Good lord. Potluck!

Birthday lunch. SO much food.

I'll vouch for the blue potato/cauliflower salad (smitten kitchen) in the foreground... and in the upper left corner, an adzuki bean dish I really like with a ginger-sesame-tamari dressing. I like it because you finely slice a red onion and cut a few carrots into matchsticks, pour boiling water over them for 1 minute, drain, and toss. How cool is that "cooking" method? And it makes the red onion edible!

p.s. There's bacon on the table: can you spot it?

Cake and cake and cake!!!

This here is a monster of a chocolate (vegan) birthday cake.   There's a layer of ganache and red raspberry jam in the center, but it's basically chocolate.  Whole wheat flour to support it (2c ww/ 2c apf) - there's basically a cup of cocoa and a bag of chocolate chips melted with hot coffee).  I can't eat it.  The caffeine makes me crazy.  

You'll see (look carefully) that the sides are held together with frosting - (1/4 c earth balance, 3/4 cup soymilk, until melted, then stir in a bag of chocolate chips) - the cake crumbled coming out of the pans.  I should have used bigger pans, but something in the whole wheat flour/brown rice syrup thing went wrong.  Not sure what.  Guess I'll have to bake it again!

Mhhm Mhhm Potato Something-or-Other

Vegan potluck: Green Foods. Not much green, but Irish enough with the spuds, and earthy enough because I cycled to the event.

This here is a tasty cross between colcannon and potato salad. Apple cider vinegar and dijon made it salady (plus the wilted greens - mostly the Wholefoods braising mix) and shallots and back-of-the-spoon action make it colcannon-y. I still don't have a potato masher. I know...

Gumbo

I hesitated about posting this one, since the photo is not so different from last time, but this trick is worth remembering: cooking the seitan in the gumbo. This technique was mentioned in kittee's post on sausage gumbo (the recipe that I based this gumbo on). I made a quick seitan dough (vital wheat gluten, chickpea flour, smoked paprika, onion powder, water, soy sauce, olive oil) and tore off very small pieces and threw them into the pot to simmer with the gumbo for 45 minutes. Yum!

Cauliflower Cheese

This post brought to you by: nostalgia. I had a craving for Cauliflower Cheese (which I know sounds strange to some -- just think Mac and Cheese but with cauliflower instead). I made up this cheese sauce as I went along, and it worked pretty well. Unfortunately I didn't really keep track of the measurements, but I wanted to post my best guesses so that I'm prepared the next time nostalgia strikes.

Cauliflower (No) Cheese
1/2 head of cauliflower
1.5 T olive oil
enough flour to make a roux
3/4 c water
3/4 c soymilk
1 t dijon mustard
1/4 c nutritional yeast
1 T fake parmesan
2 t miso
salt
pepper
nutmeg

1. cut up the cauliflower and steam it
2. make the roux
3. add the water + soymilk, and the rest of the ingredients, and whisk until it thickens
4. cover the cauliflower with the cheese sauce; bake at 400F for 20 minutes
5. (optional) place under the grill (broiler) for a few minutes to brown the top

Good things we ate (Chickpea edition)

Both of these dinners were (directly or indirectly) inspired by 101 Cookbooks. First, there's chickpea soup with homemade pasta (inspired by this recipe -- and reading Heidi's description of it now makes me want to make it again immediately). My version included carrots and mushrooms, and the broth was half vegetable, half chickpea cooking liquid.

The other meal was more indirectly related to 101 Cookbooks; I think it seemed 101 Cookbooks-ish to me because of the wild rice, which Heidi uses quite frequently. It was a sort of stir-fry of wild rice, thinly sliced cabbage (thanks to my As Seen On TV V-slicer), mushrooms, spring onions and chickpeas, along with garlic and thyme. It needed a little acid, so I finished it off with some lime juice and it was good.

Goodbye/hello to 660 Curries

So, 660 Curries has to go back to the library in a couple of days. I really love this book -- I've already bought my own copy.

Here are two meals indebted to the book. In the first photo, going clockwise from the top there's Beetroot Curry from stonesoup, a paratha, and Fenugreek-flavored Dumplings with Cabbage from 660 Curries. The parathas were going to be filled with a broccoli mixture (ala Gobi paratha, but with broccoli instead) but it wasn't very cooperative as a filling, so we ate it alongside our parathas instead (that's that green stuff in the centre). The dumplings are made of chickpea flour; they were flavoured with fenugreek (methi) and ginger. (Think falafel, but without the crispy exterior, and with a very mysterious and delicious taste from the fenugreek.) The Beetroot Curry was pretty good, but I wimped out and didn't put in enough chiles. Also, I put in a ton of curry leaves and they smelled great, but the flavour was quite muted.

The second picture shows two curries from 660 Curries: Brown Lentils with Cumin and Turmeric, and Broccoli with Ginger and Coconut. The broccoli curry was a revelation -- I've been so bored with broccoli recently, but the addition of ginger, coconut (reconstituted from dried) and some spices really impressed me.

Finally, an in-progress shot of the beetroot curry. I will admit it's not the best photo, but the colours are so pretty.