When two great things come together
Actually, this is more like when three great things come together — my CSA, pho, and kimchi.
Roast vegetable salsa
One of the perks of joining a CSA is that you get to try new vegetables. This summer mine brought me my first ever ground cherries, and more recently tomatillos. I adored both, especially the way that they come in little papery husks that you peel off to find the fruit itself.
At about the same time the tomatillos arrived I also found myself with a few cobs or corn needing a tasty home, as well as some caramelized onions, eggplant, and cilantro. All together these spelled salsa. I decided to roast the veggies first to bring out the sweetness of the corn, and generally add a richness to the flavour.
Roast vegetable salsa
- 2 banana peppers
- 1 hot pepper
- 2 small purple eggplant
- 2 cobs corn
- 1 lb tomatillos
- 1/2 lb tomatoes
- 1/2 cup caramelized onions
- 1 bulb garlic
- 1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
- 1 to 2 T balsamic vinegar
- ~1/2 cup water
- oil
- salt and pepper [to taste]
- Smoked paprika, mushroom powder, or other seasonings [to taste]
To make the salsa, first roast your veggies:
- Cut the top off the bulb of garlic to expose the tops of all the cloves. Wrap the bulb in foil, drizzle with oil, then seal the foil packet. Bake at 350F for approximately 30 minutes.
- Slice the tomatoes and tomatillos fairly thickly and spread out on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. (You might need two pans to hold all the veggies.)
- Cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds, put on a pan with the tomatoes.
- Prick the eggplant all over with a fork and put it on the pan too.
- If you like, you can drizzle a bit of oil over the veggies and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
- Husk the corn and wrap both cobs in foil to form a well sealed packet. Sprinkle with a tablespoon or so of water just before sealing this up.
- Bake at 375F for around 30 min.
- Let the garlic and veggies cool. If you like, you can lightly oil the roast corn and then put it under a broiler for a few minutes to blacken it and get an even richer flavour, but watch it carefully!
Then make your salsa:
- Once cool, cut the roast eggplants in half and scrape out the middles.
- Pulse all the veggies (but not the corn!) together with the garlic, onions, cilantro, and balsamic vinegar in a food processor until just combined. Add water a little at a time until you reach a good consistency.
- De-nibble the corn. =) Add the niblets to the salsa and stir in. You want to do this after using the food processor so that you get whole niblets in your salsa.
- Taste and adjust the flavour with whatever strikes your fancy. I like the smokiness I get from adding smoked paprika, and find mushroom powder balances the acidity of the tomatoes. YMMV — experiment!
A weekend of vegetables
It was a long weekend here, and I spent much of it trying to use up the countless veggies in the fridge. There was a lot of spinach and a lot of basil, so poof! then there was pesto. This made for a lovely pasta dish topped with steamed chard. And since I still had pesto left over after that, and also a whole bunch of root veggies, I made a warm salad of roasted potatoes, turnips, and radishes, all tossed with green onions and pesto and vegan parmesan. Yum! Now I can at least fit things into the crispers, but I still have cauliflower and beets and corn and zucchini and carrots and beans and yet more potatoes to work my way through.
Zucchini cherry bread
To make a dent in the zucchini I tried making a zucchini cherry bread today. It’s really just a veganized version of this recipe, but with dried cherries in place of walnuts (I was all out). The bread turned out quite well, if a bit sweet. Next time I’ll add walnuts (but keep the cherries!), reduce the oil a titch, and reduce the sugar by a quarter or third. Cranberries might work nicely in this too — their tartness would help balance the sweetness of the bread.
Zucchini cherry bread
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 1 cup grated zucchini
- 3 T soy milk or other liquid
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp egg replacer powder
- 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup dried cherries
To make:
- Preheat oven to 325F. Lightly oil a bread pan.
- ‘Cream’ the oil and sugar together until a little fluffy.
- Stir in the zucchini, vanilla, and soy milk.
- In another bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, soda, baking powder, salt, and egg replacer powder. Stir into the wet mixture.
- Quickly fold in the cherries.
- Pour batter into the loaf pan, and bake 60 to 70 minutes.
* If using a flax egg or other egg substitute, just replace the egg replacer powder and soy milk in the above recipe.
Happy trails
Wow, it’s been a quiet few weeks. It’s my own fault really — I managed to bruise the tendons in my wrist while canoe camping, and it’s only just getting solid enough to type with. Trust me — bruised tendons are a pain in more than just the hand.
