I don’t think we’re going to work out.

Its not you, it’s me. Really. I think you’re, um, incredible. But We’re just not compatible.

Me and vegan shepherd’s pie, um, no.

Seemed like we’d work –on paper. I mean, eharmony would have matched us on at least 97 points – peas, mushrooms, lots of corn, sweet potatoes, tempeh, veggie stock, tomatoes.

Mmmm….. but. no.

Problem one is that YOU JUST DON’T GO AWAY. That’s a lot of shepherd’s pie for a single lady! I have needs, yes, but I also need my space.

Problem two: it’s the meatiness. I dig you tempeh, but I don’t need you. I have a full, happy, well-rounded life without you. And nutritionally balanced. Your fake-meatness really doesn’t add value.

I did my best, in the end, though: I worked my way through the reheating and rewrappings and reseasonings. I mean, I committed to your creation, I’d like to try to see it through to fruition. But I’m glad it’s over. I’ve cleaned out my fridge.

Moving on to roasted green been salad!

just make yerself a dang quesa-dilla!

When all else fails, then you go for the quesadilla. If you're lucky, they might add veggies inside. And if you're double lucky, then they might remember NOT to add the chicken when you ask.

It's not so bad, I suppose, the quesadilla. Tortilla, cheese, some veggies. No wait, that's what's so bad. I mean, they taste good; that's why when you're 13 and you discover the wonder of melted cheese inside crispy tortillas you embrace them with such gusto. But undoubtedly, the tortillas are trans-fat-laden. I know this for several reasons:

1. only New York and California have banned transfats in restaurants
2. only transfat flour tortillas get that nice crisp when you fry them. It's much harder to get that texture from the healthy variety. And don't even think about the whole grain variety. Uh uh.

And besides the TF problem, they are super cheesy. Which is good if you heart cheese. Which I do. In my mind. But when you're a bit lactose intolerant, then that much cheese is, frankly, just wrong.

But you can come to terms with them because of the guacamole and the salsa: if you can't get veggies inside, at least you're getting some tomato and avocado. Right??? Well, unless your guac is the Kraft variety, which actually doesn't have any avocado in it. Which brings me back to my first point: when all else fails.

I usually only go this route when I'm at a bar, looking for a snack, and I'm facing toasted raviolis (which, by the way, someone tried to recently convince me were stuffed with spinach! the nerve!), chicken fingers, or fried cheese (again, tasty, but hard on the body). Lately I've done this a lot it seems. Here's my ranking:

1) First place goes to the Irish pub downtown (the other Dubliner), Tigin's. These were quite yummy: pepper cheese and lots of fresh garden veggies inside, including tiny tomatoes, but not on tortillas. Nope, in true Irish fashion, they were grilled on boxtys, which are potato pancakes. Amazing! 2) Second place is the Cheesecake Factory. I asked them to add veggies to their cheese quesadilla and they stuffed it with some really nice corn succotash. I actually had to purchase a side of corn succotash and then they stuffed it in, but it worked out!

3) Felix's. oy. Felix's is good for one thing: the chocolate covered strawberry martini. Which is not a veggie quesadilla. But the two went hand-in-hand ok for a work happy hour. You do what you gotta.I'm going to think of some interesting, easy to produce, healthful, tasty suggestions for bars to include on their menu and then send them all a postcard. Perhaps it will go something like this:

Dear happy hour locale:

Please consider adding any of the following for your happy hour menu:

• asian veggies and a sesame-tahini dip
• fresh spring rolls with cucumber, carrots, lettuce, sprouts, you name it!
• fresh hummus with whole-grain pita
• bruschetta with mushrooms, tomatoes, and/or roasted red pepper. oh and roasted garlic. maybe beets and goat cheese, too
• baked sweet potato fries
• edamame.

I appreciate it!

Signed,
Megfood.

Just a thought! They might not be thrilling options, but they would be a far superior choice to us near-vegans out there when happy houring. Seriously.

In the mean time, if you are a die-hard quesadilla fan, then I did happen upon a fabulous quesailla recipe that I make myself sometimes. If you're in the mood, try it.

• whole-grain transfat-free tortillas
• fresh corn cut off the cob
• yellow onion
• baby spinach
• mozzarella, grated
  

1. Just saute the veggies (make a generous amount)
2. throw them on a tortilla laying flat in a dry, hot skillet
3. sprinkle with a tiny amount of cheese--just enough to bind it
4. cover with another tortilla
5. heat till melty and crispy
6. flip
7. voila!

