fun things to do with millet

Dinner of the vegan whore! Ahem. Or, more politely, putanesca-inspired millet bowl.

Toast your cumin (1 tbs) and millet (1 cup) in a dry pan and then add water (1.5 cups), sundried tomatoes (3-5, cut in strips) and turmeric (1/2 tsp). While that does it's thing, get going on the rest.

Separately, in a pan:

a goodly amount of white wine
6-8 cloves of garlic (preferably smoked garlic), chopped
1 deseeded red chili, chopped
1 tbs capers, chopped
a giant handful of kalamata olives, pitted and chopped
1 preserved lemon, chopped
a splash of the olive brine
(let all that simmer a bit)

2 small heads broccoli, chopped
1 small handful parsley, chopped

Stir in some nooch at the end if you are so inclined. I was so inclined, and it was yummy.

Would you like to know a secret? To make pitting olives faster if you're going to chop them, squish them with the flat of your knife - the pits should just come out, or at least be loose enough that you can cut the olive in half and it will just fall out.



simmer along with Yo Yo Ma, voice of the tango.

omelettes

Omelettes! Who doesn't like these. Really. The possibilities are endless in terms of fillings. Vegan omelettes are typically made only of tofu. I like tofu, but find an entire plate of it a bit... much. Also, adding chickpeas (even in the form of flour) to anything is a good move in my books.

A note on omnisubs. I don't bother trying to imitate what an eggy omelette would taste like. I don't know that I'd remember anyways. I try to create something that is yum in it's own right, and that vaguely fills the same category as the omnifood for which I named it. And if I were naming this accurately, I'd call it "better than eggs". In so many ways.

For 4 people worth of basic omelette:

1 c chickpea flour (gram flour)
water to form a batter (about 1.5 cups)
1/2 tsp salt (black salt works best)
1/2 c arrowroot
splash vegan worcestershire sauce
4 tbs white miso
tarragon to taste (I used about a tsp)
1 tsp baking powder

mix all this together to a thin batter and let stand 30 mins.

puree in 1 block silken tofu. This will be a pretty thick batter, about the consistency of pudding. It should *just* be at the point where you need a spoon to help it spread around the pan.

just before cooking stir in
1 tbs apple cider vinegar

To cook. Spray a pan with olive oil. Let pan get nice and hot, and then pour in your omelette. Drop the heat to medium-low and cover. Cook until cooked through. You can add fillings as the omelette is cooking. Here I've added some brocolli and olives and vegan cheese (I'm not a big fan of commercial fake cheezes, but I do like me some of the stuff from the Uncheese Cookbook. You could also use my bloo pate.

Here's another combo that I made but didn't take a photo of (which makes something akin to a spanish tortilla). Mix these into the batter before cooking: cooked cubed potatoes, onions, tomatoes, olives, steamed chopped and drained greens, dash of smoked paprika, chopped jalopenos.

smoky tea tofu

Tonight I'm feeling all quiet and homey. I was listening to Leonard Cohen and cooking for someone I love very very much, and I wanted something yummy and warm and kind of exotic, in that way that teahouses can feel exotic when the lighting is just low enough and the furniture doesn't match and just for a moment you can see how it was rare and wonderful to get delicacies from hundreds or thousands of miles away. From worlds away.

It is cold and blowing and wet outside. A reminder that although the days are getting longer, it's not spring yet.

Tofu and leafy broccoli in lapsang suchong tea.

In the morning, make a very very very (very) strong cuppa. I used 4 teabags for 1.5 cups of water, in which I marinate a block of tofu, cut into strips. Marinate your cut up tofu in this all day in the fridge. If you don't do this, don't panic. Just make your tea and pretend like it's been marinating all day. Don't tell anyone you forgot. Shhhhh! It'll be just as good, just a lot less intense. First, get some rice going and try not to forget about it. Now you're free to turn your attention to the tofu and broccoli. Dump the tofu + tea in a nice big pan, add a dash (2-3 tbs) of sake and a dash (ha! still 2-3 tbs) of shoyu (take out and reserve 4 or so tbs of the tea + shoyu + sake marinade) and simmer until the liquid reduces to just enough liquid to saute the broccoli. Your kitchen will now smell like a campfire. Mmmmmm. When the liquid has reduced, add a head of broccoli, chopped (I used flowering broccoli), cover and steam briefly. When the broccoli is done, add a bunch of enoki, turn off the heat, and cover again until enoki are wilted. Now, mix 2 tbs of unsweetened chestnut puree into your reserved tea marinade. Pour this over your tofu/broccoli/enoki mixture and heat if necessary. Sprinkle with black pepper. Garnish with slivers of orange, if you have any around. Serve over rice, or with soba noodles. Or hell, as a filling for baked potatoes. Have a small bowl of green olives alongside this. They go really well with this dinner.

