Fajita Night!

Last week I went to a Fajita night with some friends. Individually, we each only brought a few components that together combined to so much more.

By your powers combined...

...I am Captain Planet!


I was in charge of bringing sautéed onions and some veggie filings so I made Beer-Glazed Black Beans

Beer-Glazed Black Beans


Originally, I had the recipe embedded here but it didn't work so well. So, I'll just link directly to it. I made these very faithfully but I pureed half the beans and used slightly less oil and slightly more beer. The beer, incidentially, was Waterloo Dark. That's actually the only beer I've made using this recipe so I don't know what it would taste like with, say, an India Pale Ale.

My friend K-Wall's task for the night was making guacamole and he shares his recipe here:

Wanna talk the talk, and Guac the Guac?

2 ripe avocados

1 hot house tomato

1 red (or any color) pepper (preferably not green)

Franks Red Hot Sauce Lime (this is diff. from the original)

1 lemon

Directions:
Fork the avocados into a chunky mush. Add desired amount of chopped tomato and pepper, I like to put in enough for noticeable color without overtaking the avocado. Dab in hot sauce until desired hotness is achieved. Add about 1/3 squeezed lemon. I don't give exact amounts for any of the ingredients, but make sure to use enough lemon and hot sauce, these are what really make this a tasty guacamole. This concoction will need to be eaten immediately upon preparing as the guacamole will brown fairly quickly. It makes a tasty appetizer for 2-4. Serve with bagel chips or whole wheat tortilla chips, or whatever chip snack you fancy. [Putting the avacodo pits in after you made it and removing right before you serve might help avoid the browning --ed]

Blogging Bittman's Beguiling Bean Burger

On an ideological level I have some issues with the concept of the veggie burger. It seems to beg the question that vegetarian food is a second-rate imitatation of the "real" food. Commercial veggie burgers are too often a grim caricature of a real burger or a Frankenstein's Monster of various hippie nuts and seeds (credit where credit's due, Webers has excellent veggie burgers). Still, there's something to be said for the burger paradigm and luckily, Mark Bittman has an excellent section of his book on how to make good veggie burgers. Here's my version:

Black Bean Burger on Bagel

2 cups black beans

1 medium onion, quartered

1/4 cup pearl barley, cooked in 3/4 cups water until the water is absorbed

3 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon chili powder

Salt and pepper

1 egg

Jot of soy sauce
Combine all ingredients in a food processor and pulse until chunky. As mentioned before, I do not have a food processor– so I used a blender. This was not as successful as I could have hoped and I had to add a little water to get it to work. As a result the mixture was a little wetter then I would've hoped (but not too much so).

Let rest for a few minutes and shape into patties with wet hands. Put oil in a skillet and turn to medium. Wait a minute, then add the patties. Cook until one side is browned, about 5 minutes. Then turn over and cook until firm and browned.

I served it with lettuce from my garden, sour cream whose origin I will mention in an upcoming post and montreal bagels a friend very kindly gave me.

Serves 4

Non-chilly chili

Chili is probably a better dish for the winter. But even if the weather outside is hot, I love making a big pot of chili. Though you'd think I might get tired of eating chili for an entire week, I don't. Thawed frozen tofu crumbles to have a ground meat like texture, its a great addition to any chili:

Chili con tofu

Oil

1 Onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 Chili pepper

1/2 cup water

1 tablespoon cumin

2 tablespoon assorted chili powders

1 cup salsa

2 carrots, chopped

3 cans assorted assorted beans, drained and rinsed

1 can whole tomatoes with juice (28-ounce)

1/2 block frozen firm tofu, frozen for a few hours, thawed (takes about a day), water pressed out, crumbled

1 can of corn

Put in a little oil and sautee the onions, garlic and chili pepper for about 30 seconds to a minute. Pour in the water and cook on high heat for about 4 1/2 minutes - 4 (or don't use any oil and just combine water, onions, garlic and chili pepper for 5 minutes).

Stir in the salsa, carrots and spices, lower the heat, cover and simmer for about 5 minutes

Dump in all other ingredients and simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring ocasionally. Add tabasco sauce at the end if you want.

Serves 6

I generally like to have some black beans and some chickpeas in the chili. I didn't have either bean in this particular chili as the Great Canadian Superstore was having a sale of a can of beans for 50¢s, and all the black beans and chickpeas were gone. There's usally a lot of variance in what I put in this recipe, the corn happens to be in here because one of my friends gifted me a can of it.

