tortas sin carne

usually, the combining of two great food groups turns out all gross/wonky, prizing concept or "cleverness" over actual taste. baked ziti on a pizza? um...no. apple pie translated into a cocktail? NO. bacon flavored lip balm? vomit! i know lip balm isn't technically a food, but, well, it almost is.

well, the torta - basically taco + sandwich (2 of the holiest food groups in my book) - does not fall prey to this silly fate. i often see very delicious sounding but very meat-ful tortas on mexican menus around the city, and never a vegan, or even vegetarian option crosses my little plate. so psyched i was, when perusing the september issue of food & wine, to see that not only was there an entire article about interesting sandwiches, but a mexican torta was included! no matter how difficult, i was going to veganize that sucker...veganize it straight to hell.

this recipe was from the much loved rick bayless, from his new "street food"-centric restaurant in chicago, xoco, and he says it's meant to show people another side of mexico besides tacos. i accept yr challenge sir rick: BRING IT ON!

the recipe:
Mexican Tortas with Black Beans, Vegan Goat Cheese and Vegan Chorizo
adapted from Food & Wine magazine, Sept 2009 issue
makes 4 tortas

1 tsp vegetable oil for brushing the sammy rolls
1 order/0.5 pound of vegan chorizo (i made the TVP-based recipe from vegan with a vengeance)
1 15 oz. cans of drained, rinsed black beans
4 long hoagie rolls, i used portugese rolls from the supermarket - sooooo good
4 ounces vegan goat cheese (recipe to follow)
1 ripe avocado
shredded lettuce
lil tomatoes
pickled (or fresh if you're feeling wild) jalapenos
sprigs of fresh cilantro

vegan goat cheese (i made this up!):
1/2 cup almond or cashews, soaked in warm water for at least 15 minutes
1/3 block of mori nu firm tofu
6 fat green olives, pitted
olive oil
1 lemon
apple cider vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

- first, make the vegan cheese so you can let it chill for as long as possible. basically, throw the first three ingredients into a food processor and pulse until well mixed and thick. add a teaspoon or so of the olive oil, approx. 1/2 the lemon juice and a bit of lemon zest, and pulse some more. add a pinch of salt and pepper, and a tiny splash of apple cider vinegar if it's not sour enough for your taste. it should have a dense, chees-y texture. i didn't add anything else, since the tortas were going to have so much flavor, but if you're using this for another purpose, basil, sun dried tomatoes or black olives mixed in could be good. scrape out of the processor and into a small dish or ramekin. let it "set" in the fridge for as long as possible.

- if your chorizo is from another day, reheat it in a skillet. if you just made the chorizo, keep it warm over a low flame.

- add the black beans to the chorizo, and mash them with a potato masher until creamy. season with s&p, and cover to keep it warm.

- prep the sandwich fixins.


- cut the hoagie rolls in half, and pull out some of the bread from the inside to create a small cavity. brush the cut sides of each roll with vegetable oil and put the rolls, cut side down, on a skillet or griddle over a medium flame, and cook until toasted, about 2 minutes. turn and cook the tops for just a minute.


- spread the top of the hoagie roll with the gauxt cheese, and spread the bottoms with the delicious chorizo and black bean mixture.

- add the avocado, tomatoes, lettuce, cilantro and jalapenos.


served with a some chips and homemade roasted carrot salsa on the side:


party time! excellent!!

love,
emily

there is a light(house) that never goes out

(this post has nothing to do with being vegan, enjoy anyway!)

one night i got to see japanther for free, drank quite a few rainiers and danced the night away, photobooth sessions at 2am and then hopped in a cab to play rockband, eat vegan pizza and sleep IN THIS??

yes, i slept in a lighthouse in seattle. i'd highly recommend living in one of these (oh and if you have great taste in style and design and decorate your house until i die from cuteness, that's a plus).

-lauren

tiny kiwi

the vegan gourmet is always on the look out for interesting produce options. because so many ingredients are off limits, we gotta keep it fresh. i mean, really...think about it. there are hundreds, thousands, millions? of items, ranging from everyday staples (butter, cream, lard) to all forms of strange exotica that we mindfully omit from our each and every dish. so when we come across a special breed of potato (we saw some the other day at the farmer's market called "red cloud," which inevitably makes me think of floating dreamily on a fluffy cumulous of mashed potatoes), or white asparagus, or green paradise figs, we get our organic cotton panties all in a wad. new products mean new possibilities, and when you just can't face another stir fry, that is a beautiful thing.

the other day when i was walking through the italian market, i was scanning the produce stands for an interesting fruit option to adorn my morning granola. berry season is mostly over (sob! see ya next year), figs were expensive, etc etc. and then a small container caught my eye. kiwi berries! the label said "kiwi grapes," but that didn't fool me for a second.