music: Leonard Cohen. Suzanne. And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.

stuffed shells

I've been wanting mole-inspired things ever since I made that chocolate dinner cake a while ago, but mole takes forever, and it was Friday night, and I was at work until 7:30 and had had a looooooooong week of being repeatedly struck down by the fickle and vindictive gods of molecular biology. So I wasn't up for making anything futzy and neat and delicate. On the other hand, I had spent the entire week being repeatedly struck down by the fickle and vindictive gods of molecular biology, so I wanted something cushy and comforting and chocolatey. So this is relatively easy, but still enough to feel like a celebratory dinner. After all, I suspect that the gods will eventually find a new victim. This was a very satisfying dinner, and since I already had cooked lentils in the fridge, only took about half an hour to pull together. I love how it looked so messy, especially after a week of extra carefully moving around microliters of ridiculously expensive enzymes, and taking care of microorganisms under sterile conditions, and keeping all the damn identical tiny tubes of minute amounts of clear liquid carefully labelled and organzied. A chocolatey mess was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Pasta shells stuffed with this:
In enough white wine to just cover , cook these (you can also use veg stock, or diluted white wine, or even a light beer):
a chopped onion
a chopped parsnip
some capers
some garlic (4-5 cloves)
some oregano
4-6 chopped sundried tomatoes (no need to rehydrate them first, they'll cook up)

When the onion is translucent, add:
2c cooked puy lentils
1/3 c cocoa nibs
1/2 tsp cinnamon
dash cloves
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp grated ginger
black pepper
a chopped chipotle pepper
dash smoked paprika
about a tbs of chopped capers
salt to taste

Simmer for a while (any liquid should evaporate) When it's all done, put your pasta on to cook. Once you have the pasta going, add 2-4 tbs flour dissolved in 1/2 c water to your hot lentils, keeping them on low heat. This will thicken them up. Once they thicken up, turn the heat off.

Sauce: 1 c balsamic vinegar, reduced to a third of a cup. Once reduced, add 15g good chocolate. It will just melt in. set aside.

When the pasta's done, stuff each shell with the lentil mixture. Drizzle with the balsamic sauce. If you want to make this fancier, make ravioli out of it using fresh pasta dough. Serve with steamed broccoli that's been doused with lemon juice. A carrot salad would also be nice, but I was out of carrots.

very exciting jacket potatoes

I've been traveling in England for work, which means that I've been eating a lot of jacket potatoes and beans. It kinda got me into a baked potato mood. Baked sweet potato stuffed with broccoli. Broccoli: Cumin, ground white poppyseeds, onion, tomato, chilli, ginger, methi leaves broccoli, graram masala, okara, salt, lemon juice. Oh yeah. Pop the cumin in a tiny bit of hot oil, then add the onions, garam masala and poppyseeds. When the onions brown add the tomato, chili, ginger and methi leaves and let that reduce to a mush. Then add the broccoli and cook that. Stir in the okara, salt and lemon juice at the end. Eat and make little happy noises. These two things go so well together. I also had a glass of Peckham's Sauvignon Blanc, which is vegan, even though it's not on the Peckham's vegan wine list. The nice wine dude there checked for me. Wooohoooo!

And a little tiny rant to all you "vegans" out there who eat fish. Fish is not a vegetable. Please consult your 1st grade biology curriculum if you need to review the differences between animals and plants. Sheesh. Just call yourself omnivores if you are one, okay? Because it confuses people, and then when I go out into the world, people offer me fish and then I have to turn it down, and they inevitably tell me about some vegan they met who ate fish (or chicken, or ...and this is my favorite...pepperoni). For crying out loud, if you want to take the moral high ground of being vegan, be vegan, because clearly you understand you should be vegan if you're bothering to lie about it. If you're just a picky eater, than own up to it. If you're on a diet, then ... well...own up to that. Just stop pretending like you don't know the difference between an animal and a plant, because if you *really* don't get that, I'm going to have to staple a dunce cap to your head.

