Sometimes it’s hard to want to eat soup when it’s hot out, but we had a few nice, cool days and a few ears of corn to use up, so….

Potato and corn chowder it is!

1. In your soup pot, fry up a sliced onion, a clove or two of garlic, and a two handfuls of chopped tomatillos (for me, this was two massive tomatillos from the market — other days it would be 10 or so littler ones) in a bit of olive oil.

2. When that’s cooked up, add a pile of cubed red potatoes (leave those lovely skins on!) and two ears’ worth of corn, sliced off of the cob.

3. Stir those around with a shake of red pepper flakes, a bit of thyme and rosemary, black pepper and a shake or so of salt. Then add enough vegetable broth to just barely cover the potatoes. Stick a bay leaf in there.

4. Let that boil a while, till the potatoes are perfect. Then with your potato masher, smash down maybe four or five or six times, to make the broth thick and potato-y. Simmer just a bit longer. Do a taste test.

5. Enjoy the heck out of this soup. It’s so flavorful — the tomatillos add a lot but if you don’t have any, maybe try adding some lemon or lime juice to up the tang.

Black Bean and Pumpkin Soup

You’ll need:

• 2 cans black beans, rinsed
• 1 can diced tomatoes (if you’re into tomatoes, or not if you’re not.)
• 1 can pumpkin puree (or in this case, a small heap of freshly pureed pumpkin)
• 1-2 onions, diced
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• ½ c cooking sherry
• ½ stick soy margarine
• 4 c vegetable broth
• 1 t salt
• ½ t black pepper
• 2-3 t cumin
• 3-4 T balsamic vinegar

Instructions, photos, and biscuit recipe below!

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African Peanut Soup

In a large sauce pan, heat up:

• a dribble of olive oil
• a good-sized yellow onion, chopped
• two cloves of garlic, chopped
• a knuckle of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
• pinch of cinnamon
• bigger pinch of cumin
• smaller pinch of cayenne – or a squirt of sriracha sauce, or a small spoon of chili garlic sauce

More photos and the rest of the recipe below!
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For x-mas I got Emma the Veganomicon cookbook. We’ve been trying a handful of the recipes out since then. A couple weeks ago we made homemade seitan for the first time using their recipe. Tonight I tried out their Chickpea Cutlets recipe and used it to make a big ass Vegan Chicken Parmesian Sandwich. Here’s how ya do…

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Ideally, fake cheese would be firm in the refrigerator and melt when heated. Ideally, it would become stretchy and somehow recreate the opiates in actual dairy-based cheese (or is that the ideal?). And of course, ideally it should taste good and not be made of chemicals.

In a pinch, Tofutti brand products will get the job done but they’re so very very processed that the sheer glowing whiteness of the mozzarella slices and sour cream make me nervous. So onward!

There are a lot of variations on making fake cheese at home. The recipe we usually use is the “Classic White Uncheese” from a weird little cookbook that I am certain is owned exclusively by vegans. It’s the venerable Nutritional Yeast Cookbook by Jo Stepaniak (purchased for a buck or two at a used book store in Ithaca NY once upon a time.)

It’s pretty convoluted and absurd but I really like it a lot. It doesn’t get stretchy but it will melt and it will brown a bit if you broil it. It’s also firm enough to grate or slice. Yeah!

Step One: Get everything out and ready first. Normally I don’t bother doing this but this is fairly involved, so just get out and measure all your ingredients and oil the container you want to mold your cheese in at the end.

• 1/4 pound regular firm tofu
• 3 T nutritional yeast
• 2-3 T tahini
• 2 T lemon juice
• 1.5 T miso
• 3/4 t salt
• (this recipe calls for garlic powder and onion granules but I have never bothered)
• 3 T agar flakes
• 3/4 c water

Step Two: Blend. A food processor or blender really is essential for this recipe. Blend together everything but the water and agar. It looks gross. Roll with it.

Step Three: Dissolve the agar. Agar is a crazy and amazing seaweed that works like gelatin. You can buy it in flakes or a powder. I’ve only ever used the flakes for this recipe but have used the powder in other recipes with equal success, so really use whatever you prefer. Use the tiniest saucepan you’ve got, bring the water and agar to a boil, and simmer it for about five minutes till all the flakes are dissolved. If you don’t have a heat resistant (silicone) spatula, consider getting one. They are great for this kind of thing.

Step Four: Hustle and blend everything. Pour the agar/water into the food processor and blend the shit out of it, stopping frequently to scrape the sides down. You have to work fast because the agar starts to set up as soon as it gets cool. Blend it thoroughly but be snappy, and then pour/scrape everything down into your prepared container.

Let it cool for a few hours in the fridge (leave it uncovered until it’s cooled through) and then do with it what you will! Our plan is fake Philly cheese steaks! I made some homemade seitan for the first time today too. As Q put it, we are Kickin’ Ass in 08!

