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.

Dessert experiments

If you live anywhere in the eastern half of the country, you already know we're in the throes of a heat wave. Here in New Jersey, we got a bit lucky today: a heavy thunderstorm hit this morning, keeping today's heat index down to a mere 99 degrees F. But by 9 am tomorrow, we're expected to be in triple-digit territory, and we won't be back to a more normal level of summer heat until Wednesday night. All of which makes this an excellent week to enjoy ice cream and other frozen treats.

But before I get to my lighthearted dessert content, I'd like to take one minute to talk seriously about this massive heat wave. We all know, or at least nearly 80% of Americans do, that climate change is real, and that it's making dangerous weather like this much more common. And a solid majority of Americans want the government to do something about it, supporting a variety of policies that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, three-quarters of all Americans think we should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. 

Unfortunately, EPA director Lee Zeldin is not one of them. He recently announced a plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel plants, arguing that this pollution is not "significant." He bases this claim not on how much of it there is or how much damage it does, but on the fact that, in his opinion, it's too expensive to fix. And if there is no "cost reasonable" solution, then by definition, there is no problem. To add injury to this insult to our intelligence, he's also decided this is a good time to repeal the rule that regulates power plants' emissions of mercury and other toxic substances, such as arsenic.

If you agree that this is mind-blowingly stupid, there's a way to make your voice heard. Elders Climate Action (ECA) has created two simple forms you can use to submit comments to the EPA on these proposed rules changes. All you have to do is enter your contact info, make any changes you like to the sample comment ECA has provided, and click submit. The comment form for the greenhouse gas emissions repeal is here, and the one for mercury and toxic air pollution is here.

So, desserts. I mentioned in last week's post that we'd recently tried Trader Joe's new vegan whipping cream and found that it lives up to its name, at least as far as whipping is concerned. Well, this week we got around to trying it in an ice cream base. We went with plain vanilla, since it has so many possible uses, and topped it with fresh berries from our garden. And I have to say, the result left absolutely nothing to be desired. This was the first plant-based ice cream I've ever tried that I literally couldn't tell was vegan. There was nothing about either the flavor or the mouthfeel that would make me suspect it was anything other than good old vanilla ice cream.

In short, this vegan dessert experiment was an unqualified success, and we've still got a little bit of the vegan cream left to tinker with. My idea is to try using it for a small batch of either the chocolate mousse or the raspberry mousse that goes into our anniversary cake. If it works for that—and there seems to be no reason it wouldn't—we can buy some of this stuff, rather than a pint of real cream, and make the cake dairy-free this year. It still won't be vegan, as the sponge cake itself contains eggs, but it will be one step closer to it.

But Brian and I were not content to rest on our dessert laurels. Tonight, we tried yet another new vegan ice-cream alternative, this time a healthier version made mostly from fruit. 

This one has a bit of a story behind it. Yesterday morning, we noticed that our neighbors across the street were having a yard sale. We wandered over to take a look, and the one thing on the tables that looked most intriguing to me was a Magic Bullet Dessert Bullet—a machine that claimed it could make "all natural, dairy-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, low fat, low sugar, low calorie desserts everyone can enjoy." I couldn't tell whether the price sticker on top was a 6 or a 9, but when I asked my neighbor about it, he said he'd let me have it for $5. 

Well, I knew we didn't actually need this gadget, and there was a possibility it wouldn't even be able to do anything our blender couldn't. But I remembered that we'd thought the same thing about our regular Magic Bullet when we first acquired it on Freecycle, and it proved to be so useful that when it finally died, we went straight out and paid full price for a new one. There was always the chance that this $5 investment would prove just as worthwhile, and even if it didn't, I knew I'd have no trouble finding a new home for it. We'd only be out $5, and that was a price I was willing to pay just to satisfy my curiosity.

So I took the Dessert Bullet home, opened it up, and perused the recipe book that came with it. All the recipes in it appeared to be built around frozen fruit, with a few additional ingredients like yogurt, peanut butter, chocolate, or coconut thrown in here and there. They were basically smoothies, but with less liquid. The booklet provided instructions on how to prepare and freeze the fruit and how long to thaw it before putting it into the Bullet to get the right consistency.

