vegan

I promised a sauerkraut update, so this is one.  It has been fermenting now for a week, and is just barely beginning to taste as if something is going on in there, fermentation-wise.  My kitchen is pretty cool most of the time, at this time of year, so I was not anticipating a rapid ferment.  I estimate that it will begin to actually taste like sauerkraut in another week.  I just ate a small dish of it, well-rinsed, as part of my lunch, and as of now it tastes like salty cabbage with slight overtones of fermenty funk.  It was very pleasant, actually, but not sauerkraut yet.

I snapped a little picture anyhow, though, because red cabbage makes such pretty sauerkraut.  With the angle of the light from the kitchen skylight, it rather looked like it was shining with an inner light, doubtless the product of all the loving exertions of the groovy all-volunteer army of free-range lactobacilli in there doing their thing.

Homemade sauerkraut lets its little light shine.

So I had a little cooking debacle yesterday, of which I wish, now, that I had stopped to snap a photo, because it was kind of Biblical in its chthonic oozy bubbling horribleness.   There is just something about the texture and movement of gently-belching batter magma — batter that was supposed to turn into chocolate cupcakes and for some eldritch reason did not — that is really hard to describe in text.  Those of you who have ever experienced Epic Cake Fail will understand.

Anyhow, the short story is that although one of my batches of cupcakes did not succeed, the other one did, and so my small cupcake-decorating party went off without a hitch.  My Belovedary, plus two of our friends, R and M, came over to hang out and shoot the breeze and decorate cupcakes.

For those of you looking for a relaxing way to spend some time on a weekend afternoon with friends that doesn’t cost too much money, you could do much worse than decorating cupcakes.  A small tube of marzipan (a little goes a long way!), some food coloring, a few kinds of shiny decorating sugar or sprinkles or whatever moves you (or indeed whatever you have kicking around the back of your cupboards), and a few kinds of small candies if you like, and you’re off to the races.  You can make your own cupcakes, or buy them if you prefer.  The point is that you spend a couple hours sitting around the kitchen table with your friends. It’s very relaxing to do something creative and visual that is ultimately totally low-stakes and inconsequential because of the fact that you’ll be eating it later.  And one of the great things about doing something like this is that you can customize your recipes to your dietary needs: everything you see below is vegan, to accommodate my dairy protein allergy.

Without further ado, a little gallery of some of the results!

R made this bright, sunny sparkler that I loved.

M did some masterful food-coloring paint-mixing, and adorned mini marshmallows.

R's sweet little marzipan nest of eggs, so cute.

My Belovedary made marzipan dinosaur eggs in the marzipan grass.

I made a marzipan octopus.

And a marzipan piggy, complete with itty-bitty cloven hooves and a curly tail.

The marzipan proved quite popular, and unexpectedly inspiring.  In fact, my two favorites that came out of the whole proceedings were both made of undyed marzipan.  One was made by M:

Behold: Marzipanhenge!

And the very best one of all was the one that my Belovedary made for me:

It's a SQUID! Made of marzipan. With hand-painted chromatophores.

It’s a squid!  An adorable ickle marzipan squid!  I was so excited I squealed like a little girl, which I suppose tells you a lot about the kind of little girl I was and the kind of person I turned out to be, but perhaps most of all it tells you that I have married very, very well.

Can these cowpeas be saved?

Today I did one of those things people sometimes do when they cook: I lost track of time and I scorched the dickens out of a pot of beans.  I was upstairs in my office working when I suddenly smelled that something was at least beginning to be amiss, and literally left my desk mid-sentence to go screeching down into the kitchen to see just how bad it was.

If I were a better human being, I suppose, I would never leave a pot unattended to do something so trivial as try to write a book.  If I were a more conscientious one, I might have brought my laptop into the kitchen and worked at the ktichen table as I so often have in the past, but I’ve been trying to keep my laptop out of the kitchen lately, so I didn’t.  And I suppose that if I were inclined to have more electronic gewgaws in my kitchen,  I would buy a slow-cooker so that the whole issue would be moot.

But oh, I’m not.  I’m just not, dear readers, I am not that kind of girl.  In my own defense I am usually the kind of girl who gets up from her desk every hour or so and goes downstairs to check on the beans, or the rising bread dough, or the macerating grapefruit slices, or whatever it is.  As a result it is pretty rare that things like today’s bean debacle take place.

