Frugal Veggie

Bonus Birthday Bean Blog Bonanza

2010-11-01T22:09:00.005-04:00

As you have probably ascertained, this blog has fallen into a long sleep. More like a coma actually. There are several reasons for this, most of them boring and job-related, but the fact remains that this blog has basically shuffled off this mortal coil. However, it’s a reader and friend’s birthday today so I decided to post as a birthday present (a not particularly great present, granted).

So here’s a two-in-one blog post about the garden and a recipe. And what better way to harken back to days of yore than some absorption pasta with an ugly brown mess of beans on top of it?

Pasta with Fava Beans

1 cup pasta

2 cups water

shot of hot sauce

oil

1 cup fava beans

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon fermented black bean sauce

1 chili pepper, diced.

glass of nice Chianti (optional)

Cook the pasta using the absorption style method and add some hot sauce. Put the oil in a skillet on medium heat and add the beans, soy sauce, fermented black bean sauce. Mash the beans together with the flat end of a spatula. Cook for a few minutes and then add the diced chili. When the pasta has absorbed almost all the water, add the bean mixture and stir until it has a healthy consistency.

Serves 1.

The chili plant has grown even more robustly than it had in the last entry, even as my other plants have withered and died (the mother-in-law’s tongues are doing alright, natch).

Until very recently though, no chilies were produced. Then I did some research and found out that in order to produce chilies, chili plants need to pollinated by insects. To reproduce this effect (no pun intended) – I used a q-tip to move pollen from one flower to another. It knocked several of them off, but within a week I had several chilies – one of which has turned a beautiful orange.

And now, gentle reader(s?), I return the blog to its slumber.

My Garden

2010-07-18T19:19:00.005-04:00

The observant reader may have noticed that the last three entries on this blog contained copious amounts of basil. Have I won some form of basil lottery that provided me with such bounty? In a way, yes. I have recreated my garden, this time in rooftop form.

This displays half of the garden: my chives, chili plants and parsley. The chili plants are, so far, the most robust. Yet, they have not produced even the smallest chili. I was ready to give up on them, until a few days ago when I spied a flower opening up. I've only used the chives and parsley as garnish. And I only use garnish when entertaining, which I have only done once so far in my new apartment. Still, even that means that they are pulling their weight more than the chilies so far, though hopefully that will change.

As mentioned, the basil is separately potted. One of the basil plants has done quite well; the other species shriveled and died. I blame society. Still, the basil has been the workhorse of the plants, in that it provides actual value add for stuff I'm cooking.

The garden is rounded out by some houseplants which have the rather evocative name of Mother-in-Law's Tongue or Snake Plant. They stand tall and apparently remove formaldehyde from the air. We'll see how they all work together to build a better tomorrow.

Salsa Cruda Pasta

2010-07-11T14:57:00.004-04:00

Perhaps my favourite line from Mark Bittman's book was from his recipe for linguine with raw tomato sauce (and basil). You could use good-quality canned tomatoes, he said, "it won't be the same, but it won't be bad (do not, however, use dried basil, here or anywhere else). And since I have some basil plants and my parents gave me a thing of cherry tomatoes from the market, I knew I should use his recipe as a base for a meal.

Pasta With Raw Tomatoes

1/2 cup chopped tomatoes

1/2 tbsp olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

2 tbsp basil leaves, tightly packed

salt

pepper

1 cup pasta

2.25 cups water
Cook the pasta – I used my absorption style method. Meanwhile, combine the tomatoes, basil, oil, salt and pepper and mash with a fork. With a few minutes to go on the pasta toss in the garlic. When the pasta is done, top with the sauce and serve.

Serves 1.

I should probably give a note on the water/pasta ratio. Because I was using fusilli instead of a more tightly packed together pasta my cup overfloweth, as they say. As is I wont, I measure out pasta by filling a plate with the dried stuff. The ratio does not scale up, 2 cups of pasta for 4.5 cups of water would leave excess water (though again, that's not necessarily a problem).

Try It Again: Tofu with Basil and Chilies

2010-06-30T18:37:00.004-04:00

Today, I launch a new feature "Try It Again". This involves me giving something that didn't quite work a second chance. On sunday, I vowed to vary up the Tofu with Basil and Chilies recipe and here is the exciting conclusion.

Tofu with Basil and Chilies, Again

Oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

4-6 [!] chili peppers, finely chopped

Salt

100 gm firm tofu, cubed

1/2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp lemon

2 tbsp water

1 tsp sugar

pepper - 2 pinches

Large handful of basil leaves

Heat a wok or pan on high and then add the oil. Before the oil is smoking, add the chilies, garlic and salt. Stir-fry for about 15 seconds and then add the tofu. Mix the soy sauce, sugar, pepper, lemon and water together well, and add to the pan after the tofu has been stir-fried for a minute. After another minute, tear the basil leaves with your hands and add.

Serves 1

This was better but, honestly, still isn't worth it. Conventional basil really isn't doing any value-added here. If you're going to make this I'd suggest upping the soy sauce to 2 tsp or 1 tbsp and reducing the lemon down to 1 tbsp. There are plenty of better things to do with tofu and chiles though. While this is a bit of a downer start to the TIA series, I'm glad I gave it another go. From now on though, my basil is just going to go into pizza and pastas. Due to Canada Day plans, there will be no post next Sunday so this one subbing in for that.

Tofu with Basil and Chilies

2010-06-27T17:51:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about recreating that type of Cambodian tofu for a while. Now that I own some basil plants, I decided to try it out using this Thai tofu recipe as a base.

Tofu with Basil and Chilies

Oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

4-6 [!] chili peppers, finely chopped

Salt

100 gm firm tofu, cubed

2 tbsp soy sauce

1/4 cup stock or water

1 tsp sugar

pepper - 2 pinches

Large handful of basil leaves

Heat a wok or pan on high and then add the oil. Before the oil is smoking, add the chilies, garlic and salt. Stir-fry for about 15 seconds and then add the tofu. After a minute, add the soy sauce, sugar, pepper and water. After another minute, tear the basil leaves with your hands and add.

Serves 1

This recipe didn't work out that great for me. First, no kidding on the "large" part of the "large handful of basil". It wilts. A lot. Second, there was too much soy sauce for me and it overwhelmed the other flavours. Third, sweet basil is not really a substitute for thai basil. Fourth, the chili peppers I bought could have been hotter (the outsides almost tasted like conventional red peppers, though the innards and seeds still packed a punch). Fifth, the sugar didn't really mix as well as it could've, so there were some bites that were sweet and others not affected.

I could stop here, but I'm not going to.

That's because, I'm going to redo this dish and post how it goes! I know, I know: the suspense is killing me too.

Restaurant: Zen Gardens

2010-06-20T12:47:00.003-04:00

I used to be a card-carrying vegetarian. The card was from the University of Western Ontario's Purple Veggie club. The card was, appropriately enough, purple and offered a 15% discount at, inter alia, Zen Gardens. Much like Simon's Wok the focus is on fake meat dishes. Simon's Wok has, I think, better food but Zen Gardens is a far more elegant restaurant.

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of restaurant elegance but I needed to find a place for a big family dinner in London and I thought it would fit the bill. The restaurant is not licensed, but has a wide variety of teas. The tea was excellent and was stored on top of candles to keep it hot. We started with an order of dumplings and then ordered for the table.

We had two different fried rices: one curried and with avocado. The Curried Fried Rice had a solid curry flavour, very different than everything else on the menu. While it was somewhat unusual, I liked the Avocado Fried Rice though several of my aunts loved it. Kung Po Soy Chicken were chewy and tasty and came with a nice medley of vegetables. The Schezuan Style Spicy Tofu were good, but not as spicy as the title might imply. There were also other dishes not displayed in the photo above. The Lo Han Chai Chow Mien had the right mix between crunchy and savoury and I am informed that the Spicy Eggplant was good (don't care for that vegetable myself). Finally, there was the Veggie Fish with Black Bean Sauce which was beautiful enough for its own picture:

I can't really remember what fish tastes like, but the meat eaters and the pescatarians at the table said this tasted like fish. It seemed so realistic I half expected to find fake bones. I liked it, but not as much as some of the other food.

I realize it's been a while since I've posted an actual recipe; hopefully now that I'm settled in and the traveling has paused I'll return the blog to its roots.

Zen Gardens Vegetarian Restaurant
344 Dundas St., London

It's still fresh

2010-06-13T18:19:00.005-04:00

I've talked before about how vegetarian restaurants scare me (because of all the choice). Another problem that vegetarian restaurants can have is the "granola" factor (think "hemp-braised fair-trade tofu served with a side of self-righteousness). Fresh suffers from both of these issues: all items on the menu have multiple variants and they certainly bring the granolaness (you can order a power shake of organic acai & guarana mango). If you order the right stuff though, I've found you can have a good meal. There are three freshes (freshi?), we went to the one near Queen Street.

I decided that I would solve both problems with one stroke, by pre-committing to ordering the least granola item on the menu. Therefore, a quick glance showed that I should get the bbq burger with onion rings (the burger is served on a multigrain bun and the onion rings are quinoa-battered. I said "least" not "without")

The meal was quite tasty. I'm not a cole slaw fan, so I gave that away to those who were. The onion rings (two, the minimum possible number to qualify as onion rings, plural) were very nice, the quinoa lent an extra crunch. I honestly couldn't tell you what the burger tasted like, it was more of a canvas for which the vegetables, garlic mayo and bbq sauce were painted on. Although it seems like there might have been too much stuff, everything in the burger fit between the two buns. So many burgers do not pass this simple test. All in all, it was a good meal and I was quite content as I ate my meal and sipped my beer (organic, natch).
fresh on crawford
894 Queen Street West, Toronto

Happy Birthday, The Frugal Veggie

2010-06-09T15:39:00.006-04:00

My little blog turns one year old today. In retrospect, I probably should have picked a more distinct googleable name. Or gone with my original choice of "Pushpanathan". I was thinking I could've named it "The Lentilist" but that might be a little too typecasting.

Still, over its short life there's been 85 posts which have been visited 1,252 times (with 2,477 pageviews) from 21 different countries. The blog hasn't been as productive lately as it was in its early halcyon days. By which I mean I haven't been as productive. Still, I've keep to the Sunday Frugal Sunday schedule since getting back from the Dominican (even if an entire month was about cabbage and another entire month was basically reviews of California restaurants most people will never get to go to).

So happy birthday! Who knows what adventures the blog will have between now and when it becomes unprofitable?

Cheese Sandwich

2010-06-06T22:58:00.004-04:00

I have had thousands of cheese sandwiches over the course of my life. A not insignificant percentage of those have followed the same basic template: marble cheese, lettuce and Hellmann's® Real Mayonnaise. There are, of course, variations. Sometimes I do some substitution: a different type of cheese or hummus instead of mayonnaise. I will not put in another type of mayonnaise because I hate them (though I do want to try crafting Bittman's homemade stuff). Occasionally I will augment the sandwich with tomatoes, or avocados, or an olive with a toothpick through it ('cause I'm classy).

Cheese Sandwich

The sandwich I had today fit the normal template, though I added arugula to the lettuce. I find arugula on its own to be too bitter, but it works great with others. One of my favourite things about my standard form sandwich is that you can hold it in one hand and it will stay self contained. The problem with a lot of sandwiches (and with my optionals of avocado and tomato) is that they go against the basic principle of sandwichdom. You bite into the sandwich and the filling shoots out in all directions. I've been in restaurants where the bread is such a small fraction of the overall sandwich that it doesn't even survive first contact. One can only imagine what the Earl of Sandwich would think!

Restaurant: Tibet Nepal House

2010-05-30T21:24:00.008-04:00

I lobbied fiercely against the original dinner choice for the night. Inspired by Ezra Klein's cri de coeur against the hated Grilled Vegetable Plate, I took a stand against a restaurant that had only that as its vegetarian option. Blind opposition, of course, is not enough: I needed to propose an alternative. So I googled for restaurants around our hotel and picked the Tibet Nepal House because it sounded fun and I had never had that type of cuisine before. I was glad my suggestion was accepted.

The food was great, similar to Indian but with slightly different spices. We had Daal, Aloo Phulkopi Tarkaari (similar to Aloo Ghobi: potatoes, cauliflower and tomatoes), Aloo-Taamaa (potatoes and bamboo), Vegetable Sekuwa (oven roasted vegetables) and Tse Phing (a noodle dish, which we ordered because it symbolized long life).

In addition, I was particularly excited by the Tofu Saag. I'm not a particular fan of paneer, it's tasteless and just adds fat and unhealthiness to meals. Why have Saag Paneer, I've always said, when you could substitute tofu which is equally tasteless that has the same texture. Finally, I found a restaurant that does this. Also, there were meat dishes, including yak which was apparently quite interesting.

When we flew back to Toronto I had leftover Braised Coconut Tofu for dinner, thus bringing this blog around full circle from the California trip posts. There were other restaurants I went to, including a nice asian fusion place in Pasadena and several mediocre lunches but I think I've done enough items on California restaurants.