Amazing!

• whole grains? check
• protein? check
• iron, fiber, other nutrients? check.

did you add real avocados and tomatoes?

• then lycopene, vitamin C, healthy fats, check.

you catch my drift.

I bet these aren't the kind that Napoleon Dynamite made, though. His were probably cheesier.

Killer Q

Friends had a barbecue. Typically, I go over the top, buying too expensive rare ingredients and coming armed with too much food (I swear). Not so much this time.

Too bad, too, because these foodies would have really dug meg's famous guac or meg's very own original roasted tomato green been salad or even meg's amazing sesame asparagus. Instead, I went to Straub's (gulp!) and brought Thai pasta salad (blush) in a non-recyclable plastic container (eegads!).

Anyway, on the menu was the most phenomenal barbecue food I've ever consumed. Here you didn't see any Dogs-in-casing orWonder Buns. Nope, this stuff was fresh made, homegrown, and organic. For real.

Bean dip. This rivals any hummus I've ever had. The black beans are Missouri-grown--from the farmer's market! Mixed in are fresh herbs from the host's garden, including chives and such. And also friend's famous "ugly dip": this stuff is just whatever's handy mixed up--tomatoes, onions, olives, corn, etc. Nothing beats fresh salsa.










Grilled curried squashes...









Since mac seems to be the thing to eat lately, we also had homemade mac-and-cheese, perfectly cheesy with swiss and cheddar, perfectly melty, and perfectly browned on the top.



Don't peek underneath because you'll see those Straub's noodles lurking down there.

And then, oh my god, fresh broccoli (from friend's garden), spiced up with herbs (also from the garden!), then grilled! Grilled herbed homegrown broc!

Delicious.

To complete the meal, hostess baked her famous cupcakes. Now these aren't vegan, I guarantee, but they were chocolate and peanut butter and cream cheese. And they came in two sizes!

Never again should "ham salad" or "Lays" be a part of Q talk... this is the way to do it up right. What a Q!!!

vegan supper club 2: indian edition

VSC2: after months of preparation and a trial run, VSC2 finally transpired and what came with it was delicious!

We had only 6 guests and therefore fewer courses than first imagined, but all the right ones appeared. First up, vegan samosas with homemade dough, stuffed with potatoes and peas and carrots, and accompanied by a homemade tamarind sauce. Wowza!










Next course was mine: sweet potato koftas and indian salad. Here's how it went: GREEN GRAVY, first off. Wha? That's a "gravy" made of peas and cilantro and green pepper and garlic.

Last time I made it, peppercorns were accidentally substituted for mustard seeds. Oops! Mustard seeds are a lot different, let me tell you! The cool thing about mustard seeds is that they blow up; you need to keep a lid on it, or you can have a little shower of boiling hot oil seeds hit your face... But if performed correctly, toasting mustard seeds is go00000od. Then there were the koftas: sweet potatoes and peas and lots and lots of garlic.The way they work is that you cook the sweet potatoes and you mash them and then you mix in the mixins and some flour. Then you put little balls of them on your cookie tray and cook them and they puff up. The first time, they really puffed up like little sweet potato dough balls. This time, they really didn't puff up; but they were still garlicky and potatoey and sweety and peay. They were really good. Like this:
I also made the standard Indian salad with raita: tomatoes, cucumber, onion, and raita, which is a yogurt sauce. I used soy yogurt (soygurt?). The weirdest thing is that soygurt is yogurty! Really, you'd never know! There are cultures and everything! I would have expected soygurt as compared to yogurt to taste like silk as compared to milk (i.e. nothing alike). But other than the fact that it's that telltale tan hue, soygurt is really quite yogurty. What I'd like to know is where those cultures come from.... something about "natural flora" makes me a little ill. But I digress: bacteria are our friends, and soygurt is the vegan alternative to infesting our intestines. Yum!


The hosts (the vegan cupcacke hosts, who are so darned talented!) made nan. Who makes nan? They do!









The first time I experienced the nan, they made it at my house and it smoked up like crazy. It was delicious, but my house smelled like a bonfire for days. Which is totally OK--I mean, as long as you are into that whole woodlands thing (whatevs). This time, however, they figured out the smoke factor and made it perfectly. O god it's good. It's heavy, and salty, and doughy, but also has this incredible crisp edge. The iron skillet is the key, so they say, so they say.

