Cooking

[pameladean]

At the beginning of this year I got tired of buying random vegetables and protein sources and hoping I could make them match up into dinners, so I started doing an abbreviated version of menu planning. I write the dinners I want to make down on a Post-It and then do the actual shopping. This week's Post-It says "Pad Thai (REMEMBER THE CABBAGE -- well, I did remember it but I didn't put it in), Grogan's Minestrone (frozen multigrain ciabatta rolls), ALL THE PIES."

I have saved, or more accurately, failed to recycle, a random assortment of these Post-Its, which I reproduce below for my own reference and possibly for your mild interest.

Tempeh Mushroom Stroganoff
Carrot Cashew Curry
Sardine Pasta (GET GREEN VEGETABLE)

Fish Masala, Aloo Gobi
SOUP, bread
hoisin explosion tofu (Tropp)
chickpea and sweet potato curry

Mimi's Spaghetti (Grogan again)
fish masala, green bean and potato curry
beans and kale (check to see if enough canned black-eyed peas)

Tofu Tacos
Tempeh Mushroom Stroganoff
Salmon, sweet potato, broccoli, frozen rolls

Carrot Cashew Curry
Sardine Pasta, green beans
MAKE BANANA BREAD
Curried red kidney beans with mustard greens

Vegan Lasagna (spinach mushroom Gimme Lean mock sausage)
Tofu vegetable quiche
Tofu fried rice

Very spicy delicious chickpeas (Jaffray), curried peas and mushrooms
macaroni and goat cheese, vegetable casserole (Grogan)
pasta with soy chorizo

Pasta with cauliflower, feta, and walnuts (add broccoli)
Tortilla casserole
lentil cassoulet (get mock sausage, price shallots)

Tuna curry, steamed broccoli
Lebanese/Canadian macaroni and bean casserole, add kale or else GET GREEN VEGETABLE
Vegan chili, ditto cornbread


That does look odd. Vegan food is always safe for me. I can't have cow's-milk products. I can have sheep or goat's-milk cheeses, but they are expensive, so we don't have them that often. I don't eat eggs or meat but I do eat fish and seafood, which are also expensive, except for sardines and canned tuna. Mock meat is fairly pricy too, except at Trader Joe's.

Cooking anecdotes welcome in the comments.

Pamela

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I made (little red) beans and (that weird Italian) kale for dinner tonight, along with mushroom risotto. Yesterday I made ginger-tahini-dressed broccoli, Lebanese chicken, and a squash, goat cheese, bacon combo stirred up with pasta. Some of those recipes I have been carrying around since the 1980s, and so I finally decided to make 'em.

After dinner tonight, I also made that gingerbread recipe you introduced me to, but it failed. I tried to mix the butter and molasses together with just a spoon, but because I have a tendon problem in my right elbow currently, I was imprecise at it. So I think that was part of the problem and the rest of the failure was caused by using a just-slightly-too-big pan. Pity.

K.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Having pulled out the gingerbread recipe (which is in my hand, so I copied it from something), I see that it is called "Molasses Gingerbread" and it claims to be from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, 1796.

Project Gutenberg has that book, and the recipe is nothing like the one I have. I vaguely recall that you said it was Mary Washington's recipe, or Martha's, or something, but those kinds of search terms turn up nothing approximate.

K. [has no pearl ash, for starters]

[pameladean]

I got the recipe from the out-of-print cookbook Ginger East to West, and that includes both the original with the pearl ash and the updated-for-modern-sensibilities recipe, which is the one you have a copy of.

I called it George Washington's Mother's Gingerbread, which is also in that cookbook, but I got confused about which one was which. I think the alleged George Washington one is a lot more complex.

P.

[pameladean]

I've adapted some of my recipes from the eighties, but they aren't as interesting as yours, for the most part.

My main problem with the gingerbread recipe is not having the pan ready and then worrying that the acid in the molasses will activate the baking soda too soon while I'm rushing around finding the 8x8 pan and greasing it. I've had one or two rather flat outcomes, but for the most part it has been okay, except in my head.

P.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

[being That Person because this ought to have been a top-level comment, not a reply to minnehaha; I blame sleepy fingers]

I am particularly taken with ALL THE PIES as an annotation.

My only expected dinner guest this season will be getting roast beef and carrots because it's a change from turkey and they really don't like the texture of onions. (With perhaps one or two other things. :)

(I like doing roast pork, which is at least Yule-ish, in a dutch oven with onions sauteed in duck fat and dried cranberries and a dark fruit juice, like currant or blackberry, and a bit of maple syrup. But there are texture issues.)

