More Root Vegetables, Please!

It's that time of year. I long for the farmers' markets. Our box of (mostly local) produce comes and I haul turnips, rutabagas, potatoes, storage apples, carrots and so on into the kitchen....and then stare at the abundance for a while.

One of my standbys is The Winter Vegetarian by Darra Goldstein, which, beyond having fantastic easily veganised recipes suitable for a northern climate, is a wonderful read full of food history and stories. It's a cuddle up in the bleak weather treat.

However, looking for new inspiration and building on my experience with the best salad ever a couple of years ago (a strawberry and onion chutney at an Indian restaurant), lately I've found that one of the most delightful ways to face root vegetables is east. A lot of south asian cuisine actually lends itself really well to root vegetables other than the usual potatoes and carrots. Try turnips simmered in a tomato based sauce with Indian spices and you'll see what I mean. This might be obvious for a lot of people, but it was such a welcome discovery for me that I'm kicking myself for not being more adventurous with my rutabagas sooner :-)


So, I introduce to you my very own grated celery root and apple salad with black mustard seed dressing:

Combine:

1 smallish celery root, peeled and grated
4-5 medium apples, cored and thinly sliced
juice from half a lemon
1 or 2 green onions, chopped
about 1 teaspoon finely grated ginger

Toast a couple of teaspoons of black mustard seeds in a couple of tablespoons of oil (I used canola) until they start popping (remove before they explode all over your kitchen!) and pour the warm dressing on top on the salad. Mix well and salt to taste.

Ta-da!

The 1900 House and Making Toothpaste

Safiya is enamoured of The 1900 House. I took the DVD's out of the library one day, intending them for myself, and one day when I wasn't feeling particularly well, I popped it in. In general Safiya is adverse to unfamiliar media, but when they started talking about not having electricity and having to use the outhouse outside, she peaked around the corner and said "watcha' watchin'?"

And so starts Homeschooling History 101 :-)

One of the things which I do on-and-off but which Safiya now helps with with increased fervor after watching the show (a gazillion times) is making toothpaste. She likes to raise her eyebrows at the idea of having to brush your teeth with just baking soda - yucccch!, and thinks our recipe is greatly improved over what they did in the 1900's (after having tried the plain baking soda :-) She actually prefers it to the fruity kids' toothpaste that she had.


Here's the recipe, adapted from my well-worn copy of Jackie French's Natural Solutions:

3 parts baking soda
2 parts calcium carbonate (which I easily ordered from the pharmacy)
1 part vegetable glycerin
drops of peppermint essential oil, as desired

Mix well. Store in whatever way is easiest for you.

The first time she made it with me we decided to use an old, well-cleaned toothpaste tube and then duct-tape the end, which worked o.k. at the beginning, but then it leaked a bit at the end.


This time we wracked our brains and found a better solution. We increased the amount of glycerin to make it a bit more runny and reused old honey bears! Perfect!


Oh, and we're well on our way with the reality-tv-show based history curriculum. We've gone through Frontier House (she's trying to convince Mr. S. to keep chickens for eggs in our backyard) and are starting Manor House (originally The Edwardian Country House). This is proper education, right? ;-)

Let's Start the Year with Crepes

Happy fifth day of the New Year! To start off the year right, I want to thank everyone who sent warm wishes through here recently; each of those was a wonderful gift, and I'm so fortunate to be surrounded by you lovely people.

Now, to dive right in. There is a reason why the empty plate in the mundane scene above is important. I ate a stack of crepes. And then I called Mr. S. at work to tell him that I'd eaten a stack of crepes.

Mr. S. is now used to me randomly calling him at work with news like this. That's because this past fall I'd finally figured out why I've had almost daily stomachaches since my early teens. Stomachaches sometimes so severe that when Mr. S. and I were first together he would insist that I needed to go the hospital and I would insist that I was fine and that it happened all the time and it was no big deal.

