Frazzled

What can't a dinner of pizza and ice cream fix?

Three small clean-out-the-fridge pizzas (dough is whole wheat from the freezer at Whole Foods; cheese is Follow Your Heart mozzarella):

1. Sauerkraut, caramelized onions, ajvar. (This was my first time trying sauerkraut on a pizza and it won't be the last. This particular pizza could've done with a little something extra, though.)

2. Salsa, caramelized onions, cilantro.

3. Kalamatas, basil (from the freezer -- I threw in a bunch and it held up surprisingly well), caramelized onions.

Then almond and pecan ice cream (just so-so by itself, but much better with chocolate and peanut butter ganache and plantains).

Righting injustice

Today we found ourselves dogless*, sodden**, and hungry in NYC. I had the bright idea to go to Pukk, a vegetarian Thai place I've heard some good things about. But could we find Pukk? We could not. (I blame the rain falling in our eyes -- Google maps says it's right here.)

Anyway, we tried to console ourselves with lunch at nearby Kate's Joint, but it ended up sucking for two reasons:

1. Given the startling advances in vegan cheese of recent (Teese and Daiya, for instance) what kind of vegetarian/vegan place serves "non-dairy" cheese that's not vegan?
2. I ordered their reuben***. It was not good. I hate wasting food and I couldn't eat it. (I think the main problems were that I was really craving a tempeh reuben, while this sandwich had fake deli meat like this, and that the thousand island dressing tasted weird -- I think it had BBQ sauce in it.)

So, I had to right some wrongs:

Baked tempeh along these lines, sauerkraut, mozzarella, thousand island dressing (vegan mayo, ketchup, plus some ajvar****) on a light rye bread. Yum.

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*He left for Australia today.
**It was raining, and waking at 5am to take one's dog to the airport does not incline one to remember things like umbrellas.
***On the menu it's called the Monte Mount Cisco. The sandwich that they call the Not Reuben has mustard rather than thousand island dressing.
****An untraditional but good addition.

Sympathy for the chef-testants

A while back, on Top Chef, there was a challenge involving nopales (cactus). A lot of the chefs seemed bewildered by this ingredient, which I thought was inexcusable. I mean, it's not that obscure. I'd never cooked with it myself, but still...

Today I finally understood. Cleaning nopales is tricky. It takes a while to scrape off all the needles and the little nodules, plus the whole time in the back of your mind there's this voice saying "I really really don't want to eat a cactus spine".

Apparently cactus is often boiled, but I used a technique from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen: you roast the cactus at 375 F for about 20 minutes. Cactus is like okra: it gets slimy when wet, but this roasting technique eliminates the slime. Here's the cooked cactus:

I roughly followed the recipe in Bayless's book for roasted cactus salad (basically the roasted cactus is added to a tomato-chile-onion-cilantro salsa).

I think if you like okra, there's a good chance you might like cactus. It has a tart, citrus-like flavour, but it also resembles okra or maybe green pepper. (Hey, you should try it. Our lovely host here on LI, who has never even tried avocado or pumpkin (and has no plans to!), got up the nerve to try a piece and declared it quite delicious.)

Pride

Last month I had my biggest ever cooking disaster. We were invited to a barbecue, and I decided to make my old faithful: curried chickpea tart. There were a few hiccups -- for instance, the kitchen here on LI has no blender of any kind, so I had to use an antique eggbeater to mix the batter, and in addition there are no tart or pie plates, so I had to send our lovely host to the supermarket to buy a disposable aluminium one. Anyway, long story short, when we got there I went to cut the tart and it hadn't set up right. I served the first piece/dollop to the host of the party, who assured me it was delicious. And then I tried some... oh my god it was way way oversalted and overspiced. (Maybe it reduced down too much while I waited for the disposable tin? But then why didn't it set up? Maybe the salt in the LI kitchen is superpowered?)

I was mortified.

It was lucky, after all, that the tart was in a disposable tin. It meant I could slink out of the party at the end of the night without having to claim my leftovers.

Anyway, tonight we are going back to those same people's house for a dinner party -- I had to redeem myself. Hence: peanut butter filled chocolate cookies (with the usual vegan subs, and egg replacer). They are tooth-rottingly sweet (like giant peanut butter cups) and I will be walking into that place with my head held high.