For our first trial, we decided on a simple chocolate dessert recipe with just three ingredients: a frozen banana (broken into chunks), 2 tablespoons of "raw cacao powder" (which we figured we could swap out for cocoa powder without harming the flavor any), and a drop of vanilla extract. We popped straight out to the Superfresh for a bunch of bananas, peeled two of them, broke them into chunks, and put them in the freezer. 

The instructions said to freeze them for at least 24 hours, so we had to wait until tonight to give our new machine a literal whirl. It has several parts: the base containing the motor a chute to insert the fruit in, a pusher to shove it down with, a rotating screw attachment that grinds it up, and a couple of different orifices to extrude it from. We chose the basic oval mouth rather than the star-shaped one. Following the instructions, we let the frozen banana pieces thaw for 5 minutes and sprinkled them with the cocoa powder. We ran the vanilla extract through first to coat the screw attachment, then dumped in the bananas and pushed them down as the motor ran. After a few seconds, the banana reemerged, transformed into a wide ribbon of roughly soft-serve consistency.

The process was interesting to watch, but the finished product was far from life-changing. It did not taste at all like chocolate ice cream; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like a banana coated with cocoa powder. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't any more enjoyable than just eating a banana, which is a lot less work. If anything, it was less enjoyable, since the texture was a bit slimy. As a dessert, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as a cup of my low-sugar hot cocoa. 

Out of curiosity, I tried topping the banana mixture with a spoonful of the vegan vanilla ice cream we'd made the night before. As you might expect, this combination was vastly superior to the banana alone, but it wasn't nearly as good as the vanilla ice cream with raspberries. And I think adding more than that one little dollop of the vanilla stuff would have nullified any claim this banana dessert has to being healthful. 

So far, the Dessert Bullet doesn't look like a game changer, but we're not giving up on it yet. There are a couple of recipes in the booklet that don't depend primarily on banana, like Creamy Berry Sorbet (a blend of frozen strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries with unsweetened coconut) and Coconut Colada (a misleadingly named blend of frozen coconut-milk yogurt, frozen pineapple chunks, and unsweetened coconut). We'll try at least one of these, as well as a few other combinations of fruit, before deciding whether this gadget deserves a spot in our crowded kitchen cabinets.

[Edit, 7/2/25: Nooooo! We just tried to buy another carton of the vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's, only to learn that it's been discontinued. The only plant-based alternative to cream we've ever found that was really satisfactory, and it's gone forever. I guess at least we know now a true vegan cream substitute is possible, but that's cold comfort if we can never find one again.]

Even more ecofrugal episodes

Nothing happened this week that seemed big enough to warrant an entire blog post on its own, so instead I'm doing another of my ecofrugal episodes posts—a roundup of the small successes and failures in our ecofrugal life. Fortunately, this time the successes outnumber the failures. 

Item #1: A grout makeover  

My birthday request this year was for Brian to replace the grout in our upstairs tub-shower, which had developed stains that no amount of scrubbing could remove. (This photo—taken after the grout had just been cleaned—doesn't really do it justice, but it should give you an inkling of how bad it was.) It wasn't until this month that we finally had a free weekend to tackle the project, and we ran into a couple of setbacks while carrying it out. 

First, after he'd already scraped out as much as he reasonably could of the old grout, Brian discovered that the pre-mixed grout he'd bought to replace it was was actually sanded grout, which isn't recommended for narrow gaps like this. (It would have been nice if the package had said this on the front, rather than in small print on the back.) So we had to make a hasty trip to Home Depot to replace it. We also grabbed an extra tube of caulk, just in case we needed extra. At first, Brian thought this purchase had been a waste of money, since the old tube ended up having enough in it to fill all the joints. But he learned otherwise the next morning, when he discovered that the caulk he'd just applied, which was supposed to set up within two hours, was still liquid. Clearly it was no longer good, so he had to spend part of that morning laboriously removing all the goo and replacing it with fresh caulk from the new tube. 

So this birthday request proved to be more of a hassle than we expected, but it turned out well in the end. Every time I've stepped into the shower this past week, I've been delighted at how fresh and clean the grout looks now. Brian even took the extra step of repainting the grungy-looking trim on the tub window, so the whole enclosure now looks sparkling and new. Once the new grout has had a couple of weeks to cure fully, we're going to follow up by applying a sealant, which will allegedly keep it fresh and stain-free  for the next few years. And even when it wears off, we can just apply a new coat, rather than going through this entire messy job again.