Hopefully it’ll recover quickly, because with any luck August will be all about camping. I have tentative plans for no less than three trips of varying lengths, including a solo trip in just a couple weeks time. In anticipation I’ve started looking at lightweight vegan camp foods — the kind of thing you can carry for a week without throwing out your back, and still find tasty and filling after a long day.
There are lots of backpacker meals on the market, but not all that many good vegan ones. They also tend to be pricey. Last year I invested in a Harmony House Backpacker Kit, which is basically a collection of dried beans and vegetables. These proved useful for an extended multi-person trip — we could pretend we had a fridge full of veggies at our disposal, reduced to a dozen or so little packages of the dried stuff. For solo tripping, though, where I’m carrying everything myself, I decided this wasn’t the way to go. Premade meals are more efficient — I only want to carry what I need.
So back to those prepackaged meals. A couple years ago I tried some Mary Janes Farm meals for bike camping trips. They were decent, with the exception of their instant salsa, which was exceptional. (Sadly they seem to no longer seem to sell this.) The serving sizes are not huge, but you can buy individual servings (which is great for solo trippers). The pasta dishes they offer are veg but not vegan, but the couscous dishes are a major score — all are vegan except the Northwest Garden Couscous. Similarly we can satisfy ourselves with all their ‘ethnic ‘dishes (those seem everyday to me!) except the polenta, which puts falafel and hummus and suchlike on the menu. That’s by no means all, there are soups and rice dishes and more too. Compared to other instant meal manufacturers, MJF offers quite a lot of vegan options.
This week I discovered that Harvest Foodworks also offers quite a few vegan entrees — over a half dozen, with additional variations on things like their veggie burgers. (Though why on earth do they list beef burgers on their vegetarian entree page?!) Whether you can find them in a local store is another question. Mine only had one, the Cajun Beans & Rice. A taste test surprised me. I’m used to bland meals, but these were quite tasty (if a bit salty). It was good straight out of the pan, and downright satisfying after stirring in a small packet of hot sauce scavenged from a local fast food restaurant. My only complaint is that the smallest packages contain enough for two very hearty servings, which means solo trippers will need to carefully measure and split the contents to create individual servings. Also, even after allowing the full recommended cooking and sitting time, the rice and beans were more stew-like than I’d expected. They made a yummy stew, but didn’t soak up all the extra moisture for a good hour or more (the leftovers were perfect in the morning). All told I’d certainly give them another try, especially their more unique offerings like insta-bannock, as well as powdered shortening and apple sauce. (Nifty!)
Not all the options out there are good though. Scavenging for options last fall, I found Hothuck’s Bombay Curry. Admittedly it’s meant to be ‘enhanced’ by adding some veggies or rice, but it was still a huge disappointment — tasteless, with an unpleasant texture. I actually threw mine out.
So what am I planning to pack for upcoming trips? Probably none of the above, because last night I found an even better resource — Bulk Barn. This is a Canadian chain, concentrated mostly in Ontario and along the east coast. I’m sure there are equivalents elsewhere though. Basically it’s a bulk food store, with bins and bins of baking supplies and dried fruit and nuts and beans and the like. I gave myself five minutes there last night, and walked out with pea soup, thai soup, chili, tabbouleh, and mixed grain mix. All vegan, all of the just-add-water variety. For around $10 I emerged with around 10 individual servings — definitely the cheapest option. They may not be as well-rounded nutritionally as dedicated backpacker meals, but I suspect they’ll do very well indeed after adding some dried veggies and seasonings, and maybe instant rice or quinoa. Certainly the pea soup was tasty and filling. I just combined 1/2 cup of the mix with 3T quinoa flakes, 1/2T dried chives, 1T fake bacon bits, and 1/4 tsp smoked paprika.
Camp mix: Instant pea soup
Also on the list of things to try and come up with in the next couple weeks: Instant salsa, instant congee, good granola bars, and tasty ‘energy balls’ (a yummy raw treat). Life won’t be dull. 
Radishes!
We collected the first of our CSA produce this week, and lo, there were many greens. After a hot start to spring this year our weather turned cool and very, very wet. It’s rained almost every day for weeks! This has been great for the greens but not so great for the rest of the veggies. Nonetheless, I was very excited by our first CSA haul, which included spinach, some sort of leaf lettuce, chinese cabbage, a mystery green, chard, radishes, baby green onions (they’re like particularly chubby chives), and dill. My housemate also grabbed us a pint of luscious strawberries from the farm, which were almost gone 24 hours later.
