Gumbo was the first meal that the Crusader prepared in our new flat. It is one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten at home. It comes from Vegan Soul Kitchen by Bryant Terry and contains lots of greens (I believe we used collards, spinach, and maybe kale) and other typical gumbo ingredients like flour, onions, red bell peppers, celery, cider vinegar and a variety of herbs and spices.
This cookbook is great, but Bryant Terry is a proponent of "slow food" so almost everything in the book takes a while to make. Although I appreciate the thought behind slow food, it is not all that practical given how much people work these days and how little spare time most people have. However, if you do have some time here and there for cooking, this cookbook has some really tasty recipes in it.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Gumbo Z
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Millennium Beer Tasting Dinner June 24th 2009
One of the posts that got delayed due to our move was a post about the fantastic Belgian Beer Dinner we had at Millennium restaurant way back on June 24. We’ve posted about dinners at Millennium before; it is a really great vegan restaurant here in San Francisco. Their special dinners and prix fix dinners are the best way to experience the restaurant and the Belgian Beer Dinner was no exception. The Chef invited representatives of three local breweries to bring some of their best beers and the Chef created a menu to go with them.
Before dinner started we had a glass of Eel River Pilsner and some warm olives:
This beer was really light and crisp and was a good way to start the evening. The olives had a great earthy taste.
The first course was a Mushroom Cocktail paired with Firestone 31:
The beer was floral, hoppy and citrusy. I love a beer with a lot of hops flavor.
The Mushroom Cocktail included seared oyster, maitake and king trumpet mushrooms, avocado, horseradish vinaigrette, a crisp plantain chip, and toasted pozole. I scooped everything up on my plantain chip and that was very tasty.
The second course was Stuffed Roasted Morel Mushrooms paired with Russian River Sanctification.
The beer tasted of sour cherry and was very refreshing and tasted very Belgian. We were told that this beer is usually more sour than the one we tasted. I thought the it was about perfect on the sour level.
The Stuffed Roasted Morel Mushrooms were served with white bean sage puree, and a salad of shaved fennel, nectarines and wild arugula with walnut oil. Unfortunately the picture is not so good because I was too distracted by the food. The nectarines really added a nice balance to the smokiness of the mushrooms.
The third course was Pineapple Achiote Grilled Protobello paired with Russian River Consecration.
The beer was very dark and sour (but delicious). It is barrel aged for 6 months in cabernet sauvingion barrels. It was very complex and had notes of miso, wine, fruit, and yeast. The beers got darker as the evening wore on (until the dessert beer).
The grilled Portobello was served with cornmeal crusted tofu, tongue of fire beans, huckleberry potatoes, consecration broth, and chocolate ancho mole. The tofu was amazing. It was so tender and light inside with a nice crunchy crust. The broth had the consecration beer in it and was very delicious. I still had some sauce on my plate when I was done just because I could not get it all off of the plate. The young couple across the table from us had broken their tofu up so that it would absorb all of the sauce and I wished that I had done the same.
The fourth course was a Lentil-Bulgar Burger paired with Firestone 12 year anniversary ale. This course was the best of the whole night.
This beer is the most amazing beer I have ever had in my life. It was really dark and had all kinds of complex yummy flavors. It smelled a little of molasses and had flavors of caramel, mint, molasses and licorice. In fact it was so delicious that I asked for a refill when I had finished the glass (they were going around with another bottle of the beer). I have never had so much beer at one sitting in my life. Unfortunately this beer is a blend of many of the previous year’s beers and will never be available again. Once in a lifetime treat I guess.
The Burger included porcini mushroom confit, caramelized smoked onions, green chile cheese sauce, and pickled romano beans on the side. I must say that this was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my life. It went perfectly with the delicious beer and was just so amazingly good, I kept saying “this is so good” over and over (I’m sure the beer didn’t hurt my insane babbling about the wonderful food). This burger was so good that I still have dreams about eating it sometimes—and then I wake up and wish I had one. The “cheese” sauce was a cashew cheese sauce (since they don’t do dairy) and went so amazingly well with the porcini mushrooms. It makes me drool just to think about it. The crisp romano beans were a lovely refreshing side that cut some of the heaviness of the burger.
The last course (dessert) was a Nectarine Filled Almond Galette with Lost Abbey Carnival beer.
This beer was really nice and was almost like a wine. It was very light and crisp and a good note to end on. It smelled of acricots and tasted kind of grapey—almost like a prosecco because of the bubbles. It is a spicey Belgian “saison” style ale (a style of brewing that does not involve refrigeration), but uses American hops.
