KD Spicy Szechwan [sic] BOLD Snack Cup

On my way to see Avatar, I was given a gift. No, it wasn't the gorgeous-but-vapid movie – but some food pressed into my hand in a booth inside the Scotiabank (née Paramount) Theatre. To be more specific, it was Kraft Dinner Spicy Szechwan [sic] BOLD Snack Cup. Actually, I got another flavour as well – but I discarded that one after reading the ingredients and discovering various meat products.

The Snack Cup sat around a for a while, until one day I decided to try it. Now, I'm no stranger to KD. Gosh, in my precooking days I packed away a lot of it. One of my patented tricks was to use Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup instead of milk! (It's slightly painful to write that – though, of course, now I just eat lentils all day which is bad in a different way). Still, even to me the idea of putting a cup in a microwave for a couple of minutes and then eating the chemicals inside seemed a bit sketchy. The over-exuberance of the KD website didn't help as they rhapsodized: "any time is the right time to make Kraft Dinner the highlight of your day." I have my problems, but if Kraft Dinner is ever the highlight of my day, you have permission to shoot me.

So how it did actually taste? I would definitely disagree with their oddly capitalized "For snacking, it's Gotta Be KD BOLD Snack Cups" slogan, but then again I wouldn't go as far as this blog which termed it a "culinary horror" that was the food equivalent of Mao's Long March. My verdict is "meh". It wasn't awful, but it certainly wasn't good. Nor was it remotely spicy. It was unassumingly bland, with a hint of soy sauce. I've put "Chinese" as one of the tags in this post entirely ironically. Although, it is possible that this product is a piece of conceptual art wickedly satirizing the problematic nature of Chinese industrialization.

Green Jade Soup

Green Jade Soup is one of my oldest, favourite dishes. I once referred to it as "the ambrosia of Earth" in a short story I wrote for Grade 8 English. The rest of the story involved my entire class being massacred by superintelligent wasps – so had I written it nowadays they'd probably have locked me up for it and then you'd never get the chance to read this blog. Unlike some other childhood favourites from the Moosewood cookbook, this one has stood the test of time.

Green Jade Soup is, however, so awesome it is probably the exact opposite of being killed by a superintelligent wasp. Plus, it's incredibly easy to make:

Green Jade Soup


4 dried shiitake mushrooms
1 cup boiling water
6 cups vegetable stock
1 1/2 tbsp grated ginger root
1 1/2 cups thinly sliced carrots
1 1/2 cups thnly sliced leeks or onions
2 cups chopped chinese cabbage, bok choy, or kale
4 cups firmly packed, rinsed, chopped fresh spinach
1 cake tofu cut into 1/2 inch cubes (3/4 pound)
salt to taste
several drops dark sesame oil

Place the shiitake mushrooms in a heatproof bowl, cover with the boiling water, set aside for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the stock in a large soup pot. When it boils, add the ginger, carrot, onion and greens. Lower the heat and simmer for around 10 minutes. Drain the mushrooms, adding their liquid to the pot. Slice the mushrooms and add them to the soup along with the tofu and spinach. Cook for 5 minutes, add some salt and sesame oil.

Serves 4.

90 Minute Beans

The Paupered Chef's recipe for 90 minute no soak beans may change my life. Just as the name suggests, it's 90 minutes from taking the beans out of their containers to having them done. Now, despite my frugality, I still buy a lot of canned beans. That's because conventional bean-making techniques take a long time. If this proves to be a useful recipe though, I can switch permanently to dried beans and save literally tens of cents. The recipe calls for a "dutch oven", which caused much mirth among my friends when I tried to tell them in person about this recipe. Hopefully, my internet readers are more mature.

90 Minute, No Soak Beans

Dried Beans

Salt

Preheat the oven to 250°. Put the beans into a pot with a tightly fitting lid (I used foil to keep the top on, this makes a big difference. Top the beans with about 4 cm of water and sprinkle with salt.