Needless to say, that many greens means salad. Strawberries mean salad too — a handful of fruit really does perk up a bowlful of greens. I was also excited to discover that you can eat radish greens. Who knew? (Probably everybody but me. ) They’re a little prickly to handle, but just fine torn up into salad. Apparently you can steam and sautee them like spinach too. To store them, this site suggests trimming them off the radishes, washing well, then storing them wrapped in paper towels or a plastic bag.
Last week I got to taste a Chinese dish that used pickled mustard greens. It was quite tasty, and today I discovered you can pickle radish greens too. You can also make a quick pickle of the radish bulbs, which I’m thinking might make a tasty sushi filling. I saw a comment online suggesting the pickles are great on pad thai. Mmmmmm. Though right now my new favourite thing to do with radishes is roast them. I got the idea from this site, and I’m forever grateful. Roasted radishes don’t have the fire of fresh radishes. In fact they turn out sort of like very juicy little white potatoes. I make mine in the toaster oven, which has become my favourite tool on hot days — I toss a single serving of asparagus or squash or fiddleheads or (now) radishes in to roast, and serve the results on salad. Makes for a yummy lunch.
But getting back to the radishes, I do mine almost the same way that Bloxham suggests. I cut a half dozen or so in half, toss or spritz them lightly with oil (garlic or spicy or sesame oil all work well), add a touch of salt and pepper, spread them out on a parchment paper covered pan, and roast for 25 minutes at 375F. Then I toss them again with a drizzle of sesame oil, another of tamari soy sauce, a coarsely chopped clove of garlic, two chopped green onions, and a couple sprinklings of raw sesame seeds. They go back into the toaster oven for five minutes, et voila, an unusual roast veg to liven things up.
One last radish-related tidbit: At the permaculture workshop I did this spring, the presenter explained that radishes are a great fast crop for gardens. You can use them to fill in empty spaces while you’re waiting for slower-growing veggies to fill out. Just sow the gaps with radish seeds, and pull them out when the bigger vegetables start needing the space. The radishes will grow quickly and keep weeds down, and give you something tasty to play with just a few weeks later.
Sweet & sour cupcakes
It’s been a week for experimentation. The tempeh chowder didn’t work out too well, but the peppercorn stroganoff surprised me and did. Then I realized just how much rhubarb I had kicking around, and decided it was time to make a stab at…rhubarb cupcakes.
A quick google search (why reinvent the wheel?) turned up this recipe, and for a while I thought I was good to go — I could just veganize it. But after writing out a vegan version using the ingredients I had available, I had second thoughts — it just didn’t look like it would produce the nice, light cupcake I was hoping for. (Not enough liquid, and egads, there were almost 3 tsp of baking powder once I substituted for the self-raising flour!) So I went back to our trusty old VCTOTW, adjusting the seasonings for a plain jane vanilla cupcake. I added some lemon extract, 1 1/2 tsp of powdered ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon, and maybe 1/4 tsp ground cloves. Voila, fluffy, slightly gingery cupcakes. For the filling I followed that original recipe’s instructions, chopping up around 2 cups of rhubarb and adding just a touch of pomegranate juice (yum), an inch of minced fresh ginger, probably 1/3 cup sugar, and reducing the lot to a thick rhubarb-y goo. (The only catch was I made too little — enough to fill 9 cupcakes instead of all 12.)
To assemble I just scooped out the centres, iced the edges (plain buttercream), filled the middles with rhubarb, iced the ‘caps’ and popped them on top. So. Very. Yummy. The sweet of the cupcake and icing complement the sour of the rhubarb perfectly. I took most to class and left some for the housemate’s date, and today there are none left.
Tempeh tuna
This weekend my gf introduced me to the most lethal store ever — Whole Foods. Apparently I’m the last person on earth to hear about the chain, but better late than never. I was won over by the bakery section alone. See, I have this thing for really, really good bread, but hardly ever find it. There are lots of average breads, and lots of ‘good’ breads, but very rarely exceptional breads. Imagine my glee, then, when I found myself drooling over three or four different kinds on Saturday. Should I take home the pumpernickel? The herb bread? Something else?
Eventually I settled on a lovely round loaf of roasted garlic sourdough, and only pure willpower kept me from nibbling on it on the subway. Back at her place we cut into it…and *swoon* Wow. So good. Amazing rich flavour, a nice moist and springy texture, an extra tasty crust.
