Nom-Able

Okay, so right now, my stomach is filled with lovely Fat Bastard Shiraz, so I’m in no mood — or ability-level — to type a long ranty entry that no one reads anyway, so I’m just going to cut right to the recipe. I found this via NPR and their “How Low Can You Go” segment about cooking a meal for under $10. A few notes, though. This meal feeds at least four adults, so reduce accordingly. Also, brown rice and naan bread go a long way toward cutting the spice and adding other flavors and textures, since it’s pretty much all just hot and bland at the end. Finally, this meal did not cost $10 to make. Maybe $10 per person but at that point, you might as well go to a fast food place, though this is at least vegan and packed full of healthy, fresh veggies and legumes, so the health thing is totally on your side. Still, if all you care about is cost, this isn’t going to keep your wallet slim. I spent $2.99 on tomatoes alone, another $1.25 on the potatoes and $1.99 on cilantro. That’s only three ingredients. The wine (which, I admit, I’m still guzzling) was $7.99, and that was at Wegman’s. The local store sells it for $10.99. Oh sure, you could use some cheap crap like Sutter Home and reduce the price there, but trust me, Fat Bastard is a fat bastard of a wine, and cooks wonderfully. Plus, there’s a cute little hippo on the bottle!

Dal, Chilean-Style

3 cups of lentils
2 cups of chopped potatoes
2 chopped carrots
3 chopped tomatoes
1 hot pepper
1 small onion chopped
2 gloves garlic chopped
16 ounces tomato sauce
1 tsp cumin
a little beer or sherry
a little red vinegar
olive oil
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

1. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.
2. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
3. Add potatoes and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
4. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
5. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
6. Salt and pepper to taste. (I sometimes add more water or beer if it’s too thick, or vinegar if it’s too sweet.) Add more cumin or hot sauce if you like it really spicy.
7. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

Okay, it’s the summer, so I’m going to be honest with you all right now — I really do not enjoy cooking during the summer, especially not during 90 degree days when my pale white ass is going to turn lobster red if I even step foot out of my front door. And don’t get me started on the futile battle that is running an air conditioner and oven fan at the same time! So, you could be forgiven for assuming that I’d do very little baking during the typically hottest months of the year.

But you’d be wrong.

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In almost every cookbook sitting around my apartment right now, there is at least one recipe for pizza dough – seriously, every one of them. Jamie Oliver, Tyler Florence, Isa Chandra Moskowitz — even Julia Child at one time or another weighed in on the fine art of pizza dough making. Though there are little variations to the recipes (one says throw basil into the crust to make it rustic!) the thing that makes pizza great is that it’s simple, quick, and easy. There aren’t a lot of fancy ingredients — it’s pretty much flour, water, and yeast plus whatever you put on top — and while it’s the sort of thing you need a few hours to make, the hands on time is probably about fifteen to twenty minutes total. It also involves punching and beating the crap out of the dough, which is why it seemed like the perfect project for me on my second unpaid day off due to The Great Recession of 2009! (Please, can we stop with that already media people? Great! Thanks!)

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Growing up, I went through phases when it came to breakfast. As a small child, it was my favorite meal of the day. My usual dinner requests were for scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes, waffles, or French toast — never all at the same time, obviously — and my mother was only ever happy to oblige, as breakfast is probably the easiest meal of the day to cook. I can still remember with great sadness the first time my father took me to a McDonald’s for lunch and the oil-slicked teenager who apathetically informed us we were too late for breakfast.

There were many such incidents in my life. Luckily, growing up in New Jersey means there’s a plethora of diners within driving distance from any place you might be, and most diners serve at least some breakfast foods 24/7.

It was sometime in my early, precocious pre-teen years that my love of breakfast began to wane, and by the time I was in high school, I’d forgotten the meal all together. I usually slept well past the point of breakfast or brunch on weekends, and at some point, I’d decided that all cooked eggs smell rotten, all pancakes are fattening. The entire point of breakfast was lost, until my senior year of high school when my best friend and I would arrive at school half an hour early for cream cheese and bagels washed down with a bottle of Surge.

Still, without Nanette’s presence to share in chewy, bagel goodness, I usually declined breakfast — or slept right through it.

My sophomore year of college, I again began to explore the idea of breakfast as the perfect compliment to a night of boozing; eating eggs after a particularly drunken evening is still a ritual I carry to this day, and I will — without exception — always wake up craving eggs after a particularly rough night. But it really wasn’t until this past year that I began to look forward to the weekend as a time when I could begin cooking breakfast for my husband and myself, looking forward to the same eggs, chicken sausage, pancakes, waffles, and French toast I loved as a child.

Which brings me to the subject of pancakes.

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Since the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale is this week — and not one of the four sites I contacted in the Princeton area would give me space to set up a table — I decided to post a brand new, never before seen, Elizabeth-original recipe in honor of the WWVBS. Of course, the question was, “Do I make a new recipe from scratch or do I veganize an old favorite?”

One of the most consistently popular, linked to, and visited pages on this site is my page about “Amish” Friendship Bread, which I pretty much pointed out is not actually Amish and the “friendship” part is debatable. With several cups of milk and three eggs in the mix, it’s pretty animal unfriendly, to start. And then there’s the issue of human friendships. I mean, imagine being saddled with a bag of goop you have to pay attention to for ten days, implored by instructions not to throw it out, freeze it, waste it, or use it as a top hat. I’m not necessarily sure I’m going to be your friend any more after you abandon your “Amish” baby on my stoop, kiddo — especially not one that results in a several-hundred-calorie-per-slice diet killer. Then, assuming I don’t bin the starter, I have to pass it off onto my friends — and how friendly they’ll be after I dump it (metaphorically speaking) in their laps is a question for the ages. Hell, the only thing friendly about this bread is the starter itself, which will take your neglect and abuse with gentle good humor and still produce that fattening cinnamon pound cake that’s about as Amish as an electric fireplace.

But what if, and I know this is just crazy talk but, what if I told you I figured out a way to make a version of this that was friendly to your co-workers, animals, and your waistline. What then?

Wonder no more, my dears, as I present to you Friendly Vegan Bread. It’s Amish Friendship Bread with all the usual substitutions — and reduced in size to make exactly one loaf plus a cup of starter!

“Devil magic!” I hear you cry, but worry not, there is nothing devilish about this bread!

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