Mac n Cheesiness

1 16oz package macaroni or other small pasta 

(I used mini penne)

1 vacuum packed box of of silken tofu

½ cup nutritional yeast 

(or you can use more, if you love the pungent cheesey flavor)

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup soy milk

2 cloves garlic

Pinch of salt

¼ cup breadcrumbs

Pinch of cayenne

Ground black pepper

Set a big pot of water on the stove to boil. While it's heating, put the tofu, nutritional yeast, olive oil, soy milk, garlic and salt into a blender or food processor. Blend until all the lumps have disappeared. When the water has reached boiling point, add your pasta and cook for ten minutes. When it is done, drain the pasta and stir the sauce into it, making sure that all the pasta is nicely coated. Then put the whole thing into a baking dish (I used an 8 x 8 inch Pyrex dish). Top with the breadcrumbs, a generous amount of fresh ground black pepper and a small pinch of cayenne. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

I love serving this dish with BBQ seitan and garlicky collard greens. I've also been known to serve it with chili beans, or on its own as a light meal. Comfort food at its best!

Italian Cornmeal Cake with Strawberries

Northern California's strawberry season truly exploded this week. The farmers' markets and stores are overflowing with sweet, ripe fruit, ready to be eaten. But what to do with all of those strawberries? Well, this recipe combines cornmeal cake (one of my favorites), with fresh fruit. Adapt it according to the season and use whatever fruit you have available. As a light, refreshing dessert, it's a great staple to get you through summer. Use it to impress your guests at summer BBQs and garden parties.

Cake:

1 1/4 cups soy milk (or whatever non-dairy milk you like)

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup flour

1/2 cup fine yellow cornmeal 

(if you only have coarse cornmeal, try grinding it in a coffee grinder)

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

Topping:

16 oz strawberries

1 tbsp granulated sugar

2 tbsp confectioners' sugar, optional

Fist, hull and chop the strawberries, sprinkle a tablespoon of granulated sugar on them, and set them aside. Next, grease your pan (either a 9 inch round cake pan or a traditional loaf pan). In a bowl, mix together all of your other ingredients. The order doesn't matter. The resulting batter will have a fairly runny consistency – that's OK. Then, pour your batter into a pan and bake at 350 degrees for 55 minutes.

After removing from the oven, pour your strawberry mixture on top. Some juice will have begun to seep out of the berries, that's good, you want to pour that on top of the cake too. When cool, remove from pan. You can dust the whole thing with confectioners' sugar before serving, if you want to.

Update, May 26^th 2013: I just made this recipe in a loaf pan and drizzled three tablespoons of orange syrup over it. It was really moist and made a great dessert, although it could also stand alone as a cake to serve with coffee. If you don't have orange syrup, you can just dissolve some marmalade in hot water.

 

Yam and Chick Pea Stew

Yams were on sale at Andronico's this week, 49 cents per pound! I can't resist a bargain like that, and it gave me a reason to think up this simple Monday night stew.

6 yams (equal to about 1 ½ lbs)

1 onion

2 cans chick peas

1 can coconut milk

1 tbsp curry powder

1 tsp salt

Cut up the yams and onion, put them into an oven-proof dish with a lid. Add the canned chick peas, the coconut milk and the seasoning. Add the seasoning incrementally, tasting as you go (some curry powders are spicier than others). Then add water to achieve your desired consistency; 1 ½ cups is probably about right. Cook at 350 degrees for 90 minutes. After 60 minutes, remove from the oven to stir, then return to the oven leaving the lid off. Makes 6 generous servings, each with 350 calories. Serve with crusty bread or brown rice if you fancy something heartier. 

Some people might judge me for using canned chick peas. Those people can get over themselves. I know it's great to soak your own chick peas and all, but this is a Monday night after all. At the end of a long day at school, and then the clinic, I need something that doesn't require any effort or forethought. OK, I have said enough on that subject.

One other note: The canned coconut milk that I used for this was especially thick, which made the whole thing much richer and more coconutty. If your coconut milk is thinner, you might want to try using two cans instead. 

Jackie's Thai Peanut Noodles with Seasonal Veggies 

OK, based on discussions in my kitchen this lunchtime, a new concept has been born. Guest bloggers. (Wait, that's not a new concept? What!?).