Tibet Nepal House
36 East Holly Street, Pasadena, California, USA

The Cambrian Explosion

2010-05-23T00:14:00.008-04:00

We drove on the edge of a cliff as darkness slowly began to surround us. We were driving to LA on California's Highway 1, which we had picked based on its beauty. We hadn't considered the reason why it was beautiful was because, to repeat, the highway is on the edge of a cliff. The day had started off leisurely, with a drive from a San Jose suburb to Monterey where we had some delicious Mexican food for lunch. The lunch special was two items accompanied by beans, rice and a salad. Honestly, the accompaniments would have been a big enough lunch – but there were also, in my case, a burrito and a quesadilla. We hadn't gone to Monterey for its food though, we went to see its aquarium. There were some truly stunning creatures on display.

No, that's not seaweed: that's a Leafy Sea Dragon. As in it's an actual living animal that looks like that. All the interesting things to see caused us to tarry perhaps a little too long. It was already four pm by the time we started heading on down Highway 1. We realized three facts early on:
1) The aforementioned cliff-edge-thingy
2) That this necessitated a low speed limit, especially around curves
3) There weren't any big population centres that could be stopped at when night hit.

We decided that we should set a goal of arriving at the town of Cambria, knowing nothing about it only other than the fact that it was the next thing that had an "over 1000 people" icon on the map. As the hours ticked past conventional dinner time, I was very happy lunch had been so big. Just when it seemed we might have to sleep in the car or at any random roadside motel, we hit a patch of non-crooked road and made it into Cambria.

Cambria was, in a word, charming. We stayed at the White Water Inn, where the office has homemade cookies and a movie lending library (VHS, natch). While there, the proprietor recommended Robin's Restaurant as vegetarian-friendly and booked us a reservation.

We were seated outside, in a semi-enclosed area. There were plenty of choices on the menu and I ended up going with the Wanton “Ravioli”.

The ravioli was stuffed with arugula and tofu feta and was quite nice and subtle. Once again though, my mom outdid me with her order of the Pan Seared Furikake Tofu. The tofu was absolutely excellent: crisp without being rough on the outside, succulent on the inside and topped with a delicious sauce.

The next morning, the Inn had washed our car's windows for us as is their custom. We drove away to LA, with strong feelings of good will for the little town of Cambria.

Robin's Restaurant
4095 Burton Drive, Cambria, California, USA

The Thousand Year Restaurant

2010-05-16T23:42:00.013-04:00

We went to dinner at another restaurant recommended by my cousin, this time he and his girlfriend joined him. Located next to the Hotel California (or a Hotel California, I'm not sure how this works) the Millennium Restaurant also occupies the prime real estate of #1 google hit for "Millennium" .

The restaurant serves haute vegetarian cuisine and was very elegant. It also proved why I'd be a bad food critic, as I really don't know how to describe the meal.

"Excellent" would be accurate, but not very useful. "My meal had a medley of vegetables, tofu and portobello mushrooms" is a bit banal. "I really don't know how to describe the meal" is a bit meta. I'll give it a shot though:

The flavours were complex and daring. The portobellos were delicious and succulent, with a crispy bottom. I asked the waiter how they did it and he explained that they dredged them before sautéing. The meal also taught me that I'm never going to like parsnips. I've never cared for them and if this place couldn't do them well, nobody can.

Coming up, tales of restaurants outside San Francisco but inside California. Where could they be? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Millennium Restaurant
580 Geary Street, San Francisco, California, USA

One Nob Hill

2010-05-09T23:13:00.007-04:00

I am in California with my parents on my way to my sister's graduation. Currently, we are in beautiful yet hilly San Francisco but who knows where we will be tomorrow (as it turns out: San Francisco). We don't know the city that well, so we asked my cousin for recommendations. He suggested an Italian restaurant with a very un-Italian name: Hob Hill Cafe.

I decided to go for the pizza option, where you build on the basic Margherita by adding toppings. I chose spinach, artichokes and mushrooms. Once I got the meal I regretted my decision.

This was not, of course, because the pizza was bad. It was actually quite good. Rather, I regretted it because I have a very ambiguous relationship with gourmet restaurant style pizza. As shameful as it is to say, in many cases I prefer the stuff from an under-the-heatlamp pizzeria. Luckily, we were all fuller than we thought we were when we ordered so I got to sample my parents orders. They had both gotten pasta and it was excellent. The Fettuccine had a delicious creamy pesto sauce but it was the gnocchi where the restaurant really shined. The gnocchi were light but not insubstantial and the sauce was zesty but not overpowering.

So if you are in San Fran, I'd recommend it but chose the pasta over the pizza.

Nob Hill Cafe
1152 Taylor Street, San Francisco, California, USA

Braised Tofu and Cauliflower in Curried Coconut Milk

2010-05-02T18:16:00.005-04:00

I realized earlier today that I hadn't had anything new this week and would have nothing to blog about. So I turned to Mark Bittman's book and opened it at random. I wanted to have something a) good, b) new and c) something with cauliflower to use up the remnants from last week. The recipe I stumbled upon certainly seemed to fit the first two, and a bit of modifications made it fit the last as well.

Braised Tofu and Cauliflower in Curried Coconut Milk

3 large onions, cut into eighths

1 28-ounce can of tomatoes (with liquids)

5 cloves garlic

1 dried chili pepper

2 tbsp neutral oil

Salt and pepper

1 tbsp curry powder

1 tbsp garam masala

700-900 grams tofu, blotted dry and cubed

2 cups cauliflower florets

1.5 cups coconut milk

Combine the onion, tomatoes, garlic and chili in a blender or food processor. Purée. Add oil to a deep pot over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the pureed mixture with the salt, pepper and spices. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes: until it becomes saucy. Meanwhile parboil the cauliflower (toss in boiling water for a few minutes) and add the cauliflower and tofu to the mixture. Cook for about about 5 minutes and stir in the coconut milk. Bring to a boil and cook for a little bit more. Serve over rice.

Serves 5?

I thought I'd made it too soupy, but once it was over the rice it turned out quite nicely: with a hearty and complex taste. I'm not quite sure how many it serves, my parents and I all had a meal out of it and there were plenty of leftovers.

Roasted Cauliflower Soup

2010-04-25T20:44:00.006-04:00

I serendipitously stumbled across a vegan food blog via an unrelated post on the 'book. After reading through some of the posts I decided to make Call Me Cauliflowah Soup (itself adapted from the LCBO magazine).

Roasted Cauliflower Soup

1 medium head of cauliflower, divided into florets

1 medium onion (approximately 1 cup), chopped

4 tbsp olive oil

salt

3 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tbsp ginger, freshly chopped

1 tbsp hot curry paste

4 cups stock

1 tsp lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 450°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Put the cauliflower florets into a large bowl, add 2 tbsp of oil and salt. Mix until all the cauliflower is coated. Place them on the baking sheet, and roast in the oven for about 30-40 minutes (occasionally shaking the baking sheet). Add the remaining oil to a big soup pot on medium heat. When the oil is hot sauté the onion for a minute while stirring frequently. Add the ginger, garlic and curry paste for a minute. Then, add the roasted cauliflower and pour in the stock. Once the soup is at a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer and add the lemon juice. Cover and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup (or let it cool down and put it in a blender).

Serves 3

I liked the soup, though the curry paste I used overwhelmed the roasted cauliflower flavour. I probably would've preferred separating out of the core of the soup and just eating the roasted cauliflower while sipping on a zesty broth. I may have to try this soup again but maybe without roasting the cauliflower and seeing what happens. Still, it was a nice soup and would probably work very well as a starter.

Restaurant: El Palenque Casa Del Mariachi

2010-04-18T15:56:00.008-04:00

The other day, I had the most bizzare service I'd ever had in my life. I seriously considered that we were actually on Just For Laughs or something. The night began with me and my parents deciding to go out for supper and choosing a restaurant which I thought was just called "Mexican Restaurant" but actually had a longer name. We'd been there before and the food had been great but the service was lousy. Apperently it was under new management so we decided to give it a another try. That was a mistake.

We ordered some guacamole to start which was quite good (although the tortilla chips that came with it were way too salty) and then decided to order the mains. This is when the storm clouds started to gather. There was a burrito on the menu that came with cheese, beans, rice and sour cream. "That sounds good," said my mom to the waitress, "I'll have the burrito." "Beef, chicken or vegetarian?" the waitress asked. "What?" "Beef, chicken or vegetarian?" "No, no meat."

You see, at the top of the menu it had "Beef, chicken or vegetarian" listed (there may have been "pork" but I can't remember) but my parents had not seen that. To them, the question was whether they wanted meat added, which they did not as they are vegetarians like me. We all ordered the burrito (everyone having some similar degree of awkward back-and-forth while doing so) and then the burritos came. We were expecting something that would be a mix of the listed food items. This is what we got instead:

So it was a tortilla filled with mainly rice, with some boiled broccoli and such. I'm a pretty cheap date, as they say, so I just started eating it. It wasn't great, or even that good, but it was alright and I was hungry. The parents, however, were not happy and called the waitress back over. And that was when the bizarreness happened. The waitress wasn't getting at all what had happened and the situation kept on spiralling down.
"Look, we just want what we ordered."
"You got what you ordered."
"No, we didn't. The menu talked about beans, rice, cheese and sour cream. Can we have that."
"What just that."
"Yes, just that, that's why we ordered it."
"Well, this isn't Taco Bell, this is an authentic Mexican restaurant!"
"Oh really? I'm pretty sure that broccoli is not an authentic Mexican vegetable."
"Well we don't know what vegetarians eat."
"Um, not this."
"He seems to be enjoying it."
"He'll eat anything."

The actual conversation lasted probably around 10 minutes but eventually the waitress conceded and brought what they ordered. The whole thing was like a vaudeville routine at the Catskills about some rude waiter at a Jewish restaurant.

El Palenque Casa Del Mariachi
816 St Clair Ave W, Toronto

Should Vegetarians Eat Meat?

2010-04-11T23:54:00.007-04:00

Ezra Klein has a call to arms about the unfortunate practice of restaurants making their vegetarian option some grilled vegetables. Grilled vegetables are a nice side, they are not a meal. As Klein points out, a vegetarians is not someone who just loves vegetables per se, but "is someone who doesn't eat meat."

But in a contrarian article for Slate (is there any other kind) Christopher Cox suggests another thing the vegetarians can eat other than the dreaded Grilled Vegetable Plate. That something is meat. Yes, in an article provocatively titled "It's OK for vegans to eat oysters" Cox posits that vegans and vegetarians should be able to scarf down oysters. He brings forth the two main reasons to be vegan: using animals for food is harmful to the environment and causes them to suffer. Neither of these reasons, he claims, apply to oysters. The impact of oyster farms on the environment is de minimis and oysters themselves live off of plankton. In addition, oysters have no central nervous system so they're unlikely to feel pain. Basically, oysters are just oddly shaped plants.

So, will the next Frugal Veggie post be a recipe for oysters? No. Despite Cox's argument I'm not convinced.

First up is challanging the premises of his argument. Do we know for sure that oysters are ecologically sustainable? Certainly, eating farmed oysters is better for the environment then eating, say, farmed salmon. But Cox does not really marshall a lot of proof in his article. Additionally, while it is true that oysters lack a brain they do have a nervous system. It's a bit facetious of him to compare the situation to plants, as we don't know that plants can't feel pain either. That may be so, but we do know that plants don't have nerves and oysters do have ganglia. This uncertainty is probably enough to make me not go out and eat a bunch of oysters.

But uncertainty can be solved by more investigation, and what if I delved deeper into this issues and discovered that oyster farming, say, actually helps the environment and oysters feel no pain? I guess my main concern goes back to the Klein quote above, vegetarians do not eat meat. I think the whole "not eating meat" thing is very important to my identity as a vegetarian. Look, it's arguable that a person who is otherwise a vegan but eats oysters is "better" (quote unqoute) then I, as I'm adding to environmental degredation and animal suffering with the milk I glug down and the cheese I consume. But that person isn't a vegan. It may sound like I'm just being obsessed with labels here, but labels are important. Labels give a quick and easy way for the rest of the world to know how to interact with us. Allow the term "vegetarian" to encompass eating meat and then the restaurant won't be bringing over the Grilled Vegetable Plate as a vegetarian option but will be bringing over an ethically raised steak that was killed painlessly.

Bottom line, if you're going to eat oysters – good for you. More people should eat more oysters. But if you want to do that, you're not a vegan. Call yourself, I don't know, an ethical pescetarian or a bivalvegetarian or don't attach labels (if you don't like labelling).

Of course, I'm only postponing the debate here. The really interesting stuff happens when we can grow meat in vats a la The Space Merchants (No, Margaret Attwood did not come up with this for Oryx and Crake). Every argument for oysters is amplified for vatted meat and every argument I have against it is diminished. Vegetarianism could be reduced to an aesthetic choice, which is not really a good reason for causing extra work for people at restaurants and dinner parties.

The Bread of Affliction

2010-04-04T21:51:00.005-04:00

Every year, I celebrate passover, where for one week I have to give up leavened bread. It has been particularly annoying as the week started off with my roommate making several dozen delicious cupcakes, which I foolishly did not think of until after the holiday had started. There has also been a veritable flood of free pizza... which was even harder to pass over (I'll be here all week folks, tip your waitress).

