Homework

I believe I mentioned that I have a book due on July 15, and am consequently in what we refer to as Book Deathmarch.

This, consequently, is what the interior of my fridge looks like right now.

My household has been eating, this past week, mostly courtesy of what’s been found in the freezer and the garden.  Right now in the fridge there are two packages of seasoned tofu, two bottles of beer, some garlic scape pesto, half a dozen eggs, a chicken carcass waiting to be turned into soup (that’s the plastic box), a quarter of a container of soymilk, Vitamin D liquid, some olives, some miso, some garlic, and the Magic Forest of Pickled Peppers And Other Condiments.  Oh, and pint of cream because I keep meaning to make caramels for someone and it keeps not happening.  There are some breadcumbs in there too, and almond meal, popcorn, and, in the plastic baggie you can see just poking out of the door, some salt cod.  The rest of the door shelves contain condiments of all sorts, from pomegranate molasses to four kinds of mustard.  And the cat’s insulin.

The cupboard is also starting to look a little less like its usual self.  There’s a big hole where several bags of dried beans used to be, the muesli stocks are pretty much gone, there’s no more peanut butter.  Even the tea cupboard has some wide open spaces in it, a state of affairs so rare as to be shocking.

It’s kind of an interesting challenge to feed yourself and your household when the fridge mostly holds condiments and not many things with which one could reasonably use same.  It strikes me that this task might be easier and less stressful if I just went out and did the hunting and gathering.  I guess I’ll have to carve out some time and do that.

This is what happens when I take my own advice.  It could be what happens when you take my advice too, if you’re so inclined.  Have some greens along with it.  We had steamed gai lan.  Fantastic.

This is one of those dinners that is not for the kind of person who is afraid of mixing things on the plate.  I caramelized zucchini in a tablespoon of olive oil with whole cloves of garlic — a medium heat, with infrequent stirring and a good stout pan, will get it done in a reasonable amount of time — and then fried two eggs over easy in the residual oil left in the pan.  After breaking the yolks, I ate the garlic and zucchini with yolk and bits of eggwhite and some black pepper.  Sublime, especially because I made a nice cucumber salad to chase it with.  The salad is a riff on the cucumber salad from Friday last, only since I had no cilantro left I used some onions pickled in rice vinegar that were lingering in the back of the fridge.  Salt-fermented chiles add a little dimension and floral heat.  A fine contrast to rich eggyolk and unctuous-yet-nicely-crusted zucchini and garlic.

These tomato babies were hanging out in their fetching green hats, soaking up the sun when I went out in the garden a little while ago.

Ushi likes to watch over the garden and supervise me while I work.

For cream-style soups, don’t just dump in soy milk willy-nilly.  The texture suffers.  A better bet is to use soymilk that’s diluted by about half with broth, and thicken as desired either with a roux, or with breadcrumbs, a handful of rice, or some peeled potato — with these last three,  just simmer until the starch disintegrates.

For casseroles, the vegan cream-style soup-in-a-boxes are not bad for the most part.  I’m not always keen on the soups as soups, but if you want a nondairy tuna noodle hotdish, vegan cream of mushroom soup is totally the way to go.

You can approximate a “cheese sauce” without dairy by making a “roux” of margarine or oil and nutritional yeast, then adding (unsweetened, unflavored!) soy milk or other milk substitute until it is the thickness you want.  Season with mustard, nutmeg, sauteed or roasted garlic, caramelized onions, black pepper, etc.  It’s not cheese, but it’s not bad, and you can get pretty close to a mac and cheese mouthfeel with it if you tinker around some.  It’s a good thing to have in your hip pocket for those times when comfort food is not optional.

Nutritional yeast is also your answer to cheese-flavored snack foods: mix about a half cup of nutritional yeast with a couple tablespoons of garlic powder and onion powder, some sweet paprika, some ground Aleppo pepper if you like a little heat, a little ground celery seed, and salt to taste.  Sprinkle over popcorn or roasted cauliflower or whatever else you like.  It’s an outstanding popcorn topping and may help you forget cheesey poofs and Smartfood.

