Bad blogger!

Me, not you. You're great.

I'm going to try posting more frequently. Since I cook every day, that really shouldn't be so hard. I'm just starting to get the hang of it, or so I think, but not so much that I can't change it up. Let me know what you like, don't like, want to see more or less of, and I'll try to accommodate! (I also just love getting comments...they make me feel fake internet-popular).



I'm not going to post about food I made today, really. Why? Because last night I roasted this beet and this turnip to put on salads, and after I turned the oven off and was making the rest of the salad, I forgot all about them sitting in the oven. Until this morning! (Don't worry - I am still eating them). So who's a food authority? Not me, that's who. Not today at least.

But you know who is?

Jeff and Amanda - www.bluehousegreenhouse.blogspot.com
All you Portlanders can buy organic heirloom veggie and herb starts from them. Can and should!

and

Jamie Oliver - http://www.hulu.com/jamie-olivers-food-revolution
This show (Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution) is about transforming the way the unhealthiest town in America eats, and it's actually really good so far. Kind of cheesy, but has a lot of good information about our food system and school food in particular. I can't believe ABC is actually airing it. I think it's on Friday nights on real TV.

It's not stuff I made, so I'll post this chana masala from an Indian restaurant a bunch of us went to in Eugene, OR last month. It was pretty good, not too exciting.



And here's some vodka I infused with blueberries I picked last Summer. I couldn't freeze them, because I was moving across the country, so I dried some, baked as many as I could into pies, and made this. I poked about 6 holes in each one with a toothpick, because someone on the internet told me to. It probably helped infuse the flavor and color some, but might not have been necessary considering most of it is still infusing 8 months later. I think most of the alcohol ended up in the blueberries somehow, because they're pretty gross tasting at this point, and the blueberry flavor entirely ended up in the liquid. Weird.

A Ton of Cornbread and the Best Kale Ever

Last week I made skillet cornbread, adapted from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, with some help with substitutions from Vegan Dad. As suggested in that post, I curdled soy milk with some cider vinegar to replace buttermilk, used earth balance instead of butter, and did not attempt to find a substitute for the bacon. Instead of using soy yogurt for some of the 3 eggs, I used flax meal mixed with water for all 3. The original recipe is available on google books (see link above) - you just need to scroll up a few pages to find the rest of it.



Man was this good. Not dry, not too moist like some recipes I've tried (Moosewood's, for example), and not weirdly sweet like cornbread can be sometimes. It also browned really nicely all over. Next time I think I'll increase the salt a little, decrease the sugar, and add some scallions and maybe red bell pepper to make it a little more savory overall.



One thing to note - I'm sure the baking time would be affected if you use a non-cast iron pan, even if it's the same shape and size. This was a 10" pan. With all the substitutions, my baking time was almost 50 minutes, up from I think 35 in the recipe.



I ate a lot of it just warmed up with some barbecue sauce (from Veganomicon). Here's some with kale prepared in the Best Kale Ever method (see below).



And here's some more, again with barbecue sauce, again with the Best Kale Ever, but also with lentils.



Best Kale Ever

Some people might think I eat a weirdly large amount of kale, but I think most people eat weirdly little of it. Maybe I can help bring the greens to the masses.

- Dice about a quarter of an average sized yellow onion and a mince a couple cloves of garlic, if you feel ambitious. This will still be almost the best kale ever if you skip the onion.
- Wash a third or half a bunch of kale (any variety), and don't worry about shaking all the water off. You want it to steam itself in the pan. Chop it up - no need to discard the stems unless they're really thick and tough. Why people do that, but then go and eat things like celery, I will never understand.
- Add a little olive oil to a cast iron or other non-stick pan, and heat to medium.
- Add the onions and garlic to the hot oil, saute with a sprinkle of salt and pepper for a couple minutes.
- Add the kale and saute/steam until the stems are tender, stirring frequently.
- Add a little drizzle of toasted sesame oil in there at some point.
- When it's about done, turn off the heat and add:
- A splash of soy sauce or tamari
- A little rice vinegar
- A tablespoon or so nutritional yeast
- Stir it up and taste for seasoning
- Put in in a bowl.
- Drizzle tahini on it. Note - if your tahini cannot be drizzled per se, you are buying gross tahini that was probably made in Missouri at a commune. I don't care if that stuff is organic. Buy the real Middle Eastern kind or don't bother. For real.