Plenty of Polenta

Polenta is a hoi polloi food; the two terms are very similar. Hoi Polloi meant "the people" but somehow shifted its meaning to "the chic-chic elites." So too has polenta shifted from hearty peasant food to a small serving at the centre of a white oval plate in an overpriced restaurant. Polenta, though, is simplicity itself to make and has a hearty corn-flavour. I hadn't made my own polenta before so I erred on the side of less spices, not wanting to overwhelm the polenta flavour:

Polenta with Mushrooms

1/3 cup cornmeal

1 cup water

pinch salt

100 gm mushrooms, chopped

1 onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

7 dried mushrooms

1/2 cup boiling water
Put the dried mushrooms in the boiling water and let sit for 10 minutes. I used the leftover mushroom water as part of the water for the cornmeal, but remember to save a teaspoon of the water. Cook the onions on high, occasionally adding a small bit of water to prevent sticking. Boil the cup of water and then whisk in the cornmeal in a slow steady stream. Turn the heat down and simmer for 10 minutes stiring occasionally. Meanwhile add the mushrooms and the reserved mushroom water. After a few minutes add the garlic. When the cornmeal is done serve the mushroom mix on top of it.

Serves 1.

Some polenta will stick to the pot, add a few drops of detergent and some cold water and let sit for an hour before you clean it.

Infusion Pasta

Earlier this year I had an epiphany about pasta based on two New York Times articles. The more recent one was about how we could use less water while cooking pasta (thus helping out the ol' environment). The second (via The Paupered Chef) was a recipe for risotto style pasta. Now, risotto is one of those things that can seem intimidating, thus "risotto style pasta" might seem like more effort than its worth. My epiphany, though, was to combine the two ideas in these two articles. What about pasta cooked in a small amount of stock (there's no need to ladle it in a bit at a time a la risotto)? It won't be a good idea for all kinds of pasta dishes – but its definitely more than appropriate for some. I mean it seems crazy to have the pasta release their starches into the water, then dump out that water and add another ingrident to make it creamy. Why cut out the middle man? This absorption-style pasta can be as simple or as complicated as you want it. Stiring in some tomato sauce at the end always works, here I added a mushroom and onion mix.

Mushroom Absorption-Style Pasta

Pasta

1 cup Macaroni

1.75 cups stock

2 cloves garlic, minced
Topping

Oil and butter

1 onion, diced

100gm mushrooms, chopped

Spices (oregano, chili flakes, cumin)

1 teaspoon soy sauce
Sautée the garlic and pasta in a little oil on high and then add the stock. Keep cooking for your standard pasta cooking time. Meanwhile, sautée the onions in a little oil for a couple of minutes. Add the mushrooms with a little butter. Add the soy sauce and the spices, continue to cook until the pasta is ready. Dump the onion and mushroom mixture into the pasta pot, stir and serve.

Serves 1 hungry person, or not as the main dish for 2.

I wasn't blown away by this particular version, but the absorption pasta technique is great at making really creamy pasta. The 1.75:1 stock:pasta ratio seems pretty scaleable.

CSI: My Garden 2: Electric Boogaloo

I sat outside today reading Neal Stephanson's Anathem (cause I'm cool, and that's what cool people do on their saturdays!) The book is a sprawling science/philosophical fiction tour de force set on an alien world with seven thousand years of history and multiple languages. Its fun though it takes a while to get used to sentences like: “Fraa Spelikon told me to go to the Telescope of Saunts Mithra and Mylax and retrieve a photomnemonic tablet that Fraa Orolo had placed there hours before the starhenge was closed by the Warden Regulant.” It was a good thing I decided to do this today because my landlords had gotten someone to go through their and my gardens and clear out the weeds (my landlords live next to me, which actually works out well because they're very nice folk).

I had grown attached to many of the weeds and engaged in hurried negotiations to save some of them: I salvaged the wild carrot and another plant whose name I can't quite recall but it tastes a bit like arugula. I stayed on the porch with that awkward feeling when someone else is doing work around you. Occasionally, I would have to interject to save some of my plants – though I wasn't in time for one of my tomato plants. Luckily though, he was an intact-root puller (a technique that I had not mastered when I weeded the garden) so it could be replanted.

The bottom line is that I'm very glad I decided to read instead of going on a bike ride and returing to see my garden annihilated.

Mjudraa

A friend once asked me what I was eating and I replied "Mainly lentils and rice." "Oh," said she, "In Pakistan that's considered poor people's food." Needless to say, my frugal heart grew three sizes that day. Here is an excellent savoury recipe combining those two great tastes that taste great together: A Lebanese dish called Mjudraa. One of my professors very kindly gave me this old family recipe. It's fairly easy to make, the only downside is cutting up all those onions. I'd imagine that a food processor would be very handy here, I'll have to try that out when I am in a place where such a device resides. Usually when I'm cooking for myself I only use half this recipe, which still provides for plenty of leftovers.

