplant

I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seat, wondering what amazing concoction we devised for our fresh tiny purple eggplants from the North Carolinian farmers' market. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we just chopped it and cooked it up in its own juices with garden green bell peppers and tomatoes. Then we added pasta sauce, heated up, and tossed with pasta. It seems like the better the vegetables get, the less we feel like doing much to them. Also, the only flavorings we currently own are Dead Sea salt (a wedding gift) and a some extra virgin olive oil. This will limit a cook.

I unpacked all my cookbooks and found to my shock that I own about forty. I have become accustomed to using only about 3, and now I find myself overwhelmed with riches. In fact, many of these cookbooks are ones I don't remember owning! I have so many choices that I am currently choosing none of them.

Another factor in limiting one's appetite for cooking is creative energy. I think most people have only so much. George is investing all his creative energy is learning to make and finish furniture, so he never feels like cooking. I am juggling everything involved in starting a new program of studies at a new school in a new state, and my brain feels tired when I get home. I don't have the same desire to leaf through cookbooks and come up with a shopping list and a week of menus. Plus, my kitchen is still a stranger to me, and it's filled with empty moving boxes.

We invited neighbors over for Sunday brunch this weekend, so we are going to have to force ourselves to get back into the swing of things. As a Jew, when I hear the words "Sunday brunch" I immediately envision lox and bagels, cream cheese, munster cheese, red onions, and fat slices of tomato with a side of smoked white fish. Of course for a vegetarian that won't do, and in any case I don't know where to find the authentic New York type of bagel around here. Suggestions for Sunday brunch? Anyone? Just click on "comments" below and Comment.

Food in Durham

Hello my pretties, George and I have moved to Durham. We now have our kitchen set up (except that the oven smokes, so I will have to clean it—sigh!). I haven't posted for a LONG time because there was nothing to post; we ate the same sandwich for three weeks, or we ate fruit. Or fruit and a sandwich. This was the sandwich: tomato, lettuce, avocado (optional), cheese or tofutti, and once roasted peppers. Not much to write about, except that the tomatoes here are so incredibly delicious that we couldn't wait to tear into them at every meal.

Then we found our pots. So George invented a simple dish: pasta (we use mutli-grain) cooked then tossed with a Special Sauce> stir-fry sweet peppers and tomatoes in their own juices, then add pasta sauce at the last minute. Mix and eat. We ate that three times.

Then we broke down and cooked a crappy frozen pizza in the oven. There was much rejoicing. Our neighbors pitied us and invited us over for dinner twice. And that really was all there was to our gourmet lives.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I was determined to celebrate Shabbat properly. At the local market I found a bag of something that looked like fresh beans, labeled "crowders." Crowder peas, that is. They are a relative of black-eyed peas. We had no idea what to do with them, so we cooked them the way we do beans, but we didn't soak them first. We covered them with water, brought them to a boil, lowered to a simmer, added a bunch of cilantro stems, and cooked until tender. We drained them, tossed them with e.v. olive oil and salt and chopped cilantro leaves and served immediately. They tasted great! They're chewier and more "full of life," as George put it, than dried beans.

I served this with challah, two kinds of cheese (double gloucester and queso fresco), Kedem grape juice, and a cucumber dish adapted from the Voluptuous Vegan: peel cucumber, scrape out the seeds, chop into finger-thick sticks, toss with lime juice and fresh chopped cilantro leaves, and serve. It worked fine. In fact, George doesn't like cucumbers unless they are served this way, as tea sandwiches with cream cheese, as kappa maki sushi, or unless they are organic Persian cucumbers.

We just purchased a fat bag of baby eggplant at the farmers' market, so maybe we'll have more culinary adventures soon.

Gourmet Mushroom-Artichoke Sandwich of Love

Last night I flew back from North Carolina to Connecticut. George braved a terrific thunderstorm to drive me home in the fay hours of night. We were both slavering and there was practically nothing in the fridge. Then I remembered a sandwich recipe from the Vegetarian Times and adapted it to our situation. Two fine sandwiches emerged, which George pronounced "tasty as hell."