I've got celiac disease. (We're still testing, but it's pretty sure.) I haven't said anything about it here yet because I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready to talk about the crying in the kitchen, the confidence shattered (if I can make vegan Mennonite food, I can bake anything, right?), the frustration over all the work done to eat local, over the fact that there is no way that rice is local to Toronto, and the throwing of the stupid cookbooks with their serious recommendations that I shouldn't try baking until at least 6 months after stopping eating gluten so that I wouldn't remember what bread really tastes like.


After the success with crepes this morning, I was ready, and more importantly, I felt moved to say something, just in case there's someone else out there throwing cookbooks and eating only naked salads at restaurants (gluten is in f-in' everything). In case there's just one other vegan-gluten intolerant-locavore out there, just to say that it will be o.k. (Bear with me here while I sound like a bad 80's self-help book....)

It will be o.k. mostly because of amazing people like Karina at Gluten-Free-Goddess. (Thank the heavens for the internet.) It will be o.k. because buckwheat, chickpea flour, and corn are local, and because quinoa and amaranth someday could be. It will be o.k. because right now rice is my medicine, and I'm pretty sure no-one's advocating local medicine (thank goodness!) And, very importantly, it will be o.k. because Pizza Pizza has a gluten free crust.

I was always so tired, fuzzy-headed, and worse, always always fighting that ball of irritability in my core. I had cramps, stomachaches, and Mr. S.'s favourite, gas that would gas a skunk out of an outhouse :-) For the first, oh, 16 days after starting to not eat gluten, I would call Mr. S. at work: "Guess what?" What? "I don't have a stomachache today!" and I'd gleefully hang up.

So, to finally share the celebration, here's the crepe recipe, adapted from Veganomicon (which is kind of ironic, because it was the hours of agony back in July after the chickpea cutlets, made from vital wheat gluten, that tipped me off):

the amazing incredible gluten free vegan buckwheat crepes

1 1/2 cups soy or rice milk
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup gluten-free flour (I keep a homemade blend of 1/2 brown rice flour, then arrowroot/sorghum/tapioca/quinoa flour to make up the other half - you generally need some starch and some protein when making a blend)
1/4 cup chickpea flour
1 Tablespoon arrowroot flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine everything, whisk/beat until smooth. Pour into an airtight container (I use a large jar for easy pouring) and let sit in the fridge, preferably overnight. When ready to cook the crepes, stir briefly (or shake the jar) if ingredients have separated.

This batter will be more viscous than usual wheat based batter. They say that when making crepes, the first crepe or two must be sacrificed, but we have a trick that works well (on our well-seasoned cast iron pan, anyway). When the pan is nice and hot (medium to medium-high heat, depending on your stove - a sprinkle of water should dance), add a little oil (a teaspoon) and coat the pan using a pastry brush. The bristles get sacrificed a bit, but the crepes will never stick and seem to always cook evenly, even on the first go.

Pour 1/4 to 1/3 cup in the pan, swirl around, then cook until there are bubbles showing and the top is mostly dry - the edges should be starting to lift. Flip, cook a little more, and voila! Perfect crepes!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

And for a good laugh (mixed with a few tears) for all you proud food freaks out there (of any ilk), I just found this list. Enjoy, and happy eating!

A Golden International Breakfast

French toast, Turkish coffee, and Indian chickpea flour "crepes" with ginger, garlic and fennel seed potato filling - that is the perfect Saturday morning breakfast. And, don't forget the last of the homemade mango chutney so gratefully received from my friend Kat.


The French toast was mainly for Safiya and Mr. S.; it's a Saturday morning ritual. The rest was my indulgence - I've been playing around with a lot of different grains lately (and some not even grains!), making bread-like stuff. The chickpea flour crepes are to die for; savoury, silky on top and lightly crisp on the bottom, and you don't even have to flip them! I'm hoping to venture into bean-based flatbread territory soon, using one of my favourite cookbooks, Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Coooking.


