Vegan Mofo 2009 #8: Foodista & Other sites

Intrigued by the wiki recipe site http://http://www.foodista.com/. A search for vegan returns 2200 hits and some look good like vegan doughnuts. Who doesn't love doughnuts. Want to try the Vegetarian Times vegan doughnuts, but need to buy a doughnut baking pan. More tools? Ugh. I'm cleaning out my kitchen of tools. Like Laurie Colwin, I'm thinking I need bowls, a knife, and a few pots.

Excellent food sites and podcats
http://www.splendidtable.org
http://www.kcrw.org/goodfood
http://www.epicurious.com

Writing ideas
Arugula
Lunch (again)
Snacks
Tofu
Rice milk

Vegan Mofo 2009 #7: On the Road

Going to Boston and looking for good vegan eats. Wheeler's Ice Cream is there and we are super excited about that. Only found one other place that sounds good for a night out: http://www.theredlentil.com/ I can't find anything like Blossom, Candle Cafe, Candle 79, or Angelica's Kitchen. And then of course there are the bakeries.

Vegan Mofo 2009 #6 Lunch

Lunch is such an unfortunate meal most times, a couple handfuls of crackers, a banana, a few cookies. If I'm at my office, I can't cook. If I'm home, I often don't have the time to cook a proper lunch. And packing a lunch to take to the office? That means preparing the night before or first thing in the morning. Neither of these is likely to happen. I only eat a healthful and filling lunch when there are leftovers to be heated through. Sandwiches always seem like an easy choice, but what does one put in a sandwich? Sandwich spreads? I'm never quite sure what these are or what to do with them? The only truly delicious sandwich I don't have to cook is composed of ingredients made in my kitchen or grown in my backyard: basil pesto, homemade Italian herb bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, and arugula. This is so delicious, I packed two the night before my husband and I flew to France this summer. The foil wrapped packages caused quite a stir with airport security.

Vegan Mofo 2009 #5:Baseball and Vegan Eats

No cooking tonight--it's the first day of the playoffs. Just watched Philadelphia beat the Rockies 5 to 1 in nearly a shut-out. The Rockies scored in the top of the 9th with 2 outs. Off to a quick bite out and then home to the watch the Yankees and the Twins.

So excited about the box of homemade jams and chutneys from my friend Dana in Santa Monica. Will put a loaf of bread together to bake in the morning so we can spread it with one of these jars of deliciousness.

In the spirit of the baseball playoffs, what's good to eat vegan or veg at the ball game? Our little beautiful single A baseball park, Jackie Robinson Stadium, has the worst food. Good beer, but bad food: soggy cheesy meaty pizza, hot dogs, bratwurst, hamburgers, old pretzels, and freezer burned ice cream. Even if I ate meat, these foods are bad, bad, bad. Suppose I could cook and bring with, but what to bring secretly into a ball park? Do any major league parks have good vegan food?

Vegan Mofo 2009 #4: Gourmet Magazine & Vegetarian Times

Conde Nast announced today it will close Gourmet Magazine, continuously in print since 1941. This is a sad blow to food writing and food photography. A consultant told Conde Nast that Gourmet should make the chopping block in an effort to save money. I've often lamented that such good writing and gourmet recipes don't exist in the popular vegetarian mags. I love Vegetarian Times for the idealism and lifestyle it offers each month, but I'm often disappointed with the quality of its recipes, many of which call for processed food. An exception is the October issue and the recipe for Curried Red Lentil Soup. Gourmet and its sister publication Bon Appetit always inspire with a different idealism, a world where I make BBQ sauce from scratch every time, throw super fun costume cocktail parties, and whip up granita for dessert.

Even better are back issues of Gourmet. Last year I found two years worth of back issues from the 1960s in a used book store. I sent them to my mom for Mother's Day. She was delighted. What window on the past. This summer, I found two back issues from the 90s thrown in a pile at the visitor's center to DeLeon Springs, itself a time machine to pre-Disney World Florida. These I read just as eagerly as I do recent issues. This time I was delighted by a 15 page article on sourdough bread by La Brea Bakery founder Nancy Silverton.

Now, can anyone tell me how to take photographs as beautiful as The Voracious Vegan?

Vegan MoFo 2009 #3: Homemade Soymilk

Soy milk, like bread or yogurt or granola, exudes hippie counter culture, back to nature simplicity. Three ingredients: soy beans, water, oil. Basic method: soak the beans, cook the beans, blend the beans. But like bread or yogurt or granola, store bought soy milk is SO much more convenient and tastes pretty good, organic even and unsweetened. Store-bought is also SO much more expensive and even at its simplest organic-ist, is filled with extra ingredients you might prefer to do without. Enter Laurel’s Kitchen. Laurel, Carol, and Bronwan encourage thrift. In fact, they elevate housewifely drudgery to community-building, save the planet, restore the family divine goddess goodness. I want to be a goddess too so I make soymilk at home.