Mjudraa

2 cups of brown lentils (washed and drained)

8 cups of water

1 teaspoon of sea salt

1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

1 cup white rice (basmati recommended)

1/6 - 1/3 cup of oil (olive recommended)

6 large onions, chopped

Place the lentils in a heavy-based saucepan and add the water. Season with salt and cayenne pepper and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer gently for 25-30 minutes. Stir in the rice and simmer for 20 more minutes, adding extra water if necessary. Stir to make sure that it doesn't burn.

After adding the rice to the lentils, saute the onions in the olive oil in a heavy skillet until they are a golden brown and are slightly gooey. I usually use less oil, 1/6 of a cup is 2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons. Add to the lentils and rice, stir and then remove from the heat.

My professor suggests garnishing with the green onions, and serve with pita bread, black lives, plain yoghurt, a squeeze of lemon over each serving, and a fresh lettuce, feta and tomato salad.

Serves 5

Rice

My rice cooker was cruelly slain and I never got around to replacing it. The one thing I disliked about it, and what I disliked about a lot of stove-top rice cooking, is the cust of rice remains left on the bottom (ugly example of this hidden below). I also dislike the inexactness of conventional stove cooking. This recipe, which I've adapted (i.e. really dumbed down) from Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything Vegetarian is a nice solution to both these problems and leaves rice that doesn't stick to the bottom. The original recipe involves sauteeing the rice in oil and adding all matter of spices and such. Its a fun recipe, but not necessarily needed when you just need plain rice. This recipe is for white rice, though you can use brown rice if you parboil them first.

Rice

x cups white rice

2x cups water
Turn the oven on to 350°. Put the pot on high heat and throw in the rice. Measure the water and add it to the pot (make sure it doesn't boil over, like it did above). Wait until it boils and then throw in the oven for 10 minutes. Remove and let sit for 10 minutes. Serve.

(show)

(hide)

Zheng bai dou fu

Fuschia Dunlop (aka Fu Xia Dunlop) is an accomplished travel writer, chef and MI6 agent. She travelled around China collecting recipes and military secrets from ordinary people (okay, the last part is a joke. Ms. Dunlop is not an MI6 agent, PRC counterintelligence operatives). Today's meal is my version of one of these recipes from her book on Hunanese cooking, The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. It came from her trip to the Kaifu Temple in Changsha – which is run by elderly nuns. Chinese Buddhist monastic food shuns meat and the Five Acrid and Strong Smelling Vegetables (so no, inter alia, onions and garlic). While the monks and nuns developed elaborate fake-meat for pilgrims and patrons, the following recipe is more reminiscent of ordinary Chinese vegetarian fare:

Steamed White Bean Curd with Black Beans and Chiles

Block of tofu

2 tbsp black fermented beans, rinsed

3 chiles

1 tbsp oil

1 tbsp soy sauce
Slice the tofu and pile into foil along with rinsed black fermented beans, sliced chiles, vegetable oil and soy sauce. Steam over medium heat for 20-25 minutes. Stir well and serve over rice.

Serves 2.

The green chili came from my garden and the red ones (pickled) came from my friend Leo, who gifted them to me before he travelled o'erseas. The fermented black beans also came from him. They add a complex and pungent flavour to food, unfortunately they make your kitchen smell somewhat like feet. The original recipe calls for the use of a heatproof bowl– as I'm not sure which (if any) of my bowls are heatproof I constructed my own out of foil. Your results may vary.

Just sayin'

June 11th:


June 16th

Mulligan Soup

One of my staple invented dishes is something I like to call Mulligan Soup. Its a ever changing mix of vegetables, beans and a starch. Usually that starch is barley, but I had not-quite-enough pasta for a meal so I used that instead. In fact, I think the only thing the same about the recipe below and the first time I made Mulligan Soup is the garlic. And, probably, cumin. The carrot and the white beans give it a nice orange look, when I made it with red kidney beans it was an angry purple. I overfilled the bowl with soup so had to sip it a bit befor I could take the picture.

Mulligan Soup

Oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

A cup of pasta or 1/2 cup of barley

3 cups Stock/Water

18 ounce can of beans

A vegetable, originally brocolli, but a carrot in this case: chopped

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 teaspoon chipotle chili powder

1 teaspoon cumin

Sauté the garlic and pasta in some oil under high heat. Add 2 1/2 cups of the stock and turn the heat down a bit. As the soup simmers, put the beans, the remaining stock and some of the vegetables in a blender. Add the pureed mix to the soup along with the remaining vegetables. Cook for about 15 minutes, under the pasta or barley is tender.