Some plain leftover potatoes were transformed into a better version of homefries ;-) using one of my favourite recipes, sookhe aloo ("dry" potatoes with ginger and garlic), from Jaffrey's Indian Cooking, and voila, a golden warming breakfast on a chilly almost-winter day. They're so good (we find the fennel seeds essential and put extra in, and will also substitute anise seeds if there is a we-have-no-fennel-seeds emergency), that I'm trying to share the recipe here; if you can make it out, it's worth it!


For breakfast, lunch, or dinner.... :-)


Note: thank you, Google! Here's the (almost-identical) recipe for the potatoes. And here's the chickpea-flour pancakes (although in Jaffrey's cookbook there is much sprinkling of oil around and on top on the pancakes after they're poured :-) Enjoy!

The Vegan Mennonite

The vegetable dishes section in the revered cookbook above are heavy on cheese and half have meat in them. Butter and eggs are applied liberally throughout, and the idea of a vegetarian is an aberration of nature....

But these things must be understood within their context, surely. When asked to submit recipes years ago, these ladies would have submitted their most proud, their most delicious. Recipes that indicated bounty and celebration (think eggy paska), not thrift (bacon fat sandwiches, anyone?)

And it is within that frame that I remember the savoured foods of my childhood. Tummy-filling borscht (tomato based, not beet), flaky perishky with savory or sweet fillings, platz, hand-cut kielke, deep fried rollkuchen, and, of course, Mennonite sausage with cream gravy and wareniki - oh, and that staple of faspa (late afternoon lunch) - zweiback (double buns)...my grandmothers' food lavished well-being on us with its freshness and evidence of hand hard work. Although, the Mennonite Treasury of Recipes, like any good 50's cookbook, has it's share of ingredients such as condensed milk, soup-in-a-can, and jello. Why not? Thrift, although unspoken, was a virtue bred in the bone.

Today I did the unthinkable, and I may have created a new mission for myself. On a substituting roll, I veganised my Grammy's raisin cookies, the recipe for which is contained in the Mennonite cookbook. It's not a traditional Mennonite food, but for me it reminds me of Grammy's house, which is authentic enough for me. So here I proudly present my first vegan "Mennonite" recipe:

Raisin Cookies

1 cup raisins
1/2 cup boiling water
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp ground flax seeds
3 Tbsp boiling water
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup unbleached white pastry flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp cloves
1/8 tsp nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine ground flax seed and the 3 Tbsp of boiling water and let sit while continuing with recipe. Combine raisins and 1/2 cup boiling water and also let sit (at least 10 minutes).

Mix dry ingredients, including sugar, in a large bowl. Drain the raisins and reserve liquid. Add oil, raisins, vanilla, and ground flax seed mixture to dry ingredients and mix until combined. Add a little of the reserved water until you get a sticky batter (don't overmix).

Drop by teaspoonfuls, bake for 10 minutes (they should rise and not spread too much, but they'll fall again when you take them out), remove from oven and cool on racks (they're a soft cookie).
..................

They turned out great, if not quite like Grammy's, then yummy in their own right. Now, the holy grail for me is zweiback, which, as Grammy told me this morning, "need butter...you really can't make them without butter." But you know what? I just found a recipe that doesn't use butter, and a really neat tutorial on how to make them, 'cause there would be shame in the room if I tried to do this at the side of Grandma or Grammy ;-)

And I'll end with my favourite part of this cookbook, the part that reminds me of the trinity of weddings, showers, and funerals in church basements, the MCC (Mennonite Central Committee - a relief organisation) sale, of youth Sunday suppers, of family reunions and church picnics.


"Quantity Servings". For 100. Now, when we get a vegan cookbook with that section, that will be a real cookbook. All else is mere child's play ;-)

There are No Pictures of the Cookies...

...because we ate them all in one 24-hour period. And by we I mean me.

The chewy chocolate gingerbread cookies, that is. Sub 1/3 cup oil for the 1/2 cup butter. Bake for 8 minutes so they don't get crispy. They'll be a little flatter than usual, but it doesn't matter. I'm telling you, it doesn't matter.

Heaven.