The nectarine galette was served with a roast apricot-blackberry swirl “ice cream” and honey crème englaise. This was delicious, but at this point, I was getting so full that I needed a little help finishing it.
After this amazing meal, I was a little tipsy from the beer and so full I could not move. We took a cab home and felt a little sluggish the next day, but this was one of the most delicious and amazing meals of my life. I lucked out in that it just happened to coincide with my birthday this year. Next year it will be a day or two off, but we will probably still try to make it.
If anyone reading this had the chance to go to this annual dinner, I highly recommend it. Millennium also has a similar wine tasting dinner that we have never been to, but would like to try at some point.
Before dinner started we had a glass of Eel River Pilsner and some warm olives:
This beer was really light and crisp and was a good way to start the evening. The olives had a great earthy taste.
The first course was a Mushroom Cocktail paired with Firestone 31:
The beer was floral, hoppy and citrusy. I love a beer with a lot of hops flavor.
The Mushroom Cocktail included seared oyster, maitake and king trumpet mushrooms, avocado, horseradish vinaigrette, a crisp plantain chip, and toasted pozole. I scooped everything up on my plantain chip and that was very tasty.
The second course was Stuffed Roasted Morel Mushrooms paired with Russian River Sanctification.
The beer tasted of sour cherry and was very refreshing and tasted very Belgian. We were told that this beer is usually more sour than the one we tasted. I thought the it was about perfect on the sour level.
The Stuffed Roasted Morel Mushrooms were served with white bean sage puree, and a salad of shaved fennel, nectarines and wild arugula with walnut oil. Unfortunately the picture is not so good because I was too distracted by the food. The nectarines really added a nice balance to the smokiness of the mushrooms.
The third course was Pineapple Achiote Grilled Protobello paired with Russian River Consecration.
The beer was very dark and sour (but delicious). It is barrel aged for 6 months in cabernet sauvingion barrels. It was very complex and had notes of miso, wine, fruit, and yeast. The beers got darker as the evening wore on (until the dessert beer).
The grilled Portobello was served with cornmeal crusted tofu, tongue of fire beans, huckleberry potatoes, consecration broth, and chocolate ancho mole. The tofu was amazing. It was so tender and light inside with a nice crunchy crust. The broth had the consecration beer in it and was very delicious. I still had some sauce on my plate when I was done just because I could not get it all off of the plate. The young couple across the table from us had broken their tofu up so that it would absorb all of the sauce and I wished that I had done the same.
The fourth course was a Lentil-Bulgar Burger paired with Firestone 12 year anniversary ale. This course was the best of the whole night.
This beer is the most amazing beer I have ever had in my life. It was really dark and had all kinds of complex yummy flavors. It smelled a little of molasses and had flavors of caramel, mint, molasses and licorice. In fact it was so delicious that I asked for a refill when I had finished the glass (they were going around with another bottle of the beer). I have never had so much beer at one sitting in my life. Unfortunately this beer is a blend of many of the previous year’s beers and will never be available again. Once in a lifetime treat I guess.
The Burger included porcini mushroom confit, caramelized smoked onions, green chile cheese sauce, and pickled romano beans on the side. I must say that this was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my life. It went perfectly with the delicious beer and was just so amazingly good, I kept saying “this is so good” over and over (I’m sure the beer didn’t hurt my insane babbling about the wonderful food). This burger was so good that I still have dreams about eating it sometimes—and then I wake up and wish I had one. The “cheese” sauce was a cashew cheese sauce (since they don’t do dairy) and went so amazingly well with the porcini mushrooms. It makes me drool just to think about it. The crisp romano beans were a lovely refreshing side that cut some of the heaviness of the burger.
The last course (dessert) was a Nectarine Filled Almond Galette with Lost Abbey Carnival beer.
This beer was really nice and was almost like a wine. It was very light and crisp and a good note to end on. It smelled of acricots and tasted kind of grapey—almost like a prosecco because of the bubbles. It is a spicey Belgian “saison” style ale (a style of brewing that does not involve refrigeration), but uses American hops.
The nectarine galette was served with a roast apricot-blackberry swirl “ice cream” and honey crème englaise. This was delicious, but at this point, I was getting so full that I needed a little help finishing it.
