up in smoke

...is what happened to my place, when the flat downstairs went up in flames. So now I find myself with far less stuff, staying with friends, and kind of shell-shocked from knowing first hand what it's like to be pulled out of my kitchen window at 2.30 am in my jammies by a fireman. The only things I grabbed between my bed and the window were my glasses, and then, only because I instinctively put them on as I get out of bed.

So, I give you the most comforting soup in the universe, which is what I've been having most nights. It's very loosely based on the "behead the chard" soup in Don't Feed The Bears. My sweetie and I just call this The Soup. I think that The Soup has magical powers to make any situation seem better.

In a pot:
-Crumble some dried shitake mushrooms (say 3 of them) and a few dashes of soy sauce (maybe 1 tbs - go easy, because you can always add more later, but if you oversalt the soup at the beginning, it's harder to save) into enough water to make you a giant bowl of soup
-Set it on the stove to boil, and while it's heating up, add 1 heaping tsp of nut butter or tahini (I've been using walnut butter lately), as much chopped garlic and ginger as you want, a dash of mirin or white wine, and a healthy pinch of dried chili (chipotle is especially fun, but anything hot works, really).
-When the soup is boiling and the nut butter has dissolved, add one serving of rice noodles
-When the rice noodles are nearly done (say, when you've got a minute left), add in whatever veg you want + some smoked or marinated (or fried...whatever you want, really) tofu in cubes. I like to use a green veg (broccoli or kale) + mushrooms + whatever bits and bobs of leftover cooked veg are in the fridge. Sweetcorn is oddly good in this soup
-In your serving bowl, dissolve a tbs of miso in some soup broth that you ladle out of the pot.
-When the soup is done, ladle it into the bowl with the miso. Stir. Add herbs if you've got them (cilantro or basil or both)
-Taste. Adjust seasoning by adding more soy sauce or more mirin, and then add a drizzle of sesame oil. A nice variation is to use walnut butter as the nut butter and then walnut oil at the end, in which case fresh parsley is amazing.
-Try replacing the noodles with cubes of sweet potato. Sweet potatoes and miso are best friends.

Devour.

The whole thing takes about 15 minutes from the time I walk into the kitchen until I have a wonderful bowl of hug in front of me.

Lessons learned this week:
1. Never get all your Xmas chocolates made in an organized, early way. This is the first time I've managed to get everything ready by mid-November and my FRIKIN' FLAT WAS SMOKED TO DEATH. Next year I will resume my sending-presents-late routine.
2. The fire dept is amazing.
3. My friends are amazing.
4. Eat soup. It helps.

Dancing along to: Mink, Schmink by Eartha Kitt. November is an Eartha Kitt kinda month, no?

bim bim baptastic

Ahem. This is soooo not authentic. But so far as I understand it, bimbimbap is "stuff on rice". And "stuff" means "a few different small things rather than one big thing". So, inspired by the recent opening of an *actual korean resto* in Edinburgh, which I want to eat at all the time, I made this:

Brown rice, topped with simmered tofu, spicy mushrooms, ginger-miso carrots, perfectly slimy okra, and kimchi. And maybe some pickled onions. YUM. Also, I have been out picking wild garlic, because, despite the craptastic weather, it is spring. Dammit.

The okra is from Asian Vegan Kitchen. It is perfect. Make it now.

Highly addictive tofu:
simmer together 2 tbs soy sauce, some sugar, 1 tsp ground sesame seeds, 1 tbs red wine, some chili flakes (I used urfa biber, cuz I wanted kind-of-but-not-really smoky). When the sugar has dissolved, carefully add tofu (enough for two people). When the tofu is cooked, add 1/2 cup wild garlic and 1 scallion, chopped. Let these warm through. Drizzle with sesame oil to taste.

Mushrooms:
Simmer mushrooms in soy sauce + mirin + kochuchang paste + grated ginger. Devour.

Carrots:
1 large carrot, grated + 2 heaping tbs pickled ginger, cut into thin strips. Sauce: 1 tbs white miso + 1 tbs lemon vinegar + 1 tbs pickling liquid from the ginger.


The next night, I might have made this again, only with greens instead of okra.

Also, I have made skully chocolates. The chocolates are not actually blurry, but my camera is acting odd. Perhaps it is afeared by the awesome scariness of my skully chocolates.

