On Hiatus

Yes, I have already mentioned it, but my compulsive tendencies compel me to reiterate that I am taking a hiatus from this blog until mid-June! I am out of town and in the midst of moving my precious kitchen. But I will do a big update when I am settled, starting with the spinach pie I made here in Vancouver for my family last night…

Sushi from Kampai

Well, I celebrated my fourth anniversary of being meat-free by hanging out with my friend as she gave birth to her baby. Then I napped, then I went back to packing. All of these things made takeout feel like sheer destiny. I went to Kampai sushi in Hamilton and got myself a Mountain Maki without the mayo (avocado and tempura yam) and a veggie roll. Hooray for the day!

Peanut Butter Cookies

Alright, I wanted to update again today and it was between these cookies I made last week and a very phallic yet boring photo of a vegan bavarian smokie I had for lunch (easy food for moving week; got two packages to get extra air miles).
This is one of the temperamental cookie recipes of the Post Punk Kitchen crew I was talking about below. I realised as I was baking these that I’ve made them several times before, always on a baking whim since it calls for so few ingredients, and always I forget I’ve made them before, because unfortunately when I bake them they are rather forgettable. They are more like little solid blocks of peanut butter and brown sugar than cookies, not that that’s a horrible thing, but, well…

Chickpeas Romesco with Pesto

This looks a bit like Indian food, but it’s really Spanish/Italian. Chickpeas Romesco from the freezer (recipe from Veganomicon), and then I tossed in the leftover spinach pesto from earlier in the week. Made it far less pretty, but turned out to be a very tasty whim, I found. I would do this combo again, but for the sake of sheer aesthetics, I wouldn’t mix them together again. Bright green pesto would look so nice next to the bright red romesco sauce!

The blog is going to be updated very sporadically over the next month or so: between the move and the trip home to Vancouver, there won’t be much chance to cook.

Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This is a recipe from Veganomicon that I hadn’t tried yet: Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Romero always have totally foolproof recipes, but I’ve noticed a couple of their cookie recipes are a tad temperamental for me, so I was very glad to be able to put these firmly in the Reliable Standby column along with most of their recipes. These look kind of health-food-y, but they taste so caramelly and dessert-like. Ironically, this is due to the inclusion of a rather health-food-y ingredient along with the brown sugar: brown rice syrup. This stuff is expensive and kind of hard to find, but a bottle lasts for multiple dessert recipes, and when mixed with other things like brown sugar and vanilla, tastes like rich caramel.

Pesto Spaghetti with Roasted Vegetables

I used to hate buying bunches of fresh herbs because it never seemed I could use the whole bunch before it went bad. Now if I have leftover herbs I just make a pesto, which always tastes like more of a big treat than like a desperate attempt to salvage the remains of my vegetable keeper. Today I had a bit of mint and parsley, but also half a bag of baby spinach that needed saving, too. I toasted up the last of my pecans and pinenuts and processed them with garlic, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, and the spinach, mint, and parsley. Meanwhile I roasted all the other veggies that I hadn’t yet been able to eat over the last week: cherry tomatoes, asparagus, onion, and zucchini. So I succeeded in using up everything from my vegetable keeper! Just a lonely little jalapeno and a chunk of ginger left in there.

Southwestern Bean Cakes

Well, for a cookbook I said I never use, A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen is sure getting lots of play lately! This was so easy and quick, and delicious. White beans mashed with cilantro, jalapeno, ancho chile powder, lime juice, cornmeal and salt and pepper, and panfried. Spinach salad to round it out, plus mango salsa. Very pleased with this one; want to make it for my family when I visit soon.

A Little Break

This is day 2 of just raiding my fridge for leftovers… should be back with a vengeance tomorrow!

Soup ‘n Fries

I make these fries ALL the time. Just a tiny bit of oil needed because I bake them at 400F arranged on a rack over a cookie sheet, a trick I learned years ago from a Bonnie Stern low fat cookbook (so 90s). The soup is Hot and Sour Soup with Spinach and Tomatoes from A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen– had some bean threads that were just taking up space! Don’t want to lug an old package of noodles to the new place. For dessert, some strawberries. I added a bit of brown sugar, so I guess they’re what you might call “macerated,” though I always found that to be a funny-sounding term for berries+sugar…

Pasta Primavera with Wine and Saffron

Spring vegetables are finally coming back to the Farmers Market. I started thinking about this pasta from Jamie Oliver that my mom makes, and my memories of the pinch of saffron soaking in a glass of white wine on the counter… it’s a seafood pasta recipe, with white wine, saffron, and heavy cream. So I set about making a vegetable version. Beautiful seared oyster mushrooms in place of the seafood: they have a strange substitutability for seafood, not just in cutesy name, but in texture and even a bit in flavour. I decided to use soy creamer for the cream, which I won’t do again. Soy creamer is a pretty processed beast, and so a little unpredictable: instead of thickening into a creamy sauce, it kind of melted the sauce into something more watery than it had been before I added it. Soy creamer thus thwarted my earnest vegan efforts to recapture my Jamie Oliver memories. Next time I will perhaps make a roux-based sauce, and just plain soy milk, and then creaminess will be mine… but this was delicious, anyways. I sprinkled some homemade parm (ground almonds, salt, nutritional yeast) on top.