Recipe of the Month: Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta

Recently, I signed up for the New York Times newsletter "The Veggie," which deposits an assortment of vegetarian (though not necessarily vegan) recipes in my inbox each week. I've downloaded several of these that looked like good potential Recipes of the Month, but for most of them, the timing wasn't quite right. It's already too late for the "Vegan Spring Vegetable Frittata" (made with tofu instead of eggs) and "Soba Salad with Grilled Mushrooms and Tofu," which calls for snap peas. At the same time, it's too early for "Basil Tofu." A disappointing start to zucchini season put the kibosh on "Smashed Zucchini with Chickpeas and Peanuts," and the deer damage to our bean plants ruled out "Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu," which requires 10 ounces of fresh green beans. You may yet see those enticing titles later in the summer, but for now, we're going with something less time-sensitive: "Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta." 

Unfortunately, I can't link to this recipe, as I recently ditched my All-Access New York Times subscription in favor of a cheaper news-only subscription that came as a freebie with my PBS donation. But the gist of it is pretty simple: shred a whole head of cabbage, then saute it in olive oil until it's browning a bit. Add sliced garlic, fresh thyme, and a touch of crushed red pepper (Brian cut the amount from the recommended half-teaspoon to a quarter-teaspoon for just a hint of spice). Whip up a white sauce out of oatmilk or cashew milk, nutritional yeast, olive oil and salt, and toss that with cooked pasta, crushed walnuts, and the sauteed veggies. Season with lemon juice and black pepper, garnish with shredded basil, and serve.

Most of the ingredients in this recipe are things we tend to keep on hand. The only exception was the oatmilk or cashew milk, which the recipe specified should be "full-fat" to make a creamy sauce. Brian was all for substituting a mixture of soymilk and a bit of our favorite plant-based cream, but I argued that for our first time making the dish, we should stick to the recipe as closely as possible. So we grabbed a container of Lidl's organic oat milk, which wasn't too extravagant at $3.99. (As it turns out, "full fat" in the case of oatmilk means it's had fat added in the form of rapeseed oil, a.k.a. canola. But it was certainly rich enough to get the job done.)

This dish looked pretty nice with its garnish of fresh basil, and it tasted pretty good too. There was nothing all that exciting about it, but it was a nice, simple, satisfying meal. Its biggest weakness was that it was a bit short on protein. I remedied this by adding a scrambled egg on the side, but that sort of undermined the spirit of making my Recipe of the Month a vegan dish. If we make it again, we might try topping it with some white beans or tofu, and we'll certainly try our usual soymilk in the sauce. Overall, this Recipe of the Month isn't mind-blowing, but it looks like a useful addition to our repertoire.

I was thinking I might be able to give you a bonus recipe here as well. Having purchased the oatmilk and found that it was as creamy as advertised, I wondered if we should take a crack at trying to use it in a plant-based whipped cream. I did a quick search and found a promising-looking recipe at Green Heart Love, which involved supplementing the already rich oat milk with a nearly equal volume of melted coconut oil and stabilizing it with some cream of tartar. Unfortunately, although Brian followed the recipe's very specific instructions to the letter, this worked no better than any of our previous attempts at making vegan whipped cream from scratch. The chilled mixture almost as soon as he started beating it, forming clumps of fat that steadfastly resisted any attempt to blend them back into the liquid. 

Since we still have plenty of oatmilk left, I might have one more go at trying to whip it using a simpler method, like this one from Chef's Resource. But if that doesn't work, I'm going to throw in the towel and use the rest of the oatmilk for pudding—topped with coconut whipped cream from a can.

Recipe of the Month: Peach Crumble

With June drawing rapidly to a close, I found myself scrambling this week for a new plant-focused dish to try as my Recipe of the Month. I had a couple on hand that I'd printed out from the New York Times' "The Veggie" newsletter, but neither of them was really June-appropriate. The asparagus in the Vegan Spring Vegetable Frittata is already past its season, and the basil in the Basil Tofu isn't yet ready for picking. So I started hunting through all our vegetarian cookbooks, and right near the end of Nava Atlas's Vegetariana, I found a recipe that I'd bookmarked ages ago but never tried: Fresh Peach Crumb Cake. 

Lavish as this title sounds, the ingredient list actually looked pretty healthful. The whole cake (billed, somewhat optimistically, as 6 to 8 servings) contained only 1/3 cup of brown sugar and 1/2 cup of melted margarine (for which we could substitute our own cheaper and marginally healthier homemade plant butter). And while it did call for 3/4 cup of white flour, it took the curse off that by adding an entire cup of wheat germ. How could a recipe with wheat germ possibly be bad for us?

There was just one problem: We didn't have any wheat germ at home, and we weren't sure where to buy it. We couldn't find any at Lidl, and a trip Brian made by bike to the nearby Shop Rite came up empty as well. We were sure they'd have it at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton, but that store's earlier hours make it harder to fit in a visit before our Thursday dance practice. Brian thought we might be able to find some at the Amish market, which we could swing by after a dance gig on Saturday. But I suggested we check our local Superfresh first, and when we located a half-pound bag there, we decided to take the $4.29 bird in the hand rather than take our chances on finding a cheaper one in the bush. This purchase, along with four fresh peaches from Lidl, gave us everything we needed to make the "cake."

I put the word "cake" in quotes because this recipe really seemed more like a crisp or a crumble. There was no batter involved, just a crumb mixture made from flour, brown sugar, finely chopped almonds, melted margarine, and baking spices. This got layered in a pan with the sliced peaches (the recipes didn't say whether to skin them first, so we put them in skins and all) and baked for 20 minutes covered in foil, then 20 minutes more uncovered. When it came out of the oven, it pretty much just looked like a pan full of crumbs, so I dished some out into one of our nice blue IKEA bowls to show it to better advantage.

If I'd been expecting this mixture of ingredients to miraculously bake up into a luscious and decadent dessert, I'd have been disappointed. Fortunately, I had no such expectation, so I was reasonably satisfied with it. It's hard to go too wrong with a fruit crisp, and while this one wasn't quite as tasty as our usual (and less healthful) recipe, it was still enjoyable, particularly topped with coconut whipped cream. It reminded me a of a dish my dad used to make called "cereal pie," which was made from all the leftover crumbs at the bottom of our cereal boxes, tossed with sugar and spice and layered with fruit. That recipe was even easier to make and probably about as healthful, with a bit more sugar but no fat whatsoever. But it only works if you have leftover cereal crumbs, and we don't eat enough packaged cereal for that these days.

Still, we're not in any great hurry to make this dessert again. We both enjoyed it well enough, but to be honest, we'd have enjoyed those nice fresh peaches almost as much if we'd just eaten them, which would be even healthier and easier. Given the cost of the ingredients and the relatively modest payoff, it doesn't seem worth the effort.

Recipe of the Month: General Tso's Cauliflower and Tofu

May's Recipe of the Month came about because on our last Lidl trip, Brian picked up a cauliflower without having any specific plan for it. When he asked me if there was any particular cauliflower dish I'd like, I suggested that he kill two birds with one stone by trying a new recipe that I could post on the blog. So he did a little search and came across one called General Tso's Cauliflower and Tofu on the Cinnamon Society website. As far as he could tell, we had all the ingredients for it except the chili sauce, and he figured he'd most likely want to cut way back on that anyway to accommodate my sensitive taste buds. So he decided to just omit it and see how the recipe turned out.