Vegan Martha

In case anybody missed it, baked goods are a vital part of life around these parts. Most of the time, we go for good. As in, it may not have eggs, or dairy, or even vegan margarine (there's someone, a friend, who is trying to take me over to the dark side with Earth Balance margarine and shortening, and oh boy, does the margarine make a tasty buttercream icing, so yes, I confess to trying it, and yes, it still continues to freak me out and will not be part of our fridge family except for weddings, which I don't see coming around again anytime soon...anyway...)

Where was I? Oh yes, none of the above right? But it still has to make me weak in the knees, or else what's the point? But besides perusing the vegan blogs and reading "Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World" like it's some kind of food bible/porn, the baking daring has remained for others.

But what to do about Martha? Because it's sad, so sad, to leaf through my "Cookie" magazines and know that there's nary a vegan cookie in there and that Martha's arteries, which by now must be made of butter, are so much stronger than mine, which are merely human.

I couldn't take it anymore. Knowing that my ultimate goal was Chewy Chocolate Ginger Cookies (which will be my undoing someday in a spectacular they-found-her-on-an-apartment-rooftop-naked-covered
-in-nothing-but-crumbs-from-a-batch-of-these-cookies kind of way), I started with another recipe, the Classic Oatmeal Cookie recipe, so that if it was a disaster it wouldn't be too hard to bear.

(See those? That's my cookie nirvana. And that's from the Martha website - my cookies never look like that)

Subbed 2/3 cup canola oil for the 1 cup butter. Subbed 2 Tbsp flax meal + 3 Tbsp hot water (mix and let sit a couple minutes until gooey) for every egg. Subbed chocolate chips for whatever they thought would be a good idea to add, obviously. Found that the dough wasn't sticky enough to make cookies (unless packing them into shape like little flat snowballs or something), so instead spread the dough between two pans to make bar cookies. Baked for 18 minutes.

Dear-goodness-on-what-the? Oh, they were good. Very, very good. I am now a brazen substituting queen and no recipe is safe, now (except maybe shortbread).

And yes, I realise that this post could have been written: made cookies. substituted these items. turned out good. ug.

Except that baked goods make me swoon. And the idea of vegan chewy chocolate gingerbread cookies may, in fact, inspire an entire novel...

Mon Petit Chou....

There are basic ways to make food: soup, fry, bake, salad, wrap-it-up....and cabbage is good at all of it. It keeps forever, it can be sweet and hearty or fresh and crisp. So when there's a dearth of fresh greens in the middle of February, we turn to a little slaw to brighten a meal up!

Seedy Slaw (adapted from one of those Company's Coming books...)

4 tsp sugar
6 tsp water
6 tsp oil
6 tsp vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
pinch ground mustard
celery seed to taste (we use about 3/4 tsp)

Mix up, pour over grated cabbage - done! This is particularly good with some walnut oil and plain vinegar or canola oil and rice vinegar.

In passing I mentioned something to Mr. S. about making our own sauerkraut - ha! The look on his face was not encouraging....apparently Nana used to make that at her house when he was a child and the smell.....

A girl can dream though, right? :-)

The Good Stuff

For a former farmgirl, I've got ridiculously sensitive skin. Today we indulged in one of the little routines around here; making lotion. This is adapted from Jackie French's Natural Solutions:

3 parts oil : 1 part beeswax, grated

(I use sunflower oil, as it's high in vitamin E, relatively inexpensive, and I can get it Canadian made. If I'm splurging I add some calendula oil.) Heat the oil and wax in a double boiler (or, um, extra-from-Value-Village-'cause trying-to-wash-wax-doesn't-work-pot balancing precariously over another pot) until wax is melted. Take off heat, add a few drops of essential oil, and slowly whisk in about 1 part water (keep whisking! or else it gets lumpy, and lumpy lotion? booo!) Keep in the fridge.

Done!

It's inexpensive, pure, and, having tried everything else including doctor prescribed? This is the good stuff, baby!

A Little Chocolate for Your Soul

Speaking of chocolate (wasn't I talking about chocolate?), here's the recipe to those birthday chocolate cupcakes:

Preheat oven to 375 F, line muffin tins with paper liners.

