very Scottish rolly buns

...because they have oatmeal and brambles. Blackberries for those of you not lucky enough to live here.

Step one: Get on your bike. Remember to pack a tupperware container or three in your bag.
Step two: Bike to a bramble patch and pick as many brambles as you can. Remember that the brambles taste better if you have to climb over a fence to get them.
Step three: return home happy and triumphant with purple hands
Step four: make these rolly buns


Dough dry ingredients:
1:1:1 (approx) mix of oat flour, whole wheat flour and chickpea flour
pinch salt
sprinkle of brown sugar
(generous) dash cardamom
(stingy) half dash of cinnamon
a goodly amount of quick yeast

Dough wet ingredients:
okara
warm water
drops of almond essence
dribble maple syrup

Roll out the dough and then spread a mix of brambles and peaches tossed in arrowroot over it. The peaches are optional. I bought some dud peaches that were too cottony to eat, but just fine to cook with. Using them up like this (and as baked peaches stuffed with brambles and candied ginger) helped numb the pain of having substandard peaches mocking me from the fruit bowl. Now, back to the buns: Roll it up! Cut into buns! Let rise overnight. Bake the next morning and have the Best Fall Breakfast Ever.

I really didn't measure anything for these, so consider recreating the buns in this post to be an invitation to break free from the tyranny of the measuring cups!

queen of tart: rhubarb thyme rolly buns

It was only a matter of thyme. Ahem. This week there was some lovely deep-red rhubarb in my fridge and a big bunch of fresh tyme in my veg box. When they saw each other, they fell in love, and it just seemed wrong to separate them. So I made these.

dry ingredients:
flours-equal parts millet, chickpea, arrowroot and brown rice (for a grand total of 2.5 cups)
1.5 tsp xantham gum
1 tbs flax meal
pinch salt
1 package quick yeast
zest from 1 lemon
2 heaping tbs fresh thyme leaves, rubbed

wet ingredients:
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup soy milk
juice from lemon
1 tsp vanilla
2 tbs maple syrup

Mix all the dry ingredients together. Mix all the wet ingredients together - they will curdle- and pour over dry ingredients. Mix mix mix until it's all mixed into a sticky dough. Add more water or soy milk if it's too dry. Add more millet flour if it's too sticky.

Filling:
okara from 1 batch soy milk (1 heaping cup)
1 tbs coconut flour (optional, but nice)
2 tbs sweet white miso
2 tbs maple syrup
pinch salt
zest from 1 lemon
arrowroot powder (start with 1 tbs)

Mix all the filling ingredients together. They should be gloopy, like cream cheese. Add enough arrowroot to ensure that this is so (the exact amount you need will depend on how watery your okara was to start with). The filling should be quite sweet, as you are going to throw rhubarb into it.

Chop up 2 cups rhubarb and one very ripe pear. Mix them. If you do not love tartness, mix 1/4 cup (or more) of sugar in with the fruit. I love tartness. I am the queen of tart. I eat rhubarb straight. I also sometimes peel and eat limes. So... I made this without sugar and found that the pear and the maple syrup took the edge off, but left the filling pleasantly puckery. If you are more of a sweetie-pie than a queen of tart, then go with the sugar.

Now, roll out the buns into a rectangle on a very well-floured surface (I used more millet flour), schmear with filling, and then cover that with a layer of rhubarb and pear. Roll up. Cut into 4 buns, place in a silicone pie dish, and let rise overnight. If you don't use silicone or other seriously non-stick cookware, then coconut oil + flour a normal metal pie dish and proceed with that. Don't skip the oil + flour, or you will never ever unstick your rolly buns from the pie dish, which will be sad.

The next morning, preheat oven to as high as it goes with a bowl of water in it. Drop temp to 200C, and, without waiting for the oven to actually cool to 200C, put the rolly buns inside. Bake 40 mins (assuming you've made 4 large buns).

Devour for breakfast with green tea and fruit and be pleased with spring.

