White beans with Kale

Cannellini beans work very well with kale, and in this gentle recipe they combine to form a warm and satisfying dish.

4 cups cannellini beans, dry
2 package dino kale
2 tsp olive oil
juice from 1 lemon
1 tsp salt
handful sage leaves
1 tsp herbs de provence

Soak beans in water (for hours if possible; if not, soak briefly in boiling water).
Tear kale leaves into little pieces, getting stems out of the way. Add 1 tsp olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and massage leaves until tender, dark green, and not bitter anymore. Set aside.

Meanwhile, drain beans, add fresh water to cover them, and cook until tender.

Mix beans with kale, sprinkling sage and herbs de provence on dish.

Green Salad and Red Salad

Two of my favorite vegetable salads: a green one with avocado and grapefruit, and a tomato-mint based red one.

Green Salad

1 large package mixed greens, or 50/50 mixed greens with baby spinach
2 ripe avocados
2 red grapefruits
1 tbsp good quality mustard
1 tsp olive oil
juice from 1/2 lemon
3 tbsp water

Peel and dice avocados and grapefruit. Toss with mixed greens in big bowl. Shortly before serving, mix remaining four ingredients and drizzle over salad.

Red Salad

10 Roma tomatoes
6 radishes
1/2 red onion
juice from 1 lemon
1 tsp olive oil
handful mint leaves

This one works best with very thin slices, so strive for those as you slice tomatoes, radishes, and onion. Place in bowl in layers and drizzle lemon juice and olive oil on top. Sprinkle thinly ribboned mint leaves.

Two-Step Spicy Green Beans

In 2009 I backpacked in China with my friend Rosie. When we arrived in Xi'an to see Emperor Qin Shi Huang's terracotta army, we found the city just as fascinating, complete with a beautiful Muslim quarter with mosques. The food in the Muslim quarter was spicier than anywhere else we went; Rosie could not even eat the green beans because they contained more chiles than beans! But we did like the flavor very much, enough to try and replicate it upon our return with just a tad less heat.

It turns out that the special flavor and texture of the beans requires a two-step process. The excellent resource Serious Eats explains that, in China, this comes from deep-frying the beans as Step 1. They suggest, instead, broiling the beans before tossing them with the aromatics. Alas, I don't have a broiler, so I tossed the beans in a very hot dry pan (no oil at all) until I charred them, and then tossed them with the remaining ingredients.

4 cups green beans
10 shiitake mushrooms
1 chile
2 tbsp chopped scallions
1 tsp grated ginger
1 tsp grated garlic
1 tbsp Bragg's Liquid Aminos or soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil

Trim edges off green beans. Heat a dry pan, and when it's very hot, toss beans in. Keep moving the beans in the pan until you can see some searing on all the beans. Remove from pan.

Add oil and thinly sliced chili to pan. Heat for a couple of minutes, then reduce heat and add scallions, ginger, garlic, and Bragg's. Cook for another two minutes. Add mushrooms and toss around until soft. Then add beans and toss a bit. Serve hot right away!

Vegan Chocolate Pots-de-Creme

Tonight I'm serving dinner for 20; my seminar students are coming over for our last class. Lots of beautiful salads, grains, legumes, roasted vegetables and other exciting things in the making; the first thing to be prepared and in the fridge is dessert.

My friend Andrea forwarded me a recipe for pots-de-creme, and I've modified it a bit and made enormous quantities. The following will leave you with a blenderful of creme, which you can serve in nice glass cups, pour into little filo dough ramekins (that's what we did here), or freeze for ice cream.

2 packages tofu: I used one silken and one firm. Soft would do just as fine.
2 1/4 cups unsweetened vanilla almond milk
1 package (approx 2 cups) dark chocolate chips
2 tbsp baking cocoa
optional: 2 tbsp brown sugar or maple syrup

Heat almond milk in saucepan until very hot but not yet boiling. At the same time, place tofu, chips, cocoa powder and sugar in blender. Add hot milk and blend until very very smooth. Refrigerate for several hours before serving.