After this amazing meal, I was a little tipsy from the beer and so full I could not move. We took a cab home and felt a little sluggish the next day, but this was one of the most delicious and amazing meals of my life. I lucked out in that it just happened to coincide with my birthday this year. Next year it will be a day or two off, but we will probably still try to make it.
If anyone reading this had the chance to go to this annual dinner, I highly recommend it. Millennium also has a similar wine tasting dinner that we have never been to, but would like to try at some point.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Pear and Goat Cheese Bagel
Well, this isn't the most exciting thing to post after being gone for so long. It also isn't the first thing we made in our new kitchen, but it is one of the first fall recipes for this year. When you are sad that all of the sumer fruit is gone, this is a good pick me up.
Cut two pears into slices and mix with a tablespoon of maple syrup. Toast two bagels (plain or in the flavor of your choice) and then spread with goat cheese (we used a fantastic soft goat cheese containing fennel pollen and lavender). Arrange the pear slices over the goat cheese and then grate some parmesan over. Put the bagels back into the toaster oven or regular oven set on broil and cook until the pears get a little color on top.
This makes a great breakfast, lunch or snack.
Friday, September 4, 2009
More food to come...
Things have been quiet around the blog, but we bought our first place with a lovely remodeled kitchen, so there will be many pictures of food cooked on our new gas stove to come. I already took a picture of the first meal that the crusader cooked in our new place, but I still need to upload it. Things might continue to be slow here for a little while until we can get all of our stuff unpacked, but we'll be back soon.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Strawberry Crumble
I am usually not a fan of cooking strawberries, but this dessert actually turned out really well. Sorry about the blurry picture--I was standing on my tiptoes in order to get a view of the strawberries. The recipe is from a cookbook called Luscious Berry Desserts (another sort floor books find). I had 3 baskets of very tasty strawberries from the farmer's market and had to find a use for them (buy 2 baskets, get one free is too tempting).
The recipe is pretty easy--it mostly consisted of mixed sliced berries with breadcrumbs, vanilla, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of butter, hazelnuts, and some salt and then baking in the oven for about 20 minutes. The strawberries actually did not taste cooked and the full strawberry flavor came out. We served this with a little bit of vanilla ice cream and it was delicious.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Seitan Satay Salad
This is a nice twist on the "Wheat Meat Satays with Spicy Peanut Sauce" in "Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes."
The satay looked awesome all by itself, but looking at the recipe reminded me of the times when Optimistic and her law school friends and I would eat at Vietnam restaurant in Philly. They would serve satay (or tofu, or spring rolls, etc) in a bowl with the grilled greasy stuff on top, disguising a mound of that awesome carrot and daikon pickle, and a lot of raw veggies, with warm, starchy rice noodles underneath. So I wanted something like that, and being 2000 or so miles from Philly made it hard to get stuff from Vietnam. But we are intrepid food explorers! We could make do!
So I made up some rice, and put about 1/2 a cup in the bottom of a bowl, and over it, I spooned about a tablespoon of the marinade from the Satay recipe. Then I topped that with the following salad:
1/2 cucumber, diced,
1 Large carrot, diced
1T diced red onion (sure doing a lot of dicing!)
Wedges from 2 or three peeled mandarins
10-15 basil leaves
6 to 10 mint leaves
butter lettuce, chopped.
Toss all this with 1T unfiltered sake.
Then I topped that with the Wheat Meat Satay and covered it all with a liberal dash of the Spicy Peanut sauce.
This was so good, and so very reminiscent of the dishes at Vietnam, that I penciled our salad variation into the margins of our copy of VM&P, just in case we get the craving again!
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Three-Carrot Post
Right before spring we began to see all these really amazing heirloom carrots in the markets. We made three really good dishes from these over the course of late winter and early spring.
The first was a recipe for Umami Carrot Soup from the Herbfarm Cookbook. This amazing soup really amped up the carrot flavor, using 2 cups of fresh carrot juice and then added a couple of fantastic additions, toasted corainder seed, and a super strong peppermint tea.
We don't have a picture for the second or third recipes. (Sorry to say!) We were tired all winter, and it was usually late and by the time we thought of taking pictures, we'd eaten all the food! (This happens to us a lot.)
The second recipe was a Hijiki and Carrot Salad. For some reason, I'm not too good with making salads, unless they have no leafy greens in them, and then I usually do okay.