Mushroom-Artichoke Sandwiches

Ingredients:
1 package sliced portobello mushrooms, washed
1 glass jar of artichoke hearts, drained, rinsed, and halved or chopped
some cheese (I used Emmenthaler)
some leftover wine
some mayo
some bread

Directions:

1. In toaster oven or real oven, stick in 2 slices of bread with slices of cheese on top. Cook at 350 or 400 degrees until cheese is melty.
2. Toast 2 slices of bread that have a little mayo spread on them.
3. Meanwhile, in a fry pan pour some left-over wine. Cook the mushrooms in them until they're juicy and the wine and mushroom juice have mostly cooked off. Add the artichokes and heat up everything together.
4. To make the sandwich: One slice cheese bread, topped with artichokes, mushrooms, and the mayo bread. Makes 2 sandwiches
   

Peanut Noodle Salad

No one has posted for a while, I know—sorry! George and I just bought a house and because our lives have been hectic we haven't been cooking anything particularly new or interesting for a while. Tonight, however, was our Farewell Dinner so we pulled out all the stops. I started planning last night (to George's disbelief), but at that time I didn't realize that today we would harvest some of our garden crops! We pulled up four shallots and picked three hot Hungarian wax peppers. The vegetables tasted so fresh that my whole body felt uplifted.

The meal deeply satisfied us all. My peanut noodle salad paired serenely with the grilled tuna steaks, grilled Hungarian and cubanelle peppers, and shallot butter. I didn't even eat any tuna steaks and my gullet couldn't take any more gorging, so I don't know how the others managed.

Would you believe that I invented the peanut noodle salad all by myself? Well, I didn't. I used Mollie Katzen's peanut sauce from the New Moosewood Cookbook. It contains a cup of peanut butter, a few tablespoons soy sauce, raw garlic, raw grated ginger, a few tablespoons brown sugar, a few tablespoons apple cider vinegar, crushed red pepper flakes, and a cup and a half of boiling water. Ambrosial.

I poured the peanut sauce over lotsa lettuce and chopped endive, boiled white asparagus, sauteed firm tofu, sliced shallot greens, and toasted chopped almonds plus noodles: wide flat rice noodles soaked in hot water until soft, then drained and thoroughly rinsed in cold water. It took me about an hour to make the whole thing at a lazy pace.

Meanwhile, people grilled the tuna steaks and the peppers. When the peppers were blackened, George sealed them in a plastic bag for 10 minutes or so, then peeled off the black outer layer. He doused them in olive oil and kosher salt and served them hot and delicious.

Lizzie made the shallot butter by melting 1/3 Cup butter with 4 finely chopped garden-fresh young shallots and 2 large minced cloves of garlic. She cooked it real slow until the shallots turned translucent. She spooned the shallot butter onto the tuna steak and for me, onto homemade whole wheat bread. De-lovely!

Red Lentil-Cauliflower Curry

I knocked this entrée out of the park, and I'll tell you why. Chastened by my recent failure on the Pineapple Quinoa Stir-Fry, I resolved to no longer alter the Veganomicon recipes. I admit to omitting a hot chile pepper but transgressed no further.

I served this dish with both a fruit salad (strawberry, pineapple, red grape) and a green salad of red leaf lettuce, Belgian endive, toasted hazelnuts, and goat cheese. Several people suggested that I adorn the fruit salad with some sort of citrus-sugar concoction, but I left it naked and tasting superb.

Fruit Iz De Tastee!

Back to the curry. A mélange of soft red lentils and tender cauliflower with kisses of parsnip, onion, and shallots soaked up a spicy brew of vegetable broth, curry powder, and various other warm-climate spices. As a flourish I zapped it with lime juice and chopped cilantro. The recipe authors told me to let it rest, and I did…for over an hour. The flavors melded beautifully. Julia frequently told me how excellent it was, and Julia knows her food, so listen up: it was excellent! Even George approved.