Potassium

I've not had good hearing (or much at all) in one ear for more than a week. Doctor man gave me many several prescriptions... Basically, it's a nerve. Not helped by prescriptions. What can be helped is an immune boost, and support for depleted adrenals (they handle stress, and the tooth-grinding - stress - doesn't help with the nerve). Foods high in potassium are adrenal/kidney-friendly, and raisins are near the top of the list. So breakfast (usually whole groat oats in the rice cooker) involved raisins this morning.
"What?" "Jason is mourning?" "Why?" "And who's Jason?"

lunch again...

Here they are again: little glass containers full of lunch. The sweet potatoes were purchased along with persimmons (!) from the same farmers who grow the baby eggplants (Thai eggplants) that look like mushrooms in the upper round bowl. Carrots and cabbage are from Wholefoods, due to lack of imagination.

Dressing on the mung bean and eggplant salad was better than the eggplants. Bummer. (They were bitter.) I’ll read something about those vegetables before I buy them again. And here’s the recipe for that dressing:

2 cloves garlic

3T balsamic

1T rice vinegar

2T toasted sesame oil

1T barley miso (I used brown rice miso)

Pumpkin cinnamon rolls

I know I promised green vegetables in my next post, but I figured that the pumpkin-deprived NOLA-ites deserved some pumpkin foodporn: pumpkin cinnamon rolls (recipe from the zine Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk).

My copy of the zine is currently on a ship bound for Singapore, so luckily the author has posted the recipe online. (I made half the recipe, and used half whole wheat flour, and added some pecans to the filling. Yum! I like how the filling worked out -- the recipe has you add some flour to the usual mixture of sugar, cinnamon and butter and I think it really helped to keep the filling from oozing out too much.)

At least the NOLA-ites have access to canned pumpkin. No such luck for the Aussie contingent.

No surprise

Porcini stock cubes obviously lead to mushroom risotto. This one involved a tiny amount of chanterelles, a lot of cheap white mushrooms plus the stock cubes -- lots of mushroomy goodness.

(I promise that the next photo I post will involve a green vegetable -- enough with the orange and brown!)

Breakfast for dinner -- sort of

When I was a kid and my dad was out of town (which was a lot) we sometimes had breakfast for dinner. I thought it was so weird, and promised I'd never do it when I was an adult. Right... note that the cornbread was from the freezer, and the beans from a can.

De-Stressed Baking

I woke up on Saturday at 4.30, ran starting at 5, and finished work at 4.30pm. I came home ready to relax. This is what I did. The cake is the Cook's Illustrated chocolate snack cake (fudged because I ran out of vegan mayo -- I used some old sour cream, which probably wasn't a great idea -- too dense). The cookies are from 101 Cookbooks, thanks to David Lebovitz. Really super tasty.

Gluttony

I spent about 10 hours wandering all over Manhattan today. Sustaining me in my travels were many wonderful bread products:

• a sesame bagel from Absolute Bagels (So good! Crisp on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside -- light textured and substantial at the same time.)
• pizza patate from Sullivan Street Bakery (Imagine pizza and potato chips had a love child. Crisp, rich dough topped with thin sliced potato (crisp and brown at the edges), rosemary and lots of olive oil.)
• vanilla bomboloni from Sullivan Street Bakery (This prompted fond memories of my Polish grandmother's homemade doughnuts, but was many times more amazing than they were, and they were good!)
• pizza at Motorino East Village (I had the filetti: mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and thyme. It was excellent. I will never be a restaurant blogger, because taking photos of food is embarrassing, but here's a review with some nice photos.)

I also went food shopping at Zabar's and Fairway. I really liked Fairway. Here's what I bought there:

Noho lunch

Back in Noho for a lightning visit, we had a perfect lunch of baked beans (a Deals & Steals score: two cans for 99c) and rosemary bread from the Hungry Ghost (still warm!) plus a mini (vegan) apple pie also from the Hungry Ghost. Yum.

Salads

I'm not actually a very good cook. I'm nervous, I'm anxious, I'm cheap... and after a long day of trying (read: merely but mightily trying) to be creative, my meals are less-than-inspiring. But I have a few tricks for lunch. I always pack, and because it is the highlight of my day, I try to pack something good. Here's today's sampling, posing for you from the bench where I ate it.
Bottom left: carrot slaw, dressed with miso-sesame. Bottom right: navy bean and tuna salad with great chunks of pickle; center (upper): broiled eggplant, pepper, local goat feta, and greens, dressed with balsamic.
It's true... in my laziness, and in the summer heat, I've opened more than a few tins of tuna. It started (?) in Australia/NZ, where I spent most of my days working or walking, and needed something easy to prepare but full of protein during the day or before bed. Excuses, excuses.

Back

This is what I've been eating, and mostly how I've been eating it, for the summer in New Orleans.