Cooking tips

Here are five random cooking ideas I've learnt in my brief cooking obsession thus far.

1. The internet. It's totally underrated as a cooking tool (or simply not considered) by way too many people. Google is already answering all your other pressing queries, so why not try asking it what to cook? Try putting ingredients you have in your fridge in as your search terms, e.g. "carrot and tomato recipes" and see what comes up (I did this once, and ended up making tomato-carrot soup), or if you have an idea for something but aren't sure how to go about it or if it's a good idea, put that in, e.g. me and the pear bread pudding.

2. Rice. If you're in doubt about a good side dish, try rice; it goes with pretty much everything. Making rice intimidated me for the longest time, but it's pretty simple. After yelling at the mr. once for doing it wrong, I found boiling water first, then adding the uncooked rice and proceeding works best. Also, keep the lid on so it can steam properly. Experiment with different kinds too, basmati is great. If you want to funk it up a bit or more advice, I once watched a video on the Rachael Ray website with a how-to. (Note: Rachael Ray isn't in it, if you're worried about that). If you still have crunchy rice, add more water and let it cook more. It'll turn into normal rice eventually.

3. New ingredients. Branch out in your cooking repertoire by acquiring something new at the supermarket. Splurge a little if you can afford it, sometimes something simple like a new kind of vinegar or oil will really add a different (good different!) taste to your food. Especially with pantry supplies, you could end up useing them a lot and having them last for a long time (like spices).

4. Fruit with ice-cream. This is a good way to eat more fruit and make a fast dessert. I don't remember where I read it, but it created happy times in summer.

5. Roast. Make friends with your oven, the rewards are great. This is the most important thing I learnt from Veganomicon. You can throw most any vegetable in your (pre-heated) oven at 400 degrees F (205 C) on a baking sheet with a little olive oil and salt, and keep them in there til you can pierce them with a fork (generally 30 minutes for smaller things, 45 minutes to an hour for big things, like half of a giant pumpkin). Especially good for those pumpkins, sweet potatoes, carrots and pumpkins. Make sure to either oil your baking sheet or line it with some parchment paper.

Anyone have others to share?

Great food books I read in 2008

Since I like lists, I thought it would be fun to do a few year-end type lists. Since it's already December 30, this will probably spill over into January. Oops. Let's be postmodern about this and acknowledge that the new year is just an arbitrary calendar date. This list is of food books (not cooking) I read and recommend this year.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.
Kingsolver, a wonderful novelist (check out The Poisonwood Bible), chronicles her decision to move to a farm and dedicate a year to eating only food grown locally. There are meal plans, with recipes, by the seasons, along with essays from her 19 year-old daughter about her experience, and more background info about eating locally provided by Kingsolver's husband.

A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. Laura Schenone.
Schenone uses food as a framework with which to look at American history, women, and culture by looking at how people ate and women cooked. She begins with Native Americans, then follows through different periods chronologically: the pilgrims, immigrants from the old world, slavery, and through to the present day phenomenon of being too busy to cook.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon.
It seems like the same premise as "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" of eating locally for one year, but Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon, a young couple, decide to define local as only things within a strict 100-mile radius. It's also a much more intimate account than the one offered by "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle."

The Language of Baklava. Diana Abu-Jaber.
A nice food memoir with wonderful recipes. Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American and she recounts her life growing up between the two countries and cultures, while sharing the recipes for the food she ate along the way. I want to read more memoirs like this. Check out some of the recipes I tried here, here, and here.

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family. Laura Schenone.
This book chronicles Schenone's effort to recover her family's authentic ravioli recipe. It got me thinking about our connections to the food we eat, definitely made me want to make ravioli, and inspired me to pick up her earlier book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove (also on this list). (This book also prompted my "home food" post.)

Still reading:

Culinary Artistry. Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page.
This book is changing the way I think about food. It seems more directed towards a high-end chef, but it's still fascinating reading. It discusses whether cooking can ever be an art, has charts for which ingredients go well together, and discusses how important presentation really is to a dish - turns out a lot of chefs think that sprig of rosemary stuck in the middle of your pasta is silly. The cool thing is the authors interview a bunch of different chefs, so you're exposed to a variety of opinions on each topic.

It Must've Been Something I Ate. Jeffery Steingart.
This is a funny collection of essays by Vogue food critic and his continual quest for great-tasting food, like hitting a dozen boulangeries in Paris for perfect baguettes. He's obsessed, and teaches you a few things along the way.