Half the loaf made it home with me, and today I decided to do something more than slather it with Earth Balance. It had a perfect texture for sandwich-making, so I coerced the freezer to yield a package of Sea Veggie Tempeh and made a tempeh tuna sandwich. Mmmmmm. Tempeh tuna has always been my answer to tuna sandwich cravings. The filling consists of tempeh (poached to remove any bitterness), crumbled and mixed with a bit of vegenaise, dark sesame oil and a bit of spicy oil, diced onion, a bit of Braggs, and a teaspoon or so of kelp powder. Since I recently rediscovered the dulse powder I picked up on Grand Manan island last fall, I threw a bit of that in too. Happily the tempeh’s nuttiness and seaweed’s…ummmm….oceaniness(?) paired nicely with the roasted garlic flavour of the bread. Yum.
Experiments
There’s a lot to be said for seeing the sun come up in the morning. Sadly most of the words involved are swear words, because I am not a morning person. But since sleep eluded me last night for some reason, I found myself puttering around in the kitchen at 6am this morning, and decided to make muffins.
Only one problem — I was out of some key ingredients, and specifically vegan sour cream or yogurt. Hmph. But I did have soy milk, so I decided to try the yogurt substitution I listed as untried in my Substitutions post. To replace 1/2 cup of the stuff I didn’t have, I mixed 3/4 T of cornstarch with a scant 1/2 cup of soy milk. Then I microwaved the mixture for 30 seconds, stirred it, and microwaved for another 15 seconds or so. Stirred in a splash of apple cider vinegar and let it cool. The results? Thickened soy buttermilk. It was a neat little chemistry experiment. I added the results to my muffin batter with some minor trepidation, but without cause — they worked out just fine. Hurray for an easy to make yogurt substitute! (And muffins too. )
Pie!
A rare alignment of the culinary planets brought me fruit, lots and lots of fruit. I had a huge bunch of rhubarb, two plump mangoes, and maybe 24 hours in which to use them up. Hmmmm, I thought, wonder what they’d taste like together?
The answer? Tasty. The sweetness of the mangoes nicely balances the tartness of the rhubarb. (Well, the mangoes plus a cup of sugar, but I digress.) I think the combination might actually work even better in a crisp, but won’t know until a similar culinary alignment brings me those ingredients again. And next time I’d make it tarter, because I like my rhubarb treats mouth-puckeringly tart…but my housemate declared this version perfect for the rest of the world. 
Rhubarb mango pie
- Pie dough for two crusts (I made a full batch of this, used half, and froze the rest for some future pie-making. There were enough trimmings to make an extra tart after making the pie.)
- 1/4 cup ground almonds
- 1 tablespoon unbleached flour
- 2 cups mango, peeled and chopped small
- 2 cups rhubarb, chopped small
- 1 cup sugar*
- 1/3 cup flour
- 1/2 T cinnamon**
To assemble:
- Preheat oven to 350F.
- Prepare your pie dough. When ready, roll out half and fill a pie pan, trimming the edges.
- Line the shell with a sheet of parchment paper, and pour in enough dry beans to cover the bottom. (These will keep your crust from shrinking as it bakes.)
- Put the pie pan on a cookie sheet in case of drips, and bake until golden brown (app. 15 minutes). Remove the parchment paper and beans. Sprinkle it with the mixture of ground almonds and flour. Bake another 5 minutes.
- Let cool.
- Mix the rhubarb and mango with the remaining flour, sugar, and cinnamon.
- Pour into the cooled pie crust.
- Roll out the other half of the pie dough until big enough to cover the pie. Press the edges and cut steam vents on top.
- Bake (again on a baking sheet for drips) for 45 minutes to 1 hour…basically until golden brown on top and bubbly in the middle. I started with 30 minutes and then checked every 5 to 10, but lost count. )
* Next time I would cut the sugar to 2/3 cup, because I like my pie tart rather than sweet, but my housemate thought it was fine as is (and proved it by snagging two pieces).
** Cinnamon was okay, but mango demands something a little more exotic. Next time I’m thinking allspice.
Stick to yer ribs
The awesome folks over at What the hell does a vegan eat anyway? got me lusting last week, when they posted pics of a rib recipe (veganized, bien sur) from Gourmet magazine. Mmmmmm. But lacking the key ingredients (black vinegar, seitan, and the ability to deep fry things), I figured I’d take a stab at a baked tempeh version.
OMG. I bet the original version is even better, but these are yummy. The sauce reduces to a rich, savoury-sweet glaze full of ginger and caramelized shallots and garlic. I served them with steamed dandelion greens and garlic-celeriac mashed potatoes the first night, and balsamic mushrooms, cornmeal potato cakes, and a spinach/kale mixture the next. My omnivore housemate liked them a lot — he felt they really did have a certain ‘ribness’ going for them.
Damn, I’ve gone and made myself hungry.