So what do I eat instead? Matzah, which tastes like cardboard without the flavour. I'll usually have it with peanut butter (there are some Jews who do not eat peanuts on passover, but that's not how I roll) or cheese, but there are some things you can do to make it taste really awesome. In specific, here is my Mom's recipe for Matzoh Crunch (which I will spell her way, as it is her recipe).

Matzoh Crunch

3 pieces matzoh

1/2 cup butter

1/2 brown sugar

1 cup chocolate chips

Line a cookie sheet with foil and place 3 matzohs on the sheet. Melt the butter and add the brown sugar. Boil for three minutes, stirring frequently. Pour over matzoh--fairly evenly but your don't have to spread it as it spreads while baking. (don't go right to the edges)

Bake for 10 minutes--should be bubbling--if not, give it another minute. Remove from oven, sprinkle with the chocolate chips. When they melt, spread them around. Takes a couple of hours to cool, put in fridge it you need it to cool faster.

The Conclusion: Creamy Cabbage and Carrot Soup

2010-03-28T22:23:00.005-04:00

With this entry what I believe future historians will term the "Cabbaga Saga" comes to an end. Technically, this was not the last thing I ate from those cabbages but I felt that "I made dal normally and threw in some cabbage" would not be a very interesting blog entry. The impetus for this soup was the fact that I took several unopened packages of sour cream home that had accompanied some nachos at my friend's birthday party. Upon waking up and realizing I had no idea what to do with that sour cream, I looked through Mark Bittmans' book and settled on something from the creamy soups section.

Creamy Cabbage and Carrot Soup

oil

1 onion, minced

2 cups carrots, chopped

2 cups cabbage, chopped

salt

1 teaspoon chipotle chili powder

3 1/3 cups vegetable stock

1/3 cup sour cream
Heat the oil in a pot over medium. When hot, add the vegetables. Season with the salt and chipotle. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes, then add the stock and cook for another 15 minutes. Let cool and puree and put it in the blender. Stir in the sour cream and serve.

Serves 2

This is a nice unoffensive soup, but it's a little too boring for a main dish. So the serves 2 is a little misleading, it would be a great appitizer soup course before another course – or a breather in between more spicy dishes.

The Story Continues... Kimchi Tofu Soup

2010-03-21T17:54:00.006-04:00

My last post here was a bit of a cliffhanger because I didn't mention what dish I used the kimchi in (I realize I am using a very expansive definition of the word "cliffhanger"). Well, now all will be revealed (unless you read the title of this post)! As I used Mark Bittman's recipe for kimchi, I thought I'd troll through the index to find recipes that used kimchi.

Kimchi Tofu Soup

dark sesame oil

1 medium onion, diced

1 cup kimchi

1/2 block tofu, cubed (or crumbled if soft tofu)

2 teaspoons chili paste

4 cups water or stock

2 teaspoons rice vinegar

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1/3 cup white rice

Put the sesame oil in a medium saucepan over medium/high heat. Add the onions when it's hot and cook for a miute. Add the kimchi, tofu and chili paste for a few seconds then add the water, vinegar and soy sauce. Bring to a boil. Tone down the heat a bit till it's simmering, then add the rice and cook for 15-20 minutes.

The soup was a nice mix of sour and savoury but, like the kimchi, not spicy enough. I'm going to be making it again this week and I'm going to use soft tofu and more chili paste. Maybe even a couple of my pickled chilies, we'll see if they're still good after I accidentially put them into the freezer.

"Korean mothers doubtless could thank kimchi for preserving the virtue of many of their daughters..."

2010-03-14T23:13:00.007-04:00

As we speak there is cabbage rotting in my kitchen. Which is, I guess, my way of saying that I decided to make kimchi with some of my cabbage surplus (almost gone, but still have a bunch more cabbage). Now, let me stipulate that many of the ingredients I wanted were not at my disposal. For example, this awesome looking raddish would've be great to put in the kimchi:

Alas, it was not to be. Still, I was able to – more or less – follow Mark Bittman's recipe.

Cabbage Kimchi

1/2 head cabbage (about 1 lb), seperated into leaves

1/4 cup of salt

1/2 tablespoon hot red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons minced garlic

2 tablespoons sugar
Layer the cabbage leaves in a colander, putting salt in between each layer. Lit sit over a bolw for at least a few hours. When the cabbage is wilted, rinse and dry. Chop the cabbage and add it and all other ingredients to a jar. Let sit.

So my first problem was that my red pepper flakes were weaksauce. I ended up putting in a bunch of cayenne instead but it still wasn't hot enough. Maybe I should've chopped up some chili peppers. So how was the final version after it fermented for a few days. Well it was pretty pungent, a bit sour and complex but not spicy enough. I don't know if I even get to call it kimchi, maybe I should say pickled cabbage instead. My landlady was touring the place so I had to open a bunch of windows to get rid of the smell before the visitors came. Still, I'm glad I have it in a jar, so I can use it for other meals. In fact, I've already used it in another meal... that you'll hear about next time on The Frugal Veggie!

PS– The quote is from a book called Korea: The First War We Lost. I remembered the phrase dimly but couldn't remember where it was from or the exact wording. So I typed in virtue+kimchi+korean+war into Google Books and it popped up the result. What an era we live in!

Silky cabbage with quinoa

2010-03-07T12:07:00.007-05:00

My parents are away in the Yukon so I took some vegetables out of their fridge so they wouldn't go bad. Now I have an abundance of cabbage. I was going to make dal with cabbage but then realized I wouldn't have anything to write for my three or four loyal readers. So I was flipping through Mark Bittman's book and stumbled across one of his subrecipes: Quinoa with silky cabbage. Quinoa (pronouced keen-wah) is a crunchy protein rich grain. More accurately it's psuedocereal as it's the seeds of a leafy plant rather than a grain. I'm not it's biggest fan, but I'm always eager to add more quinoa to my diet. I didn't stick much to the recipe, but it was a good basis.

Silky Cabbage with Quinoa

1/4 head Napa cabbage, slice into rings

pinch of cayenne

sesame and neutral oil

1/2 cup quinoa

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 cup stock

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon ginger, minced

2 chilies, minced

Put the cabbge in a large covered pot over medium heat. Cook, stirring infrequently, for about 15 minutes. Add the oil and cayenne and cook for a few more minutes. Turn the head up to medium-high and add the quinoa and soy sauce. After a few minutes add the stock and bring to a boil. Add the garlic, ginger and chilies stir a final time – cover – and turn the heat to low. Cook for 15 minutes. If the quinoa isn't quite done or if there's too much stock left, turn the heat up and cook for a few more minutes.

Serves 2.

KD Spicy Szechwan [sic] BOLD Snack Cup

2010-02-28T15:20:00.006-05:00

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

2010-02-21T12:17:00.009-05:00

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

2010-02-15T18:51:00.005-05:00

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

2010-02-14T16:22:00.008-05:00

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

2010-02-07T22:30:00.006-05:00

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.

Christmas time is here, by golly

2010-01-07T21:04:00.005-05:00

Eastern orthodox christmas that is. Still, I thought it would be a good time to blog about my family Christmas. Gentle readers, I have – I confess – let you down by not posting over the break as much as I thought. Hopefully this will help remedy matters.

My Jewish family had our traditional christmas day: open presents (I got tree fungus!) and watch a movie (we saw Up In The Air which was quite good). For dinner we invited over one of my mom's Buddhist co-workers and had another traditional meal of Raclette. Raclette is sort of a swiss fondu that we discovered during a trip to Montreal many years ago. Appropriately enough, it starts with the eponymous raclette cheese:

After acquiring a slice of raclette cheese you place it inside the raclette maker, which is a device that melts the cheese on the bottom and while on top it grills items that you will pour the said cheese over. The middle slots melt the cheese faster, so those are always prized. It uses a lot of electricity (actually dims the lights in our house) but we only pull it out once a year or so (usually on Christmas).

While you can pretty much pour the raclette over anything we generally have a staple of items: gerkins, cocktail onions, boiled potatoes and french bread. We made a few changes this year, we couldn't find any french bread so we used bagels instead. I also supplemented the gerkins with conventional dill pickles which, quite frankly, I prefer anyway.

The meal itself is delicious, mainly becaues of the massive amounts of cheese it involves. It's incredibly unhealthy and very bad for the environment, but you're allowed to have a few of those every year.

Coming up next, our Christmas Day desserts. Plus, a post on Hannukah if I get around to it.

Chickpea and Broccoli Scramble

2009-12-22T20:20:00.003-05:00

So, I think that over the December break at least I'll probably be updating the blog more. That means that I'll probably abandon the "Frugal Sunday" format for this month. Tonight's recipe was improvised based on me seeing what food was around. I also made a small amount of stock for this recipe out of the peels and scraps from its ingredients. I also learned that my rice recipe doesn't scale as well as it could – there were remnants of water in the pot.

Chickpea and Broccoli Scramble

Oil

1 onion, diced

1 broccoli, chopped (what is the unit for broccoli?)

1 dried chili pepper, crumbled

1/2 cup stock

1 can chickpeas

1 red pepper, chopped

1 tablespoon ginger

1 tablespoon garlic

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon rice vinegar

1/4 small lemon

1 teaspoon cumin

Sauté the onion in the oil for a few minutes and then add the broccoli and chili. Add a bit of stock to the pan. After a few minutes, (when the broccoli are bright green) transfer them to a plate. Add the chickpeas, soy sauce, vinegar and remaining stock to the pot and cook for 5 minutes. Add the red pepper and continue cooking. Return the broccoli/onion mix to the pot and add the garlic, ginger, cumin and lemon. Serve over rice.

Serves 4.

Martin the Warrior

2009-12-13T12:52:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago my washing machine tried to kill me. It was the first, but not the last, instance of attempted murder in this sordid story.

I was just washing my clothing when it started to shake and heave and emit banging sounds louder than the Battle of Thermopylae. When I went to investigate it literally charged at me. A side note, I hate it when people use "literally" to mean "figuratively". But, aside from the anthropomorphizing implicit in the statement, I'm telling the truth here: that washing machine actually lunged several feet toward me as if demonically possessed. For a while my roommate and I did laundry as a team effort, when it got to the spin cycle we would both go and restrain the washing machine so it would stay in one place. We realized, ultimately, that this was both not particularly safe nor a good use of our time. Before we could decide whether we should stop doing that the spin cycle broke all together. So, no trying to kill us = good; clothes still completely wet after come out of dryer = bad.

Our landlady got a washing machine repairman to come over who made an interesting discovery. We had acquired a pet. A mouse was living inside the washing machine and had gnawed through some of the wires (he didn't see the mouse, but did find... evidence of its life inside the machine). We decided to name it Charles Martin. Also, my roommate got some traps from our landlady to kill him. I was a little sad as I went to bed, knowing he couldn't resist the delicious cheese laid out. Poor little guy.

I was right that Charles Martin couldn't resist the cheese. What I was less right about was my assumption regarding his mortality. Because when I woke up, the cheese was gone and the trap was unsprung. Over the next few days my roommate tried various combinations of cheese and peanut butter and every morning the situation was the same: no food, no mouse. He even got up in the middle of the night one time, noticed the cheese was gone, put more in and woke up to find it gone.

Last week, I noticed the trap was different. Hewing to the adage about better mousetraps, my roommate had beaten a path to Canadian Tire's door and bought an evil looking spring-loaded trap with a hair trigger. He put it out, laden with peanut butter, knowing that this trap would get the mouse. But in the morning, the peanut butter was still there. Charles Martin had outsmarted us! He became somewhat of a folk hero in my mind. Much like the protagonist of the excellent Fantastic Mr. Fox (seriously, go see it), he was a wild animal besting us in a battle of wits and stealing our food. His very existance was a critique of our petty bourgeois student life style and our social norms about property.

This morning there was a dead mouse in the trap.

He was grey with cute little white paws and a long pink tail. I buried him in the garden next to the ivy. Requiescat in pace, Charles Martin.

Frugal Veggie Semiversary

2009-12-09T10:40:00.002-05:00

Six months ago today, I started the Frugal Veggie blog and put up the first post (appropriately enough about lentils). Since that time I've done 62 posts (including this one) and been visited 718 times with 1492 pageviews. These visits have come from 5 continents and 17 countries. The majority of my entries have been recipes and restaurant reviews (respectively about 2/5ths and 1/5 of my posts) but posts about my garden or animals eating stuff in my kitchen are also up there.

Who knows where this blog will be on its real anniversary 6 months from now.

Peaceful Lentils

2009-12-06T00:07:00.006-05:00

Okay, this recipe is not actually called "Peaceful Lentils"; it has the more proasic name of "Lentil Barley Stew". I had made this recipe while I was a cook at Sci '44 Co-op and then there, on the board, the vegetarian option was listed as "Peaceful Lentils". It confused me for a second until I realized the cookbook it was from was called "The Peaceful Palate". I am, I think, the only one in the world who finds that story interesting. Yet I still tell it. Good times. Whatever you call it, Lentil Barley Stew is an old favourite from my childhood – its a simple hearty stew that is just as good leftover.

