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sapotelunch1) I am reading You Won't Believe It's Vegan!" by Lacey Sher and Gail Doherty, mostly for pleasure instead of actual cooking intent. (I am so many cookbooks behind as far as actual cooking intent that the list starts sometime in 1998.) Still, it's funny to me how much reading vegan cookbooks feels like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of shoes. There's the socca! There's the ganache! There's the overlong chapter on desserts because when you eat a low-fat diet you crave sugar all the time! There's the scrambled tofu! There's the recipe involving tamarind paste, two kinds of miso, red wine, nutritional yeast, umeboshi plum paste, and I don't know, corn smut oil just to make a simple gravy! Oh, vegan cooking, how comforting and familiar you are, what with the ten different condiments requiring five trips to different ethnic groceries just to faintly approximate the taste of salt pork.
2) This has been on my main lj/dw, but I'm reposting with current measurements and method.
Recipe:
About a cup and a half of white beans, cooked or from a can. (a link on how to cook beans. Or my cooking method: put in crock pot, add 3x as much water as beans and some salt - let's say 1/2 tsp -, cover appropriately, turn to "low", go to bed, wake up in morning, rinse beans in pasta strainer, refrigerate for later use.)
Zest and juice of one lemon.
2 cloves garlic, minced.
2 tsp dry italian herbs, or any combination of preferred Italian-type herbs (oregano, basil, red chili flakes, rosemary, etc.) I used 2 tbsp fresh herb mix last night, and it was actually not as good as dried herbs.
3 tbsp-ish olive oil (a hearty chug)
1.5 tbsp-ish butter (a goodly chunk)
1 bunch assorted greens, washed and chopped to one's preferred chewing size. (I have used: kale, spinach, arugula/rocket, chard (turns out I don't really like chard))
1 largeish acorn squash or smallish butternut squash, cooked, seeded, and removed from its shell in your preferred manner and cut into chunks. (I stab mine multiple times with a knife and either bake it or microwave it whole, and then remove seeds and flesh)
3 cups of cooked pasta or chunks of potato, or about 6 slices of toast.
Procedure:
1) Oil, butter, herbs, garlic, zest, and lemon juice go in a heat-safe cup and are either warmed in a toaster oven/real oven on low for about 30 minutes, or microwaved for ten seconds, stirred, microwaved for another ten seconds, stirred, until butter is melted and ingredients are warmed through.
2) Then the oil/herb/juice mixture can go in a sauce pan and the greens/beans/squash gets dumped into it and sauteed (stirred around with a spatula) on medium for a while. Alternately you can dump this whole mess in the microwave, taking it out and stirring it every two to three minutes till it's hot, but the results from that have not been stellar.
3) Then I eat the resulting mixture on pasta, potatoes, or toast.
Yesterday I got the lemon-to-oil ratio way too lemony (I figured there couldn't be that much juice left in another, older lemon I had lying around, and threw it in too; I was wrong) and added broccoli, which was weird. In compensation I added a little bit of grated gruyere to the finished dish, which added a nice if somewhat feetsy finish.
ETA 3/15/2010: Variation: Instead of lemon juice, I used 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar; instead of squash n' greens, I baked 3 medium (about fist-sized) beets in parchment paper at 300 degrees for two hours, let them cool, cut them into bean-sized cubes, and mixed them into the beans. Delicious. Also, pink.
Cost: This full recipe should be about $6, depending on if you cooked the beans from scratch; the number of servings really depends on what you're serving it over (and whether you accidentally double the beans, like I did last night.)
I love my microwave, but man, microwaves do make everything a lot mushier.
2) This has been on my main lj/dw, but I'm reposting with current measurements and method.
Recipe:
About a cup and a half of white beans, cooked or from a can. (a link on how to cook beans. Or my cooking method: put in crock pot, add 3x as much water as beans and some salt - let's say 1/2 tsp -, cover appropriately, turn to "low", go to bed, wake up in morning, rinse beans in pasta strainer, refrigerate for later use.)
Zest and juice of one lemon.
2 cloves garlic, minced.
2 tsp dry italian herbs, or any combination of preferred Italian-type herbs (oregano, basil, red chili flakes, rosemary, etc.) I used 2 tbsp fresh herb mix last night, and it was actually not as good as dried herbs.
3 tbsp-ish olive oil (a hearty chug)
1.5 tbsp-ish butter (a goodly chunk)
1 bunch assorted greens, washed and chopped to one's preferred chewing size. (I have used: kale, spinach, arugula/rocket, chard (turns out I don't really like chard))
1 largeish acorn squash or smallish butternut squash, cooked, seeded, and removed from its shell in your preferred manner and cut into chunks. (I stab mine multiple times with a knife and either bake it or microwave it whole, and then remove seeds and flesh)
3 cups of cooked pasta or chunks of potato, or about 6 slices of toast.
Procedure:
1) Oil, butter, herbs, garlic, zest, and lemon juice go in a heat-safe cup and are either warmed in a toaster oven/real oven on low for about 30 minutes, or microwaved for ten seconds, stirred, microwaved for another ten seconds, stirred, until butter is melted and ingredients are warmed through.
2) Then the oil/herb/juice mixture can go in a sauce pan and the greens/beans/squash gets dumped into it and sauteed (stirred around with a spatula) on medium for a while. Alternately you can dump this whole mess in the microwave, taking it out and stirring it every two to three minutes till it's hot, but the results from that have not been stellar.
3) Then I eat the resulting mixture on pasta, potatoes, or toast.
Yesterday I got the lemon-to-oil ratio way too lemony (I figured there couldn't be that much juice left in another, older lemon I had lying around, and threw it in too; I was wrong) and added broccoli, which was weird. In compensation I added a little bit of grated gruyere to the finished dish, which added a nice if somewhat feetsy finish.
ETA 3/15/2010: Variation: Instead of lemon juice, I used 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar; instead of squash n' greens, I baked 3 medium (about fist-sized) beets in parchment paper at 300 degrees for two hours, let them cool, cut them into bean-sized cubes, and mixed them into the beans. Delicious. Also, pink.
Cost: This full recipe should be about $6, depending on if you cooked the beans from scratch; the number of servings really depends on what you're serving it over (and whether you accidentally double the beans, like I did last night.)
I love my microwave, but man, microwaves do make everything a lot mushier.
