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.
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.
In the dark of the night…
…there can still be food, and photos of food.
I just finished constructing my first ghetto light tent. It cost me a whole dollar to make, because the only thing I needed to buy was a sheet of white posterboard. It’s a cardboard box with most of the sides cut out, and papered over with rice paper (I’ve had a huge roll of the stuff kicking around for years). Parchment paper probably would have worked too. Objects go inside the box/tent, placed on a backdrop that curves from the top-back to bottom-front — curved so that you get no lines in the shot, and the background looks continuous. (Apparently this is called a ’sweep’.) That fancy backdrop is the aforementioned sheet of posterboard, cut to fit the interior width of the box, and held in place by two big magnets stolen from the fridge. For light I’m using a clamp-on full-spectrum light stolen from my painting easel. I can aim it through any of the three papered-over sides of the box to create different lighting. See how the shadows and highlights shift?…
I could even add more lights to cover different sides if I wanted to, but naaaaah. This is good enough for late-night shots of tomatoes, and just the thing for even yummier foods. Ta da!
Apple-sprout-pecan salad
with a maple vinaigrette
A spoonful of sprouts
It’s a wet, grey day outside, and rather cool and dark inside. It might seem bleak if it weren’t harvest day. Yep, today my wee little sprouts became food, and their crisp greenness offered a nice reminder that spring’s lying just beneath that melting snow out there.
The mung beans went into cilantro tabbouleh. Even though I’ve been nibbling those for days and throwing some in everything I’ve cooked, I still had a good two loose cups for the salad. Not bad considering I started with just two tablespoons of seed! They turned out a little bitter, apparently because I didn’t hide them away in the dark while they were sprouting. That’s okay, though — I still found them tasty, and the flavour went well with the salad, so it all worked out well.
The broccoli sprouts I used as a garnish. They’re light and fluffy compared to the mung sprouts, and taste like, well, little fiery broccoli bursts. Go figure. I didn’t touch them until today, and what you see in the photos is the entire ‘crop’ — a single spoonful! From an entire seed pack! (I’m not sure how much the packet contained, but definitely less than 2 T.) Must see if I can find a bulk source of seed so that I can sprout more, because otherwise I just won’t be able to grow enough.
Raw!
Today was a blast. I got up too early (any morning hour is too early on a weekend), grabbed a quick shower, and headed downtown to the Kitchener market to meet K. We found each other, and then spent a pleasant hour or so wandering around, restocking on fruits and veggies. Eventually we headed to her place to drop off our things and say hi to their adorable dog Sammy, and then it was off around the corner for our raw food workshop.
The workshop was two hours of numminess, with a side helping of good company. We were joined by around eight others, plus our instructor. She started us off with edamame hummous dip, which was quite fresh tasting. Then we each received a plate of several samples:
Clockwise from the bottom, you’re looking at bean-free refried beans, mango salsa, dairy-free sour cream, corn tortillas, and guacamole.
Confessions
I have a confession to make: I don’t really like kale very much.
*gasp*
I know, I know. Somehow this makes me feel like a Bad Vegan. If I was ‘real,’ if I was ’serious,’ then surely I’d like the stuff, right? All my hardcore vegan friends seem to love it; they eat it raw or just plain steamed. I’ve tried to like it that way, but no such luck. Kale and I just didn’t seem made for each other.
Tonight, I changed my mind. This recipe piqued my interest, because it uses arame — a type of seaweed that’s stringy, with a nutty taste. I luuuuuurv arame. There’s also garlic and ginger, and what’s not to like there? So tonight I wandered into the kitchen, eyed my kale somewhat dubiously, and had at it.
My version turned out both similar to and different from the original recipe, because I wanted a single portion with a lot more veggies. And hey, it also produced Surprise Soup! (It was a suprise because I didn’t plan to make any.) The results were tasty. Hear that? I dubbed kale tasty. Ha! Success! I are teh hardcore vegan now!
