Brussels Sprouts Hash

I know that people are entitled to different opinions on brussels sprouts, but I love them so much I have confused them in my mind with junk food, and gobble them up like I'm going to get caught. If you haven't had them since you were a kid, now's a good time to give them a chance.

Today I made a simple "hash"- I fried some potato cubes in oil until browned, then tossed in messily sliced brussels sprouts, diced apple cubes, some chopped almonds, and salt and pepper. When everything was cooked and kind of burnt, I squeezed half a lemon on top. It was so heavenly- nutty and fresh and slightly sweet. I recommend you try it at home with whatever random ingredients you have at home. I myself might eat the same tomorrow.

It was definitely a nice lunch to prepare for an evening consisted of the sisyphean task of standing around holding up a large heavy board, and occasionally turning in time with some 30 other folks, all while remaining perfectly silent and still for 2 hours. (Part of an art project I mentioned yesterday, that I am getting paid for.) But tonight was the actual "performance" and actually, people really seemed to dig it! You see, we made like a maze with these boards, that changed in tune with the music to lock some people in and some people out. Since I was directed to stare only at the board, I didn't see people's reactions, but they seemed enthusiastic afterwards. And who can complain at getting paid to participate in real live art? I think I'm going to add to my cv... T: lawyer, performance artist, admirer of brussels sprouts.

Song of the day: The Clash- London Calling

Improvisation, European Style

I've realized since I've been in Belgium and Germany that I have an unusually high reliance on recipes and cookbooks. Most of my friends here, when making lunch or dinner, just glance around the kitchen and throw something together step by step. In contrast, even if I am making one of my own recipes I'll look back at the blog or my jotted notes to find out how exactly I did it. When my friends and I are cooking, this leads to some funny situations, where I am begging them to let me look quickly at a cookbook to find out what the cooking time, quantities, or temperature is, and they are heavily rolling their eyes saying "ahhh, you can just tell when its right, just taste it!!!"
Pumpkin+ Pumpkin oil+ bread + margarine
I have a whole cultural theory behind this: Europeans did not experience the same boom in reliance on prepared foods that Americans did in the fifties and sixties. (Ie, European recipes do not usually look like: "empty a can of mushroom soup onto chicken, toss, and bake for 30 minutes...") As a result of the fact that Europeans, either because of stronger traditional adherence, relative poverty in the post-war era, or the Common Agricultural Policy, retained a reliance on elemental ingredients, and thus passed down to their children techniques for cooking that became second nature. American kids, on the other hand, found themselves at a loss for making things from scratch, having grown up with canned beans, cake mix, and Hamburger Helper. (Not everyone, mind you, but I think its more typical in the US than here.)

Roasted carrots+ Avocado+ olive oil+ salt and pepper

This might be why European cookbooks are so sparse in explanation (as opposed to the novels in American cookbooks), and why my generation had to teach ourselves to cook relatively simple things: we grew up with so many prepared foods at our disposal that we forgot improvisational cooking techniques, and feel more attached, (even, fervently attached) to cookbooks that teach us how to get those skills back.

Now, this is all a theory and I may be totally full of it, please let me know if you have an alternate explanation in the comments.
Mashed potatoes mashed w/ brussels sprouts+roasted sweet potatoes, carrots, and pears

At any rate, this is all to say that here are a few meals that were bravely improvised, with nary a recipe in sight. You may notice that they have very few ingredients, but still, I'm making progress here! However, I don't care if I live in Europe till I die, you will still have to pry my Veganomicon from my cold, dead American hands.

You know you've been veganized...

As I was enjoying my delicious and homey supper of mashed potatoes with spinach, mushrooms with leeks and thyme, and roasted brussels sprouts this week, I stopped for a moment and looked down in wonderment as two thoughts occurred to me:

1. This entirely-too-green meal might be a nice dinner for St. Patricks day- screw green eggs and ham!
2. Everything on my plate was something I would have considered deeply odd to eat a few years ago.

That's when it occurred to me... I had been veganized!