Item #2: Pride pants 

Recently, I noticed that my older pair of blue jeans was starting to wear out in the thigh area. This is a common occurrence for me, but this time the pattern was a bit unusual: instead of spreading across the whole inner thigh area, the threadbare sections were confined to a line right along the inseam. I thought this would be a good spot for a little visible mending, but wasn't sure whether it made more sense to darn these tiny holes individually or try to cover all of them with a patch. 

I went hunting for suggestions online and came across this image: a long row of stitches in different colors of embroidery floss running down the length of the seam. I decided to try a similar idea, but with a rainbow color scheme. The whole worn area was about 12 centimeters long, so I divided it up into sections of roughly 2 centimeters for each color. I started at one end putting in parallel stitches in red embroidery floss, then about 2 centimeters down I tied off the red thread and started on orange, and so on down the spectrum to purple.

I've only done one seam so far, since the wear on the other isn't quite as bad, but eventually I intend to do the other one to match. The stitching is far from perfect, but it's colorful and cute and gives me a little boost of happiness every time I wear these jeans now. And it's just in time for Pride Month!

Item #3: Repair, then replace 

About a year ago, our old toilet seat broke. Rather than buy the cheapest model to replace it, we decided to spring for one with "soft close" hinges. I quite enjoyed this feature, but unfortunately, these slow-closing hinges weren't very durable. A couple of days ago, I noticed that the lid was askew, and when I examined it, I discovered that one of the hinges had snapped clean through. I managed to wiggle it through so that the lid could close fully, if no longer softly, but this clearly wasn't going to be a long-term solution.

Rather than run out to buy a whole new toilet seat, Brian decided to try repairing the hinge with epoxy. He applied the glue to both broken edges, then clamped the lid in the open position overnight to give it plenty of time to set. But sadly, as soon as he unclamped it in the morning and tried lowering the lid, it snapped straight apart again. 

Although this repair wasn't a success, I still think it was worth making the attempt. It didn't cost us anything except a little extra time, and we had no way of knowing it wouldn't work unless we tried it. And now that we know, we feel no guilt about discarding the broken toilet seat and spending $40 on a replacement. (This time around, we spent $10 more for one with metal hinges, which we're assuming will hold up better. Paying the extra $10 now seems like a better deal than spending $30 to replace the whole thing again in another year.)

Item #4: Whipping it good 

Ever since we first started cutting back on dairy products back in 2018, we've been looking for a decent substitute for whipped cream. We tried numerous homemade versions using various combinations of coconut cream, aquafaba, and plant milk, with results ranging from near success (but not quite) to colossal failure. We tried a commercial product called Coco Whip that worked reasonably well in a raspberry fool, but the store where we found it has since stopped carrying it. And we tried one or two commercial plant-based cream substitutes that were so unimpressive I didn't even bother blogging about them.

But on a couple of recent trips to Trader Joe's, we've noticed a product in their dairy case called "Vegan Heavy Whipping Cream Alternative." We couldn't remember if we'd tried this one before, but at only $4 a pint—about the same price as regular cream—we didn't have much to lose by giving it another go. So we grabbed a pint, and last weekend Brian took a crack at using some in a honeyberry fool (a phrase I love having the opportunity to say). And right away, we noticed that this stuff actually was whipping up like real cream. It formed genuine stiff peaks that held their shape and didn't collapse even when we folded in the berry mixture. And if the flavor and mouthfeel weren't exactly identical to real cream, you could hardly tell by the time it was combined with the berries.

We only used about half the pint for this experiment, so we're going to try tinkering with it further, seeing if it can make a plant-based ice cream that works better than our iced coconut cream (which didn't turn out so well the second time we tried it). If it works for that too, we'll probably stop messing around with DIY versions and make this our go-to substitute for any recipe that calls for cream—possibly even our anniversary cake.

Item #5: Extension cord life extension

One of the items we picked up at last year's yard sales (or, to be exact, from the piles of discards after the sales) was an electric hedge trimmer. It's just a light-duty plug-in model, but since our property only has one hedge and we only trim it a couple of times a year, it's been perfectly adequate for our needs. But last Friday, Brian discovered its biggest drawback: make one false move with it and you cut right through your extension cord. To add insult to injury, he had noticed that the cord was in harm's way and was just attempting to move it out of the way when it happened. 

