parsnip perfection

You know when after the first bite of something, you immediately think "I will have this every day from here on in, thank you very much. I don't need anything else." ? That was my reaction to this soup. So easy. So wonderful. Parsnips and smoked chilies were made for each other, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It looks like soup. You don't need a photo. Incidentally, that's also my reaction to La Confession. Once I heard it, I swore that it was all the music I needed. Yum.

1 yellow onion, chopped
2 large-ish parsnips, washed and chopped
1 small spud, chopped
lots and lots of fresh ginger (like 3 -4 tbs) chopped
4 whole cloves garlic
1 tbs marmite (I don't actually use marmite, I use some hippie health food store brand not made by kraft... any yeast extract spread will do here)
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1-2 tbs cumin seeds, depending on how much you love cumin.
1-3 chipotle chilies, in adobo sauce
salt to taste
juice from one lime
1 cup parsley, chopped


Put everything up to and including the vinegar in a pot, add enough water to cover by an inch or three, and simmer until everything is tender. Meanwhile, dry-toast and grind up your cumin seeds. When the soup is done, remove from heat and add the cumin, chilies, salt and lime juice. If you are not of the heat-loving kind, use smoked paprika instead of the chilis. Puree. Add parsley and serve. Oh. Yum.

smoky music with a touch of heat: la confession, by lhasa de sela

fun with blowtorches

.... because who could resist buying a little blowtorch?

You see, I was in the hardware store, looking for a replacement knife for reasons that are neither interesting nor any of your business, dammit. Hardware stores are my favorite, because they tend to have both power tools and kitchen stuff, often in the same room. If there is a consumer-whore heaven, this would be it. In this particular hardware store were lovely little blowtorches. Lovely. They called my name, and I couldn't resist thier siren call. "Wield us!" they said. Who could say no? Not me. After all, I'm only human. Anyway, freshly armed with a new blowtorch, I had to make creme brulee, like, right away. And for some reason, I wanted it to be green.

I've had vegan creme brulees based on both cashews and coconut milk, but find both of them a bit much. They just sit there in my stomach, being heavy. I don't like it. I like the tofu ones, even if it is super-fashionable right now to cook all desserts with ungodly amounts of cashews. Oh, and have I mentioned I also don't make cupcakes?

Anyhow, these are yummerific, subtle and just the right amount of sweet and rich without tipping over that edge of making you regret it an hour later. Plus, they're green! Yay! And more importantly than the taste or colour: you get to use a blowtorch.

green tea and almond creme brulee

1 package soft silken tofu
1/2 cup almond milk
1 tsp almond essence
1/4 vanilla bean
3/4 cup sugar
1 tbs matcha
pinch salt
2 tbs cornstarch

mix together and blend! blend! blend!

Pour into 4-6 oven-safe containers, and place them in a pan of water. The water should come halfway up the containers. Bake, uncovered at 200C for 45 mins. Cool completely. Sprinkle with sugar and then melt it with a blowtorch! Wooohoooo! Alternately, place under a broiler until the sugar caramelizes (this is not even nearly as much fun as using a blowtorch, but will produce perfectly good creme brulees, if you're into that sort of thing). I think I need to practice a bit to get the top of these perfect, but I'm totally willing to put in as many tries as needed.

I made them in glasses, because I was excited about the colour, but I actually think they'd be prettier in ramekins. I'm sure you can make your own decisions on this front.

scavenged pumpkin buns

I really hate it when people waste food. This week at work, there were three perfectly good uncarved pumpkins that were going to get thrown out after being used as decoration for a Halloween party. This made me angry. What sort of people are we that we use food as disposable decorations? So I took one of the pumpkins home and made these buns, and also some pumpkin ravioli. Note that this is the kind of pumkin that you usually carve up for jack o lanterns, so it's not very sweet or tasty. I also used an apple from a big batch of them that I picked a few weeks ago that was well past it's prime, and wasn't very sweet. If you use a sugar pumpkin for these, cut down the sugar and spices. These are rather heavily spiced because the pumpkin mainly provides moisture and a bit of a pumpkiny taste, but there's no point trying to let an anemic pumpkin "shine through". You'd need a sweet winter squash or sugar pumpkin for that. If you don't use quick yeast, proof yours in some water and sugar beforehand and omit the hot water from the pumkin/apple mixture.