As he started preparing the dish, however, he discovered he'd made a mistake. The recipe called for "baked tofu," which he had assumed meant that it would involve baking some cubed tofu in the oven. But apparently, what the author had in mind was commercial baked tofu that comes in a package. She warned that you could not simply substitute pressed tofu, as it "falls apart too easily." Rather than run out to the H-Mart for some baked tofu, Brian opted to cut his pressed tofu into cubes and pan-fry it to give it a firm, golden outer skin. He also made a few minor adjustments to the seasoning: cutting the amount of canola oil tossed with the cauliflower from a quarter-cup to 2 tablespoons, increasing the teaspoon of sugar to one and a half teaspoons, and cutting the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes down to a mere eighth of a teaspoon. And he disregarded the direction to separate the white and green parts of the scallion, simply slicing up the whole thing and tossing it in the wok as he always does.

Most of these alterations, as far as we could tell, worked fine. The tofu did not fall apart during cooking, and the sauce, though mild, was far from bland. The one thing we both noted was that its flavor was rather bright. Although it contained only half a tablespoon of rice vinegar, which is milder than many other types of vinegar, the combination of that and the tomato paste gave it quite a strong acidic tang. Brian suspected part of the reason was he'd left out the 2 to 3 tablespoons of chili sauce, which would otherwise have increased the volume of the sauce and diluted the other flavors. I suggested that next time he could make up the extra volume with water, but he feared that would thin the sauce too much. My other idea was to replace some or all of the sugar with molasses, adding a darker note to balance out the brightness of the other ingredients.

In any case, the extra acidity wasn't a major drawback, particularly after the first few bites. We both enjoyed the dish enough to take second helpings and happily gobbled up the leftovers for lunch. We'll definitely be adding this recipe to our stable of cauliflower dishes, which means we'll have plenty of opportunities to tinker with it further. One note I gave him for next time is that so long as he's leaving out the chili sauce, I think he can safely increase the red pepper flakes to the full quarter-teaspoon the recipe calls for. Even my wussy palate should be able to handle that much.

Recipe of the Month: Egg Roll in a Bowl

As I've mentioned before, April has been a pretty full month for us. Weekdays and weekends alike have been crammed with medical appointments, game nights, last weekend's Repair Cafe, a major garden project, a stream cleanup I didn't even mention here, and a trip up to Massachusetts this weekend that combines a dance performance at NEFFA with a visit to my sister. All of which hasn't left us much time for picking and trying new vegan recipes.

So it wasn't until this week, with the end of April drawing near, that Brian asked me if I had any recipes I'd like to try as a Recipe of the Month. And fortunately, I happened to have one I'd been saving for a rainy day: this Vegan Egg Roll in a Bowl from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. Brian ran down the ingredient list and found that we had all the required ingredients except the plum sauce. However, we did have some frozen plums in the freezer. And being Brian, he figured, well, how hard could it be to make our own?

He did a little searching online and eventually settled on this plum sauce recipe from Serious Eats. Since we only needed a little for this recipe (and didn't expect to need it for anything else), he made just a quarter-sized batch, using half a pound of our frozen plums and correspondingly scaled amounts of the other ingredients. He used one small garlic clove in place of the half a clove the sized-down recipe called for, and we just happened to have a quarter-piece of star anise in the spice cupboard, so he didn't need to mess with breaking up a whole one. The whole process took about half an hour, including cooling time.

After that, the rest of the recipe was pretty straightforward. Aside from the extra step of tossing the tofu with the plum sauce, it came together much like any other stir-fry. He served it up over plain white rice with the extra plum sauce on the side, leaving out the other garnishes, and it was pretty good. Not extraordinary, but pretty good. The addition of the plum sauce did not magically transform it from a standard tofu-and-veggie bowl into some kind of higher-level concoction, but we both enjoyed it enough to to go back for seconds and happily polish off the leftovers for lunch.

So, will this become a regular addition to our recipe repertoire? Well, maybe. As I said, it's not necessarily better than a standard stir-fry, so Brian will probably stick to his usual method of tossing together whatever veggies we have on hand, rather than deliberately preparing this specific combination of ingredients. But we do have some of the plum sauce left over, safely stashed in the freezer, so should we ever find ourselves needing to use up some cabbage, carrot, onion, and tofu, we can thaw the sauce, follow this recipe, and be confident it will come out well.

Recipe of the Month: (Not Really) Sticky Eggplant and Tofu

Quite often, when I choose a new Recipe of the Month, Brian has to modify it a bit. He might replace an ingredient we don't have available, adjust the level of spice, or swap out animal products for plant-based alternatives. But this month, I found a dish that didn't look like it would require any alterations at all. The recipe, called Sticky Eggplant and Tofu, came from a site called Plant Based on a Budget, so it was fully vegan, and all the ingredients it called for were already in our fridge. And based on a quick scan of the ingredient list, it looked like it would taste great with no modifications.

But as soon as Brian started the actual cooking, it became clear there were some problems with the recipe. First, it called for him to cut the eggplant and tofu into 1-inch cubes, which he knew from prior experience would take far too long to cook. So he went with half-inch cubes (one-eighth of the size by volume). But once he'd prepared the cubes, it wasn't clear how long they were actually supposed to cook. The recipe, rather confusingly, said to spread the cubed eggplant on a baking sheet, then toss the cubed tofu in oil and coat it with cornstarch, and then "bake for 10 minutes." Bake what? The tofu or the eggplant? Based on the next instruction, "remove the eggplant to a plate...[and] continue baking the tofu," Brian concluded that it must mean both together, so he threw everything onto the sheet and popped it in the oven. And when the requisite 10 minutes were up, the eggplant was nowhere near done. Parts of it had started to soften a bit, but most of it was basically raw.

To correct this problem, he added another step to the recipe. After assembling the sauce ingredients in the pan, rather than just "stir until it begins to thicken" (which he knew wouldn't actually happen, since it didn't contain any sort of thickener), he added the eggplant to the pan and let it simmer, covered, in the sauce for 10 minutes. Then he added the tofu and proceeded with the recipe as written. Unfortunately, this meant that we ended up with no sauce at all, since the eggplant simply soaked up all the juice like a sponge. 

The completed dish was nothing at all like the promised "crispy tofu and melt-in-the-mouth eggplant in a super flavorful, sweet, tangy, savory soy garlic sauce." The tofu, after 20 minutes of baking, was not at all crispy; the eggplant, despite its extra 10 minutes of simmering time, did not come close to melting in the mouth; and there was no sauce whatsoever. Instead, it had squishy tofu and spongy eggplant chunks so saturated with vinegar, lime juice, and soy sauce that they were mouth-puckeringly tart. It was edible, but it was so completely different from the picture on the website that I find it hard to believe the chef actually followed her own recipe.

So, clearly, this recipe was not a success. And yet, looking again at that ingredient list, it still seems like it should be possible to make a good-tasting dish from those components. If Brian had started with those ingredients and no instructions, he'd have roasted the eggplant until it was truly tender, pan-fried the tofu until it was truly crispy, added a thickener to the sauce, and ended up with something much closer to that appetizing description and photo. But the fact is, this combination of flavors is so basic that he probably wouldn't have needed the recipe in the first place to come up with it. If he ever gets a hankering for something similar, he can probably create it from scratch, with no need to refer to this recipe at all.

In short, this was a total flop, and we have no reason ever to make it again. And in future, if I'm ever tempted to try another recipe from this website, I'll make sure both Brian and I take a good hard look at the instructions first.

Recipe of the Month: Shish Andaz

This month, for a change, Brian and I did not wait until the last minute to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month. In fact, I discovered this recipe at the end of January, and Brian deliberately held off on making it until last Sunday so that it could serve as the Recipe of the Month for February. 