I can't have dairy, gluten, or soy, so we have rather disjoint menus, alas. Though I did manage to come up with a no dairy, no gluten, no soy vegan pie so I had something to take to potlucks:

cup of quinoa flour
cup of amaranth flour
half cup of canola oil
~1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp xanthan gum

water to correct consistency (between 1/2 and 3/4 cup)

[roll on one of those thin lexan cutting board sheets so you can get it into the pie plate]

bake at 350 for ~22 minutes.

1 cup maple syrup [250 mL]
1 l (almost) cranberry juice [weird American 983 mL bottle size]
2 packs "Mother Hen" organic raspberries [2 @ 300g/10oz individual packs; 600 grammes of frozen raspberries]
200 grammes tapioca starch

reserve 1 cup cranberry juice

remainder and maple syrup into a sufficient pot
keel the tapioca starch into the reserved cup of cranberry juice

Add, once the juice is medium warm; stir until thickening occurs, stir in the raspberries,
add to baked pie shell

chill

Pray the pie shell's strong enough to serve.

Which concludes the recipe notation. I find the pie shell is generally strong enough; the tapioca may help hold it all together. Not everyone likes the texture.

[pameladean]

ALL THE PIES because Christmas, which is also Eric's birthday, so really, ALL THE PIES. I need to get started on those.

I am unenamoured of tapioca generally (WHY DO THEY PUT IT IN ALL LOCALLY AVAILABLE GOAT YOGHURT, WHY WHY WHY), but the insides sound lovely.

P.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Birthday-Christmas collision does indeed sound like grounds for ALL THE PIES. :)

I'm pretty sure one could use something other than tapioca as the thickening mechanism; I like tapioca, even in fish-eyes-in-glue form, and it's reliable about setting fruit juice for relatively small volumes of thickener, but I can't see why cornstarch wouldn't work. It would just need to be rather more cornstarch for an equivalently firm consistency.

Putting tapioca in yoghurt seems bizarrely odd. I suspect them of yoghurt that won't consistently yogh and they have to cheat.

[pameladean]

I think goats-milk yoghurt is indeed runnier than regular. I base this thought on my experiences with the Minnesota Dairy Goat and Fantasy Society, which used to attend and host parties at Minicon, with accompanying generous ladlings of yoghurt, goats-milk ice cream, cheeses, and other delicacies.

I personally would rather have runny yoghurt than have it thickened up with anything at all. But apparently this is not the majority opinion.

P.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

I confess that these days, I do much of my "cooking" by browsing the already-cooked dishes in my grocery store, which has a splendid selection. It's nice to get just enough for 2 or 3 meals of foods that can't be made in small amounts. I start with the "We Made Too Much" half-price section, where I might find meals for less per portion than it would take to cook them.

[pameladean]

I am not sure we have anything like that hereabouts, but then, I haven't looked. Whatever works, is my motto.

Prepared foods as a rule have things I can't eat, generally unnecessary ones, though not always. That is, there is random whey in all sorts of things for no particular reason other than, I guess, the dairy industry wants to get rid of it.

P.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

The only things I have to look out for are mushrooms and hot peppers. Alas, the cooks sometimes change the recipes, inexplicably and without notice, to include these things. Mushrooms in Chicken Cordon Bleu! Jalapeños in corned beef hash! Hot peppers in sweet-and-sour chicken!

Call me cynical, but I think the reason for the whey (and high-fructose corn syrup) in prepared foods is that it increases profit for the food manufacturer (by bulking out the food) and for the dairy and corn industries. Pfui, I say!

[pameladean]

That is just bizarre -- the hot peppers in the sweet and sour chicken is particularly weird to me. My mother has similar complaints about modern food. She loves potatoes in anything, but the last time we went to the nice coffee shop that grows its vegetables in back of its building and has lots of vegan options, I had to eat her potato soup because they had put Tabasco in it. Really a lot of Tabasco. It's okay to do that, but it's really not okay to then advertise it as creamy potato and chive soup. Calling it creamy when it has no cream is also dicey, but at least that warns one to check. It didn't say spicy or piquant or anything.

I am sure profit is well entangled in the adding of these ingredients to everything in sight. At least whey is probably harmless to people who aren't allergic to dairy, and it does increase protein content -- which is a matter of adding verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and non-nutritious narrative much of the time, admittedly. But HFCS is horrible all around.

P.

[clindau.livejournal.com]

No anecdotes, but curried kidney beans with mustard greens sounds good (and it's fun to say aloud...). If I were to start a vegan-type diet, menu plans would be a lifesaver. Hard enough to figure out dinnertime some days without the added degree of difficulty that a specialized diet brings (ahem) to the table.

[pameladean]

Beans 'n' greens generally are fun to say and lovely to eat.