These aren't cinnamon buns in the cakey sense. I like to eat them for breakfast, where I don't want a sugar rush, or to feel weighed down afterwards. These are more of a bread, and would even go nicely with soup, especially one with north african spices. Mmmmmmm..... maybe I'll try that for dinner.

dry mix:
2 cups ww spelt flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp nutmeg
dash black pepper
pinch salt
1 tbs quick yeast

blend together:
1/2 rescued (medium size) pumpkin, cut into slices and roasted until it begins to caramelize
1 apple, picked from an abandoned tree
2 tbs of okara or soy yogurt or ground almonds or almond butter. Pick one.
You should end up with a scant 1.5 cups of puree altogether. Reduce the water if you have more, or if your puree is very wet. Mine was the consistancey of very thick apple sauce.

mix into pumkin/apple
1/2 cup very hot water.

Add wet ingredients to dry, mix with a spoon, and then liberally dust a counter with either a cup more spelt flour or a cup of some other random flour (I used rice flour). I also liberally dusted myself with flour, but that's optional. Knead until the dough comes together, adding more flour if you need to.

For the filling (basically a sweet lemony creamy thing):
1 batch okara or 1 cup ground almonds
agave nectar to taste
generous squeeze lemon juice
1 tbs sweet white miso

Roll out dough into a square. Spread with filling. Sprinkle with raisins. Roll up and cut into 6-8 buns and place them in a pan that is lined with paper that you have sprinkled with cornmeal. Let rise overnight in a cool place, or for an hour in a warm place. Preheat oven to damn hot (250C) with a pan of water in it. Bake at 250C for 10 mins, drop temp to about 200, and bake another 5 mins. Take out and brush with a mix of soy milk, agave and cinnamon. Bake for another 5 mins. Take out and brush again. Let cool for about 20 mins. Eat!

Warm and comforting music: Nighbook.

Untraditional traditional familiy irish pudding!

Veganizing traditional holiday favorites is always a bit tricky, because you're often fucking with something imbued with a great deal of nostalgia and meaning. And in this case, something that until now, was imbued with a great deal of Guiness. And as we all know, Guiness is not vegan.

I've seen a few vegan Christmas pudding recipes. Most are, um.... lacking. One was nothing more than fat-free banana bread with raisins. Now, I like banana bread with raisins as much as the next vegan, and I do keep added fat to an absolute minimum on a day to day basis.... but c'mon.... It's frikin' CHRISTMAS! A feast day should be a feast, dammit. This is one of those holiday dishes that I look forward to, but only want to eat once a year, so rich and boozy and sweet is it. To me, this *is* what Christmas tastes like. So I give you my mommy's recipe (which was my gramma's recipe, which ... oh... you get the idea) for (Irish) Christmas pudding, which I've veganized. Irish pudding differs from (the dreaded) fruitcake in that it barely maintains enough structural integrity to slice, and is basically just dried fruit rehydrated in a winning mixture of stout and whisky, and then sterilized and left to age to perfection for several months. It is like the embarassing drunk-on-sunday-afternoon cousin of respectable fruitcake. Usually, you'd make this at Easter-ish and store it until Christmas. The best puddings are the ones that have sat for TWO years...

1 loaf white bread, in crumbs (stale is best)
1 pound cocoa butter, grated (you could use margarine or vegetable suet if you'd rather, but I hate the taste of both of those, and figured that cocoa butter would taste better)

1 heaping tbs baking powder
1 cup white wheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp nutmeg

In a blender, mix:
3/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup arrowroot flour
1 lemon (or orange), chopped, peel and all, but de-seeded
1 apple, cored and chopped (you can use a grated carrot instead if you want)

add this to the bread and spice mixture.

Add
4 pounds (yes POUNDS) raisins, currants, sultanas etc. your choice of mix
1.5 cups fancy dried fruit (I just used dried pears and candied ginger)
1 cup halved candied cherries

Slowly stir in 2 pints of cold stout (I used Suma organic stout... a good list of vegan beers is here, 2 tsps almond extract and 2 shots whisky. I've been told that the whisky must be Irish. I suspect this is true. Anything other than a splash of Irish might hurt the very soul of the pudding. This would be unwise.

Let the pudding batter sit overnight, covered, soul intact. You can see it in the photo of the pudding-mess in the giant pot. It looks gross, and tastes and smells oh-so-good.

The next day....give it a stir and divide it into 3 large or 6 small puddings.

You can cook them in air tight tins or other containers that you can boil for 9 hours. I used sandwich containers that are microwavable and freezable, so I figured that they were boil-able as well. I turned out to be right (phew!).

For each pudding:

It is very important to line the tins very well because the puddings must stay dry while they're being steamed. We use layers of brown paper and wax paper. Put a triple layer of brown paper on the bottom of your tin and then put strips from one side to the other going across the bottom again until the side is covered. Then, put another piece around the side. The particular pattern doesn't matter, but the key is that you shoudn't have any holes in the paper nest.Make a wax paper pocket inside that and spoon the pudding in. See photo. Close the wax paper over the pudding and put a triple layered piece of wax paper over it. Put more brown paper and close the tin tightly. There should be no spare room inside the tin.