Bonus feature: photo of my favorite stop sign in the world. It makes me smile every day on the way to work. Every. Single. Day.

Ranty ranty broccoli music: joan jett. fake friends.

full of beans

I love beans. This is kidney bean curry masquarading as chili. (onions, tomatoes, coriander, salt, amchoor powder, pomegranite seeds, pepper, salt, fenugreek, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, bay, cardamom, caraway and some other stuff that smelled like it might go, plus kidney beans, plus some leftover steamed broccoli). I love using my mortar and pestle to smash up spices almost as much as I like beans, as you can tell by that list. The bread is anise fig sourdough bread. I'm trying to learn how to make bread, because much of the bread here is disastrously unvegan, and also too fluffy and white for my liking. The trying is rather half-assed, though, because I don't really eat that much bread in the first place. Still, sometimes you need a vehicle for eating dried figs instead of just sitting there and eating the whole package at once. So, bread.

Soundtrack for the dancing/cooking: No quarter.

ducky's culinary school: post 1

So, in the kitchen, sometimes there is my flatmate. We'll call him Spanky. Spanky can brew beer with the best of 'em, and one day, I will know his dark beery secrets. In exchange, I'm helping him learn to cook. This is Ducky's Culinary School. I, as you may have guessed, am Ducky. Culinary school started a while ago, but we didn't have a blog a while ago. So you'll have to jump in here.

Here's Gnocchi with A Sauce Loosely Based on Something Resembling Arrabiata. And wine, which was good, but a poor choice for this particular dinner, as it was firmly beaten down into submission and throttled by the chillies. Sorry wine. Better luck tomorrow. Spanky says it makes a good post dinner treat now that the sauce isn't bitch slapping it. Yes, we use that sort of strong language here. We find it helps. I like gnocchi because it's comforting and can seem very fancy "ooooh! homemade gnocchi!", but it's ridiculously easy to make and if you make lots, you can freeze the extra gnocchi and have it later in borscht, only then you call it potato dumplings.

The vague directions for making gnocchi:

Bake some spuds. We baked 6, and we cheated by using the microwave. The important thing is that the spuds not be waterlogged. If you boil them, leave them in the fridge overnight. We didn't have that kind of time. We wanted dinner tonight. And we have a whack of spuds to get through. It's Scotland, it's winter, and we have a CSA box. Then, mash the spuds and add salt. At any rate, more than you think you would for plain old mashed spuds, but not enough to make you gag. Then, sprinkle in a good cup of plain white flour. Not self-raising. Not whole wheat. White. Dammit. Mix with your hands, and keep mixing and adding flour until you have a dough. Now make little tiny dumplings. I just rolled them one at a time between my palms while barking orders at Spanky, who was making The Sauce. If you don't have a fabulous roommate who makes sauce while you roll dumplings, or just want to just eat the gnocchi plain with a bit of olive oil, then add some chopped fresh rosemary (about 2 tbs) and nutritional yeast (2-4tbs) to the dough and it will be yummy beyond words.

Spanky, meanwhile, was busy combining his recent skills in onion-frying and tomato sauce making. He did this: 1 Onion, fried. Then lots of garlic (5 cloves). Deglazed with a can of tomatoes and 4 chopped tomatoes and about a cup of leftover red wine. Then a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of chopped capers, two chopped thai bird chilies and a teaspoon each of basil and oregano. And we threw in 5 or so chopped up sun dried tomatoes because we were feeling fancy. That all simmered, and then at the last minute, we added lots of spinach. But no matter you add, you always end up with two tablespoons of the stuff. I swear, if you started with 10 pounds of spinach, you'd just just get a really dense 2 tablespoons.

When that was ready, we boiled the gnocchi until it floated, and then rescued it and dumped unceremoniously into the sauce. It was yummy. We had broccoli and the worlds most giant parsnip, simmered in veg broth, thyme, lemon and a tiny bit of maple syrup, on the side. In the photo, you can see Spanky's notebook. Spanky takes this cooking thing very seriously, as should we all.