The curry paired beautifully with long-grain brown rice. I think even long-grain white rice would do. Go wild.

Pineapple Quinoa Stir-Fry

Some people prefer new recipes merely to slightly modify familiar dishes. Doug, for example, makes one kind of lentil soup. He is open to other, similiar lentil soups but barely tolerated my Pineapple Quinoa Stir-Fry because juicy sweetness in an entrée is an affront to his palate. I felt the same until my friends Heather and Gillian introduced me to pineapple pizza two years ago. Now I'm drawn to the possibilities of slight sweetness in an entrée or side dish.

Unlike Doug I keep on hand recipes that represent several contradictory conceptions of a good meal. So I enjoy slightly sour soups, a bean dish cooked with wine and apples, a Mexican lasagna of corn tortillas, a stir-fry cooked in ketchup instead of soy sauce, and two types of luscious whole-wheat vegan cakes. Pineapple Quinoa Stir-fry, a recipe in Veganomicon, fits neatly into my obsession with unexpected foods.

I'm sure the original recipe tastes fantasic. I made so many slug-brained modifications that only Julia said she liked it, and she possesses excellent manners. This dish probably functions better as a side dish. Next to pizza.

Sarah's Not-So-Praiseworthy Pineapple Quinoa Stir-fry Variation

I toasted blanced slivered almonds instead of cashews. A mistake.
I used canola instead of peanut oil.
I used shallots instead of scallions.
garlic
I omitted a hot red chile.
I don't know how much fresh, minced ginger I put in. Too much, apparently.
I omitted a red bell pepper.
peas
I added far more than 1/2 Cup fresh basil, and I didn't cook it.
Ditto for fresh mint.
Instead of salad bar pineapple, I used fresh-cut pineapple chunks.
Soy sauce
Vegetable broth
Mirin
I forgot the lime wedges for garnish.
Red and original quinoa, cooked in pineapple juice and water.

We all dutifully ate a bowlful, but I don't feel like eating the leftovers today: a bad sign. But without a doubt the stir-fry places in the World's Top Ten Beautiful Stir-Fries. Also delightful was the textural interplay on the tongue of pineapple chunks, peas, nuts, and quinoa. A better, or more obedient cook, could definitely turn this recipe into a masterpiece.

Veganomicon WIN!

As you may recall, for the last 3 months I have been on a vegan diet (plus a few extra restrictions for giggles!). Combined with exercise, this diet paid off although I have several months of delightful deprivation to go. Today I deepened my vegan recipe repertoire with the help of Veganomicon, a recipe book written by the people who wrote Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I find Veganomicon a promising resource, even for those blissful future days when I reëmbrace clotted cream and hot buttered scones. Tonight's repast featured both the pleasingly simple Escarole with White Beans and Basil-Cilantro Pesto.

I liked that the Pesto lacked both Parmesan and pine nuts. Many people love pine nuts. I don't, but even pignole fans must admit that pine nuts don't keep well and cost more shekels than the leading nut competition. The Pesto made up for their absence with lots of basil, a handful of cilantro, raw garlic, blanched almonds, and lemon juice. Lacking a food processor, I tossed the solids into a blender, but there wasn't enough liquid in the recipe for the blades to work. I added a little of my favorite vegetable broth (Imagine's No-Chicken Broth) and presto chango! Delicious pesto.

I slathered the pesto on sprouted whole wheat bread (GF bread to you celiacs), and topped it with sliced tomato and slow-roasted Portabello mushrooms. Heaven sang in my mouth. George also masticated blissfully.

For the escarole side dish, I went All Out. Dried beans cooked at home always outshine beans from a can…and cost practically nothing. So last night I soaked my small white beans. This morning I drained and rinsed. I covered them with two inches of water, added fresh parsley stems, and brought them to a boil. Then I simmered, checking every 15 minutes. When they were tender but not done, I salted them but good. They only had to cook in total for about an hour. I drained them, removed the parsley and tossed with extra virgin olive oil. Voilà! A week's worth of beans so good that George and I snack on them plain and cold.