Naturally, he was quite annoyed that this one brief slip had, as he thought, totally destroyed an extension cord that would cost around $17 to replace. But then he discovered that it's actually possible to cut off the damaged portion and attach a replacement connector, which only costs about $3. You just end up with a slightly shorter cord—in this case, 47 feet instead of 50, which is still plenty for our small yard. Less cost, less waste, and less frustration about having damaged the old one. (Of course, if this keeps happening, the cord will gradually get shorter each time until it's too short to be of much use. But I suspect after this incident, he'll take extra care to keep the cord out of danger in future.)

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.

Sumer is icumen in

It's been an unusually cold spring here in New Jersey. During a stream cleanup we did in early April, it was actually snowing. Last weekend, we were guests at an outdoor wedding, and I kept my coat on pretty much the entire time. And just last night, we opted to skip the local outdoor film series because the temperature was already down in the 50s by showtime.

But as soon as the calendar page flipped over to June, the weather seemed to get the memo that it's supposed to be summertime. The temperature forecast for this week is heading steadily upward, from a high of around 70F today up to 92F by Thursday. And our garden is likewise getting with the program, swinging into full production mode. Yesterday, Brian gathered a big bunch of lettuce and arugula for a salad and a pound of rhubarb for a strawberry-rhubarb compote; today, we went out and filled up two pint containers with our honeyberries and alpine strawberries. And, in a preview of things to come, we gathered six snap pea pods and our first raspberry of the season.

To celebrate all this bounty, Brian fired up the grill and cooked a batch of his mushroom seitan burgers. To accompany them, he also grilled a batch of zucchini spears, some onion and potato slices, and a couple of ears of corn in their husks. He upped the veggie content of the meal with a salad of home-grown lettuce and arugula, livened up with a few white strawberries, snap peas, and chopped walnuts (the only component we didn't grow ourselves). 

By many folks' standards, this is a pretty humble home-cooked meal. There's no meat, and the ingredients—including the store-bought buns and a batch of our favorite balsamic vinaigrette dressing—cost us less than $12 for at least two or three meals' worth of food. But as I admired the spread laid out on our table, I exclaimed to Brian, "We're so rich!" and meant it. A satisfying supper featuring fresh-picked organic produce, a beautiful June day to cook it on, and my favorite person to eat it with: if that's not wealth, what is?

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.

What's holding back plant-based protein?

I recently discovered The Tyee, an independent Canadian news site with a leftward bent. Flipping through to see what sorts of stories it covered, I happened on one about a "revolutionary" new plant-based protein made from mycelium, the root-like fibers that connect networks of fungi underground. The company profiled in the piece, Maia Farms, claims it can cultivate and harvest its mycelium protein in just seven days, as compared to 18 months to grow a calf to adult size and slaughter it for beef. Its process produces 84 percent lower carbon emissions per "unit of production" than chicken, which in turn has only about 12% of the carbon footprint of beef. The founder of Maia Farms calls his product "arguably the most efficient form of agriculture that will ever exist" and says it could be a "global solution" to the problem of meeting the protein needs of a growing population. All of which, obviously, sounds fantastic. 

But I was not impressed. Why not? Because I've heard this same story so many times before from so many other producers of plant-based protein—all of which have, so far, completely failed to make a significant dent in humanity's meat consumption. 

In 2023, for instance, the Climate Coach column in the Washington Post ran a story (free gift link for non-subscribers here) about Plantible, a California startup producing a protein called rubisco from fast-growing duckweed. The article touted rubisco as a versatile protein that can easily step in to do the job of eggs, meat, or butter. It also noted how easy the duckweed is to grow, producing "36 metric dry tons per hectare — roughly 10 times more than soy." It sounded like it should be utterly revolutionary. Yet in the 19 months since that article came out, I have not seen Plantible's Rubi Protein, nor any product that contains it, in any store. Obviously, it takes time for a new product to scale up, but based on Plantible's website, I can't find any evidence that its product is available anywhere at all.