News Flash: The Creamy Salad Dressing of your Dreams Has Always Been Dairy-Free.  Hollyhock Dressing is made as follows… 1 cup olive oil + 1/3 cup water + 1/3 cup cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar + 1/3 cup regular soy sauce + 1 cup nutritional yeast + whiz in blender until creamy and smooth = OMGdelicious.  Up the ante by adding as much fresh raw or roasted garlic as you think you might enjoy.  Me, I will often use an entire bulb of garlic for a batch of this stuff, but of course it depends on how hot the garlic is.  This dressing is also outrageously good with potatoes, and other veggies, especially roasted ones.  And it’s orgasmic with fresh tomatoes.

Pizza is still good without cheese.  Adding lots of high-flavor ingredients, like chopped pickled peppers, anchovies (if you eat fish), olives, onions, roasted garlic, and the like makes it work even better.  My favorite pizza, made by my local Egyptian pizzeria, is called the Dahb, and consists of their chewy, wheaty, out-of-this-world crust topped with roasted marinated eggplant slices, chopped red slightly hot pickled peppers, black olives, sliced garlic, and chopped sun-dried tomatoes.  It’s toe-curlingly good.

In Italy, cheese is not sprinkled over every damn pasta dish in the world like we tend to do here.  My advice is to make sure your sauce stands on its own, buy or make really good fresh pasta, and enjoy it like they do in the old country.  We’re almost at pasta puttanesca season…

Pesto without cheese is fantastic.  I make it with pecans, basil, garlic, oil, and salt, and it’s divine.  Also, you can make other pestos.   Pesto di noci — walnuts, parsley, marjoram, garlic — is trad Ligurian voluptuousness and well worth your time.

Oh, and even though I probably didn’t need to mention it: most Southeast Asian cuisines don’t cook with milk, traditionally.  There are occasional exceptions, but for the most part, you can eat your way through Chinese (esp. southern), Japanese, Thai, Malay, Cambodian, Myanmarese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotian, Indonesian, and other cuisines of the region without a hitch.  The dairy tends to come in when you get into the steppes and herding territory: Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan.

Indian food is tricky; Indian food that is not Traditional Indian Restaurant Outside Of India menu food is easier and there are vastly more options if you cook it yourself than if you’re depending on a restaurant to do it for you.  Do note that tofu will sub for paneer in most applications, and that coconut milk will do nicely for dairy milk in many cases.  Southern Indian coconut milk payasam — a near relative of the rice pudding called kheer — will make you very happy indeed.

Baking without dairy can be a challenge.  Milk is not tricky, butter is not particularly tough.  But sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk, and other cultured products can be hard to approximate.  (You can just forget about cheese.)

Of these, buttermilk is the easiest.  You can sour soy milk in the same way that you would sour cow milk to make faux-buttermilk, by adding about a teaspoon of white or cider vinegar or lemon juice to a cup of milk.  Use an unsweetened, unflavored soy milk.

Sometimes I will make a richer “buttermilk” by combining equal parts unsweetened, unflavored soy yogurt and soy milk, then adding a teaspoon of lemon juice.  I use this in my vegan black chocolate layer cake, and in my non-vegan buttermilk cornbread, and it works beautifully, adding moisture and density.

Sour cream is difficult indeed.  Non-dairy “sour cream” products are made with many thickeners for the sake of texture, and not all of them react well to heat.  The texture of your finished product can suffer badly.  Also, their fat contents are not the same as that of dairy sour cream, which means that in terms of chemistry and physics they will not perform the same way.  I learned the hard way that it wasn’t possible to make a sour-cream pastry dough for kolaci with non-dairy sour cream.  The dough wouldn’t perform correctly without my adding enough extra flour to turn it into something much closer to a pretzel than a pastry — inedible.

Some recipes, however, will do well with soy yogurt instead of sour cream if you do the following: the day before you want to use it, pour the unsweetened, unflavored soy yogurt into a colander lined with a damp clean kitchen towel and let it drain as much as it can for about 24 hours.  Then, just before you are going to use the drained soy yogurt, whip about a teaspoon of lemon juice and a  tablespoon to a tablespoon and a half of neutral oil (grapeseed, canola) into the yogurt to increase fat and acidity.  This will work well in things like sour cream coffee cake.  I still wouldn’t try it in pastry dough, though.

Yogurt generally speaking can be substituted for with soy yogurt.  Once in a while you may find that due to one of the thickeners present in the soy yogurt, you’ll end up with a texture problem, but if you try to buy the least thickener-happy soy-yo you can find, that should be diminished.