Bopping along to: Kung Fu Fighting! (getting tempered chocolate into those frikin' skully molds means) I was fast as lightning....

fava tarts

A friend gave me a bunch of stuff from her garden. Fava beans were in there. Oh yes. And we all know that I have a deep, deep looooooooove of fava beans. We all know this. Not only are they extra tasty, but Pythagoreas forbid his followers to eat them, because of something to do with hinges and beanskins and the doors of hell. Undaunted, I eat them at every opportunity.

We spent the day walking in the woods by Roslin, and finally, after living in Edinburgh for (ahem) almost three years, made it to see Roslin chapel. I enjoyed 1) the sculpture of the angel playing bagpipes, which I assume was ironic since I am convinced that the bagpipes are Satan's Instument and b) the gargoyles that looked like they were clinging to the walls for dear life. It was much more interesting than I assumed it would be. Huh. As a bonus, we could actually *see stuff* since the da Vinci Code tourists were mostly not out today because the weather was extra-super unpredictable, even for Edinburgh in July. We had both rain capes and sun hats (and a thermos of tea) and were just fine (though we used all of that equipment every single hour). These tarts, along with a giant green salad, were the perfect "summer" dinner. Note the copious amounts of garlic. As usual, my food is both delicious and vampire-repellent. It never hurts to multitask.

Tart shell:
1/2 cup almond pulp left over from making almond milk (or sub almond meal mixed with some kind of liquid)
1/2 cup ww spelt flour
2 tbs nutritional yeast
1 tbs white miso
pinch salt
1 tsp (or more) finely chopped fresh rosemary
1 tsp coarsly ground black pepper
1 small onion, chopped in half-moons

Mix all ingredients except onions together. Add more flour if the dough is sticky. It should be wet but not sticky. Divide evenly in half and press into two tart tins (if you are having them as a main dish) or 4-6 muffin cases (for starters). Cover tart shells with onions. Bake at 150C for 15 mins (until beginning to brown).

While the tart shells are browning, mix in a bowl:
1 cup shelled fresh fava beans
1.5 cups sliced oyster mushrooms
2 cloves smoked garlic, chopped very finely
1/4 c white wine
1 tbs soy sauce

Let these marinate until the tart shells are ready. Then divide the filling equally among the shells and bake for another 10 mins at 180C. Remove tarts from oven. Sprinkle with (in this order): lemon juice from one lemon (divided among all tarts, not per tart), salt, black pepper. Drizzle with a small amount very fruity olive oil (I used garlic-infused olive oil...). Don't go too nuts with the oil or it will overwhelm everything else.

angels and bagpipes and flaunting the possibility of the doors of hell: Pope and Antipopes: music for the courts of avignon and rome, by the Orlando Consort.

japarancini

The bad titles and fusion cooking continues. More and more, I am coming to the conclusion that Italian and Japanese foods were meant to be melded together. In my kitchen they have a tendency to end up in the same dish.

So, you take your leftover brown rice, and your leftover stewed okara, and you mix them together, smooshily, with some glutinous rice flour and some flax meal, and then bake them. You end up with japanesey rice balls along the same lines as arancini (leftover risotto balls), except vegan. And not fried. And dare I say pretty damn healthy and low-fat and yummerific to boot. Okay, so it's not much like arancini at all except in shape and leftover ricey gooey goodness. This is a way to use leftovers, so all the amounts are approximate. My stewed okara had fancy-pants mushrooms, green beans, and carrots. I learned to make okara stew from this book, but I more or less wing it now because it's a dish I make so often. I've linked to a free online recipe if you need to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

2-3 c cooked short grain brown rice, cooled
1c leftover stewed okara with vegetables, cooked down until fairly dry.
1 tsp powdered dried porcini, optional (available at specialty Italian stores)
1 tbs or more white miso
1/4-1/3 c glutinous rice flour (which you should have on hand at all times for emergency mochi making)
1 tbs flax meal in 2 tbs water, left to sit for 10 minutes
dash salt (I used truffle salt, because I am a decadent freak)