It comes from a website called (for some reason) Hermann, which was featured in my One5C newsletter. Run by chef Julius Fiedler, it showcases "traditional vegan recipes from around the world." This one, called Shish Andaz, is an Iranian stew made primarily from eggplant and walnuts. It caught my eye because we're always looking for new eggplant recipes, particularly ones that pack a good dollop of protein. And we just happened to have everything on hand required to make it, with one notable exception: the pomegranate molasses. Not only did we not have it, I'd never even heard of it before. 

A quick trip to Wikipedia informed me that "molasses" is a misnomer: this "Middle Eastern, Caucasian and Balkan condiment" is actually made from concentrated pomegranate juice. It wasn't something we could whip up at home, and I wasn't even sure where we could buy it—or if we'd want to, since we didn't know of any other ways to use it besides this one untested recipe. Fortunately, someone had already asked in the comment section if there was a reasonable substitute for it, and Fiedler proposed "a tablespoon of sweet molasses of your choice and then 30-40ml of lemon juice." With this substitution, we had everything we needed to make the dish.

The recipe offered two alternatives for preparing the eggplant strips: pan-frying and roasting. Brian opted for roasting, which he'd found from previous experience to be the best way to bring out the flavor of almost any veggie. And since a single big baking sheet can hold all the eggplant at once, it didn't take appreciably longer than frying it, a job that would have needed to be done in two batches. It's not a quick recipe either way, about 80 minutes from start to finish, but about half of that is just simmering time.

The finished dish could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered pretty. It's an amorphous, brownish mass, broken up only by vague blobs of eggplant and gritty particles of walnuts. But it tasted much, much better than it looked. The author said it "might be the richest plant-based stew I’ve ever made," and I'd say that's a fair description, but there was a lot more going on than just the rich, nutty texture. It had hints of all five major flavors: the faint bitterness of the eggplant and walnuts, the acidity of the lemon and tomatoes, savory onion, salt, and a touch of sweetness from the molasses. Layered over that, there were the fragrant, spicy tones supplies by the cinnamon, pepper, and turmeric, all combined into one complex, flavorsome whole. I didn't enjoy looking at it, but I certainly enjoyed eating it, as did Brian.

This dish has just about everything we could ask for in a recipe. It's tasty, healthful, and reasonably easy to make with ingredients we nearly always have on hand. With all those walnuts, it's not particularly cheap, but since Brian only made a half recipe, the 150 grams he used (about a third of a pound) is only $1.44 worth, which certainly isn't going to break the bank. The only downside is the lengthy preparation time, which might make it impractical for a weeknight. But, as I'll discuss more in next week's entry, Brian is about to retire from his job, which means he'll soon have the leisure to cook a slow-paced dish any day of the week. So I think we can count on this Persian stew to become one of our go-to recipes, particularly for cold weather like we're having right now.

Recipe of the Month: Random Curry

January's Recipe of the Month is a dish Brian improvised last Tuesday to use up a nearly-full can of coconut milk we had in the fridge. (We had opened it and taken out just a few tablespoons to make the "tiramisu mocktail" recipe from this cookbook, which we got out of the library.) He already knew a good cauliflower curry recipe, but he didn't have a cauliflower on hand. So instead, he mashed up that recipe with the one he uses for malai kofta and threw in the hodgepodge of veggies we had available: green peas, chick peas, half a bell pepper, and a smallish butternut squash. He called the resulting dish...

Random Curry

• Saute 10 oz cubed butternut squash, ½ diced red bell pepper, and ¼ tsp salt in canola oil on medium high heat until softened and browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside.
• In the skillet, heat 1 tsp cumin seeds, ¼ tsp fennel seeds, and 8 fenugreek seeds in oil until they start to pop. Add ½ diced medium red onion, 2 large cloves finely diced garlic, 1 tsp finely diced fresh ginger, and ¼ to ½ finely diced jalapeno, and saute until soft.
• Add 1 ½ cups coconut milk, 1 cup crushed tomatoes, 1 tsp ground coriander, ½ tsp ground turmeric, ½ tsp ground cardamom, ¼ tsp garam masala, 1 Tbsp brown sugar, and 1 tsp salt. Whisk to combine and heat until bubbling.
• Add 1 ½ cups cooked chick peas (or 1 can, drained) and 1 cup green peas (frozen is okay). Heat, stirring, until the mixture has reached the desired thickness and is heated through.

This kludge of a dish worked surprisingly well. I liked it at least as much as either of its parent recipes, if not better. The mixture of veggies gave it a nice balance of soft and firm textures. It had plenty of flavors, but none of them was overpowering: tangy tomato and sweet butternut squash, zesty onion and spices offset by the coolness of the coconut milk. 

So would we make this again? We certainly could, but I'm not sure we have to follow the recipe exactly. Given how readily these two coconut-based Indian dishes combined to accommodate what we happened to have in the fridge, I suspect we could just take the base from this dish (the coconut-tomato-spice gravy) and throw in whatever veggies we needed to use up. Cauliflower, broccoli, squash, peas, beans, mushrooms, eggplant—if it works in a curry, it can probably work in this curry. Or at any rate, it's worth a try.

Recipe of the Month: Apple Brown Betty

As the days ticked down toward Christmas and our annual trip to Indiana, I realized that I had only a limited amount of time to fit in a Recipe of the Month for December. We wouldn't be cooking anything during our time out there, and by the time we got home the month would be nearly over. So if we wanted to test out a new recipe, it would probably have to be this week.

I went through both my new vegan cookbooks to see if I'd bookmarked any recipes we hadn't tried yet, but the only ones I found were things like bean burgers and spicy grits, which weren't sufficiently veggie-focused. So I started perusing the rest of the cookbooks on my shelf, and I happened on one by Olwen Woodier with the simple name Apple Cookbook. That reminded me that the current rules of my Recipe of the Month challenge allow for both fruit- and veggie-based recipes, so there was nothing to stop me from choosing an apple-themed dessert for this month.

The one I picked was called Apple Brown Betty. I don't want to infringe on Olwen Woodier's copyright by reproducing the recipe exactly, but the basic idea is simple: thinly sliced apples layered in a pan with a crumble made from bread, sugar, apple-pie spices, and melted butter. Woodier's version also called for a bit of lemon juice in the crumble and some apple juice or cider poured over top before baking. The recipe as written wasn't vegan, but it was easy enough to swap out the butter for our homemade plant butter.

With this substitution, we already had most of the necessary ingredients for this dish on hand. The one sticking point was the apple cider. This isn't something we usually have in the fridge, and with the thermometer below freezing and snow coming down, we weren't keen to make a run out to the store for some. But since we were only making a half recipe of the brown Betty, we only needed a couple of tablespoons' worth, so Brian decided to see if he could squeeze that amount out of whole apples. He tried pressing some apple slices in my trusty Aeropress coffee maker, but all it did was squash them slightly. Then he tried grinding up the slices in our little Magic Bullet blender, which reduced them to a pulp but didn't liquefy them. Finally, he ran the pulp through the Aeropress, using the perforated metal filter disk to strain out the sediment, and succeeded in extracting enough juice for the recipe.

The dessert came out of the oven looking very pretty and very wholesome, with its chunks of whole-wheat bread topping over a base of sliced apple. It tasted wholesome, too, with the apple flavor being very much to the fore. However, when I asked Brian how much sugar had gone into it, he said the half-sized recipe used six tablespoons. That means the roughly one-quarter of the dish I ate contained four and a half teaspoons—three-quarters of my recommended daily limit. Oops, maybe not so wholesome.

Brian said we could probably get away with using even less sugar in the topping, as he does with his apple crisp, which usually contains about four tablespoons. But given that the crisp is even easier to make and probably healthier, with its hearty topping of rolled oats, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to making brown Betty instead. So we'll probably save this recipe for occasions when we need to use up a few slices of stale bread and stick to crisp the rest of the time.