One more I didn't read this year but still recommend: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It traces the journey of your food from farm to table. I posted a review of it here.

Finally, the following is a list I found of "farm to fork must reads" in this newspaper pamphlet-thing about a Seattle harvest festival. I'm planning to read a few more on this list.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Barbara Kingsolver. 2007.
Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. Mark Winne. 2008.
Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe. 2003.
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. 2005.
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Michael Pollan. 2008.
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Warren Belasco. 2006.
Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew. Samuel Fromartz. 2007.
Omnivore’s Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals. Michael Pollan. 2007.
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. Alisa Smith, J.B. MacKinnon. 2007.
Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair. Carlo Petrini. 2007.
What to Eat. Marion Nestle. 2007.

PS: You can find a cool list of food memoirs to read here at the NPR website.

Chow.com

If you're looking for a way to while away yet more hours on the great internets with food-related stuff, check out chow.com. It has stories, weekly top ten lists, recipes (some of them are even vegan), really useful forums, and video tips. When I was up all last night jet-lagged, I went through their review of the year in food. Lots of interesting stuff in there, from California's proposition 2 on increasing space for farm animals to how quinoa is the new 'it' food.

Also check out a piece they have on reinventing table settings - they invited a bunch of designers to go wild with arranging dining tables. Pretty neat.

Baby it's cold outside

I got in from Cairo two days ago. It was a good trip, although it feels now a little too brief. I left Seattle cold, but unfrozen, and return to find it transformed - my first experience with snow. Walking outside yesterday morning - carefully armored in thermal, wool, boots, and a duvet-like coat - felt like an acid trip.

My plans to glean cooking tips while away mostly fell flat, but I did procure some regional goodies, orange blossom water and rose water, which are meant to impart a subtle flavor to desserts.

I also bought an Egyptian cookbook, "My Egyptian Grandmother's Kitchen: Traditional Dishes Sweet and Savory," originally in Arabic but translated into English. I haven't tried any of it's recipes yet, but I have enjoyed leafing through it, especially since it has full-color photographs for every double page spread. For an idea of what a big chunk of Egyptian cooking is about, there is an entire chapter in the book dedicated to stuffed vegetables. Dolmas, potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes, and cabbage rolls are but some of the contenders for stufffing.

Yesterday I cooked, which I did precious little of back in Cairo. A quinoa salad with grape tomatoes and romaine lettuce dressed with a watered-down soy mayonaise I made two weeks ago from Hot Damn & Hell Yeah. The quinoa made it more filling, and the mayo made it creamy. So it tasted good and looked aesthetically pleasing too what with the contrasting colors, but my photos weren't so hot.

I also tried a mushroom-barley soup from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I succumbed and bought it before I left, and I have to say it's a pretty good investment so far, a nice basic guide to all kinds of things you might want to do in the kitchen (soups, salads, bread, and charts with information on vinegars, nuts, etc), with simple, fast recipes. I was looking for a book to tell me how to deal with any vegetable the CSA box might throw my way, and it seems to fit the bill. The soup was good, it was my first use of pearl barley, and it was nice and toothsome. I used cremini mushrooms mixed with dried shittake, and there were carrots and potatoes thrown in too.

Not-Tella Rolls

A few days ago I made the not-tella from Veganomicon - and it turned out great! Since I didn't have the hazelnut extract, I consulted the internets, which revealed by way of this recipe at Su Good Sweets (linked from the Bittersweet blog) that increasing the vanilla extract would do it (I upped it to half a teaspoon).

I wanted to experiment with the nutella (i.e. find a new way to eat it, it's great on fruit and toast) so I followed a recipe for cinnamon rolls and spread the not-tella instead of a sugar cinnamon mix. Expectations for the rolls were sky-high but they turned out a bit too hard and dry, I think because I kept them in the oven after baking to stay warm.

**

I'm going to be gone for two weeks, so I think blog posting will grind to a halt during that time. The hope is I glean cooking secrets of the middle east while on vacation (Egypt, the motherland).

What happened to the pumpkin?