Dancing along to: The Spice Girls: Wannabe. I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want: RHUBARB.

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.

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.

it's not easy being green.

Green is the colour of spring. It's the colour of so many things.... and if green has a taste, this is it. I love foraging for edibles (though I actually didn't pick these myself). Wild garlic, nettles, berries, mushrooms... yum. And there's something extra yum about food that is a) free and b) seasonal and so precious. This soup is dead easy, so long as you don't touch the nettles. I used a cunning combination of chopsticks and scissors to remove them from their stems. If you lack chopsticking skills, I recommend gardening gloves.

Nettle soup.

1 onion or leek, chopped
1 large spud, cubed
3 cloves garlic, crushed
cover with either lightly salted water or broth, and boil until soft

when the spuds are cooked through, add
1 cup of parsley, chopped
2 cups of nettles, leaves only (don't chop them, just dump them directly from the colander into the soup, then wash off the colander immediately lest any of the diabolical little stinging hairs be left behind)
let this simmer for a few minutes

Blend! Blend! Blend! Reheat if you need to.

Off the heat, add
1/2 cup of okara or soy yogurt
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
juice from 1 lemon
2-3 tbs of white miso

Eat, preferably while listening to Kermit the frog sing "It's not easy being green"

we're here, we're queer, we're brunching!

Aaaaand this is what happens when your straight friends forget to show up for easter brunch. You end up with a decapitated bunny,  a half-drunk bottle of champagne, and evidence of a show-and-tell about sex toys. 

I made maple hot cross buns from here (so yummy!) and a herb kuku wrapped in lavash bread. The kuku was: 1 block tofu + 1 batch okara (or 1 cup soy yogurt) blended together, 1/4 c cornstarch dissolved in 1/4 cup water, 1/2 c nutritional yeast, salt, 1 tbs cumin, 1 tbs dijon mustard, dash tumeric, grind or two of pepper, a few tsp of barberries, 1 tbs dried fenugreek leaves (kasuri methi), 3 tbs of flour mixed with 1 tbs baking powder,  and 1 cup each of the following fresh herbs, chopped finely: dill, coriander, parsley and wild garlic. Spread onto a pizza dish and bake for 40 mins at 400F. Cool, slice into fingers, and wrap in lavash bread. Dip: soy yogurt, garlic, mint, rose petals, salt. In the little bowls: one bowl each of green olives, cherry tomatoes, very dark easter eggs from Montezuma mixed with chocolate covered almonds from Coco, and mixed grapes. I have to say that between the food and the vast amount of info on sex, you straight people really missed out. 

We also had a bunny from Coco chocolate, who rock because they have kick-ass fair trade chocolate *and* a list of vegan stuff (so you don't have to guess), plus they're super-nice at the shop and have good taste in music. Yay! Plus, this bunny didn't skimp on the chocolate, or try to use subpar chocolate just because it's in the shape of a bunny. Go Coco!

music: I like fucking, by Bikini Kill

red bean swirly buns

Life has been stressful lately. Bordering on insane, really. Consequently, I've been making food that's relatively easy in that it doesn't take much time, but that's really colourful and pretty and comforting. And what could be more comforting than warm homemade bread?

These don't take long to make. Only a few minutes to put them together the night before, assuming you have some red bean paste lying around (which we all should have, really), and the next morning they only take about 20 mins to bake. Mmmmmmmm.

Green tea red bean swirly buns. Apparently I just can't get enough of the Suessian-looking breads lately. A special but not sicky-sweet weekend breakfast. Bread part: whole wheat flour, a little bit of sugar (maybe a tbs for these 6 ginormous buns), yeast, salt, matcha, okara mixed with some water and almond extract. Mix, knead, roll into a giant rectangle. Cover with red bean paste (you can see this in the first picture), which is just aduki beans mashed with sugar and a smidge of salt... I like this not too sweet, so I make my own, but you can buy it ready-made if you want. Roll up like cinnamon buns and let rise overnight (second picture). The next morning, bake 5 mins at 220C, then 15 min at 180C, take 'em out of the oven, top with almond icing (soy or almond milk, icing sugar, almond extract) and devour (third picture, where you can see that I accidentally started devouring before remembering to take a photo).