Well, from now on, guest contributors are invited to submit ideas and I'll feature their favorite new recipe/ingredient/technique here on Charlie's Kitchen Blog. The only requirement is that everything needs to be vegan and within a grad student budget. To make things easy, I will begin by featuring a recipe by my housemate, Jackie Ballard, since she was already in the kitchen cooking something fabulous when I had this brilliant idea. Talk about convenient! Jackie claims that she is not a vegan, but almost every time I run into her she is cooking something deliciously plant-based. Today, she is excited to be working with Thai peanut sauce (a good choice, in my opinion).

Oil for sautéing

2 cloves garlic

1/2 yellow onion

2 cups chard, including stems

1 cup sugar snap peas

1 package yaki soba noodles

Peanut sauce

Mince your garlic, tear up your chard into bit-sized pieces, cut up your onion and slice your sugar snap peas into 1 cm pieces. Then heat oil in a pan. When hot, add the onion, garlic and sugar snap peas. Allow them to sauté for up to 5 minutes, depending on how al dente you like them. Next, add the chard and stir it around. It might look like a lot, but it will soon wilt. Open and drain your package of noodles, add them, and stir the whole thing together. Leave on the stove until everything is piping hot, stirring regularly, then add peanut sauce to taste - I think 2tbsp is probably about right. This recipe makes one generous serving.

Jackie used San-J peanut sauce. Both that and the yaki soba noodles are available at Safeway. The peanut sauce is with the Asian specialty foods - usually somewhere near the soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, etc. The soba noodles are in the produce section. They come in a thick plastic bag and can be found in the refrigerator near the tofu and fake deli meats. Thanks, Jackie!

Tea Time Raisin Scones with Strawberry Jam

Scones in the UK are different from scones in the United States. They're smaller, less sweet, and typically served with butter and jam. A perfect snack at tea time!*

1 ¾ cups self raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

6 tbsp Earth Balance, or other vegan margarine

2 tbsp caster sugar

½ cup soy milk, plus a little extra for glazing

½ cup raisins (optional, you could substitute nuts or other fruit)

Jam and vegan butter to serve

Grease your baking sheet. Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl. Add the Earth Balance. Using your hands, rub the fat into the dry ingredients, making a sandy mixture of small clumps. Slowly add the milk, stirring with a wooden spoon. Once the mixture is an even consistency, mix in the raisins. 

Dust your work surface with all-purpose flour and roll out the dough to a thickness of 1 inch. Cut out your scones using a circular cookie cutter and glaze them with milk using a pastry brush (if you don't have one, you can just dip your fingers in milk and glaze them by hand). Bake at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes. Let cool and serve with jam (strawberry is most traditional) and/or vegan butter. 

When I made this recipe, I rolled the dough a little too thin, and I got 11 ½ scones. You should roll yours thicker, about 1 inch, and it will yield 8 scones.

* “But what time is tea time?”, I hear you cry. Experts vary in their opinions on this matter. “High tea” involving scones, cake, biscuits, cucumber sandwiches and a fancy tea pot is usually served at 4pm. However, in the North, “tea” might also be used to refer to the evening meal, which is eaten quite early, around 5pm. 

Never Buy Seitan Again (or, how to make your own meat feast)

I don't like to brag, but I will admit that my seitan gets excellent reviews. Last Thanksgiving, I made seitan roasted in orange juice, rosemary and olive oil. A panel of hungry omnivores and vegans taste tested it against a store-bought variety cooked in the same marinade, and my version won unanimously. I mean it when I say that you will never want to buy seitan again after trying this recipe. Perhaps even more importantly, the homemade version is considerably cheaper than store-bought. The only downside is that it's a bit of a pain in the ass to make, but that's why I made big batches. This recipe makes 6 generous servings.

Most seitan recipes involve making a dough, then boiling it. My recipe adds a third step; roasting. Without roasting, the resulting product can be flavorless and the texture can be pretty weird (strangely fluffy, not dense and meaty). So, omit this step at your peril. Although my recipe is a multi-stage process and takes at least an hour and a half, it is well worth it and does not need constant attention, so you can get on with other stuff in the meantime.

In this entry, I offer a recipe for orangey BBQ marinade, but you could substitute any kind of marinade that you fancy – teriyaki might be good, or possibly something with red wine and onions. 