Recipe of the Month: Smoked Cauliflower Soup

This is going to be a very full weekend. Tomorrow I'm spending the entire afternoon with my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter, watching CCL's Fall Virtual Conference (which technically has already started, but tonight's session is just a "reception" that I don't consider important). On Sunday, we've got a role-playing game session scheduled in the afternoon, after which we'll just have time to grab some dinner before dashing off to a rehearsal for the Cotillion Singers—an ad hoc group that forms once a year and learns four or five pieces for a single performance at the Princeton Country Dancers Winter Cotillion. So tonight is about the only time I have free to dash off a quick blog entry about November's Recipe of the Month: the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from Everyday Happy Herbivore.

This is the fifth recipe we've tried from this cookbook, which we picked up at Half Price Books last Christmas, and all the others were varying degrees of lackluster. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was decidedly lacking in orange flavor, the Chickpea Tenders were dry and crumbly, and the low-sugar, high-fiber Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits and Apple Fritter Cups were both stodgy and insufficiently sweet. So I was feeling a bit disillusioned with the book, but I decided to give it one more try, this time with a simple recipe that looked like it could hardly go wrong. Then, if that one proved as disappointing as the others, I'd pass on the book to someone else.

The Smoked Cauliflower Soup recipe certainly looked straightforward enough. The first step is chopping up a whole cauliflower and boiling it until tender. While that's going, you whip up a soup base from a cup of nondairy milk (we used soy) seasoned with onion powder, garlic powder, Cajun seasoning, salt, paprika, and liquid smoke. Then you add the cooked cauliflower, blend it all together, and heat it through. 

It seemed pretty foolproof, and yet Brian was wary. Based on his knowledge and our previous experiences with this cookbook, he was convinced the amount of seasoning in the recipe was going to be woefully inadequate. So he doubled the liquid smoke from an eighth of a teaspoon to a quarter, tripled the Cajun seasoning from a half-teaspoon to a half-tablespoon, and bumped up the salt from a tiny dash to a robust teaspoon and a quarter. He also decided the meal needed more protein, so he supplemented the dish with some roasted chickpeas. These were even simpler than the soup itself: he just drained a can of chickpeas, tossed them with a half tablespoon of canola oil and a teaspoon of Cajun seasoning (to match the soup), and baked them at 450F for 20 minutes. 

Both these alterations turned out to be wise choices. The thick soup had a texture rather like Cream of Wheat, and without Brian's additional seasonings, it would probably have tasted pretty much like it too. Instead, it was reasonably flavorful, and sprinkling the chick peas on top gave it a bit of textural interest as well. In fact, I thought the chickpeas were by far the best part of the meal, and I saw the soup as little more than a vehicle for carrying them. Brian liked it better than I did, enough to take seconds at dinner and willingly polish off the leftovers for lunch the next day, but he didn't absolutely love it. All in all, we both agreed that while there was nothing wrong with the soup recipe, it wasn't nearly as interesting as most of the other things we do with cauliflower, such as his aloo gobi and the roasted cauliflower dish that was our Recipe of the Month for June. So while we both liked it all right, we don't see any compelling reason to make it again.

All in all, I'd give this dish a solid C, maybe a C plus. It's a passing grade, but I'm not sure it's a good enough one to bring up the cookbook's GPA to a reasonable level—particularly when you consider how much Brian had to amplify the seasoning in the recipe just to get it up to that passing score. So I can't decide if we should keep tinkering with the cookbook or give up on it. Maybe we should pick out just one more interesting-looking recipe, give that one a try, and let that be the deciding vote. If that dish is a keeper, so is the cookbook; if not, it's time to write the book off as a loss.

Recipes of the Month: Tofu Sushi and Apple Fritter Cups

Brian and I tried two new vegan recipes in October, one sweet and one savory. Technically, the savory one doesn't qualify for the Recipe of the Month slot, since it doesn't have a whole lot of veggies in it. But since I grew up with the rule that you have to finish your dinner before you can have dessert, I'm going to tackle it first and set aside the fruit-forward sweet dish for later.

The savory recipe was a variant on one Brian has been making for years: homemade sushi. Normally, he makes this with the fresh sushi-grade salmon they sell at H-Mart. It's very tasty, but also quite pricey—as much as $30 per pound. He always buys the smallest package he can find, but it's still $10 to $15 worth of fish for a single meal. Of course, that's still much less than the cost of going out for a sushi dinner, so we look on it as an affordable luxury. But it's not one we're willing to indulge in very often.

So, when I decided on a whim to spend $2 on a half-pound package of surimi (faux crabmeat) at Lidl, Brian thought he'd try experimenting with it as a cheaper sushi filling. Not surprisingly, it didn't have the same melt-in-the-mouth texture as the salmon, but bundled up into little rolls, it worked well enough to scratch the sushi itch. That got him wondering: if it was the rice and nori that really mattered, did the filling tucked inside them even have to be fish? Could he make reasonable sushi rolls out of tofu?

To find out, he pressed the tofu and cut it into narrow sticks. He marinated these briefly in a vegan fish sauce he'd found a recipe for at the Minimalist Baker. (He found it pretty weak, not nearly as flavorful as real fish sauce, but he thought it could work for this purpose.) Then he browned the tofu sticks in a pan, added thin slices of cucumber and avocado, and rolled them up in nori with sushi rice and sesame seeds on the outside.  

The resulting "tofushi" was...not bad. I can't say it was as good as the salmon sushi, but it was a damn sight better than the carrot salmon we tried as a vegan alternative in 2020. The tofu, even after its dip in the faux fish sauce, didn't have a lot of flavor, but it had a firm texture with a satisfying chew, and the soy sauce and wasabi supplied the missing taste component. And because the tofu provided protein, it stuck to the ribs much better than the veggie-only carrot rolls. It was satisfying enough that Brian definitely intends to make it again, possibly tweaking the recipe next time to amp up the flavor. (Come to think of it, treating the tofu the same way we did the carrots in the carrot salmon recipe might work well for that purpose.)

The sweet recipe came out of the Happy Healthy Herbivore cookbook we bought at Half Price Books last Christmas. We've already tried a few dishes out of this book and found them rather a mixed bag. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was okay, but not as orangey as we would have liked; the Chickpea Tenders, contrary to their name, were dry, crumbly, and disappointingly bland. We also tried a sweet recipe called Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits, which called for "white whole-wheat flour." After a little research, I found out that this stuff is more commonly called golden wheat flour and managed to track down a bag of it at Shop-Rite for around seven bucks. It was a big investment, but I figured it could be worthwhile if it allowed us to make healthier desserts without compromising on texture. Sadly, the pumpkin biscuits didn't really provide this payoff; while their lightly sweet, spicy flavor was okay, the texture was rather stodgy, not at all what I expect from something described as a biscuit. 

Hoping that this disappointing result was a one-off, I decided to try another dessert recipe from the same book, the Apple Fritter Cups. This one actually called for whole-wheat pastry flour, but Brian decided to try making it with the golden wheat flour, since we'd already sprung for the bag. He skipped the optional sugar glaze and went with just the basic recipe: a simple, lightly sweetened batter (just a quarter-cup of brown sugar for 14 little muffins) topped with diced apples fried with cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar. They smelled good, and Brian thought they tasted pretty good too, but I found them no better than okay. Like the pumpkin muffins, they were dense and doughy, and they didn't have enough sweetness to make up for these defects. The apple part wasn't bad, but it wasn't much better than a plain raw apple, which is healthier and requires no cooking at all.