Note: these aren't cake, or even remotely cinnamon bun like in texture. They're not very sweet (unless you drown them in icing), but they are very filling. They're dense and quite moist and yummy, and (without the icing) would go perfectly well with soup or a salad (I might have had one with miso soup for dinner later in the weekend). In fact, I suspect that these buns are what would happen if german-japanese baking ever happens.

A quick note on my obsessive use of okara in baked goods: I use it because I have it lying around. You can pretty much always sub in soy yogurt, or blended tofu. Or, if you want, soured soy milk (add lemon juice to soy milk until it curdles). You can also use ground almonds in water to make a yogurt-consistency paste, if you're so inclined.Note that these will make your baking slightly denser than the okara will, so you may want to step up the sugar (yeast food) and yeast. In this recipe, I have an okara-free version of the dough here, which just uses soy milk, and which makes a less cakey bread.

A quick note on the quick note: A good trick to make vegan baked goods rise more is to add a bit of baking soda (like half a tsp) to the dry ingredients, and then 2tbs of vinegar to the wet. Don't use this trick with yeasted breads, only with stuff you're putting in the oven soon after you mix wet and dry ingredients

Eat your leftovers.

I hope all the americans out there had a lovely thanksgiving. I'm not american, and I didn't celebrate american thanksgiving, but I do have a lot of fancy dinner parties. I kinda got to thinking about big fancy dinners, and wanted to remind you that almost half of our edible food ends up in the garbage. Please use your leftovers, okay? Being wasteful isn't a sign of celebration, it's a sign of stupidity and entitlement, neither of which is worth celebrating.

Now, on to the food:

The best part about weekends is having time to do stuff like this for breakfast.

Green tea and chestnut swirls: Green tea bread dough (spelt flour, matcha, sugar, salt, yeast, soy milk, little tiny bit of almond extract) with chestnut filling (okara, chestnut flour, maple syrup). I make the buns the night before and let them rise overnight. My kitchen is cold, so I just leave them on the counter, but if you live somewhere warm, or keep your heat on at night (and dammit, you'd better have a good reason for that one), you could let them rise in the fridge. This is a picture of the night before. I fogot to take a photo the next morning. The next morning, I bake them and have hot buns for breakfast. Served with icing (icing sugar, soy milk, almond extract). I like these because it looks like Dr.Suess made my breakfast.

For the leftovers, make bread pudding: cut up the stale bread or buns in chunks and soak overnight in just enough soymilk to cover them, with a tbs or two of flax seeds and some sugar (if you want it). The next morning, add almonds if you want 'em, dump the whole goopy mess into a greased cake pan and bake it up for breakfast. It will take about half an hour at 180C, which is just enough time to have a cup of coffee and/or make out with your weekend guest (brush your teeth first if you go for the second option). Once the pudding is done, sprinkle with matcha and/or sugar. You can do this with any stale bread, and it's especially good with these or old cinnamon buns/raisin bread. You can add chopped up pears and walnuts and a bit of cardamom (to plain white or whole wheat bread), chopped up apples (to cinnamon buns) or slices of bananas (to anything, as far as I'm concerned, but it's strikingly good with any kind of nutty bread), or if you're feeling really decadent, you can add chocolate chips to the puddings before baking them. Go crazy. There are no rules!

armoured turnip!

Aaaand the prize for best named recipe so far goes to.... armoured turnips: baked sliced turnips with white bean boursin (made with urad dal, because some of us have managed to run out of white beans even though we could have sworn we had a giant jar of them somewhere) from the Uncheese Cookbook. Basically layers of sliced turnip, cheese and the ubiquitous cinnamon/ginger/clove combo. These are clearly the predecessor to scalloped potatoes. I ate them on kasha with greens. I will do this again with pumpkin or kabotchka squash or sweet potatoes. Something bright orange.