Red Lentil Stew

This stew is so simple and incredibly tasty. I made it after a long day of eating less-then-optimal food at a work event (bagels for breakfast, sandwiches and chips for lunch; would you like more starch with your starch?). After learning lots of interesting things, and collaborating with others in a new initiative that, it is hoped, will make the world just a bit better, I worked out and then decided to make something warm and nice for dinner. It's a pretty red soup, but to my surprise it doesn't become beet-pink. I bet the leftovers will be even better at lunch tomorrow!

2 cups red lentils
4 large carrots
3 large zucchini
3 medium-sized beets
4 large shiitake mushrooms
2 bay leaves
2 tbsp dried vegetable powder
1 tbsp baharat
1 tsp salt

Dice all vegetables. Place in pot and cover with hot water. Cook for at least 30 minutes; the longer this cooks, the better, and you might need to add some water once the lentils drink it up.

What I'd Really Like for my Birthday

As the semester reaches its usual boiling point, I think of home as a place of rest and repose. Which is why, for my birthday, which happened this weekend, I didn't actually want to do anything special. Still, many special things happened. We had a wonderful dinner at Greens. I got a beautiful white orchid from my friend Raul and a vegan chocolate cake and a snazzy handmade dress from reclaimed sweaters and a gorgeous mug for my morning tea from Chad. And my parents funded my new Vitamix, which is a source of endless cooking magic. And this morning, my beloved friend Dena sent me a fermenting book, Amanda Feifer's Ferment Your Vegetables. I can't wait to make my own kimchi!

I have everything I could possibly need, live happily and want for nothing. But if you really, really want to give me a birthday gift, please exclude meat, cheese, and eggs from a meal, or two, or five, or all of them, this week. There is nothing that will make me happier than more animals that will get to live thanks to this simple action. Thank you!

Chamin 3.0: Extreme Departure from Tradition

It's finally raining a bit in San Francisco--just in time to help our new olive tree, whom we named Habibi, to adapt to its new surroundings, and to irrigate our newly-in-the-ground purple cauliflower and brussels sprouts. Of course, this also means putting up a new chamin pot.

My prior forays into the world of chamin produced this wonderful pot and this delectable version. But today, the slow cooker includes:

1 cup azuki beans
1 cup mung beans
1/2 cup brown rice
1 sugarpie pumpkin, lightly roasted in the oven
1 big onion, chopped and lightly browned in olive oil
5 shiitake mushrooms
1 package of kale

Not quite Eastern European, but very delicious. I seasoned it with cloves, cracked cardamom pods, and a couple of spoonfuls of dried vegetable powder, and covered with hot water for a long cooking time (4 hours on high, 10 more hours on low). The nice thing about layering the ingredients neatly in the pot  is that you can serve yourself whatever you like and leave behind things you like less. In my case, this is not a problem, as I like everything!

Homemade Pita

Who doesn't like a fresh pita, straight from the oven? If you don't, it's because you've been eating thin, inadequate North-American ones, not the fluffy Middle-Eastern ones. Chad got this recipe from Aba Gil, who now has a gluten-free, vegan deli in Tel Aviv. Before his gluten-free phase, Aba Gil had a wonderful organic humusserie, which we used to frequent when we lived in Israel. And he taught (and still teaches) great workshops. Chad attended one of those and kept the recipe for posterity; today we made some of these and ate them with fragrant ful, jalapeno"cheese", and vegetables.

Anyway, here goes:

Mix and knead a bit:

500g flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 packet active yeast
350cc water (about 12oz)

These will create a firm dough - for those of you used to baking non-pita bread in a pan, the dough will be firmer than your remember. You should exercise some judgment with the water; you might not need all of it. Place dough in a bowl, cover with a towel, and leave somewhere warm for an hour (we used our old oven, with the pilot light on.)

