an easy summer salad

Annie came over yesterday to have some tea and work on our scarf knitalong, so I fixed us one of our favorite salads. I would usually wait till further into summer, as it's really dependent on good tomatoes, but Whole Foods had had some ripe looking tomatoes on sale and I thought I'd risk it. They turned out to not be quite up to snuff, but they were okay. I should have known: there never are really good tomatoes in Seattle till at least August. Anyway, for the benefit of my followers to the south, here's the recipe:

Tomato Tofu Salad
the amounts given are approximations; use however much you feel like using
tomatoes, two medium, halved vertically then thinly sliced
tofu, 6oz, cut into ~1cm cubes
pepper
2 or 3 green onions, thinly sliced
2t each soy sauce and sesame oil

Arrange the tomato slices on a platter, then scatter the tofu cubes over them.  Grind pepper of it all, then whisk the soy sauce and sesame oil together and carefully drizzle so the at least a little gets on each piece. Artfully strew the green onions, then serve.

Below is pictured the scarf Annie and I were knitting. I finished mine last night, and she just started hers yesterday,  but we did work on them together for an hour or so.

kawaii!

I have long admired amigurumi, but thought they looked too finicky to be fun to make. They're so little, and have so many pieces to sew together, and you wind up with all those yarn ends to deal with! My friend Shannon--a capable maker of afghans but inexperienced at crocheting small things in the round--asked me to help her interpret the directions in her amigurumi book, and when I looked them over I quickly realized that they would be more fun to make than I had thought. There can be a lot of little pieces to sew together, but you use the ends for the sewing and then just bury them in the body; no need to laboriously sew them invisibly into the wrong side of your work.

I decided to make something small and limbless for my first project, as I thought arms and legs might be a little tricky to arrange naturally, and I was eager to get it completed. I settled on this tiny, tiny owl I found on Ravelry, and it was really fun and quick to make. I crocheted all of its pieces in about half an hour before I went to bed last night, and when I got up I found some beads for its eyes and sewed it all up in another half hour. The many yarn ends became the stuffing! I'm really pleased with how it turned out, and plan to make a sheep or a squirrel very soon. This will be an excellent way to use up little yarn scraps!

raw foodist's strawberry pudding

One of my favorite late spring/early summer puddings is strawberry tapioca.  It's better than many strawberry dishes because the strawberries are never cooked; that cooking destroys strawberries' flavor is a Ross family truism. My new dietary regimen precludes tapioca, though, so I had to modify my recipe to make it for my work lunches this week. It turned out pretty well, but be warned: the success of this recipe rests almost entirely on the quality of the strawberries you use.

Strawberry Chia Pudding
serves two or three


1 lb strawberries, cored and thinly sliced
1/3C sugar (raw if that's what you like)
2T lemon juice
1/4C chia seeds
water

Toss the sliced strawberries with the lemon juice and sugar, and let rest for about an hour. Strain the juice into a big measuring cup and add enough water to make a total of 3/4C water plus juice. Whisk the chia seeds into the juice, and stir every few minutes for a while so they don't form a huge clump. When they've thickened up quite a bit, stir them into the strawberries, cover, and put in the refrigerator for about an hour.

a spring tonic

I got some nice rhubarb at the farmers' market on Sunday and used some of it to make this juice. It has a really nice, revivifying tang. You can see from the above photo that I included some pineapple cores, but those aren't really essential to its success--I just had them around because there had been a bargain on organic pineapples, so I made a bunch of dried pineapple. 

Spring Juice

makes about 5 cups

20oz carrots, scrubbed and trimmed

2 fat rhubarb stalks

2 oranges, peeled

cores from 2 pineapple (optional)

Run through your juicer a couple of times, then chill.

a cheering pink drink

 

































Poor Annie was feeling gloomy yesterday: the weather was too hot, and she was failing to tick off of her list most of the myriad tasks she had set herself. I was on my way home from a trip to West Seattle when she called me to propose a jaunt to our favorite restaurant, the Canterbury. 'It may dispel my gloom,' she speculated.

Annie had a shandy and a giant plate of hash browns ('They'll go right to my waist,' she lamented, and it turns out she was right), and I had a nice salad and  a gimlet (with more gin and less Rose's Lime Juice than Philip Marlowe's preference). Afterwards, replete and cheered, Annie came to my house to take some pictures for her blog. I persuaded her to try my tasty new drink, the Salty Setter (it's like a Salty Dog, but pink). 'Not too strong, now! I have to ride my bicycle home and don't want to get a ticket! And I don't like gin!' The one I made her (which she liked despite the gin) was semi-virginal, with only half of the specified amounts of gin and Campari.