The entree was korma. You can never go wrong with korma. But here's the amazing thing: the korma cooks just made it up! Some of this and a little of that and voila--ten tons of veggie korma. Complete with mushrooms and tomatos and beans and peppers and potatoes and almonds and I don't even know what else. I don't even know. And the basmati rice was cooked with cinnamon sticks and peppercorns (avoid those because they pack some flava!). That makes it so much more special; who knew rice could be so much more than rice?
After all this, of course, we weren't hungry. But we had ( WE HAD ) to stuff ourselves, if only in honor of all the little piggies and cows that didn't die or get their teats squeezed on our account, so we ate the dessert, too. The chefs called it padawakana or something, which turns out not to be Indian, but rather just some sort of cobbler made with with mango. It was delicious! Who cares about themes anyway?! As long as it's vegan, we're not picky.

That's the food story. But here's the back story: wait, I can't tell you. It's against VSC rules to share the ins goings on of these events. So just enjoy the food and pictures and stay tuned for another adve[gan]ture!!

The thing about mushroom stuffing

Yum. I don’t think you can ever go wrong with stuffing, because it’s pretty much bread, and who doesn’t heart bread? But here’s why this one was so spectacular: vegetarian, mushrooms, celery, toasted hazelnuts, good, yum, yes!

It was for Thanksgiving, the meat holiday that is always a challenge to the unmeaters among us, especially when you’re contending with relatives’ oyster stuffing family recipe. Ick.

I found this one on Epicurious. It's my favorite resource for recipes, since you can limit the search to Gourmet Magazine (which I find superior to all other magazines with recipes). It’s called Hazelnut, Sage, and Mushroom Stuffing. The description is as follows: “it tastes like a gift from the forest”; I’m not sure I’d use those words myself, but I’ll put them here in quotes, so you know that it's not me who ventured into the world of cheesy. (Although I’ll gladly take a tour through the land of cheese, if that’s available…!)

Anyway, here’s what it called for (with my modifications):

• White bread (I used rye—whoah!)
• Shallots
• Baby bellas
• Butter (Earth Balance)
• Celery (added extra)
• Fresh thyme and sage
• White wine (I used a good one)
• Parsley
• Toasted hazelnuts
• Turkey stock (Veggie stock)
• Eggs (yes I used those, you need a binding agent)

Making it was time-consuming. Partly chopping, partly assembling, partly toasting hazelnuts, which isn’t so difficult in and of itself, but using the towel to rub off the skins is a real pain in the butt. Oh, and the nuts got a little burned so I had to cut off the burned sides, too. I’d recommend buying extras, in case of emergency. Or you could keep a very tiny knife on hand for cutting out burned hazelnut corners.

But oh my the stuffing was fabulous!! It was nutty, moist (I hate that word, so you know I really liked it if I’m using it!), sagey, mushroomy, toasty, ryey (good call!), and so much better than what you remember from childhood with the sausages and the onion soup mix. This was no stove-top! Yummers. Even the die-hard oysters and sausages agreed!

The mushroom gravy, on the other hand:

My advice: don’t blend it. Mushrooms like to be chunky, not smooth. So they tell me.

M'eggs

After a long workout, I always crave protein. Eggs were the last animal product I quit in the process of becoming a "near vegan" (first bacon, then chicken, then all meat, then fish, then milk, then butter, then most cheese, then eggs). It's not that I thought they were the least offensive, but rather than I just rarely ate them, so it didn't matter much. When I started thinking about what they were, however, I quit them cold turkey (eggy?) (sorry), and never looked back. Ew, right? Leaky food = gross.

Until the B12 scare.

Then I thought that even a small risk of mild retardation wasn't worth it, so if I was craving eggs, I'd go for it. Now I eat them about once weekly after my long Saturday visits to the Y. Here's what I do:

1. baby bellas, sliced, sauted in olive oil and balsamic
2. tomatoes (fresh or canned and diced)
3. handfuls of baby spinach
4. optional add-ins: diced red pepper, onion, artichoke hearts, asparagus
5. once that's mostly cooked, crack two eggs on the other side of the skillet and cook over easy
6. toast whole grain bread (preferably Seeduction bread from Whole Foods!), "butter" with Earth Balance, top all on to bread, top that with a little feta


mmmmmm..... m'eggs....

and a glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit/orange juice and a banana and a DECAF SOY MOCHA!

Happy Saturday!

