Crema

enjoy now or taste the bitter

The fall weather means that the oven starts getting back into shape for all the use it will get throughout the winter. Mac&Cheese was the taste on our minds and we luckily had some very fine cheeses left by friends at our baby shower. The left-hand cheese is a lightly aged gouda and the right-hand cheese is a sharp white cheddar. We made a rich, creamy roux that was seasoned with powdered mustard, Worcestershire (the non-anchovy kind), black pepper, cayenne, and a touch of salt. Half of a box of frozen spinach was defrosted, drained, chopped, and mixed into the roux before we poured it over the cooked penne.

The topping is a mix of panko bread crumbs and parmesan that cooked to a crunchy golden brown.  This will be a repeat in the next few months for sure.

When the weather cools we start upping the frequency of soups. This was a new recipe for us, a lightly spicy corn chowder. The most interesting technique in this soup was the cooking of a split jalapeno and then removing it before finishing the soup with milk. Jalapeno tea? All I have to say is that the spice was just right.

The air has a definite chill to it in the last week, and the mornings are letting us know that fall is coming soon, and fall means slow cooking, soups, stews, and tons of our favorite recipes. This was our first try at making joes from scratch. For the chewy bits we used brown lentils, and they worked out just fine.

For those of you who are concerned with the finer points of dining, coleslaw is a necessary component of sloppy joe dining and must be eaten on the same fork as your joes. We thought we had some prepared dressing for coleslaw, but once we began cooking we discovered that we were out! Internet to the rescue — we used an online recipe we found here that worked out terrifically. Two notes about this version, 1.) we were out of celery seed, so we used 1/4 cup of finely chopped fresh celery, and 2.) the creole seasoning we used is this one. If you haven’t made friends at least once with Konriko on a pizza then you should try it. Amazing.

One other note about the bread. We use regular buns, not the hippie whole wheat thousand grain full of the earth power buns, and we do it for one reason: size. Healthy breads tend to be monstrous, dwarfing almost anything you might want to put on top of them. So we use plainjane white buns because they work better. Okay, maybe we used the whole grain white buns, but size was the deciding factor.

From the Veggie Times low-fat and fast cookbook, these spiced black bean cakes were just the right thing the other night. There are minced onion, cumin, coriander, cilantro, bread crumbs, and a bit of egg.

The salsa was a little less saucy than normal because the mangos weren’t as ripe, but the tartness was a cool change. There is ginger, onion, bell pepper, lime, and cilantro all chopped up and ready to go.

We had a lot of extra corn tortillas from some other meal and so we made some fresh chips with salt for the side. Tasty.

At our old place we used to have people pass by with coolers filled with fresh tamales. They always smelled great, but they were also pork or beef or chicken only. We had some amazing blue corn tamales with some friends in Colorado this summer and we were determined to make some of our own.

Autumn is coming soon, so we’re trying to get down with tubers, roots, all the really fantastic warm and rich foods that start really popping up as we approach the fall.

I have to admit that my form is terrible, and next time we will add more water to the dough and steam the tamales for less time, but we would up making 30 tamales filled with yams, bell pepper, onion, corriander, white pepper, cilantro, and salt. The smell they started making at 30 minutes into the steaming was awesome!

The recipe is from the Autumn 2000 issue of Veggie Life.

When you choose to be a strict vegetarian in America then you choose to feel excluded. I get that. It’s a self-imposed exile from a place your friends, your family, nearly everyone you meet visits daily. I have to admit that I miss the amazing flavors that meat can bring to dishes, but I’ve made peace with missing out on that for the social, political, moral, and health benefits of abstaining from killing sentient things as much as we can.

