vegetarian recipes | Slow Food Fast

Wanted: cooler heads, warmer hearts

Posted on September 5, 2020 by DebbieN

…and less inflammatory bloat.

Warning: This is kind of a long make-up post with 3-4 related recipes out of my experiments since April. They’ve been helpful and fairly fast for coping with hot weather and hot tempers, mostly my own.

It’s been a long spring and summer not posting and just trying to get through, and wondering what kind of food post could possibly make up for the mess we’ve seen unfolding in this country.

So my thinking has kept roiling around in the manner of the following rant (much cleaned up):

We have to do better. As a nation, as a people, as individuals and members of our communities, as responsible and worthwhile human beings.

The proof is in the pudding, they say. This is true of both government and cooking. Right now we’re learning the hard way that you get out of it what you put into it. So watch what you put into it, and don’t treat yourself or your country like a garbage can. Prepare to vote like it matters, and in the meantime contribute as best you can to your local public schools’ support organizations to get students in low-income families the food and tech they need during distance learning.

— — —

I can’t help but cook, and usually I like to experiment, but with my husband and daughter suddenly home 24/7 for the past half year (my kid just went back to university across the country), and with temperatures getting up to 100+ some days here, staying creative about food without a lot of excess shopping trips or extensive cooking has meant staying fairly simple and more about fresh produce than about artiness in the kitchen, and maybe just using more herbs–one of the few things I seem to be growing successfully in the backyard. We all could use some shoring up healthwise and flavorwise, with some trimming back after a stressful winter and spring. So I’ve been trying hard to make the veg and fresh fruit more prominent and easier to grab-and-go for self-made lunches, without any of us having to work too hard.

But I have been cooking, and some of it has been good, and a lot of it has been anti-bloat AND good, surprisingly enough.

And it has in fact worked, most impressively for our daughter before she went back east.

So this is worth passing on, especially now: forget the “stress-baking.” Go for basic vegetables and fruit. Seriously. It makes a difference, and it might help lower your health risk, and possibly your food expenses, as well. Maybe even help de-stress.

My daughter came home from university in March seriously stressed out from the shift to online and upended plans. She’d been suffering acid reflux badly enough to be on daily medication, and had to ask me for mild zucchini-type vegetables only for the first couple of weeks home, because tomatoes were too much, and so were the hot peppers she loves.

Being home with us during the shutdowns meant a lot less “student” food, aka greasy takeout with its oversized portions. More beans and lentils and fresh veg and fruit every day. More sleep, more water, more hanging out with friends online or by phone, more socially distanced walks to get a break from us parental units (yay!). By June, she was already in visibly better shape, needing less insulin per day to stay in range, had lost the “freshman 10” from last year without major effort, and possibly (probably?) as a result, she was able to stop taking the acid reflux meds. Just in time for Anaheim peppers and Fresno tomatoes. And Indian food.

(okay, back to food):

For my husband’s birthday this summer, I took requests and ordered celebratory takeout from our favorite restaurant, which has been in Pasadena for over 20 years and just keeps getting better. We’ve only done takeout anywhere a total of three times since the shutdowns, partly because it’s a splurge and partly because the logistics are more nerve-wracking now (were they wearing gloves? were you? do you wipe down the containers? should you nuke them?) You don’t want to know how it went on our first try back in April when the bad news was first ratcheting up. Not at all fun. I vowed to my still-beloveds afterward that we’d do it again and this time I’d be calmer, and just decide ahead how to handle the containers safely.

In any case, by my husband’s birthday, we’d finally got the hang of it enough for us, and there’s no denying that it was delicious. It also inspired a couple of microwave-friendly dishes I plan to pass on to my kid now that she’s back and cooking for herself. Two (well, three) of these dishes are hot, the other frozen, and all are cheap, fast, surprisingly easy and pretty good–they’re even fairly close to the dishes I was trying to imitate, but a bit lighter fat- and calorie-wise.

Which is good because today we’re in a massive heatwave in Southern California, and it’s so hot I decided to try hanging wet sheets out on an old clothesline I’ve never used. I think they were dry by the time I finished pinning them up 5 minutes later. I know I was.

Lightening up Makhni Paneer

Makhni paneer-style tofu with pumpkin sauce, plus added green beans and cooked chickpeas for a microwaveable next-day lunch. Or in this weather, just eat it cold.

One of the dishes we ordered from the All India was makhni paneer, which is cubes of fresh-pressed cheese submerged in a very rich tomato cream sauce. I’ve looked in a number of cookbooks and online–could be ghee and cream or full-fat yogurt in the sauce, could be coconut milk. Tasty but way, way, way too rich for my blood (cholesterol, that is). Way.

Still–the ideas started churning. The makhni paneer had a slight tang and a suggestion of sweet under all the obvious richness, and showcased the spices in a completely different way from the other dishes at the table.

How do you do that, but lighter, and possibly a little faster?

I love paneer but my daughter prefers tofu, at least for my home renditions of saag paneer. That actually fits a recent wave in US Indian communities of making heart-healthier substitutions–unsaturated vegetable oil for ghee, tofu instead of paneer, lower-fat yogurt where possible, and hopefully backing down a little on salt. Even the All India offers tofu as an alternative. So we obviously start there.

But the cream sauce is really the main challenge. The bhuna (browned-onion/spice flavor base) works fine with unsaturated vegetable oil instead of ghee. You can precook the chopped onion in the microwave for a minute or so to get it going a little faster when it hits the frying pan without the need for salt. But for the bulk of the sauce?

A large can of pumpkin sitting on the shelf for one of those just-in-case moments (why do we always seem to have them?) caught my eye, and it suddenly seemed right.

Pumpkin? right color, right substantial thickness, smooth, decent taste, likely to go well with everything else, easy to thin out just enough with milk or soymilk to get it a little more like the sauce I was going for, only without fat and with lots of vitamin A and fiber. Use enough of it to make a difference and it counts as a vegetable. Check.

