Pok Pok

This was a great dinner courtesy of Pok Pok. Maybe I should say 'inspired by', because I did a lot of veganizing and lazifying to the very precise recipes.

It's a cucumber salad in the style of papaya salad, with coconut rice and grilled eggplant salad. We also had (not pictured) some flavored tofu with this -- I was inspired by the recipe for Khao Man Som Tam (papaya salad with coconut rice and sweet pork). The combination of the cucumber salad, rice and sweet tofu was superb -- I kept making myself perfect little bites with a bit of each on my fork. The coconut rice in particular was the best version I have ever made: the secret is coconut cream instead of milk, and a bit of sugar. (Who'd have thought adding extra fat and sugar would make something taste better?)

For veganizing, I replaced fish sauce and dried shrimp with a healthy dose of toasted and ground tua nao. I didn't have a mortar and pestle for the cucumber salad, so I just bashed everything a bit in a bowl.

Garden salads

I'm not really sure why I planted 12 lettuce plants. We've gone from eating salad maybe once a week, to having shopping bags full of lettuce in the fridge and resorting to lettuce soup to get rid of the stuff.

We have had some nice salads though. The first is lettuce, rocket (leaves and flowers), baby broad (fava) beans, golden beetroot, and mulberries. The second is lettuce, rocket, roasted golden beetroot, and homemade tofu misozuke. I really love that almost all of these ingredients came from the garden.

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.

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)

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.

Worth waiting for

Back in January, when I borrowed How to Eat Supper from the library, I had a list of recipes that I didn't get a chance to try. One of them was Thai Cantaloupe Salad with Chile, which we had last night along with fresh spring rolls and a pea and rocket [=arugula] salad. Yum! I didn't have any basil, so I used mint and cilantro, and I replaced the fish sauce with a little bit of soy sauce and some vegan nuoc cham. This was really good: I'm looking forward to trying it again with basil.

The pea salad was pretty good too. I made it up as I went along: peas, rocket, some almond feta (from the freezer), lime juice, salt and pepper. (Hey look, peas and rocket: great minds think alike. And yes, in Noho we are only just now eating like they do in NOLA in January.)

Bun

Tonight we had this take on the Vietnamese noodle salad, bun. Rather than the traditional vermicelli-style rice noodles (from which the salad takes its name), I used whole wheat angel hair pasta instead, plus lettuce, fennel, cucumber, quick-pickled daikon and carrot, mint, cilantro and peanuts. The salad was dressed with a vegan nuoc cham -- recipe from Kittee.

Summer's here

After what feels like weeks of rain, we finally got some blue sky today (before the late afternoon thunder and clouds arrived). This dinner felt like summer: sauteed garlic scapes and homemade seitan sausage, broccoli, and a Greek salad with lemon oregano feta.
For dessert, we had strawberries and dumplings, topped with some mimiccreme. This recipe is originally from Gourmet, but I went with the smitten kitchen version. With the cakey dumplings and warm strawberry sauce, this was very much like what around here we call "Australian style pudding" (as opposed to "American style pudding"). (The very best Australian style pudding is of course The Magic Pudding. Apparently Norman Lindsay wrote the book to settle an argument -- he was defending his claim that children would rather read about food than fairies.)

Julie Andrews, hold onto your hat!

My favorite things these days are cabbage salad with miso dressing, and roasted kale ("chips"). Yum. Yum. Yum. And now that I'm reading _One Bite at a Time_, Rebecca Katz's wonderful cookbook with anti-cancer recipes, I know that this is a meal packed with goodness.

Best part of the cabbage salad, though, is the sidecar container of toasted seeds and nuts I bring with it for lunch. Tofu chunks, sweet potatoes, carrot chunks, onions, wild rice, maybe even celery, pea pods... all great additions.

Beet and Potato, Spinach and Mushroom

For those of you Vegans or good Vegetarians, forgive me the egg slices here.

These are salad leftovers -- and there are still some hanging out in the fridge. I forget that salads don't age like soups... there's still quite a bit of the potato-beet mixture in the fridge. I could have held on to some of those beets for a little while longer -- overheard someone at the market talking about chopping beets with celery and onion and some hard boiled eggs... I lost him at the "Catalina" dressing, though. I think it once appeared in our fridge during one of my mom's diets in the early 90s. Yuck.

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?

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...