i first learned of kiwi berries at work, and have loved the little dudes ever since. on the outside, they don't resemble kiwis at all: smooth skin with not a spot of fuzz. actually, they kind of look like - and are roughly the same size as - green cherries.


but then when you cut them open:


like a tiny kiwi! so i bought a box for a dollar and experienced the little buzz of finding something special. i bet these would be a snazzy little garnish on cupcakes or a fancy cocktail...

the wikipedia tells me that while we associate kiwis with tropical climates, kiwi berries are native to korea, china and siberia. the vines are quite hardy, and though they need a frost free period of 150 days to properly grow, they do survive temperature drops. also, the vines apparently smell like cat nip and cats love it! so next year, i'm growing these babies in my back yard, to snack on all summer long and to attract a gaggle of kittens to hunt the mice that frolick in our kitchen at night!

love,
emily

mushroom hunters of the pacific northwest

when you meet someone for the first time and you tell them you had a "lord of the rings-ian experience" on a rowboat yesterday, and their response is to inquire if you'd like to do another lord of the rings-ian adventure tomorrow and go mushroom hunting for chanterelles, you can be damn near positive you're going to like this person.

josh powell is the kind of guy with a beard and a smile that makes you immediately think, "yes, i will go into the forest with you for hours, finding potentially poisonous or psychedelic edibles in the hopes that ingesting them for dinner in a vegan cream sauce will not kill me or leave me wandering in a hallucinogenic haze for 12 hours straight, but will only be, in fact, delicious."

after a hearty meal at the wayward cafe, josh picked us up with a bucket full of books and tools and we drove northward to north bend, the town where twin peaks was filmed and also modeled after, home of the double r diner with the famous cherry pie and sporting two actual peaks, you know, the ones during the intro.


josh had a book THIS THICK (a good three inches) just chock full of mushroom information. fortunately, instead of having to read this in the back seat during the hour drive, i just bombarded josh with a shitload of questions and he more than happily obliged. here are a few we spotted on our jaunt:

chicken of the woods, not to be confused with hen of the woods
we picked this one! totes edible

POISON POISON DO NOT EAT!
this was the only totally "do not mess with this mushroom"
mushroom that we found on the hike,
spotted by yours truly! those little dots are bad news,
no matter what mario tells you

the artist conch is called so and so cool
because the underside is super soft
and you can write stuff on it with your fingernail

TOTAL JACKPOT!!!!!!
lobster mushrooms are not only beautiful,
they are also quite expensive,
plus we found like 20!

at this point, my extremely unreliable camera bit the dust and i couldn't take any more pictures of our hike. call me a bad blogger if you will, but get this, i had a backup battery and THAT was dead too! i tried to be prepared, i really did.

fast forward to dinner at josh's house where he was whipping up some fierce vegan cream sauce with lobster mushrooms, fettucini, garlic bread with angel mushrooms and a big old salad. ah, gourmet delicacies on a forager's budget.





to (literally) top it off, josh brought out a little saucer of ground white pepper and pink sea salt. be still my beating...stomach.

-lauren

vegan mofo day 2, seattle day 3

i must admit, i sure love philadelphia but we can often lack in the way of brunch for vegans. sure there's the good old go to tempeh club, and even a recently discovered (although it seems i was the last veganin the damn city to do so) tempeh hoagie, but usually when you go somewhere you're working with one, maybe two choices. that's why i love all vegan restaurants. THE CHOICES! the "no i'm not ready to order yet, i've only looked at one column of the menu and have 4 prospective dishes in mind" dillema. wayward cafe, in university district, seattle, offered one of these conundrums, a delicious and beautiful conundrum it was.

do you know how it feels to be a (vegan) kid in a (vegan) candy store, anything you can lay your grubby little fingers on could be yours. and my grubby little fingers were feeling up on the seitan hash like it was a soft puppy dog. "scrambled season tofu combined with smokey seitan, crisp green peppers, onions and home fries, served with toast". i like this dish because it has everything i could want, tofu, seitan, home fries and when i sub a biscuit for toast (i had heard they were the most amazing biscuits, vegan or no!) you really, truely, got it all.

and then when your dining partner gets biscuits and gravy and a side of steamed garlic greens and you both go halfsies, well shit, you know how to do brunch.

ok so the picture doesn't really do it justice, because gravy is not the top model of the culinary world, but that was seriously the most flaky, buttery, herbed soft pillow of goodness i ever called a biscuit. and the fact that i didn't even turn the menu over to scope out the lunch options means i might just have to go back someday.