I was a little apprehensive about anything called "boiled sallet", but I tried this, staying remarkably close to the actual instructions, minus the egg: boiled broad beans and leeks (I figure anything green counts here) drained and tossed with with oil, vinegar, ginger, cinnamon and currants. This was remarkably yummy and comforting on polenta. The recipe calls for chopped boiled egg and harps on about how important it is, so I added an okara burger (okara, capers, liquid smoke, garlic, cilantro, chickpea flour, tamari) to my plate.

Here's what I followed:
Source [A new booke of Cookerie, J. Murrell]: Diuers Sallets boyled. Parboyle Spinage, and chop it fine, with the edges of two hard Trenchers vpon a boord, or the backe of two chopping Kniues: then set them on a Chafingdish of coales with Butter and Uinegar. Season it with Sinamon, Ginger, Sugar, and a few parboyld Currins. Then cut hard Egges into quarters to garnish it withall, and serue it vpon sippets. So may you serue Burrage, Buglosse, Endiffe, Suckory, Coleflowers, Sorrel, Marigold leaues, water Cresses, Leekes boyled, Onions, Sparragus, Rocket, Alexanders. Parboyle them, and season them all alike: whether it be with Oyle and Uinegar, or Butter and Uinegar, Sinamon, Ginger, Sugar, and Butter: Egges are necessary, or at least very good for all boyld Sallets.

Medieval food is not pretty. But is is yummy. Things I've noticed so far: I miss chilli, and it's amazing how different food is without tomatoes (I'm still eating the ones that come in my vegbox, but I've not been buying extra ones, because they're a new world food, and so aren't in any of the medieval recipes). Also, I think I may end up with a cinnamon addiction and start adding raisins/figs to everything by the end of the modern medieval project. Quinces are underappreciated, and I love them.

Music that is also not pretty and yes yummy: The pubcrawlers.

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....

august is the yummiest month

The new spuds are arriving in the veg box, and there are plums everywhere. I've been eating raspberries for breakfast all week and having a multicoloured tomato salad at least once a day for the past while. August is the yummiest month.

Trufflespuds: Boiled new potatoes, scooped out and then mashed with truffle oil, salt and parsley and then restuffed into the skins and baked, topped with slices of summer truffle. OH THE YUMNESS! *ahem* The poor potatoes have to go through a lot (boiled, mashed and baked), but it's all very worth it. On the side you see purple stuff (onions,purple kale, ungodly amounts of garlic, godly amounts of chili, nutmeg, raisins, sprouted azuki beans)

Plum Cake: Self-raising white flour, polenta (about 1:2), brown sugar, salt, baking powder, okara from almond-soy milk mixed with water to a yogurtish consistency, almond essence, rosewater, apple cider vinegar, Victoria plums, itsy-bitsy plums (the size of grapes!).

music: kd lang. all you can eat.

Pancrepe scramble

You know, it all started off with one substitution too many. I decided to make crepes. I didn't have enough wheat flour, so I used rice flour. There may have also been some creativity with soy and coconut milk. It should have worked. I mean, I've made rice flour crepes before, but this time it didn't. They just lost structural integrity. Then I thought...these look....scrambled. It is one of the better kitchen rescues that I've done. I may never make unscrambled pancakes or crepes again. You see, if you accept that the purpose of pancakes is to be coated in stuff (maple syrup, usually), then it becomes obvious that scrambling them a) increases the surface to volume ratio of the pancake bits, allowing more stuff to adhere to each bit and b) introduces more nooks and crannies where sauce can get into the pancake, or bits of fruit can hold on to it. The word "velcro" springs to mind. Also, it's wonderfully satisfyingly messy-looking. The basic method is: pretend you are making pancakes, pouring out one giant pancake on your pan (my pancake recipe makes 3 giant pancakes, so I repeat this three times) but when it gets to the bit where you flip it over, just scramble it instead. There's a photo of a real live nude pancrepe being scrambled in a cast iron pan. Yum. Put all the scrambled pancake aside, and throw piles of chopped fruit or veg into the pan and heat through. Add scrambled pancake. Place mess in bowl. Douse with sauce. Eat.