But once in a while fate takes its cut, you know, and the next thing you know you are gingerly scooping the un-scorched beans up out of the bean pot, muttering imprecations under your breath and trying to make sure you only get the beans that come free easily and aren’t scraping up any of the ones that are likely to taste nastily like carbon. This is something of a secret about beans: unless you really blacken the bottom of the pot, you can probably save most of the beans.  Scorching the bottom layer of beans is by no means a death sentence.  As long as things haven’t gotten to the point where the whole pot is steeped in the stench of burnt bean, you ought to be able to salvage at least a good majority of your legumes.  Just be careful when you scoop them out.

I had cooked the cowpeas in water, then later added a decent-sized spoonful of Marmite and a pair of bay leaves to flavor them.  The dried cowpeas had been sitting around the pantry for a while, so I thought it’d be good to cook them up and use them.  I didn’t have any particular recipe in mind for them, but I have never yet found it to be a bad idea to have a supply of cooked legumes in my fridge, so I don’t mind cooking up a mess of beans even if I don’t have immediate intentions for them.

When the beans got scorched, though, I had to come up with some plans in a hurry.  You see in the picture above how the beans are dry, and the little patches of starchy crust on some of them?  That’s what happens when the pot cooks dry, and the starch that was in the water gets deposited on the beans.  The heat dries them out a bit internally, too.  It’s actually not an unpleasant texture, so long as they aren’t too too dried out. The beans are nicely distinct and not mushy as a result of having dried a little.  But they don’t keep as well this way as they do with more moisture.  In the fridge, they get chalky, stiff, and unpleasant. What to do?

I didn’t want to waste them, so I poked around inside the fridge and emerged triumphant, with something that would save the day.

Onions (and celery) to the rescue!

A couple of the softball-sized yellow onions from the left-hand crisper drawer, and the remains of a bunch of celery from the right-hand crisper drawer, and I was on track.  The beans were already a little salty and savory from the Marmite and bay leaves, so onions and celery were a natural choice.  I sliced the onions and celery thinly and sauteed them until just beginning to caramelize in a healthy amount of olive oil (remember that the beans were a little dry).

While the onions and celery cooked, I had some dessert.  Dinner had gone topsy-turvy on me, so I figured I might as well.

Small slices of the two Shaker pies I gave recipes for on Monday, lemon on the left, cranberry-raisin on the right.

This is the only photo I have of the two pies for which I gave the recipes in the previous post, but at least you get an idea.  Tiny slices of each pie, and most of a mug of tea, were just about the right amount of eating to fill the time required for the onions and celery to get themselves cooked.

When the onions and celery were done, I folded the cooked cowpeas into the mixture, then ground some black pepper over the top.  I had some rice leftover from lunch, so I put the rice on a plate, then topped the rice with the cowpeas and onions, and sliced up a few radishes to go on the side for crunch factor as well as taste contrast.  It wasn’t quite like the lentil dish known as mujadarah, but it wasn’t quite not like it, either.

A closeup view of the not-quite mujadarah.

It wasn’t the dinner I had planned for myself, I confess.  And it wasn’t exactly what I had planned on doing with the cowpeas, either.  But you know what?  It was awfully tasty.  And I have plenty of leftovers… and am now looking forward very eagerly to breakfast.  (Yes.  Legumes for breakfast.  In terms of food that’s good to get you going and keep your blood sugar up all morning long, you can’t do better than  the complex carbs and proteins of a bowl of nice savory legumes.  They make a body feel good.  Yes, I’m serious.)

Kitchen fumbles happen to everyone, even people who have plenty of kitchen experience and skill.  And I suppose the reason I wrote this post is that I don’t see food bloggers write about their screwups too often, although I’m sure some of them do.  I particularly don’t see many of them document the kinds of simple maneuvers that can salvage an overcooked mess and turn it into a pretty decent dish.  It’s not complicated and it’s not glamorous, it’s not exotic, and it often isn’t very pretty.  But then again, most cooking isn’t, and very little of it really has to be to taste good.

Also, pie.  I do like pie.

On that note, I have to go spend some quality time scraping scorched cowpeas out of a stockpot.

I’ll leave you with a bonus cute dog picture.  Trust me, cute dog pictures are much more fun than pictures of the bottom of my stockpot.

Will wear a dishtowel on my head for food.

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One of my quiet devotions in the food world is Shaker cooking.  I grew up near, and sometimes in, the city of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an early twentieth-century “streetar suburb” of Cleveland where at one point there had been a substantial Shaker presence.  The Shakers were, of course, long gone by the time there were streetcars: their community, which was called the North Union Settlement or, by some, The Valley of God’s Pleasures (and isn’t that a fantastic monicker?) reached its peak in the mid-19th century and had faded into near obscurity by the time the Shakers sold their land to the Van Sweringen brothers who went on to establish it as a town.