For the seitan:

2 cups vital wheat gluten

6 tbsp nutritional yeast

½ cup soy sauce

2 tbsp olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp tomato paste

For the marinade:

3 tbsp olive oil

1 ½ tbsp BBQ sauce

2 tbsp marmalade

1 tbsp soy sauce

Cracked black pepper

Start by heating a lot of water in a big pan – there needs to be room for all of the seitan, plus a lot of extra space for it to expand and move around. Next, measure all of the seitan ingredients into a bowl – the order doesn't matter. Mix with a wooden spoon until a sticky dough has formed. Then sprinkle a handful of all-purpose flour onto your work surface and use this to kneed your dough. See picture:

The dough should remain a little sticky, but should not stick to your countertop. If it does, add more flour and keep kneading. After kneading for about 5 minutes, form the dough into a log shape. Then slice this log into sections about an inch thick. See picture:

When the water is hot, lower each slice of seitan into the pot. The goal is the have the water just on the brink of simmering – steaming but not really bubbling. If you're getting a lot of bubbles, turn the temperature down. Allow the seitan to sit in the steaming mixture for 30-40 minutes. Stir once or twice during this time; not vigorously, just enough to make sure that the seitan isn't sticking to the bottom of the pan. When the time is up, fish the seitan out of the pan and leave to cool on a chopping board for 10 minutes.

After the seitan has cooled a little, you can either leave it in big chunks to make “steak”, or you can cut it into strips. Either way, measure the ingredients for the marinade into a roasting pan and add the seitan. Mix the whole thing around with your hands, making sure all sides of the seitan get nicely oiled. Roast at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, flipping the seitan pieces half way through.

When it comes out of the oven, the final product is beef-like. It can be served with vegetables and gravy, or it can be used in stir fries, sandwiches, and burgers. 

Blueberry Crumb Cake

Recently, there's been a lot of talk about the nature of coffee cake in the Walnut Street house. I was confused because in England coffee cake is cake that contains, and tastes of, coffee. In the United States, it seems more often to refer to a cake that is served with coffee but that can be made with anything, although it is commonly cinnamon-y and covered with a streusel topping. This difference became more confusing when my Canadian housemate Stephen got in on conversation.* So, this cake isn't really what I think of as coffee cake, but it is a rendition of what I think other people think of as coffee cake. It's a two-layer arrangement; cake on the bottom, crumbly topping on top, with a layer of jam stirred into the middle. I used blueberry jam, but encourage you to try other flavors. David suggested gooseberry, which would be great, although I don't know how widely available that is in the United States. The Post Punk Kitchen has a very similar recipe, but they use raspberry jam, which I'm sure is devine.

The recipe is easy to make and I prepared it ahead of time because I had friends coming over for brunch this morning and was too lazy to get up early. I left it uncooked in the fridge overnight and just got it out and popped it in the oven this morning about an hour before they were due to come over. It still had a warmish just-baked feel when we cut into it. It was a great success and was consumed in its entirety.

Topping:

1 cup all purpose flour

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/3 cup Earth Balance

Cake:

3/4 cup soy milk

1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp baking powder

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour

1tsp salt

2/3 cup jam

First, put the milk and vinegar in a measuring cup and set it aside to curdle while you work on the rest of the recipe. Then grease your pan, preferably an 8 inch springform pan, or an 8 x 8 square dish. Next, prepare the topping. To do this, measure all of the ingredients into a bowl, then gently rub them together with your hands until you get a crumby mixture with smallish clumps that stick together. If the mixture feels too dry and is a sandy consistency, rather than clumpy, add another tablespoon of Earth Balance. Set aside.

Make the cake batter separately in a large bowl. Slowly mix together the milk/vinegar mixture, sugar, oil and vanilla extract. Stir until the sugar has dissolved. Sift the flour and baking powder into the mix, stirring constantly. Now you should have two bowls; one with cake batter and one with topping. You should also have a jar of jam at the ready.

To assemble the cake, first pour all of the cake batter into the pan and smooth it out, making sure that it reaches the edges. Spoon the jam on top of this, then lightly swirl it around with a fork. Sprinkle the topping over the top, making sure that it reaches the edges, and gently pat it down. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. After this time, check it by sticking a knife in it. If the knife comes out clean, the cake is ready. If not, leave it to cook for another 5 minutes.

* Discussing coffee cake with Stephen prompted him to get out a recipe book of family favorites that his mother compiled for him. It is quite an impressive collection and definitely deserves a place in a museum of contemporary Canadian cultural history. It reminds me very much of a passage in Neal Stephenson's Reamde in which he talks about the beauty of mid-Western food; “...he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.” I might try to veganize some of the recipes from Osadetz Family Favorites for future editions of the blog in a futile attempt to prove that I am not, in fact, a snobby Bay Area foody. "Classy Chicken" could easily become "Classy Chick'n" and "Nuts and Bolts", which seems to be a variation on Chex mix, could easily be made with Bragg's Liquid Aminos instead of Worcestershire sauce.