Bring to a boil (about 15 minutes) and then put in the oven for 75 minutes.

Serve.

I've had mixed results with this recipe, sometimes the beans come out a little too tough. I think that can be traced back to having lids that don't fit well enough. When I can try this with proper pots I may be switching for good.

The chickpeas turned out quite nice tonight, I made a mashup recipe where I combined curried chickpeas and tofu with Mjudraa with some expired mixed greens I got from a friend today (expired for, like, only a day! And he was going to throw them out!)

Restaurant: Simon's Wok

Vegetarian restaurants scare me. It's the choice, you see. At a (quote/unquote) "normal" restaurant, I can pick the vegetarian option (or chose between a couple). At a place like Simon's Wok there are over a hundred different things I could eat. But the deer-in-a-headlight feeling is well worth the deliciousness. It's also worth the trek, it's located east of the DVP.



Despite the temptation of ordering randomly off the menu, we decided to pick using our human logic. Simon's Wok has lots of fake meat items, so we made sure to get some of those. We started with some mock duck appetizers, which are quite nice. Next up were the Szechuan Fake Shrimp (seen at bottom right on the picture below). I don't remember what shrimp taste like, but apperently they were a pretty good proxy. Whatever their flavour-replication accuracy was, they were delicious. We had got one of their specials before on a previous visit, so we ordered the broccoli and king mushroom again (also excellent). My parents enjoy eggplants (I don't) so we got an eggplant dish (I still enjoyed the peppers, mushrooms and tree fungus in it). We finished off with a fried noodle and veggie dish, which was quite nice.



Remember to bring cash, Simon's Wok doesn't take anything else.

Simon's Wok Vegetarian Kitchen
797 Gerrard St. East, Toronto

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess: My DR vacation

Gentle Readers, I have wronged you by being away too long. In my defense – I had vacation, then a short (but intense) term and then another vacation. I will try to stick to my "Sunday Frugal Sunday" schedule from now on.

Check the space below this entry for some posts I was working on but haven't published yet. In the meantime, here's a report from my vacation to the Dominican Republic.



I spent a week at an all-inclusive resort: $1000 (CDN) got you a roundtrip flight, shelter and the food you can eat and alcohol you can drink. I had a blast, though the days settled into a routine: wake up at noon, go to the beach for a bit, have lunch, go the pool (maybe play some volleyball or water polo), have supper, attend a charmingly amateur show the resort staff put on, hit up the Discoteca and then to a late night beach party or the 24 hour bar. While there are some interesting stories from some of these activities, as this is a food blog I'll describe the food.

The food was a bit of a change of pace for me: while there were veggie options there was certainly nothing frugal about the resort. One of the good things about the massive availability of alcohol was that it inhibited thinking through the political implications of so much waste in a country so poor (to say nothing of an island with such a recent catastrophe). I donated to Haiti again before I left. An indulgence, Martin Luther would sneer.

There were fairly massive quantities of food, I easily tripled my caloric intact for the week. Normally I have a sandwich for lunch and a plate of food for dinner. Here, I'd have a plate of food for lunch and probably two plates of food from the buffet for dinner. The ingredients were also different, I ate a lot of cheese. Generally, my meals followed the same pattern:



I'd have a slice of pizza, some fries, rice with some veggies and pasta with grilled vegetables over it (sometimes the pasta would have a cheese sauce). As you can see, there's nothing really Dominican about the food offerings. The food was, as one of my hipster friends would sniff, "unoffensive". It was good though, and sometimes something would genuinely surprise me. The guacamole was excellent, though I thought it was only served a few select occasions. Turns out it was there but I had been missing it. That was disappointing. Not as disappointing though as when I discovered – on the last night! – there was a vegetarian curried bean dish every night that, again, I had just overlooked. I also had some spiced potatoes that were amazing.

It's not the way I'd like to live for my entire life and it's certainly not the way I'd always like to eat. But it was fun for a week.