Lentil Barley Stew

2 cups lentils (about 1 pound)

3/4 cup pearl barley

8 cups stock

1 large onion, chopped

2 carrots, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

1/2 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

1/4 tsp black pepper

salt to taste

Place all ingredients except salt in a large pot and bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally, until lentils and barley are tender. Add salt to taste.

serves 12 6.

The original recipe says it serves 12, but really half that. I guess they're talking about serves 12 as a course as a meal, but my number comes from it being the whole dinner. This is also a good exam-period meal, as once you've done the chopping it's very low maintenance and you can do other things (e.g. study). Plus, it produces lots of leftovers (and, as indicated above, it makes good leftovers).

The Cider Experiment

2009-12-01T11:12:00.004-05:00

Happy at how the first batch of cider turned out, we decided to lay down not one but two bottles of cider. One was the same "Simply Apple" Apple Juice and the other was Mott's Fruitsations Apple Juice (I checked, it was clam blood free). For the "Simply Apple" we used Morgan's Lager Yeast. We'd read that lager yeast provided a more cider-y flavour and said "Hey, why not." For the Fruitsations, we decided to try an experiment and added honey and cinnamon to it, while using the champagne yeast from last time. For that one, we decided to do the balloon trick for an airlock – a white balloon with a pinhole in it. The fact that it's white will have some later significance. We had added more water than we were supposed to the yeast last time, so this time we added just enough. It turned the yeast into a solid (a colloid?) and made it very difficult to scope the yeast into the cider. That done, we put them downstairs in the closet.

Soon after I had the following conversation with my roommate.
Roommate (excitedly): I have a great new idea. Can I use some of your friend's honey to make fermented honey?!
Me: You mean mead?
Roommate: Mead?
Me: Yeah, that's what that's called.
Roommate: Nerds. I thought I had invented that.

As you saw above, there was a lot of fermentation in the experimental bottle and a bunch of the cinnamon had been kicked up into the balloon itself. However, when the balloon had deflated enough we decided to try it. It was gross. Like really gross. It tasted watery and sharp and bitter and a grim parody of cinnamoness. An idea struck me and I added some of my roommate's mead to it. It still wasn't great, but it really complemented it well. The mead filled out the watery taste and took away the bitterness. Seeing inspiration, we dumped in the rest of the mead and capped the bottle.

We decided to taste the other bottle and it was actually pretty good. It tasted more like cider than the first batch did, with a nice crisp apple taste and a gentle fizz.

Heartened by the good cider, we decided to check on the experimental cider. When we opened the lid, it vesuviused all over the place. I starred at it in horror for a couple of seconds as it foamed all over my floor. I suppose we should've predicted it. After the foam out, we tasted it and it was even grosser. So we threw it out.

We have since drank all our cider, but we have part 3 fermenting downstairs as I write this. We used lager yeast and a bit of honey, so we'll see how it turns out.

I knew a girl and her name was Julie...

2009-11-22T19:25:00.007-05:00

I was on a plane recently (Perceptive readers may be able to guess where from) and so had a bunch of movies to chose from to watch. I ended up watching Julie & Julia or, as it might be titled, Women With Supportive Husbands Learn About Food And Their Feelings. Snark aside, I did enjoy it. The movie follows Julia Child and Julie Powell. One of them is a famous chef who served in the OSS in China during WWII, wrote a groundbreaking cookbook and became, perhaps, the first television cook. The other is a food blogger. So there is a bit of a disparity in terms of interestingness – certainly I did muse during my viewing that it might have been more interesting as a Julia Child biopic rather than cutting back and forth with Ms. Powell.

Still, as a food blogger, it is kinda neat to see a movie about a fellow food blogger. Now, in terms of blogging we are very different: she scorns vegetarians and I think she uses way too much butter and other unhealthy stuff [also, she had lots of readers --ed]. It is interesting what the movie shows about this type of blogging though. Her blog had a schtick, she would make every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook. That means that her blog had a lot more influence on her life than mine does. It's really a tail wagging the dog type thing, where she is always preparing meals to suit her blog. I don't really do that, if I haven't made an interesting bloggable item than I'd do something like, y'know, put up a post about a movie I saw. That said, I have made some meals to have something to blog about when I otherwise would have made something simpler.

The movie also shins a light on the inherent narcissism of blogging. Although, if you think about it, there is an inherent narcissism in writing. At least with food blogging you get, say, a recipe for chickpea soup rather than "Putting my tweets on facebook! #twitter #facebook". Julie becomes more and more obsessed with the blog and her readership that she neglects the real life relationship she has with her husband. I don't really have any comparable incidents, though I do like looking through the site statistics to see where my readers are coming from.

Amy Adams did a good job as Julie Powell and Meryl Streep did an excellent Julia Child. There was a lot of physical comedy just based on Child's height relative to everyone else. The food looked good too, there was an interesting article in The Atlantic by the person who made the food for the movie on her tricks of the trade (though I would be interesting how they did the scene where Julia Child cuts a small mountain of onion). I don't know if it's as entertaining as this (I linked there before, but it's still funny).

The House Cider Rules

2009-11-19T19:15:00.004-05:00

My roommate has been thinking about making alcohol for a while. I like the sentiment, but beer seemed like it required too much of an infrastructure to start. Plus, we don't have a basement that could absorb any hypothetical explosion. Just when things seemed darkest for the possibility of homemade alcohol I discovered The Paupered Chef's three part series on making hard cider (Parts I, II and III).

Not a lot was required: apple juice, yeast, a container and an "airlock". An airlock is a mechanism that lets gas come out of the container while stopping bacteria from getting into it. A balloon with a pinprick in it could suffice and, as that sounded whimsical, we decided to make that our airlock.

So now we needed to go out and buy these products. We went to the Valumart to buy the apple juice, it would have to be one without preservatives. I originally misremembered this as without pasteurization which, as you can except, was not being sold. After a while of looking, I realized that everything in the store was going to be pasteurized and we ended up getting a 1.75 L bottle of "Simply Apple" Apple Juice. We also got a pack of balloons and, unrelated to this post but still pretty cool, a 10 lb sack of potatoes for $2. We weren't sure where to get yeast and briefly toyed with the idea of using baker's yeast. Thankfully, my friend Emma's dad pointed us to Danny's Wine and Beer Suppliers which is on the bus line.

I was in class all day, so my roommate ventured out to Danny's to purchase the yeast. We got Lalvin EC-1118 Champagne yeast (or, rather, yeast from the Champagne region). While there he decided to spend a few bucks to make an airlock, so we ended up not using the balloons after all. The mouth of the Simply Apple bottle was too big for the airlock, so we cleaned out an old pop bottle and poured the juice into there. Then we activated the yeast, which involves adding some warm water and waiting for about 15 minutes. The yeast packages are intended for bigger batches than we had, so there was a lot of improvised math. We erred on the side of too much yeast, because the supply of sugar was fixed and that was what was important. Just meant more sludge. So we tipped in the yeast, and let it ferment!

It was always fun opening up the closet we stored it in and watching the bubbles. Still, there was a bit of a pungent smell in said closet which did not bode well for the future. After a week was up, we opened it up and decided to taste it.

It was... actually pretty good. It tasted like a dry white wine with a hint of apples and, at least in the beginning, a nice fizz. Several of my friends tried it and expressed surprise that 1) it wasn't terrible and 2) that we did not go blind. It was especially gratifying even the slapdash way we went about making it. It's almost all gone now, but tomorrow we're probably going to get some more apple juice.

What will we do differently? Well, the way we did it wasn't terribly cost effective. It was a test run so we used a smallish bottle. For the next time we'll buy a bigger bottle of apple juice. Also, instead of champagne yeast we'll try lager yeast, which apparently creates a more cidery type flavour. We're also thinking about adding some honey to one of the batches to see what happens with the extra sugar and honey flavour. It's pretty good honey too – given to me by my friend Megan from her family bee farm. Maybe we'll ferment these ones in sanitized wine bottles to give it a classier touch than a pop bottle. Whatever we do, I'm looking forward to experimenting more with cider.

Restaurant: Samuel's by the Park

2009-11-16T00:09:00.006-05:00

Perhaps the oddest thing about Samuel's is their wine pricing scheme: glasses cost less than bottles. Now, that statement by itself is obvious: of course, a glass of wine is going to cost less than a bottle. The surprise at Samuel's is that the relative cost is cheaper. You get 4-5 glasses per bottle and, for example, a glass of Jackson-Triggs costs $6 and a bottle costs $33. Even if we go for the higher 5 glasses per bottle, it still costs $3 less to get the equivalent amount of wine in glass form.

But aside from the oddity of the wine pricing (and, for the record, I did not get the Jackson-Triggs) you might wonder how the food was. That question is hard for me to answer, as I'm not really the target audience for this restaurant. The place is not what you would call "vegetarian friendly" as the dinner menu has no vegetarian options. Now, I was here at a big family dinner (17 people) so they had set up a prix fixe menu for us, which did include a vegetarian entree.

The bread they brought out was good, but the olive tapenade that accompanied it was amazing. Definitely the best I've ever had. So often they're too oily or too salty, but this was perfect. I checked the prix fixe menu, which had been printed out for all us on paper. It had "Mr. [one of my last name's] Menu" at the top, which made me think that I was sitting in my uncle's chair. After a moment's investigation, I discovered all the menus thus entitled as he had been the one who booked it. We had a choice of a starter, an entree and dessert. The two starters were caesar salad and the soup of the day (that's another oddity, when they printed up the menus presumably they knew what the soup of the day was. Why make extra work for the waiter who had to identity the soup to us all?) neither of which was vegetarian. The soup was made of chicken stock and the salad had anchovies and bacon in it. So that was a bit annoying (especially as a quarter of the party was vegetarian).

My entree was a spinach risotto with julienned vegetables and shaved asiago cheese. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The risotto was a little too chewy and not creamy enough, I couldn't taste the spinach or the asiago and every now and then it tasted burnt. My sister got the same thing and said there was no burnt taste on hers, so its possible I just got the bottom of the pan. Again, I'm not really their target audience so I guess they don't have a lot of experience making vegetarian food not bland.

The dessert was a delicious chocolate cake – the icing was perfectly done, rich and creamy and sweet (without being sickly sweet). I ended up having more than one piece as I got half of my aunt's (she was finished) and part of my sister's (she had left).

Bottom line: the bookends of the meal were excellent and the carnivores seemed to like their meals. I just don't think I could recommend the place to my vegetarian readers [yeah, your many vegetarian readers in Victoria, BC --ed].

Samuel's by the Park
655 Douglas St. Victoria, British Columbia

Restaurant: Bangkok Pad Thai

2009-11-09T07:42:00.004-05:00

So this post will have less pictures than usual because I forgot to bring my camera (image from website). On the plus side, the food was excellent. I had almost gone to Bangkok Pad Thai with some friends a few weeks ago, but we went to a pizza place instead. On Sunday, I remembered it looked good and went there with my friend.

We started off with an order of edamame, which is always fun. There were a lot of good looking entrees but I ultimately decided on the Pad Kee Mao Veggie (which, I learned later, means "drunken noodles" for some reason). The Pad Kee Mao contained some of my favourite vegetables for stir-frys: broccoli, baby corn, bamboo, water chestnuts and carrots cut into whimsical shapes. It was served over what the menu referred to as "rice noodle" and topped with a spicy chili garlic sauce. Spicy-for-white-people spicy, but still spicy.

For dessert we had the deep-fried ice cream which is an amazing concept. I definitely will have to go back sometime, I've heard the green curry is excellent.

Bangkok Pad Thai
735 Richmond Street, London, ON

Curried Chickpeas and Tofu

2009-11-01T19:39:00.004-05:00

One of the classic "workhorses" of my diet has been this simple chickpea and tofu curry from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. I don't eat as much of it now, but there was a time I'd have it at least once a week. In fact, my copy of the book is broken open at this recipe. It's a somewhat stripped down version from the cook book, mainly because it calls for a little bit of tomatoes and I don't usually have tomatoes in that particular amount.

Curried Chickpeas and Tofu

1 medium onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 chili pepper, minced

oil

2 teaspoons curry powder

2 teaspoons cumin

1/2 block tofu, cubed

1 cup cooked chickpeas

salt

Sauté the onion in the oil until translucent. Add the cumin, curry powder, garlic, chili and tofu a cook for a few minutes. Add the chickpeas and a 1/4 cup of their liquid if you cooked them from dried or water if you didn't. Simmer for 5-7 minutes or so and serve over rice.

Serves 2.

I have been experimenting with adding the chili later to maintain the heat, I probably should have added it even later (maybe with a few minutes to go?). Speaking of chili peppers, the one for this meal was the last from the garden. With its picking, my garden is now officially de– I mean taken to a nice farm where it will have lots of room to run around and such. Actually, the garlic is still there – I have to decide when to harvest it, and where to store it (maybe ask my landlords if I can use the garage?) Still its kinda sad, I guess I'll pull out the stakes supporting my dead tomato plant.