Plus, I’d once used it successfully as the base for a fat- and egg-free eggnog back in my 20s, the early days of cooking for myself. Squashnog? That’s what I’d put in my little blank-book cookbook. Maybe it would work here too. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: food, frozen desserts, Indian food, low-fat cooking, recipes, vegetarian recipes | 2 Comments »

Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

Posted on March 12, 2015 by DebbieN

My kid had the flu just in time for President’s Day (and both Friday and Monday off from school). How does this happen in a place where it actually hit 90 degrees one day??? How annoying! But her classmates had been catching it right and left all through January and coming back to school still iffy. She and I had both gotten the flu shot a couple of months before, achy arms and all. The prevention rate this year isn’t all that good; only about 23%. And people have naturally been grumbling if or when they catch the flu anyway.

But I’m still pro-vaccine, and here’s why: The minute she woke up with fever, I called and got an appointment with her pediatrician for that morning, no being palmed off on the advice nurse (or the muzak they put you on while waiting half an hour). When you’ve got a diabetic kid with flu, you take a deep breath, channel your Brooklyn-raised mother and elbow your way through to get seen before the kid has a chance to develop nausea and vomiting, which makes it trickier to manage food, insulin and so on safely. I mean, we’ve done it, it’s doable, and we’ll probably have to do it again at some point, but it’s a total pain.

Luckily for me, the pediatrician is also from Brooklyn and doesn’t take offense. She and the nurses had been run off their feet, and yet she was glad we got our act together early enough for Tamiflu to do some good, because the poor kid just ahead of us at the clinic was wobbling and actually fainted just as he got into the exam room. Five days his family waited and he had serious fluid in his lungs. So I stopped feeling selfish and stupid for bringing my kid in when she was mostly okay except for a fever. And I hope the other kid’s better by now.

So I wanted to pass this on: the doctor told us the best-bet recommendation is still to get a flu shot. Why? Because even though you might still catch flu, the severe hospital-level cases this year with pneumonia and worse, at least in Southern California, are turning out to be almost all unvaccinated patients. That’s a result you might not have expected. You need that insider perspective to see there’s a more serious benefit hidden behind the obvious numbers. And the serious cases are pretty bad. So if you haven’t gotten a flu shot yet, go get one now.

And my kid did indeed get better by the time school started up again, and my husband and I managed not to catch the flu from her, which was good, because with a snarky bored teen home on a 4-day weekend, the last thing either of us needed was to catch it from her just when she was finally back at school.

But we needed soup in a big way. And with a sick kid in the house I had less time to go shopping. I imagine (because we had the fluke 90-degree day, I have to imagine it or else talk to my poor mom in Boston) that people caught in the big snows back east also have these problems of limited shopping mobility, patience and scant last-ditch vegetabalia in the house. What did we have left that was soup-worthy?

Well…there’s always the can of tomato paste for nearly instant cream-of-tomato, which my daughter likes when she’s sick. The real cream-of-tomato, made with actual tomatoes, is more voluptuous but takes 45 minutes on the stove and involves baking soda to tame the acidity before you add cream, plus the use of a stick blender which I aspire to but don’t yet own. Tomato paste doesn’t have much acidity to start with, so you could just skip the baking soda and heat with milk instead of water if you wanted to. We generally leave milk and cream out and add a dash of vinegar to restore some semblance of tomato flavor.

– – –

Tomato Soup in the Microwave (AKA, “bonus” recipe for what it’s worth)

1/2 can tomato paste (no recipe EVER specifies a whole can, as far as I can tell…must be some kind of culinary superstition, much like “the Scottish play”…so just scoop the rest into a ziplock baggie, squeeze the air out, and throw it in the freezer for next time…)
1-2 c. water (enough to bring it up to the thickness you like best for soup)
small splash of vinegar, any kind
small clove of garlic, minced, mashed or grated
pinch of cumin or thyme, optional
salt to taste after cooking
splash of milk or half-and-half, if you like it

In a microwaveable bowl, use a whisk or fork to mix the water gradually into the tomato paste until it reaches the thick-but-not-too-thick consistency you prefer for cream-of-tomato soup. Add the garlic, vinegar, and cumin or thyme, cover the bowl lightly and microwave 2-3 minutes or until heated through. If you want to add a little milk or half-and-half afterward, you probably could, just don’t add it and then heat or it’ll curdle from the vinegar (or leave the vinegar out to start with if you want it bland).

– – –

But down to business with the “not-chicken” vegetable broth. I’ve already gone about as far as I can go with bok choy and shiitake broth, up to and including hot-and-sour soup. Plus we didn’t actually have any bok choy left. Feh.

So the usual carrot-onion-celery not-chicken broth should have been next…but no celery either. Double feh. And no fresh dill–dry we had, but you know fresh makes a world of improvement. So it wasn’t looking all that good in the clear soup department this week. And I needed some for me, even though I only had a head cold and a bad temper and a sassy, feverish bored teen at home watching cartoons.

(BTW: if you luck out with a fresh bunch of dill that’s too big to use up quickly, wash the rest well, twist off the stem ends, stuff the dill into a ziplock sandwich bag with the air squeezed out and freeze it–it’ll stay good for a couple of months minimum, and you can just quickly crumble a frozen bit into whatever dish you want, then toss the bag back in the freezer. Or in Boston, just leave it out on the porch and rediscover it sometime in April.)

Normally I’d say onion and carrots alone aren’t enough for a soup; you have to have something else in there or when you add garlic it’ll just be about the garlic. Which is fine for me, of course, because my motto still seems to be, “If there’s no garlic, is it really food?”

True, the Italians have acqua pazza (“crazy water”), which is basically garlic broth. I think both Spain and France have similar offerings. But normal people might want something a little more complex or at least balanced.

My usual MO for vegetable soup and bok choy broth is just to microwave the base vegetables to wilt them and then bring them up with a bit of water, add garlic, herbs, and any other appropriate flavorings, and heat again. Pretty basic, and very quick–5 minutes, maybe 10 for a couple of quarts that will last me a week. But with such a limited vegetable base as onion and carrot, I was going to need something more.

So I scrounged again in the fridge. Carrots and a red onion…and a clove of garlic. A sprig of thyme–well. A little leftover white wine. Yes. OK.

