Raw Week, RawR!

Ani Phyo-style goji coconut almond cookies

I'm almost done my raw week.  It's been easy in a lot of ways (the food is just as delicious as any "normal" food), and in other ways a bit of a challenge (detox symptoms, having to throw out lots of food that spoiled unexpectedly fast, the whole nut soaking thing, the whole raw food extremism thing)...

It's actually going to be bittersweet easing back into regular food, I think.  I don't feel any huge inclination towards it at the moment, even though I know that someone as flighty and spacey as me really does flourish better on the standard vegan fare.  But that said... I should get onto the food of this week, more or less a meal by meal replay of all the lego-bright dishes I got to have the time of my life constructing.

Okay, so this is technically a pre-raw warm-up (haha, warm up, is that a pun?).  I made a carrot/tomato/miso soup to see how I'd feel about it all, thick with pumpkin seeds and bowl-licking good, and so....

I jumped in headfirst.  Would you look at that?  It looks like a deep-sea fish it's so pretty.  A lot of green, but worth it.  The sprouted chickpea hummous in those wraps kept me going for snack times for the first few days, and the minty cucumber dressing from Vegan World Fusion doubled as a salad topper and a soup, before spoiling way too fast as these enzymic dishes are wont to do.  Alas, alas!

Avocado was also a life-saver, as I never felt warmer or more satisfied than after a meal that incorporated it.  I mashed this one up with rice vinegar, soy sauce and ginger, and made showy crunchy (astoundingly good) sushi rolls.  And a fruit salad with loquat and date syrup beside it.

Breakfast of day 2: the incarnation of my oatmeal habit!

Raw oats ground up in a spice grinder, with a heavy pinch of ground flaxseed, half a mashed banana, berries and lots of salt and cinnamon, left to soak overnight.  I'm keeping this one!  I'd been getting tired of regular oatmeal and this is perfect for summer and very laid back.  You have to choose fairly soft fruit for best results, but again - peaches, berries, tropical things - all available right now!  It's very nutty and satisfying to have for breakfast.

Lunch day 2: Zucchini bites with spicy hummous, a salad of shredded carrot, red pepper, soaked walnuts and red wine vinegar (yum!!), and broccoli tossed with cucumber dressing.

Dinner that night was my first green smoothie.  I will admit I thought it the concept very strange at first, at least before I took my first sip.  Is it totally an unabashedly weird that I love the taste of green things in my smoothie now?  It adds a neat texture and a resonant kind of garden note that makes it more of a meal to me.  Especially wonderful with banana and pomegranate juice, I might add.

I'm skipping breakfast reports because they're all variations on the raw oat groat thing, but...

Lunch day 3: A curried miso carrot dressing on spinach with avocado chunks and dried pineapple pieces - ZOMG.  Genius.  And some cucumber dressing in a bowl trying to be soup as I attempt to slurp it all up before it goes bad.  

Dinner 3: My attempt at flatbread without a dehydrator resulted in (of course) a lot of prematurely fuzzy food, but there was a small grace period where it was semi-firm enough to eat as bread and I made little sandwiches with homemade sumac tahini cheese, and some green beans tossed with organic stone-ground mustard and lemon.

Dinner day 4: pizza!

(lunch seems to be missing from the record)

The pizza is topped with sage-y sundried tomato marinara, green pepper, onions, pineapple, almond cheese, and artichoke hearts.

Lunch day 5: Possibly in the top 5 sandwiches I've ever eaten, is this Haiku Wrap from Juliano's contribution to The Complete Book of Raw Food.  It has avocado mashed with garlic, ginger and lemon topped with wakame, mustard, pickle, burdock, bell pepper, onion, corn and shoyu - and it's a magical, magical combination.  (carrot slaw with sprouted peanuts keeping the sammiches upright on either side).

Dinner 5: Another one of those raw standbys I never understood (like the green smoothie), was the zucchini pasta thing, but you know what?  It's pasta-like, and not salad-like as I thought it would be!  Really good, actually, enough to repeat it later.  And the things that look like eggs are crunchy turnip slices topped with nut cheese.

Lunch 6: Cabbage burrito-wraps with cumin and chili sunflower pate inside (along with corn and tomatoes and green onions and things).  With a side of Pringle lookalikes (but really it's delicious turnip) and nut cheese again for my new favourite take on nachos.  Soaking the slices in cold water gives them the perfect chip shape and makes them sweeter, too!