If these plant-based proteins are so revolutionary, so efficient, so sustainable, then why aren't they everywhere? The Climate Coach article implies that the main barrier to wider adoption is taste: plant-based proteins, it says, "fall short of the savory appeal of eggs, dairy and meat." But I don't buy that argument. Brian, a longtime fan of beef, says burgers and bratwursts from Impossible are, to him, indistinguishable from the real thing. That is, until you look at the price tag. On Target's website, a bag of six Impossible Burgers (in their new red packaging, designed to appeal more to carnivores) costs $13.59, or $9.06 per pound. A 3-pound bag of store-brand beef burgers costs $13.99, or $4.66 per pound—roughly half as much. At those prices, what reason would anyone who isn't a vegetarian already have to switch?

I can only see two ways that plant-based proteins will ever become more popular than the animal products they're meant to replace. Either they'll have to get a lot cheaper, or the animal-based products will have to get a lot more expensive. And there's some chance that economies of scale will, in fact, drive down the cost of plant proteins. A 2021 analysis from the Good Food Institute (GFI) shows that, while plant-based meats and cheeses were about 40 percent more expensive in 2020 than corresponding animal products, plant-based products in "more developed categories," such as plant milk and butter, had a much smaller price premium of 7 to 11 percent. So maybe, once mycelium and rubisco proteins have been around as long as soy milk, they'll be more affordable. But they won't be doing much to halt the growth of food-driven carbon emissions in the meantime.

But there's also the second possibility: a spike, or even a sustained rise, in the price of animal proteins. We're starting to see it right now with eggs, which have jumped in price to an average of $4 per dozen from $2.50 just a year ago. That inflated price is still considerably cheaper than Just Egg, but it's significantly more than scrambled tofu. One large egg weighs about 2 ounces, so a two-egg scramble would be about 4 ounces' worth and cost 67 cents. Last time we bought tofu, we paid only $1.29 per pound, so a scramble made with 4 ounces of tofu would cost only around 32 cents. Even if you throw in a pinch of turmeric for color and a pinch of black salt (kala namak) to give it an eggy flavor, it won't cost more than about 34 cents—roughly half the price of real eggs.

Honestly, I'm thinking the next time we make a recipe that includes scrambled eggs, like our staple weeknight meal of roasted Brussels sprouts with eggs and potatoes, we should just scramble up a corresponding volume of tofu instead. At both half the price and half the carbon footprint, it's an ecofrugal no-brainer. The only downside is that the leftover tofu in the package won't keep as long as eggs in their individual shells, so we'll need to make sure to use the rest of it up within a few days so it won't go to waste. But with the number of recipes we know that use tofu, that shouldn't be difficult. And it will allow us to save our precious eggs for the jobs that only they can do properly, like holding matzo balls and rice casserole together.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 3: Drink

It was perhaps a bit misleading for me to call the theme of this year's Thrift Week "Champagne tastes on a beer budget," because actually, I'm not that big a fan of bubbly. I'm happy to drink a toast in it to celebrate someone's wedding or graduation, but it's not a drink I'd choose for myself. I prefer alcoholic beverages (and, for that matter, nonalcoholic ones) with a bit of sweetness to them, like a nice tawny port.

However, a high-end tawny port doesn't exactly come cheap either. Some of the top-rated tawny ports at Vivino sell for over $300 a bottle, rivaling the price of Dom Perignon. So while it's not literally a champagne taste, it's one that could be equally pricey to indulge.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be. The tawny Brian and I like best, Hardy's Whiskers Blake, sells for as little as $14 a bottle. It's not technically a port since it's not made in Portugal, but as far as I'm concerned, its dark, velvety flavor leaves nothing to be desired. Wine Spectator, which awards it an impressive 94 points out of 100, describes it as "Succulent and smooth...tremendously complex...layered with caramel, walnut, coffee, almond and orange peel flavors, long, elegant and spicy in the mouth." The highest-priced tawny on that same site, a 40-year-old Taylor Fladgate that costs $210, gets only 90 points, so I think we're missing nothing by choosing this bargain bottle.

The only problem with Whiskers Blake is that it's a little hard to find. The only store anywhere near us that carries it is in Somerville, half an hour's drive from here—a bit far to go just for a bottle of wine, particularly in weather like we're having this weekend. So instead, my Treat for Today is a tipple we picked up on our last trip to Trader Joe's: Joe-Joe's Peppermint Wine Cocktail. It's a sweet, creamy drink with a strong peppermint flavor. The bottle cost only $8.99, and a little of it goes a long way. Because it's so strong, I tend to sip it slowly, so I can easily nurse a couple of ounces over the course of an hour or two while curled up on the couch watching Critical Role or Taskmaster. And a dollop added to a cup of hot cocoa, along with a puff of coconut whipped cream, turns an everyday sip into an indulgent treat.