It would all be kind of blah and pale, though, if I just dumped it in a bowl with some water and hit the nuke button. When you have so few main ingredients and they’re both boring when simply boiled or nuked, you have to strategize a little to get the best out of them quickly. Continue reading →

Filed under: frugality, Microwave tricks, soup, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: flu shot, food, microwave cooking, recipes, soup, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

Giant favas

Posted on October 28, 2012 by DebbieN

Fresh fava beans are the province of spring. Dried ones–the ultra-large size favas–are pale gigantic beans with a flavor like roast chestnuts, only without the sweet. These are the ones for Greek-style winter stews (gigantes plaki) or, as a friend in Jerusalem makes on cold and rainy December weekends, a very slow-braised stew of giant favas with chicken and vegetables.

Here in Pasadena it’s still hovering in the 90s midday, long after Yom Kippur has come and gone. So there’s no incentive to cook anything for more than 15 minutes at a time if you can possibly help it. And gigantes or giant favas (I’m not absolutely sure they’re the same bean, so for reference–what I’m using are the peeled giant favas, about an inch across) take a very long time to cook through to tenderness, even after soaking overnight. The challenge, actually, is to cook them enough without having them fall apart like overcooked potatoes. Oven-baking or crockpotting would probably work, but it’s hours of time.

So most of the dried-fava recipes I can find are for favas that have crumbled and been puréed for soup or hummus or paté. But the stewed favas–that’s what I wanted. Only I wanted them on their own, meatless, tomato-less, pure, as it were, because I had an idea of marinating them a little for a side dish and serving them room-temperature. Something like marinated artichoke hearts, but subtler.

There are few “slow food fast” shortcuts for this, unless a pressure cooker would work well enough without blasting them to bits. I might have to get one and try it–when everyone’s out of the house, just in case my purple thumb tendencies kick in.

You still need to soak them very thoroughly overnight, a minimum of 12 hours and maybe better, 24 hours (in the fridge) before starting to cook them, because at least two batches of Sadaf peeled giant favas have shown a distinct reluctance to take up water the way most reasonably fresh dried beans do, even though a lot of the beans were split in half. Were these two bags of favas just incredibly old and dried out? Are giant favas just naturally tough? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I have to go with the bags of unpeeled favas instead?–maybe those dry out a little less inside and cook up more tender once you get the peels off (after cold-soaking and before boiling). One can only hope.

And substituting giant lima beans that a lot of Greek cookbooks recommend as a substitute in plaki would obviously give more tender results, plus they don’t require laborious peeling, but the flavor would be pretty different. The giant favas are what I want, and no other.

Nevertheless–once the favas were soaked as best possible and rinsed again, I cooked them partially by microwaving 10 minutes in water to cover by an inch and letting them sit. I didn’t want to do it a second round, as I would for chickpeas, because they had the kind of tough obstinacy that reminded me that microwaving can actually make some cooked beans tougher–black beans in particular. At least the raw bean taste was gone, but they still required 2 hours of simmering gently and partially covered on the stovetop, to become something approaching tender. Frustrating.

Some of them broke up. I think it’s practically inevitable. But some of them were huge and very impressive. Once they were as done as they were going to be, I drained them most of the way.

The marinade I use for microwaved artichoke hearts is just lemon juice, garlic, salt and olive oil–the artichoke hearts donate enough juice as they cook to mellow out everything else a little. Favas–no. Plus I wanted something richer and less strident for the flavoring.

So I pulled a bottle of cheap but dry rosé (for want of chardonnay or the like, and rejecting the ever-present reds so as not to stain the beans) out of the fridge and poured some of it into a frying pan to boil off a little of the alcohol and pick up some of the other marinade flavors: a fat clove of garlic, the juice of a lemon, olive oil and a couple of sprigs of rosemary off the bush I’ve managed not to kill this year. I let this simmer together a few minutes to take the edge off the raw garlic and wine flavors and steep the rosemary a little, and then poured in the boiled-up fava beans and just a little of their broth to simmer a few more minutes before pouring the whole thing out to cool.

A little more olive oil would have been good if I’d had it (the bottle ran out after about a tablespoon)–I was actually hoping it would help soften the beans further but I didn’t really have enough for oil-stewing (the Greek cookbooks I have all recommend about half a cup in a batch of about a pound of dried beans) and I’d have had to stew the thing a lot longer to get anything resembling a silky texture, I suspect. But the flavors permeated the beans very nicely–rosemary has an irreplaceable perfume that even wild thyme doesn’t reach even though that would be pretty good too. Together, the rosemary and wine balance the surface brashness of garlic and lemon and bring out the unusual flavor of the giant favas without the need for salt. It’s good hot, but it’s even better the second day, hot or cooled.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: bean salads, beans, cooking with wine, favas, gigantes, Greek food, mezze, Middle Eastern food, rosemary, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Giant favas

Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Posted on February 29, 2012 by DebbieN

Calzone–one of my favorite Italian dishes–is extremely easy to make once you’ve got some basic pizza or bread dough risen and ready to shape. Flatten out individual rounds of dough, mix up a ricotta-based or roasted vegetable filling, fill and fold the dough over into half-moons, crimp the edges, brush with olive oil, and bake on a sheet in a hot oven until they’re puffed and golden. A satisfying but fairly light supper dish, especially if you have a good thick spicy tomato sauce to go with it and a salad on the side.

But even if you don’t, they’re a good consolation on a Sunday night for a kid with frustratingly advanced math homework the teacher didn’t quite prepare himself or the class for (11th-grade precalculus techniques popping up in a sheet of homework for 11-year-olds? The dangers of pulling your homework handouts from a math site on the internet. I keep reminding myself that he’s young yet). All I can say is, you know you’re in trouble when the heartburn is coming from the homework and not the food.

Grrrr. I’m almost over it. Anyway, here’s a much easier calculation trick that doesn’t require factorials…

The trick about making dinner from homemade dough is that the kid in question is diabetic and needs to know how many grams of carb she’s going to get in her calzone. Pizza, calzone, any kind of handmade entrée with dough plus noncarb ingredients, is tricky to calculate carbs for because you can’t easily tell by eye how much bread you’re getting in a serving. Check out any of the commercial pizza companies’ nutrition stats per slice–they’ll often state carbs as a range rather than a set value. How thick the dough is, how large the slice, etc, can really throw things off. Most people don’t need to know more precisely than “35-50 grams per slice”, but diabetics really do. Fifteen grams is a pretty big variation.