There’s another dimension we’ve been discovering lately, and it’s related to hospitality, generosity, and prosperity. The dominant American culture of eating meat says that the lack of meat at a shared dinner table means a lack of all three to your guest. Meat equals money, and if you’re not sharing it you’re being rude, greedy, and perhaps you are poor. So when our friends, many of whom are fabulous cooks (some even deserving of actual gourmet foodie status), want to share with us the ‘good stuff’ they cannot. We go to visit with friends, enjoy their company, and then tell them we are not accepting their very real and delicious offers of hospitality, generosity, and prosperity. By choice. At nearly every meal we share. That’s a complication, a lingering foreign-ness that our friends and family most likely do not encounter with anyone else they share food with and we always hope that we’re aware of the weirdness and thankful that they can still hang with us.

Because we are veg, eating at ethnic restaurants together is a good time. We get a variety of choices that are tasty, and these restaurants often serve food family style, meant to be ordered as a group and shared. But if we go out with friends there will usually be no sharing. There’s the meat side of the table and the non-meat side. No way to share the wealth of friendship with food there and another strong reminder of our choices.

After being veg for this long we’re pretty sure it’s not a fad. In fact we’re kind of amazed at our stubbornness. Honesty, if you saw the food we have to turn down sometimes, you’d be amazed too. But we’re sticking to our meat embargo, and we’re working on ways to get around the blockade in the ways we can. We’ll see what happens.

Cheers to everyone that entertains us and complicates their foodlives because of our decisions, and thanks for sharing the wealth that is your company.

We have been craving a white bean burger, but not the same recipe we always make, so we decided to improvise. This recipe is

• 1 can white kidney beans
• 1 smallish leek
• 1 carrot
• 1 rib of celery
• 4 Tbs of Panko bread crumbs
• 2 Tbs of shredded parmesan
• salt & pepper
• 1 egg

We sauteed the shredded leek, carrot, and celery in 2 Tbs of butter for a bit, then added it back to the cuisinart, tossed in everything else and blended thusly:

The hot pan that just got done cooking the mixed vegetables was re-used for frying up 6 patties. While that was going we shredded some Romaine lettuce and added chopped cornichons (little sour pickles)

and mayonaise to the greens. Some tasty Trader Joe’s flatbread made its way into the oven and was warming for about 4 minutes @ 350 degrees F. Assembly and enjoyment.

We are mov’d, and we struggled for about a week with eating arrangements. I can’t tell you how hard it was for us to cook the way we like while moving was happening. This whole experience has shown me what a creature of giant habits I am, and what happens when my fragile ecosystem gets out of whack. I am trying to shake these things out of my life right now, to be prepared for the coming total chaos. In the meantime, I am habit-perturbed.

Anyway, kitchen is settling into place enough to throw some McC-style food together, so I present to you homemade Pesto Potatos, Mache salad, and Trader Joe’s Naan bread with a light brushing of butter. I call it greenstorm:

Babymomma suggested that we combine walnuts and pine nuts, which worked out fantastically, and we cut the basil with a bit of flatleaf parsley. All together the sauce turned out a bit lemony and a strong in the cheese, still tasty.

It’s been threatening to rain on and off for the past few days. Last night there was the tiniest spray of rain before we went to be last night, but today the late afternoon opened up and sprayed rain and hail for about two minutes like I’ve never seen it before. We thought it was just raining hard until the hail started pelting the shell of the swamp cooler. Wild weather.

From out the back door:

From out the front door:

My wife and I were fortunate enough to work at a Thai restaurant together and we have so many memories of the great food that the family made there. One of our summer favorites, besides Som Tam, is Laab. It’s usually a ground meat dish but if you asked really nicely the Thai auntie would make it with ground fried tofu. This dish is refreshing like a Radler (beer and lemon-lime soda or lemonade) on a hot summer day. This variation is 1 can garbanzo beans ground up a bit, drained, soy sauce, lime juice, a little raw sugar, a handful of mint chopped up, peanuts, roasted rice powder, and hot chili sauce. We serve it over sticky rice and roll it up in Romaine lettuce leaves. We make the rice powder by browning uncooked rice in a pan for a bit then running it through our (cleaned out) coffee grinder.