The Nachos

2009-10-25T22:59:00.007-04:00

The International Day of the Nacho occured last week, and how better to celebrate than a post on nachos?

Nachos are probably my favourite pub food. I wouldn't pretense to call myself a connoisseur, but I've had a lot of nachos and have many fine memories of some of the best like my friend Jeremy's multi-layered Super Bowl nachos or The Gem Bar & Grill's refried bean dip covered nachos. I also have bad memories of the worst nachos I've ever had: at a crappy place on St. Clair Street that will go unnamed. Even though I didn't know that International Day of the Nacho was last wednesday, I ended up having quite a few nachos last week. First up, I made myself some bareboned nachos in the hotel room using nacho chips, cheese and salsa. There wasn't a grater, so I sliced the cheese up with a sharp knife. They were okay, but they didn't have the wide range of toppings that the professionally done nachos I had at two different restaurants:

Christie's Carriage House Pub
Christie's had an impressive number of beers on tap, including the awesomely titled "Back Hand of God Stout". It was a tough choice, but I ended up going with Phillips Blue Buck, a local Victoria beer.

The name came from a contest after a lawsuit was threatened over their previous name "Blue Truck" (it was alleged as being too similar to a Vancouver craftbeer named Red Truck). While Christie's had a fair number of vegetarian options, I decided to go with the nachos:

I liked the nachos, but they had a central flaw: the cheese was baked in. Now, I'm all about baking nachos, but I think that nacho cheese should have a gooey consistency. This was the opposite, the cheese was embedded into the chip. In one way though, the picture doesn't do them justice as you can't see the jalapeños and tomatoes that were in the dish. Still, definitely not the best nachos I've had.

Ein-Stein's
'Stein's does not have the range of beer that Christie's has. Indeed they are the "local drinking hole" I mentioned here that prompted me to give up cheap beer. One thing that 'Stein's does very well though is pub food. Naturally, we had to order the nachos:

They were amazing. The cheese was perfectly melted. This was no accident, such is the dedication to detail of the chef that after baking he runs the nachos through a microwave to get that desired consistency. There was a good selection of toppings such as jalapeños and olives and they were well distributed. At some places after a while you start just getting plain nacho chips. At 'Stein's there is an abundance of cheese and toppings and no chip is left behind. We ended up ordering another, bigger, plate of nachos later in the evening. Traditionally, if my friends and I are ordering pub food at 'Stein's we get the party platter but I think that nachos should be the new paradigm. They are excellent.

Christie's Carriage House Pub
1739 Fort Street, Victoria, British Columbia

Ein-Stein Café and Pub
229 College Street, Toronto, Ontario

Scalloped Potatoes

2009-10-19T03:43:00.005-04:00

Scalloped potatoes have always been a 'comfort food' dish from my childhood, but I don't really get an opportunity to make them (I don't usually have both cheese and milk in the house at the same time). Luckily, I was over at my friend Megan's for dinner tonight and they were on the menu. I was feeling like having dairy (some readers may be able to guess why) and, serendipitously, I got my wish. We started by having an omelet with orange peppers and onions (inspired by this video, albeit not in form) as the scalloped potatoes baked.

Scalloped Potatoes

6 potatoes

1 onion

Cheese

1 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 375°. Slice the potatoes into ovals (cut the bottom first so it doesn't slide on the cutting the board), ring the onions and grate the cheese. In a casorolle dish, add a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions and a layer of cheese until you reach the top. The top layer should be cheese, but before you put it on, add the milk. Cover in tinfoil and bake for an hour, then remove the tinfoil and bake for 45 minutes.

Serves 3 (or 2 for hungry folk)

Sunday Frugal Sunday

2009-10-17T14:01:00.007-04:00

Hello, my neglected readers. When I started this blog I mentioned I had created this as a summer hobby (in lieu of getting a goldfish named Pushpanathan¹). Since that time the blog has gotten literally tens of hits²! While traffic has not been noticeably down during September, my posting has been. Whycome? I was really busy in September (September included the first couple weeks of October just as the 60s actually continued until 1975³). This not only meant that I didn't have time to post but also that I wasn't eating very interesting food: lots of pasta with tomato sauce and cans of chickpeas (that's not pasta with tomatoes and chickpeas, but two separate items: I actually more than once just had a can of chickpeas for dinner). However, things have calmed down a bit. So I'll resume blogging, but probably the once-every-day posts some periods of the summer had won't return. Here is what I will do: try to make sure to post every Sunday. That doesn't mean I won't post in the rest of the week necessarily, but that there will be a type to check and see new content.

In lieu of a recipe or restaurant review, here is fascinating look at the history of modern ketchup (via a comment thread on home-made ketchup at The Paupered Chef)

1 I have since found out that Pushpanathan is not pronounced Push-pan-a-than but Push-pa-NA-than. This disappointed me greatly and my hypothetical goldfish will need a new name.
2 Actually I've gotten over 1000 pageviews. But I like that expression.
3 Many decades are like this. For example, the 50s lasted from 1948-1963.

Restaurant: Raja Fine Indian Cuisine

2009-09-20T22:43:00.006-04:00

I was up in Stratford today, seeing A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum with the 'rents. It was funny with good performances all around except for the mother. The bar at intermission didn't even have completely outrageous markups, actually relatively competative vis-à-vis certain bars. Their premium wine seemed overpriced though, it was something like $9 for a glass of Jackson-Triggs (I guess "premium" has a different meaning in the theatrical world?) Afterwards we went to Raja, which my boss had recommended to me.

The waiter brought over papadum with chutneys, including an excellent cilantro one. Still smarting over the "potato incident" at Massey's I made sure to push for getting dishes with a lot of potatoes.

We got the Aloo Gobhi, Sag Aloo and the Mixed Vegetable Dupiaza. All with potatoes and all very good. My parents vetoed dal, as they are of the opinion that I eat too many lentils as it is. The only quibble I would have is that I was hoping that the dupiaza, at least, would be a little spicy. But I guess they know their audience and don't want to rock the boat spicewise. I should have asked for it to be hot, which probably wouldn't have worked but at least I'd have known they made the effort. It was a nice place though and apperently they opened up a twin restaurant in London. So I can agitate for that one if people want to go for Indian.

Raja Fine Indian Cuisine
10 George Street W, Stratford, Ontario

Tofu Stir-Fry

2009-09-17T16:51:00.007-04:00

I like stir-fry's quite a bit. Traditionally, I adapted a recipe from the Moosewood but this one is from Mark Bittman's book. The adaptation is very loose though, as such the recipe listed below is not intended to be comprehensive, there are so many different vegetables that can be added. So I talk about baby corn, but water chestnuts or bamboo are awesome substitutes (or really any vegetables). That said, I really like all the ingredients listed below. I love the bright green colour that broccoli turns when you cook it and it makes a welcome change from my usual colour schemata.

Tofu Stir-Fry with Broccoli

1 block tofu, cubed

3 large mushrooms, cubed

Oil

1 onion, chopped

1 head of broccoli, floretted

1 can baby corn

1 tablespoon garlic, minced

1 chili, diced

1/4 cup Shaoxing wine

1/3 cup water

2 tablespoon soy sauce

Cook the onion in some oil for a couple of minutes on high and then add the broccoli and the water and cook for about 5 minutes. Remove with slotted spoon and add some more oil. Add the tofu and mushrooms and cook for a few minutes until browned. Add the baby corn and the wine and cook until it evaporates. Return the onion/broccoli mixture, add the garlic, the chili and the soy sauce and cook for a few minutes. Serve over rice.

Serves 2

Tragedy struck when preparing this meal. I had lovingly diced the red chili I mentioned below and was about to add it into the frying pan when the fragments jumped off the plastic cutting board and on to the floor. Only a few pieces loyally stayed on board. As a result the stir-fry was underspiced. The bites I had that contained red chili were excellent, the other bites couldn't live up to them.

Housekeeping

2009-09-13T23:10:00.003-04:00

During the year I'll probably be updating this blog not as frequently as I did in the summer. I'm considering picking a day of the week and making sure I have an entry on that day but I'm not sure. I'll keep you posted.

My parents drove up to see me (went to Veg Out with them) and provided me with some groceries. I haven't really been able to take advantage of it because there have been lots of free food/meals out in the last week.

On that subject, I went to Massey's Indian Restaurant. Ordered the Alloo Paratha which is supposed to come "with smooth potato stuffing". There was, in fact, no potato stuffing – smooth or otherwise. I was very disappointed.

I was really lazy one night (home late and had had snacks) so I just had a can of chickpeas and chili flakes. Surprisingly tasty.

Finally, I have an awesome looking red chili growing. Isn't it a beaut:

A Roast Of Garlic

2009-09-09T23:06:00.005-04:00

I usually buy five-packs of garlic bulbs for about a buck. The problem is that if I'm away for long periods of time, the garlic isn't really keeping up at top quality. I solved that problem a while ago by planting some of the sprouting/mushy garlic – but there's only so much garlic I'm going to put in my garden. My solution was roasted garlic. When roasted garlic loses its pungeny and becomes a rather sweet mushy food. The recipe is from Mark Bittman:

Roasted Garlic

Head of garlic

Oil

salt
Preheat the oven to 375°. Take a head of garlic, remove some of the outer coverings and cut off the top. Drizzle with olive oil and salt, put on a baking pan and cover with aluminum foil. Bake for about 40 minutes.

Roasted garlic is great added to other dishes or used as a spread, but I even had some cloves as a snack. They pop right out of their coverings, there's no need to peel. I mentioned that at Veg Out we had the roasted garlic appetizer. It came with some very nice garlic toast, but honestly the roasted garlic tasted pretty much the same as mine. So, roasting garlic gets you something classy and interesting that's quick, easy and provides restaurant quality.

Restaurant: Veg Out

2009-09-07T11:39:00.004-04:00

I wanted to go to Veg Out before, but they were closed on Sunday evenings. Which was somewhat annoying, so I was leery about trying again as I didn't want to reward that sort of behaviour. But, I'm glad I did (plus I don't want to tell them how to run their business). Veg Out is a relatively new restaurant, it has a nice simple menu that gets the job done. Plus, I believe it is London's only vegan restaurant if that's your thing. After sitting down with the parents, I decided to order the Chipotle Black Bean Burger.

The actual burger tasted somewhat similar to the burger I made but it was topped with all sorts of things I usually don't have access to at the same time: a ripe tomato slice, sprouts, guacamole and a chipotle aoili. Also, and this is important with burgers, the bun was quite good. You need a bun strong enough to hold the burger in place, but not too tough to be a detriment. We had the roasted garlic with toast as an appitizer (more on that later!) and split a chocolate cake for dessert. One of the parentals had a pâté sandwich which I tried and thought tasted like dirt, but then again, I think a lot of pâté tastes that way. The bottom line was that its a pretty solid restaurant and very professional for a place that could've been very granola (not that there's anything wrong with granola).

Veg Out Restaurant
646 Richmond Street, London, ON

Hot and Sour Edamame

2009-08-26T20:44:00.005-04:00

So, finally, another recipe. That makes what, 3 recipes all this month. Partially this is a problem with what I eat. I mean this week has been all lentils and pasta and there's only so much I can milk out of that [maybe you should have thought of that before starting a food blog! --ed]. I was going to have another lentil dish, but then remembered I had bought some shelled edamame on an impulse buy. So I decided to make a varient of Mark Bittman's Hot and Sour Tofu with Edamame (the varient was, I had no tofu). It taught me a valuable lesson though, if you have a recipe you're downscaling fourfold, do the calculations beforehand. As a result, the proportions are wonky.

Hot and Sour Edamame

oil

1/2 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 cup frozen edamame

1/4 cup vegetable stock

2 small chilies

3/4 teaspoon fermented black beans

1 heaping tablespoon Shaoxing wine (I used Fukien Loh Chiew, which may or may not be Shaxoing wine)

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1/2 tablespoon soy sauce

couple of squirts of honey
Sautée the onion in the oil on high for about 3 minutes. Add the edamame and the stock and cook for a few more minutes. Add the garlic, chilies and black beans and cook for another minute. Add the wine, vinegar, soy sauce, honey and a little water and simmer for 5-7 minutes. Serve over rice.

Serves 1.

For a very ad hoc meal it was quite tasty. Because it was ad hoc I grabbed, edamame right out of the freezer, if you were making this with foresight the edamame should go in with the vinegar. I used a pickled red chili and the mottled green chili from this picture. It worked out well and I hope to make the real thing at some point.

Grand Gardening Generalissimo

2009-08-25T22:24:00.003-04:00

Gardeners are somewhat like dictators. You have, what you think, is absolute control over your land. Yet you're constantly fighting a series of internal and external enemies to maintain control. Then there's also the whole notion of the "fit" plants being allowed to survive while the untermenschen are ruthlessly exterminated. Which is to say, I felt slightly guilty about weeding – especially after I realized how many weeds there were (and this is after the weeding I already mentioned):

So I'm not saying its not politically problematic, but given that it satisfies some of the same urges I think that all potential dictators and sociopaths should be redirected towards gardening. And its not just theory, the despot Diocletian gave up the Roman Empire to tend to his garden. I'm just sayin' we need to get the proverbial Diocletian's before their reign starts....