So how do you deal with it at home? If you’re making lasagne or stuffed shells or spanakopita, you can calculate the carb by counting the noodles or sheets of fillo dough you use and looking on the package nutrition label, then figuring a total carb count for the tray and dividing by the number of portions. A little tedious, but manageable.

Bread that’s already baked is also easy enough to calculate for–just weigh it out on a food scale in grams and figure 50 percent carb by weight. Most nonsweetened bread is pretty consistent, whatever density its texture. Weigh out a 70-gram piece of bread, and you’re usually looking at 35 grams of carb.

But for calzone or pizza you’re dealing with a bowl of wet dough to start, and once the dish is baked, it’s got lots of other stuff on or in it so you won’t be able to weigh it cooked and really know what carbs you’ve got. You need to test a portion of your raw dough, only raw dough is heavier than it will be once baked. Depending how wet the dough is, the proportion of carb could vary from a little less than half to a lot less.

Weighing a sample of raw dough to figure carbs after baking

The only thing to do is test a bit of dough by weighing it out raw, then reweighing it once it’s baked. Doing this in a conventional oven just for a single test ball of dough can be time-consuming unless you’re already heating it for the main event. Still, you want to get ahead with making the actual calzone so dinner will be sometime before midnight.

Enter the microwave. Yes, really. A nectarine-sized ball of dough, say 100 grams raw weight, will cook through lightly in 40-50 seconds in the microwave if you put it on a saucer and punch the “nuke” button. It’ll still be white and pale, but it’ll have risen fairly well to the size of a large dinner roll and won’t have gooey raw spots (you can check by breaking it open, just watch out for steam). Then just pop it in the toaster oven for about 5 minutes and it’s browned and baked through. When you reweigh it, you’ll know how much a 100-gram ball of your dough weighs cooked, and then figure 50 percent of that weight for carbs.

Aside: This nuke-and-toast scheme works pretty well for making a fast sandwich roll from a bowl of dough in the fridge. When I first came up with the idea, it was with great reluctance, because my only previous experience with microwaving bread had been the horrible, horrible mistake of Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, breads, cooking, Dairy, Diabetes, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition | Tagged: bread, bread dough, calzone, carb counting, cheese, diabetes, diabetic recipes, digital food scales, feta cheese, home baking, homemade pizza, Italian food, nutrition, ricotta, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

There’s something wrong when a veggie burger is worse for you than cheesecake

Posted on January 14, 2012 by DebbieN

Recently spotted in the Los Angeles Times Food Section “Dear SOS”

Veggie burgers from North Peak

Dear SOS: My family and I just got back from a trip to Traverse City, Mich., where I had the absolute best veggie burger I’ve ever had. Is there any way you could coax North Peak Brewery Co. to give up its recipe for its Black Bean and Portobello Mushroom Burger?

Dear —–: This burger even had some non-vegetarians going for it. The restaurant also sometimes serves it with provolone cheese and sliced avocado along with a dab of basil pesto aioli on toasted ciabatta rolls.

Total time: 1½ hours, plus cooling time Servings: 8

The recipe starts out with a 9-ingredient pico de gallo homework item–let’s just agree it’s basically salsa, and it gets mixed into the beans and other stuff at midpoint in the cooking process–which is long. One and a half hours? Yikes. But then check out the rest of the ingredients for the veggie burger itself:

Veggie burgers and assembly

4 cups cooked black beans, from about 2½ (15-ounce) cans (drained)

1/4 cup honey

1/4 cup molasses

2 teaspoons salt, more to taste

1 tablespoon cumin, more to taste

1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for sautéing the burgers

1/2 cup finely diced onion

9 ounces portobello mushrooms, cut into ¼-inch pieces (about 4 cups)

1 cup pico de gallo

3 cups panko bread crumbs

Semolina flour for dusting

Sliced cheese, if desired

Sliced toasted ciabatta rolls

And then — guess the nutrition stats?

Each burger (without cheese or garnishes): 604 calories; 21 grams protein; 103 grams carbohydrates; 11 grams fiber; 13 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 16 grams sugar; 1,227 mg sodium.

Whoa. 604 calories for a single veggie burger. 103 grams of carbohydrate–more than a meal’s worth just by itself. Honey, molasses and panko turn what might have been a reasonable amount of carb from a serving of black beans into something that reminds me of the old sketch from Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion on NPR: “Here’s my secret. I just add sugar to the same tired dinner and wow! suddenly everyone loves it!” … or words to that effect.

No doubt the honey and molasses also go a long way toward disguising the fact that each burger contains more than 1200 milligrams of sodium. Where’s that coming from, anyway? the canned beans–400 mg or so per serving. The added salt–a quarter-teaspoon or about 560 per serving. Breadcrumbs–more salt. Add a ciabatta roll and cheese and you’d be above 1500 mg easily.

At this point, despite their long laundry list of ingredients, the MorningStar Griller’s Vegan burgers I used to eat are looking a little more decent nutritionally–about 300 calories apiece and 280 or so mg. sodium. So if they could do it, why couldn’t you?

In theory, at least, you could make veggie burgers a little less dangerous and cheesecake-like if you just skipped the added syrups and salt, and cut the large excess of frying oil for the mushrooms and other sundries by simply microwaving them to precook. That is, choose a sensible recipe instead of something ridiculous.

Oh yeah. But then it would just be, you know, veggie burgers. Not keeping-up-with-the-chain-restaurants versions with the pumped-up sugar-salt-and-fat formulas. I ask again, is there any hope?

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Eating out, nutrition, Revised recipes, unappetizing | Tagged: chain restaurants, David Kessler, food additives, The End of Overeating., vegetarian recipes, veggie burgers | 2 Comments »

Microwave tricks: Seitan without Simmering

Posted on August 23, 2011 by DebbieN

My sisters-in-law from Oakland were planning a visit to us this summer now that we actually have a house and can host them. It fell through, but the prospect got me thinking about vegan food and what we might serve them. They’re both good cooks, but they eat a lot of commercially-prepared vegan meat substitutes along with their own fresh vegetables and grains and baked goods.