Portobello

First up of the food from Oregon, I'm going to share photos and a review, I suppose, of Italian, all-vegan Portobello in Portland. I went there with a couple friends and we tried a bunch of things. I'd been there twice before, and every time everything has been great. They're doing so well, apparently, that they're moving out of Cellar Door and into their own space soon. Can't wait to go to the new spot next time I'm in town.

We split three starters - garlicky broccolini, beet tartare, and a beet salad. The salad was good, but nothing special - boiled beets, apple pieces, I think some walnut and some kind of nut cheese, and greens.



The vinaigrette was fine but not exciting, but we all enjoyed it. That is, until we noticed they forgot to take the sticker off the apple.* Oops! Two of us ate a little plastic before we found the rest, but that's forgivable I guess. I did think the food came out awfully fast.



I'm so glad I'd been recommended the beet tartare - it was so good. The beets were either roasted or boiled, then shredded, and there was a lot of olive oil and a lot of either raw or very slightly cooked garlic.



The broccolini was also super good - I don't know how they put so much oil in their dishes without making them...oily tasting, I guess. Anyways, it seemed like a lot of oil, but wasn't heavy.



The entrees come in either half or full plates, and what with all the starters, half plates were plenty of food for all of us. The food here is definitely filling. This is the portobello steak with yukon gold mashed potatoes. It had a marsala sauce kind of similar to the Farm's tofu marsala, but I think I prefer the Farm's (then again, we all know that when I'm the reviewer tofu vs. mushroom is not a fair fight). It was also maybe a bit on the salty side, but all of that said, it was still really good.



Here's what I ordered - smoked tomato sausage and cheese ravioli with tomato-basil sauce and cashew cream. I thought it was great, but was a little surprised that a place that makes so many things from scratch would use field roast sausage in its ravioli. The sauce and the cashew cream were both really flavorful and not too heavy.



There were some other reactions to the food that I was supposed to include, but totally forgot. Salt, chervil...sorry Claire. Feel free to amend by comment if I misrepresented your dinner!

So yeah, if you're looking for classy Italian food in Portland, check out Portobello. They change their menu seasonally, offer local beer and wine, and use a lot of local organic produce and other ingredients. And it's not one of those vegan restaurants that only vegans like, I promise.

*Actually we still enjoyed the rest of the salad anyways.

Dinners from the darkest days of Winter

I just got back from a two-week trip to Oregon, where the flowers are blooming and Spring is in full swing. In the meantime, most of the snow here has melted, leaving a few piles of old, dirty, icy slop and unearthing last Fall's soggy, rotting leftover leaves and garbage. It's by far the ugliest time of year. I would post a picture, but you would lose your appetite, and this is a food blog, not a whining about Winter blog. The upshot is that I haven't uploaded all of the pictures from my trip yet, so here are a few things I've made over the past few months.



I've said it before - Winter squash is one of the few highlights of a Midwest Winter. Butternut is one of my favorites. Roasting it really concentrates the flavor - just put a little olive oil on the cut surfaces and it'll get crispy and caramelized. After roasting, add to sauteed onions and garlic (or roast those along with the squash for a deeper flavor), maybe some white beans, sage, salt, pepper, broth or water, and whatever else you like, cook together for a while, then puree. This soup always makes me feel a little less bad about being a shut-in once Winter has gone on just a bit too long.



I also picked up some fava beans from Holy Land at some point, and made a couple things with them. I don't buy them much, but I really love the flavor and at some point plan to look up some more authentic Middle Eastern recipes that use them.



I cooked the beans with onions and garlic (of course) and some greens, and seasoned it with thyme and sumac. It turned out really well - the sumac is nice and tart, and adds a unique flavor that I think went well with the favas. Then apparently the next day I thought it would be a good idea to cook the rest of my greens with an entire onion.



I got ambitious one night and made some simple chick pea crepes and a tofu-tomato filling. They turned out great, but unfortunately all my ambition must have been spent, because I couldn't seem to take a decent picture. Sorry for the blurry close-up.



I didn't use much of a recipe for the crepes, just added a mix of chick pea flour and white flour to water with a little salt, pepper, turmeric, and maybe garlic powder, then let it sit for about 20 minutes, then cook them sort of like thin pancakes, flipping once. The filling was just sauteed onion, garlic, tomato sauce, and tofu.



Stay tuned for a write-up of some food eaten in Eugene and Portland, including the much-anticipated Minneapolis-Portland brunch-off! Hint: Portland might win.