And that's not to say there were no sweets!  I made some tahini-geranium cookies, that I could upload but they look pretty much like little brown discs.  The brownies are gorgeous, though!  I ground up some sprouted and dried buckwheat into flour and combined it with dates, ground almonds, walnuts, carob powder, salt and vanilla and proceeded to nom NOM NOM them up because they were so amazing!!  I highly recommend the buckwheat flour thing, I have a container of the sprouts in my freezer right now and it gives things a more cake-like texture than the usual wodgy raw dessert texture.

And here's a plate full of desserts I took to a raw potluck last night.  Clockwise from the top left are salty sunflower seed cookies, then those buckwheat brownies with a banana-fudge frosting, then coconut-cashew-agave crusted pear tarts with gojis on top, and finally like orange & clove oatmeal raisin cookies!  So much fun, and so easy to just make a few servings of anything, and experiment all over the place!  I definitely got into the habit of whizzing up just a single cookie for after lunch sometimes when I needed something for my sweet tooth.

Potluck food itself was possibly the BEST vegan thing any non-vegan has ever made for when I came to dinner.  It was a sundried tomato-cashew romesco sauce over marinated eggplant and it was mindblowingly good.  I think it was from a book by the same people who did Raw Food/Real World, if you wanted to try it, and you might want to add extra orange juice like my friend did and eat every indulgence-soaked aubergine triangle with additional gusto for having done so.  :)

Day 7....

....   it's day 7?  It's the end of the week?

Do you realize I didn't realize that until about halfway through writing this post and counting up the dates?  Oh my goodness, I suppose that means I'm done and I should ground myself now.  Part of me wants to keep going, and in fact... *goes off to buy bananas for a few minutes*

* a few minutes later *

Well... on the way down the stairs to the market, oh what do I smell but buttery wafts of rice and faint hints of curry? and whoa-p, there goes MY 100% raw convinction!  That, and charred hot dogs on the street as I walked... and I'd like to feel like myself again, I think. :D

A few things I noticed, though, to sum up the week...

* it doesn't necessarily have to be expensive at all to eat raw.  I stuck mostly to almonds and sunflower seeds for nut protein, which can be relatively cheap.  And I didn't indulge in the condiments like nama shoyu and special apple cider vinegar or anything.  If anything it might have been cheaper due to me not buying coffee all the time.  OH YEAH I QUIT COFFEE FOR A WEEK.  !  Craziness.

* nut soaking liquid is super mucilagous and gross, and I'll probably soak most things now if I think of it beforehand.

* white wine was okay to drink, as was whiskey (although I'm pretty used to whiskey).  Red wine on the other hand, made me terribly achey for a whole day after drinking it, and then the ache turned into a kinda "detox ache" that I've still got in my calves when I bend over too far.  

* a couple drying racks set in front of a sunny window was my dehydrator, and it worked pretty well for cookies and buckwheat sprouts.  Terrible for bread though, and I wouldn't even try crackers.  Oh yeah, and sun tea!  Tasty stuff!  And not even that long to make, maybe a few hours in the sun for amber-steeped liquid.

* I caved once, for a bunch of artichokes I got for free, but wouldn't you?  All succulent and dipped in lime & olive oil???  I'd never tried artichokes before and it was my chance right there, so I don't feel bad.  And they are, by the way, not nearly as hard to make and eat as advertised and mysteriously sweet and I ate the stems too, YUM.

* Guess that's it!  And I'm so making pizza, man, like, soon.

R-r-r-r-r-r-andom. All out of order!

I don't particularly feel like sorting my pictures right now, there is just TOO MANY of them.  So, yes, here is the first, what a delight of puffy strawberry muffs in a basket!  Hannah's recipe is perfect for basic muffins, in fact I memorized it and freestyled a batch of chocolate-raspberry versions later while I was groggy and in my dad's kitchen at some ungodly hour of the night after breaking in un-announced and he didn't even know I was in town!  I raided the cupboards (after cleaning the place spotless, of course) and managed to at least find enough basic baking supplies to make them, lurvly brunette muffins, which will have a photo later in this post, because (of course) as I said - completely out of order.  Why not, right?