When I first started doing vegan cooking -- and that was all vegan, and for four people, while now I mostly just cook for myself and Raphael, and have a few more options -- I had very extensive menu plans. Then I got the hang of it and then I got sloppy. A lot of learning curves seem to end up there.

P.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Ok, here's a question:

Sort of recently, I heard a radio interview with Mollie Katzen of the unbeatably famous "Moosewood Cookbook" and its fussier cousin "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest." Somewhere in the interview, it was remarked of the Moosewood books that vegetarians "don't cook like that any more."

Can you explain the change in how vegetarians cook? The starred reviews of "Moosewood" (new version) on Amazon point out that the revised version from 1992 is not as good, and that the food tends to be bland. So I guess people mean the food is too bland now?

K.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I'm interested to hear what actual vegetarians say, but my impression is vegetarian cooking used to be more of a genre than it is now. Overlapping with the ‘hippie-derived’ cooking genre, which also has declined.

I think cooking vegetarian used to be more of A Big Change, and cooks went vegetarian without a tradition and were open to trying new inventions of recipes because they were vegetarian. I can browse the cookbooks not looking for anything just because I have a soft spot for the vibe.

Or from another perspective, American Veggie invented some unnecessary things from too small a culinary foundation, when people could have drawn more directly from existing vegetarian traditions.

(I do cook from Moosewood and American Wholefoods, but I would feel too limited if I had to stay inside those.)

[pameladean]

I don't actually know what they mean. Lots of vegetarian food is quite spicy these days in Minneapolis, in all the little coffee shops and restaurants that grow their own herbs and vegetables or use locally-sourced products.

The difference I noticed between the two versions of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is that the first one made very heavy use of eggs and dairy, and also of things like pickle relish and mayonnaise -- it had a strange '50's tinge to it, almost. The newer one uses less fat altogether and sometimes uses oil rather than butter. I don't find that either is a win over the other -- you have to try the individual recipes out to see.

Molly Katzen was always somewhat conservative with hot spices, though she usually said you could add them to taste. And I think she just had sensitive taste buds. There's a running theme in her books about how just a little olive oil and garlic and rosemary makes white beans taste divine. I don't find most of her recipes bland, but that one needs something, maybe just more of everything. Then again, there's a lot of recipes of hers I have never made because they have too much dairy to be readily convertible.

Bryanna Clark Grogan's vegan cookbooks certainly aren't bland. There are fads in vegan and vegetarian cooking, as in everything, and the ones I am noticing at the moment are a huge emphasis on coconut products of all kinds, a de-emphasis on soy, which annoys me, and a general desire to avoid fat, which also annoys me.

P.

[inlaterdays.livejournal.com]

No anecdotes here, but these all sound extremely yum. I like the annotations in ALL CAPS.

[pameladean]

I think I got that from LOLCATS, but I find it both fun to do and useful to my brain.

P.

[jiawen]

"hoisin explosion tofu" sounds both delicious and dangerous.

[pameladean]

It's originally a chicken recipe, and I'm not entirely sure what the explosion refers to -- maybe the red pepper flakes, or maybe just the way a dish based in hoisin sauce tends to burst on the tongue.

Or possibly other people's cashews explode when fried. It's a mystery.

P.

[sraun]

Did I ever give you the recipe for the Vegan BBQ Beans? If not, would you like it?

[pameladean]

I am pretty sure you emailed it to me; I'll check and let you know.

P.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

This list is oddly useful for inspiring cooking ideas. I can't have cow's milk, either, and am allergic to wheat and soy, but I eat some meat/fish/egg; much of this would suit if I readjusted some of the obvious substitutions. So, thanks. :)

[pameladean]

Oh good! I use brown rice noodles for the tempeh stroganoff (most wheat-based broad noodles have egg in them), and a lot of the curries and stir-fries go over rice, so yeah. All my pasta is whole wheat, but I've used brown-rice lasagna noodles in a pinch, and they worked fine.

P.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Good to know--thank you! I haven't tried rice pasta yet, but I eat a fair amount of red, brown, and purple rices.

[pameladean]

I love how sweet and nutty the red rices taste. And brown rice is our staple. I don't think I've ever tried purple rice.

I'm used to rice noodles from Thai and Chinese cuisine, and the burgeoning supply of rice pasta is really a boon to me, because if you want brown rather than white rice noodles, the ones made for people who can't eat gluten are a lot cheaper than the ones made for people who want brown rice noodles for other reasons. Regular Asian white rice noodles are insanely cheap, as a rule.

The brown rice fettucini I use is from Tinkyada, and I think it's their lasagna noodles I've used too. I find them more slippery than wheat pasta, but perfectly tasty.

P.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I've seen Tinkyada at a local shop--perhaps the time has come to give it a try!