After an hour, break the dough, which should be pretty gargantuan by now, into six balls of aproximately 4-5 inch diameters, and give them a bit of a mushroom cap shape. The original recipe calls for letting those sit for an additional 40 mins, but our meticulous experiments prove you can wait only 10 mins or so and that's enough.

When ready to make, roll the balls into 8-9 diameter flat discs, approximately 1cm (2/5 inch) thick.

Heat a dry frying pan to a very, very, very hot temperature! Place the pita on the pan and wait for it to balloon up (that's the pocket, you see). Flip so that both sides are heated evenly. When ready, take out of pan and enjoy warm and fresh.

Jalapeño "Cheese"

This one is very, very, very easy, and is an excellent sandwich filling. Highly recommended!

1/2 package firm tofu
2 jalapeño peppers
a bit of lemon juice
a bit of salt

Open the jalapeños and get as many seeds out as you like (the more you leave in, the spicier it will be). Place them in blender or food procesor with tofu, lemon juice, and salt to taste; blend/mix until homogenous and pink. Note that the image shows it on homemade pita; recipe forthcoming.

Pumpkin Bread

Pumpkin bread!

We used the basic recipe from the Minimalist Baker and made a few substitutions - doubling the recipe and using ingredients we happened to have at home. The method of preparation is the same, but our ingredients were:

1 cup jaggery

6 tbsp olive oil

3tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

pinch sea salt

pinch chana masala seasoning

1 cup soy milk

2.5 cups whole-grain flour blend (we used about 40% oat, 25% buckwheat,  25% brown rice, 10% arrowroot powder)

1/2 cup currants

1/2 cup roasted walnuts

1 tbsp flax

3 tbsp water

We served it with a dollop of cashew cream on top (unsweetened, but with a tad of vanilla extract) and some fresh kiwi on the side.

Winter Is Coming Garden Soup

Growing vegetables in a small plot, or in windowsill boxes, is easy, cheap, and very gratifying. In Tel Aviv, I grew herbs in boxes on my balcony; in El Cerrito, I had a little plot in the back yard. Here in Mission Terrace we grow vegetables all around the garden, surrounded by flowers and, sometimes, by curious cats. But one of our favorite vegetable growing spots is in the L-shaped plot around our house. We don't have, never have, and never will have, a lawn; instead, we have fruit trees and a variety of California natives (the yerba buena is particularly aromatic and gladdens our neighbors; several of them have mentioned how much they like to walk by and smell our plants). The advantage of natives, beyond their beauty, is their adaptive nature; they deal better with the drought than other plants, and certainly better than water-intensive lawns, many of which are now dry in California.

[As an aside, brown lawns have become a bit of a status symbol in the Bay Area, n'est ces pas? It saddens me a bit that we're engaging in these showy water-saving displays when eating plants in lieu of animal products is the single most meaningful and important step everyone can take to save water. Eating a burger--one burger--is the equivalent of showering for two months straight. I wish the powers-that-be were less preoccupied with placating this cruel industry; if all Californians refrained from eating meat, dairy, and eggs on a fairly regular basis, much of these brown-is-the-new-green dramatics would be unnecessary.]

But back to the vegetables. Surrounded by flowers we have a vegetable plot in which we grow seasonal produce. In the picture you can see a colander full of freshly picked chard and kale (several varieties of each.) There is so much that can be done with them, but yesterday's drizzle called for some soup, so here it is:

1 pound chard, kale, and other green vegetables
1 sweet potato
1 potato
4 celery stalks
1/2 onion
1 cup Pomi or other canned tomato product (or fresh tomatoes)
Herbs de Provence to taste
(if you have any) 2 tbsp dried vegetable soup mix

Slice and dice vegetables and place in pot with Pomi, herbs, and dried vegetables. Cover with water and cook for 45 minutes.

Grilled Vegetables

 

Vegetables on the grill are so delicious that the prominence of meat in the many grilling events I've attended over the years is somewhat befuddling. All you need is some produce and a bit of creativity, as we found out yesterday at Tomales Bay. 