You see, when you first go vegan, there are a lot of foods that you havent been exposed to before, and it can be scary. You might just stick to fake chicken nuggets, cheese-less pizza, french fries, salads and spaghetti, like all the uninitiated. Then you start to venture a little further, frequenting health food stores, trying your hand at some muffins, maybe a stir fry and... even some baked tofu. Soon enough though, you find yourself eating, for every meal, things most people have never heard of or thought of... and loving it! It means you've been VEGANIZED! Symptoms:

-you think everything's better with nooch on it.
-you can instantly tell if the barista gave you regular milk instead of soymilk.
-you look at recipes with kale in them and think: "YUM!"
-"panko", "agar-agar" and "arrowroot" aren't nonsense words to you- they're in your pantry!
-you're deeply shocked that people still make non-vegan cupcakes.
-you know how to pronounce "quinoa" correctly.
-you prefer brown rice and whole wheat bread to their bleachy-white counterparts.
-you fight over the last green bean, and lust over brussels sprouts, beets, broccoli, and all those other veggies your childhood self turned your nose up at.
-to you, sweet potatoes and black beans go together like peanut butter and jelly.
-you are weirdly obsessed with oatmeal.
-you have agave nectar, maple syrup AND molasses in your pantry.
-why put white sugar in your coffee, when you have stevia/ succanat/or sugar in the raw to choose from?
-you can veganize almost any recipe (even one by Anthony Bourdain) in less than 3 steps.
-you can't remember a time when there wasn't a tub of Earth Balance and a bottle of Braggs in your fridge.
-the words "chocolate soymilk" are deeply meaningful to you.
-the words "chickpea gravy" cause a faraway look to appear in your eyes.

What's funny is, you don't have to be vegan to be "veganized"- I think the fact that my parents now suggest things like roasted beets, paradise pie, and penang tofu for dinner shows that they too have fallen victim. Who knows, with the prevalence of health conscious recipes online, and mainstream omnis who love vegan food like Mark Bittman, perhaps the whole world is on the verge of being veganized...

What are your symptoms?

Song of the Day: Titus Andronicus- Arms Against Atrophy

A Very Soul Power Christmas

Let's face it: holidays are all about food.

Ceremonies, prayers, costumes... all that stuff can be nice, but nothing beats brunch, dinner, or the moments when you are eating candy at 9 am and nobody gives you any trouble. After all, what's the real show of loyalty and family? Not who's around when you go to bed or open presents, but who comes for dinner!

At my house, Christmas dinner is always a special affair because of the fact that it is also my brother's birthday. This makes for unusual holiday fare (chicken wings and velveeta mac & cheese anyone?) and is not always the most vegetarian friendly. Of course, who can blame him? On your birthday, you want comfort food, special food, but not always, say, a Christmas goose, or a seitan roulade. No problem! The fact that my brother picks out the carniverous portion of the meal leaves me in charge of pleasing my younger brother and I, which is convenient since we can sort of go wild on the crunchy hippy stuff and not try to make crowd-pleasing approximations of omni meals.

Although, for breakfast, we did just that. There's this amazing restaurant in Atlanta called Ria's Bluebird which has gorgeous bluebird murals on the wall, a great friendly atmosphere, and absolutely scrumptious vegan breakfast hash. I have to hit it up every time I'm in town, and one of the best things on the menu is the pancakes with caramelized bananas. Although I wouldn't vouch for this being vegan there, the many times I've re-created it it has always been equally fabulous.

So while my folks munched on the eggs benedict which is traditional in my home, we had some pancakes (recipe courtesy of The Joy of Vegan Cooking) topped with caramelized bananas and pecans. The soysage is Morning Star and (!) not vegan, but since it was already bought I didn't want to disappoint everybody.

To make the bananas, simply heat a few knobs of earth balance until melted, then stir in a fist-full of brown sugar. Blend the two until you've got a nice bubbly syrup going, then add in sliced bananas and coat to your heart's burned-ness content. Top with pecans. Mine were a little mushy today, but fabulous nonetheless. Oh Ria!