Like making good homemade bread or yogurt or granola, making good homemade soy milk never turns out to be so simple or so basic. The instructions to the “Cornell University Method” for making soymilk cover three pages. There’s lots of boiling, pressing, and mixing. There’s fortification with B-12 and calcium. Mess it up, the book warns, and the soymilk will taste bitter and strongly beany. I’m intimidated. I turn to Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer instead. Their recipe from How It All Vegan, which is very good by the say, appears on one page and even includes fun drawings of milk glasses with twizzly straws. What to do? Follow the “Cornell Method,” of course because it “inactivates lipoxidase” as you blend the soybeans with 180 degree Fahrenheit water. Use a thermometer or keep the water at a hard rolling boil. The results are indeed delicious if a little grainy. No matter. Just shake, shake, shake before you drink.

Ingredients
1 cup dry soybeans
6 cups boiling water (plus 2 cups boiling water to heat the blender)
2 tablespoons canola oil
4 tablespoons agave nectar, maple syrup or barley malt extract or to taste
1 tablespoon vanilla (optional)
1800 milligrams vegan calcium carbonate (optional)
25 to 50 micrograms vitamin B-12 (optional)

Directions

1. Sort and rinse the soybeans then soak them in 3 cups cold water for as little as 4 hours or overnight
2. Drain the beans and rinse them and drain them again
3. Boil 8 cups water
4. Divide the beans into 3 equal portions
5. Preheat the blender (I use my Vita-Mix, but use what you have being careful with glass pitchers—the boiling water can crack glass if it’s cold so warm it up a bit from the tap) by blending 2 cups of the boiling water for 1 minute then dump out this water into another pot for watering your plants or filling the cat bowl later.
6. Add two cups beans and two cups boiling water to the blender. Blend 2 to 3 minutes. Pour the soymilk into another pot or very large pitcher.
7. Add two more cups beans and two more cups boiling water. Blend 2 to 3 minutes. Add this to your pitcher and blend up the final 2 cups beans and 2 cups boiling water.
8. Now you are ready to strain, sweeten, and fortify. If you’ve used a very powerful blender like the Vita-Mix, you might not have to strain, but otherwise line a strainer with cheese cloth, muslin, or a clean kitchen towel. Set this over another large pot or bowl—you’ll be washing up for a while, but you’re after goddess-hood here so suck it up—then pour over your soymilk pressing to strain all the milk from the pulpy residue.
9. Heat the soymilk in a double boiler for 30 minutes. You can fashion a double boiler out of your largest bowl placed over a pan of boiling water, but you can also just heat the soymilk on low in your largest pot for 30 minutes, stirring CONSTANTLY to prevent scorching. Note how many cups of soymilk you add to the double boiler at this point and add water if you want to account for evaporation.
10. Stir in the oil, sweetener, and the calcium and vitamin B-12 if using
11. Decant to pitchers or bottles with lids. The soymilk will taste best refrigerated for 7 to 10 days.
12. Don’t forget to shake it before you drink it, especially if you’ve fortified it.

Vegan MoFo III 2009: #2 Laurel's Kitchen

Six years ago, when I was recently singled and living alone for the first time, I lay in bed at night and read Laurel's Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey. While old-fashioned even in 1976 when it was first published and some would say anti-feminist, Laurel's Kitchen opened a window onto a world of food community. These women cooked together, ate together, shared recipes, taught each other how to cook, and encouraged a reverence for whole food that much more serious in a way and with more profound implications that the other cookbook authors I had until then been following. A garden and Nigella Lawson taught me how to cook and how to eat, simply with little fuss. But Laurel's Kitchen taught me how think. In many ways, Laurel's Kitchen is to vegetarians what Nigella Lawson's How to Eat is to gourmets or The Joy of Cooking was to post-war suburban women. All of these books have attitude. A friend from San Francisco tells me that all her mothers had Laurel's Kitchen on the shelf like Midwesterners had Joy of Cooking or The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. Their authors share more than just recipes; they share a lifestyle. Laurel's Kitchen is my reference book for nutrition and basic vegetarian cooking, like cooking beans and grains. We pull down off the shelf often while sitting at the dinner table just to answer questions about broccoli or beets or protein or iron.

A few things I learned from Laurel's Kitchen:

1. Bake bread
2. To eat well, someone needs to shop well, garden, and cook often
3. Mushrooms have nutritional value (again with the mushrooms; I know I'm onto a little theme here--more on that later)
4. Homemade soy milk is time consuming, but cheap and delicious (recipe to follow tomorrow)
5. Veganism is easy if you eat from the four food groups for vegans (list to follow tomorrow)