Mush everything together. Add more rice flour if it is too dry to stick together. Form into 4 large balls, about the size of oranges. This is where the name comes from. Yup. Place balls in silicone muffin cups, or just in a greased muffin pan. Then you have each japanarancini in its own little bowl and it can sit in your lunch box the next day and not get hurt. Of course, not all of you take your lunches to work, and not all of you bike, and in that case, you don't have to worry so much about preserving the structural integrity of your lunch while biking to work over cobblestones. But I do. So nyah. Bake the well-protected rice goodies at 200C for 20 mins. Cool. Take to work for lunch the next day and make your coworkers jealous. I took them to work with asparagus, red pepper and greens salad with yummy yuzu dressing, so it was a pretty winning lunch day indeed.

big bowl of hug

Yup. It's a giant bowl of umami. The culinary equivalent of a hug, if you will.

1/2 cup dry aduki beans
1 large piece konbu
4 dried shitake mushrooms
1 onion, chopped
4 tbs soy sauce
1/2 cup white wine
splash of mirin
1 heaping (and I *do* mean heaping. don't skimp) tbs chopped fresh ginger
1 cup butternut squash bits in cubes
1 leftover baked spud, chopped
1 tbs red miso
sesame seeds to sprinkle on top

Put the dry aduki beans in a pot. Add konbu and shitake mushrooms. Add about 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil. Now, go away and do about half an hour of yoga, or read a book, or whatever. Then, come back, top up the water, fish out the konbu and discard it. Fish out the shitake, chop them up, and throw them back in (discard the stems if they are too tough to eat). Go away for another 15 mins, or until the beans are soft. Add everything up to, but not including the spud. If you don't have leftover baked spuds lying around, add raw chopped one now. It will be almost as good. Almost. But not quite. Simmer until the squash is done. There should be just enough water to cover all the ingredients, but not much more than that. This is a pretty thick stew by the time it's all done. Add spud and miso and warm through. Adjust seasonings. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and eat. Feel better about the world.

Now, you could of course be all fancy and make dashi etc. etc. But I was not feeling fancy. And you know what? It worked out fine. Better than fine. Yummy enough to make again, just like this, all non-fancy like.

Umamusic: naive and simple music, by john adams.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Gentle readers (adventurous cooks). Science is a demanding mistress who leaves precious little time for blogging. Though I intend to sporadically update this blog, it will be quite rare from here on in. I'm leaving it up as a recipe archive. Enjoy, and see you when I retire (or get tenure)!

Fish balls: okara, shitake mushrooms, chopped yuba, capers, garlic, wakame, soy sauce, smoked paprika, chickpea flour.

I ate this with kimchi rice (exactly what it sounds like) and a bowl of miso onion soup.

Now, excuse me. I have some extremely nerdy thoughts to think, some slime to pipette, and fitness landscapes to paramatize.

Dancing to: Nrrrd Grrrl. MC Chris.

smoked shitake slurp

I find the farmer's market pretty exciting, generally. This is because a)I like produce and b) I am easily amused. However, there are some people whose mere presence (and they're not there every week) throws me into a tizzy. They are: the smoked shitake dude, the heritage potato guy, and the fancy tomato people. (Those aren't their official names.) This week, the smoked shitake dude was there! Oh joy! Oh yummyness!

Also, life is especially full as of late, and I haven't been cooking very involved dinners. This is quick but satisfying. I looove the combo of mushrooms, plums and smoke. It's deep and dark and mysterious and earthy. And in this particular incarnation, slurpy as well (bonus).

Saute about 3 cups of sliced smoked shitake in a splash of sake. Add a handful of chopped roasted chestnuts or a cubed cooked sweet potato (ie, you want something sweet and dense)

When the mushrooms are done, mix the sauce together in a cup and then add it to the pan:
1 tbs ume paste
1 tbs mirin
1 little dash soy sauce
1 tbs white wine (or sake)
dash lemon juice
about 1/4 cup of water to thin it out

Toss with two people worth of rice noodles. I used these fancy-pants pumpkin rice noodles, but they totally didn't taste pumpkin-like.

Variation: for extra points, leave out the water and add 1/2 cup of extra strong brewed black tea to the sauce. Jack the heat up so that the sauce reduces a bit, and proceed.

Slurp your noodles along with: Coco Rosie. Everybody wants to go to Japan.

beets, lentils, and homemade mustard.