After this experience, I'm feeling a bit disillusioned both with the golden wheat flour and with this cookbook as a whole. I'm willing to give them both one more try, but I think our next selection from Happy Healthy Herbivore should definitely be a savory dish and not a sweet one, such as the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from the "Soups, Stews & Dal" chapter. And next time we try the golden wheat flour in a dessert recipe, it should probably be a real dessert with actual sugar, like the Cinnamon Whole Wheat Scones from the King Arthur website. Or maybe we should forget about desserts and try them in a bread recipe we'd normally make with white flour, like Brian's Granola Bread.

Recipe of the Month: Coconut Cauliflower Curry (with bonus bread and dessert)

As I've noted before, my husband has a bit of a cauliflower problem. When he spots a cheap cauliflower at the store, he just can't resist buying it, even if he has no idea what he wants to do with it. Last week, he found himself in this position once again, and rather than fall back on an old standby like aloo gobi, he decided to look for something new. On a site called Rebel Recipes, he found a cauliflower and chick pea curry recipe with coconut milk, which he adores, so he decided to give that one a try. He didn't modify it much, aside from scaling dialing back the chili flakes to just a pinch and adding a teaspoon of salt, which the original recipe lacked entirely.

Visually speaking, this curry wasn't very appealing. It was a sort of orange, gooey mass, without much contrast in color or texture. The flavor, on the other hand, had a lot going on—a bit too much for my taste. Against the tang of tomato and the sort of musty coolness of the coconut milk, there was a huge array of spices—onion, garlic, ginger cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel, chili—all fighting for attention. I found it a bit overwhelming, and I felt no urge to go back for more when I'd finished my bowlful. Brian, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. He's promised not to "subject me to it too often," and I've agreed to put up with it once in a while for his sake. Perhaps it'll grow on me after a while. And if it doesn't, he can have all the leftovers to himself.

But this was not the only new recipe we tried in August. We're only halfway through the month, and we've already tried two others: a simple bread that wasn't a stunning success, and a dessert that was.

The flatbread recipe was something I discovered while browsing Reddit. On the r/Frugal forum, a Redditor posted with great enthusiasm about a two-ingredient flatbread that he swore was a "gateway drug" for baking. To hear him tell it, this recipe could work for just about anything: pizza crust, burger buns, wraps, even crackers. It sounded interesting, but the original recipe called for Greek yogurt, which wouldn't fit our mostly dairy-free diet. So I hunted around and unearthed a vegan version that also called for only two ingredients: soy milk, which we had, and self-rising flour, which is easy to make by adding three teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of regular flour. (A third ingredient, salt, was listed as optional.) 

I showed the recipe to Brian and he agreed to give it a try with the next night's dinner, falafel. Making the flatbreads was pretty similar to the process he uses for the homemade tortillas he usually serves with this meal: mix the dough, knead it briefly, form balls, roll them out, and pan-fry them. However, since the dough got to rise a bit before cooking, the flatbreads came out larger, puffier, and more substantial than the tortillas. And at first, that seemed to be a good thing. The sturdier flatbreads could hold a larger volume of falafel and veggies without letting any spill out, and they felt more secure in the hand. And I found their chewy texture quite enjoyable.

But after a couple of days, the weakness of this recipe became apparent. The flatbreads that had been so firm and flexible when fresh out of the pan grew drier and more brittle with each day they stayed in the fridge. By the time I tried to use the last one four days later, it was so crumbly that it couldn't wrap around the falafel at all; it simply fell to pieces, leaving me to finish up the meal with a fork. Since the tortillas are about as easy to make and stay good much longer, it makes more sense to stick with those for all our sandwich-wrapping needs.

But on the dessert front, there is good news. For background, a couple of months ago, we discovered a vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's that worked beautifully for plain whipped cream, in a fruit fool, in ice cream, and even in our anniversary cake. So we were devastated to discover on our next trip to the store that it had been discontinued. (This is an ever-present danger with Trader Joe's products we get too attached to, like their toothpaste and shampoo bar.) I thought maybe we could make our own plant-based cream using the TJ's product as a model, and I came up with what seemed like a promising recipe combining soy milk, coconut oil, and canola oil, with guar gum as an emulsifer. But apparently there was some key element of the alchemy missing, because the stuff stubbornly refused to whip.

But then the story took a happier turn. Last weekend, Brian stopped by Shop-Rite to use up a gift card, and while there, he noticed a plant-based cream from Country Crock in the refrigerated section. Both the package and the ingredient list looked pretty similar to the Trader Joe's product, suggesting that the taste and texture might be also. And when we tried whipping some, we found that was indeed the case. It needed more sugar, since it wasn't as sweet as either the TJ's cream or real cream, but the texture and mouthfeel were just fine.

After that, of course, we had to test it in an ice cream. Brian asked me to pick a flavor, and I suggested a fruity ice cream made from some of our frozen or preserved fruit. That reminded him that last year, he'd tried making a batch of raspberry jam that hadn't set up very well, so it was more of a raspberry sauce. And, recalling a particularly tasty black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream he'd had once at a place in New Hope, he decided to add chocolate to it as well. Solid chocolate chips aren't ideal for this purpose since they don't melt that quickly in the mouth, so he decided to use a technique he'd seen in another recipe: melt the chocolate with a little oil, then drizzle it into the ice cream base as it mixes.

The result: a truly delicious vegan ice cream. The flavor had the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, and the mouthfeel was just as smooth and creamy as you'd expect from real dairy cream. It's good enough that, unlike the other two vegan recipes we tried in August, I think it's worth sharing in full. (This is a small batch sized for our baby ice cream maker, so adjust the proportions as needed).

Vegan Raspberry Chocolate Chip Ice Cream 

Combine ½ cup Country Crock vegan heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. soy milk, 5 Tbsp. seedless raspberry jam, and ¼ tsp. vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture (if most of the ingredients are already cold, a couple hours should be fine). Place in ice cream maker and run for 10-15 minutes. Melt 1.33 oz. chocolate chips and 1 tsp. canola oil in a double boiler until liquid. When the ice cream is soft-serve consistency, slowly pour in the chocolate either while the maker is still running or while stirring. Run the ice cream maker for a little while longer, then freeze the mixture for a couple hours before eating.

Recipe of the Month: Green Bean and Mushroom Curry

First, a quick apology for the late post this week. We were away for the weekend and didn't get home until Sunday evening, by which time we had no energy left for anything productive.

Now, on to the meat—or rather meatless—of the post. Brian found July's Recipe of the Month the way he often does: by searching online for a dish he can make with whatever we happen to have in the fridge. In this case, that was a half-pound of mushrooms and a roughly equal amount of green beans from the garden (our first of the season). Running a search based on those two ingredients, he hit on this Green Bean and Mushroom Curry from a site called Cooking with Mum, which bills itself as "a collection of authentic recipes from Fiji." So we can now add Fijian to the list of world cuisines we've sampled.

Well, sort of, anyway. As usual, Brian had to make a few modifications to the recipe based on our dietary needs and what we had available. He left out the optional curry leaves, the Thai chili, and cilantro, none of which we had on hand. He used only half the volume of green beans the recipe called for, since that was all we had, and he didn't bother blanching them. He reduced the amount of oil from half a cup, which seemed a bit excessive, to a quarter-cup, and substituted cheaper canola oil for olive oil.  He added half a teaspoon of salt, since the original recipe called for none at all. And lastly, he gave the dish a boost of protein by cubing up 8 ounces of firm (or at least firm-ish) tofu, sauteing it with a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and tossing that in at the end before serving the whole thing up over brown rice. After all these changes, what he finally put on the table was more like an adaptation of the original Fijian dish than a faithful translation.

In its edited form, this dish was not particularly inspiring. Despite the large variety of spices included in the recipe, it wasn't all that flavorful. Even though Brian had added salt to it, we both ended up adding more and couldn't imagine how flat it would have been with none at all. Perhaps if he'd been able to include the missing chili and curry leaves, or if he'd sprung for the half-cup of olive oil instead of a quarter-cup of canola, that would have made all the difference. But I have a little trouble believing that. 