At the end of my last post I mentioned I had a never-ending pumpkin and was considering my options. Feeling energetic, I went ahead and tried pumpkin ravioli. There seemed to be two problems: the dough too dry and stiff and my lack of a rolling pin. In retrospect it's very easy to say, "don't go there," regarding ravioli if you don't have a rolling pin, but at the time, I thought it was at least worth a winging it attempt with a bottle used instead of a rolling pin. Lesson learned, and I plan to invest in one soon. I did form ravioli of a kind, but the doughy wrapper was more akin to the thickness of a sandwich. The filling was great though. (Note: I don't blame the recipe for my unhappy ravioli, which was from Plenty magazine.)

Much more successful was the pumpkin chocolate-chip bread from Vegan Knitting (adapted from the VWAV best pumpkin muffins). This turned out really well, I even subbed apple sauce for the oil (adding 1 tablespoon of oil) to no detriment.

I still had about a cup worth of leftover pumpkin so I threw it in the freezer to be dealt with later. Not to mention since I was only able to make about six ravioli from the dough (despite doubling it), I had leftover pumpkin filling too, but I put that in leftover phyllo. Those adventures are for another post though.

Fried Oatmeal

Stumbling across the internets a while back, this idea of frying oatmeal at a blog called Fuss Free Flavours presented itself. You have to soak the oatmeal with a little milk and flour the night before, which is not a big deal but requires a little forethought. Last night there was a long bout of insomnia, so mixed it up. Used some carrots and green onions for the vegetable portion. It turned out to be interesting, a good addition to the repertoire of weekday morning breakfasts, not to mention a new way to prepare oatmeal, although the oatmeal could've used a little more frying.

Besides that there is about 1/6th of a large roasted pumpkin sitting in the fridge wrapped in clingfilm, patiently waiting for its fate to be decided. Options include an "undercover cornbread" at Vegan Explosion where the pumpkin is a secret ingredient, pumpkin chocolate chip bread at Vegan Knitting (an adaptation of VWAV's pumpkin muffins), and pumpkin ravioli in an article with ideas for a vegan thanksgiving at Plenty magazine (scroll down). Bets are on the pumpkin chocolate chip bread.

Side note: anyone heard of this website called Vegetarians are Evil? Just discovered it last during the insomnia. Crazy stuff, brings up a certain mustachioed leader of Germany in WWII.

on the minimalist chef

An interesting profile of "the minimalist chef" Mark Bittman was written up here at the New York Observer. Bittman maintains the New York Times food blog Bitten and has authored "How to Cook Everything" as well as "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian." I own neither, but think I want to get the latter sometime.

Although not a vegetarian, Bittman is akin to Michael Pollan in encouraging everyone to eat less meat for environmental reasons, but too bad his blog doesn't focus on veggies more. Still, I've found lots of good ideas there, like parsley sauce and cornbread. There are also frequently non-cooking yet food-related posts about things like farming that I like. I'm still waiting for his post on the 50 best cookbooks - his readers responses with their suggestions are here. Yes, Veganomicon was suggested many times, but Vegan with a Vengeance not as much.

A Vegan Thanksgiving

So I went to this vegan Thanksgiving potluck today. A lot of firsts: my first Thanksgiving, which I've discovered is a Really Big Deal here in the US (I thought it was mostly having kids make turkeys out of colorful construction paper and dress up as pilgrims and Indians; at least that's what we did in my American elementary school in Kuwait) and first vegan potluck. It was great not to guess what was in all the food, which was abundant and mostly pretty good. Things weren't very Thanksgivey besides the food - although there was no Tofurkey, which I was led to believe was the very essence of vegan & vegetarian thanksgivings.

The place was packed, and I met lots of interesting people. On the way there, we carpooled with a couple who revealed they keep a neat food blog, Vegan Ricans, complete with videos they've shot making Puerto Rican recipes.

Also, Bethany from Spotted Devil Cat and his Vegan Assistant was there, and it was really fun to meet up with her again. She brought Susan V's black bean dip with her - very tasty.

I met a man who's been vegan since 1980! I was really impressed. I imagine no-one was vegan back then. He said the only "vegan" food you could get back then was tofu, and I'm guessing it wasn't at your friendly neighborhood chain supermarket.

The only bad thing was driving back from Issaquah, since it was dark and rain with signs warning of deer skipping merrily along the highway, but we survived.

I made Veganomicon's Spinach-Noodle Kugel/Casserole and a double batch of VWAV's Pumpkin muffins. It was my second go at the spinach casserole. Last time I skipped the fresh dill, and it made a world of a difference here - it complemented the lemon juice in there wonderfully.