The sky was overcast and it was gently drizzling the whole time, but it did not deter us from going for a nice swim in the chilly bay, where we had a couple of pelicans for company. They swam and flew very close to us--how exciting!

The pelicans reminded me of how much I love Judy Irving's terrific documentary Pelican Dreams. In fact, that's the movie that pushed me to become vegan, because I realized, while learning about the environmental threats faced by these beautiful birds, that everything is interconnected, and that the best thing I could do for all animals--farm animals AND wild animals--is to stop consuming them in any form.

But back to the vegetables. After our swim, we sliced up a potato, a yam, and a red onion, removed the less-exciting parts of several green onions, sliced up two Field Roast sausages lengthwise, and removed the stems from an entire bunch of rainbow chard leaves. We set all of this up in one layer on foil, drizzling olive oil and sprinkling cumin on our bounty.

Setting up the grill is easy, but time consuming. It calls for a match, some kindling (we used splinters) and coals. We started by lifting the grid (and cleaning the ashes inside), and then by making a little fire with the splinters and doctoring it to health. This requires some patience when there's wind and a drizzle, but is certainly doable. Then, we gently and carefully placed the coals atop the little fire, taking care not to extinguish it.

The idea behind cooking on charcoal is as follows: when oxygen (in the air) meets carbon (in the charcoal), they produce CO2 (they also sometimes produce CO, carbon monoxide, which is why doing this indoors is a very bad idea.) A by-product of the chemical reaction is heat. You can tell that things are going okay by the coals starting to become white and ashen. When the process starts, it's time to put down the grid and layer the foil atop it. It helps with steaming if you cover your food with a second piece of foil.

Everything on the grill was delicious, but I was particularly fond of the chard and sweet potato. The grilling process imparted a smoky and wonderful taste, which you can sort-of-but-not-accurately recreate at home by adding liquid smoke. The big discovery was how unnecessary meat was. While the vegan sausages were great, the vegetables were terrific, and I can see us trying with eggplant, green beans, and tomato slices next time.

Finally, before heading home, don't forget to extinguish the fire!

Stop Bragging and Gloating about Eating Bacon

In the aftermath of the World Health Organization report published yesterday, which linked red and processed meat to cancer risk, several of my friends have recurred to Facebook to reiterate their commitment to stuffing their faces with bacon, because it's tasty, goddammit, and because the minuscule increase in risk is not worth giving up their delightful pleasure. As a reward for this sentiment, they get "likes", and "mmmm, bacon", and smiley emoticons.

I understand why people do this. They cling to what they know and are used to, they don't want to change, and they therefore reject new information that contradicts their old ways. It's the oldest heuristic in the Kahneman and Tversky bag of tricks. Moreover, if they post about their desire to cling to their habit, they're bound to get "likes" and other confirmations from people who are also reluctant to let go, which strengthens their resolve to stick with it.

I also understand how easy it is to ignore the realities of what one is eating as long as one is not directly confronted with them. Any disruption of this ignorance (such as a new report or a vegan's presence) reminds people of things they don't like to think about, such as that the meat on their plate once swam, walked, flew, enjoyed the sunshine, and wanted to continue living. Or that the meat on their plate came from someone who lived their lives in conditions comparable to those in a concentration camp before being deprived of life. It's not a comfortable thought; we all like to believe that we are good people, so it's easier to ignore our complicity in something horrible and go back to one's meat-eating support base and get some pats on the back.

Nonetheless, reading these posts throws me into an abyss of distress. I get that it's hard for people to let go of what was traditionally on their plate. But to take moral relish in the killing of pigs for taste? To openly revel and boast in opting for participating in the world's vilest, cruelest industry and in the suffering of living beings because it's tasty, goddammit? It's particularly disturbing when it comes from people who I know are committed to world improvement in all other aspects of their lives. From people who cry out against much lesser cruelties on a daily basis. I guess the human rights buck really stops with "human", even though the desire to live, the love of our offspring, and complex emotions of fear, pain, and suffering, are common to all of us.