But though this curry wasn't remarkable, it wasn't bad either. The flavor didn't knock our socks off, but the dish was still reasonably enjoyable, and, with the addition of the tofu,  substantial enough to fill us both up. And even with the reduced volume of green beans, it made enough for two dinners and two lunches. It isn't necessarily worthy of a place in our recipe collection, but it served its purpose: turning the odds and ends into our fridge into a reasonably satisfying meal.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Cauliflower and Chick Peas (plus bonus dessert)

On the last Thursday in May, during our weekly grocery run to Lidl, Brian made an impulse purchase of a cheap cauliflower. Having bought it, he then had to figure out what to do with it. We'd already had aloo gobi recently, and he didn't have any leeks to make his roasted leek and cauliflower pasta. So he went hunting online for ideas and dug up a recipe at a site called Last Ingredient for a dish made from roasted cauliflower and chick peas, topped with an "herby tahini" spiked with fresh parsley, cilantro, garlic, green onion, and lemon juice. We had all of that except the cilantro, so he just substituted additional parsley, which the garden is producing plenty of, and left the rest of the recipe unchanged.  

This dish isn't at all complicated. All he had to do was divide the cauliflower into florets, toss them and the chick peas with olive oil and spices, spread them out on a baking sheet, and roast them for half an hour. While it was cooking, he whipped up the tahini sauce and a batch of quinoa to accompany the dish. (The recipe didn't call for this, but it noted that "Leftovers can be stirred into cooked pasta, quinoa, farro or barley," so Brian figured there was no need to wait for it to be left over.) 

He served the dish with the herbed tahini on the side, along with some extra parsley for sprinkling. I tried it first without the sauce and found it quite enjoyable on its own: with its blend of onion and garlic powder, cumin, smoked paprika, black pepper, and salt, it wasn't at all lacking in flavor. But when I added a dollop of the sauce, that extra punch of lemon, garlic, and sesame flavors livened it up still more. It didn't need a lot, just a little sprinkle in each bite to give it that extra brightness and piquancy.

In short, I expect this recipe to become a part of our regular rotation. So long as cauliflower remains cheap at Lidl, we can alternate back and forth between it and aloo gobi so we don't get tired of either one.

This was not the only new recipe Brian tried last week. Late in May, the New York Times climate column ran a story (gift link here) about a vegan chocolate cake that was so good, it convinced the author to go vegan herself. She'd long been concerned about the climate and the impact our food choices have on it, but she also couldn't see a life without animal foods as worth living. Tasting this "sumptuous" cake at a backyard wedding, she reports, opened her eyes to the idea that "plant-based eating could be delicious."

Of course, this did not come as news to Brian or me. We already had many delicious vegan recipes in our repertoire, including a pretty good chocolate cake. That recipe, known in my family as "wacky cake," depends on a vinegar-and-baking-soda reaction to leaven it with no need for eggs. It's incredibly simple to make; I first learned to do it at the age of 7 or 8. But Brian found the swooning description of the cake in the New York Times piece so intriguing that he decided he had to try it for himself. 

The recipe, from the site Nora Cooks, isn't particularly complicated. In fact, the ingredient list is pretty similar to our basic wacky cake, with the addition of a cup of soymilk and some applesauce. The main feature this recipe has that mine doesn't is a chocolate buttercream frosting to go with it. The recipe calls for vegan butter to make this frosting—specifically, the kind that comes in sticks rather than in a tub. Brian and I used to buy this kind of plant butter for pie crusts, but lately it's become harder to find in stores. So, rather than go hunting all over for plant butter in stick form, Brian decided to try using our homemade plant butter in the frosting and see if that worked okay.

The answer turned out to be "sort of." The problem is, the oils it's made from (canola and coconut) have a significantly lower melting point than the palm oil used in the plant butter sticks. Brian had to put the cake layers into the freezer to keep the frosting from melting as he applied it, and the iced cake had to go immediately into the fridge and stay there to keep it from melting just in the warmth of the kitchen. When we wanted to share some slices with our friends at Morris dance practice, we had to pack them into a cooler to keep them from turning into puddles.

That bit of hassle aside, this was definitely a good chocolate cake, with a moist, rich texture and a strong chocolate flavor. But to be honest, it wasn't that much better than our usual wacky cake. It was mainly the rich frosting that made it feel much more lavish and decadent—almost too much so for my taste. I had to carefully manage the balance between cake and frosting as I ate to keep the sweetness from being overpowering.

So, while it was interesting to try this cake of legend, I honestly don't know that it lives up to the hype. Personally, I didn't find it that much better than the wacky-cake cupcakes with coconut frosting Brian made for my birthday ten years ago, and it certainly can't hold a candle to our wedding cake with its layers of chocolate and raspberry mousse. If we could figure out how to make that cake vegan, now, that would be a cake truly worth converting to a plant-based diet for. But this one, while good, is hardly a life-changing experience.

Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese

When Brian asked me to look for new recipes to use up our plentiful supply of butternut squash, I recalled one I'd seen a while ago on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken: Vegan Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese. We'd previously tried the Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder from the same site, and it hadn't at all successful, but I thought this squash-based "cheese" might be more successful. Most of the ingredients in it—onion, garlic, butternut squash, veggie broth, nutritional yeast—were things we liked and already knew would go well together, so it didn't seem like it could go too wrong.

However, there was one ingredient the recipe called for that we didn't have: white miso paste. We assumed this would be easy to find at our local H-Mart, which carries all kinds of Asian foods at affordable prices, but Brian couldn't find it there—nor at the Ranch 99, another Asian grocery store a little way down the street. Our local SuperFresh had some, but it was $9.99 for a 14-ounce package, which seemed a bit much to spend on an ingredient we'd never used before and might never want to use again. We finally managed to locate a smaller package for $2.99 at Trader Joe's—a 5-ounce resealable tube that we hope will help the stuff keep long enough for us to use it up.

Making the "cheese" sauce was simple enough: just saute the onion and garlic, then add the cubed squash and broth and cook it until tender, and then puree the lot in a blender with the nooch, miso paste, and a little salt. However, the volume the recipe produced seemed like far too much for the three cups of cooked macaroni it was supposed to cover. Fortunately, Brian had decided to cook a whole half-pound of elbows, which came out to about four cups cooked, because even this larger volume of noodles was more or less swimming in the sauce. It was more like a soup than a pasta dish. 

As far as I was concerned, these messed-up proportions more or less ruined the dish. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor of the squash sauce (although, like the other mac & cheese recipe from the same site, it tasted nothing at all like cheese), but there was just too much of it. I tried to eat it carefully so that the noodles were distributed as evenly through the sauce as possible, but I still ended up with a significant volume of cheese-sauce soup in the bottom of my bowl that I had to spoon up by itself. This wasn't at all agreeable and left me with no appetite for the leftovers. 

Fortunately, Brian didn't mind it as much, so he was able to finish it off over the course of the next few days. But neither of us feels much inclination to try it again. In theory, this dish might be okay if we just made a smaller volume of sauce. But why bother making a squash-based pasta dish that's only okay when our Brown Butter Butternut Squash Pasta recipe (and the new vegan variation we've created) is already delicious without any tinkering?

Recipe of the Month: Maple-Roasted Tofu with Butternut Squash

Brian and I have found ourselves with an unusual problem this year: too many butternut squash. Most years, we've had barely enough to make all our favorite squash recipes—souffle, lasagna, pizza, rigatoni, Roasted Stuff—once or twice each. But after last fall's bumper crop of squash (42 pounds in total), we've already made most of these at least once without making that big a dent in the pile. (The one exception is the lasagna, which we hesitate to make with vegan mozzarella for fear it wouldn't be quite the same.) 