Combo 1: rice-flour coconut/soy milk "crepe" with bananas, kiwis, cashews, pistachios, coco nibs. Sauce: soy milk, cardamom, cinnamon, sugar.

Combo 2: wheat flour/ almond milk pancakes with strawberries, blueberries, mango, kiwi, plum, fresh figs, nuts, ground green cardamom, sea salt. Sauce: fresh mint leaves, pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, maple syrup.

Combo 3: buckwheat/chocolate stout (spanky's homemade chocolate stout, no less)/flax seed crepe with onions,apples, capers, green pepper and smoked okara and almond cheese (okara, ground almonds, nutritional yeast, tahini, garlic powder, grated onion, dijon mustard, sweet/light miso, lemon juice, smoked salt, smoked paprika, thickened with kuzu)

I think I might try a vaguely mexican combo next...I'm thinking a cornmeal scrambled pancake with yellow squash, beans, smoked chilis and cacao nibs. ....

just yummy

It's pretty rare that I post my lunch, but this one is two of my favorite lunch things. Potato salad: spuds and greens (though spuds and tomatoes also works), fresh coriander. Dressing: toasted and then ground cumin, salt, chilli, sugar, a whole lemon worth of lemon juice. The yum. Fun with okara: all in a food processor: 1.5 soy milk batches of okara, a small onion, a carrot, half a bell pepper, a few chives, a sheet of nori, two tbs or so of dry wakame, some capers, about a tbs of miso, a sprinkle of oregano, some lemon zest. When I have celery, I add a bit of celery too. Then when that was all blended, I added smoked paprika and some rice flour. The amount of rice flour depends on how wet the other ingredients are. Them made them into little patties and baked them. And I eat them with either ketchup or lime pickle, depending on how classy I'm feeling. I've heard these compared to crab cakes, and they are wicked good with sweet chili dipping sauce, but I've never had a crab cake, so I have no idea if they taste anything like them.

morning music: CBC radio 2.

secret pizza

Potato crust pizza and new hoodie! I didn't eat the hoodie, but it did make me feel like a kitchen ninja because it is black and secret. I also have an apron. If you're very very good, I'll model it when I make something that goes with apron. Pizza crust (leftover mashed spuds, salt, wholewheat flour, rosemary, baking powder, water). I prebaked the crust, and while that was going on, I blanched some spinach and rocket and sliced up a pear. On the pizza: brie-like stuff loosely based on The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook (I used the seasonings, but used okara as the base), walnuts, spinach and augula, pear. Bake again to make everything warm. Oh yeah. The yum. I like the potato crust. I will do it again, probably often, perhaps requiring some sort of intervention in the future. I ate this with carrot sticks, and drank red wine out of a tumbler because the whole arugula/pear/brie combo was just a *little* too classy for me. I may or may not have used the carrot sticks to make vegan vampire fangs on myself during this picture. You'll never know.

pizza poetry: luna allison.

take me to your leader

There were these little round zucchini. They kinda look like fat little aliens, don't they? I could practically hear them saying "Take me to your leader!" in the store. So I beamed them into my veg basket and took them home. Here's a photo of them all lined up, completely ignorant of the fate that awaits them. I have included a manga postcard for scale, both in terms of size and cuteness. The alien zucchinni got stuffed with onion, celery, parsnip, kidney beans in white wine, sage, garlic, smoked paprika, capers and some chopped up olives. Here, you can see me sneaking up on the stuffed, cooked alien zucchini. They were yum. We had some gnocchi along with it. Rosemary gnocchi in lemon-garlicky goodness. I wanted something that made the lemon-garlic stick to the gnocchi that wasn't just oil, so i used okara, which was a damn good idea, if I do say so myself. It was kinda like making a lemon-garlic ricotta sauce, and not alien at all.

lulling the zucchini into a false sense of security with: the scissor sisters

soy milk maker madness! and carrot pickle.