But I do digress.  The point is, I grew up in an area that had a Shaker history, and a number of Shaker recipes had made their way into the local culinary vernacular.  Since then I have, as they’ve come my way, collected Shaker recipes, which I have found to be as trustworthy as Shaker carpentry and created in much the same spirit: Shaker food is not fancy, in fact it is quite plain, but it is very sturdy and beautiful.

In keeping with the Shaker spirit of economy and resource management, Shaker cooking is also thrifty and geared toward making much of little.  Certainly we can all, particularly in straitened times, do with more of that.

Best of all, these pies are very simple to produce, and, as the Shakers well knew, simplicity is a gift.  Pies like these are easy enough, and good enough, to make you wonder why you would ever buy a pie.

In that spirit, I offer you my two favorite Shaker pie recipes.  Both are winter pies, not summer pies, although I suppose you could make them in summer if you wanted.   They have the additional attraction of being non-dairy, and the cranberry-raisin is vegan so long as you eat some form of granulated sugar. I will presume for the sake of argument when presenting these that you already have a pie crust recipe in hand and know what to do with it.

Shaker Cranberry-Raisin Pie

crust for double-crust 9 inch pie

1 to 1.5 cups fresh raw whole cranberries, washed and stemmed
one-half to 1 cup seedless raisins (you may substitute dried sweet cherries, dried blueberries, or other small sweet dried fruit if you prefer)
3/4 cup sugar
pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 Tablespoon all-purpose flour

Preheat oven to 350F.  Line pie dish with bottom crust.

In a bowl mix fruit, dried fruit, sugar, salt, vanilla, and flour with a fork.  The variable amounts of cranberries to dried fruit allow you to adjust the sweetness of the finished pie.  If you use equal amounts of cranberries and dried fruit, you can expect a quite sweet pie, for the dried fruit is there partly to act as a sweetener.  If you increase the cranberries and decrease the dried fruit it will be more tart.

Pour fruit mixture into prepared pie crust, dispersing sugar evenly, and top with second crust.  Cut several slits (make them decorative if you like) into the top crust so that steam can escape.  Bake at 350F until evenly browned on top and allow to cool completely before cutting.

Note: Cranberries should be plump, smooth, and very hard.  Discard any cranberries that are wrinkled, wet, soft, or seem badly bruised.

The Cranberry-Raisin pie is a homey pie, comforting and surprisingly rich-tasting.  Serve it in narrow slices.  It is very nice with ice cream, and also with tart homemade applesauce.

By contrast, the lemon pie for which I am about to give the recipe is a showstopper.  No one expects a pie made of whole lemons.  Certainly no one expects it to taste as amazing as it does.   Because of the presence of the lemon rind and pith, it has a wonderful marmalade-like taste, a symphonic combination of sweet, sour, and bitter. If you make it with a double crust, it is all the more unexpected since typically both lemon pies and custard pies (of which this is a variant) are single-crust pies.  I prefer it as a double-crust pie, as I feel the extra crust helps balance out the intensity of the filling, but your tastes may well be different.  Do what you feel tastes best.

Shaker Lemon Pie

pie crust for either a single or double-crust 9″ pie

2 lemons, well scrubbed (organic by preference if you can get them)
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
4 Tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)

The Day Before:
Blanch lemons in boiling water for 2 minutes.  Cool in a pan of cold water.  Slice paper-thin, rind and all,  with a sharp knife or, if you have one, a mandoline of some sort, I suppose, although you’d never have caught a Shaker cook with one.  Truly, though, you want to slice the lemon as thinly as you possibly can manage; the thicker the slices the more likely you are to end up with objectionably bitter bits in your pie because the sugar won’t be able to penetrate the rinds properly. Remove the pips as you go.

Combine the lemon slices in a bowl with the salt and sugar.  Mix well to combine, cover, and set aside in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

Assembling The Pie:
Preheat oven to 425F.

Line the pie dish with bottom crust.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and flour (and vanilla if using) until smooth.  Add sugar/lemon mixture and mix in carefully with a spatula or wooden spoon until thoroughly combined.  Pour into the bottom crust and gently pat down any protruding lemon slices.  Try to make sure the lemons are more or less evenly distributed throughout the pie.

Add top crust, if using.

Bake for the first 20 minutes at 425F, then reduce heat to 350F and continue baking until pie is well set in the center (test by jiggling the dish — if the center doesn’t shimmy, you’re good to go).