...which is a lot for one little post, but they all go together. This lentil and beet dish is incredibly versatile. You can change the ratios to make it mostly beets, mostly lentils, mostly onions, or anything in between. You can also make it as simple or complex as you want by adding some or all of the extras.

For the lentil and beet salad:

3c cooked black beluga lentils

2 beets

1 large onion

1/2c dried mushrooms (nice strong ones, like porcini)

fresh dill, chopped (I used about 1/2c, but others are usually more, um, moderate with herbs. I don't see why.)

balsamic vinegar OR vincotto + a splash of lemon juice (I used my new favorite thing, which is vincotto with carob)

scant 1 tsp good carob powder

salt and pepper to taste

optional add-ins

any or all of: chopped walnuts or toasted hazelnuts or green olives or capers or chopped fresh parsley to taste.

Bake or caramelize the beets and onions. Rehydrate the mushrooms in as little hot water as possible. When the beets and onions are done, take them out of the oven to cool a bit, and simmer the mushrooms briefly in their own juice. Chop up the beets and onions. I like big slices. When the mushrooms are done, hopefully there will still be some liquid left. Combine everything, including the mushroom liquid. Add the optional add ins. Or don't. They are, after all, optional. Serve this salad warm (or cold) on chopped bitter greens and apples. Or just chopped bitter greens. Either way, you can schmancy it up if you toss the greens first with a mustard/agave/vinegar dressing (which is those three ingredients in a 1:1:1 ratio, using apple cider or red wine vinegar)

I like mustard, and it's insanely easy to make your own. Here, I used my homemade whiskey mustard. Yes, whiskey. Because what's the point of living in Scotland if you can't cook with whiskey? 

To make your own whiskey mustard: put mustard seeds of the colour(s) you want in a glass container and cover them with whiskey and leave it in the fridge for a day or two or three (the exact length of time will depend on whether or not you forget it's there). Then blend it to the smoothness you want, add apple cider vinegar until it's the right consistency (the consistency you want), and return it to the fridge for a week so that it can calm down a bit. Make sure you put a lid on it. There. Now you have mustard, made to your own taste. You can even add sugar (agave nectar) or salt or other flavours (tarragon is yummy, for example). Don't you feel smart?  

While your beets are baking and your mustard is mustarding, dance around wildly to whiskey-mustard music with a sweet side: The Pubcrawlers

parsnip plum pancake perfection

I had me some parsnips, but I wanted pancakes. Like, reeeeeally wanted pancakes. But the parsnips were getting kind of menacing. "Eat us now",  they were saying. "You've had pancakes for a few days in a row. Your vegbox will have more of us next week, and you have to keep up!" I've been on a okonomyiaki kick lately, since finding the perfect recipe for them in the Asian Vegan Kitchen cookbook (by the way, I can't say enough good things about this cookbook. It rocks.) Now, having figured out basically how to make *anything* in my veg box into scrumptious and highly addictive japanese/kitchendancing fusion pancake madness, I'm unstoppable. 

Unstoppable, yes. But I did pause when I realized that I had taken parsnips, leeks, some soaking shitake mushooms and umeboshi plum paste out of the fridge, plus the requisite greens, (because it's not dinner if it ain't got anything green).  Really? I thought. Is this a good idea? OH SWEET JEEBUS YES. This is heaven if you like foods where the flavours strongly contrast but still play nice together. The parsnips are sweet and earthy. The mushrooms pick up the earthy note and run with it,  the greens lighten up the dish a bit and the picked plum sour/salty/sharp just skips over the whole thing and somehow ties it together. It also keeps it from being too sweet to eat for dinner. I like sweet and savory together, but  at least for main dishes, I"m not a big fan of out-and-out sweet. Try this. You won't be sorry. By the way, you'll need 4 shitake mushrooms soaked in about a cup of water beforehand.

parnsnip rosti/okonomyiaki (makes 2 pan-size pancakes, or 4 smaller ones)

2 large grated parsnips (about 3c. grated parsnip)

1 smallish leek, chopped

1/3 c shittake mushroom stock (just the soaking water from the mushrooms)