Lard-free Brunch

Two things you should know: growing up, Sunday brunch followed Sunday Mass. Pancakes came after penance, waffles after worship, eggs after Ecclesiastes (sorry.) (you get it.) Second, the family priest had the thickest St. Louis accent ever to be articulated, rendering our “most holy Lord” into a very very sacred lard. This has humored me for years. Often, today is “the lard’s day” at my house, and we’re always so grateful for the fact that “the lard provides.”

Last Sunday, I had brunch with friends. Probably because of the ever-present lard associated with brunch and my overly controlling healthy food-choice lifestyle that just doesn’t allow for that in my diet, brunch has never done it for me. But friends invited (vegan ones, too!), and so I went. (At lest the lard wouldn’t be partially hydrogenated!) (sorry again)

I of course wanted to put my new cookbook VEGAN WITH A VENGEANCE to use, and I was extra excited because I got to crack open those breakfast pages that I never ever look at (who cooks muffins?).

I choose the asparagus sundried-tomato “egg” frittata. Now again, being a near-vegan, I usually avoid eggs (my auto-response is set for “dead baby chickens”), but when I go to the gym frequently, I usually crave serious protein. Plus I still have a lingering fear of over-soying myself. So I’d have been inclined to just cook the eggs, it’s Sunday brunch after all, and thus, the day of lard. But these are my vegan friends.

So I do it—buy the tofu, nutritional yeast, etc. and set to work making fake eggs. Here’s the weird part (it’s so weird): you crumble firm tofu with your fingers, mix in a few drips of soy sauce, a tablespoon of mustard, and some nutritional yeast, and you are suddenly facing a bowl of scrambled eggs. It looks like eggs, it smells like eggs, and yes, even though cold and uncooked, its tastes like eggs! Again I say, wha? huh?

Sauté onion and asparagus, stir in sundried tomatoes, mix, bake, done: frittata. And it was pretty good, I have to say. The end product tasted a heck of a lot less like eggs than pre-cooking, but it still registered “brunch” on my radar. Not bad. I like that Isa Chandra.

The rest of the brunch, though, is what wowed. These two are true Isa Chandra junkies, having baked and consumed probably literally 75-100 batches of her cupcakes (god, I mean lard, it could be triple that, truly), they make recipes like the sweet potato crepes on a regular old week night, and research her other publications just for fun. These are some serious PPK cooks. Here’s what they provided: banana-walnut waffles (ohmygod who knew that bananas CARAMELIZE when waffle-ironed??), grits from heirloom corn plants in North Carolina, and homemade seitan sausage (OK satan’s sausage on the lard’s day…. now this is coming full circle.). It was surreal. To relive Sunday Brunch, on the lard’s day, with the balls of seitan present, in full veganese. Now that’s something. I love this life. Praise jebus!

Beets!

I woke up with a hankering for beets. I'm not sure where these hankerings come from, especially when I've never really had beets. But when our pals called us for a dinner party, I nevertheless texted back, "we'll bring beets!"

So I emailed my neighbor, knowing he'd have the perfect recipe for such a thing. His response, at 3am, came as such:

• Buy beets, last time I mixed yellow and red.
• Preheat oven to say 400F
• Wash vigorously - the beets not the oven.
• Trim the greens but keep about 1" of stalk attached.
  
• Prick the beets if they are large
• Salt the beets a lot but not too much - salt to taste later
  
• Put the beets on a large piece of foil
• Coat the beets generously with oil
• Seal tightly the foil around the beets.
• Put the beats in the oven for about 30 minutes
• It's a good idea to put a cookie sheet under them to catch oil drips.
  
• Open the foil and continue to cook until you can pierce easily with a fork but not until they are mushy.
  
• Cool the beets overnight - I just leave them in the oven - don't spill the juice!!!
  
• Peel/Skin the beets with a veggie peeler if the skin is tough
  
• Slice the beets
• Add feta first then salt to taste. Add black pepper.
  

So we set to work, scrubbing, salting, roasting, leaving, shaving, slicing, rosemarying, reroasting, and finally, fetaing. Oh boy. Amazing.


They were the perfect texture of soft, yet toothsome, chewy, yet not underdone. Although not akin to the texture of the seemingly perfect gnocchi, it was equally perfect.

I feared our dinner friends wouldn't enjoy them, knowing full well that not everyone shares my passion for all things garden, but they tore into them; only a few small rounds were left after dinner. But I should have known better; these were the exact crew that introduced me to Brussels sprouts and initiated the quest for BS that reigned my fall of '07.