Serves 2.

Restaurant: Nazareth

Nazareth is a small restaurant, yet there are those who love it. I am one of them. Quite simply, Nazareth is everything I love in a restaurant: non-fancy decor, inexpensive prices and excellent food. From the outside Nazareth looks like a small, sketchy bar, instead of Toronto's best Ethiopian restaurant.

Instead it is small and cramped, there is a line (as always). The menu is short, the chef(s?) clearly specialize in a few things done well. My friend Faisal and I order the vegetarian option. It costs $8 tax included. That is to say, $8 for two people! It arrives soon after we order:

The meal arrives on a giant plate– a salad and five different selections on a bed of injera, a form of bread that is seemingly the offspring of a pita and a sponge. We eat by dipping torn pieces of the sponge-bread them into one or more of the concoctions. The main items, many probably lentil-based, are savoury and delicious. The minimalist salad complaints them perfectly with its tangy lemon dressing. Conversation is sparse as the meal is quickly demolished. The bill is $4 each, before tip.

Any adjectives I could summon to describe the food would be inadequate. A friend of mine, who has lived in East Africa, says it is the best Ethiopian food she has ever had. Certainly, it probably has the highest taste/price ratio in Toronto.

Nazareth Restaurant
969 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario

CSI: My Garden

I have started a small garden this summer. There's some dirt in front of my house where my landlords have already planted some ferns and the like and I decided to add some vegetation. Nothing fancy, a few chili plants, some lettuce, flowers from some miscellaneous seeds the Cystic Fibrosis people sent me and four tomato plants.

Four tomato plants... until yesterday. When I woke up that grey June morn I discovered that I now had two tomato plants because half of them were... stolen!

I thought long and hard whether to show this shocking crime scene photograph on a public blog which might, after all, be accessed by orphans or sensitive individuals. Ultimately though, I decided that I needed to share pictures of the devastation that was once one of my tomato plants.

I honestly don't know who would steal a tomato plant. A raccoon? A spaghetti enthusiast? An alien woefully misinformed about the dominant species on our planet? Hopefully it wasn't a radical one tomatoist who interprets the project's goals overly literally.

PS– Yes, I'm aware that I'm going to have to put some sticks down soon and tie the tomatoes to them.

Uighur, please

The island-state of Palau did the right thing and took in some Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo. The Uighurs were a weird state of legal limbo: innocent of terrorism, facing possible execution if they returned to China and not wanted in any other countries. Personally, I thought that Canada should have taken them in. I guess Harper didn't want to antagonize the PRC, he probably has to balance our national interests with concerns about morality. Still, the Uighurs are no threat to anyone and it would've been the moral thing to do.

All of this is, I guess, an overly lengthly preamble to the time my friends and I went on a voyage to eat some Uighur food. We treked out to the far northern reaches of Toronto (venturing through many buses and subways) to head to the (not vegetarian-friendly sounding) Chinese Beef Lamb House.

As it turns out, we were mistaken. The owners were not Uighurs – rather Han Chinese converts. No matter what their ethnicity, the food was excellent. My friend wrote a review of it for Mondo Magazine (I'm the "vegetarian friend"). I had the delicious "tofu with chili pepper, a dish of thin tofu skins covered luxuriously with a garlicky sauce and fresh green chilies sliced lengthwise" (I have a fairly ugly picture of it on my cell phone that I guess I'm not going to upload).

There were $8 pitchers of watery beer, which went very well with the food. It's not that it tasted particularly good or that we got drunk off it. The water-beer was perfect for cooling off your mouth after eating something spicy. Water would've just circulated the hot around my mouth and milk wouldn't have gone with the meal. I don't know if I would really recommend a trip that far for vegetarians, but if your meat-eating friends want to go on an expedition don't be turned off by the "Beef Lamb" part in the title.

Chinese Beef Lamb House
3591 Sheppard Ave. E., Toronto, Ontario

Stocking up on stock

"The stockpot," warned Mark Bittman, "is not a garbage can." In a sense, I don't follow this dictum. After all, I am making my stock out of things that would otherwise go in the garbage (or compost). I save onion peels, garlic skins, carrot ends and the like, throw them in a jar in freezer and then turn that into stock. The bottom line is that stock is a great way of adding flavour to your food. This is true no matter where you lie on the continuum between what I do and making your stock from oven-roasted fresh produce from the farmer's market.

Technicially, I guess, what I am making is broth– not stock (because there's no meat). But "Brothing up on broth" doesn't have the same ring for a title. Whatever you call it, it involves simmering vegetables in water and straining the resulting liquid out afterwards.