Put a little rack on the bottom of your pot and put enough water in to have the pudding tins float. You need fairly big pots as they need lids on. Let the puddings simmer for 9 hours. Yes, 9 hours. This is serious, folks. I made several small puddings instead of 3 large ones because I didn't have any containers big enough to do big puddings. Meh. So I only simmered them for 7 hours. I am such a slacker.

At the end of this marathon simmer, rescue the puddings by removing the tins from the water and drying off the outsides. Open the tins. Double check that no water got in. If it did, that pudding won't keep and you should eat it in the next few days (it'll keep for a few weeks in a tupperware container in the fridge). Assuming all your pudding wrappings are dry, DO NOT TAKE THEM OUT OF THE TINS. Let them sit for an hour on cooling racks before removing the puddings from the tins. DON'T UNWRAP THEM.

Let them cool and wrap them well in 2 layers of tin foil. The tin foil goes over the many layers of wax and brown paper already encasing the puddings. If you have any tin foil leftover, you can make yourself a tin foil hat. You know you want to. Let them sit somewhere cool and dry until Christmas. Ideally, this should be about a year (which explains the careful wrapping), but we've been known to just make them a few weeks before. They really do taste better the longer they age.

Me and my dad eat this pudding with vanilla ice cream (I think coconut-milk based would be best). Everyone else seems to just eat it plain.

Untraditional traditional music: The Pogues, or to get in the holiday spirit: Lump of Coal (the only acceptable Christmas album ever).

Cleaning out the fridge soup

This soup is a great example of using stuff lying around... I had half a pumpkin left, and had cooked up a big batch of black beans a few days ago for hummous... and I've had a houseguest, so have made more almond and soy milk than usual, and had pulp from that taking up fridge space.. you know how it is. Because this soup just relies on baking everthing, it doesn't take much actual work. I was at home working, and this took about 15 minutes, total, of my time, though it baked for about an hour while I typed and swore. Feel free to apply this method (omitting the typing and swearing, if you wish) to what's in your fridge rather than focusing on what was in mine. The basic flavours (with what I used in parentheses) are:

something dark and smoky (black beans, smoked peppers)
something sweet and dense (pumpkin, baked onions)
something acidic (tomatoes, lemon juice)
something rich (nut butter, almond meal, hummous)
spices

What I did:

I put all this in a roasting pan:

1/2 squash with edible skin, cubed
1 onion, cut in chunks
5 whole cloves of garlic
12 small tomatoes, halved

I poured enough water to the baking dish to come halfway up the tomatoes, and popped it all in the oven, uncovered, at 220C for about an hour. Once it got going, I did the beans.

I had cooked black beans on hand. About 3 cups of them. I put them in a large pot, covered them with water, and added
3 tbs fresh grated ginger
2 tbs roasted cumin
2 tbs roasted coriander
some fresh thyme (because it was there, dammit)
1 tbs chunky peanut butter
some left over almond meal from making almond milk (1/2 cup or so)
some leftover hummous (about 1/4 cup)
salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
a healthy number of chopped chipotle peppers
lemon juice ( I'm out of lime, which would have been my first choice)

I simmered that until the pb dissolved, and then just turned it off and let it sit there until the roasted veg were done, then combined the two things. I almost threw in some cocoa as well, but oddly enough, I didn't feel chocolatey. This is rare, but it does happen from time to time. I'll probably add a few tablespoons of cocoa nibs to the leftovers when I take them for lunch.

We had this with baked corn tortillas, olives, salad, and ginger beer!

Just to get you on your improvisational way, here are some possible subs for the different taste categories. Don't use them all at once (except the spices. They all go together if you want. Use one, two or all of them), and not all combos will work, but play around a little... pick one or two things from each category and go for it! say 1) blackeyed beans, plantain, mangoes, lime and coconut, or 2) lentils, mushrooms, stout, parsnips, tomato paste and chocolate....:

something dark and smoky, including a legume (puy or beluga lentils, blackeyed beans, shiitake mushrooms, smoked paprika, porter, stout or rauchbier, dry-roasted spices in general)
something sweet and dense, when baked (carrots, parsnips, leeks, beets, apples, any winter squash, corn, red peppers, plantain)
something acidic (mangoes, tomato paste, unripe peaches, tamarind, lime juice, cider vinegar)
something rich (tahini, soy/oat cream, coconut or coconut milk, cocoa powder or grated chocolate, leftover hummous or tofu spread)
spices: cumin, coriander, oregano, black pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, cayenne, jalopenos, chipotle or other smoked chili, sweet chilies, garlic.