Cool completely before cutting, as the filling finishes setting during the cooling process.  Cutting prematurely will result in filling oozing all over the place like lemon magma, which may or may not appeal to you.  It does not really appeal to me, but some of you people are weird.

Serve the lemon pie with tea, it is a natural pairing.  A little plain unsweetened whipped cream on the pie would not go amiss if you are the type to bother with such a thing, but if not, don’t worry about it.

Both pies keep well.  Because the lemon pie is not a true custard, it does not tend to weep and cannot separate, so if you normally avoid making eggy pies because you suffer from Custard Fear, try this one.

For tedious reasons that do not bear a dissertation at this point, my Belovedary’s doctor has directed him to pursue a course of primarily vegan eating for the next six months.  Dairy and eggs are strictly verboten, and while fish is permitted, meats of all other sorts are meant to be a “major holidays only, if you can’t avoid it” sort of thing.

The Belovedary’s co-workers, it seems, have had a skeptical field day with this, teasing that he’ll never be able to maintain such a regime, and proclaiming with a metaphorical wrist-to-forehead swoon that they would starve to death if they had to go vegan.

This is, of course, all very silly.  But it’s likewise true that many people seem to be terrified of the idea, let alone the reality, of vegan eating and cooking.  My reaction, on the other hand, was “oh, okay, but how do you feel about continuing to use oyster sauce in cooking?”  ( We have decided that, as oysters are considered permissible in Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and as fish is permitted by the sawbones in question, the oyster sauce can stay.  But if it couldn’t, there are vegan alternatives for it to be had.)

You see, my take on it is that human beings are omnivores, and “omnivore,” by definition, means that you’ll eat anything that is edible.  Therefore the prospect of an entirely-vegetable meal, or even several months or years of entirely-vegetable meals, really shouldn’t bother anyone too much.  Besides, as I have mentioned previously in this blog, you still get to eat French fries (made in vegetable oil) and pie (made with vegetable shortening), to say nothing of things like Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, ratatouille, hummus, mushroom-pecan pate, channa masala, and red beans and rice, so really, I am not so convinced that veganism is a prison sentence.  (Unlike, say, being the captive audience of a militant animal-welfare-wingnut vegan who won’t shut the hell up about it, which is.)

Probably it helps that I was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life, and vegan for two of those, so this is not unfamiliar territory to me.  Probably it also helps that with an allergy to dairy protein, I eat vegan by default any time I don’t eat a meal containing meat or eggs.  But mostly, I think the way to stop being scared and feeling deprived when faced with veganism — or with any dietary regime that is limited in some way — is to get into the kitchen and start experimenting.  Its hard to feel like you’re missing out if you’re eating really well within the boundaries of what is available to you.

I bring all this up because, given what we’ve been handed as a household, the content here for at least the next six months or so is likely to be 99.6% vegan.  If you find that offensive, there are about seventy billion other food blogs out there, not a few of them fully and vigorously omnivorous, so don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.

As for me, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to blog about more dairy-free recipes — that will also, for the time being, be meat- and egg-free, or at least exist in versions that don’t use animal products.  The astute among you will have already realized that just as you can often take a dish that contains animal products and vegetarianize or veganize it by removing and/or replacing the things you don’t want to eat, you can also take vegan recipes and add things to them.  (I myself am partial to a hard-cooked egg or two in my channa masala.)

So what have we been eating since the whitecoated declaration was made?  Noodle soup with tofu and chiles.  Roasted cauliflower, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. Homemade bread with cashew butter and apricot jam.  Red beans slow-cooked with four kinds of sweet and hot peppers.  Black bean soup enhanced with liberal handfuls of smallage (bunching celery) and poblano chiles.  Aloo ghobi, the Indian potato-and-cauliflower dish.  Oatmeal cookies with dried tart cherries.  Cantonese-style pickled cauliflower.  Hummus sprinkled with diced smoked black and green olives.  Honeycrisp apples, “Shinko” Asian pears, Macoun apples, the last of the year’s peaches.

Tomorrow I will be making an apple pie in the morning.  While it bakes, I’ll prep several pounds of plum tomatoes for gradual caramelizing in a slow oven all day long.  We’ll eat them tossed with pasta, perhaps, or made into an out-of-this-world pesto and smeared on homemade pain de campagne.  Or maybe I’ll marinate some portobello mushroom caps in sherry and soy sauce and olive oil and garlic and grill them on my panini grill, and put caramelized tomatoes on top of each one.

Yeah, I don’t know what I’d eat if I had to go vegan, either.  It’s just so hard to choose.