10.05.08
Posted in Belovedary, food, good things, health, non-casein, non-dairy, vegan at 7:20 pm by Hanne Blank
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.
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10.01.08
Posted in Books & Publishing, arrrrgh, cookbooks, desserts, food, how to, non-dairy, reviews, vegan at 8:11 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve got nothing against Jeff Rogers, author of Vice Cream: Over 70 Sinfully Delicious Dairy-Free Delights, although it does bear saying that his self-chosen sobriquet, “The Naughty Vegan!” is, in a word, twee.
Nor do I have anything against the idea behind his book, namely, that people who do not wish to consume animal dairy products, for whatever reason, might nevertheless enjoy a frozen dessert that wasn’t an ice or a sorbet. In fact, I heartily agree.
But I do have a number of problems with this recipe book.
First off, there’s the title. I will skip, for the moment, a discussion of why I find the invoking of terms like “vice” and “sin” in relation to food to be problematic and merely point out that if one is so devoted to clean living that one is capable of considering vegan desserts made (as instructed!) with all-organic ingredients and nary a speck of refined sugars to be “sinful,” one is perhaps living an overly-virtuous life.
Second is the fact that there are, in essence, only two recipes. All the “over 70″ variations are nothing more than ringing the changes on the two methods. Further, the two methods themselves differ only the slightest bit, in that the “raw” recipes use dates as sweetener instead of the “cooked” maple syrup called for in all the others. It is only out of courtesy that I can bring myself to say they are even two methods, rather than a more accurate one-and-a-half. Whether you find it admirable or infuriating that someone managed to parlay a recipe and a half — and not even a particularly challenging or difficult-to-derive recipe-and-a-half at that — into a book deal is entirely a matter of perspective, and heaven knows mine has oscillated to and fro all evening.
Nevertheless, the recipes are there, and therein lies the third problem: whoever edited this book should be keelhauled. I got the strong impression, reading it, that whoever was assigned to edit the book over at Celestial Arts (an imprint of Ten Speed Press) back in 2003 or so had never been inside a kitchen in his or her life, and had certainly not bothered to test any of the recipes.
Interestingly, the poor editing doesn’t show much on first browse. The copy is clean and the recipes are presented clearly. But when you begin to read with the intent of actually preparing (I’d say “cooking,” but for the fact that none of these desserts is cooked, meaning that the author has completely ignored the family of frozen desserts that use a custard base) one or two, the problems bob to the surface like clots of wheatgrass scum in an inadequately-mixed smoothie.
On the surface, the recipes seem very simple. The recipes consist of nut milks, prepared with either juice or water, some sweetener, and either fruit or flavorings in the form of extracts or spices. They rely heavily on the use of a blender and/or a juicer, not only to puree fruits and other flavorings, but also to generate the nut milk to be used as the base.
Let me say that again: to generate the nut milk to be used as a base. This book was published in 2004. Does anyone else see the problem here? Nowhere does Rogers discuss the use of prepared nut milks–which have been readily available since well before he wrote the book–in making vegan frozen desserts, nor does he even acknowledge their existence except for canned coconut milk, which he grudgingly acknowledges will do in a pinch. Also, while I appreciate the fact that Vice Cream does not rely entirely upon soy milk, the fact that it is mentioned nowhere in the book is an issue that, like a number of others, makes me think that Rogers did not approach his task as a cookbook writer — which is to say as someone aware of and capable of explaining the technical and material scope of his project and where it fits in to the larger culinary picture — but primarily as a chronicler of things he had done in his own kitchen that happened to work out well. Sadly, he did not have an editor perspicacious enough to query him on these issues, or to just encourage him to get a blog instead of attempting an actual book, which frankly would’ve been a lot more appropriate to the material.
While we’re on the subject of Things A Halfway Competent Cookbook Editor Should Have Caught, beware the paragraph Rogers includes on non-nutritive sweeteners for these desserts. Rogers recommends the use of stevia for sweetening without adding sugars in order to make diabetic-friendly and low-GI-friendly desserts. Fine as far as it goes; as it happens I am a big fan of stevia so was glad to see it featured. Rogers then fails to address the fact that stevia is produced in both liquid and powder forms, and in the liquid form, that both glycerin- and alcohol-based solutions are available, and that these variations are going to pose different challenges to creating a final product that performs well in terms of taste and texture. Most bizarrely of all, Rogers does not even hint that there could be a major texture problem with stevia-sweetened creams, which rather boggles the mind given that he is calling for recipes that ordinarily include a cup of maple syrup to be sweetened, instead, with one and a half teaspoons of a dry powder. That’s rather a lot of liquid to have just vanish from a frozen dessert and expect to have it turn out in anything like the same texture as the original recipe.