So for the first time I can remember, Brian asked me to look for some new squash recipes. I dug through our recipe files and found a few that looked worth trying, but the one that most piqued my interest was the Maple-Roasted Tofu with Butternut Squash and Bacon I'd printed out five years back from the New York Times Cooking section. (This gift link will allow you to view the recipe without a subscription.) We couldn't include the bacon, obviously, but the author had already provided helpful instructions to "make this dish vegan" by skipping the bacon and adding a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika. (Actually, that doesn't make it vegan, since it also calls for a teaspoon of Asian fish sauce. But with so many other strong flavors in the mix—maple, ginger, pepper, onion, sage, coriander, lime—you could easily replace this minor ingredient with an extra teaspoonful of soy sauce or, as one commenter suggested, half soy sauce and half rice vinegar.)

We tried this dish for the first time last Sunday. Since the recipe didn't offer any suggestions for a starch to accompany the tofu, we just served it up with some of Brian's whole-wheat no-knead bread, left over from an earlier meal of roasted vegetable sandwiches. Since the bread worked with one roasted veggie dish, we figured it would pair okay with the other. In any case, it was only there to provide ballast, as the dish certainly didn't need extra flavor. Between the sweetness of the maple syrup, the brightness of the lime juice, the bite of the onion and scallions, the heat of the red pepper flakes, and all those aromatic spices and herbs, the meal had quite a lot going on. It was not unlike our Roasted Stuff recipe (which we usually now make with Brussels sprouts instead of broccoli), but with an extra kick from the additional spices.

The one thing that wasn't ideal about the recipe was that the thick slabs of tofu were kind of awkward to work with. The recipe calls for them to be "tucked" onto the baking sheet with all the diced veggies and brushed with the maple glaze, then flipped halfway through roasting and brushed again. Well, as several of the comments on the recipe point out, trying to flip large slices of tofu while they're sitting in the middle of a pile of diced veggies isn't the easiest thing to do. Brian managed it, but it was a hassle, and the slabs didn't absorb much of the flavor of the glaze. And because the tofu was in such big chunks, it was unclear how to eat it together with the veggies. You could just alternate between bites of each, of course, but it would have been more satisfying to get everything onto the fork at the same time. I tried arranging the tofu slabs on the bread and covering them with the veggies to make a sort of open-faced sandwich, but that proved impossible to eat neatly.

So, next time he makes this dish, Brian plans to dice the tofu and soak it in the glaze for a while before adding it to the roasting pan with the veggies. He hopes this will make the tofu crisper and more flavorful, as well as easier to cook and eat. We might also try to think of something a bit more interesting than bread to accompany it. Quinoa might be good, or maybe kasha. We may have to experiment a little to figure out what works best. But repeating this recipe several times while we fine-tune it will certainly be no hardship.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Pasta Alla Norma

Several years back, I mentioned in a post that Brian and I had become fans of the Netflix series "Queer Eye," in which five queer powerhouses (four gay men and one "nonbinary fairy," as they call themselves) team up to help others spruce themselves up both inside and out. Along with being energetic, funny, and heartwarming to watch, this show has proved to be a good way to discover new dishes. One of the earliest episodes introduced us to mujadara with fried eggplant, which has since become one of our staple recipes. And in a more recent one, we watched chef Antoni teach a deli owner how to prepare his girlfriend's favorite dish, pasta alla Norma: pasta in a light sauce made from tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, and fresh herbs, topped with crumbled ricotta salata cheese. It looked so tasty that right after watching the episode, I went to my computer and hunted for a recipe.

The one I found at Serious Eats looked pretty simple, but it had one problem: the cheese. According to the description, this particular cheese is a pretty major component of the dish's flavor; the notes on the recipe describe it as "funky as all get out with a punchy barnyard flavor, an intense saltiness, and a savory aroma somewhere in between a good aged pecorino and a feta." So simply swapping it out for some of our vegan mozzarella wouldn't work. 

My first idea for a substitute was to crumble up some firm tofu and spike it with nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and salt, as suggested at Voyo Eats. But when it occurred to me to just look up a vegan pasta alla Norma recipe and see what it used, I found that most of them didn't bother with any of that. The one at Holy Cow Vegan, simply left out the cheese altogether, and at Lazy Cat Kitchen replaced it with two tablespoons of toasted pine nuts. These nuts taste nothing like Kenji Lopez-Alt's description of ricotta salata, but they do have a pleasant taste of their own and would add a nice bit of crunch to the texture. 

So Brian made this simple substitution in the Serious Eats recipe, along with a couple of other minor changes. Kenji Lopez-Alt said to use whole peeled tomatoes and crush them by hand into 1/2-inch chunks; however, since the Lazy Cat Kitchen recipe called for four fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced, Brian figured he could get away with subbing in a can of diced tomatoes instead. He increased the amount of eggplant from 3/4 pound to a full pound and reduced the amount of pasta from a whole pound to half a pound, thereby boosting the veggie-to-pasta ratio. He replaced the fresh basil in the recipe, which we didn't have on hand in early March, with a roughly equivalent volume of our frozen basil. And he dialed back the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the recipe to half that amount to accommodate my low heat tolerance.

I don't know if these modifications made a big difference in the flavor, but I found the result something short of extraordinary. There was certainly nothing wrong with it—with a sauce that was essentially just eggplant, tomato, garlic, basil, and oregano, it's hard to see how there could have been—but there was nothing all that exciting about it either. It certainly wasn't the best dish we've made with eggplant; it wasn't even the best pasta dish. I prefer the similar one we call pasta melanzane, which includes fresh mozzarella (regular or vegan) in the mix. 

Thus, this new vegan pasta is unlikely to make the cut to be included in our regular rotation. We'll save our eggplants for dishes we truly love, like our favorite eggplant and pepper sandwiches.

Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu (with bonus dessert)

I've had other things to post about the past couple of weeks, so this is my first opportunity to tell you about our new Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu with Roasted Cauliflower. Brian found this recipe on a site called Eating Bird Food while hunting for new ways to use a cheap cauliflower we'd scored toward the end of January. As usual, he made a few small changes to the recipe:

• Scaling it down from four servings to three
• Substituting canola oil for avocado oil
• Leaving out the fresh cilantro, which we didn't have (and I don't care for anyway)
• Replacing the hot chili sauce, which we also didn't have, by adding a dried hot chili to the marinade instead—and then, for fear that change would make it too fiery, dialing back the crushed red pepper to just a pinch for the two-thirds recipe

As it turned out, he needn't have worried about the heat level; the dish was mild enough that even my delicate taste buds could easily have handled more. In fact, I'd say it was bordering on bland, despite the ample amounts of onion, garlic, and ginger in it. It just seemed like it could have used a little bit more of pretty much everything. Texture-wise, the cauliflower worked better than the tofu, which seemed a little too soft and squishy for the dish. It might have worked better with some Soy Curls, which have a firmer texture closer to chicken. But given how unmemorable we both found it, it's probably not worth making a second attempt.

But that wasn't the only new vegan recipe we tried this month. Last night, as a special Valentine's Day treat, he prepared the Salted Dark Chocolate Tart from Gimme Some Oven. This rich little dessert has a gluten-free chocolate-almond meal crust filled with a dairy-free chocolate ganache made with coconut milk. It's supposed to be served with flaked sea salt on top, but Brian decided to make that part optional. Since the recipe says it makes 8 to 12 servings, Brian cut it down to one-quarter of its size for the two of us.