• 3 c. flour
• 2 c. sugar
• 1/2 c. cocoa
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 3/4 c. oil
• 2 tsp. vinegar
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 2 c. water

Just throw it all in a bowl and whisk or mix with an electric hand mixer. Fill each muffin cup almost full. I've lost the original instructions, so I bake for about 10 minutes at 375 and then lower the temp to 350 and bake until I smell them and have to come running from another room. The trick is to catch them before that because if they're a little underdone they're wonderfully moist and just a smidgen gooey....mmmmmmmm

I vowed to Safiya that yes, we would have pink icing and sprinkles, but knowing how her body processes artificial colours, I splurged and ordered natural food colouring online and found not-so-offensive-sprinkles at The Big Carrot.

No picture today...I need a clapper for my camera.....

Oh, and today? Today Safiya was so tired at the end of today that she fell asleep standing up, eating an icecream cone......mid-bite

Yummy Evening

Tonight there was the smell of cardamom, coriander, and toasting naan bread in the house. Yum. We keep already made naan from the store in the freezer and just pop it in the toaster when a craving for Indian food hits.

The recipe is based on one from Madhur Jaffrey Indian Cooking, an excellent Indian cookbook in that it has lots of veggie dishes, the pictures are scrumptious, and the recipes are easy to modify if you don't have all the ingredients. Just really really good food - who would have thought that chickpeas and mushrooms go together, but oh, they do - in very good ways...

And then quite possibly the yummiest hardly any fat cookies ever, from The Vegan Chef. I need my chocolate fix, and these are perfect (sorry, couldn't get a good enough picture to do them justice in this light). They're called "Brownie Bites", 'cause they're kind of a cross between a brownie and a cookie - they're made with dried prunes! (can't taste that bit) and the only fat comes from the bit of cocoa power...I'll cheerfully devour these over the next couple of days....

Pink Elephants Make Everyone Happy

Things that are making me happy:

Safiya feeling the couch and in her sweet sing-song voice saying "it's so nice and warm"...


Finishing a little felt hood for her (wool sweaters with hoods are like gold!)...


Discovering that our parquet floors (which I wasn't too crazy about) are exactly 6" square, thus greatly increasing the likelihood that the blanket I'm cutting out will also be square (and now I love the floors, especially since I don't have a right-angle-triangle-thingy)...

Pink pom-poms and packages going out to family and new friends:

And a genius way to make a recipe (I don't know much about Seventh Day Adventists, but man, do they know how to make a loaf - ours was delish! Must get Mr. S to calculate all possible combinations...) thanks to Jennifer at the Vegan Lunch Box, whose blog I haven't read yet, but looks interesting and is a definite will-read!

And, ongoing giddiness about the fact that a got a little shout-out from Toronto Craft Alert and they added my blog to their list of Toronto crafters, just for passing some info on to them...I feel like a cool kid just asked me to dance!

Now to figure out how to add their button to my side-bar...

Weekend Contentment

The best pancakes that I've ever had are the vegan banana pancakes made at The Naam, in Vancouver. A close second are these yummy ones from the cookbook put out by Ruth Tal Brown, owner of fresh by Juice for Life, one of my favourite restaurants (and a vegan one to boot!) here in Toronto.

Here's the recipe, but be warned, it makes an enormous number of pancakes, which is why the picture above is so peaceful...everyone's already done their breakfast! (sorry, my scanner's down and my camera is balking at focusing, but the recipe's worth the blurriness, I think):


Then there's tea:


Herbal tea is a passion of mine, and one of my favourite things to make are tea cozies:

I added the ribbons on the bottom (from Mokuba : 577 Queen Street West) because my aunt and family live by the ocean - Mr. S. thought it was hay (sigh). It's reversible, with felted pink wool on the inside for those I'm-definitely-in-a-pink-kind-of-mood days:



The big project for next week:


A pieced baby blanket for a friend's baby who is having a birthday next weekend, so there's a self-imposed deadline...hmmm....I'll try to turn any anxiety about that into something creative!