(Side note: nice tip on the PPK forum about lowering sugar/fat in the muffins that I just saw now and will definitely try next time I make them.)

Spinach & Tofu-Ricotta Pizza

What is it about pizza? You know how they say, even when it's bad, it's good? Well, this was actually really good.

I'd been thinking of making Fat Free Vegan Kitchen's Polenta Pizza yesterday (out of a desire to avoid making real pizza dough rather than health reasons of avoiding gluten) but then decided to bite the bullet and roll out the real deal. I've made the polenta pizza once before long ago and I liked it, although the polenta somehow made it look and taste a lot like an omelet. But maybe that was just me. I would definitely make it again though.

Anyway, I went with the VWAV pizza dough recipe which I tried before. I topped it with the VWAV tomato sauce (naturally), tofu ricotta, spinach, chopped tomatoes, vegan sausage and a sprinkle of nutritional yeast. Somehow it was very successful, maybe because I decided to listen to the mr.'s advice that lots of toppings = better pizza. Pre-baking, I was a bit worried it was overload, but those eight minutes in the oven seemed to shrink the toppings down to normal amounts.

Plus, I'm not really sure why I wanted to avoid making dough - it's so fun. I don't like cleaning up the counter afterwards, and I also get intimidated by the wait periods involved in letting the dough rise and then 'rest' (the 'rest' always makes me feel like it's an exhausted diva that needs beauty sleep). But really it's not such a big deal, and kneading out the dough and eating the pizza are well worth the labor involved.

Parsley pasta

Parsley is not a herb I like very much, so when I saw a parsley-vinegar sauce on Bitten, I marked it to use some of the green stuff that was coming in the CSA box.

Bittman says you can use the sauce over "steaks, pork, or chicken," but commenter number two remarked that they often paired pasta with parsley pesto. In my mind I just registered it as, "okay, I'll throw it on some pasta." As I was making it I worried it would be too strong for the zucchini and carrots I was having with the pasta, so I threw a little tofu into the blender after everything else to mellow it down, just in case. It worked great: nice creamy green pasta sauce, and a full cup of parsley down.

Isa's perfect chocolate-chip cookies

I tried the new cookie recipe Isa posted a few days ago yesterday. I replaced most of the canola oil with apple sauce (I added a tablespoon of oil) and the tapioca flour with cornstarch. They really were good, I think the extra vanilla gives them a really rich flavor. The apple sauce made them really soft though. I used Julie Hanson's tip of using an ice-cream scoop to form the cookies, and it worked great, but it made gigantic cookies.

**
For dinner I had stir-fried left-over radishes (thinly sliced), bok choy, and mustard greens, topped with some grated carrots with peanut sauce and noodles. This was good because the strong flavor of the mustard greens got cushioned by everything else; last time I made them on their own and I couldn't finish them.

**

Even lunch was exciting yesterday: I mixed left over rice and chickpeas with sauteed radishes, added a little vegetable stock, cumin, and raw garlic in an attempt to get rid of my cough. It was good stuff, cumin is my new favorite spice (farewell, oregano. Note: nothing will replace fresh basil).

Chickpea Cutlets & Middle Eastern food

I made the famous chickpea cutlets from Veganomicon yesterday, baked. They were good, and I was most impressed by how fast and hassle-free they were to assemble.

Today I had a flop and a mid-range success. The flop was falafel. I had two recipes, one from the food memoir "The Language of Baklava," and another in VWAV. I decided to try the first today, and the latter another day. It seemed simple enough: mix everything together, let the mixture sit in the fridge for awhile, form into little patties and then fry those babies up. Sadly, it was not to be. The batter didn't want to be formed into patties and kept breaking up, so I made them smaller and figured it would be okay. It wasn't: two minutes into the frying and they completely disintegrated! I tasted some of the broken-up crumbs rescued from the hot oil, and the flavor was right on, but they were nothing more than crumbs. Big disappointment. However, I need to point out the other recipes I've tried from "The Language of Baklava have been really successful.

Luckily I'd also made mujaddara, which is a cousin of an Egyptian dish called koshari. I'd never heard of mujaddara until a few days ago. It's a fried onion, rice and lentil mix with a little bit of spices thrown in. Pretty simple. Also from "Language of Baklava," but recipes abound on the internet.

