Smoked carrots

I made this dish from Vedge: spiced little carrots with chickpea sauerkraut puree. It's a play on a reuben -- the carrots are roasted with a spice mix inspired by Montreal-style smoked meat. I smoked the roasted carrots (10 minutes, then left in the smoker box until cool). It was really nice. Unsurprisingly, the leftovers made a good sandwich.

Carrot hot dogs

I have to say I didn't have a lot of confidence that this would work. I had read about a place in LA that makes carrot hot dogs, and I found a few recipes on the web, like this one. I cooked the carrots, then marinated them for a day in a mixture of vinegar, soy sauce, water, sesame oil, garlic, mustard, paprika, pepper, coriander, nutmeg, cardamom and homemade celery salt, and then the next day cooked them on a hot pan.

And the verdict? It was simultaneously like eating a hot dog and a carrot. When I tasted one of the carrots by itself, it definitely was hot dog-esque, but in the context of the strong-flavoured condiments the carrot flavour was hard to miss. Overall, I can believe that some people have perfected this (insofar as one can perfect the carrot as hot dog). I think I didn't quite cook the carrots soft enough, and I bet the marinade could be improved. Anyway, even though they were okay, I think next time I have a hot dog craving, I'll be buying soy dogs from the supermarket.

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.

Sauerkraut and cherries

For lunch today I made the Cherry Sauerkraut soup from Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. (I added a little bit of leftover rice, rather than the suggested millet/bulgar.) This was quite nice, and tasted much less weird than you might expect.

Hot dog!

We made two very fancy dogs, and halved them so we could try them both. In the back, there's one with caramelized onions, sauerkraut, mustard and cheese; the one in the front has caramelized onions and avocado. The sausage is Field Roast Italian, and it was superb.

This was a meal totally worth setting off the smoke alarms for.

Seitan stew with sauerkraut

Things have been kind of Eastern European around here. Last night we had golabki. And tonight we had this stew, which was based on a recipe from Peter Berley's Modern Vegetarian Kitchen: Beer-braised seitan with sauerkraut and onions. (I didn't have enough beer on hand, so the braising broth was about 1/4 beer, and the rest was broth and a little bit of sauerkraut juice. I also added some tomato paste. The seitan was based on Isa's Spicy Pinto Sausages, with different spices (mainly thyme and pepper).)

This recipe finished off two mostly empty jars of sauerkraut, and for good measure I threw in the last of my pickled brussels sprouts (recipe here). Adding the brussels sprouts was a very good idea.

I thought this stew was amazing, but then, I do have a weakness for sauerkraut.

Reuben

I've been sort of obsessed with sauerkraut recently (see also, here). This obsession morphed into a need to make reuben sandwiches.

The seitan marinade was inspired by a recipe printed in Vegetarian Times -- the Radical Reuben from Chicago Diner. For the rest of the sandwich, I basically followed the Tempeh Reuben recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. There was no rye bread to be found in town today, so we had to make do (ha!) with spelt bread from the Hungry Ghost.

This was a great sandwich. I think that the subtleties of the seitan got lost amongst the sauerkraut, avocado and Thousand Island dressing, though. So the overnight marinade was kind of a waste of time. But on the other hand, it was bright pink and looked great against the green of the avocado.

By the way, how's this for a specialized blog? They review all the vegan reubens available in Portland.

Photographic evidence

Tonight we had some tasty tasty golabki, based on this recipe from Vegan Visitor.

The filling was a mixture of ground seitan, rice, carrot, capsicum (bell pepper), onion and garlic, plus some Worcestershire sauce, thyme and dill. (Now that I have discovered the wonders of ground seitan, failed homemade seitan no longer bums me out.)

I like Vegan Visitor's freezing technique for softening the cabbage. The sauerkraut on top was a good idea too.

R liked these so much, he checked to make sure I'd taken a photo.

Red food

I just realized that we've been eating a lot of red things recently.

Bean tagine from How to Eat Supper:
Posole from Tigers and Strawberries:
And one of my favourite dinners for when we need something quick and hearty: it's a kind of goulash-type thing made with seitan, peppers, paprika, tomato and sauerkraut. (It's inspired by a recipe in the Native Foods cookbook.)