2 heaping tbs chopped pickled ginger

1 heaping tablespoon white miso

dash shoyu

dash sake

salt

grind of black pepper

about 2/3c. ww flour mixed with 1 tbs baking powder

Mix all ingredients together. This should be a very thick batter, with the flour just barely present enough to hold the parsnip and leek together. This isn't a pancake batter that you can pour. It's more like rösti with a bit of adhesive. Adjust the liquid/flour if you have to.  Fire up a pan (if you have a nonstick, now is the time to use it), spray with oil, and spread/press one pancake of batter into it, smothing it out with the back of a spoon. Cook covered until the bottom is browned, then flip, and cook covered again until the other side is brown. Repeat for pancake number two.

ume-mushroom-spinach sauce

4 rehydrated shitake mushrooms

1/2 cup cooked spinach, chopped  (I just used frozen)

2/3 cup shitake stock (ie, the rest of the stock)

dash shoyu

1 heaping tbs umeboshi plum paste

Simmer the mushooms in the stock and shoyu. Let it simmer down until there isn't much liquid left.  About 2 mins before you want to serve the pancakes, add the cooked spinach into the mushrooms and stir to combine and heat  the spinach. When you're ready to serve, stir in the plum paste. 

Oddly enough, this is really good with a few spicy dill pickes on the side. 

plum-a-riffic music: My favorite plum by Suzanne Vega.

highbrow/lowbrow

After brunch this weekend, the kitchendancing cave had some leftover champagne.  By the way, if you want to keep champagne fizzy, store it in the fridge with a fork in it thusly. Maybe it works without the fork, but I like champagne too much to risk finding out. Since  I looooves me some boozy cooking, I decided to make something decadent yet decidedly lowbrow with it: Barley "risotto". People often try to do too much to risotto, and also tend to get dogmatic and snobby about it. If you have good mushrooms and good wine and decent technique, it's best not to add too much in the way of other flavours, and if you do that, it's hard to go wrong. Others may differ, but I find that the trick to a really good mushroom rissotto (other than quality ingredients) is to do the mushrooms and the rice (or in this case barley) separately, and to make sure you don't over-spice. I also like to add the barley or rice to the mushroom pan instead of vice versa, so as not to lose all the good stuff kinda stuck to the bottom of the mushroom pan.  Also, rissotto is just a wet pilaf, or savory rice pudding, depending how you look at it. Have fun. Making perfect rissotto takes a bit of practice, but it's not hard, and if you're a beginner, barley is much more forgiving than rice for this dish, though you could do this entire recipe with rice as well. Personally, I love the way barley goes with mushrooms. It's all very earthy and musky and kinda sexy. 

Barley-mushroom-champagne risotto

Soak in enough water to cover:

15g or 1/2c dried porcini (or other) mushrooms

4 dried shiitake mushrooms, chopped and stemmed

Basically, you want a good cup of dried mushrooms here. Use what you have. That's what I had. Nyah.

meanwhile, 

Fill your kettle with water and turn it on. While the kettle's going, dry-roast 1.5 cups of barley in a big pan on low heat. When it gets light brown, douse with all the champagne you want, reserving a few tbs of the champagne for the next step (though you can use white wine, vermouth, or even vodka here). When the champagne is absorbed, add hot water to cover, stirring occasionally and adding more water as needed. You'll eventually be adding the mushroom soaking water, so take it easy at this point with the water-adding, okay? This should be cooking on low heat, just barely simmering. I used about 1.5 cups of champagne. Yes. I'm that decadent. If you're just using a splash of wine, sub hot veg or mushroom broth for the hot water, but use one without strong flavours (like celery) that might overwhelm your lovely little mushrooms. You don't have to stir constantly. That's some kind of myth perpetuated by people who want to intimidate you into thinking that making rissotto is difficult. *Feh*, I say to these people. The secret is out: this is easy. 

While the barley is cooking, chop a leek and (in a separate large pan from the barley) saute it in some more of that champagne. Use green onions if you don't have leeks. When the leek is translucent, add two cloves of chopped garlic. Then throw in the soaked mushrooms, and dump the soaking water into the barley. Turn the heat dow waaaaaaay low and cover the mushroom leek goodness. It should be wet enough to not stick to the pan, but not simmering in liquid as such. This should cook for at least 15 mins. You want to give the leek time to start getting kinda sweet. 

Your kitchen should now smell like I imagine heaven does. 