Similar lack of testing shows, and even more blatantly, in Rogers’ suggestion that brown rice syrup “may work well” when mixed with other sweeteners. Yes, it may. So might agave nectar, or malt syrup, or crystalline fructose, or for that matter the sweet sweet nectar of generosity and kindness that courses through my veins and that has so far kept me from using obscenities in writing this review. But again, I expect more from a cookbook than a hand-wave and a “well, hey, this might work.” Mr. Rogers, if you’re reading this, you may be a stalwart person, a charming conversationalist, and a dab hand with a Champion juicer, but you’re a crap cookbook writer, and you can tell your editor I said so.
While we’re on the sweetener subject, let’s talk about maple syrup. I like maple syrup. I like it a lot. I cook with it frequently. But it has a rather particular and specific flavor of its own, even when very cold. To have it feature in every single one of the non-raw recipes seems like… oh, I don’t know… no, wait, I do: culinary laziness. In some of the recipes, like the chai, or (of course!) the maple walnut, it seems like just the thing. But I can’t be the only person who saw it in a recipe for peppermint ice cream and involuntarily made a face. Maple syrup simply isn’t the best sweetener in every conceivable case. Even if one doesn’t want to attempt honey (not vegan to some) or refined cane sugar, there are numerous other sweetening options, some of which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. For that matter, why not explore other maple syrup options? For instance, how about using the more strongly-flavored Grade B syrup in places where a stronger maple flavor would be desirable? What about crystallized maple sugar, which has a very alluring texture? The All Maple Syrup All The Time regime is lazy and dull, and the All Honey Date All The Time regime in the “raw” portion of the book isn’t any better.
While I’m here, I just have to say a word or two about one particular paragraph in the front matter. On page 12 of the edition I am looking at, there’s a short paragraph about durian. Just as durian itself is a humdinger of a fruit, this is a humdinger of a paragraph:
“…[durian is] shipped to the United States frozen, so you may find it in the freezer section. Durian is a large, thorny, hard-skinned fruit containing four to five sections of fleshy fruit, each enclosing several large seeds. A seven-pound durian will yield about two and a half pounds of edible fruit. When the fruit is ripe and at room temperature, you can pull apart some of the thorns to create a tear in the skin, exposing the fruit within. Be careful as the thorns are sharp and can cut skin. You can also cut the durian open with a knife, which is a little safer. Be warned that durian is also called “stinky fruit.” It has a very distinctive odor, sometimes mistaken for natural gas.”
Where to begin? First of all, in many major cities (very much including Seattle, where Rogers lives), durian is in fact available fresh. But let us suppose that frozen durian is the only thing available. How long does it take to thaw one out? Should it be thawed at room temperature or in the refrigerator? Does the texture change markedly if it has been frozen, and if so, does this affect how one might handle it for a recipe? You certainly won’t find out from Rogers, who leapfrogs straight from dragging this deep-frozen sea mine of a tropical fruit home from the nearest freezer section to having a ripe durian at room temperature. Which he then proceeds to indicate can be pulled apart, at some risk to life and limb, before making the concession that one could conceivably use a knife.
What is that about? I mean, aside from patent idiocy? You can render a watermelon into pieces by dropping it from a height, too, and portion out servings of tuna noodle casserole by sticking your bare hand right into the bubbling hotdish, but most folks prefer to avoid unnecessary injury and mess and use the utensils that were developed specifically for the purpose of performing such tasks. You know, like knives. Which would certainly be the first thing I reached for if I had occasion to try to dismember something that weighed as much as a sack of potatoes and was sufficiently spiky that it would do nicely as a projectile weapon.
Those of you who have encountered the durian in the flesh may also concur with me that the warning about the smell comes a bit late in the game and is, in fact, almost criminally understated. This is a fruit, after all, that has been banned from public transit, airplanes and airports, and some hotels in the countries (like Malaysia) where it is grown, and these are countries where large numbers of people actively enjoy eating it. I have eaten durian, both fresh and frozen, and in various preparations, and I quite like the flavor. But even I cannot help but concur with Richard Sterling, who writes “…… its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” There is a Malay saying that durian “smells like him, but tastes like her.” This is, you begin to comprehend, not a fruit to be approached in a casual sort of way, unless one lives not only alone, but without any neighbors within, say, a half a mile.