When things like this happen, I'm reminded of J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. Like his heroine, Elizabeth Costello, "I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.”  But how do I cope, every day, with friends and acquaintances that I know to be kind, good, moral people, and who participate in the most horrific crime against other living beings every day without batting an eyelash, and feel it is appropriate to gloat and boast about this? It's a contradiction that is really hard to live with.

Please, open your eyes. If you cut back on animal products--or, better still,eschew them completely--the taste sacrifice you'll supposedly make is minor (as this blog proves, it's non-existent!) and you'll exit the vilest human crime on earth. The cancer prevention is just a side benefit.

Chamin 2.0: Halloween Version

I really hope some of you got to make my four-color chamin recipe from a couple of weeks ago--it really rocked. I'm posting yet again about chamin because I've made some seasonal improvements to the recipe and it came out even more wonderful (and more nutritious!) than the previous installment.

Essentially, what I did was replace the white potatoes with a squash and more carrots, making the meal more orange and less white. I also did away with the rice and put in mung beans instead. It came out phenomenal, and I'm thrilled to have a hot meal for the rest of the week!

Tofushuka

This morning I happily found a way to veganize one of my favorite egg dishes, shakshuka. Old-timer followers of this blog may recall that I once posted a shakshuka recipe here, and I've rather missed it. But FEAR NOT. It's very simple: All you have to do is, in lieu of the egg, crumble some tofu into the red sauce. The texture is a bit different, but I have to say that the taste is remarkably similar, and it delivers a heap of protein.

I'd use about 85 grams of tofu (a two-inch-by-two-inch-by-half-an-inch block) for every cup of sauce. This really requires some generosity with the sauce.

New Smoothies: Carrot Pineapple and "Poached" Pear

The new Vitamix is a thing of marvel, and it has inspired me to create new types of smoothies. Every morning I make up a new recipe. The latest two successes have been really special:

Carrot Pineapple
1 cup soymilk
1 carrot
1/2 cup pineapple chunks
1/2 cup chard
1 tsp turmeric


"Poached" Pear
1 cup almond milk
1 pear
2 plums
1/2 cup unsweetened cranberry juice
2 cloves
1 tsp cinnamon

Morning Tofu Scramble

It's been a long morning; I started working at 5am and will be working until 10pm. Fortunately, I have a brief lull getting from home to the office and managed to make myself a decent breakfast:

100gr extra-firm tofu (about 3/4 cup crumbled)
1 tbsp chopped onion
1 garlic clove, chopped
12 cherry tomatoes
2 cups chard leaves, sliced into ribbons
3 large mushrooms
1 tbsp hot sauce
1 tsp olive oil

Heat up olive oil in pan. Add onion, garlic, and mushrooms, and sautee until they soften a bit. Add chard and tomatoes and sautee a few more minutes. In a little bowl, crumble the tofu and mix with the hot sauce. Add to pan and stir fry with the vegetables. Yum!

UPDATE: Great variation - pesto sauce in lieu of the hot sauce, and a little bit of Miyoko's Kitchen mozarella! Also marvelous.

Four-Color-Chamin: Vegan and Satisfying

Despite the fact that El Niño has not arrived yet, I found myself in a winter preparatory mood (I know, I know, it's 75 degrees outside) and made chamin, the cold-weather, slow-cooked wonder my grandma used to make on Saturdays. Typically, we'd all show up, eat a fresh salad and a big plate of chamin, and then essentially collapse in a diagonal fashion and fail to move for hours. The vegan version is much lighter than the one that includes big chunks of beef and stuffed guts.

