Shepherd's Pie, Pot Stickers, Cleaning out the Crisper Drawer

Last Saturday (1/17) I knew exactly three things when I got up.

1. The weather was positively amazing. Amazing enough to run errands on my lipstick red, 1000cc, pack mule. I've had a bit of a love/hate relationship with my bike since my car died. Commuting to work in the morning by motorcycle is at best inconvenient (what with gear and luggage considerations), and at worst a little scary (what with half-asleep, idiot drivers yakking away on cell phones and trying to balance coffee and bagels in their laps). Carpooling with my roommate has been a godsend, but during the winter it leaves my bike alone and lonely, alternating between being under a cover and in the garage. I have felt guilty, even while taking the occasional weekend ride. It was when I looked outside on Saturday that I realized my problem was not with my bike, but with winter in general. Gearing up and strapping on my saddlebags was more pleasure than hassle, and I zipped around my neighborhood running errands and had a grand time.

2. I wanted to invite my mom over for homemade pot stickers. She loves pot stickers, and I love hanging out with her.

3. I wanted to make shepherd's pie and blog about it.

I didn't photograph the pot stickers, unfortunately. I was too busy actually making them, and they are fairly labor intensive. I used Lolo's recipe(ish) from Vegan Yum Yum (can you tell I love her blog?), though I made the filling a little different. I did make the baked seitan, but opted for cabbage, carrots, green onions and garlic for the filling. After all those things took a spin in the food processor, I put the whole lot in a pan and cooked it up a little, just to soften the vegetables. I added soy sauce, sesame oil, seasoned rice vinegar, ginger and black pepper, all to taste.

The best part about making those is that 1 package of potsticker wrappers is never enough to use all the filling, which means I have a delicious pile of well-seasoned, parcooked vegetables mixed with ground seitan in my fridge. This led to a thai-inspired sort of pasta salad.


The cauliflower is just sauteed in olive oil, salt, and chili flakes. The pasta is (of course) whole wheat orzo. The dressing for the salad consisted of about a half cup of peanut butter, a Tbsp of soy sauce, 2 Tbsp of seasoned rice vinegar, and just a tiny knob of red curry paste. This would have been better with cilantro and fresh lime juice, but no way was I making a special trip to the store just to dress up some leftovers.

I guess this has always been my philosopy when I cook. Making what I can with what I have. This is not to say that I don't buy anything special for certain things, but I really try to understand the essence of what I want to eat, and use the things in my pantry to make it happen.

A good example of this is shepherd's pie. The things I know to be absolutely true if I want to call something shepherd's pie are that it must contain vegetables and some kind of protein, it must be a bit like a thick stew, and it must have potatoes on top. Given those guidelines, I can go nuts! I wanted to try treating some seitan like stew meat, frying it up and then adding my veggies during the braising stage. I thought about sprinkling flour in with the seitan as it was frying, but then I felt sort of weird about that given that seitan is more or less made of flour. My filling ended up being a little soupy as a result, but was still delicious.

Here's the seitan, ready to fry:


Also, if I had it to do over again, I would not turn my back on the stuff! Stirring constantly is the order of the day!

Here it is as I added some of the veggies and prepared to let it simmer for a while:


Cabbage is a pretty traditional ingredient for shepherd's pie, and it's also a vegetable I feel i should eat more often, so I pretty much always use it. Don't feel any pressure, however, to use something just because it's common. Again, the most basic components of this dish are vegetables, stew-like consistency, protein of some kind, and a potato topping. It need not be any more structured than that to be absolutely delicious.

Here's the pie with the cabbage in:


You can also see in this shot that the seitan has gotten much paler. It increases in size a bit and gets springy as it gets close to being done. I think the texture is wonderful, but it's probably not going to fool anyone into thinking it's actually meat. Since that is never my goal, it's not really a problem.

A word on the potatoes: normally, it's mashed potatoes that go on top of the pie. I prefer my potatoes skin-on, and with a little bit of crispness. As such, they're chopped into quarters, boiled, and drained.


Then some oil is heated, and they're fried until they're a little brown and crispy on whatever side happens to be touching the pan.

Meanwhile, my vegetables were as soft as I wanted them, the seitan was delicious and springy and chewy, so I added some kale to wilt just a little before the whole thing went in the oven.

The potatoes are smashed while they're frying (no need to go for perfection, rustic is just fine), and then put on top of the pie.


The whole thing is baked for about 30-45 minutes, pretty much until the potatoes get a little more brown on top. I like the challenge of cooking vegan, but there is no reason this couldn't be finished with some shredded cheese like Gruyere over the potatoes.

I made some broccoli to go along, first sauteeing some leeks, onions and garlic until the leeks were translucent.


Then I added lemon juice and a little bit of water and some broccoli florets. I covered the pan to steam it, and probably overdid it a little, as the broccoli didn't have that beautiful green color when all the water had evaporated. Oh well. It was still tasty.


No pictures of the finished product, as this was not a spectacularly photogenic meal. The best part about shepherd's pie is that the leftovers are dynamite for lunches!!

For a special treat on Friday night (1/23), Mari made vegetarian onion soup out of her "Vegetables Every Day" cookbook. It was INCREDIBLE, easily the best french onion soup I've ever had. I just had to get a picture of the cheesy, crouton-y, brothy goodness:

I have to say, it sure is nice to have someone make dinner for me!


There's also been knitting (as usual!), I finished the Bell Curve skirt from Knitty. It turned out beautifully, and I'm very happy with it, even though it could NOT have been more boring to knit!



