• Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 241 other subscribers

  • Noshing on

    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

  • Recent Posts

  • Contents

  • Archives

  • Now Reading

  • The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

  • See also my Book Reviews

  • Copyright 2008-2024Slow Food Fast. All writing and images on this blog unless otherwise attributed or set in quotes are the sole property of Slow Food Fast. Please contact DebbieN via the comments form for permissions before reprinting or reproducing any of the material on this blog.

  • ADS AND AFFILIATE LINKS

  • I may post affiliate links to books and movies that I personally review and recommend. Currently I favor Alibris and Vroman's, our terrific and venerable (now past the century mark!) independent bookstore in Pasadena. Or go to your local library--and make sure to support them with actual donations, not just overdue fines (ahem!), because your state probably has cut their budget and hours. Again.

  • In keeping with the disclaimer below, I DO NOT endorse, profit from, or recommend any medications, health treatments, commercial diet plans, supplements or any other such products.

  • DISCLAIMER

  • SlowFoodFast sometimes addresses general public health topics related to nutrition, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes. Because this is a blog with a personal point of view, my health and food politics entries often include my opinions on the trends I see, and I try to be as blatant as possible about that. None of these articles should be construed as specific medical advice for an individual case. I do try to keep to findings from well-vetted research sources and large, well-controlled studies, and I try not to sensationalize the science (though if they actually come up with a real cure for Type I diabetes in the next couple of years, I'm gonna be dancing in the streets with a hat that would put Carmen Miranda to shame. Consider yourself warned).

Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

Posted on November 17, 2009 by DebbieN

Newspapers all over the country are sweating to include vegetarian main dishes in their annual Thanksgiving features. But they’re not doing all that well. This week the LA Times food section proudly listed a whole bunch of Thanksgiving vegetable side dishes as if to say, “See how much there is for you vegetarians to eat without your hostess making any changes just for your special status?” Only, as readers quickly pointed out,  1) none of the dishes contained any noticeable protein, 2) most of them were overloaded with butter and salt and 3) two of them contained chicken broth or pancetta. Someone had forgotten to re-edit them for a vegetarian audience.

I pick on my local paper because we’re talking Los Angeles, with great produce available all year round and a very large vegetarian population–and a lot of ethnic groups with significant roles for vegetarian dishes in their traditional cuisines. We have less excuse for this kind of simple ignorance than most cities.

But it isn’t simple ignorance. Running very close to the surface of most food publications’ features on vegetarian fare at the big showdown holidays is a distinct tone of hysteria. How can anyone not want to eat meat? Nothing tastes like turkey, and nothing sells like it either! We don’t know anything about vegetarian proteins! they panic. Do vegetarians eat Durkee Fried Onions or Empress Yams? Do they eat marshmallows? They don’t even like pancetta! What’s wrong with them?

These are home questions for newspapers and food mags, because you know the real survival question is, “How are we going to sell advertising for chickpeas and lentils, for chrissakes?” That probably goes double or more for food shows on tv. If they don’t advertise, they don’t stay on the air.

It’s not like tofu has a big marketing presence in the nation’s newspapers or brand recognition outside of local markets. There are only so many brushed-steel and cherrywood designer kitchens anyone is willing to buy in a down economy, especially once they discover how badly brushed steel shows fingerprints. And cooking mags don’t get a lot of help from PepsiCo and CocaCola, Ralston-Purina or the many cigarette and pharmaceutical companies.

What’s left? Bacon, turkey, and processed food companies featuring starches and microwaveable tv dinners. This might not be such a problem for food pubs if they’d found a way to keep their features a little more independent of their ad base. Bacon is showing up these days as suddenly gourmet in so many inappropriate dishes–ice cream? chocolate bars? popcorn?–precisely because it’s relatively inexpensive, widely available in supermarkets, and sold by a few recognizable national namebrand companies that still advertise reliably in a down market. Young food bloggers who go for it think it’s something new and daring, but you have to wonder whether they realize how hard the commercial food media are pushing it and why.

In any case, the November and December issues or episodes really need to push meat for all they’re worth because American bacon is basically the same everywhere and straight-up turkey isn’t all that popular the rest of the year, and the companies know it. Meanwhile, vegetarianism in all its variations, and with a growing political undercurrent, is gaining ground among younger Americans, or at least those not too obsessed with bacon. What to do?