One fine day I was taking out the recycling, and I realized that I had about a kazillion soy milk tetra packs and that this was ridiculous. So finally, I bought a soy milk maker. I *heart* ebay. Oooooh. Look. Fancy schmancy weekend cappuccino. Yuuuuuuuuuuuum. Some people dislike the beanyness of homemade soymilk. For soymilk, I add about a tablespoon of rice to the soaking soybeans, and then a bit of agave to the finished soy milk, and it's all I can do to hold myself back from drinking the entire batch right there.

Then, much to my dismay, I realized it was going to be one of those days where I just want to cook. Sigh. Nearly everyone I know is out of town, so I only have one brave soul coming for dinner tonight. I hope she's up to the challenge. I used the okara to make an indian-inspired dessert. And finally, the novelty of making my own tofu was too much to resist, so I made some, just following the instructions, and made saag tofu. Oh, and the fun didn't stop there.... While I was in Montreal, I had the most amazing carrot pickle. Yup. As in, I spent the entire plane trip back plotting and scheming the re-creating of this carrot pickle in my kitchen, and here's what I came up with: the problem with pickle is that it needs time to pickle. The problem with me is that I am impatient. Luckily, I am also not adverse to faking it when need be. So, here is my highly dubious carrot pickle method: I filled a 2 cup measuring cup with carrot machsticks. Toast and then grind some fenugreek seeds. Add these, some turmeric, some chilli, some salt and a bit of garlic to your carrots. Go easy on the chili. You can add more later if you need to. Chop up 3 pickled lemons, fearlessly creating the hybrid pickly love child of moroccan and indian food. Throw 'em in, along with a bit of the lemon pickle water. From experience: DO NOT taste the pickle at this stage. Trust me. Then pop some mustard seeds in a pan with a bit of oil, and throw on some asafoetida for good measure. Dump this on the carrots and other spices, and then mix up the whole thing. Microwave for a few minutes. Cover and refrigerate. It worked! I suspect my methods would have traditional cooks wringing their hands, but I'm not a traditional kind of girl. Plus, I have this damn good pickle, which makes me feel rather smug about the whole situation.

As for what happened to the okara (that's the leftover soybean pulp), I noticed that it had a consistancy similar to that near-solid milk that one uses for indian desserts...and I had some moong dal on hand, and well, sometimes these things just happen. Random dessert: boil up some moong dal with piles of green cardamoms until you have a paste. While that's going on, dissolve some saffron in a tbs of soy milk, and mix the saffrony soy milk into the okara. Also, dry roast some cashews. Pick out the cardamoms from the dal paste (chopsticks work well for this). Heat up a little bit of oil in a pan, and pour in the dal paste and stir it around until it starts sticking to itself and then add brown sugar to taste. I imagine jaggery would work better, but that would have required me leaving the house. Not going to happen. Once the sugar has dissolved, add the okara mix, and keep mixing until you have a giant ball of goo. Press into a plate. I have used my "fancy" plate. Cool, slice, eat. Yum. I know that this dessert, or at least the more authentic version of it, has a name. But at my favorite indian dessert shop in Montreal (ahem. Pushaps), we always just called it "the vegan one".

obsessive cooking sing-along: those pretty, those pretty, those pretty little things.

from russia, with love

Kasha with mushrooms, leeks, and carrots (oh come on, you don't need an ingredient list. it really is just kasha with mushrooms, leeks, and carrots and a spash of vermouth, because I'm that kind of girl) and stuffed tomatoes (tomatoes, okara with basil, nutmeg, mustard and truffle oil).

bopping along to: satisfy the mind podcast.