Thin Brown Wings

I'm going to try experimenting with posting excerpts or vignettes here and see how that goes. 

*

Across Lake Union, her unbuttoned cardigan blowing in the breeze as she pushed the pedals so she had thin brown wings propelling her as she rode. Light and nimble, it wasn’t hard to imagine her as a mythical winged being. She hovered at intersections every so often, waiting for me to slog up hills which minutes ago she’d effortlessly summitted, not breaking a sweat. In between panting I appreciated the view of the towers of downtown Seattle as the sun sank. We were high above, parellel to I-5 on a skinny bike trail I hadn’t known existed. A blonde man thoughtfully dressed in dark denim and button-down shirt paused to snap a picture on the sidewalk. 

Earrings

Hi friends! At the encouragement of my beautiful sister, I'm going to stick some things back up here for a few days and see if I'm ready to get back into the blog groove. I think it'll be mostly photos of art/craft things I'm working on. Welcome.

These are some earrings I made recently using a wire-weaving technique.

Maikel Nabil

Maikel Nabil is an Egyptian blogger who was imprisoned for insulting the army. He's since been released, but this blog post was a mirror of the one he'd written that got him sentenced.

You can read Maikel's original post, or an English translation here.

Free Maikel Nabil

UPDATE: Maikel Nabil was sentenced to three years in prison today, one day earlier than sentencing was scheduled, in the absence of both his lawyer & himself.

Maikel Nabil was arrested from his house March 28, 2011 by military police. He faces the charge of offending the army and spreading false news that could threaten public security.

Nabil is an activist who wrote a blog post entitled, "The army and the people were never one hand," and provided details of the Egyptian army detaining and torturing protesters.

Nabil is also vocally pro-Israel and resisted getting conscripted into the Egyptian army. This makes Maikal Nabil a clever choice to be targeted by the army because 1) it will be hard uniting people against his arrest 2) it will generally discredit people who speak out against the army. We need to work hard in condemning his arrest and show the army their intimidation tactics intended to silence people from speaking out about military detainees and torture won't work.

Information about Maikel Nabil's case gathered from @rago_legal and @elnadeem. @AalamWassef contributed with some analysis.

The Bus Back

If you've been following for the food, it probably won't be making too many appearances henceforth. In fact, at the risk of shooting myself in the foot from the get-go, let me say that there may not be many posts in general. Okay, on with the post.

***

It was early afternoon and I was riding the bus home today from my book group. It wasn't my usual bus where I have the route memorized, but what I think of as my second choice bus. After I finished the book I was reading, I noticed that the bus seemed to be going on a strange route. "Hmm, either I accidentally got on the wrong bus or I've never paid enough attention to the bus route before." The seats all around me were empty, and suddenly the bus came to a stop and the lights on the bus went out. I got up and walked to the front. "Is this the last stop?"
The bus driver had stood up and was putting on his jacket. "Yes."
"Isn't this the 73?" I asked.
Irate, he replied, "Yes, but didn't you hear me announce that the last stop today would be at 65th?"
"No, I thought you were just announcing the stop."
Clearly I was the only one who had not gotten it.

It was sunny and warm, and it was only a 20 minute walk back to the house. I blinked back tears, for feeling stupid, I guess. I walked along, thinking I should feel happy that a gong had rung in the middle of my day, allowing me to shift focus and enjoy this unseasonably warm October day and these roads previously unwalked. But I just felt irritated, annoyed that the course of my day had run off its tracks.

Good night, blog

Things have gotten quiet on this blog lately. I’ve been meaning to post an explanation of sorts for a while, and here it is.

I started my blog in what felt (to me, at least) like the heyday of blogging. It seemed fun and also exciting – theoretically, people from all over the world could read what I wrote and gaze at pictures I posted.

My blog in its early days was rarely about food – more like random musings, links to things I thought were cool, the occasional weird photo, and sometimes showcased arts and crafts projects I did.

At some point after I left Cairo and moved to Seattle, it evolved into a food blog as I got more interested in cooking and baking. I'm still cooking and baking frequently, and I'm still reading other people’s blogs, food related and not. I'm trying to move away from over-reliance on (or slavish devotion to) recipes. But I just don't really feel like blogging about it for the time being.

