Chili oil

I am still daydreaming about this avocado on toast I had for dinner last night.

It all started with a post on The Hungry Tiger a couple of months ago. Said post described a sandwich very much like this one. I was especially taken with the idea of chili oil infused with ginger, Szechuan pepper, star anise and other delicious things. Then I forgot about it, until I was racking my brain trying to come up with some homemade Xmas presents. I made the oil, and then tested it on this sandwich. Perfect! (Note the chili flakes: I couldn't even wait to strain the oil before using it, it smelled so good.) (The oil recipe is from Mark Bittman, who apparently got it from the proprietors of Szechuan Gourmet. But, like the Hungry Tiger, I left out the scallions.)
Xmas present problem solved. But now I need to make more!

No Oil Cake?

Carrot cake with pineapple (crushed, drained) and buttermilk and applesauce is dense. No coconut lightness, no walnut chunks... but this cake made my kitchen smell like spiced donuts. Where does that "fry" smell come from? Was it the 2 egg whites, and one whole egg? Was it the mix of spices and a longing for "fry"?
I think the next time I do carrot cake, it'll be with some oil. Or butter. The crumb was too dense, and even though my head knew it was "healthy," I wanted something that was more like cake.
I got the golden raisins here at a little shop I stumbled into in Philadelphia. They are sugary sweet -- too much for my taste. But aren't the lovely?

Thanksgiving

Shiitake bacon

I have a new favourite fake bacon: shiitake bacon.

I got the idea from the PPK, in its new home here. Following a suggestion in that thread, I used dried, pre-sliced shiitakes. I reconstituted them with the barest amount of hot water, plus oil, liquid smoke, smoked paprika and salt. I think they were in the oven for about 30 minutes -- after about 15 minutes they were smelling really good, and I kept checking on them every 5 minutes to make sure they didn't burn. In the end there was a nice mixture of crispy and chewy textures.

The shiitake bacon found its way into some amazing VBLATs (vegan bacon lettuce avocado tomato). You know the fake bacon is good when it can upstage avocado in a sandwich.

Green tomatoes

One of my tomato plants died. It was the biggest one, with green tomatoes all over that I'd been eyeing for weeks, and then it was suddenly struck down with a disease (fusarium wilt, I believe).

I harvested all the green tomatoes. I'd never tried them before, but green tomatoes are tasty! We had fried green tomatoes, and on Friday (which reached 38 or 39 degrees C -- that's 100 F) we had gazpacho with red and green tomatoes. But maybe the best meal was this one: roasted green tomatoes with tempeh, based on this recipe for chicken.

Looking at the recipe now, I see that I forgot the basil. But it was delicious anyway, and I really loved the combination of the tomatoes with ginger. The tempeh worked out pretty well. I had marinated it in a sort of all purpose marinade (soy sauce/oil/lemon juice, I think). I had to add some of the marinade part way through cooking because it was starting to dry out.

Liege waffles

Recently in a conversation with R about waffles, I promised I'd make him the best waffles ever. And so I finally got around to trying gaufres de Liege (Liege waffles). They're like brioche, but cooked in a waffle iron. The dough is full of pearl sugar, which melts and crisps on the outside. Delicious!

Veganizing notes: I used the recipe linked above, replacing the butter with vegan margarine, and the egg with a pinch of lecithin and some vital wheat gluten (I got the lecithin and gluten tips from Parsnip Parsimony's post on brioche).

Sidenote: if anyone can tell me why lecithin is so widely available here, I'd love to know. Seriously, it's in every supermarket's health food section. I don't think I ever noticed it in the US. The pack I bought suggests sprinkling it on cereal, soup or salad as a 'pleasant addition'. If I'm going to be sprinkling some strange granules on my cereal, I want the packet to be selling me on how awesome it's going to taste, or what miraculous things it's going to do for my health. The mere promise of pleasantness doesn't really do it for me. (Plus, I tasted some, and... NOT TASTY.)

Kale Salad!

I've seen these really beautiful kale salad posts on SmittenKitchen and 101Cookbooks, but my version is sort of a hack's salad with lots of whatever in it (like a regular salad). This one has wild rice with roasted butternut squash, dried cherries, feta, almonds, and raisins. The wild rice-squash mixture is actually a pilaf I made, so it has onions in there too... but I've had this for lunch now two days in a row, and with a slice of German seeded rye bread, it's superb.