The best fucking sandwich I ever ate was the vegan reuben at the Chicago Diner, circa November 2004. It is the only time I can recall in my entire 26 years when I thought I might honestly truly vomit from eating too much. I couldn’t stop. It was that good.

It’s a tough thing to replicate in vegan form, since really most of the ingredients are not vegan. This calls for some hardcore imposter ingredients, though, of course, rye bread and sauerkraut can be their regular real-deal selves.

Since there’s no place in Pittsburgh to get a vegan reuben, a personal mission began. The Quiet Storm here in town has a vegetarian reuben on the menu, which some would declare a thorough success and why not just stop there? But a) it’s got dairy cheese, which I can’t/won’t eat, and b) it’s based on tempeh, which I just can’t get down with in this case. Totally wrong texture for me. But good on ya, QS, for doing the vegetarians a solid!

So, a mission to make a reuben… and make a reuben I did. In fact, if I were the competitive type, I might challenge you all to make a better one than I can. Here is what I do:

1. Make your own fucking fake cheese the day before you plan to make the sandwiches* or just buy yourself some delicious, albeit petro-chemically based Tofutti brand mozzarella slices.
2. Get yourself some really good marble rye, and slather each slice with some Earth Balance margarine.
3. Thinly (and I mean THINLY — we are replicating corned beef, remember?) slice one package of seitan. As a sidenote here, I haven’t yet experimented in making my own seitan, which I plan to do this winter. I’ll report back. I have done some research about spicing seitan with corned beef spices, which may kick my previous reuben’s ass.) Fry it up in a bit of oil in a skillet till it’s hot through and a bit crispy here and there.
4. Meanwhile, get the dressing ready. This is a slapdash version: one part ketchup, two parts vegannaise, one part sweet pickle relish. A true Russian dressing would have a bit of horseradish in it too, which I don’t generally have around.
5. Heat up a good forkload or so of sauerkraut — unless you have some homemade kraut, I generally find kraut to be pretty much the same, brand to brand. Not worth being too choosy about.
6. Slather the non-buttered sides of each slice of bread with the dressing. Layer on a good helping of fried up seitan, then a layer of cheese, then a load of kraut, and close up your sandwich. Fry it up gently in a skillet, taking care as you flip it over that you don’t spill out all your delicious sandwich innards.
7. Eat the fuck out of that fucking sandwich and declare your life to be complete. Especially if you’ve got some good beer, and you’ve already roasted some potatoes that just happen to be piping hot and covered in salt and pepper and on your plate.

Fig. 1: Reuben with mashed garlic potatoes and wilted swiss chard.

Fig. 2: Reuben with red parsley potatoes and no effing vegetables.

* future post about making your own fake cheese to come. It’s totally worth it. No crazy chemicals, tastes like food, melts, awesome.

Alas, none of the vegetables in this roast were from our garden. We’ll toss up a post soon about the winterization of the garden — we’ve done a pretty solid job this year of getting the garden ready (unlike the last several years when we’ve flaked on it till the first warm day in the early spring! oops!).Tonight’s dinner was VERY simple: a heap of miscellaneous winter vegetable, roasted in the oven, and some baked polenta. Mmmmm. Excellent with a good glass of wine and a buddy sitting beside you!

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We’re about to have our first freeze of the fall season, so I picked all the rest of the green tomatoes on the vine today. I was totally blanking on any ideas so I turned to one of my favorite books of all time for inspiration. (more…)

We’ve been around and about, and far away, and doing all sorts of things the last week. You may recall that my dear friends’ wedding was this past weekend — the one for which I had agreed to make ten cakes. The difficulty here was not so much the number of cakes, but the very, very little time I had for preparing them. (more…)

I’ve made a lot of cakes in my day. I don’t think I’ve ever made ten cakes for one event though!

In just under three weeks, following a week out of town and on the day we fly home again, that is what I will be doing! Two dear friends of mine are having a wedding at a farm in West Virginia, and I’ve agreed to be in charge of the cake. This translated to cakes, plural, over the course of time. Turns out one individual hates frosting. Also one individual wants cayenne pepper. And two individuals cannot eat gluten. And so the idea is born: Ten small cakes in many flavors.

So far the definitive list includes:

• chocolate & cayenne cake with cinnamon frosting
• gingerbread (or carrot cake, haven’t decided) without frosting but decorated with candied ginger flowers.

Other options which I am currently debating:

• basic white cake with lemon filling and vanilla frosting, wedding style!
• orange cake (or yellow cake with orange filling and frosting)
• chocolate cake with peanut butter mousse filling, and a chocolate ganache

Should I roll out the big guns and do a mojito cake? The mojito cupcakes of this summer were probably the most glamorous things I’ve ever made…

Behold!