This dish was much more successful than the tofu. The crust was a bit crumbly and didn't come out of the pan neatly, but the ganache was creamy and delicious. Brian had his with a sprinkling of salt and found that enhanced it still more, but I chose to top mine with a generous portion of coconut whipped cream instead. This actually made it a bit less decadent, tempering the richness of the filling by stretching it out over a larger volume. We ate about half of it up while watching the last bits of Campaign Three of Critical Role, leaving us with two more small portions to enjoy tonight.

So, unlike the kung pao tofu, this dessert looks like a keeper. We might fiddle with the recipe a bit to see if we can keep the crust from sticking, but we can be sure the results will be good enough to justify the effort.

Recipe of the Month: Spicy Orange Broccoli

This holiday season, I acquired not one but two new vegan cookbooks. My mom gave me Anything You Can Cook, I Can Cook Vegan by Richard Makin, which I became interested in after trying his whipped cream recipe. (It didn't quite work, but it came closer than any of the numerous attempts we've made with coconut milk, aquafaba, or a combination of the two.) That one, as the name suggests, focuses on plant-based versions of animal-food favorites like chicken nuggets, grilled cheese, and (since the author is a Brit) sausage rolls. Some of the recipes in that one look pretty complicated, but we can probably get a lot of mileage out of simpler ones like Blender Bean Burgers and Cannellini Gnocchi with Pesto. There's even an instant mac and cheese powder that might work better than the disappointing one we tried from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. 

The other cookbook, Everyday Happy Herbivore by Linsday S. Nixon, looks even more promising. I bought this one myself during our annual pilgrimage to Half Price Books in Indianapolis. Its focus is fat-free or extremely low-fat vegan dishes—so extreme that it labels some recipes as "cheater" dishes because they contain peanut butter, which seems to me like taking things a bit too far. But regardless, there are lots of interesting ideas in here, from Charleston Grits to Apple Fritter Cups.

Our first pick out of this book was a simple dish called Spicy Orange Greens. This recipe can be made with any type of greens or, alternatively, with broccoli florets, which is the option that we chose. The veggie of choice gets cooked until just wilted with a simple sauce made from water, soy sauce, fresh ginger, red pepper flakes, and orange marmalade, then served over soba noodles. 

We had most of these ingredients on hand, but we didn't have any orange marmalade, and we couldn't find any at Lidl. Rather than spring for a pricey jar at the local Superfresh just to pull out a tablespoon for this dish, Brian decided to try whipping up his own using a recipe from Tastes Better from Scratch. After half an hour of simmering, he had a chunky mass somewhat stickier than commercial marmalade, but close enough to use in the recipe. Along with the homemade marmalade, he made two other minor changes: replacing low-sodium soy sauce with regular (since that's what we'd had) and adding some diced tofu, since the recipe was otherwise lacking in protein.

The resulting dish was very pretty to look at, but it fell a bit short on flavor. With two tablespoons of fresh ginger and a quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes, the "spicy" part came through just fine; it was the "orange" that was lacking. Maybe it was the homemade marmalade, or maybe it was the fact that it was spread out over a larger volume of food thanks to the addition of the tofu, but to both of us, the recipe had no discernible orange flavor. I had to stir another spoonful of the marmalade—at least half a tablespoon—into my bowl to get what seemed like a reasonable level of orange. To orange-ify the whole panful of greens and tofu, we'd probably have needed at least three tablespoons—three times what the recipe called for. 

Fortunately, that's not a difficult change to make, and with that slight adjustment, this could be quite a useful recipe. Since most of the ingredients are usually in our pantry or fridge, keeping a jar of marmalade on hand (homemade or store-bought) will allow us to trot it out as a last-minute supper for nights when we're not sure what to make. (Alternatively, Brian thinks we might be able to make a sufficiently orangey sauce by leaving out the marmalade and replacing the water with orange juice. But that's an adjustment we'd have to experiment with to get it right.)

If this dish is any indication, we can probably expect this cookbook to be useful overall, but in need of a little tinkering to get the recipes just right. We'll get another chance to test it out shortly, as Brian is currently cooking up a more complicated one from the same cookbook: the intriguing-looking "Chickpea Tenders," which are designed to take the place of a chicken cutlet. I'll let you know how that one turns out in a future post.

Recipe of the Month: Greens, Beans, and Mashed Potatoes

As the days ticked down toward Christmas and our annual trip to Indiana, I realized I had one task to complete before the trip that had nothing to do with holiday gifts: finding a Recipe of the Month for December. I had a couple of downloaded recipes I'd been meaning to try, but none that were both vegan and vegetable-forward. So I turned to our shelf of cookbooks and started flipping through them, looking for inspiration. On page 69 of Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, I found what looked like just the thing: a dish called "Green And White Beans Under Garlic Mashed Potatoes." It was a casserole of white beans, fresh green beans, and spinach topped with a layer of mashed potatoes, in the manner of a shepherd's pie. All the ingredients were either in our kitchen already or easy to get hold of. It did have a rather lengthy preparation time (an hour and 45 minutes, with 30 minutes of hands-on work), but since Brian had three extra days off before we had to leave for our trip, he'd have plenty of time to make it.

As usual, Brian modified the written recipe in several ways. First, he had to swap out a few ingredients to make it vegan. That wasn't difficult: he just replaced the butter and milk in the mashed potatoes with oil and soy milk and the gruyere cheese that was supposed to go on top with a spritz of oil and a sprinkling of nutritional yeast and salt. He also replaced the olive oil used to saute the veggies with cheaper canola oil and the fresh green beans, which are quite expensive in December, with frozen. He boosted the 10 ounces of frozen spinach the recipe called for to a full pound and dialed down the half-teaspoon of nutmeg the recipe called for to just a quarter-teaspoon to avoid overpowering the other flavors. And rather than simmering the white beans and boiling the potatoes on the stove, he did them in the pressure cooker, thus saving a good chunk of time and energy.

Even with that change, this recipe was fairly time-consuming. First, he had to cook the soaked white beans and set them aside. Then he cooked the potatoes and mashed them (skins and all) with soy milk, oil, garlic, and salt. The next step was to saute two chopped leeks in oil with salt, thyme, and more garlic, then add flour, pepper, nutmeg, and water to make the sauce. When all that was done, he integrated the cooked white beans into the dish with the green beans and spinach, cooked it briefly, and spread it in a casserole dish with the potatoes and his improvised nutritional-yeast topping layered on top. And finally, he loaded the whole thing into the oven to bake for around 40 minutes.

The finished casserole didn't look much like a vegan dish. Between the golden-brown topping and the white sauce that had bubbled over the sides, it gave a very good impression of something rich and cheesy. Unfortunately, its flavor and texture didn't live up to the hype. The biggest problem was the green beans; after nearly an hour of cooking between the stovetop and the oven, they were mushy and bland, doing nothing to relieve the stodginess of the bean-and-potato mixture. (Fresh ones might have stood up better to the long cooking time, but even they might not have survived it.) And while the leeks, garlic, nutritional yeast, and spices did their best, there just wasn't enough of them to perk up such a vast mass of greens and starch. Unfortunately, Brian had decided to make a full batch of the recipe (six servings), so we had quite a lot of it left over after that first meal. We managed to get through it all before leaving for our trip, but we were pretty sick of it by the end.

Despite these shortcomings, I think this dish has potential. If you left out the green beans altogether and made it with only spinach and leeks, it would basically be a variation on colcannon, a classic Irish greens-and-beans mixture, but with an added pop of protein from the white beans. Another variant of this dish, called Rumbledethumps, was a staple meal of ours for years until we gave up cheese; this beany casserole, with a little more nutritional yeast to boost the flavor, could potentially fill the same role. (But if we decide to try it this way, we'll probably go with just a half recipe.)