Veganomicon's "mediterranean-style cashew-cucumber dip," which is the vegan version of the Greek yogurt dip tzatziki, was supposed to accompany the falafel, but in their absence I put a little on the mujaddara. I was really impressed with this dip, mostly for even trying to recreate it. And it was not bad at all.

Cabbage Rolls, take two

I gave cabbage rolls (mahshy kromb) another shot today. I'm pleased to say it turned out way better than last time. I can attribute the success to several things done differently (mostly due to the guidance of the recipe): using regular cabbage instead of Chinese (Chinese cabbage has a different, thicker texture) and cutting the stalky parts of the cabbage leaves - these add too much bulk. I used a different recipe, also from The Language of Baklava, and just excluded the meat. The stuffing was a chickpea, onion and rice mixture with a little cumin and cinnamon. It tasted pretty good, although not exactly Egyptian as I know it. It was cooked on the stove, simmering for about an hour, not in the oven as lots of non-Middle Eastern recipes seem to call for.

I'll probably make these again. They weren't as fiddly as I thought, although somehow I ended up with less than a dozen, because a bunch of cabbage leaves got accidentally torn.

Oh, and on the right of the plate is a bunch of baked Jerusalem artichokes (or sunchokes). They're quite similar to potatoes in taste and texture.

Caramelized Pear Bread Pudding

So, as planned, I used up the last of the overripe pears yesterday. Since they were really soft, I was wondering if they could replace bananas in a quick bread. I turned to the internet, discovered it was possible, and got the idea somewhere to make a bread pudding. Bread puddings have been in the back of my mind since I saw this at veganlovlie. Anyway, Google revealed pear bread puddings did exist, and found me a recipe from the Mayo Clinic's website, of all places. I did the usual vegan substitutions, and it turned out to be pretty pleasant, warm with a little crispiness in the midst of much creaminess. I think some ice-cream would've gone really well with it too. It was a little heavy though, even though it uses only 3 tablespoons of fat.

Return of the fennel

We had fennel again in our CSA box and again I didn't know what to do with it. I considered the gingery fennel I made last time, but then I saw a recipe in Vegan Italiano for a fennel and pear salad. It called for ripe yet firm pears, which I thought was the case with ours until I took a look at them... they were sadly overripe, but I made the most of the situation and set aside the mushy parts for another use. Anyway, this salad was delicious, and the usually hard to integrate licrorice taste of the fennel was put to good use combined with the sweet pear.

I also made Veganomicon's baked pumpkin ziti again. It was great, again. I added some sliced vegan sausage and green onions and fresh (frozen) thyme to use them up. I could barely taste the green onions, but the sausages were nice.


**

A few days ago I made pumpkin-apple soup. I remembered a soup I made a few weeks ago as being pumpkin-apple, but really it had been sweet potato-apple (and I subbed pears for apples), but the pumpkin-apple worked pretty well. I sauteed onions for two minutes on medium heat, added the apples for another 10 (til soft), then spooned roasted pumpkin into the pot. Roasting pumpkin is so wonderful, I just always roast now whenever a recipe calls for pumpkin in any state, it's so much easier than cutting up in in an uncooked state and cutting it up. Then I used an immersion blender to make it creamy. I garnished with never-ending green onion. It turned out pretty well, apples sauteed with onions taste surprisingly good.

The 7 random things meme

I've been tagged by Bethany at Spotted Devil Cat and his Vegan Assistant.

Rules:

1. Link the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links.
4. Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I've had a lot of short-term odd jobs. One of the oddest was summarizing an Arabic religious show into English for the English-speaking editors.

2. I go through phases of deep interest in different activities. Right now it's cooking, but there's also been art, writing, comics, embroidery, crochet, and knitting.

3. I have trouble throwing things away, especially old receipts, clothes tags, and bus passes.

4. The best dessert I've ever made were some chocolate peanut butter shells that I found at Yeah, That Vegan Shit. Despite that, I've only made them once because they were a little labor-intensive. I should remedy that situation one day.

5. I'm not sure why my blog is called nineteen ninety nine. I wanted something random and I think I got it, but I would do it differently if I made a new one today. Also the old URL used to contain a misspelling.

6. My favorite thing in my flat is our small square wooden dining table that we got from a vintage furniture store.

7. I don't drink coffee because caffeine's powers seem to multiply by 10 for me, but I love coffee flavored things like cake and candy.