I have not yet tried baking with coconut milk yogurt.  I am a little suspicious of how it would perform because the protein content is so different.  Also, I haven’t been able to find a source for unsweetened coconut milk yogurt.  If anyone who reads this has experience baking with coconut milk yogurt, would you let me know how it went?

It’s been so hot here, and so dry, the kind of weather we usually don’t see until August. Unbroken 90F or better for more than a week now, and no rain at all. It’s hard on the gardens, and on the gardeners. I water every day, carrying buckets of water from the rain barrels to the beds, because it’s the most efficient way of getting water where it’s needed — I have no desire to waste my water on the grass, or on the drought-tolerant plants. Especially since the hydrangeas are barely hanging in there (you see the heat-related leaf droop in the photo above, and it was only 9 am!) and need the water more than, say, the day lilies.

That said, I’ve been managing to keep things looking pretty green, and growing relatively well. I went out this morning first thing to cut grass and do weeding before it got too hot to work. Before I went in again, an hour and forty five minutes later, I decided it might be time for pictures.

The magic beanstalks have begun producing beans. So far just a few, which I have happily eaten right there in the yard. They’re extraordinary when picked small and eaten raw, with a vibrant, incredibly lush sweet flavor. It’s a treat you only get if you grow them, and one of the best arguments I know for keeping a garden.

Shiny happy brassicas holding hands. Brussels sprouts and broccoli and gai lan and yu choy. You can also see some tomato on the far left and chard on the far right. Some of the gai lan and yu choy are being allowed to bolt and self-sow for a fall crop.

The pumpkins have an extremely vigorous will to live. They are basically taking over a quarter of the back yard, which I am carefully not watering so the grass won’t grow much… since there’s no way to mow around and between all those vines.

Pumpkins At Work!

Cucumbers, purslane, long beans, and the Forest of Herbs. Now that the dill’s going to seed it’s thinner-looking over there. Purslane is often considered a weed, but it’s actually a wonderful vegetable. I grow it on purpose and eat it often. It grows back very quickly, it’s actually hard to keep up with it. It’s extremely nutritious, and tasty.

Cucumber blossoms.

The volunteer long bean plants (I grew them in this spot last year intentionally, and some came back to visit again) are blooming. I love their delicate lavender blossoms. Some varieties have pale blue blooms, others white.

The tomatoes have begun to set some fruit, particularly the paste tomatoes. The peppers are starting to bloom. The eggplants are doing their thing, and beginning to set fruit as well. Soon there will be lots of fruit in the garden. And the kitchen.

When it comes to things culinary, some dairy things can be substituted for with relative success.

Other things cannot.

Fluid milk is in the first category.  Soy milk, nut milks, and seed milks can do a pretty darned good job of substituting for liquid milk in nearly all situations.

Butter is also pretty easy to substitute for.  Ghee or clarified butter is an option for many people.  But if it isn’t, or if its more assertive flavor wouldn’t work as well, there are many different plant oils that will work wonderfully.  Pastries can be made with leaf lard to fine advantage.  And there are hydrogenated vegetable shortenings and various kinds of margarines, which I list last because I like them least.

In the second category, the things for which there are no good substitutes, is cheese.  I’ve tried the vegan cheeses.  Some of them are in fact edible.  But they are not, emphatically not, cheese.  Anyone who tells you they’re the same, or “so close you won’t be able to tell the difference,” has a palate made of purest tin.  Either that or they’ve been vegan so long they’ve forgotten what cheese is supposed to taste like.  I’m sorry, it’s just true.  Cheese is sui generis and there is nothing that replaces it adequately.

There are some things you can slip into sandwiches and burritos and such that will give the same unctuous, rich, yielding quality of cheese.  Avocado and guacamole are fantastic, silken tofu “ricotta” is sometimes a nice touch, hard boiled egg yolk is also very good in some things.  But none of these have the tang or the body of cheese, nor the saltiness, and certainly none of the specific flavors that come from the various bacteria that act on the cheeses are present in the substitutes.