By the way, if your tastes actually do run toward Champagne, don't worry: there are budget-priced picks for you too. Sparkling wines from outside the Champagne region, such as Prosecco, Cava, or Cremant, are much cheaper than the real thing and just as fizzy and fabulous. Check out Gear Patrol and Reverse Wine Snob for recommendations costing as little as $8 a bottle.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 2: Food

When you ask people to name a luxury good, many of them will probably think of traditional rich-people foods like caviar or lobster. And thirty years ago, this would indeed have been an accurate reflection of a multi-millionaire's diet. According to a 2018 story in Quartz, the 1991 Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook featured these two luxury foods right on the cover, alongside such other delicacies as chocolate-dipped strawberries and capital-C Champagne in crystal goblets. But in the years since, the article notes, the lifestyles of the wealthy—including their food choices—have changed dramatically. Today, rich-people food is all about "wellness": cold-pressed juices, organic produce, "fermented lamb and local lichens" served at a high-end restaurant on a remote Scottish island.

Healthy whole foods like these are indeed more expensive than processed foods, especially if you're looking for local and organic produce and the green halo associated with it. (As it turns out, this halo is mostly illusory; local and organic foods have roughly the same carbon footprint as conventionally grown ones. Some reputedly earth-friendly foods, like grass-fed beef, are actually significantly worse than their cheaper equivalents.) But the cost doesn't have to be prohibitive—particularly for those lucky enough to live near a Lidl store. 

Over the course of our two most recent visits to Lidl, we picked up ten pounds of mandarin oranges, a cauliflower, half a pound of Brussels sprouts, three bell peppers, a pound of mushrooms, two eggplants, an avocado, a head of broccoli, a bunch of scallions, a bag of red onions, and an English cucumber, all for a grand total of $25.86. That works out to $12.93 per week—slightly less than the $13.06 per week the average low-income household (under $15,000 per year) spent on fresh fruits and veggies in 2023. (To be fair, we also bought some produce from other stores, but our total food spending was still less than half the limit set by the USDA's Thrifty Food plan.) And if you're looking for more traditional luxury foods, like caviar, Lidl carries those too—at prices that, while a bit steep, won't break the bank.

Which brings me to my Treat for Today: a half-pound of smoked salmon, purchased on our most recent Lidl trip for $8.39. Admittedly, anything that costs $16.78 a pound is still an extravagance, but as extravagances go, it's a pretty affordable one. Served on Brian's home-baked no-knead bread with sliced cucumber, accompanied by a salad of red leaf lettuce with walnuts, dried cranberries, and our favorite honey-garlic balsamic vinaigrette, it's a meal that wouldn't look out of place in the pages of a modern Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook. And you don't have to be either rich or famous to enjoy it.

Fun with legumes

After last week's partial success with the Spicy Orange Broccoli, Brian did not rest on his vegetable laurels. Over the past week, he has continued to explore our two new vegan cookbooks, preparing not one but two of the recipes I flagged as interesting. Both of these involved beans—but not beans served in their natural form, as in last month's recipe. Instead, they were mashed up and formed into new shapes to masquerade as something else. Neither of these bean disguises was entirely successful, but one worked much better than the other.

Last Sunday, even as I was writing up our first recipe from Everyday Happy Herbivore, Brian was in the kitchen working on the Chickpea Tenders from the same cookbook. This was a lot more complicated than the previous recipe. Before he could even get started on the tenders themselves, he had to whip up three mixes from the same cookbook that were ingredients in the recipe. First, there was a Poultry Seasoning Mix made from five dried herbs (thyme, rosemary, sage, marjoram, and basil) ground together. Next came the No-Chicken Broth Powder, made from nutritional yeast ground up with various herbs and seasonings (onion powder, garlic powder, fresh sage, dried thyme, paprika, celery seed, dried parsley, and turmeric, which I suspect is mainly in there for color). And finally, he had to blend up a small batch of Vegan Mayo from silken tofu with Dijon mustard, white vinegar, lemon juice, and agave nectar (for which he substituted simple syrup).