I'm tagging:
http://lifeloveandfood24.blogspot.com/
http://veganefcliz.wordpress.com/
http://yeahthatveganshit.blogspot.com/
http://baliwhat.wordpress.com/
http://boosveg-a-nut.blogspot.com/
http://heathenandvegan.blogspot.com/
http://www.zoeyskitchen.com/

Collard Greens Stir Fry & Lentils

I've never had collard greens before, so I figured I'd try the Veganomicon easy stir-fried leafy greens recipe which is pretty straightforward, any leafy green with some ginger, garlic and soy sauce. I was expecting the collard greens to taste kind of neutral like chard or kale, but instead it turned out to be bitter like mustard greens, which I'm not a fan of. Oh well. I added some hummus to it to try and salvage the situation, it helped. It needs to be mixed with other things to cut down on the strong bitterness, maybe quinoa or any other grain.

Since there were leftover lentils from the soup, I thought it would be easy enough to sautee some onions and add a few spices to jazz them up. But no. I'd already soaked the lentils overnight to make soup, so I brought them to a boil and let them simmer for 20 minutes. I forgot to add salt, and they kind of disintegrated. And the flavoring turned out to be off. I turned to hummus again for help, and it worked. So now I know I have a way to go before I become an intuitive cook who can live recipe-free.

Sushi, VWAV Ginger Cookies & Tofu Scramble

Yesterday was my second solo sushi attempt. I did two variations: avocado, carrot, chives, and the same thing but with tofu ricotta added. I think they turned out pretty well, and luckily I still remembered how to roll. The rice was still crunch after 20 minutes, which made me think I was cursed (combined with the cookies that were too sticky, not to mention I forgot to preheat the oven), but I added water and kept checking in two minute increments, and finally it worked. The carrots added a little crunch, the chives a subtle onion flavor & freshness (for lack of a better word), and the avocado and tofu ricotta creaminess.

After I saw the sparkled chai cookies on Bitter Sweet, based on VWAV's Sparkling Ginger Cookies, I figured I should give the originals a shot. The dough was super sticky. I tried the trick of putting it in the fridge for a bit, which was okay for the first two cookies but didn't last long. So I adapted by using a spoon and sprinkling the sugar instead of using my hands to roll the cookies out and sprinkling on the sugar. The sugar added a crunch that was nice, and the flavors worked pretty well together. I think I'm going to make more gingery-things in the near future.


We had this tofu scramble for breakfast with the recipe from VWAV. Thinly sliced radishes, a bit of shiitake mushrooms, and the grated carrot at the end. For some reason it turned out to the best tofu scramble I've made so far.

Braised Cabbage & Lentil Soup

So, last week I checked out a bunch of vegan cookbooks from the library since a bunch of them were just hanging out on the "reshelf" aisle. One of them was "Vegan Italiano," which as you might guess is a collection of vegan Italian recipes, but the cool thing is that they are all authentic Italian recipes - i.e. no tofu, mock meats, soy cheeses, etc. Naturally, this book is right up my alley, and I think I will purchase it soon. The recipes all seem fairly simple too, although I've really only skimmed it so far. Two days ago I made the Braised Sweet & Sour Cabbage with Kidney Beans, and it did not disappoint. I never know what to do with cabbage, but we get it in our produce box fairly often these days, so this was a good solution. I made some "Fancy biscuits" to go with it from "How it All Vegan" (also from the library). The fanciness is attributed to the green onions added. They were more like scones than biscuits, very soft, but I liked them.

**

I just finished reading this food memoir entitled "The Language of Baklava" by Diana Abu-Jaber, a Jordanian-American, so I decided to try out some of the recipes. The book itself is a great read, full of memorable characters and pepppered with recipes from her chidhood, most Jordanian/Middle Eastern. Anyway, for lunch I followed her lentil soup recipe, with a few tweaks. The flavors were exactly right, but I like a thicker lentil soup, so next time I'll just reduce the amount of water she calls for. It was really easy too. This is a perfect winter soup.

Lentil Soup, adapted from The Language of Baklava

1 C lentils (soak your dried lentils overnight)
1 medium onion
splash of olive oil
3 C water (I used 4, but I think 3 or even less will make a thicker soup)
1 carrot, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon cumin
juice from 1 lemon
salt & pepper to taste

Rinse lentils. Sautee the onions in olive oil until transluscent in a medium pot. Add everything else and cook over medium heat for 30 minutes, or until carrots are tender. Wait until soup cools slightly to blend, or use an immersion blender in the pot.