Holy macro focus, Batman:

And last but not least, my plans for Tony Harrison:

Stay tuned for more, and as always thank you for reading!!

Not food related, but...

I just finished my first knitted garment that I can stick my head and arms through. It's a knitted shirt from Jennifer Stafford's book "Domiknitrix." I'm so proud, I thought I'd post some pics.

Christmas Eve, Knitting, and January 6th

My alarm went off at 7 am... Merry Christmas Eve, now get to work!

First order of business: Heidi Swanson's Heavenly Pie. Rather than the graham crackers, I used the Italian almond cookies that Mari used for her tiramisu. Same idea, I gave them a whirl in the food processor with some sliced almonds, Earth Balance and honey.


As that was happening, I was melting chocolate in my makeshift double boiler (glass bowl on top of a metal pot).


When the chocolate was melted, I took the bowl off the pot and carried it over to put in the food processor with the cream cheese, egg and tofu. I've made this pie before, and didn't remember the bowl being so damn hot!! I tried at least five different ways to hold the bowl and scrape it with a rubber spatula into the food processor, but all methods appeared to be heading straight towards disaster, namely dropping the bowl full of chocolate and breaking it. It was then that a brilliant idea came to me. I am the Hooligan Vegetarian, after all. Tourmaster should market these as oven mitts.




At last, the pie was poured...


And then it was baked. And lo, it was delicious.


While the pie was baking, dear Mari prepped the green beans for me.


And the mighty Kitchenaid stand mixer made short work of some tangerines for the brussels sprouts.


Once the pie was finished, the oven was freed up for the roasting of the tomatoes. Aren't they festive?


As the tomatoes were roasting, I put together the potatoes au gratin. I also painstakingly wrote down the recipe, but it needs perfecting. The potatoes tasted really good, but there was liquid in the bottom of the pan. That's decidedly unattractive, and I think it has to do with using too much milk? I'm not sure. Before I post the recipe, I would like to make it better. The pictures, however, came out very well. Behold:




Now comes the part where you tell me I'm amazing. In the midst of all this culinary madness, I needed to finish my mom's scarf for Christmas, the Versatility pattern from knitty.com. In the morning, it was still blocking on the living room floor.


Over the course of the day, I sewed on all 14 (yes, it should have been 16) buttons and finished the scarf in time to surprise my mom on Christmas morning. She enjoyed her gift, and i was pleased to give it to her.



I also decorated the house... trimmed the tree, all that jazz.




As the party drew closer, things started getting finished. Remember the dip? I toasted the pine nuts...


And plated it!


I browned the brussels sprouts while the chili orange glaze was cooking.


I broiled the green beans and mixed them in with the tomatoes roasted earlier in the afternoon.


We put all the appetizers and delicious sweets that Mari made out on the sideboard.


I pulled the coconut shrimp out of the oven. A note on those as well... I paid attention to this recipe, but dredged them in flour first per advice re: frying shrimp. Baking, as it turns out, is not sufficient to cook the flour. The shrimp meat was perfect, the breadcrumbs were crunchy, the coconut was toasted... but I could taste uncooked flour. Everyone ate them and said they liked them anyway, which was sweet if they were lying and great if they just didn't notice anything (I tend to be fairly critical of my own work), but I fully intend to try this out again. This time, however, on tofu... since I don't tend to eat seafood except on occasions that I find myself in sushi restaurants, at my folks' place for dinner, or trying to please a big crowd of omnivores!



So that was Christmas Eve. There was much wine and merrymaking, it was truly wonderful to share the night with family and friends.

In between then and now was New Year's Eve, which I spent with the lovely and talented Brian. He made Thai curry for some of his friends and me, and we rang in 2009 watching the ball drop and drinking champagne cocktails. Mari's birthday followed in short order, and her parents took us out for sushi and then a big group of us took Mari out for karaoke at one of those wild places where you get a private room. The book of songs was about three inches thick, with seven pages of english songs. The rest of the book was in Korean, which is what I assume the TV was shouting at us when choosing songs and giving us our score (!) after we sang.

The past few days have been spent getting back to the real world, which is frankly kind of a drag. However, there has been creativity, in the form of Mari's belated christmas gift: a felted handbag. Here's the bag knitted, before its magical mystery tour through the washing machine this evening.




During said magical mystery tour, I made dinner. Dinner was tempeh marinated in about 1 1/2 cups of No-Chicken broth and a Tbsp of Herbs de Provence. It was served over mushrooms, onions and greens with tomato sauce and arugula walnut pesto on top.

First, while the bag was felting, I toasted the walnuts.


The pesto is made from 2/3 cups of walnuts, toasted in a hot, dry, pan; 3 cloves of garlic, 2 cups of baby arugula leaves, 3 or so Tbsp of olive oil, 2 tsp lemon juice, and salt & pepper to taste. After a time in the food processor, it looked like this:


The marinade was boiled and then poured over the tempeh, then covered with foil. This steamed the tempeh (cut in half lengthwise and then into triangles, making eight thin pieces) before it was pan fried.


Somewhere in here, I pulled the bag out of the washing machine and set it up to dry.


The package of sliced mushrooms and two small onions were caramelized in olive oil, about 1/4 cup of the marinade, a splash of balsamic and a bit of salt and pepper. The greens were added later.

Like so...


The tomato sauce was made by reducing a drained can of tomatoes and the rest of the marinade.
And... Voila!! Vegan Dinner!