My recipe changes a bit every time I make this, but this time I decided to follow the advice of an expert and made one of Ori Shavit's recipes. I had no red quinoa, so I substituted it for red kidney beans, and included black dal and white beans as well. Here's the recipe, translated to English, with my changes and modifications:

1 cup black dal
1 cup white beans
1 cup basmati rice
1 cup kidney beans
2 russet potatoes, thickly sliced
3 sweet potatoes, thickly sliced
3 carrots, thickly sliced
1 red onion, coarsely chopped
5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
3 prunes, chopped
3 bay leaves
5 sage leaves
blackened spice to taste (I used 1 tbsp for the whole pot)
salt to taste (I used 1 tbsp for the whole pot)
7-8 peppercorns
olive oil

If possible, soak the beans and rice in water overnight; if not, no worries (this is a slow-cooked recipe.)
In a heavy pan, heat up a bit of olive oil and sautee the onion, garlic, bay leaves and safe leaves. After a few minutes, add the potatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrots, and sautee for a few more minutes. Then, place and layer that whole mixture at the bottom of a 6-quart slow cooker. On top of it, arrange the rice and beans in four distinct areas (each in every corner), add prune pieces, peppercorns, salt, and blackened spice, and carefully cover with boiling water. Set slow cooker to "high" for three hours. Then, add boiling water to cover again, and set slow cooker to "low"for twelve hours.

This improves when reheated, refrigerates and freezes wonderfully, in case you don't have a horde of people coming over for the weekend.

Almond "Feta"

This was a massive pantry day! We made three loaves of seitan--Italian, Berbere, and Cajun--and froze most of them. And I also made almond "feta", which is now happily brining in the fridge.

The recipe comes from Miyoko Schinner's The Homemade Vegan Pantry, which is turning out to be an extremely useful resource. Here's the process:

Step 1

2 cups blanched almonds
1 cup liquid from sauerkraut
a bit of salt

I soaked the almonds for a few hours in water, then drained them and processed in the blender with the liquid and salt. I poured the remaining mixture into a container and put it on the counter to culture. With the warm weather we had, it cultured the following day! (how do you know? you taste it to figure if it's tangy.)

Step 2

2/3 cup water
2 tbsp agar powder

I simmered these together on low heat until the agar dissolved and solidified. Then, I turned off the heat, added the almond mixture, and whisked. I then poured the mixture into a container lined with cheesecloth and placed it in the fridge for a few hours.

Step 3

water
salt

The cheese is ready and solid! I cut it into four pieces and placed them in a different container, pouring salt water on top. I'm told it will be wonderful and improve as time goes by.

Oh, and just for fun - here's what we had for dinner: fresh sourdough with hummus and mature ful, green ful lightly steamed with lemon juice and za'atar, caprese with vegan mozzarella from Miyoko's Kitchen, and a cucumber-dill salad. It was atrociously hot and this is all we could manage. The only thing here that might not be obvious is the ful topping on the hummus, but all there was to it was opening a can and sauteeing it a bit with sliced onion and some baharat.

UPDATE: The cheese came out wonderful!

Step-By-Step Seitan

I've been wanting to make homemade seitan for a while, ever since I took Psalm Lewis' wonderful cooking class. At that workshop, we made vegan pot pie with seitan made from scratch--it's not difficult, and with all the ingredients on hand you can have a nice and reliable protein source for cheap. This morning I bought some vital wheat gluten and other essentials and followed Psalm's recipe:

Ingredients

Step 1:
1 cup vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
 2 tsp baharat (I did that in lieu of poultry seasoning, but I imagine anything meatlike would do)
1 tsp mashed garlic (the original recipe calls for garlic powder)
1 tsp paprika
3/4 cup cooked and mashed beans (I used black-eyed peas, which is what I had around the house)
1 tbsp Bragg's liquid aminos

Step 2:
broth or bouillion or dried vegetables

I measured and mixed the dry ingredients, then added the wet ingredients, and kneaded them into a ball--actually, more of a loaf shape--which I then left to rest for 15 minutes.

I then made some broth, placed the loaf in it wrapped in cheesecloth, and let that simmer for 30 minutes.

Then, I let the content of the pot cool somewhat before taking the seitan out of it.

I let the seitan cool completely before slicing it into 1/4-inch cubes, some of which I froze and some placed in the fridge for immediate use. Yum!

Update: Here are some of the seitan chunks in a nice tomato-based ragu. It came out absolutely delicious.