When everything is done, mix the barley into the mushrooms and adjust the liquid. If it's too soupy, let it simmer a bit (unlike a rice rissotto, it's near-impossible to overcook this one by letting it go a few extra minutes) and if it's too dry, add water or broth. Then add salt, pepper and  if you want, stir in a tablespoon or so of white miso at the end. Add a whack of fresh chopped parsley. Drizzle with some truffle oil if you have it. 

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.

spring soup

Wild garlic! It's here! Yay! This soup is simple, and perfect. The mushrooms add a lot of depth, the black pepper gives it heat, and the whole thing is satisfying but unstodgy. Kinda like spring.

Spring soup:

boil up:
2 dried shiitake mushrooms
lots of galangal (um, at least 4 large slices)
some lemongrass (2 stalks, bruised)
lots of black pepper (at least a tsp, more if you like the heat)
anisseed (1 tsp)
shoyu to taste (2-4 tbs should do it, but make your food how you want, not how i want)
a dash of mirin
a leek, chopped
a medium spud, chopped
some mushrooms
a chopped carrot
chicken seitan

when the spuds are done, declare the soup done, take it off the heat, pick out the galangal and lemongrass chunks, add a bit of lemon juice, and stir in 1 cup wild garlic, chopped.

exhuberant music for exhuberant soup: king of spain, moxy fruvous.

cold nights, warm soup

We spent day outside in the uncharacteristically sunny (but very cold) weather...until the sun set around 4. Then we came home and had this warming mushroom soup. I had some black eyed beans soaking, so I put them on to boil with two finely chopped onions and some bay leaves. When they were just about ready, I threw in a few cloves chopped garlic, some marmite, some white wine, sage and thyme and a whack of dried wild mushrooms, along with a bunch of leftover cooked brown rice. Then, just before serving it, I added a dash of tamari and a few drops of truffle oil. That's it. We ate it with salad (mustard greens, cabbage, fennel, pear in maple syrup/mustard/wine vinegar and pepper). This is really easy. You can use pretty much any combo of white bean and cooked grain you have lying around (wheat berries or barley are yum too). The only thing that you really *need* are dried mushrooms, or if you're lucky, a whole lot of fresh wild mushrooms. You don't actually need truffle oil, but if you're lucky enough to have some, use it for crying out loud. There is a special place in culinary hell for those who let truffle oil go rancid because they're continually "saving it for something special". What the hell are you waiting for? Oh, and go easy on the marmite/tamari, you don't want it to ovewhelm the other tastes...you can always add more at the end of cooking, along with some black pepper if your mushrooms aren't *ahem* very good. If you have some fresh parsely lying around, I'd strongly suggest stiring a good handful of chopped parsley in at the end, but I didn't have any and it was just delish anyways, thank you very much.

warm, comforting music: jazz lounge

Also, from a few days ago when I was far too stressed to post (or make anything requiring more than about 10 minutes of cooking), a superquick dinner. You see, I have a pumpkin problem. I love pumpkin. LOVE IT. And I accidentally bought one that was too big. I couldn't stop myself. It was just so... orange. So I baked it up (along with a few potatoes and some onions, cuz it never hurts to have those around) on the weekend and put in in the fridge and ate pumpkin stuff all week, which turned out to be a great thing, since I hardly had time to eat this week, let alone cook, I was so damn busy. This is from the last day of pumpkin. This is buckwheat crepes (buckwheat flour, ground flaxseeds, soured soy milk, water, salt) filled with mashed pumpkin, baked onion, nutmeg, pepper and nooch. Side of greens with *lots* of garlic and lemon.

music: guten tag. wir sind helden.

i wanna be a chocolate god post 7: alien appendages

You know sometimes food is good just because it reminds you of something gross. Or fun. Or both. If it tastes really good, then you know you have a winning situation. This is one such situation. This is basically a rolled version of lasagna, and the three concentric layers kind of make it look like a severed limb. Now, because of the colours, it's clearly vulcan (red bone, green blood, brown skin). Orrrr...it might just be lasagna. Vulcans are vegan, but eating them isn't. Though I seem to be a little obsessed with it (see this post).