The rest of the garden is going well. There are lots of tomatoes turning red. My chili plants are doing well, my estimate of 4 chilies growing was off, I have at least double that. I had a green chili off my main chili plant for dinner today, gave off a nice amount of heat. I'm really excited about the chili plants my neighbour gave me. They're starting to produce chilies, which should be ready to eat at some point:

Has Low's Hierarchy of Coupons

2009-08-24T20:27:00.003-04:00

Unlike humans, all coupons are not created equal. Some are great and some are awful. I get a fair number of coupons in the mail and I've begun to see themes. Therefore, I present, to you the hierarchy of coupons:
1. Coupons for Free Things
These are self-explanatory, a coupon that lets you walk into a store and get something for free. No strings attached. Starbucks had a promotion where, on Earth Day, you could walk in and get free coffee if you had a travel mug. I don't know why I led with Starbucks and not McDonalds, which was also giving out free coffee, as McDonalds apperently has better coffee than Starbucks.
2. Coupons that give a good discount
Okay, you still have to buy something but they provide a tangible reward. I got some Quiznos® coupons in the mail, which included a $2 off coupon. That means a sub is a third cheaper. As I may I have mentioned before, I won a bunch of Quiznos® gift certificates and so it was a no-brainer to go to my local Quiznos® and use up some of these coupons (Quiznos®: It’s the sub sandwich your mouth always wanted!)

3. Coupons where you buy something and get something else free
The pinnacle of this is the "buy one get one free" though it does have its bratty little brother that gives you a couple of free, say, couple of mints. But let's stick to the high-end of the spectrum. Why do I rank it below #2? Let's use the example of Quiznos® coupons. They had a coupon for a free bag of chips and a free drink with the purchase of any sandwich and another that gave a free small sandwich (equal or lesser value) with the purchase of a sandwich and drinks. Both these examples are worth more in absolute terms than the #2 $2 off one, so why do they value it less? Answer, I don't want chips or a surgery soda. Even something that I do want, like a sandwich, I don't really need. The generalization of this is while I can always enjoy getting something I want cheaper, getting other things cheaper or free requires me to want them. And chances are, I won't (This is why we learned in economics that cash transfers were better than food stamps).
4. Terrible Coupons
You know the kind. Buy more of something to get something you don't want. Or buy a bunch of things to get a discount off something else. There are so many different kinds of terrible coupons and, truth to be told, they make up the majority of coupons.

Now, of course, these categories are not completely rigid. A big enough discount for something I like (#2) beats something I only somewhat like (#1), though its gotta be a big enough discount to beat the FREE! Effect. Likewise, the Marble Slab coupon for a buy one get one free cone of ice cream (#3) appeals to me more than their $1 off (#2) ones (because I don't see myself ever buying ice cream by myself). I can't really think of a case where a #4 coupon would beat a #1-3 one but that's because of the tautology inherent in its construction.

"The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees/Are grown in solid ground"

2009-08-23T13:54:00.005-04:00

So, I thought I probably should say something about my garden other than various bad things that happen (I realize that this is a very expansive definition of "bad"). My tomatoes have really grown since I first planted them. Just look at the difference from how they used to look and now:

I really should be pruning these, because I really don't need that much folliage. If I'd be more diligent about that I'd probably have more tomatoes now, but what can you do, eh? Besides, I have a lot of tomatoes growing. I ate a couple right off the vine last night on my way from a concert (The Fine Print, tell your friends) which was very tasty. I also have about 4 chilies growing, all still green now but I think they'll probably be turning red soon enough. I'm very excited about some of them because they're from plants that my neighbour gave me and I've never tasted that variety before. I had a very nice conversation with her today, she and her husband have a massive garden (and then an even bigger garden in their backyard). I brought down weeds for her compost and toured it, they have a pumpkin plant lazily sprawling over a lot of real estate. There are two pumpkins and about a million spikes. Seriously, those things are covered with little spikes, including the stem connecting the pumpkin to the plant.

I think I'll try to get ahold of some fresh basil and use it with the tomatoes for pasta and with the chilies for an approximation of this dish.

Restaurant: Ghazale

2009-08-22T16:17:00.003-04:00

Toronto has a lot of places that sell falafel. I like Ghazale. They catered my bar mitzvah and I've been a regular, if infrequent, customer. Its a cute little place, nestled next to the Bloor Cinema (along with the upscale burger joint Acme Burger, which is quite good though a little pricey).

I will occasionally grab a samosa from Ghazale on my way back from one of the area's bars (some of which don't have the greatest record) but I mostly will get falafel there. We had some family over and picked up a big order (too many, in fact, but the leftovers were pretty great when it was too hot to cook).

We also got some of their Tabbouleh, which I ate with some of the falafel. The other pita, I added some greens from a salad. In retrospect, I would've thrown in some tomatoes. You may notice that there is no tahini. After a long struggle, I have admitted to myself that I do not like tahini and eat falafel without it. I like the fact that Ghazale respects this choice, unlike another certain falafel place in the area which will always put tahini on no matter how many times I ask for it without.

Ghazale
504 Bloor Street W, Toronto, ON

Cooking With Others

2009-08-20T21:44:00.003-04:00

Cooking with other people can be a hazardous experience. Especially in a small kitchen, there's only so much space... and I'm not just talking about counterspace. Cooking is a very kinetic activity, you're darting from one place to another: chopping, stirring pouring. The more people you throw in the more likely it is that people will be stepping on each other's toes – figuratively as well as literally. That said, it can be really fun to cook with others. One thing that helps is a division of labour. If you have one person chopping and another person throwing those chopped items into a pan you're not going to have a lot of collisions. There are also some tasks where its really helpful to have multiple people helping out with. When I was a cook at Science '44, there would usually be at least 3 cooks in the kitchen (it was, also, a pretty big kitchen). When we were breading chicken, it was great to set up an assembly line where each person could perform one of the steps (Yes, I was breading chicken. There were 150 people in the co-op and most of them weren't vegetarians).

One of the nice things about being back in Toronto was getting to cook with my parents. We went to a lot of restaurants (some of which I've blogged about, some of which I will blog about and some of which I forgot to take pictures at) but had some meals we made at home.

The 'rents had bought some pre-spiced tofu and we basically just stir-fried it with a bunch of vegetables. We were planning on making rice but we forgot to put it on so made rice noodles instead. I spent the next few days running around and living on power bars and hor d'oeuvres so it was nice to be able to have a home-made meal before that.

An Open Letter To The Man Who Crushed My Lettuce

2009-08-19T22:00:00.004-04:00

Dear Man Who Crushed My Lettuce,
First of all I should say I appreciate you painting my house. I know you're not doing it for charity – my landlords are repainting their properties – but I appreciate you're helping make my house better. I do, however, have issues with where you decide to stand. Now, I don't have an issue that you woke me up today by standing on the roof right outside my bedroom window and spraying water higher up. I was going to wake up anyway around that time to go to work, so really what did that hurt? I am slightly concerned that your standard operating procedure is not to knock on the door first but to climb on to roof outside someone's window in the early morning! How do you know I'm not a 19 year girl. Maybe this hypothetical person would not like to wake up to hear a ladder being pushed against the roof that connects to her bedroom window as a strange man climbs up it. Just sayin'.

But, as I stated, that wasn't the standing that concerned me. When I left for work you were spraying down the porch... while standing on my lettuce plants. Really? Really?

Like, there's a lot of other places in my garden for you to stand. There are areas, for example, that do not have plants growing. There are areas that have more resilient plants, like ivy. There is a wooden path midway through it that has no plants.

Or there's the sidewalk. That's good too.

So, while I'm grateful you didn't wreck any of my other plants I'm not entirely pleased about the lettuce.

Govern yourself accordingly,
The Frugal Veggie

Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu Korean Restaurant

2009-08-18T19:46:00.005-04:00

I have to admit that until I decided to do this blog post I had no idea about the actual name of this resturant. I'd always previously just called it "The Korean Restaurant near Clinton's" or merely "The Korean Restaurant". Its usually pretty busy but they have a platoon of orange clad waiters who try to shuffle things along. Its clean, spartan and pretty afordable.

One really nice change this time I came was that it started of with a bottle of cold water at the table. Usually its pretty hard to get water and its a place where water is pretty great to have. The meal started off with a selection of appetizers, some of which I could identify (kimchi) and others that I couldn't.

The restaurant was a little less busy than usual (though still pretty crowded) so they refilled the mung bean dish a few times before the entrees came. The first time I went – my uncle took me – I had the Bi Bim Bop and, quite frankly, didn't enjoy it much. A few years later, I started coming back for the tofu soon soup.

The soup comes to your table in a big bowl still bubbling from the kitchen. Its filled with a delicious spicy mix of tofu, broccoli and zucchini. This is why the water comes in handy. You can either sip the soup directly, or pour it over purple rice to cool it. The practice is to crack an egg in the soup, which gets cooked by the boiling broth. I tend not to do that, though I think I'll probbaly start doing it again. The rice water is left at the table, I have a silly tradition wher I take a sip of it (though I sometimes forget, including at this meal. Dinner comes out to be $8 a person which is very reasonable in my opinion.

Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu Korean Restaurant
691 Bloor St. West, Toronto, ON

Garden Scramble

2009-08-13T15:05:00.005-04:00

So I've been away for a bit with real world stuff, this post is therefore a bit like time traveling as the events contained herein occured in the past (woooooooo). I was planning to make a meal using items from my garden and the last vegetables in my fridge (some onions and some mushrooms). It was going to be a pasta dish, but then you-know-what decided to wreck my pasta. So I had it as a breakfast instead, sans starch.

Garden Scramble

Handful of mushrooms

1 chili, chopped

Oil

2 small onions, diced

1 garlic shoot, chopped

1 cherry tomato, garnish
Saute the onion in some oil on high for about 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook for a few more minutes. Then add the chili and the garlic shoots. Add the tomato on the plate.

Serves 1
I think this would have been nice served over something. I probably could've cooked these particular mushrooms for a shorter period as well. The tomato complemented it surprisingly well, if I'd had more ready I would've put more on (say 4 cherry tomatoes).

CSI: My Kitchen 2: The Return

2009-08-06T08:20:00.005-04:00

I am literally angry with rage. Today, I wake up and head into my kitchen and what do I find. Some animal has ransacked it, again.

Not cool, animal. Again, if it was just the bread that it ate – I would be annoyed. I was planning on eating that bread for breakfast today. But y'know, I eat it, it eats it, it all balances out. But it wrecked and contaminated a bunch of my stuff: pasta, barley, lentils, cornstarch. I wish you ill, little animal. I wish you ill. This time it ate through my screen:

I guess that gives a slightly better idea what it is: probably not a squirrel. Whoever you are, little animal, I'd advise you to get out of here cause the town ain't big enough for the both of us.

Julie & Julia & Food Photography

2009-08-05T20:52:00.006-04:00

Mere months after I started food blogging, a movie about food blogging is coming out! Coincidence? Yes. The movie has been over-hyped in the NYT but there have been some interesting articles. In particular, there have been two fascinating articles in The Atlantic by the lead food wrangler (not her actual title) for the movie. There are a lot of stories in food photography about glue-for-milk and the such but all the food in Julie & Julia is real.

It made me think a bit about the food photography I do for this blog. I think the photographs have improved (although the one from the Indian restaurant wasn't great). I've not though it necessary to include the whole plate in the picture which gives it a better look than the miles-of-ugly-tablecloth-and-the-food-in-the-middle look of the early blog (also, I have a better tablecloth). I mean, compare this early pasta picture and this later one. One looks like something you'd want to eat, the other does not. I usually snap a few photos and pick the best one.

I think even the early pictures that I liked could do with some cropping. this was one of my favourite early pictures... but I think I prefer this version:

"Asian-Style" Frittata

2009-08-04T21:19:00.003-04:00

I'm not a huge fan of the term "Asian-style" (and its older, thankfully mostly disappeared, brother "Oriental-style"). I mean, it makes as much sense as talking about Euro-South-North-Amero-Afrostralian cuisine because there are more people in Asia than those places and just as diverse (you could throw in an extra North America and Europe and Asia would still be larger). This is a rather lengthy way of mentioning that I made the Moosewood's Asian-Style frittata. I was back in Toronto for the weekend and wasn't sure what to make as there was lots and lots of food. Ironically though, I have a lot more (quote/unquote) "Asian" condiments and sauces which really could have helped out this meal.
Asian-Style Frittata

1/2 red onion

1 cup sliced mushrooms

1/2 cup snow peas

3 bok choy leaves

2 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon ginger

2 eggs

1 teaspoon soy sauce
Sauce

1 dried chili

1/4 cup water/stock

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

1/8 teaspoon sesame oil

1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved in 1 teaspoon cool water
The vegetables sound eclectic, but its pretty much just any 2 cups of vegetables per egg. Sauté the onion on medium heat for 3-4 minutes. Add the mushrooms, snow peas, ginger and bok choy leaves (or the slower cooking veggies you use) and sauté for a few minuets. As you're doing that, whisk the eggs with the ginger and soy sauce. Add the garlic and the boy choy greens (or the faster cooking veggies) and cook for a minute. Poor the eggs in, cover and cook on low heat for about 6 minutes. Bring the sauce ingredients to a boil and then add the dissolved cornstarch. Pour the sauce over the frittata and serve.

