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.

A commandment from the chocolate god

Thou shalt not use blood chocolate. I post a lot of chocolate stuff, and so I think I have some responsibility to ask you not to use chocolate produced by slaves when you make the lovely, decadent dark chocolate goodness from my blog. Animal slavery is not vegan. Human slavery is also not vegan. Both suck, and the edge of guilt will ruin the otherwise perfect taste of chocolate. And it will break my little dancing vegan chocolate god heart. For more info, go here.

You can be a chocolate snob like me and still not rely on child slaves to get the stuff to your table. Many of the fair-trade, organic chocolate bars have failed miserably to impress me, but just as many have knocked my socks off with how good they are. Here are my recommendations:

For cooking cakes etc: Green & Blacks or GEPA dark chocolates, Plamil for cases where you want a dairy-free milk or white chocolate. Green and Blacks also makes kick-ass coco powder.

For super decadent stuff (truffles, hot chocolate): Valhrona, either tempered or not, depending on the application.

For straight up eating (decadent): Coppeneur, Charlemagne, Coco of Bruntsfield, Luento Santoro

For straight up eating (fun): Dagoba (if you can get it fresh-ish... I don't know why, but I've had extremely bad luck with getting stale/bloom-ish chocolate from this company, yet their lavender chocolate is so good, I still buy it.)

Generally, stuff marked organic (or fair trade) is slave free, as is single-origin chocolate that is not from the Cote d'Ivoire. Please do your sleuthwork if you are unsure of the origins of your chocolate. Here is a link to a list of some slave-free chocolates. If you're too lazy to do your own research, please please please stick to the brands that others have taken the time to research for you.

i wanna be a chocolate god post 4: enlightenment

Sweet Jeebus. After making this, I think I'm going to become a hot chocolate activist and lobby to have this sort of thing declared "real hot chocolate" and everything else clearly labelled as "a vague suggestion of what hot chocolate might be if it were done all the way". The "just add soy milk and stir" or even "melt really good chocolate into the soy/nut milk of your choice, along with a few spices" has got nothing on the crazy elaborate preparations from the enlightenment. Drinking this sure enlightened me. Hot chocolate cobbled together from a few different 16-18th century recipes, most of which are already vegan! Yay!: For 8 people: Start with 1 batch almond/hazelnut milk (I made this in the soy milk maker). Place the milk in a pot with mortar and pestled: generous 1/2 tsp annatto, 1 heaping tsp anisseed, a scant tsp of strong cinnamon (the kind used in indian cooking), 3-5 cloves, as many candied rose petals as you want - I used about two tablespoons. Add a whole vanilla bean and an ancho chilli (deseeded), both were dried, so I just cut them into strips with scissors, since the whole mess is going to be strained later. Heat this all to a simmer, then turn it off and let it sit for a few hours (I left it for about 8 hours) This should be a) bright orange (yup, that's it in the pot, with the tomato for comparison) b) not sweet and c) kinda thin. Then, strain the whole thing into a pot, and dissolve about 150 g of good dark chocolate in it (I used 75% untempered chocolate from Valhrona) plus a tablespoon of unsweetened cocoa. Sweeten to taste with agave. Drink. It will become immediately clear why this is considered an aphrodisiac. I nearly went off in my pants while drinking it.

You really do need to let the almond/hazelnut milk and spices sit for a good few hours. When I tried a little sample of it early on in the afternoon, it was quite jarring, but by the evening, all the flavours had rounded out and melded. There was a bit left, and we had it for breakfast, and I have to say that it was even better. Next time I think I'll start the hot chocolate the day before and let it steep (before the straining step) overnight. Oh, and this is not suitable for american "serving sizes". I served it in small cups, which I think amounted to just over half a cup per serving.

Just for the record, I am completely and utterly unable to understand how anyone sees being vegan as deprivation.

music of the gods for the drink of the gods: dead can dance

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. ....

kale, spuds, chillis. what else do you need, really?

I wasn't planning on blogging this, but... yum!

Potato roti: About 3-4 spuds worth of leftover mashed spuds, or microwaved spuds that have been mashed. Mix in curry powder, mango powder, nutritional yeast. Roti dough: about a cup of whole wheat flour and a cup of ww spelt flour, sprinkle of crushed flax seeds, a nice sprinkle of white poppy seeds, dash of salt. Add water (enough that the dough is wet but not sticky), knead, and set aside while you make the greens. It is KEY to let the dough rest in quiet for at least 20 minutes, or you will rush it, which will upset the dough, and then it will retaliate and the roti won't be as wonderful as they could, all because you couldn't wait 20 minutes. So step away from the dough.