So, thanks for reading. Right now I’m in Cairo, absorbing the heat, and enjoying things being slow.

And if you’re interested, I twitter.

Homemade Ice Cream

The weather is getting hotter (at least sometimes), and ice cream is most definitely called for. Imagine my delight while flipping through old copies of Vegetarian Times* at the library and encountering a feature on homemade vegan ice creams.

But homemade ice cream means nothing to me if it requires an ice cream maker, which my kitchen is not outfitted with. Happily, the first recipe I saw, for a peanut butter coconut ice cream, was free of such demands, although it did call for a blender, which is in my possession.

The ingenious technique used is to first blend all the ingredients together, then pour the mixture into ice cube trays, freeze, and blend again into creamy refreshing indulgence.

You can find the recipe at the Vegetarian Times website here. The article had two other recipes too, which called for the blasted ice cream maker, but I'm wondering if I could apply the same technique for creating other ice creams.

Incidentally, I used a very thick homemade oat milk flavored with vanilla instead of the soy creamer (which I never buy) and the ice cream turned out great, so don't let an absence of soy creamer in your home stop you from making this. And creamy peanut butter instead of crunchy for the same reason.

If you're interested in the subject of ice cream making without a machine (like me), there's an informative post about the subject here at the blog A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise.


*Speaking of Vegetarian Times, I can't in good conscious bring up the magazine without pointing out that they have a fantastic article about nut-based cheeses in this issue, one of which I tried.

Yummy persian food

A few weeks ago I took a one-time Persian cooking class at PCC (a natural foods supermarket in Washington state) about Persian cooking. It was my first time trying Persian food and it was wonderful - flavors totally different to anything I'd experienced before. I was mistaken when I thought it would be similar to other middle eastern cuisines (Lebanese, Egyptian, etc).

Yesterday I decided to try and recreate Khoresh-e Fesenjoon, which is Pomegranate-Walnut Stew, traditionally served with chicken but for our purposes with chicken-style seitan (a vegan "meat" made of wheat).

Since I just got a new cookbook called Yellow Rose Recipes, I was excited to find a recipe for chicken-style seitan. It was my first try at making seitan, and while I think it was not super-successful (didn't follow the recipe carefully enough, although it was pretty basic), I still threw it in for the stew.

I put too much lemon in there and didn't process the walnuts finely enough, but otherwise it was pretty good, and you should definitely seek Persian/Iranian food in your life one way or another. We also got to try a cardamom-infused baklava in the class, so I'm hoping to try that soon too.

Khoresh-e-Fesenjoon- Pomegranate Walnut Stew with Chicken-style Seitan

2 cups walnuts
1 large onion, diced
4 tablespoons oil
1 package chicken-style seitan
1 cup pomegranate juice concentrate - more if you're using a thinner pomegranate juice
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar - maybe less; this turned out quite sweet
1/4 teaspoon ground saffron
2 teaspoons salt

Pulse the walnuts in a food processor until finely ground, but be careful not to over-do it. You want it to be fine crumbs. Set aside.

In a large pot, saute onions in the oil for 5 minutes. Add the seitan and ground walnuts and mix. Add remaining ingredients.

Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to low and simmer for at least one hour. Stir periodically.

Serve over basmati rice.

Koshari

I've been wanting to post about - and make - koshari for a very long time, and somehow the forces convened about a week ago. Koshari is what hamburgers are in the US - fast, cheap, and ubiquitous, but luckily, vegan. The problem with koshari is that it's made up of about a hundred different things: rice, lentils, macaroni, chickpeas, super-fried crispy brown onions, and a garlicky sauce to go over everything. So each individual component is pretty simple, it's just kind of a production to make them all together.

There really is no recipe: get some rice and macaroni cooking, have your chickpeas ready (canned or dried & cooked), and fry the heck out of a chopped up onion, until they are dark brown and crispy. This takes a while. Then mix it all up and spoon some sauce on top.

Really, the only thing to worry about is the sauce, which is called daqqa. I used a recipe I found in the cookbook "My Grandmother's Egyptian Kitchen," with a few modifications.