Apparently the answer is, panic and get mad at the vegetarians for wanting non-meat dishes that are worth something, but try hard not to admit it in front of the camera. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, Grains, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

High-Speed Split Pea Soup

Posted on November 11, 2008 by DebbieN
Split Pea Soup in the Microwave on SlowFoodFast

Microwave split pea soup, atop my current "blank book" cookbook (Sunflowers, by Vincent Van Gogh)

It’s November and even in Southern California, we’re starting to feel the season (there’s pretty much only one) change. It’s still sunny out, and sometimes near 100 degrees at midday, but by three or four in the afternoon, the temperature suddenly dips down into the 60s and people start complaining about it because they left their sweaters at home or in the car. And their hair is getting messed up. So even though you wouldn’t think it was necessary out here, split pea soup is on the menu.

There are two kinds of pea soup worth eating. Fresh (or fresh-frozen) peas make a sweet, delicate, beautifully green soup if you blend them with some water or milk and a little chive or onion or shallot and dill. Fresh pea soup also takes only five minutes to make, which is perfect for LA’s average springtime patience level. But that’s for spring–when the temperature suddenly hits an insistent 95 in mid-March and people start reaching for their waterbottles and sunglasses again. And declaring loudly, “Ah, it’s finally Spring!” when in reality we’ve had 80-degree days in December and January.

Split pea soup, the starchy thick heart of winter comfort eating, is another beast altogether. Most people either open a can of indifferent and hideously salty soup with mysterious lumps that claim to be carrot or–well, carrot, it’s the politest guess. Or else, if they actually cook, suffer a two-and-a-half-hour boiling-with-hamhocks-all-throughout-the-house kind of ordeal. Not that it doesn’t smell wonderful during that time, but with gas prices the way they are, and the sun still beckoning at midday, no one in their right mind wants to bother.

Doing it the old-fashioned way, it takes the full 2.5-3 hours for the peas to fall apart and make soup. And when you go to bed at night your pillow smells like split pea with hamhock…you really have to be dedicated to put up with that. Microwaving might just be the best solution. Mine is minus the hamhock, because this is a kosher-to-vegetarian kind of blog, but you can add a precooked piece of hamhock to yours if you’re serious about it–precooked for safety, because this soup may be too fast for a meat bone to cook all the way through the way it would if you boiled it to death on the stovetop.

High-Speed Microwave Split Pea Soup

  • 1/2 lb (half a 1-lb bag…) dried split peas (or a whole pound, see note #2)
  • water or low-sodium vegetable or chicken broth, about 2 qts.
  • 1/4 yellow onion
  • 1 fat clove of garlic, mashed, grated or minced
  • 1-3 t. curry powder, to taste
  • 1/2-1 t. each ground coriander and cumin
  • 1/4 t. ground caraway, optional
  • juice of 1 lemon
  • pinch or two of salt, to taste–don’t overdo it
  1. Rinse the split peas well in a colander, then scrape them into a 2.5 qt pyrex bowl, cover with water or broth (I prefer water, but your mileage may vary) by two inches at least, and cover the bowl with a lid or microwaveable plate.
  2. Nuke for 7 minutes on high and let it sit covered, not cooking, for maybe half an hour in the microwave. The peas will swell and take up most of the water.
  3. Scoop the peas into a food processor–leave the liquid behind in the bowl for now or you’ll get a lot of hot backsplash and the peas won’t puree well. Grind the softened peas down with the onion, garlic, lemon juice, and spices.
  4. As the peas grind down to a thickening mass, pour a little of the cooking liquid into the bowl in a slow stream.
  5. Once you have the consistency thick but pourable, add a little more water, put everything back into the bowl, stir well, and taste for salt. Don’t add more than a little–if it’s still not salty enough at the end, people can add their own at the table. Nuke the soup covered for 3 or 4 more minutes to reheat and cook the onion. The soup will probably thicken considerably, and you may have to stir in more water before serving.

Notes:

1. The flavor of lemon tends to weaken on reheating, so if you serve this soup throughout the week, reheat and then add a fresh squeeze of lemon.

2. You can make a whole pound at a time just about as easily–you may want to add another couple of minutes to the cooking times before blending if the peas aren’t done enough at the times listed above, but they may well be.

Filed under: high-speed soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on High-Speed Split Pea Soup

« Previous Page