This is a banana-date scone from Veganomicon.  Somehow I thought it would be more decadent, being from the Vcon, but granted the whole introduction does mention it's healthy qualities explicitly, so I should have been duly warned.  Don't you love the background?  This was to fuel some tarot play time with a teatime friend who lets me bake for her (very nice of her).

I love Nigella, it's no secret to anyone who's met me (or at least heard her show playing from my bedroom whenever I need some serious calming and indulgence for the soul).  But strangely I've made .. well, none of her recipes so far.  That needed to be remedied, which I did with her moroccan-ish eggplant rolls with cinnamon, capers and bulgur ... YUM!!  Like what I imagine most of her food to taste like, it is soft, nuanced, silky and doesn't hit you over the head with electric or sour notes, so ultimately delicious, but I added more lemon. ;)

Pretty grill marks. :)

Ancient photo !!!!!

I made nachos with no nooch in the house.  I canvased the city (briefly) looking for a single serving of nacho chips just so I could have this to satisfy an immediate post-school craving.  It was everything awesome and more.  I made the cheese with cashews, oats, miso and hot chiles and it served the purpose mightily.

This is a pancake I made at my sister's house, using her mystery bag of mystery organic flour (we believe it was likely spelt), as well as some honey-like natural sugar, lots of coconut, some cashews wedged in there... maple syrup.  Other things.  It was so very very punk, as their larder was BARE and we still managed to have a sizzling merry breakfast on the hob in time for a decent 11 am-ish kind of hour.  I'd just read this book -- 

Which was a very anarchic ancient kind of (NON vegetarian) underground poetry/cookbook/highly vague anti-establishment montage of stuff, with many chapters waxing poetic about misty green mornings cooking rashers of bacon and potatoes and I was inspired at least to follow that part of the sentiment.  Much of this book was a little too dated and silly for me, but I liked the non-political jumbo.

As promised, a chocolate-raspberry mini-muff in a cup with Hagan-Daaz raspberry sherbert I found like a special present in my dad's deep freeze.  Hurray!  Went together like a dream, and though that iced stuff is sweeet, it is definitely top quality and I was definitely proud to call this lunch.

Like cocoa soldiers.  Did you know it took me about 27 minutes and the help of a disgruntled 13-year old to help me find where they had counter-intuitively stashed all their muffin cups?  (for the record: in the highest right invisible spot in the kitchen, behind the curry powder, above the plastic bags).  

There's more photo backlog, but this is probably browser-crashing enough with all the stuff in this post already, plus this random plate is a nice thematic end to a r-r-r-r-r-andom post.  This was my favourite dinner by SO much last week.  Probably the large luscious chunks of drippy tropical fruit had something to do with it, plus the arcade-style cacaphony of flavours all sharing one oddly harmonious restaurant-square plate.  There's papaya salsa, asian-dressed cabbage, an eggplant roll that didn't fit in the container I put in the freezer, and the BEST ASPECT OF ALL --- peanut butter and jam on rusks.  Perfection.

ps. I swear I'm not on drugs or even feeling all that strange.  I just rode a mechanical bull, though, (seriously!) and I'm mighty jazzed about that!

The 9 Days of Bagelry

It's kind of torturous, living precisely between the two most famous bagel shops in Canada, the smell just doughy, sweet, redolent down the avenues whenever I go shopping... I grew up on these things, fresh montreal-style bagels (chewier than most) hot out of paper bags at a moment's whim.  They're cheap and carby and never need much more than a bit of buttery spread or cream cheese to achieve bread nirvana and OH how I've missed them.  So... I thought it about time to take matters into my own hands and just make some!  I guess I figured it would be difficult, but this is actually one of the easiest bread recipes I've made in some time.  I also couldn't leave well enough alone in the creative noodling department (of course!) and made 9 individual flavours, kneading in little special things into each little dough blob.  I ran out of blobs before I ran out of ideas, but these were so easy to make that when I'm not sick of bagels anymore I can make some again super quick. ;)  

I also found it pretty necessary to make some sort of cream cheese to go with them -- it's almost half the deal, at least for my own nostalgia.  The slightly sour tang and creaminess on sweet and seedy bread.... zomg.  Thankfully I remembered about Bryanna Clark Grogan's Boursin-style spread, because it hit the spot really perfectly, AND it didn't call for nutritional yeast at all which I think would have messed with what should be a mild-flavoured thing.  It's just cashews and EB and miso rocking this out, and soooooo yummy.  

haha, oh CURRY BAGEL.  You were variant no. 2 and I was still such a novice at the "rise & boil" method that I forgot to oil the baking sheet you rose on!  Sooooo wonky looking and the crumb was kinda off since I had to scrap you all out of symmetrical wack, BUT still really good.  Curry powder and cumin seeds in this one.

