Coconut Tofu Redux, Comfort Food & Knitting

Friday night was the night. Coconut Tofu II: Son of Coconut Tofu was playing in my kitchen. First of all, I think my failed attempt from Thursday merits a couple shots. Here's the tofu cut up and ready to go into the WAY too salty marinade for the first go-round:

I roasted purple potatoes along with the tofu, and they are beautiful. Check it out:



Alright. In an attempt to redeem myself, I decided to give up the idea of baking the tofu. Tofu needs a long time to cook in the oven, and coconut takes a very short time to burn in the oven. You can see the problem.

Per the indications on "What the hell does a vegan eat anyway?" I went with the three-dish process involving dredging, slurrying, and coconutting.

A word on the coconut... It's hard to find unsweetened flake coconut! I had to go to Whole Foods, and the stuff I got was raw, and a little... woody (as my roommate described it). The fibers were really long and it didn't want to stick to anything, and if I had to do it over again, I would either run it through the food processor before using or look for the powdery stuff that I got at the Sac Co-Op a couple years ago. Complications aside, I learned from my aunt Patty long ago that anything breaded and deep-fried (or floured and fried in a half-inch of oil, as it were) is good. As such, dinner was pretty delicious. Instead of the green curry in the recipe, I had red for the slurry/dipping sauce and it was fantastic.

While I was taking care of the vegan side of dinner, my roommate made a beautiful pot of osuimono, complete with mochi, shiitake mushrooms, and some sort of greens that she pulled out of our garden and assured me were edible. So amazing.


Monday night I wanted to make something comforting and casserole-ish. This recipe is endlessly variable and customizeable. The sauce is what sets it apart, and as such I'll give a recipe for that, but the bulk of the casserole can be anything you want. Quinoa, broccoli & white beans? Sure. Bulgur & sun dried tomatoes? Why not. Brown rice, kale & lentils? Get it on!!

Anyway. The sauce. If you've never tried nutritional yeast, I would highly recommend it. It's good to sprinkle over steamed veggies or pasta, and it makes fantastic sauces in dishes where cheese or cream sauce would be the order of the day. It has a sort of nutty, sharp flavor that I've found is best highlighted by some kind of acid, be it lemon juice or rice vinegar or balsamic.

Again, making a recipe is difficult for me, because I'm an incessant culinary fiddler. Start small, taste, add. Lather, rinse, repeat. You get the idea. Give this a try if you're interested, and remember to taste frequently. When it's pleasing to your palette, it's ready!

Mine went as follows:

2 Tbsp Earth Balance
1 Tbsp white whole wheat flour
2 1/2 Tbsp nutrtitional yeast
approx. 1 1/2 cups plain (or unsweetened) soy milk
approx. 2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1/4 tsp nutmeg (or to taste)
salt & pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium high heat and sprinkle in the nutritional yeast and flour. Stir to get everything mixed together and cook, stirring constantly, for a minute or so. This is kind of like a roux, except with less fat. The mixture will likely be a little thick or pasty (as opposed to smooth and cake-battery like a regular roux), but that's ok.

Stream in the soy milk while whisking the mixture. Whisk until smooth and add the vinegar. 2-3 tsp seemed about right, and the balsamic makes it quite sweet. Taste and add more if you like. Add the salt and pepper and the nutmeg. Whisk for about 5-8 minutes longer, the mixture will thicken considerably as a result of the vinegar. It'll look about like this:


This sauce is rich-tasting, velvety, and open to lots of seasonings. It makes this casserole seem especially decadent, even though it's chock full of good-for-you things. Mine was made from about three cups of (mostly) cooked short grain brown rice, three onions, about eight cloves of garlic, the pine nuts and sliced almonds left over in my pantry, a container of extra firm tofu crumbled very fine, a can of red kidney beans rinsed & drained and a package of frozen peas (added with about 5 minutes left to bake).

