February birthdays

Rachael's birthday was last Wednesday (she's 24!), and her sweetie Tommy's birthday was the week before, so we had a joint party on Friday. Poor Annie had a prior engagement and couldn't come, so it ended up being just the three of us. I forgot to take any pictures of the birthday children during the party--I documented the food in advance so as not to irk Rachael with photographic delays--so the above illustration is from a couple of weeks previous.



We had cauliflower salad from Ottolenghi and Tamimi's new cookbook, Jerusalem. It turned out really well, and Tommy said he'd never had such tasty cauliflower.



We also had the above roasted carrot salad, a Jamie Oliver recipe. My oven was going all day--almost everything I fixed was roasted or baked, and they all required different temperatures! This salad was good too, though a little more work than the cauliflower.



We had some nice challah,



and the main dish was vegan lasagna from Veganomicon with extra spinach and red sauce.



For the birthday cake we had Clementine cake, and some of David Lebovitz's chocolate sorbet to go with it. Rachael's not a sorbet or chocolate lover, so I tried to interest her in this dish by pointing out that it was a molecular gastronomy thing, a variant of Hervé This' famous chocolate mousse, and she just said 'Ew, chocolate mouse? Rosemary's Baby? Ew!' But she thought the cake was super, so that was good.



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nut cheese

I have newish raw food book, Practically Raw, which I highly recommend. It's not just a bunch of salads and smoothies and dehydrator lasagnas--there are lots of really inventive recipes which an average person like me would never think up herself. There's a whole chapter on kale chips (chocolate! sour cream and onion!), and another on hummus. The recipes aren't entirely raw--for instance, she has three base recipes for hummus, one of them the traditional variety with cooked garbanzo beans--and she gives tips for how to use your oven if you don't have a dehydrator.

I'm currently excited about nut cheese. Vegan 'cheese' recipes are usually bland chèvre or ricotta imitations, or else nutritional yeasty sauces. The nut cheese in this book are fermented and actually get kind of a cheesy taste even before you add additional flavorings. Here's my slightly modified version:

Brazil Nut Cheese
makes about one cup, or 4 generous servings
1C brazil nuts (or use cashews if you want to have less fat and selenium)
1/2C filtered or bottled water (you don't want the chlorine to kill your germs!)
1t probiotic powder
2t nutritional yeast
1t kosher salt
1t lemon juice

Soak the nuts 6-8 hours (2-4 if you're using cashews), then drain. Whiz them in the blender with your filtered water and probiotic powder till very smooth, then transfer to a cheesecloth or nut milk bag-lined bowl. Let it rest for about an hour, giving everything time to settle and mingle, then set the cheesecloth or bag in a strainer over the bowl. Wrap the bag or cloth over the top of the nut paste, then add a little weight (I used a 5.5oz cat food can). Put in a warm place and leave it for 24-48 hours, till it's fermented to your liking. Scrape it out of the cheesecloth and into a fresh bowl, and stir in the remaining ingredients. Refrigerate.

Pictured above is the Mexican Cheddar variation, which has chili powder, onion powder and things added to give it a kind of nacho cheesy flavor. It was an excellent work treat along with some juice pulp crackers.

a couple of recipe suggestions

My computer has been broken since mid-November, so I'm going to try posting this from my tablet. It's more work, so the formatting might not turn out just right.... I just wanted to tell you real quickly about a couple of really tasty recipes I fixed from the New York Times yesterday when Ana came over to cast on for our hat knitalong and have lunch.

I made this cauliflower dish exactly as written except that I used some fake, vegan parmesan in place of the cheese. The parmesan tastes just like the kind you shake from the green can, but it worked out well with my cauliflower. The cauliflower got a pleasant, surprisingly fluffy texture from being boiled, then baked.

I also made this roasted carrot salad, and it too was a real success. I left out the olives as we were already having a lot in the cauliflower, and I had some radicchio on hand so used it in place of the arugula. It was so pretty and red and orange, I decided to make it even redder by adding some pomegranate arils. So yummy!

an exciting week on my block

Friday before last I went to the store in the morning and saw a bunch of police cars arriving at the end of my block. Throughout the day there were more and more of them, and a big police bus. I was worried that there had been a terrible murder or something, so I looked at the Capitol Hill blog and found that my neighbor--the one with all the signs, who Rachael and I had long ago pegged as a suspicious character--had an eBay business selling stolen computers and bicycles. Rachael and I were pleased to be proven right, of course, and I was relieved that it was not a more distressing crime.