Salty Setter
1oz each, gin and Campari
2oz grapefruit juice
juice of half a lime, plus a lime slice
salt

Rub the rim of your glass with the lime slice, then roll it through a little saucer of salt .
Fill a cocktail shaker half-full of ice, then add the gin, Campari, and grapefruit and lime juice. Shake well, and strain into the glass. Garnish with the lime slice.

an excellent work lunch

I made a couple more recipes from Rawvolution before I returned it to Nurse Lu. She had encouraged me to try the 'famous onion bread,' so I made that along with some mock tuna salad (I'm a real tuna lover, and always looking for good vegan facsimiles). Both recipes required heavy modification--the bread looked like it would be far to oily and salty if I made it straight from the book, and the tuna had what looked like way too much mustard. They both turned out really well, though, and I will tell you how I made them for both our benefits (if I don't document it here I might forget what all I did). As you might guess from my remarks, I like this book but can only really recommend it to experienced cooks who will notice when something looks off about a recipe and can fix it to their tastes.

Onion Bread
makes 27 pieces

The amount of water is an approximation--if you use sweet onions, for instance, you will need less water than if you use storage onions. Start low so you don't end up with overly sloppy dough!

1kg onions
100g flax meal
100g sunflower seeds, chopped in your food processor till they're the size of polenta
1/4C soy sauce (nama shoyu if you want to be strictly raw, tamari if you you want your bread to be wheat-free)
3T olive oil
1/3C water

Peel the onions and halve or quarter them, depending on the size of your food processor feed tube. Slice them with the food processor (or cut them as thinly as you can by hand, wearing glasses to save yourself from onion tears).  Put in a big bowl and mix in the remaining ingredients. Squish with your hands to get the onions to release their juices.

 Divide the dough in three and spread each portion into a nine-inch square on a non-stick sheet. Put in your dehydrator and dry at 118° for about twenty-four hours. After at least ten hours, peel the breads off of the sheets and return to the dryer.

When they're done, cut each sheet of bread into nine squares. Store in an airtight tin.

Tuna-safe Salad
makes four generous servings

dressing:
1/2C coconut water* or regular water
2 cloves garlic
1/3C lemon juice
1t kosher salt
1/2C each macadamia nuts and cashews
2t seedy mustard

salad:
2C sunflower seeds, soaked 2-6 hours and drained
3 stalks celery, diced
4 green onions, sliced
2-3T dulse flakes

Whiz the dressing ingredients in a blender till thoroughly smooth.

Chop the soaked sunflower seeds in your food processor till they resemble flaked tuna, then transfer to a bowl and mix in the remaining ingredients. Add the dressing. Let rest an hour before eating. See below for a serving suggestion!

*The coconut water makes the dressing a little sweet and Miracle Whippy. The sweetness dies down a little after a while, but if you really object to sweetness in your tuna you should opt for regular water. That way you won't have to open a young coconut either.

oh-so-easy cauliflower couscous

One of the things I fixed for dinner in Orland was cauliflower couscous. It's a tasty and super-quick side dish, as long as you have a food processor. I'm just going to give you a basic template, and you can add whatever tidbits you see fit. This is adapted from Rawvolution, a book with lots of good ideas but recipes that are far too oily and salty for my taste. In Orland I pretty much followed the recipe below, except that I added a handful of almonds, soaked and then chopped, and some pretty purple celery we got at the farmer's market. At the bottom of this post you can see a wild, hippie version I made for my work lunch: I used a mixture of white and purple cauliflower, which turns magenta when the lemon juice touches it, and added almonds, goji berries, hunza raisins, and minced fresh turmeric root.

Basic Cauliflower Couscous
Serves 2-4, depending on what else you're having. Enough for 3 work lunches!
A small cauliflower, leaves removed, roughly chopped
A bunch of parsley or half a bunch each of parsley, coriander, and mint (or other herbs you have and think would be good), stems included except for woody ones like on the mint, very roughly chopped
A big handful of green olives, seeded and torn apart
Juice of a lemon
2T olive oil
salt and pepper (be stingy with the salt till you've tasted it, as the olives will add salt)
Optional: nuts, dried fruit (unless it's really hard, don't soak it), zest from half of your lemon if it's organic (chop it, then add it to the food processor with the herbs), small amounts of spices you think would be good (Aleppo pepper, cumin, ground coriander), other seasonal vegetables....

Chop the cauliflower in your food processor till it looks like couscous. If you don't have a big one it would be better to do this in a couple of batches, so it gets chopped evenly. Scrape the cauliflower into a big bowl, then chop your herbs in the still-dirty processor. Scrape them into the bowl, then mix in the remaining ingredients. Let it rest for half an hour, then taste for seasoning. More salt? More lemon? Serve!