With all these ingredients ready to go, he began on the laborious process of preparing the tenders. First, he had to drain and rinse a can of chickpeas and mash them thoroughly with a fork. Then he mixed the resulting mash with the seasoning mix, broth powder, vegan mayo, and some Dijon mustard and soy sauce. (The recipe called for low-sodium soy sauce, but as with last week's recipe, he just used regular.) Once he had that combined, he mixed in a third of a cup of vital wheat gluten and a few tablespoons of water and kneaded it all together. He divided the resulting dough into four balls and shaped them into long, flat ovals, which he laid out on a baking sheet. And for the final step, he baked them for a total of 40 minutes, removing the pan to flip them over every 10 minutes. 

After all that work, he ended up with four flat oblongs that, frankly, didn't look much like the chicken tenders they were meant to replicate. They were more like veggie burgers, but not particularly good ones. They were dry and somewhat crumbly, and their flavor, despite all the elaborate seasonings that went into them, was unremarkable. Brian had served them with frozen green beans and roast potatoes, and the cutlets were by far the least appealing part of the meal. I had to slather each bite of mine liberally with the two dipping sauces Brian had prepared—the rest of the vegan mayo and a vegan "honey" mustard from the same cookbook, containing equal parts Dijon mustard and simple syrup—to get the whole thing down. Brian didn't have as much trouble with his, but he certainly wasn't enthusiastic about it, and he sees no reason to attempt this recipe again. It's much less interesting than any number of other things you can do with chick peas, most of which are a whole lot less work.

It occurred to me after trying this dish to check the other vegan cookbook, Anything You Can Cook I Can Cook Vegan, to see if Richard Makin had any better ideas about how to make a vegan replica of a chicken tender. He did, but his recipe was even more ludicrously complicated than the chickpea one. His called for wheat gluten and cannellini beans and silken tofu and seasonings (some of which we don't have), all processed together in three our four stages in a high-speed blender (which we also don't have). Then the resulting dough has to be kneaded and rolled out into ropes and tied into knots and simmered in broth for an hour, after which it has to go into the fridge and marinate in the broth for at least another four hours before it's ready to cook. So, yeah, we're not doing that. 

The recipe Brian actually selected from Anything You Can Cook was a much simpler one: Cannellini Gnocchi with Pesto. Brian has made his own gnocchi before, both a simple version using potato flakes and a more elaborate, but tastier version using baked potato, but this recipe had one thing those lacked: protein. With canned cannellini beans in place of the potatoes, it would go from a starchy meal to one that balances carbs and protein, with some fiber to boot. 

Making the gnocchi from beans wasn't that much more complicated than making it from potatoes. The recipe called for them to be mashed and then strained through a sieve to remove lumps and skins, but Brian didn't bother with that step. He just mashed a can of beans and blended them, lumps and all, with a cup and three-quarters of flour and a bit of salt and pepper, kneading it until he had a reasonable ball of dough. He rolled that out into a long snake, cut that into little nuggets, dusted them with flour, and pressed each one with the back of a fork to make ridges—more or less the same process he uses for regular potato gnocchi. Then, as directed in the recipe, he dumped them into a pot of boiling water and cooked them until they floated up to the surface.

Brian did not use the pesto recipe that accompanied the dish in the cookbook, since he already had his own. He just combined about a half-cup's worth of frozen basil-and-olive-oil cubes with a third of a cup of toasted pine nuts, two cloves of garlic, 2 teaspoons of nutritional yeast, and half a teaspoon of salt, and blended it all together to get a smooth paste. Because the basil had been frozen, the pesto came out a sort of olive-drab color instead of the nice bright green you get with fresh basil, but it tasted fine.

The cannellini gnocchi themselves, to my taste buds, were also fine. They didn't have the same light, pillowy texture as Brian's potato gnocchi, but their chewier texture was satisfying enough. Brian, however, found them too stodgy for his taste. He thinks they could still work, but next time he'd make them about half as large, and he'd serve them with a nice, thick tomato sauce that would add more moisture to them than the pesto. So this recipe wasn't a failure, but it's not quite ready for prime time.

Based on these two experiences, I'd say there is some potential in the idea of using beans to mimic other things. I can certainly think of at least one more recipe I'd like to try that uses them for that purpose (the Kidney-Quinoa Burgers in Everyday Happy Herbivore). But, to be honest, I think there's even more potential for interest in recipes that use beans as, well, beans.

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.