I’m not great on packaged foods in general, and unfortunately, vegan proteins other than plain fresh tofu and dried beans look an awful lot like vegetarian versions of Oscar Meyer sliced bologna and turkey loaf to me. Not just the appearance, but the cost per serving (really high–something like 4-6 bucks for a chic little package that serves two, ostensibly) and the salt (also really high–600 mg and up per serving). And the ingredients lists are always long and kind of mysterious-sounding, either in a surprisingly chemical way or in a Japanese-ingredient-names-as-authenticity way. Not that I’m not working to figure out exactly what kombu and dulse and Job’s tears are. Two seaweeds and a resin? I think, anyway.

There’s also a lot of yeast extract in some of these processed vegan proteins–sounds like between that and the salt, what they really did was dump in Vegemite or Marmite. Bleagh (my husband’s sister is kind of an Anglophile, but that doesn’t excuse either version to me).

On the other hand, some of the vegan cookbooks out now have do-it-yourself recipes for seitan, and so do Ellen’s Kitchen and FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

Seitan is basically wheat gluten dough cooked in stock. If you do it yourself at home, it may take an hour to simmer but really isn’t very expensive compared with the commercially prepared versions. A 5-lb bag of flour at about $2-3 or a few ounces out of a 22-oz bag of vital wheat gluten (about $6-8, depending where you buy it, and worth it for getting 100% gluten out of the bag and not having to wash the starches out of the dough since it’s already done for you) produces something like a pound or two of seitan at a go. That’s enough for a larger meal, maybe even for that elusive home-made vegetarian centerpiece dish…

Why is this worth doing if you don’t eat vegan and aren’t actually having vegan guests in the house after all? (and now that I’ve schlepped the last of the moving boxes out of the living room, I’m really wondering).

I think back to my favorite Chinese restaurant back east, the Hunan Manor in Columbia, MD. Every time we fly back east we try to make a stop there.

One of the things that makes the Hunan Manor great is their willingness to experiment and invent. They serve a wide variety of vegetarian versions of standard banquet dishes using “vegetarian chicken”–basically seitan cut and fried as for meat. These dishes complement their masterful use of tofu with textures from nearly silken to deep-fried to pressed and diced for the vegetarian jao tse, which I’ve always thought looked better and probably tasted better than the pork-based meatball filling our nonkosher friends would get (though they raved about them, and I’ll take their word for it).

The last time we came east, the restaurant had added several new dishes using a different form of seitan with very finely layered rolls that were cut in bite sized pieces, coated and fried–a pretty close simulation for the layered flesh of chicken. It was really delicious in their orange “chicken” with perfectly cooked bright green broccoli. It was unexpectedly unsalty as well, so I don’t know whether they made it in-house or had bought the prepared seitan in an unflavored form.

Either way, the dish was a great argument for using seitan creatively, and I don’t think my sisters-in-law, competent cooks though they are, have eaten any seitan dishes that good using anything from a little Gardein package.

So I decided I’d like to try my hand at seitan at home and see if I can’t come up with something flavorful, chewy, satisfying and nutritious, without having it scream salt. After all, once you’ve got the finished loaf or pieces, you’re Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, frugality, Grains, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: FatFree Vegan Kitchen, Food Blogs, Gardein, low-sodium cooking, meat substitutes, microwave cooking, mock duck, seitan, vegan recipes, vegetarian protein, vegetarian recipes, vital wheat gluten, wheat meat | 4 Comments »

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Posted on August 1, 2011 by DebbieN

I know, Diana Kennedy (The Cuisines of Mexico, 1971, and onward) probably wouldn’t do it this way–or maybe she would, at home, for herself? Naaah. She’s still pretty particular. Eighty-seven years old, and doesn’t seem to have slowed down noticeably in her quest to rescue the disappearing dishes of Mexico. Her latest, Oaxaca al Gusto (2010) is a huge coffee table cookbook, beautiful and unfortunately for me, so full of rare Mexico-only ingredients, not to mention pork and lard, that I don’t know if there’s much I can really cook from it. I’m scouring it now for possibilities, but in the meantime…

Friday afternoon was vegetable-shopping day again, because we go through good tomatoes like a pack of sharks after a swimmer’s leg, and unfortunately our own backyard gardening adventure is turning out to be more like the $50 tomato kind of thing. To make up for packing our daughter out with my husband on his errands all afternoon instead of on mine (because I desperately needed some time off for bad behavior), I decided to do a little better than the usual dinner. Of course, they had a decent time, and so did I. Gotta do that more often.

So while they were gone I stopped at my greengrocer and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes that actually have flavor at 99 cents a pound (we have one left), a couple of eggplants for 65 cents apiece, some tart green plums, and these Anaheim chiles, which were beautiful and at $1.19 a pound, cheaper than the bell peppers this time. If you’re not completely clued into eating with the seasons, sometimes the pricetag gives a gentle hint of how the growers are thinking about any given vegetable that week.

Normally I wouldn’t buy Anaheim chiles–they’re pretty mild, but still hotter than bell peppers, which we usually eat raw, and the chiles are really better cooked. But when I saw them, all I could think about was stuffing them with feta for a quick pick-me-up side dish to go with mahi mahi and rice.

Some stuffed chiles are authentically made with Anaheims, I was encouraged to find (thumbing through one of my two, count ’em, two copies of Kennedy’s first book). But the ones that make good-looking cookbook photos are made with pasilla or poblano chiles–darker green, plumper to hold more stuffing, and with thinner walls. Also a little hotter, and often soaked up from their dried form. Baked in tomato broth or else stuffed with meat picadillo, coated in egg, baked, and dressed with a walnut/sour cream sauce (chiles en nogado) with pomegranate seeds sprinkled on top–a Moroccan-origin dish, maybe, with that egg cloak and the pomegranate seeds?