First, find a Vulcan. Lure them into a false sense of security. Then steal their arms. This is difficult, because the average vulcan will see right through your ruse. So alternately, try this:

I batch chocolate pasta

beet filling: cooked beets, red chard stems (or more beets), okara riccotta (okara, lemon juice, maple syrup, salt, sweet miso, chickpea flour, vinegar)

chard layer: chopped chard leaves, rocket, blue Sheese, nutmeg, pepper

mushroom layer: onion, mushroom, white wine, oregano, thyme, marmite, pepper, truffle oil, flour to thicken.

Roll out the pasta dough into a ginormous rectangle on a peice of waxed paper. Lay three stripes of filling (in the order above) onto the rectangle. leaving room to seal the edges. Roll up like a giant sushi roll (making sure not to roll the paper into the thing) cursing if necessary. Cut into two. Use the paper to hoist the arms up and place them in a dutch oven. Inundate with white wine and water, drizzle with olive oil, and bake at 375 for about an hour, covered. Check periodically to make sure that the arms aren't welding themselves to the pan. Serve slices sprinkled with toasted pine nuts, cocoa nibs and pumpkin seeds, a bit of truffle/olive oil, and some parsley. We also had salad with it. On the salad was reduced balsamic vinegar with a square of dark chocolate melted into the reduction. because sometimes things really do get that decadent. Oh yes.

You can also use any of these fillings alone as ravioli filling.

Coming soon: post 8: whiskey....

Yuba yum

According to medici, this is the best yuba I've made yet. Oooookay. To make the best yuba yet: soak yuba and discard water. Use a pan you can put in the oven. Simmer the yuba in soy sauce and white wine. Fish out the done yuba (there should still be some liquid left), and throw in grated ginger, garlic, a tiny bit of sugar and mustard greens. Cook the greens down, and add enoki mushrooms. Pile the cooked yuba on top, sprinkle with truffle oil and sesame seeds and pop the whole mess under the broiler. When it crisps up, eat it on black sticky rice. Drink the white wine along with dinner. Chase with salted chocolate. How very decadent. Medici is groaning with pleasure even as I type. Because of the food. Really.

If you set the rice soaking earlier, this really is fast to make, and dead easy. Any greens will work, as will any mushrooms (or combo of mushrooms). You can add tofu, or nearly any other vegetable that tastes good when cooked through. You can use sesame or olive oil instead of truffle (but I have truffle oil sitting there, and if I let it go rancid or fail to use it for yummy inventions, I will burn in culinary hell). Go easy on the soy sauce and heavy on the wine if you're not sure. You can always add salt later if you want. The sugar is key. You can't really taste it, but it makes the soy sauce taste, well, soy saucier. It's like when you add salt to cookies, but the opposite. See? Makes total sense.

Singing: "try a little priest" and many other choice tidbits from Sweeney Todd.

sushi

Sometimes I get this need to make vast quantities of sushi. I don't know where it comes from, but I do know that I can't really fight it. I mean, sometimes I just make myself a few rolls of raw veg/avocado sushi for dinner/lunch the next day, but occasionally, I want to make many different kinds all at once, which means I need brave souls to help me out by coming over to eat. Feeding people is always fun, though nothing compares to the delighted faces that people make when when they walk in and see an entire table of sushi. So delicious. Some of the rolls were: chocolate (chocolate olive tapenade...which is really just melted chocolate and chopped kalamata olives and some garlic...., cucumber, ume paste and a little salted chocolate sail for the top), spicy eggplant and greens with sesame, sweet potato tempura with wasabi mayo (for the mayo, blend 1 pack firm silken tofu with 1tbs apple cider vinegar, some salt and some sugar and as much wasabi as you can handle), many mushroom (enoki, shitake, and some I don't know the names of), mock eel (those are the ones that are arranged in little pinwheels...the "eel" is just yuba, wakame and dried mushrooms soaked together and then drained and then put through a blender with some capers, soy sauce and smoked paprika. Then I added rice flour until it was not gooey, and then wrapped the not-goo in nori and fried that. ), and tofu pouches stuffed with salty sesame rice. There were also some that were various combinations of raw veg (carrots, cukes, avocado, chives), and some tiny ones that were pickled ginger and shiso. It was fun. The salads are spicy konnyaku (konnyaku cut into strips and fried in sesame oil, then simmered in konbu stock and then spiced up with red pepper and citrus), and a wakame/cucumber salad. There's a bowl of veg tempura in the middle of the table (mostly potato and zucchini), because it seemed silly to stop after just doing enough sweet potato for the sushi. Once you're deep frying stuff, you might as well keep going until the batter is used up.