Sunflower seed and golden B.C. syrup (to kind of take the place of honey).  Expectedly so crisp and fluffy inside, I ate it with loads of Boursin and extra syrup.  Oh, and I packed it for lunch to eat after a 2-hour lecture class and it was still crunchy-fresh even by then!

Garlic, olive oil, herbs.  Too much salt, but still pretty nice.  Oh!  And I should take a moment to mention that I boiled these in water with a bit of sugar to approximate the honey water that the real bagelries use.  I stopped doing that to the last few because I found it too sweet... but it's worth experimenting with, as a method.

Green chile chopped up inside, on a sandwich with VeganDad's lunch slices (A++ on this flavour).  Subtle fruity heat!

Onion, with herbs on top, on another sandwich because I pretty much died and went to lunch heaven with the first one and had to repeat it.

Another A++ flavour -- Sundried tomato and red chile flakes!  Here you can see it bathing in (sugar-free) water this time.

And I'm impatient, I really am.  If I were different I may have waited until I actually baked the last two flavours to make this post.  But I figured that Isa's Brunch Book bagels would be taking the blogs by storm pretty soon and I should post now while I can!  Plus, seeing them in fossil-form is pretty important to the whole process.  I didn't mention, but I froze them just after the second rise, right before they were to be boiled.  Then all I had to do was pull one out 45 minutes before I wanted to make it, let it defrost and puff a bit, then boil and bake and eat!  I'm glad my oven is so small or I'd feel bad about gas, but it really is small, and I'd have no idea what to do with more than one at a time, really.  Anyway... It's also really nice to know I have a few stored away.  I saved the weirdest one and the best one for last -- 1 goji matcha, and 1 cinnamon raisin, and I'm gonna have that cinnamon raisin drowned in EB and it will be glorious, I just know it, with hot hot hot tea on the side and a crossword if I can get my hands on it and one more long-time craving finally sated at the hands of homemade how-to-do. :)

Seriously. !!

(some thoughts for later: chocolate chunk, lavender, zaa'tar spiced, mixed olive, walnut and spice, annatto-yellow, green peppercorn, corn & coriander, cranberry & pepper, flax!)

simple and good

This was the result of a hankering for an old-fashioned face-stuffy burger, and did it ever deliver on that. I made some crusty kaiser rolls, some straightforward black bean burgers (with rye flour and tortilla chips instead of white flour and breadcrumbs), put a bit of mayo and pepper on it and it was absolute perfection.

Oh yeah, and pomegranate salsa is like salsa with pink jewels in among the spiciness, and it really really works.

I also tried soygurt for the first time last week (in order to make that harissa yogurt swirl for the fava soup) and I loooooooove it. I didn't eat cheese as an omni, I ate YOGURT, and loads of it, so I don't know why it took me this long to grab the blue tub and add it to everything. This almond butter-lime dressing was so easy and yummy!

And speaking of soy... the other day a half block of firm tofu practically jumped into my blender and went "eeeeeeh! add sugar and lemon to meeeee!". And who was I to argue? I baked this one, and added a pinch of nutritional yeast which sounds weird but gives it depth (just a pinch). The texture was perfect too... it sliced off into tart little "wodges" which in my odd mind is the exact word for an ideal slice of cheesecake. I wish I could live off of this stuff!
(oh and it was about 4" across. I love mini tins!)

Finally I made Juineve's creamy eggplant and roasted pepper soup with zaatar crackers. I doctored it a bit, roasting the vegetables and added tomatoes and a splash of sherry, and wished I had made more, it was so luscious. Thumbs up!

I'll be back soon

I'm going camping in a few days. Camping at the Sumkidz Om festival for a week of community-building discussions, burlesque workshops, art jams, fire spinning, gigantic Ontarian skeeters, the smell of fresh woods, and hopefully spending a good chunk of my time in the free open-air volunteer kitchen that they have every year. Open-air and vegan, even. There's a special meal planned for the full moon on wednesday, and the annual 1000-garlic clove firey Shanger Sauce for friday! Not to mention the actual solstice night meal... I'm pretty excited. The food runs entirely on donations by festival goers, so amidst mountains of oranges and potatoes there are always some crazy treasures like chia seeds and galangal and ume vinegar that get used in the most tasty of ways. The salads alone are a touch of exquisite!

