Eggplant and Peppers and Mushrooms, oh my!

A co-opified take on the Thai Crepes in Vegetarian Planet, the book that (8 years ago!) taught me how to cook without meat.

Salad Greens, with the Moosewood carrot dressing again, because it's that good.

Low Carb Whole Wheat Tortillas: spongy, a fair stand in for the crepes, which would have been way too much work to make

Veggie Stir Fry: eggplants and mushrooms and red peppers and green onions with soy sauce, vinegar, and some powdered spices

Baked Salmon: with mustard, soy, and garlic. In the oven at 350 for a half hour. Could have used some sweetness

Stir Fried Tofu: a la Megan Williams. A little greasy, but the best greasy tofu I've seen around here in a while.

Pinto Beans with Onions and just a little five spice powder

Jasmine Rice with Turmeric: 14 cups rice, 17 cups water, double rinsed, coated with just a little oil. Worked just like Christie said it would.

Lychee cupcakes: Not as lycheetastic as I expected, but still quite good. Next week - Coconut lime?

29 Sept 09

Green Salad with Moosewood Japanese Dressing (by Megan Williams- very good)

Sushi Roll Salad from Epicurious, modified for house (brown and white)

(the wasabi dressing was terrible! I can't figure out why; I've made it before successfully.

Tilapia with Pineapple/Orange/Soy Sauce and Ginger

Baked Tofu with same

Nasu Dengaku Soup

Eggplant, chickpeas, veggie broth, miso, peanut butter, soy sauce, mirin, sugar, scallions added at end. Better than I expected.

Minimalist Black Bean Salad, Japanese Variant, Served Warm with Seaweed. This was kind of gross when I just followed the recipe, because I hadn't really cut the onions small enough. So I added a little more soy than was demanded, and simmered it for an extra half hour. It turned into more of a Japanese Variant on Mexican pot beans than on American Bean Salad, but it was quite yummy. Should have mixed the seaweed in, though.

Chard and Spinach with a little soy, rice vinegar, and tahini

Strawberries from a Stranger

22 Sept 09

Green Salad

Turkey

Seitan Chickpea patties

Pineapple cranberry sauce

Mushroom Gravy

Brown Rice

Reheated Bread

Amazing Butternut Squash with Almonds

Chard

Okay Pumpkin Vegan Brownies

15 Sept 09: Pork, pork, pork

Kinda a repeat. Not bad. Poor Emily peeled a lot of garlic, though.

Pork Loin with Orange Juice and Garlic
(covered, as hot as the oven goes, for the whole shift. Surprisingly well cooked)

Seitan with Same
(didn't take as well to the treatment. Had to rescue by chopping and stir frying at 6:50. Yea awesome assistants doing all the clean-up and set-up while I salvaged this!)

Roasted Cauliflower Soup
Bland. We didn't have veggie broth, and I forgot the paprika.

Sauteed Cauliflower Greens
A triumph of non-wastefulness. Sasha honestly almost labeled these incorrectly as "chard" even though she'd had a hand in cooking them. Served with pine nuts; should have had raisins, but we were out.

Chickpeas Romesco from the mighty Veganomicon
Times Ten. All Sasha's doing. Perfect.

Spanish Rice from the mighty Veganomicon
3 qts long grain Brown Rice, 4.5 quarts water, onions, lots of garlic, a little turmeric

Spinach Salad with Garden Cucumbers, Craisins, Blue Cheese, and Pear Dressing
A perfect use for the overripe pears: six of them went in the food processor with some apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and a tiny bit of olive oil. You never would have guessed that they were probably a day short of inedibly rotten; this was actually my favorite part of the meal.

Millenium Cafe's Chocolate Almond Midnight
with all nuts swapped out for peanuts. And Strawberries instead of Raspberries. My second favorite thing.

8 Sept 09: Menu for a transitional season

And by transitional, I mean changing of the guard and not the trees. We've all been iron cheffing this semester while the new kitchen manager has been away. A little stressful, but also fun. I'm pretty proud of what I managed to throw together tonight.

Baked Tilapia
Still don't have the quantity down. Last week, one box of fish was not enough. This week, I made two and less than half was eaten in the first round. I'm going to take this as a positive comment on the rest of the meal. Just salt, pepper, cumin, parsley, and lemon slices, because we had sauces. Thirty minutes in a really hot oven was not quite enough time.

Chickpea Carrot Burgers
Vegetarian Planet baked falafel burgers, executed by Sasha. Multiplied by 8, which was _way_ too much. But super yummy. Left to one person, this is quite a hussle. They need to bake at least forty minutes.

Green Salad
Overall, pretty weak (greens from Friday's produce delivery, carrots leftover from the burgers). But the poppy seed dressing from Chef Jamie's Healthy Kitchen was very good. Roughly equal parts plain soy yogurt and red wine vinegar, plus poppy seeds, s&p, a little sugar, and a big dollup of mustard. Vegan, low fat, and creamy! Yay! Plus feta and nuts.

Tomato Salad
How can tomato salad be bad? This one was great. Nice Romas, chopped pretty small, mixed with green onions and a balsamic dressing by Sasha.