The other thing Kennedy specifies is to char, bag-steam and peel the peppers before using them, which makes the egg cling a lot better and probably makes them a bit more digestible. Very classic, but let’s face it, with all this stuff, including the sauces: I’m not that good, and I’m kind of impatient. What I really wanted for supper was quick stuffed peppers, gooey on the inside but not so messy outside– so as to avoid wearing it. (A girl’s gotta know her limitations. Maybe next time, if I can find an oilcloth bib my size?)

I’m not so interested in long baking in tomato broth or soaking fresh walnuts in milk for the moment–maybe sometime when I want to get the whole dish together, because I’m sure it’s delicious, especially if someone else is making it and heating up their own kitchen in July. But right now, time is ticking, it’s nearly supper, and Beauty and the Beast are about to show up in the driveway (my husband is beautiful for taking on the Beast, even if he grumbles while doing it.)

So I’m definitely not about to char and peel the peppers–what a pain, plus to me it makes them kind of slimy and slithery and not what I want to eat. Unlike Tom Colicchio, who consistently makes a fuss about it on Top Chef, I don’t mind the fact that pepper skins have a little bitter alkaloid edge to them. It’s part of what makes them peppers, and it helps them keep their crunch.

And, of course, I’ve had the experience of walking into someone’s house when they’d just been charring peppers on the gas burner, and it smelled an awful lot like dope. Not lovely, and not at all like them.

So anyway, these are not proper chiles rellenos by any normal standard. They just taste good, they’re not slimy, and they don’t take more than 15 minutes tops. My kind of dish.

In addition to the usual feta and mozzarella, I still had a few half ears of leftover corn on the cob from my daughter’s birthday party last weekend. They were still good, but there weren’t enough to share out for supper, unless–well, corn and peppers also go together (usually as a soup, but why not here too?)

Aside: That was surprisingly one of the easiest celebration dinners I have ever put together in my life — pan-grilled salmon fillets, tomato/basil salad, raw vegetables with bleu cheese dip, and microwaved corn on the cob. I was going to make a cheesecake but decided at the last to buy a Trader Joe’s frozen one for expedience and served it with strawberries and blueberries. It was surprisingly good, inexpensive, and quite moderate on carbs and calories for commercial cheesecake. Of course, because my daughter’s friends are all about 11-13 years old, at least one couldn’t eat the corn due to braces but didn’t know how to shuck the kernels off with a knife, one immediately declared she wasn’t into vegetables (I was mellow enough to shrug and say it was fine), and one couldn’t hack cheesecake so I scrounged her up an impromptu dessert of chocolate bar and cinnamon grahams because we had literally nothing else in the house dessertwise. Oy. And they all stayed up till 4 am, but at least they were quiet and sneaky about it. My goals for a good sleepover.

So anyway, I had made 6 or 7 ears of corn, broken in halves, and steamed them in the microwave in a big pyrex bowl for about 8 minutes. The leftovers were fine reheated during the week with a drizzle of water on a plate in the microwave for 30 seconds or so. But I still had a couple and decided to use the kernels for the chile stuffing, and they were delicious.

Stuffed Anaheim Chiles with Cheese (specific amounts given for 3 chiles, because that’s what I made for us Friday and again on Sunday with new corn, so this actually works out, but you can and should scale up, obviously, and I wish I had made enough to serve them a second time without starting all over.)

Anaheim chiles, 1 or 2 per person
corn kernels (1 ear or about 1 c. kernels made enough for 3 chiles, generously stuffed)
feta cheese, crumbled (1-2 oz)
low-fat mozzarella, chopped fine (1 oz/stick)
finely chopped onion (1/4 med yellow onion)
garlic clove(s), grated/minced/mashed (1 med clove)
za’atar (wild thyme), thyme, oregano or sage, chopped or crumbled in if dry (to taste; I used 1 t. or so chopped fresh za’atar–do what looks and tastes right for your quantities)

Wash the chiles, cut off the cap and remove the seed core as best possible without splitting the flesh (rinse with water to get out the seeds way down inside). It’s not really a disaster if the pepper splits–just wrap it around the stuffing and press it together, more or less, but it looks prettier and handles better if you keep the pepper whole.

Microwave the peppers on an open plate 3-4 minutes to start them cooking. Mix all the other ingredients together well with your hands–it’ll be pretty moist and crumbly, but you want the garlic and onion well distributed. Cool the chiles just enough to handle. Stuff the chiles with the mixture by hand, pressing it in with your thumbs as you go to make sure some filling reaches the tip end. Microwave again on HIGH on an open plate 3-4 minutes for 3 chiles, arranged with the tips toward the middle of the plate and the wide stem end toward the outside, or maybe 5-6 minutes for 6, or until the peppers are getting tender and the cheese has melted.

Don’t forget to wash your hands well with soap after handling the chiles–I find that even though the Anaheims are mild-tasting, my fingers still get a little of the classic burning sensation as an aftereffect when I handle them.

Filed under: appetizers, books, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Anaheim chiles, chiles rellenos, corn, Diana Kennedy, feta cheese, Mexican cooking, microwave cooking, stuffed peppers, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

Posted on March 13, 2011 by DebbieN

Stuffed shells (shown here with plastic wrap for the fridge) cook up really quickly and easily in a microwave

This was the second try at a quick supper while juggling too many other things at once. The first half box of pasta shells I cooked in the microwave as I usually do but they ended up staying in the water much too long while I was busy elsewhere (lecturing my kid about waltzing out of the house without letting us know–Oy! I thought we had this down by now, but 10 is 10, with a lot of eye-rolling and forgetfulness and sudden impatience for all the ordinary rules).

When I returned to the kitchen, the bowl of shells had long since cooked, softened, soaked and turned to pasty shell-shaped mush–too far gone to rescue. Bleagghhh…I threw them out and started over. Luckily, a microwave cuts the time it costs to boil the water for a new batch, and I’d already made the stuffing and had some tomato sauce ready. This time, I decided to pay attention, and it came out fine.