Vegetable Stock
I start by letting the vegetables in the jar thaw out [You felt the need to clarify that? --ed]. Then, I heat up some oil in a pot and sauté the vegetables in it.


This particular one had carrot, garlic and onion fragments, a green pepper core and edamame pods. I still don't quite have a handle on what not to put in stock. Some say nothing from the broccoli family, others say that family is good but nothing from the pepper family. I guess its a Capulet/Montague situation.
After a few minutes I add water in a 2:1 ratio, put in some black pepper and maybe a dash of soy sauce. Then turn the heat down a let it simmar for about half an hour. I strain it through my pasta strainer, but I should really get a seperate strainer as there's the hassle of cleaning out veggie remnants from it.

I'm left with food-augmenting liquid and a good-smelling kitchen.

"Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage"

The connection between Jacobs and lentils goes all the way back to the first Jacob (Gen. 25:27-34). Though I've never used lentils to buy the birthright of anyone, I do really love them. Some people think I eat only lentils, which is sometimes not entirely an exaggeration. Naturally, there will be oodles (probably not the right plural noun) of lentil recipes on here. Tonight's dinner was a fairly informal version of dahl. Normally, when I'm making these I do it with a curry theme but I found this varient to be quite good as well:

Dahl With Vegetarian Oyster Sauce

1/4 cup red lentils

1 cup water or stock

1/4 cup rice

oil

1 carrot, chopped

1 onion, diced

1 chili pepper, minced

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

[1 teaspoon?] soy sauce

[1 tablespoon?] vegetarian oyster sauce

Combine the lentils and the stock in a pot on medium-high. Wait till it boils and then turn to medium-low cook for about 15-20. Prepare the rice however you prepare rice (I suppose you could cook it with the lentils, but I usually like to make surplus rice for leftovers).

Sautee the onions on medium-high in the oil for five minutes. Add the carrots, garlic, chilli and carrots. Stir throughout. With a few minutes to go add the soy sauce and the oyster sauce. I've never actually calculated how much I put in, just eyeball it.

Combine the lentils and the vegetables. Serve either on top of the rice or mix the rice in.

Serves 1.

Introduction

My roommate gone for the summer, I decided to start a food blog. I suppose I could've learned how to yoodle or gotten a fish (which I'd have named Pushpanathan) but I decided to do this instead. I do love to cook, though I guess it doesn't naturally follow that I should thus share recipes and my thoughts on vegetarian cooking with the entire internet. The project might seem narcissistic but... well I guess it is narcissistic. Still, it's not any more than most other kinds of blogging, so I guess I'll try it for now.

I didn't cook much for most of my life. My parents cooked for me throughout high school and there was a (not particularly great and overpriced) meal plan in first year university. Everything changed in second year when I went to live at Sci '44 Co-op a co-operative housing organization. Well not everything, there was still a meal plan. The difference was, we needed to work for it. Every week I'd enter our big stainless steel communal kitchen and cook for a hundred people (hundred fifty if everyone showed up). I'm still very grateful for my co-cooks and the head cook (A wonderful woman named Wanda) for really teaching me how to cook and tasting the meat for me to see if it was ready. I'm definitely still an amateur though.

I consider myself fairly frugal when it comes to buying food, but I definitely don't want to get into a frugaler-than-thou contest. If being frugal is part of your identity, I'll concede you're more frugal than me (for example, I just switched away from Lakeport Beer. Not worth the savings). Still I have some fun stories about frugality that I'll share over the course of the blog, some of which maybe only I find funny. One thing about not spending a lot of money on food is that it can still taste great! I remember reading a blog about a person who ate for a dollar a day for a month. It was really cool, but a lot of the stuff sounded really bland. He ended up having some money left over, it probably would've been good to invest in some spices other than relying simply on salt. It certainly did for me when I've spent a similar amount in some months (which isn't, of course, a fair comparison because I already have spices).

When it comes to cooking, aside from the internet I have three main cookbooks. Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything Vegetarian is fantastic. It's a thousand pages of information about how to set up a kitchen, buy produce and, of course, hundreds of recipes. My other two are both from the earnestly vegetarian Moosewood Collective: Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day and Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals. They're less comprehensive but there are some really great recipes in there. And although I don't own it, Fuschia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province is also amazing. Though far less vegetarian (maybe cause, uh, it's not a vegetarian cookbook) it also does double duty as a travel memoir.

So that's where I'm coming from. Basically the plan is to talk about recipes, cooking and vegetarianism and hopefully not be too boring in the process.