Serves 1.

You may be wondering why I had balsamic vinegar in an "Asian-themed" fritatta. Well, as I mentioned above my parents didn't seem to have any mirin etc. Also, once again, cornstarch thwarted me by clumping up forcing me to spoon out half of it. The meal was okay, but I wish I'd used the greens and such for a stir fry and soft-boiled the eggs for breakfast [That's your wish?! Not world peace or something? Geez --ed].

Housecleaning Updates

2009-08-02T02:26:00.002-04:00

So to add another hit of meta to this blog I thought I'd give some updates on previous posts.

I've updated my review of Khmer Thai to include a picture of the restaurant and fixed some embarrassing spelling errors that my friend Leo pointed out.

I did perform the promised update for my four sad vegetables post where I tripled the sauce. (I added the same sauce as before, but as there were now half of much vegetables which had gotten half of the previous sauce...) It was better, though approaching too much salt, but still nothing to write home about. I'll have to work a bit more on it.

Finally, I was challenged to go one step further and cook pasta directly in the sauce. So I did. I diluted it one part sauce to one part water and cooked it down with the pasta.

Sauce-Cooked Pasta

Like anytime you cook pasta on high its going to spatter a bit. In retrospect, I should've cooked it lower for longer. I felt the pasta was a bit too al dente for my taste but I can see how some people might prefer it. The sauce really thickened up though, not just loosing the extra water I'd added.

Restaurant: Savera

2009-07-31T22:10:00.008-04:00

Food critic Joanne Kates once glowingly reviewed an Indian restaurant in Toronto. During the course of the glowing review she said how it was so nice that there was finally an Indian restaurant that catered to the upper class. All the others, you see, were centered on serving the plebeians and thus could not devote the proper resources to preparing sauces and such (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much). Savera is not the kind of chic-chic Indian place that Kates was lauding. It's a cute, small family-owned place that has good food.

Like many Indian places, I find the waiters are very attentive and are always refilling my water glass. I like having water, though the problem is I inevitably drink it whereupon it is filled up again and the cycle continues. The end result is that I leave the restaurant having had far too many glasses of water. We maybe ordered a little too much food – though its never a bad thing to have leftovers. We started off with samosa, which were solid – not great. Next we had some naan and rice (we had too much naan and not enough rice) with the Aloo Gobi, Channa Masala and Dal Makhani.

I really liked the Aloo Gobi, though then again I always like the Aloo Gobi. As always, I secretly prefer the potato element. The Dal was a little soupy, but that wasn't a problem for me when spooned over rice. The chickpeas weren't my favourite but they did a pretty good job with them. For those who like that sort of thing, the ambience was very nice: there was a lot of light and the interior was pretty. All in all, an enjoyable meal.

Savera Indian Cusine
815 St Clair Avenue West, Toronto, ON

I'm bored of cheap and cheerful

2009-07-28T21:55:00.006-04:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that the reccession is causing consumers to shift away from premium beers. And – btw – by "premium" they're referring to beers like fraking Budweiser so its even worse from a beer snobs perspective. Ironically, I'm going the other way [That's not what ironic means! Was Alanis Morisette your english teacher --ed]. I have decided to move away from cheap beer.

Oh we had some good times, cheap beer and I. I fondly remember drinking, say, warm Lakeport Honey at parties. Heck, I was drinking Lakeport before it cool: back when it was a lucky find at The Beer Store. I thought the romance would never end. But lately, I've felt a sense of estrangment from buck-a-bottles. I've been feeling this way for a while but I think what clinched it was last week when I was having some beers with my friends at our old drinking hole. We were drinking their sourbrew house ($8 a pitcher!) but after a couple of pints I felt sick. If I'm going to feel sick from drinking I expect to be drunker!

So goodbye, cheap beer. Its not like I'm going to turn into one of the aforementioned beer snobs (not that there's anything wrong with that). Probably, I'll just be drinking Steamwhistle or Sleemans or even Keiths. How will I afford it? Drink more at home/parties and less at bars. Or brew my own beer. Or brew my own mead! I can put a beehive round back.

Note to my foreign readers (yes, I do have readers in other countries or, more accurately, people who have visited TFV from other countries): Steamwhistle, Sleemans, Keiths and Lakeport are all Canadian beer companies. I guess that should be "Canadian" as Sleemans is owned by the Japanese and Keiths and Lakeport are owned by the Belgians. The Beer Store is a business that has a monopoly on selling beer in Ontario for the protection of the public. Naturally, it is also not owned by Canadian companies (although, technicially speaking no one can "own" a corporation as they are legally people). The monopoly is limited as you can buy beer from, inter alia, the LCBO: a government-controlled corporation.

Four sad vegetables and their story

2009-07-28T19:14:00.006-04:00

As I left Toronto, my parents reminded (via phone) that I could take some food back with me. I grabbed some pasta (because I was out of pasta) but I allow opened up the refrigerator to salvage some food that was just going to sit their until it got thrown out. I felt like a real humanitarian, saving those vegetables (though I guess they probably would've prefer a slow rot than a fast burn). I retreived an old cauliflower, a fragment of a red onion, part of a cabbage and a piece of celery that was actually holding up pretty well.

I decided I would turn these into a meal. Unfortunately, it did not end as well as I hoped. I decided that you, the reader, might be tired of my 3CSBOOS (curry/cumin/cayenne/small bit of other spice, pronounced three cees booze) method of cooking so I decided to do some experimenting.

Four Vegetable Experiment

1 onion, chopped

The four vegetables above (say 1/4 cabbage, 1/2 red onion, medium cauliflower and 1/2 celery stack)

1 carrot, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 tbsp vineger

1 teaspoon chili paste

1 teaspoon black bean paste

Rice

Start cooking the rice – I used my rice method. This gives a 20 minute opportunity to cook the vegetables on medium-high. I added the onions to the pan and started steaming the cauliflower. 5 minutes later I added the red onion and celery. 5 minutes after that, the carrot. 5 minutes after that the garlic, cabbage, steamed cauliflower and sauces. I cooked it for 5 minutes until the rice was done.

Serves 2

So what went wrong? In a word, blandness. Now, I liked the vegetables fine but there was no kick. I had made a rocky mistake and underspiced, fearing an outcome that was too salty or too vinegary. But all is not lost! Note the "serves 2". Tomorrow, I will reheat the leftovers and add more flavourings. Hopefully, it will be a better dish.

Restaurant: Mexitaco

2009-07-27T22:32:00.005-04:00

Mexitaco is a wretched little restaurant. That means that this review will be less promotional than the others I have written, therefore there will be none of the accoutrement in other reviews. To make up for that, I will write up the evening akin to the game of Fortunately/Unfortunately.

Fortunately, I was going to Nazereth with my friends.
Unfortunately, it was closed for renovations.
Fortunately, that meant that, hopefully, when it reopened there would be more room.
Unfortunately, we didn't have anywhere to eat and we were hungry.
Fortunately, there was a mexican place nearby.
Unfortunately, one of my friends had a bad feeling about it and didn't want to go inside.
Fortunately, we convinced him it would be good.
Unfortunately, we were very wrong.
Fortunately, we didn't know that yet and had some delicious guacomole (though as Chris Rock says you shouldn't get credit for shit you supposed to do and its easy to make good guacomole).
Unfortunately, the entrees were about $10 each (way overpriced for the quality as we shall see).
Fortunately, the rice was alright.
Unfortunately, the burrito that I ordered had not-particularly-great beans and as for the vegetables... The vegetables were insipid carrots, peas and lima beans whose flavour had been cruelly boiled away. I thought I had gone to a Mexican restaurant – not WASP family dinner from the 1950s.
Fortunately, well actually there weren't any more fortunatelys there...
Unfortunately, there was a piece of chicken clinging to the bottom of my friend's quesadilla. When we brought it up the waitress basically shrugged it off. Then, after we'd paid for the $42 meal amongst the 3 of us with 3 twenties, she had the chutzpah to ask if we wanted change.
Fortunately, I bought a cheap Korean dvd from a random Korean dvd store afterwards.
Unfortunately, I then walked past Tacos El Asador which would've been a far better restaurant.

Mexitaco
No, I'm not giving an address – I'm not going to make it easier for people to find this awful place

Restaurant: Khmer Thai

2009-07-26T23:18:00.006-04:00

It's a bit disingenuous of me to review Khmer Thai as a restaurant. Sure, it has my usual likes in a restaurant: not expensive, a little shabby and vegetarian selections but that's not why I go.

I only go to eat a Cambodian tofu dish I used to eat all the time back in Kingston. Alas, I haven't been able to get back to Kingston recently and thus have not been able to have the real thing at Cambodiana Restaurant. I had it last when I was in town for a wedding, staying at my grandfather's empty condominium. Everything had been cleared out for his move to Toronto, leaving rooms hauntingly devoid of anything. I sat on the floor (as there were no tables), eating the tofu with a plastic spoon (as there was not cutlery) and hoping not to drop anything and stain the carpet. That's a rather long winded way of saying that since then I have to get my spicy basil-chili-tofu fix at Khmer Thai:

I generally don't like sweetness in my meals but this dish combines sweet, sour and hot beautifully together. If this dish doesn't sound appealing to you, I can't recommend this restaurant in good conscience. After all, I'm only in it for the tofu.

Khmer Thai
1018 St Clair Avenue West, Toronto, Ontario

More Absorption

2009-07-23T17:22:00.004-04:00

In what I hope won't become a trend, I'm going to yet again recap one of my earlier entries– infusion pasta. I could say that the recipe below is sufficiently distinguishable from the first post – which is true – but that's not the whole story. Really, I don't know if the first post made the best argument for absorption pasta. Firstly, the picture is kinda ugly. If a parodist wanted to aim low and lampoon my blog they would probably start by noting the number of dishes that resemble some sort of brown (or dark orange) mess on a plate. When I'm trying to preach a new form of pasta making I should've probably led with a more vibrant colour (to say nothing of grounding it in tradition with tomato sauce). Secondly, its about twice as fast because you don't need to boil the water first. Thirdly, you don't have to bother with straining the pasta. Straining isn't the end of the world but its difficult if you have a full sink and a big pot. WIth this method, it just goes right on your plate. Finally, I mentioned that it was a better method for the environment but didn't break it down: If everyone in the US cooked pasta this way it would save half a million gallons of oil. Here I use whole what pasta – you don't need to of course – which I think really benefits from this style of cooking:

Whole Wheat Absorption Pasta with Tomato Sauce

Pasta

1 cup whole wheat pasta

2 cups liquid
Tomato Sauce

1 can (28 ounces) tomatoes

1 large carrot, chopped

1 onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

Sautée the onion in the oil on medium-high for a few minutes. Put some oil in a pot, turn to high and add the pasta and then the liquid. Cook for the normal pasta cooking time. Normally I use stock, but for this meal I used a mixture of 1 part chickpea liquid to 1 part water (from cooking dried chickpeas, not that awful liquid from a can. More on that story later). I turned out quite well, I think. Meanwhile add the garlic, carrot and then the tomatoes to the onions. Turn down to medium and simmer for about 10 minutes. Puree and pour some over the pasta.

Serves 1, but its easily scalable.

Observent persons may notice that there are no mentions of mushrooms in the recipe, yet the picture shows mushrooms. That's because I made the pasta sauce in advance (that recipe will sauce many different meals) and sauteed some mushrooms for this meal. I don't know if I'd really recommend having three burners on the go as a routine matter as I did talk up environmental considerations.

"Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat"

2009-07-19T11:06:00.007-04:00

I've always compared vegetarianism to Judaism, we look down on those less observant but think those more observant than us are crazy (I guess I'd proably be a equivalent of Conservative; the vegans are Lubavitchers). Yet veganism does have a compelling intellectual draw for vegetarians. If its wrong to eat a chicken, then why is it right to eat its eggs produced as they are by a killing of male chicks and locking the female ones up in a tiny cage where they are treated horribly? I don't have a particularly good answer for that, though I guess I can say I'd never, for example, murder a Congolese child but I did buy a cellphone that is produced, in part, by the death and exploitation of people in the Congo. There are actually long periods of time I am effectively vegan, I don't eat out that often and I don't usually use a lot of animal products in my house. Now is not one of those times though, I took the advice of my co-workers and bought some eggs. While you can use eggs for many things, I'd like to sing the praises of the softboiled egg. Many people don't particularly care for egg yolks, but they are glorious here: like silky delicious lava.

Soft-Boiled Eggs

Egg

Boil water in a small pot. Place the egg in the pot with a spoon and set it to a simmer. Cook for about 4 minutes and extract the egg.

Serves 1.

Let us have lentils

2009-07-16T20:05:00.002-04:00

So I've had this blog for – what – a month? And I'm already doing another dahl recipe. But I guess there are sufficient enough differences. The usual caveats about inauthenticity apply. Though, of course, the concept of inauthenticity itself is quite problematic. I once read a review of a Toronto Indian restaurant praising it as "authentic" while slamming other Toronto Indian restaurants as "inauthentic". The highlighted item had chili peppers, potatoes and tomatoes in it: all foods from the Americas and thus recent arrivals in India.