Stealing an idea from the Herbfarm's soup, we soaked the hijiki in a hot mint green tea combo until it softened up. Then we drained it. The hijiki was tossed with some sliced radishes (about 5,) some diced heirloom carrots (probably two or three,) a diced avocado, and then dressed all of this with about two teaspoons of ume plum vinegar and about a tablespoon of unfiltered (nigori) sake and finished with a single drop of toasted sesame oil. This was really fantastic. We had it with something else, but darned if I can remember what that was!
The third recipe was an Heirloom Carrot Ziti with Ricotta.
1lb heirloom carrots, cut into thin disks
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Shallot, minced
2 T olive oil
2 or 3 fresh tomatoes, diced, or a 24 oz can of chopped tomatoes drained of liquid. Save the liquid for another sauce!
1 or 2 T of drained, rinsed capers.
2 T chopped fresh mint (basil would work)
2 T fresh chopped parsley
1/2 cup fresh sheep's milk ricotta.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Start some water to cook a pound of ziti. The water should be started while you prep the stuff above, and the pasta and sauce should cook at around the same time. When you drain the pasta, hold on to about 1/2 cup to a cup of the pasta water.
Heat the garlic and the shallot in oil on medium high heat until golden. Add the carrots and cook for a few minutes (at the end of cooking, the carrots should still be a bit crisp and sweet, so keep that in mind.)
Add the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes until they begin to break down a bit. Add the capers and simmmer until it breaks down a little more.
Take the ricotta, the mint and the parsley and put them into a bowl large enough to hold all the sauce, and all the pasta. Add 1/2 cup of pasta water and wisk this until it's smooth-ish.
Once the pasta finishes, drain it (don't rinse!) and add the pasta and the tomato sauce. Toss, and season with salt and pepper to taste. This is good enough to eat at this point (and we did, twice!)... BUT
This type of sauce would traditionally add around a cup of grated parmigiano-reggiano and some grated nutmeg at this point and then have you stir that all in, but it really will stand up without that.
The first was a recipe for Umami Carrot Soup from the Herbfarm Cookbook. This amazing soup really amped up the carrot flavor, using 2 cups of fresh carrot juice and then added a couple of fantastic additions, toasted corainder seed, and a super strong peppermint tea.
We don't have a picture for the second or third recipes. (Sorry to say!) We were tired all winter, and it was usually late and by the time we thought of taking pictures, we'd eaten all the food! (This happens to us a lot.)
The second recipe was a Hijiki and Carrot Salad. For some reason, I'm not too good with making salads, unless they have no leafy greens in them, and then I usually do okay.
Stealing an idea from the Herbfarm's soup, we soaked the hijiki in a hot mint green tea combo until it softened up. Then we drained it. The hijiki was tossed with some sliced radishes (about 5,) some diced heirloom carrots (probably two or three,) a diced avocado, and then dressed all of this with about two teaspoons of ume plum vinegar and about a tablespoon of unfiltered (nigori) sake and finished with a single drop of toasted sesame oil. This was really fantastic. We had it with something else, but darned if I can remember what that was!
The third recipe was an Heirloom Carrot Ziti with Ricotta.
1lb heirloom carrots, cut into thin disks
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Shallot, minced
2 T olive oil
2 or 3 fresh tomatoes, diced, or a 24 oz can of chopped tomatoes drained of liquid. Save the liquid for another sauce!
1 or 2 T of drained, rinsed capers.
2 T chopped fresh mint (basil would work)
2 T fresh chopped parsley
1/2 cup fresh sheep's milk ricotta.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Start some water to cook a pound of ziti. The water should be started while you prep the stuff above, and the pasta and sauce should cook at around the same time. When you drain the pasta, hold on to about 1/2 cup to a cup of the pasta water.
Heat the garlic and the shallot in oil on medium high heat until golden. Add the carrots and cook for a few minutes (at the end of cooking, the carrots should still be a bit crisp and sweet, so keep that in mind.)
Add the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes until they begin to break down a bit. Add the capers and simmmer until it breaks down a little more.
Take the ricotta, the mint and the parsley and put them into a bowl large enough to hold all the sauce, and all the pasta. Add 1/2 cup of pasta water and wisk this until it's smooth-ish.
Once the pasta finishes, drain it (don't rinse!) and add the pasta and the tomato sauce. Toss, and season with salt and pepper to taste. This is good enough to eat at this point (and we did, twice!)... BUT
This type of sauce would traditionally add around a cup of grated parmigiano-reggiano and some grated nutmeg at this point and then have you stir that all in, but it really will stand up without that.
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