And after all this, how much durian pulp is actually required to make the Coconut Durian flavour of raw “vice cream”? A whopping one and a quarter cups. God alone knows what Rogers assumes the hapless vegan is going to do with the remainder of an extremely large and, at best, rather difficult fruit. For this, and his many other sins, including neglecting to mention that the same markets that sell whole durian fresh or frozen also often have the frozen pulp available in smaller quantities much more amenable to experimentation, I have but one recommendation:
Divide surplus durian pulp into two cardboard takeaway food containers. Seal them up, but not too thoroughly.
Send one to Jeff Rogers.
And send the other to his editor.
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09.04.08
Posted in american, cooking, food, main dishes, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes, vegan at 4:12 pm by Hanne Blank
This is a cellphone photo of my lunch yesterday, which, in this case, was, a serving of a dish I first devised in college when I was poor and had to make something hearty for a vegan potluck. My roommate at the time christened it, amusingly if not entirely charitably, “Hungry Hungry Hippie.” (The reference, for those too young to get it, was to the children’s board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, introduced by Hasbro in the late 1970s.)
Hungry Hungry Hippie is one of those dishes for which I will never publish anything like a precise recipe because there really can’t be one.
Nonetheless, I love Hungry Hungry Hippie to this day, and wish to spread the joy.
Hungry Hungry Hippie is, in its most elemental form and as pictured here, a sort of pilaf of cooked seasoned barley tossed with cubed tofu.
It can get plenty fancy if you have the scratch and the interest.
But usually, if you are making Hungry Hungry Hippie, you don’t.
How you make the basic version (and it makes plenty) is like this:
– you take about seven cups of water and you put it in a big heavy-bottomed pot what’s got a lid to it, and you start heating it
– then you flavor the water with a spoonful or two of Vegemite or Marmite, maybe some miso, and some onion powder and garlic powder; the water should end up pretty strongly flavored and a notch or so saltier than you’d want it for soup. You use the Vegemite or Marmite (I prefer the latter) because it has a lovely strong meaty flavor that goes really well with the barley, and also seems to penetrate and soak into the barley better than anything else. Don’t use boullion cubes instead of Vegemite or Marmite, it won’t work, it’ll taste of salt and nothing else.
–then you add a couple-three tablespoons of olive oil or whatever kinda oil you got. Bacon grease is amazing in this, but totally not vegan or vegetarian. You do what turns you on.
– then you pour in 2 cups of pearled barley and you stir it, and you bring it to a boil
– then you reduce the heat to a low simmer, cover it most of the way, and let it simmer until the barley kernels get to swelling appreciably
– whereupon you give it a stir, turn the heat off, put the lid on tight, and ignore it for a couple hours until all the liquid is absorbed
– at which point you drain and cube a pound or so of firm tofu and toss it into the barley, and reheat the whole thing a little (add another half-cup of liquid if you do it on the stovetop, or else put the whole thing (covered) in the oven at 300F for a bit)
And then you eat it! Unless, of course, you’d like to add something yummy to it first.
Many things can be added to Hungry Hungry Hippie along with the tofu. Some combination of sauteed onions, garlic, celery, and mushrooms is good. Thoroughly caramelized onions are super-duper rockin’. So are caramelized tomatoes, or little bits of sun-dried tomato. Sauteed cabbage (sliced thinly) goes into it nicely. So does chopped fresh parsley. And so do chopped up dried tart fruits like unsweetened dried apricots, or cranberries. When I could, I used to eat it with a dollop of sour cream on top.
But it’s also really tasty (and hella easy) on its own. I like it with a healthy wodge of black pepper ground on top.
Its many virtues include keeping well, reheating well, being very nutritious, being very filling, having lots of complex carbs that will handily carry you through the day, being high in fiber, and being extremely economical.
Good for hippies and other living things. Give it a whirl.
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08.18.08
Posted in Uncategorized, cooking, culture, food, food allergies, non-casein, non-dairy, politics, salad dressings, salads, vegan, writing at 2:00 pm by Hanne Blank
Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.
This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.
Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.
Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.
Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.
The ingredients are simple and few.