Yesterday I had Rachael, Tommy, and Dakki over for tea. I was standing at the stove pouring water into the teapot when I noticed smoke wafting past my window. I wondered if my next-door neighbors were cooking out on their deck, and Tommy asked if my neighbors had a fireplace. We decided we'd better investigate, and went downstairs to discover smoke billowing from the front steps! Rachael called 911 while I gathered Marigold (who now goes by her new middle name, Sheena) and Tommy rousted Dakki. My downstairs neighbor had been playing video games with his headphones on and hadn't noticed the smell, but I banged on his door hard enough to get his attention and he came out and managed to rip the insulating tape off of the outdoor faucet so we could squirt water under the porch till the firemen got there.



I forgot to put shoes on in my excitement, and Rachael wouldn't let me go back to get them, but a kindly neighbor gave me some flip flops (it was really cold out). My neighbor on the other side was worried about Sheena's welfare and offered to take her in if the house ended up burning down. They were so nice! Fortunately, the firemen got it out quickly and the smoke smell is fading, so all is well. I'm so glad I was home when it happened, though--it got smokey (smoky?) so quickly, I bet poor Sheena would have died of smoke inhalation before the firemen got there if we hadn't been alert.

sauerrüben

I made this sauerkraut about a month ago, and I think it ties with my seaweed sauerkraut for the best yet. I didn't write down the exact weights of all the ingredients, but I do have an approximation so I can maybe replicate it later. If you like beets, this is the sauerkraut for you!

I scrubbed and shredded 8 medium beets, a small red cabbage, and 1/2 a small green cabbage. I added 3 cored and roughly chopped Gala apples, and ended up with about 2 kg total. I mixed in 17g salt, and some bay leaves, tarragon, marjoram, and sliced green onions. No matter how I squashed it I couldn't get quite enough juice to thoroughly cover it, so I added a little bit of water, maybe 1/2C.

After 2 weeks it didn't seem quite ready, and after 3 weeks the juice was so sour I thought maybe I'd let it go too long, but it turned out to be just right. This amount exactly filled up a half-gallon jar.

pretty pink plums!

My Victoria plum tree--only about three feet tall--made lots of plums this year. A few went to waste before I got around to picking them but I still had 1.9kg, enough to make lots of jam. The jam I made was so tasty that I think it will be my default Victoria jam from now on.

I halved and pitted the 1900g plums and added them to my jam pan with 1600g sugar, 300ml orange juice, and one big cinnamon (not cassia) stick. I brought it all to the boil, them simmered till the plums were soft. Let it rest for a few hours, then brought back to a hard boil and cooked, stirring very frequently, for about ten minutes at which point it had turned to jam. I stirred in 130g chopped walnuts, then put it in jars (11 half pints!) and boiling-water-bathed it for five minutes.

What I did in August

My new computer was in Texas getting a fresh motherboard for much of August, so I didn't do much blogging. I did lots of interesting things, though, and took pictures as I went so that I would eventually be able to tell all about it.



I bonded with my new kitty, Marigold Hanele. She's nothing like my darling Maria, but she's a sweet, good girl. She likes to cuddle me violently throughout the night, then play all day long. When I'm not playing with her, she works on little projects, like figuring out how to get a high-up cupboard door open so she can see what's inside and throw it on the floor. A grown cat--she'll be three in November--she's much livelier than Maria ever was. She especially loves to help me sew: the only time she likes to sit in my lap is when I've got a needle and thread.

Speaking of sewing, I made a couple of dresses. The first one was a McCall's 'Pounds Thinner' pattern from 1972, and I look kind of frumpy in it. Rachael says it's because I don't need slimming dresses, and says I should make myself a nice A-line dress instead. The second was a McCall's 'One-hour' dress, but it took me much longer than an hour to sew it. It's made out of leopard-and-floral print rayon, which I found very hard to cut and sew in a straight line. It turned out well in the end though, and as you can see it looks nice on Rachael!



I made lots and lots of jam and pickles! My damson tree had more damsons on it than ever before--9 ounces--so I made a tiny batch of damson apple jam. The Warner plum tree made many, many plums, and I made twelve jars of lemon-plum and lemon-vanilla-plum jam. And another twelve jars of pickled Warner string beans. I also made this saffron-peach jam. I didn't make it exactly as written, and as it was such a success I want to note down here what I did so I can replicate it in the future (isn't it a pretty color?): for five pounds of nectarines (they're better than peaches for jam as you don't have to peel them) I used 1 3/4C sugar, juice of a giant lemon, and only 6g saffron (and that was plenty). I ended up with 7 1/2 jars.



Finally, I made David Lebovitz's pineapple coconut macaroons. My pineapple came in a different size of can than his did, and I veganized them, so I had to change the recipe a little. These are the ingredients I used: 16oz canned, crushed pineapple, 160g sugar, 200g desiccated coconut, 6T flax gloop (in place of the egg whites), and 1/2t vanilla. I followed his method exactly. He's right that these are at their very best on the day you make them, because of their delightful crunchy crusts, but they taste just as nice for the next couple of days.