Daqqa (tomato sauce):
6 cloves garlic (I used 4)
salt and red pepper (I used cayenne)
1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
2 cups tomato juice (mixed 2 tablespoons of tomato paste with 2 cups water)
1/4 vinegar

Crush the garlic, salt, and red pepper together. Fry in oil until light golden brown. Add tomato juice and cook until sauce thickens and oil rises to the top. Add vinegar and bring to a boil.

The sauce makes a lot, you could (or should) probably halve it.

VCON Chickpea Noodle Soup

On a chilly day, after a not-quite fight with the bus driver, come home to Veganomicon's Chickpea Noodle Soup (follow link for recipe). Miso gives it a vaguely chickeny (not in a bad way) savory taste. Adding extra leafy greens (I used collard greens) is a good idea. Oh, and I used rice instead of noodles to use up leftover rice, throwing it in about 5 minutes before the soup was done.

Vegan YumYum's Roll-up Lasagna

I've been in a bit of a kitchen slump recently. We have all these fruits and vegetables in the fridge and I'm at a loss as to how to combine them successfully.

Happily, one of the vegetables was a gigantic eggplant, so I got to try out Vegan YumYum's eggplant and pine nut rolled lasagna. It was a bit labor-intensive since I had to fry eggplant slices, but turned out delicious and totally worth it. I subbed some of the pine nuts with cashews since I ran out of the pine nuts. It's really rich, what with the fried eggplants and pine nut cream, so a good one for these wintry months.

The lasagna is also tofu-free and, as pointed out by Lolo, much less messy than other cheese-free lasagna's because it's rolled up. You can also totally adapt the filling - spinach, tofu ricotta, etc.

If you're wondering, the brown flecks are bread crumbs.

kitchen flops: semolina pudding

A semolina pudding recipe I came across in Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian sounded too intruiging to pass up. Semolina (usually used to make pasta) in a dessert?

I made a few adaptions to the recipe, the worst being subbing yogurt with tofu cream cheese, which killed it, and resulted in a funky dessert (bad funky). In taste tests throughout the process (read: licking spoons), it was great, but I guess that tangy cream cheese flavor the overall taste off.

The semi saving grace was an optional rosewater glaze that gets put on post-baking. To make it, combine 3 C confectionar's sugar with 1-2 teaspoons of rosewater (I used one, and even less might be better) and 1/2 cup of water (or soy milk) and whisk til smooth. Try it anywhere a regular glaze would go, like scones, cakes, or doughnuts if you're that kind of girl or boy. I'm barely a glaze girl at all, so we'll see what becomes of the cup or so that remains.

Tiramisu & Pasta Della California

Things have been busy. I went to Boston really briefly, for a few days, to visit my cousin who was also visiting.

Before I left I made some note-worthy things: the Pasta Della California from Veganomicon (recipe here) and the tiramisu from the Candle Cafe cookbook. The pasta was incredible, and highly recommended - who knew lots of garlic, broccoli and avocados would taste so incredible together?

The tiramisu was really good as well - very light, and with tofu used to replace all that dairy.

Boston was fun, despite the freezing weather (snow, snow, snow), but it served an important function in making Seattle seem warm in comparison.

Besides that, I recently got a book entitled "Creating a Life Worth Living" by Carol Lloyd which is quite similar in subject to "The Artist's Way," if you're familiar with it. The idea is to figure out what you really want to do with your life & career through a workshop-style week-by-week program with exercises to do and questions to think about and the like.

In an attempt to fill up the countless of hours of my day, I joined a gym that just opened in my neighborhood and am meeting with a personal trainer today. This is scary because, despite a brief gym-intense phase as a college freshman, I have avoided and disliked gyms for much of my life.

My other endeavor began last night: a writing class I signed up for many moons ago had its first session yesterday. The class seems like it will be really focused on pushing towards a structured and eventually completed piece ready for publication, whether it's a book chapter or essay. The other class members seem really diverse in their backgrounds and also what they want to write, so I think it should make for an interesting experience. I feel nervous about exposing myself through my writing like this - but I'm sure I'm not the only one in the class, so here goes nothing.

Pancakes

Pancakes make things better. I really wanted to make these after I saw them on Bethany's blog (scroll down). They're from the Candle Cafe Cookbook, so it was an added bonus since I haven't made much out of it yet. The texture is really spot-on, and of course with maple syrup and margarine, they were worthy of being the first breakfast of the new year.

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.