If you have fewer distractions or better time sense than I do so you can catch your pasta before it falls apart, you can put together a number of good filled pasta casseroles like this one all (or at least mostly) by using your microwave, and they might take less than half an hour from start to finish. Two other examples–the very similar spinach lasagne I make with eggroll wrappers (same spinach/ricotta/feta filling, same microwave marinara but don’t cook the eggroll wrappers before layering them, and use two wrappers at a time, since they’re so thin), or even butternut squash or sweet potato ravioli with wonton or gyoza wrappers and a mozzarella-based cheese sauce. Once the shells are cooked al dente (still a little chewy, but not hard), the dish goes together in about 5 minutes and cooks just to heat it through.

Stuffed Shells in the Microwave

1/2 lb or so dried large pasta shells for stuffing (about 20 shells or 1/2 box)
1 recipe Microwave Marinara or about 1 c. of your preferred tomato sauce
pinches of fennel seed, dried or fresh thyme or oregano, and/or hot pepper flakes
shredded mozzarella for topping (optional)

Filling:

2 c. low-fat or skim ricotta
2 oz. or so crumbled feta
1/2 lb defrosted/cooked spinach
1/4 onion
1 fat clove garlic, grated, minced or mashed
a few leaves shredded basil and/or thyme or marjoram
pinch or grating of nutmeg
6-8 microwave-marinated artichoke hearts, optional

Put the shells in a big pyrex mixing bowl (2.5 qt or liter), fill with water to about 2 inches above the shells, cover with a microwaveable plate and microwave on HIGH about 9 minutes, or until the water is bubbling but not boiling over. Leave the shells in the microwave another 5 minutes to absorb and check for doneness–you may need another 2 minutes or so. When they’re just cooked through but still firm, drain them gently so they don’t tear apart.

In the bottom of a microwaveable casserole (in my case, a pyrex deep dish pie plate), spoon about 1/4 c. tomato sauce and spread it around. Sprinkle on the fennel seed, oregano and/or hot pepper flakes if using, or just mix them into the sauce before you start.

Mix all the filling ingredients together by hand. Stuff each shell with a soup spoonful of the filling and set it in the casserole–you can fit about 20 stuffed shells into a deep dish pie plate, maybe more if you pack them tighter than I did. Carefully spoon the rest of the sauce between the shells and if it seems too dry on top or your shells are parcooked and kind of stiff, drizzle a few spoonfuls of water, maybe 1/4 c. total, on the sauce but not on the shells themselves. If you’re using mozzarella to top the shells, sprinkle it on now and add a pinch of oregano if you like it. Cover the casserole with a microwaveable plate or lid and microwave 7-8 minutes on HIGH or until heated through. The cheese should be melted on top and the shells should be tender.

You can reheat the casserole the next day very easily–check to see if it feels dried out at all, and drizzle in a tiny amount of water (spoonful or so) if it does, then cover with a microwaveable plate and heat for 5 minutes on HIGH.

DIABETIC/CARB COUNT NOTES:

Barilla says their shells are 37 grams of carbohydrate per 5 shells, or about 7 grams apiece. Ricotta has about 3-4 g. carb per 1/4 c. serving (about 2-3 shells’ worth), so for 5 shells maybe 5-7 g. carb. If you use my microwave marinara, it has just tomatoes and a bit of onion, none of the commercial added sugars or starch thickeners, so negligible carb count per serving.

Total: about 45 g. per 5 shells, or about 8-9 g/shell.

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Pasta, Vegetabalia | Tagged: carb counts, marinara, microwave cooking, Pasta, stuffed shells, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

Soupe à l’oignon gratinée (or not)

Posted on December 22, 2010 by DebbieN

Sometimes it pays to think out the recipes you read before you try them. For example…

I love and miss French onion soup from my pre-kosher days (that would be up to about age 19, long, long ago…) Can’t be helped, though–if you keep kosher, beef stock does not combine with Gruyère. And I’ve never actually tried making it at home before, because, if you go by a traditional, official kind of recipe like the one published in the LA Times below, it’s a 3-hour ordeal.

RECIPE: Soupe à l’oignon gratinée – Los Angeles Times.

Total time: 3 hours Servings: 8 Note: Adapted from Comme Ca.

8 large yellow onions, halved and sliced lengthwise into 1/4 -inch strips

1/4 cup unsalted butter

Salt

2 2/3 cups water, divided

2/3 cup dry Sherry

5 cups chicken broth (with as little sodium as possible)

2 2/3 cups beef broth

8 sprigs fresh thyme and one bay leaf, tied together

Fresh ground black pepper

1 loaf French bread

1 pound Gruyère, grated

Pretty onerous just on the ingredients (lot of salt in them thar vacuumpaks of stock), not to mention the bread. The Swiss cheese, oddly enough, is a lower-salt cheese than most, about 120-150 mg sodium per ounce as compared with, well, anything else at 180-210. It makes up for the lack of salt with a huge OD of saturated fat–and 2 ounces per person’s got to be a lot, really, just for melting on top of soup. It would be another matter if this were a legitimate fondue, or a sumptuous grilled cheese on really good toasted pain levain, and you were actually going to eat it all, but if I recall correctly, you aren’t.

Because I never had French onion soup at home, I never had to face the task of scrubbing baked-on cheese off the rims of the bowls afterward. Maybe 1/3 of what was sprinkled on ended up stuck like Swiss barnacles to the bowl, which seems like a waste, especially if you shell out for real Gruyère. The rest turned into goop that sank to the bottom of the bowl and stretched up for yards on the spoon only to stick to the front of your teeth. Or blouse.

Plus at home there’s all the rooting around in the cabinets hoping your soup bowls are the kind that can survive the broiler and that your oven mitts (and guests) can Survive The Gruyère.

But the real cruncher here is time.