You could also add a whack of chopped cilantro or parsley to liven this up... but I didn't have any. Chopped kale or spinach would also be lovely, and add some green. The point of cleaning out the fridge soup is that you *don't* run out to the store for random ingredients. Use what you have on hand.

I wanna be a chocolate god post 10: tea, kind of.

So, I've been hearing a lot about Brewed Chocolate lately, but we can't get it in the UK. I looked on line and discovered that it's just concentrated chocolate tea. As in, just cocoa beans and water (and of course sugar, which I'm glad to do without in this case, because it is tediously overused in just about everything... I could rant about this for days). I thought, sheesh, how hard can it be to brew chocolate? So I did. And it's yum. It was super easy. Easy, I tell you! And depending how much you pay for your cocoa nibs, it's about 10 times cheaper than buying the stuff. Plus, you don't have to put up with somebody else oversweetening your drink. Win.

1 heaped cup cocoa nibs
1 L water

Place in pot. Simmer until reduced by half. At this point, you can (optionally) add spices. I used about half a cinnamon stick, 2 cloves and 2 green cardamom pods and a few whole black peppercorns. Continue simmering until you have about 150mL of liquid left... in my pot this was just enough to barely cover the nibs. Strain liquid into a glass jar. Keeps in the fridge for, uh, a long time. I used it up before I discovered how long.

To use: use 1-3 tbs of concentrate for 1 cup of hot water. Add sweetener to taste (I don't add any). Sip. Feel sophisticated.

The strength and bitterness of the concentrate depends both on how much you reduce the liquid and the quality/taste of your cocoa nibs. I get my cocoa nibs from here, a source that I highly recommend for anyone in the UK. It's pretty much the best unprocessed chocolate beans/nibs/liquor that I've found anywhere, and very reasonably priced for what you're getting. Plus, it comes packed with little heart confettis. As usual, when buying chocolate/cocoa products, make sure that slaves weren't used to get them to you.

When you're done, don't throw out the cocoa nibs! Nooooooo! You can use them in cookies, brownies, cakes, pancakes, or mole sauce (grind them up for the mole). Or, you can throw them in the blender with 1/2cup of almond or hazelnut (or other nut) butter and some agave, or with 1/2 cup - 1 cup of apple, pear or pumpkin butter (you won't need agave for those, and the pear is divine, especially if you a hint of cardamom, while the pumpkin is nice with cloves and black pepper, and you can actually use it for really decadent pie filling if you want) and make your very own chocolate spread. You can give this to people as presents and they will be very very impressed. Or...you can use them ground up in any of my savory chocolate recipes on this blog. Or you can just eat them with a spoon.

savoury blackberry preserves

I love blackberries, and we were out on the beach picking them. A lot of them. Lots and lots. While picking, I ate as many as possible. Usually I try to stick to the general rule of "don't eat anything larger than your own head", but I may have eaten more than one me-head worth of blackberries. However, since blackberry season is tragically short, I think an exception was in order. Plus, we were on our bikes all day, and you need energy, right? Upon arriving home with 4 L of blackberries, I made blackberry soda bread, and a few wee little adorable pots of blackberry jam (mostly for guests and gifts), but to be honest, jam doesn't really float my boat. I like all of my sweets to be in the form of actual fruit and/or chocolate. At this point, I should confess that my house is where jam comes to grow very interesting mould and then die. However, I do love berries with a wild passion, and miss the saskatoon berries that I grew up gorging on. Recently, I've been into making savoury dishes of things that are usually sweet (at least in western cuisine), and have pretty much fallen in love with this idea. This is a sauce that's good on rice, especially with marinated and baked tofu, or chickpeas and rice, or an omnisub such as that slightly bizarre yet yummy vegan duck that is *actually shaped like a duck* at the Chinese supermarket and travel agency near my place... Either way, there are lots of jam recipes out there for those with a sweet tooth. Here are some blackberry preserves for the rest of us:

2L blackberries (I only know this because we picked 2 1L containers)
6 cloves garlic, chopped fine
dash salt
1/2 tsp spanish paprika
dash chili flakes (I used about 1/2 tsp)
1 whole lemon, chopped, peel and all.
1 bunch coriander chopped (about 1.5 cups).

Combine everything except the coriander in a pot and simmer until the berries start to disintegrate and the lemon has lost all hope of remaining recognizably a lemon. Add coriander and simmer another few minutes. Pour into sterile jars and preserve using your favourite technique, or let cool and pack into freezable containers for the freezer. British freezers have a capacity of approximately 1 pint of very specific geometry, and I need that space for my cube of frozen edamame, so I went for the preserves. Here is a good explanation of making preserves if you don't know how.

music for berries with a hint of nostalgia: all you can eat, by kd lang.