Kale: dry-roast a heaping tbs paunch poran, plus extra cumin, plus crushed chilli, plus asafoetida. Then add two large onions, chopped + water. When the onions have cooked through, add a handful of fenugreek (methi) leaves and um, 5 cloves of chopped garlic. Then all the kale you can handle and a few mushrooms if they're looking at you, all sad and excluded-feeling (like mine were). Cook the kale uncovered, you need to cook all the water off. ALL OF IT. When it's all cooked up, salt to taste, mix, and then add about half a cup of toasted chickpea flour. Mix. Turn off heat. Now, go back to your roti.

Repeat after me: The point of potato roti is to get as much potato product as humanly possible in the roti. Keeping this in mind the entire time, assemble your roti: Put a goodly layer of flour on the cupboard, or whatever surface you're using. Divide dough in 4. Take one chunk, knead, and form into a ball. The dryer you make the dough (ie, the more flour you knead into it), the harder it will be to roll out your roti. So knead just enough to make the dough unsticky. Squish the ball and roll it out in a smallish circle. Say.... the size of a saucer. Now, take a quarter of the spud mixture and put in in the middle of the rolled-out dough. Even though you don't think it will reach, pull the edges of the dough up around the spuds and seal it by pinching. See? It reaches! You will now have a dough-covered spud sphere. Do not get demoralized. Flip the sphere over so that the seam is on the bottom. Now dust the top with four and roll out the roti, squishing down gently. You should end up with a roti the size of a large dinner plate (do not exceed the size of your roti-cooking pan). If you cheated, and didn't let the dough rest, or were overzealous with the kneading just now, the roti will get back at you by exploding, leaving you with a mashed potato covered cupboard. Otherwise, you should be fine. Cook on a hot pan. No oil. The roti should puff up a little, which is how you know it's time to flip it. You'll just have to be figure out when to take it off the heat after flipping it. Good luck.

The whole dinner took about half an hour to make. Roti get fast to make, but you'll want to set aside a fair amount of time the first few times you do it.

Roti music: Cabaret. And I was singing along....badly.

taking a bow. plus, going all medieval on your ass

Lelly gave me a blog award! Eeeeeeeeeeee! How very exciting! Thank you! Apparently I am supposed to put up this little banner thing. And nominate more people. I can do that. But Lelly already nominated Vincent over at Vegan Improv. *sigh* Once again, Lelly is a step ahead of me. Now, I suspect that the people I nominate are supposed to nominate yet more people, so get on it you guys!

First, I nominate Tuimeltje over at twigs and tofu, because she tries new stuff, and rocks.

And Jake, who writes some of the funniest and most insightful stuff out there.

And...ahem.. Hezbollah Tofu, for being fabulous, and regularily exposing the fuckwititude of Anthony Bourdain. This saves me endless time, as otherwise I would have to expose said fuckwititude myself. Plus, yum fancy-pants food that will impress everyone you know and often takes a long time to make, which can lead to excellent bouts of cooking-as-procrastination.

Also, Jillian and her bitchin' vegan kitchen. Jillian makes food by actually following the recipes. This is an inspiration to me, and I secretly use her as my recipe tester, even though she doesn't know it. Shhhhhhh!...

And finally.... Vegandwhatnot, a fellow Canuck ,whose blog is just starting out, but looks brilliant. Saskatchewan needs more vegans. And more pirates.

Now. A project: Ducky's Modern Medieval. Starting at some yet-to-be-decided date this fall, I shall embark on a one-month experiment, mostly to see how my tastes change if I move away from the dominant spices in my spice cupboard. Soooo...for a month, I'll let loose in my kitchen with medieval recipes. Yes. A month of vegan medieval. Just to be clear, I won't be following the recipes in the sense of trying to recreate medieval food. The question is: if a cook from a medieval vegan kitchen (say a monastery) found themselves with my vegbox in my (modern) kitchen every week, what would they do? For lack of a better term, I guess I'll be doing fusion cuisine, only across time instead of geography. So Modern Medieval, not "Ducky's Time Travel", okay? There seem to be a fair number of vegan recipes out there, mostly because meat, eggs and milk were off limits for so many religious communities for so much of the year. I'm vegan for slightly less godly reasons, but no matter. I shall move bravely forward (or backwards? which am I doing here?). Basically, this is going to be an experiment with different spice combinations and cooking techniques. I've been fascinated by medieval/renaissance cooking for a while now, partly because there isn't much of a distinction between the use of what we would now consider to be sweet and savoury spices and partly because there was some pretty interesting cooking (and scholarship) before plain boring-ass food took over because it was somehow less sinful (less decadent?) than yummy food. So, bring on the cloves, cinnamon and rosewater! If you have any specific recipes you'd like to me try out, send me a link, and providing it's not something totally unveganizable, I'll probably try it.

fava pizza

Potato pizza crust made from TMSBE topped with layer of yellow zucchini and then baked. Once done, topped with fresh fava beans, garlic, lemon and parsley. I also did one with multicoloured tomatoes and fresh basil to take for lunch tomorrow. Ooooooh. The omnis eating cafeteria food are going to be so jealous.

pizza sing-along with Aladin Sane, of course.