-lauren

quick & ease - peperonata

we now interrupt this broadcast of seattle-based adventures to talk, once again, about cooking. a few years ago, october was dubbed "vegan mofo" AKA "vegan month of food" by the blogosphere, as an impetus for all of us bloggers to write up a storm during the first real autumn month. it's a bit too easy to be lazy about cooking, documenting, photographing and writing for posts when there's no real pressure to do such, and sometimes days or a week can slip by without updating the old weblog. vegan mofo is kind of like friendly peer pressure to stay on top of your game. someone, god bless them, even designed an adorable logo (see above), meant to be shared by the virtual community at large. last october, vegan royale wasn't yet off the ground, and so this october we are please to join in the vegan mofo.

in that spirit, i want to really focus this fall on making easy, reasonable dishes for lunch and dinner. i forget sometimes that preparing meals doesn't always have to be this big ordeal involving specialty ingredients and multi-step processes. thusly, i can get overwhelmed by the prospect of cooking and end up just slapping a sandwich together. so i am starting a little VR column called quick & ease as a way of exploring this concept. a cookbook that i think will be my guide and inspiration is a new way to cook, by sally schneider. this tome, gifted to lauren a few years ago by our aunt jenny, is about simple, hearty, healthy cooking that doesn't sacrifice flavor. to clarify, this is NOT a vegan cookbook by any means. actually, many of the recipes highlight meat, and how to cook "unhealthy" comfort food in a still nutritious manner. many recipes suggest sauteeing or frying things in panchetta or bacon fat. so yeah, sally isn't a vegetarian, but there are still hundreds of recipes that are vegan or vegan-izable, and i just really like her style: sophisticated but easy and customizable to what's in your fridge on any given weeknight.

the first recipe out of this book that i made was peperonata, a rich pepper laden stew that can be used as a condiment, pasta sauce, sandwich spread, or with grilled (faux)meats. it was amazingly simple, and served over whole wheat rotini with some tofu sauteed in red wine, just the perfect wednesday night, pre-phillies supper.
Peperonata w/ Pasta adapted from a new way to cook by sally schneider

ingredients:
1.5 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion
4 - 6 cloves of garlic
3 - 4 bell peppers, sliced thinly (she suggests red and/or yellow, i used green & yellow)
1 heaping tablespoon tomato paste
4 tablespoons of water
handful chopped fresh basil or flat leafed parsley
handful chopped black olives (i used kalamata)
salt & pepper

the recipe:

- heat the oil in a heavy skillet until hot, but not smoking. add the onions and garlic and sautee for about 5 minutes. stir in the peppers and sautee for another 2 minutes.

- cover and reduce the heat to moderately low. cook the pepper-y, onion-y mixture for 5 more minutes, stirring a bit. everything should start to soften. **if you are low on time, you can leave the lid on for another 5-6 minutes, and reduce cooking time in the next step by 10 minutes**

- put the pasta water over a high flamed to bring it up to a boil. then uncover the skillet and cook everything for another 20 minutes, until the peppers are super soft.

part of the reason this dish is so low in fat but still tastes so good, is that the peppers release their juices, which emulsify with the oil and tomato paste. brilliant!

- stir in the tomato paste and the water, and cook for another few minutes, until most of the liquid is evaporated. throw the pasta in the now-boiling water.

- turn the heat off the peperonata, and let it cool for a bit. check on the pasta after 7-8 minutes. drain when al dente.

- stir the olives and herbs in the peperonata and add black pepper to taste. spoon over the pasta! like i said, i added some fried up tofu for a little extra substance, but this would be great on its own too!


love,
emily

pinball wizards

having no obligations for nine days straight (aka vacation) is pretty sweet because you can do things like stop in to shorty's for a drink and some pinball at 1 in the afternoon. shorty's is a coney island themed pinball-hotdog-bar and i guess after thinking about it for a while, there aren't three things more suitable to be under one roof. shorty's has some 15 pinball machines and a handful of other games (pacman, donkey kong, etc.), 7 different kinds of hotdogs (including two veggie dogs!) and a lot of different ways to get drunk. i myself didn't have a dog being as i'd just had breafkast, but beer and pinball were drank and played, respectively, and two outta three ain't bad.

it was this dark inside, it was lunchtime

next we took a wobbily walk through the olympic sculpture park. it was pretty cool but i was more into the exhibit in the pavillion - Geoff McFetridge: in The Mind. he's a graphic designer from LA and uses really simple and stark images to communicate a message. i didn't take a single picture of the sculptures but i spent like half an hour taking pictures of McFetridge's installation. oops?

this illustration covered a 20 foot long wall

detail of above

for some reason i love this picture so much,
the saddest circle would be a square

coming up: vegan biscuits and gravy and great mushroom hunters of the pacific northwest!