Another suggestion I have for making these types of things is to season every layer of the dish. The water the rice cooks in is salted. I add salt, pepper and smoked paprika while cooking the oninos/garlic. I taste it all again when I add the tofu and add more seasonings if necessary. Ditto the beans. Anyway, this is the onion, garlic, nuts, tofu & rice:

And here it is with the kidney beans added, ready to stick in the oven:

Delicious. Stick it in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes. If you're putting in anything like spinach or frozen peas, add those when the dish has about ten minutes left.

While the casserole was baking, I made some wilted red chard with lemon-garlic-Earth Balance sauce. Isn't red chard beautiful?

And the sauce was amazing... I got the garlic nice and toasty in the Earth Balance before adding some lemon juice and just tossing the wilted chard in it. Simple and VERY flavorful.

Dinner is served!


...Along with some requisite shots of my most recently finished knitting project: a handbag for my roommate that I made for her as a belated Christmas/Birthday gift. Last you all saw it, it was sitting on top of the dryer with plastic bags, air-drying after being felted.

Here it is as I started stitching on the i-cord trim:


And here it is finished:


(The lining was my first attempt at anything of that nature and as such is a little... punk rock.)

The outside:


Thanks for reading!!

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!

Gearing up for Christmas Eve

For the past few years, I’ve had a party on Christmas Eve featuring all of my dear friends that are home for the holidays. This year, that concept has been extended to include a big dinner for our families and whoever else would like to come enjoy a ridiculously oversized meal with no theme whatsoever. I mean, besides “Deliciousness.”

I’ll be making:

Broiled Green Beans with Slow-Roasted Cherry Tomatoes (recipe here, along with tons of other fantastic-ness for a vegan Thanksgiving)

Brussels Sprouts with Orange and Chili (Recipe here!)

Potatoes Au Gratin (I’ll be more or less flying by wire on this one, but just for Brian I’ll try to keep better track of amounts and procedures.)

Coconut Shrimp

I’ll be photographing all the pescatarian goodness as it happens, and hopefully will get a post up either on Christmas day or the day after. Merry merry, enjoy all the time spent with friends and family… The holidays are precious for that if for no other reason.

Introductions.

This blog represents my first foray into photographing food and writing about cooking. What I intend to offer here will be less about recipes that one can follow step by step, and more about getting inspiration from the things I cook. Cooking is one of my passions, and I always do it by the seat of my pants. I don't think I've ever made the same thing twice, really. I tend not to measure ingredients unless I'm baking, but try to use relatively little fat when i cook.

I am technically a pescatarian. I stopped eating cows, chickens, etc. because I know that faced with the prospect of killing such an animal just so i could enjoy its meat, I wouldn't be able to pull the trigger (swing the hammer, wield the pneumatic bolt, whatever). I don't like the conditions present in factory farms. The idea of slaughterhouses turns my stomach. These facts combined suggest to me that I don't have the right to eat those animals, and I am lucky enough to live in a place that is so bountiful that I can freely make that choice.

I still eat seafood because i like to fish. I like to eat what i catch. For now, at least, i can justify that to myself.

Some of the food you see on here will be vegan, as I really enjoy cooking vegan meals. It's definitely not every day, but i like the challenge, and i love to tell people that what they're eating is vegan. so many don't know what it means, or that it can be delicious. I enjoy opening people's minds to that idea.

Riding a motorcycle is my other passion, the one that makes me daydream all day about twisty back roads and threatens to take all my money and every second of free time i have. I love it, I can't get enough of it. I will do it for the rest of my life, or at least as long as my motor skills hold up. There will be discussion re: riding throughout the blog, but I will do my best to keep it interesting to people not involved in the sport. So far, even people that don't ride have enjoyed the photos I've taken of all the incredible natural beauty I'm privileged to enjoy on two wheels. Hopefully my new readers will as well.

Enjoy, and feel free to comment with any feedback or suggestions!