The LA Times instructions don’t even include the time it takes to sliver 8 very large onions, but you should, because it’s not trivial: 20-30 minutes, plus crying time. Heat the oven to 400 degrees (15-20 min, they also forgot this bit, but maybe while you’re crying over the onions). Stew onions with butter and 1/4 t salt in lidded casserole in the oven until the onions are softened and a light golden-brown, about 1.5 hrs, during which you’re supposed to stir every 15 minutes (!) Take the casserole out and cook further on the stove top until the onions are a deep golden-brown and just begin to stick to the bottom of the pot to form a crust (10 min? 15? 20? more?–from the experience below, I’d say at least 20, maybe even 30). Add half of the water and cook until the water has evaporated, about 8 minutes (so specific?). Add the sherry and keep stirring until it has evaporated, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining water, broth and the thyme bundle, bring to simmer (5-10 min) and simmer 40 minutes (why 40? who knows?). Slice and toast the bread. Fill 8 oven-proof soup bowls, lay the toasts on top of the soup, sprinkle the grated Gruyère evenly over the tops and place the bowls under the broiler just until the cheese is bubbling and begins to brown in places (5 minutes?). Serve immediately.

TOTAL TIME: At least 3 hours, probably more like 3 1/2.

KLUTZ FACTOR: HIGH–lot of hot transfers of heavy casserole dish, finding and broiling ovenproof soup bowls, transferring to the table without spilling…not to mention serving “immediately”.

Then there’s…(you knew this was coming)

Nutrition per serving: 490 cal; 27 g protein; 36 g carb; 3 g fiber; 26 g fat (15 g sat); 78 mg. cholesterol; 808 mg. sodium.

Wow! Am I wrong in thinking that almost no soup should be this much of a labor of love, not to mention love handles? For this much time, fat and salt, I’d demand at LEAST grilled marinated lamb. Or a good runny camembert, a perfectly ripe pear, some excellent sourdough toast and a half-glass of something complex and interesting in the way of wine.

Maybe it’s as delicious as promised. But all those hours, all that stirring, not to mention all that fat and sodium and cholesterol, just for a bowl of onion soup and a slice of toast with melted cheese? Is it any wonder Lipton’s is popular?

Still…Can we do better with the onion soup itself? Maybe as in, vegetarian but still opulent, and furthermore without the heavy-duty time and calorie burden? Let’s try, anyway.

The first objections I have are eight huge onions and 8-10 cups of salted broth. Do I want to make anywhere near that much onion soup? Do I have that many takers in my house? Unfortunately not. One huge onion just for me, then. Maybe my husband and daughter, but only if it’s obviously fabulous. In which case, I won’t really want to share with them.

The main thing here is getting the flavor out of the onions–you want to caramelize them thoroughly and evenly without breaking down their aromaticity too badly. But I personally think baking them slowly in a big oven for an hour and a half just to start to do that is insane. Even if we’re talking about eight big onions.

My first attempt at shortening this recipe did not go badly, exactly, but it didn’t get me soupe à l’oignon either. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, haute cuisine, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, soup, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: bistro food, cheese, French cuisine, French onion soup, Gruyere, kosher cooking, low-sodium cooking, microwave cooking, soups, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Soupe à l’oignon gratinée (or not)

Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Posted on December 23, 2009 by DebbieN

Last week I got a Chanukah package in the mail from my sister. In it was India with Passion: Modern Regional Home Food by Manju Malhi, a British food writer with a popular UK cooking show, Simply Indian, on home-style cooking. One of my sister’s food-savvy friends had tried out the recipes and raved about it.

Indian food is becoming more popular in America and non-Indians like me are finally getting to taste a broader variety of regional cuisines (though I’ve yet to get down to Artesia, the “Little India” section of west LA, and really dig in). But learning to cook these dishes at home is another matter.

Yamuna Devi, Maddhur Jaffrey, and Julie Sahni were the first major Indian cookbook authors in the U.S. But their classic books and most of the ones published since then don’t give you a way to make sense of the laundry lists of spices given for each recipe. They give a rote answer as to why Indian cooks don’t use the standard yellow jar of generic curry powder that the supermarkets stock, but there’s no serious discussion on the balance of flavorings and how to vary it within a meal for any one particular regional cuisine. And perhaps there really is no great way to explain it. You really have to read through the book and see how the spices and proportions change from one dish to another–something most Western readers aren’t used to noticing.

If I had my wish, I’d want general notes like “red lentil dal is better with twice as much cumin as coriander seed and a fair amount of both–we’re talking teaspoons to a tablespoon for 6 portions–but palak paneer should have much less of both–half-teaspoons– in equal amounts and include cardamom–preferably the black smoky kind–as the signature ingredient.” I want to know why you have onions cooked down to a paste in one dish but no garlic, and in another use fennel instead of cumin. What’s essential and what can I leave out if I don’t have it in the house? How can I vary the dish with the vegetables or beans that I have on hand at the moment and still have it come out tasting good? And what’s authentic and what’s modern?

A crop of recent cookbooks published in the US and UK attempt to deal with these problems a little more systematically–sometimes more for recent Indian emigrés and students than for the larger non-Indian community. Monica Bhide has simplified the spice lists in her recipes–sometimes to the point where you wonder if the food bears any resemblance to the original. Suvir Saran, lauded by Mark Bittman and the first Indian restaurant chef to join the American name-brand-chef pantheon, has also simplified ingredients lists and incorporated some American ingredients–like ketchup–with reasonable reasons (ketchup’s origins lie in British-controlled India of a century or so ago). And cooking teacher Raghavan Iyer has just come out this year with a big, bright paperback tome, 660 Curries, which logically ought to be more than you could or would want to cook in a couple of years.

One new trend is an attempt to make Indian food heart-healthier by cutting down on saturated fats, substituting unsaturated vegetable oil for ghee and tofu for paneer cheese. What they haven’t yet done, and probably should, is cut back the salt as well. (So should everybody else, of course.)

Nearly every Indian cookbook I’ve ever seen uses screamingly high salt–rarely less than a teaspoon for a dish that serves 4-6, often a tablespoon or even more. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cookbooks, Indian food, Indian home cooking, Indian regional cuisine, Julie Sahni, low sodium, low-salt cooking, Maddhur Jaffrey, Manju Malhi, Raghavan Iyer, slow food, Suvir Saran, vegetarian recipes, Yamuna Devi | Comments Off on Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

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Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

There’s something wrong when a veggie burger is worse for you than cheesecake

Microwave tricks: Seitan without Simmering

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

Soupe à l’oignon gratinée (or not)

Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

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