For dinner, we decided on a feast of my favorites with the main course being Jimmy's pick. We had the paradise pie from The Candle Cafe cookbook, one of the J's favorite meals EVER, plus a yellow beet salad and the brussels sprouts with apples and tofu from 101 Cookbooks. To drink, I mixed a cheap prosecco with sparkling pomengranite juice for a refreshing cocktail. (At least, to me. Everbody else preferred Heinekin. Yatever.)


So first, the bad news. The 'paradise pie' was so amazing at the actual Candle Cafe that I had very high hopes. Unfortunately, I overcooked the millet and didn't get the beans just right, so although the miso and cinnamon-laced sweet potatoes were scrumptious, it wasn't quite the revelation that it was in NYC. Next time I might used canned black beans as a shortcut... and obviously try not to overcook anything.

The yellow beet salad, on the other hand, came together wonderfully and was extremely simple. I was pulled into some yellow beets at My Organic Market and decided that, despite the holiday-appropriateness of red ones I would give them a go. They were drizzled with a home-made dressing from my Mom that was delicious and broiled on each side for about 8-10 minutes.


Beet Happening Dressing

Combine in a food processor: 2 chopped shallots, 1/3 C. Balsamic vinegar, 3 T. maple syrup or agave nectar, pinch of salt and pepper. Drizzle in 1/3 C. Olive oil until blended.

This dressing was a sort-of marinade for the beets, and then tossed into the spinach salad with some pecans (leftover from breakfast) as a landing for them after they came out from under the broiler. So perfect.

And saving the best for last, the Brussels Sprouts! OMG the Brussels Sprouts, with apples and tofu and pistachios! I know, I know, it has to stop, this obsession with those undesirables of the produce section, but holy frying pan was this good! The recipe, which is another brainchild of 101 Cookbooks' Heidi, the woman who brought us caramelized tofu, was beyond fabulous. It was by far the star of the meal, both with omnis and herbis, and so easy to put together (although I used pistachios rather than pinenuts). Cook this immediately. The recipe can be found AQUI.


So all in all, this meal was a bit of a departure from last year. I played around with tradition a bit and some things didn't come together. But tastes change, and I'm very happy with the way things turned out. And now, as a new year's resolution, I must find some new vegetables to obsess about. Any nominations?

Hope everyone's Christmas/ Chanukah was spectacular!

No use crying over spilled soymilk

Wow, so guess what happened to me this week? Its the first week of finals, I have my second 26 page paper due in 3 days, and my ENTIRE computer crashed. As in, hard-drive is completely wiped clean.

It all started the other day when I turned on my computer to find the screen replaced with a blinking question mark. "That's not good," I thought. And so it wasn't. I headed to my friendly neighborhood Apple Store to have it worked on, chastened, but still upbeat.

The Apple Store is increasingly reminding me of a doctor's office the more I go there. There are scared parents rushing in with cracked baby i-phones, ashamed dumbasses like me trying to sheepishly reveal our sketchy symptoms without mentioning that we don't use protection (back-up), and over-cautious newbies bringing their new macbook in because it merely froze. And meanwhile, the smug "geniuses" walk around saying "well, that's not good" and smirking at eachother while jangly hipster music plays in the background.

Well, actually, my "genius" was super nice and did all he could, but my hard-drive is gone, along with 16 lovely pages of my European Union law paper. *SIGH* I guess this is G-d's way of telling me that the last version was crap, and its time to try harder! I just wish my semester's worth of notes could have been salvaged...Oh yeah, and my 6,000 songs... *DOUBLE SIGH*.

At any rate, amidst all this madness I made some serious comfort food- Vegan Yum Yum's Mac & Cheeze. This was my first attempt at vegan mac & cheese, y'all! Can't believe I waited so long! It was way good. Even without the tomato paste or tahini, which I didn't have on hand. Toss in some roasted brussels sprouts and finals season, with its attendant computer woes, seems world's away...


Song of the Day: Somebody got murder- the Clash