Liquid cream  is difficult to substitute.  There are nondairy creamers and some of them will work in some applications and others will work in other applications.  Coconut cream can be used in ice creams, panna cottas and other custardy type dishes, ganaches, and similar sweet applications but it does bring a coconut flavor along for the ride.  Condensed soy milk can also work, depending on what you want to do with it.  It’s also easy, since it just requires boiling down some (unsweetened, unflavored) soy milk until it is thick enough to get the job done.  I know some people also have success with extremely rich nut milks, but I haven’t experimented with these.  I have tried a product called Mimicreme, and have not been thrilled by it.  I suspect it would be great for ice creams, but I wasn’t pleased with it on berries, that’s for sure.

Whipped cream, however, is not possible with either coconut cream or condensed soy milk.  There are, yes, nondairy whipped toppings, e.g. Cool Whip.  I don’t care for them or the plasticky smeary mouthfeel they leave behind, but sometimes they have a use just the same, especially if you aren’t as put off by the texture issue as I.  But for the most part, if you can’t have dairy you just can’t have whipped cream.  (It’s a tough one.  Not as tough as cheese, though.)

Yogurt is difficult partly because so many American yogurt companies cannot seem to make decent yogurt in the first place, and partly because American yogurt companies cannot fathom the idea of yogurt without sugar.  I prefer yogurt to be unsweetened, and like to use it in savory applications better than sweet ones, so this is a problem for me.  I have found one, and only one, brand of commercially-available soy yogurt that is unsweetened, and it is Wildwood’s Soyogurt in the plain unsweetened version.  It has a decent texture, although to me it tries a bit too hard.  I get the sense that they are adding a lot of inulin to produce a smooth texture through a fiber suspension, and it comes off to me as a bit artificial, almost plasticky.  I have not had good results with it for labneh or Greek-style strained yogurts, and I suspect that the high-fiber texture trick is why.  Every once in a while I think I should experiment with making my own soy yogurt to see if I could do better.  Maybe I really ought to.

I have never found a source for non-dairy kefir.  I would adore one, and one for non-dairy ayran or dhalla, both of which I love, as well.  I know that some people make non-dairy kefir at home with kefir grains to get the fermentation rolling, but I haven’t experimented with it.  Another thing I ought to try!

A reader asked me if I could post some tips about living without dairy products, since it sounds like she may be facing a need to do that.

I’ve been doing without dairy for several years now.  I have an intolerance to casein, the protein in milk.  My reactions to it fall somewhere in between what doctors think of as classic allergy territory and what’s considered merely a “sensitivity,” so I’m not sure, technically speaking, what that’s called.  All I know is that mostly I can’t eat dairy products.  I can tolerate very small amounts, on a very occasional basis, of butter and heavy cream — I can eat ghee/clarified butter without a problem — because they are mostly butterfat with only incidental amounts of protein.  Clarified butter is all butterfat, the protein has been removed.

So I guess that’s my first thought: figure out, if you can, what aspect of the dairy is bothering you.  If it’s the sugar, lactose, you are in luck, because lactase enzyme may make it possible for you to eat dairy.  Lactose intolerance is really common, much more common than having a problem with dairy protein.

If it’s dairy protein that bothers you, you’re going to have a harder time.

Dairy ingredients are used in a lot of prepared products.  Baked goods, particularly, are loaded with dairy products in the US; it adds richness and improves mouth-feel.

If you must avoid all dairy, then you will have to avoid most prepared foods.  This is probably not a bad thing in the long run, it’s just kind of an inconvenience sometimes.

You need to learn to read labels.  Read carefully, not all dairy ingredients look like dairy ingredients.  Caseinate and sodium caseinate are found in a lot of meat products, in particular.  They’re dairy derived and if you’re allergic to casin, you’ll be allergic to these.  (I’ve had some unfortunate run-ins with sausages.)   Lactic acid may or may not be dairy-derived.  Whey protein and derivatives are off the list.  And of course anything that says “milk” — or “butter” or “cheese” or “yogurt.”

You also have to get a sense of what prepared foods are likely to include “stealth dairy.”  Dairy ingredients sometimes sneak in under the convenient phrase “natural and artificial flavors,” and also there are some kinds of foods that simply won’t have a label you can easily look at.  Nor do people selling you things necessarily know everything that goes into them — the person at the farmer’s market who sells you the sausage is not necessarily the person who made the sausage.  For me, the categories of food of which I am  most wary of dairy ingredients are: sweet baked goods, savory baked goods, sausages and other types of charcuterie for which a mixture is prepared (pates, terrines), jarred pasta sauces, prepared salad dressings, prepared sandwich spreads, and canned soups.