I removed a cup of those beans, and cooked them with garlic, capers, and a head of escarole. That simple! It barely took any time and the food turned out scrumptious and elegant. George tends not to like the bitterness of escarole, but he ate it all up. Maybe I was staring at him pointedly, I don't know.

Doug's not home, so LEFTOVERS! Hurrah!

Peas N' Beans

This post will not convey my most recent, exquisite experiences with home-cooked food. Justine just visited us. She whipped up some tasty scrumpkins: scones, citrus curry, onion sonata soup, and (most divinely) chocolate mousse cake from the Voluptuous Vegan. But all these triumphs are for her to tell (nudge, nudge) although we hold hostage the pictures for the cake. Once she takes possession of the photos I am sure you will all yearn to learn how to make the most luscious, glistening chocolate cake in the world (also vegan and part whole wheat—Score!).

I, on the other hand, managed the less spectacular but no less unusual feat of conceiving a dish meriting all this praise: easy, quick, healthy, cheap, long-lasting, and satisfying to both George and me. I call it Peas N' Beans. Not as magnificent as chocolate cake, sadly, but fills up the 'tum.

Peas N' Beans

Ingredients:
frozen peas, about half a small bag
one third of a 15 oz. can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1 or 2 shallots, thinly sliced
1/4 Cup blanched slivered almonds, chopped up
pinch ground cinnamon
pinch turmeric
pinch ground ginger
pinch ground cardamom
pinch other, similar spices like curry powder or ground coriander that I may have forgotten
oil

Directions:

1) Steam peas until tender. Drain and cool as fast as possible.
2) Meanwhile, saute shallots in spices and oil one minute. Add garbanzos. Heat and cook thoroughly.
3) Mix together peas, garbanzo mixture, and almonds. Serve over rice.

Chinese Dumplings

If it's wrapped, sandwiched, rolled up, or stuffed into an edible material, I will eat it. I will happily munch on burritos, egg rolls, dosas, stuffed peppers, tortellini, crêpes, rice balls, Vietnamese spring rolls, pierogies, chimichangas, blintzes, sushi rolls, tacos, stuffed deep-dish pizza, enchiladas, ravioli, and miniature quiches. My friend Justine likes to make Burrito Bowls, which is all the fillings without the tortilla; well, Justine, it may be healthier—a lot healthier—but you are Missing the Whole Point.

The point is that it's like eating a nicely wrapped present. That's the point.

I was bowled over with joyousness when Vegetarian Times magazine had a whole section featuring home-cooked take out food. I had just cottoned onto the astonishing deliciosity of vegetarian dim sum in New York City and San Francisco and was eager to build myself a three-week stash of this goodness. Kay was visiting me at the time so I enslaved her and together we produced Eggplant shu mai and Chinese dumplings (with snow peas and mustard greens). Kay now says she hated them, but I think she's just remembering all the hard work they required because she sure wolfed them down, same as George and I did.

How to Cook Chinese Dumplings

You can find your own recipe; the tricky part is cooking them properly. I prefer to use gyoza skins (pictured above) but won ton skins are okay. When filling them, moisten the edges with water or egg yolk, and bring the edges together in whatever shape you want, making sure that there's a flat surface somewhere on the dumpling so you can cook them easily in the frypan. Then freeze the dumplings on a flat surface. When they're good and frozen, you can seal them in freezer ziplocks for a long time if you like.

Take out the least sticky fry pan you have and cover the surface of the pan with a mixture of oil and mostly water. Heat it up but good. Add the dumplings, so the fry pan is not too crowded. Cover the fry pan with some sort of lid or foil. Occasionally push the dumplings around so they don't stick to the bottom. After they're cooked all the way through and the water is cooked off, continuously move the dumplings around the fry pan until the bottoms are nicely crisped up. Serve immediately with the dipping sauce of your choice.