I even made some homemade larabars to take with me for tent-munching, aren't they adorable? :D

I can't wait to get out of this city and get rid of a few of my less-useful ideas about the world to make a fresh clean start in the second half of the year. And I'll for certain have copious feast photos and a few more culinary tricks up my sleeve when I get back around the 24th!

One last thing I have to post about is this beautiful burrito picnic we had a few nights ago to say goodbye to the city. Except for the chips, everything was homemade, even the whole wheat flax tortillas. The salsa was piquant and freshilicious, there was creamy cheesy cashew dip, the best guacamole I've ever had, refried black beans I would give my eye-teeth to get the recipe for, rice, lettuce, cilantro, lime, and little purple plums for dessert. Like kings we ate, and played guitar, and watched the park get soft and dusky to the sound of a raining fountain, bellies full of cumin and feeling no lack for anything, at least on that night.

Back in ten days!

when in doubt, make midget cake

I had the worst day yesterday -- looks like I'm stuck paying for a course on ancient Aegean culture and whatnot, even if I drop it. They said it was art history, the trolls! It's about freaking architecture. Well, I *did* learn what a 'lentil' is... (not the food kind, but the kind that holds up treasuries and apollonian temples). I'm going to drop it and go to the lectures anyway because it's interesting but I have an average to think about.

So yeah, that brought on a severe chocolate cake craving. And not one of those shrink-wrapped Skinni Mini vegan squishy fudgey squares they sell at the grocery store check-outs EVERYWHERE here, no I wanted a wedge, a slice, a piece of cake.

Luckily I find fractioning recipes therapeutic in the extreme.

I also recently made some cashew & agar cheese, or at least attempted to achieve that grate-able holy grail of yeasty goodness.

Not so pretty, and alas...

...not so firm.

Absolutely, 100% scrumptious though - maybe even better than that aged cheddar crock-cheese my mom used to eat while I wrinkled my nose. This also marks my first vegan melty-cheese experience and it did bring on giddy stupid munching, I will not lie. I had a griller with tomatoes and pickles just like I used to survive off of, glee!!

EDIT: due to popular interest, more talk about cheese! I adapted a recipe from this site here.

What I ended up doing:

3/4 cup water
2 1/2 tbsp agar flakes
1/4 cup raw cashew pieces
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 1/2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp tahini
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp paprika
1/8 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp salt

"Place the water and agar-agar flakes in a small
saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and
simmer for 5 minutes, stirring often. Place in a
blender with the remaining ingredients, and process
until completely smooth.

Pour immediately into a lightly oiled, 3-cup [1 cup, really]
rectangular mold, loaf or other rectangular container.
Cover and chill for several hours or overnight. To
serve, turn out of the mold and slice. Store leftovers
in the refrigerator."

Next time I'll probably make a full recipe (I went through this block fast!) and add another tablespoon or 2 of agar flakes. Also, I would suspect that the moistness of the tomatoes played a crucial role in the meltyness.

And speaking of lunchables, I must tip my hat to Amy of a A Stranger in the Alps for her cardamom-vanilla-pear muffin recipe. If a muffin were a person, this one would wear cotton gloves and ride a skinny black bicycle through moors and stuff (okay, I've been reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando and I've got immortal british elegance on the brain, but THEY WERE SO AWESOME). The carrot soup was good, but a victim of my blended soup kitchen-sink philosophy and a bit too much curry powder. Anyway...

I also feasted last week on crispy crunchy stuffed tofu (from Cake Maker to the Stars), and sweet & sour green beans (from the More Than Twigs & Berries zine), and holy novelty tofu batman! I think I was channeling kitchen genius fairies cause I don't know why down-home sweet potato tofu chews got made with chinese-ish beans, but they went together like a dream, like sweet and gooey with crunchy and nutty... yeah. Quite good.

So in conclusion I am bad at memorizing dates and couldn't tell a Kore from a Kouros if you paid me, but hey, I can make up for those things. With tofu. Rarrr!