The solution is often to just not buy these things.

You can also take a shortcut and look for kosher certification on the label.  Kosher-certified meat products are guaranteed not to contain any dairy products.  For non-meat products, however, Kosher certification alone doesn’t mean something is non-dairy.  What you want to look for is the word “Pareve” or “Parve” or a big letter “P” — this means that it does not contain either meat or milk.  Kashrut authorities vary, however, on what counts as “milk.”  Sometimes if milk ingredients are sufficiently denatured by processing, a kashrut authority will decide that it is no longer “milky” in nature and will allow it in a pareve product.  So if you are particularly sensitive, you may wish to not place all your trust in this shortcut, and read ingredients closely anyhow.

More as I think about it, I’m sure.  If the person who originally asked about this has more particular types of questions in mind, please let me know.

A couple folks have asked, so here’s the approximate method for DIY salt-fermented chiles.

You need about a pound of chiles of your desired degree of hottitude.  Wash them, remove the stems, and chop them coarsely.  I often bung them in the food processor and whir them until they are mostly coarsely chopped with a few bigger and a few smaller bits.  It saves a lot of time.

Put your chopped chiles in a large bowl. Add about 2 Tablespoons kosher salt for a pound of chiles, and combine thoroughly.  Feel free to knead the salt and the chiles together if you like.  Pack salt and chiles into a clean glass jar or jars and put lids on them loosely.

Leave the chiles out on the counter at room temperature for about 2-4 days depending on how warm your kitchen is.  Less if it’s warmer, more if it’s cooler.  They’ll give off some liquid and you’ll see some little bubbles starting to form in the liquid.  Stir things around some with a chopstick, put the lid(s) back on (still loosely) and put your jar(s) in the fridge.  Every day or two, stir things around some more with a chopstick.  In about a week to ten days your chiles will be sufficiently transformed that you can start using them.

They will continue to improve over the space of a couple of months.  If you use them at a steady clip you’ll figure out eventually how much you have to make in your initial batch so that you will not run out until after they’ve had a chance to reach their peak.  What their peak is, of course, is subjective.

If things get fuzzy, remove the fuzzy bits and carry on.  If things start getting blue or grey, though, or it smells like a horrible dead thing that has died horribly, throw it away and start over.

And if you are even more adventurous than this, you can use Andrea Nguyen’s amazing recipe for homemade fermented Sriracha sauce.

This is a dish that falls squarely into the category that my friend Jeannette calls dolce far niente cooking.  Perfect for hot weather, it is light and cooling but has strong, invigorating flavor.  And, as the dolce far niente thing implies, it requires hardly any effort.

You’ll want a couple-few cucumbers, a healthy-sized bunch of cilantro (yes, cilantro is a vegetable, now hush), a couple cloves of garlic, and a hot chile or two of your preferred degree of heat.  Additionally you’ll need some salt, some rice vinegar, a little sesame oil, a colander, a bowl, and a knife.  Proportions may be varied to suit your tastes and the number of mouths you’re feeding.

Peel your cukes if the skins are thick or bitter, or not if they aren’t.  Seed them if they’re the kind with lots of watery seeds, or leave them intact if they don’t.  Cut the cukes into happy bite-sized pieces and strew with a tablespoon of salt, toss, and let sit while you clean and coarsely chop your cilantro and your chiles.  (If you happen to have a jar of salt-fermented chiles in the fridge, this is a good time to use them.  You can also use drained chopped pickled chiles if you like.)

Rinse your cukes in the colander and give them a good few shakes to get the water off.  They shouldn’t be too salty but they should be a little salty.  Rinse out the bowl.  Put the cukes back in the bowl with the cilantro and chopped chile.  Crush a couple cloves of garlic, or mince them, or however you prefer to render a garlic clove into something approaching a fine schmear, and add that to the mix.  Add a glug or two of rice vinegar and a glugette or demi-glug of sesame oil, toss, taste, correct the seasonings if need be, and serve.

If by chance you should recall, as you head to the table, as I did this evening, that you have an avocado that is on the overripe side, or even one that is just becoming ripe I suppose, seize it up immediately, peel it and chop it up and add it to the salad.

This is very fine as a side dish, especially with cold noodle dishes, fried plantains, or with fish or seafood.  It is also a delight as a main dish on a hot evening, particularly if you add the avocado.