Dahl With Lettuce

1/4 cup red lentils

1 cup water or stock

1/4 cup rice

oil or butter

1 onion, diced

1 chili pepper, minced

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup lettuce, chopped

1/2 tbsp curry powder

1/2 tbsp cumin
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, maybe using this blog's rice recipe.

Sautee the onions on medium-high in the oil or butter for ten minutes. Add the garlic and chilli and cook for 5 minutes. With a few minutes left add the lettuce

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

Serves 1.

Is There No Lemon Balm In Gilead?

2009-07-15T00:42:00.003-04:00

As I've mentioned I have a bit of a garden. It's tiny, but I get some food out of it. My neighbours, on the other hand, have a gigantic garden – one even vaster than I thought because it also takes up a hill on a side of their property (as I wrote "their property" I mentally felt one of my professors hitting me upside the head). Occasionally, some of the garden's bounty will end up with me, e.g. some of the chili plants came from there. The other day, we were talking about the herb section of her garden and I received some lemon balm. Lemon balm is an herb that can be turned into a delicious, calming tea. It wasn't the only thing in the garden that was tea-worthy: Catnip, apperently, can become a medicinal tea. Tastes awful though.

Lemon Balm Tea

Lemon Balm Leaves

Boiling Water
Add 2 tablespoons of fresh leaves for each cup of boiling water.

The tea had a nice subtle lemon flavour. I'm currently letting some of the leaves dry out and will try it again with dried leaves (where the proportion is 1 tablespoon per cup of boiling water).

The Red Pill is a Lie

2009-07-14T01:14:00.004-04:00

Ezra Klein has a great post up at the IFA (actually I found it first at his Washington Post blog, but as this is a foodblog I should probably link likewise). The backstory is that a foodie sneered at another foodie for liking an upscale chain restaurant. The sneeree challanged the sneerer to visit said restaurant and if they didn't enjoy the Miso Salmon the sneeree would buy 15 copies of the sneerer's book. The sneerer lost.

As Klein says:
Foodies have an unfortunate tendency to alight on a Unified Field Theory of Corporate Food: It’s bad for the environment and bad for workers and bad for animals and bad for waistlines and, above all that, a fraud, because it also tastes bad. This would be convenient, if true. If people weren’t actually enjoying what they were eating, then getting them to change their eating habits would be pretty easy. But it’s not true, of course. They keep going back to the Cheesecake Factory because, well, they like it.

This rings very true to me. I like the cookbooks I have, but they have the annoying habit of saying stuff like "this is so much better than the stuff you'll get in restaurants" and such, but often its not necessarily true. For example, the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favourites says of their Asian Noodle Soup: "This soup is so much better than the freeze-dried ramen noodle sopus in the supermarket, there is no comparison. And you'll feel good that your soup is filled with fresh wholesome ingredients instead of who knows what." Well, the second part may be true but the first part an overstatement at best and just wrong at worst. Raman noodles are, in fact, often better and always comparable.* Which makes sense. When you pack your food with lots of fats and salt they are going to have a inherent taste advantage. That doesn't mean you can't overcome it, but often a lot of the, say, organistas are blind to that simple fact.

Klein's solution is mandatory nutrition labelling for restaurants. Although interesting it might have some downsides. It could impose costs on smaller restaurants that chain restaurants could absorb easier, leading to more chain domination. More ominously it could backfire. Hardee's has embarked on a corporate strategy of embracing their unhealthiness. They flaunt their Monster Thickburger's 1,400+ calories and 107 grams of fat and use the outrage about it to sell burgers. I don't know if I have a solution, but it seems like changing the way we pour billions of dollars into agribusiness might be a good start.

*Plus, the ramen noodles are very cheap and just go in boiling water. The Asian Noodle Soup recipe has a crazy Rube Goldberg construction where part of the recipe is on another page and part of that recipe is on yet another page.

Ketchup Soup!

2009-07-12T18:34:00.008-04:00

So all of my past entries have been about soup. This is not entirely a coincidence. I made a big pot of stock, so now I have ready-made broth for all kinds of different soups. Given that all of the soups have yielded leftovers, I suspect I'll be eating (or should that be drinking?) soup for quite some time. Today's meal sounds pretty ghetto*, even for me: especially given the story of how I acquired the ketchup. I wanted some ketchup to put on my veggie burgers so I asked a friend to give me some of her ketchup packages when she bought a lunch. She did, though I was roundly mocked for of it. Still, mockery is worth getting free food. Today's recipe is modified from Mark Bittman's Egg Noodles With Soy Broth so it was probably not entirely on the level for me to go with the title I picked. Still, ketchup is the most unusual ingredient in it. It adds a nice flavour to the soup, but is by no means as overpowering as I feared it might be when I was cooking.

Noodles with Soy-Ketchup Broth

3 cups water/stock

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp ketchup

1/2 tablespoon rice vinegar

A few drops sesame oil

1 chili, diced

1/2 pound noodles (but see below)

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it. Bring 3 cups of liquid to a boil. I didn't want to go full on stock with this, so I cut 1c stock with 2 cups water. One the stock/water mixture is boiling turn the heat down so the water is only gently bubbling: add the soy sauce, ketchup, vinegar and diced chili. Stir and let simmer. Add the noodles to large pot and cook until they're done, so not yet mushy. Divide noodles into bowls and pour in the broth. Sprinkle with sesame oil.

Serves 2 but without adding something like tofu this isn't a very substantial meal (I had more food after). I'd recommend using this as a starter and serving more people with it.

I actually have no idea how much 1/2 lb of noodles is so I just eyeballed how much Bittman used, and used half that. I probably could've added more. In lieu of sriracha sauce or a dried chili, I used one from my garden.

*I use the term ghetto only in the most respectful sense, e.g. "When I was at Queen's I lived in the student ghetto".

Fiery Chickpea Soup

2009-07-11T18:28:00.007-04:00

Mere days after I derided Ben Thanh's "spicy for white people" labelling policy, I fell into the same track with this post's headline. Think of the soup as "Fiery for White People Chickpea Soup". It's got a nice, but not strong, heat to it. I adapted the recipe from The Paupered Chef crowd over at Serious Eats (who in turn adapted it from here who adapted it from here. It's turtles all the way down). The soup is orginally called Tunisian Chickpea Soup, but given that I'm using an asian chili paste I don't know if I should claim that.

Fiery Chickpea Soup

1/2 large onion, chopped

Oil

14 ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 1/2 cups stock

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon red chili paste, I used Lee Kum Kee's Guilin Chili Sauce

Salt

Pour the oil into a soup pot and turn the heat to medium. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Add the garlic, cook for a minute, and then add the chickpeas, cumin, stock and chili paste. Simmer for 30 minutes. Season with salt, and serve.

Serves 2

Red Lentil Soup

2009-07-10T18:45:00.004-04:00

One of my favourite recipes is also one of the simplest and most proasically named. Naturally it involves lentils. The original was from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day and over the years I have honed the recipe done into simpler and simpler versions. Simple does not mean simplistic, after all. Like chess. Or this recipe.

Red Lentil Soup

1 1/2 cups red lentils

6 cups vegetable stock

5 garlic cloves

2 medium carrots (1 cup)

1 cup canned tomatoes or 1 chopped medium fresh tomato

1 small red or green bell pepper (1/2 cup)

1 1/2 cups choped onions

2 teaspoons cumin

2 teaspoons curry powder

couple of shakes of cinnamon

pinch of cayenne

2 tablespoons soy sauce or lemon juice

Put lentils, stock and garlic in a soup pot, cover and bring to high heat. Chop the vegetables and add to the pot. Bring to a boil, stir and reduce heat. Add the spices. Simmer for 15 minutes, or longer if lentils are not tender. Add the lemon juice or soy sauce. Let sit and blend. Puree, reheat and serve.

Serves 4-6.

You don't actually have to puree this, but I don't like the texture of the lentils if you don't. I guess you could cook the lentils seperately in, say, 3 cups of the stock and then transfer them back into the soup. I had an interesting experience pureeing this particular soup as it hiccoughed some soup out of the top. That's funny, I thought, I guess I didn't attach the lid right. So I tightened the lip and turned it on again. More soup sputtered out. Would that happen again? I wondered. This time the blender vomited up soup all over my kitchen as I tried to turn it off without getting a facefull of hot soup. I guess there's a moral there.

Restaurant: Ben Thanh

2009-07-08T19:42:00.008-04:00

Ben Thanh was alright. Is there any more boring way of starting a review? A praiseful review's lyrical prose can make you almost taste the food; a biting review can schadenfreudeistically mince up a place like an onion. Ben Thanh's not bad but not great either. The price's are also alright, in the $9 for an entree range. Alright, but again that's not a great price. To be fair to them, I enjoyed it a lot more the first time I went. When I went on Sunday I had the Saigon Chow Mein so it was probably my fault. I fell into the "spicy for white people" trap, where such restaurants list their mild stuff as medium and their medium stuff as hot. So it was too bland, plus the noodles were too eggy [you didn't like the fact that egg noodles were eggy?! --ed]. The broccoli was great though (though I'm a cheap date with broccoli, doesn't take much to make me like them). Plus, I was looking to go somewhere else but the two restaurants I checked were closed on Sundays (ick).

My parents both had leftovers – a noodle dish and a tofu dish – which they didn't want to cart back to Toronto. So I took them home and poured the tofu and the sauce into the noodles and – like magic! – turned it into a kind of soup. The soup was a lot better than my entree. The tofu was a bit rubbery, but the vegetables were good and it even had a bit of a kick to it. I even ate half of it cold because I like cold spicy things.

Actually just thinking about the soup made me change the name of this post from "Pho-Gettable" to the blander title it has now. The downside is that I might have locked myself in for the banal "Restaurant: [Restaurant's Name]" formula for restaurant reviews. But I don't want to knock it – I've enjoyed most of what I had there (over my two visits and the leftovers) and they have 2 pages of vegetarian options.

Ben Thanh
57 York Street London, Ontario

CSI: My Kitchen

2009-07-05T19:59:00.004-04:00

I awoke the day after Canada Day eager to have some toast. That's funny, I thought to myself, I don't remember tearing the bread covering open with my claws and then devouring it on the floor... scattering crumbs and remnants everywhere. After surveying the scene I also didn't remember ripping open all of my staples and scattering them about either.

Surveying the damage, the intruder had ate my bread and torn through my pasta, cornmeal, lentils (two types) and barley. I decided to throw everything that was pawed through out, given some the diseases animals carry. So I guess I draw my frugal line at "might contain brain-eating parasites".

The intruder entered through the window, I guess I hadn't secured the screen enough. At this point I'm guess it was a raccoon, squirrel or crackhead. A crackhead who wanted bread I guess.

Half Baked

2009-07-01T19:50:00.005-04:00

I'm not much of a baker (aside from rice that is). Calling myself an intuitive cook might flatter me, but I have a very ad hoc approach to cooking. You can get away with that with cooking. Baking though, is a science. I have a series of horrible baking disasters under my belt that would make your hair turn white if you were really into baking or just generally very sensitive. Still, I had promised I'd bring in something for all of us working on Canada Day so I made some of my mom's peanut butter cookies:

Irresistible Peanut Butter Cookies

3/4 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup butter

1 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 egg

3 tbsp milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 3/4 cup flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

Preheat to 375°
1. Cream peanut buter, butter, sugar, egg, milk and vanilla in large bowl until smooth and creamy.
2. Combine four, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed mixture gradually, beating at low speed until thoroughly blended.
3. Drop by rounded tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets. I f desired press wit fork
4. Bake at 375 for 7-8 minutes or until set and just beginning to brown. Cool slightly, then remove to cooling rack
If you want, you can add chocolate chips at the end of mixing--about a cup.

Given what I said above, you can assume everything did not go perfectly. It did not. Kids, here's a simple tip for baking. Check whether you have the ingredients before you start baking. I did not. I didn't have any brown sugar, milk or vanilla extract though these could be replaced by, respectively, white sugar, water and nothing. As I was mixing everything together I noticed I didn't have enough flour or sugar. I decided to eyeball the baking soda and add a heaping 1/2 tsp. I ended up cooking them slightly longer in the oven but they turned out good. So I guess this story has a happy ending.

Fajita Night!

2009-06-29T17:39:00.009-04:00

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

2009-06-28T18:26:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-27T19:14:00.006-04:00

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

2009-06-23T18:55:00.004-04:00

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

2009-06-22T00:49:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-20T22:55:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-20T02:08:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-18T16:46:00.001-04:00

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)

Zheng bai dou fu

2009-06-17T18:09:00.000-04:00

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'

2009-06-17T18:04:00.000-04:00

June 11th:

June 16th

Mulligan Soup

2009-06-16T17:37:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-14T01:21:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-13T16:56:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-12T01:17:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-10T19:15:00.000-04:00

"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"

2009-06-09T22:16:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-09T20:28:00.002-04:00

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.