Ducky's culinary school: foodgasms.

I was in Florence and spent some time in the central market on the top floor where all the vegetables are, stumbling around in a state of quasi-estatic sensory overload. Mostly because of a fresh porcini stand. I bought fresh porcini, which are butter-melty and frankly, have a taste and smell that falls into the sex category. It would have been criminal to do too much to such a lovely and complex taste, so I just heated them through in some olive oil and salt, and put them on some fresh bread and ate. I also cooked up this little flowered zucchini on the side (just oil, salt, pepper and a bit of garlic). And maybe slumped into my chair making little noises of happiness. Of course, the next day, I went back to the market and bought some dried porcini to take home.

Now, usually, dried mushrooms don't smell like much when you open the bag. This smelled like much. Suddenly I understood why one might need a warning on a plastic bag telling you not to stick your head in it. One night, I rehydrated a few of the mushrooms, and put them on spaghetti with truffles and just a bit of parsley (Yes, I bought truffles packed in oil on this trip. Because life is too short not to) and parsley. Oh. My. Goodness. And then last night Spanky and I went down to Leith for an night of risotto. Hilarity ensued, but that was mostly due to the conversation.

Mushroom risotto: If you are lucky enough to get your hands on mushrooms this good, for the love of sweet Jeebus, don't do too much to them. Brown rice in olive oil, heated until is smells nutty and then doused with a good cup of dry white wine. Simmered and stirred in the mushroom water. Meanwhile, the rehydrated mushrooms were heated up in a little oil, a tiny clove of garlic, some wine, and a green onion. When the rice is done, mix, and add salt and a smidge of black pepper. Perhaps a little more olive oil. If you have more delicate mushrooms, use white rice.

Strawberry risotto: Take thinly sliced red onion and a clove of garlic and add it to olive oil in a pan before heating the oil. Turn the heat on low and cook until the onion is translucent. Add white rice and a tiny bit of cumin and some salt. When the rice is also translucent, add a healthy two or three shots of saffron gin (or gin and saffron. vermouth would also work), then hot water. Do the usual risotto thing. Meanwhile, reduce some balsamic vinegar (somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup for 1.5 cups of rice going into the risotto). When the rice is done, stir in the reduced vinegar, about 3 cups of sliced strawberries, at least half a cup of fresh basil, and black pepper.

Take both of these, and serve them with green salad to good friends. Eat slowly. Laugh a lot.

perfect music: snippets of Bach, sung by a choir boy and an angel, interrupted by helpless laughter and drinks.

kimchi and more wild garlic

I found vegan kimchi! And when I walked past a veg store, there were little flowering bok choy. And then we found a whole field of wild garlic and onions on our bike ride today. So I give you pure happiness in a bowl: rice and barley. Two kinds of mushrooms and tempeh simmered in soy sauce, sake and mirin and then getting friendly with the wild garlic and onions and some ginger. Carrots, spuds and flowery bok choy in spicy korean bean paste. Kimchi.

Singing along with the soundtrack from Cabaret, and maybe doing the cancan.

mmmmm....mushroomy

Ahem. In order to compensate for the last round of photos, taken with a real camera with actual daylight, I give you my worst-yet spycam photo, starring recovering-from-a-week-of-culinary-madness soup. M brought me some enoki (yay!) and then I remembered I had daikon (yay!) and red radishes (yay!). While rescuing the daikon from the back of the fridge, I found a zucchini snuggled up against it. They looked so happy together it seemed a shame to separate them. Soup (daikon, the smallest onion ever, normal-size shitake mushrooms, a bit of leftover red rice, dashi, white wine, mirin, soy sauce, ginger, zucchini, enoki). It is exceedingly rare that the odds and ends in the fridge on veg-box eve go together so well. Salad in a teacup (wakame and red radishes with lemon, miso, maple syrup and a bit of white vinegar).

Also, Hezbollah Tofu has not yet posted my yummy yet disturbing boudin. Harumph.

enoki music: serge gainsbourg