Vegan Vermonter

This is sort of an intro-to-fried-rice recipe. Fried rice is a gigantic family of dishes, with different versions all around the world. The vast majority of these are pretty inexpensive and quick to prepare, which means they get cooked often and modified often. You can pretty much use any produce, fresh or frozen, raw or cooked. You can even use leftover rice. This particular recipe is an intentionally simplified version, so that I can focus on the theory and technique. For veggies I’ve just used my two stir fry favorites, napa cabbage and mushrooms, but you can use anything. In future posts I’ll explore some more exotic flavor combinations.

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Tomato sauce is the foundation of a huge selection of Italian dishes, so there are as many variations as there are folks who cook Italian food. Once you discount the gimmicky super simple recipes, the rest sort of separate into two separate philosophies. The first is the gourmet approach, which puts emphasis on subtle relationships between fresh ingredients and is careful not to overcook the tomatoes. I think these sauces do best when they are the center of the dish. The other philosophy is the homemade slowcooked sauce, and that’s what this recipe is. The intent here is to concentrate the flavor of your ingredients, yielding a thicker sauce that’s great to support other dishes. This is the kind of sauce I go for if I’m making pizza, lasagne, baked eggplant, etc…

This recipe takes a little while to cook (2-3 hours usually), but it’s really low involvement. You spend a few minutes at the start getting it going, and then just come back every once in a while to stir. If that still sounds like a long time to spend, you can get more for your troubles by making a lot. The quantities scale up really easily, so you can make a big batch and keep it in the fridge (for a couple of weeks) or freezer (for a couple of months).

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Tofu scrambles are pretty weird. I’m just gonna be up front about that. Another thing that we need to get out of the way is the word scramble…. I didn’t name this dish, and if I did, I wouldn’t have used the word scramble because immediately people think of eggs when they hear scramble. Granted, it looks a little like scrambled eggs, and it’s good for breakfast, and it’s good with ketchup, but that’s where the similarities end. (whether or not ketchup is good with scrambled eggs is not up for debate, nor is it “regional”, it’s just true.) Lots of times when people first try a tofu scramble, their reaction is something like “this doesn’t really taste like eggs”. Recently I even got a “this would be great with eggs in it”. Ok. This is a weird dish whose cooking method and flavor have nothing to do with scrambled eggs. Disclaimers sorted, moving on!

I love how popular this dish has become! The vegan community discovered nutritional yeast and suddenly everywhere there are tofu scrambles. I’ve had it from nice restaurants, quick buffets, frozen food, “just add tofu” mix from a box, plus a few dozen varieties from my own kitchen. As you might expect, the ones I’ve been cooking lately are a mix of theories from all the strange iterations I’ve had. Most of the time this dish ends up being a really casual, slow cooked affair. This is the first of many different takes that I’ll eventually blog about, and my primary motivation this time was just to cook a lot of hearty food. The nutritional yeast matches well with basic American staple flavors, so I used corn and pasta this time to get a bunch of food without too much fuss. Spinach isn’t exactly necessary in this dish, but at the same time I can’t ever recall having it without it. Also I just love spinach.  : )

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This is totally my new favorite recipe! I have very little experience with baking and sweets and that whole universe, so muffins this good are doubly exciting to me. It’s also nice for a change to cook something that doesn’t even pretend to be healthy. A bit about how this began: Over the winter, my cousin Erin made for me a batch of zucchini muffins, and I was amazed how good they were for vegan pastry… all the vegan baking recipes I’d tried had always come out dry, or heavy, or required some weird egg replacer or something. Months later, I finally got my hands on Erin’s awesome recipe and couldn’t resist tinkering.  : )    The first thing I tried was a pumpkin spice version, and it was delicious! (I’ll have to post that one on here someday) The recipe held up really well to all my adjustments, so I decided to keep exploring… lots of baking is exact chemistry, and doesn’t tolerate such nonsense. Years ago, before I was vegan, I had some chocolate chip banana bread that my friend Scott’s mom made for everyone, and it blew my mind. It seemed like such an unlikely combination of flavors, but they go perfectly together! That recipe of course was not vegan, or even close, and I had no idea how to go about converting it. The muffin recipe on the other hand turned out to be an excellent way to get chocolate and banana together, and lots of other flavors too as it turns out. This won’t be the last weird combination to come out of this recipe.  : )

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This is my take on an Italian classic. First of all, what can be said about fresh, raw tomato and basil? Pretty much any excuse you can find to get these guys in a dish together will be delicious! When I went shopping to make this awesome snack, sitting right next to the fresh basil at the market was some beautiful fresh marjoram, so I decided to throw some of that in as well. These three summery flavors sit atop fat slices of crusty Ciabatta that have been toasted up with homemade garlic oil.

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This garlic infused olive oil can be prepared and then kept in the fridge, ready to add flavor to all kinds of different recipes. Use it in grilled sandwiches, salad dressings, pasta dishes, on pizza crusts, drizzled over casseroles, the possibilities are endless! In my next post I’ll use some to make a quick bruschetta.   : )

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Summer is finally here! We had some hot weather this week and it really made me want to cook something spicy and fresh. All of the local herbs and aromatics are starting to show up at the market, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity for a green curry. This is a coconut milk curry, flavored by a freshly ground herb and spice paste. When you’re shopping for your herbs, there are a few classics to look out for, but this recipe is really open to anything fresh and green. I picked out the best looking stuff at the market and ended up with basil, coriander, lemongrass, scallion, and jalapeno. Like most Thai curries, this one also has ginger, garlic, coriander seed, and black pepper. I’ve also added a little fennel seed to bring out the bright fresh flavor of the greens. For me this dish is all about the sauce, so I like to use steamed jasmine rice, and vegetables with a subtle flavor that won’t overwhelm the herbs. This time I went with napa cabbage, tofu, potatoes, and cashews. Many times I’ll roast my potatoes to concentrate their flavor, but I actually boiled them in this recipe to keep them a little quieter. This curry gets even more summery at plating time with the addition of cucumber and lime!

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A Chinese take-out favorite, and it doesn’t even take long to make! This is an extremely savory dish, whose flavor is built by double black soy sauce, sesame oil, fermented bean paste, and high heat cooking. Once you’ve made it a couple times, it’s totally possible to put together in a half hour, which is a sharp contrast to most of what I cook.   : )

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This is a classic Indian dish that I make using mostly authentic methods.  Actual masters of Indian cooking will probably disagree with my interpretation because I’ve made a bunch of little changes here and there over the years.  Saag Aloo literally translated is just “Spinach Potato”, but it’s the complex curry sauce that gives this dish its character.  It starts with whole spices fried in oil, followed by fresh aromatics and home made curry powder.  Golden raisins and coriander leaf balance the spiciness of the sauce.

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