For a single batch, you will require:
- 1/3 cup water
- 1/3 cup tamari (you can use soy sauce but the flavor isn’t as good)
- 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (you can use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar or whatever vinegar you like, but the flavor will be accordingly different, and balsamic is so yummy I rarely mess with anything else)
- 1 cup olive oil
- approximately 1 bulb worth of peeled raw garlic cloves (I usually just use 15 cloves because I peel large quantities of garlic ahead of time)
- 1 cup nutritional yeast
The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:
Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.
Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.
Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.
One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.
Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.
I told you it was good.
(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)
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08.03.08
Posted in allergy, cooking, food, food allergies, main dishes, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes, pasta, salads, vegan at 7:16 pm by Hanne Blank
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m allergic to casein, the protein in milk. So I’ve had to work out some ways to achieve the same culinary effects one can get from milk products without poisoning myself.
This recipe for what I call Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce is one of my favorites, because it is one of the most successful texture and mouth-feel replicas of the comfort-food original that I’ve yet come up with . A sauce based on nutritional yeast will never taste like a cheese sauce, not really. But if it’s creamy, smooth, savory, a little salty, and rich, it definitely pushes all the right buttons. The flavor provided by the yeast and Marmite (a yeast product), plus garlic and onion and plenty of mustard, is perhaps not quite cheeselike but it’s not quite not cheeselike, either.
As a bonus, it’s vegan, so there’s no cholesterol to worry about. And all the yeast means it’s bursting at the seams with B vitamins. It will keep reasonably well, although it doesn’t reheat quite as gracefully, texture-wise, as dairy mac and cheese does. (Still tastes good, though.)
I like to pair Mac and Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce with a particularly bright and somewhat acidic side dish to help cut the richness. Today I made an impromptu cucumber and cilantro salad in a spicy Asian marinade.
Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce
2 small onions, minced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced very fine
10 Tablespoons vegan margarine
1 cup unsweetened, unflavored faux-milk of your choice (I usually use almond), thinned with 1/2 cup hot water
2 Tablespoons prepared mustard
4 Tablespoons creamy-style almond butter, cashew butter, or tahini
1 Tablespoon Marmite
1 1/2 cups nutritional yeast
1 Tablespoon ground dry mustard
Measure out the nutritional yeast and ground dry mustard in a bowl, and stir to combine. Set aside.
Melt the vegan margarine in a saucepan and add the onions. Saute the onions in the margarine until they are transparent, then add the garlic. While the onions are cooking, stir together the faux-milk/water mixture, the prepared mustard, the nut butter or tahini, and the Marmite until thoroughly combined. After you have added the garlic to the hot fat and onions, let it cook for about a minute, then add the liquid and stir everything well. Reduce heat to barely a simmer.
Add yeast/mustard mixture to the liquid slowly, using a whisk to combine. Once all the yeast/mustard mixture is added, whisk over low heat for about 2 minutes, then remove from heat and let stand for 5 minutes, stirring once or twice.
This provides enough sauce for a pound of elbow macaroni. Cook the macaroni until it is quite well done, or it will absorb too much liquid from the sauce and the sauce will lose its texture. Reserve a quarter cup or so of the pasta cooking water when you drain the pasta, and add it back into the dish a tablespoon or so at a time if this begins to happen.
Serve hot with plenty of freshly-ground black pepper.
Note: if you don’t like the slight lumpiness introduced by the onions, feel free to omit them, but they do add some dimension to the taste that I enjoy.
I love a good marinated salad, and I also love the southeastern Chinese (and indeed, pan-southeast-Asian) combination of cucumbers and cilantro and chiles — it is bright and sprightly and summery and delightful. Although, yes, probably not a dish for those people to whom cilantro tastes of perfumed soap. Of whom I am not one. Which is why I like to make a salad that goes a little something like this…
Spicy Cucumber and Cilantro Salad
5 Kirby cucumbers, small Asian cucumbers, or other firm-fleshed variety with few seeds (if you must use another variety, consider removing the seeds so the dish won’t get watery), peeled and sliced about 1/4 inch thick
2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 cups cleaned and dried cilantro (coriander) leaves
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon Chinese chili paste (in oil) (or less if you do not care for a lot of heat)
Sprinkle sliced cucumbers with the salt and toss with your hands to combine. Let stand 15 minutes, then rinse well in several changes of water, and drain well (use a salad spinner if you have one). Toss the cucumbers with the cilantro leaves and add the vinegar, sesame oil, and chili paste. Toss well to combine, cover, and refrigerate for an hour or so before serving.
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