Butternut Squash Soup
Standard. Not the best, because I didn't have the patience last night to wait up for the squash to cook as long as I would have liked. Apparently, this is not where I should be cutting corners.

Dressed Up Rice
Leftover rice with carmelized onioions, French lentils, and baked summer squash. Monday's cooks keep making too much rice, but they are *so* much better at it than I am, so I just reheat theirs in the oven, fixing it up a bit if I have time. Yay leftover rice!

Cucumbers and Mint in House-made yogurt

Lemon Tahini Garlic Sauce

Banana Pudding Brownies
from the Veganomicon. Times 4. Just right.

Heeeere, fishy fishy fishy!

brown rice
Long grain. Perfect. I should ask Margit for the proportions before she leaves!

steamed broccoli
underdone, but not severely

minestrone
Me worrying about vegan protein. I gave Kevin two quarts of beans, a can of tomatoes, and two hours. He made some really good soup, with lots of veggies and roasted garlic. Turns out, we didn't really need it, and it didn't get eaten at dinner because there was so much other stuff.

sauteed spinach
Completely extraneous. I thought that the tofu needed it and was wrong.

salt and pepper five spice tofu
Tofu in the wok with even parts salt, pepper, ginger, and sugar, and slightly less five spice powder. This was very easy and reasonably good, but not as good as last week's baked tofu.

mahi mahi en papillote
Gorgeous huge sides of fish, not quite thawed when I took them out. We baked them on a cookie sheet at 500 degrees for an hour, with many thin rounds of lemon and a little bit of olive oil. Aluminum foil over the whole sheet, not fish-by-fish. Just barely done on time. This was naturally wonderful food that I managed to not screw up in any way. The bits that didn't fit on the primary sheet got thrown in another oven with the excess bacon for the tart. These were especially good, in part because we didn't put them out, so you had to discover them.

saffron and red pepper aioli
I didn't even try this. I gave the recipe to Margit, and I'm pretty sure it came out perfectly, but it wasn't what I expected and the fish looked so good on its own...

apple potato and fennel tart with blood sausage and bacon (deux porcs a deux pommes!)
Store bought puff pastry, covered in yogurt mixed with a ton of minced red onion and a little sour cream. Then oven crisped bacon. Then thinly sliced fennel. Then boiled and chopped potatoes, and pan fried apples. Baked at about 400 degrees for an hour and topped with blood sausage. This would have been better if 1) I had been more consistent about seasoning each layer, instead of counting on it coming out in the end, 2) There had been more apples, 3) I had fried the apples for the meat tart in bacon fat, instead of frying all the apples together and using olive oil to keep them veggie, and 4) There had been a final drizzling of the yogurt mixture on top. Also I should have rotated the pans halfway through the cooking time. NB. 4 boxes of puff pastry are exactly enough for 2 of our big sheets.

strawberry pie with homemade orange flower marshmallows
All Margit, ahead of time. From Paris Sweets. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and tastier than it looked. (I've made this before myself; my marshmallows were nicer, but her crust would destroy mine, and her pastry cream was better by a hair. And the marshmallows are just dressing, so she wins on this one, by a lot.)

A bit of catch-up

French Menu #2

Pounti Auvergnant (Clotilde's Edible Adventures, page 97)
Tons of leftovers. I liked this, but the house did not. Do not make again!

Vegan Cassoulet with biscuits (Veganomicon page 172)
Not nearly as good as when I made a small test batch on my own. I'd do this again, but I'd make sure the beans were really well cooked, and that there were plenty of vegetables to go around, especially the leeks. The flavors are mild enough that this can't carry extra beans the way that some soups can. Also, the biscuits took much longer to cook than expected and were good-not-great. Probably not worth doing next time. Maybe on the side?

Beautiful Salad
Beautiful

Amazing Yogurt Almond Cake with Mangoes and Strawberries
Next time, do Clotilde's yogurt cake, or the almond cake from Vegetarian Planet. The Dorrie Greenspan French yogurt cake is a lot more work for very little extra yumminess. The mango puree from Clotilde's Edible Adventures, however, was extraordinary. I believe that Rebecca cut down (cut out?) the sugar, and pureed all the mango instead of half.

Asparagus with yogurt sauce
Asparagus: always good. Yogurt Sauce: usually good. Today, not so much.



Post-Special Dinner "light" menu
(after Judie's in Amherst, in response to Margit's Flying Biscuit meal)

Popovers from the Bread Bible
excellent day of, too buttery as leftovers.

Apple Butter
More of a chunky, heavily spiced apple sauce. But very, very good. Worked with everything, not just popovers.

asparagus
Chez Panisse Vegetables "asparagus with crispy ginger." The asparagus ended up a little under cooked, and there wasn't quite enough ginger for the whole preparation to be worthwhile. We would have been better off roasting or grilling it.

Sweet Potato Fries
Kevin Chan. Perfect. Matchstick thin, and cooked on a preheated pan with almost no oil. Too much food, but perfect.

Cold Curried Chicken
Wok fried chicken slices, cooled and mixed with yogurt + curry powder + dried ginger + honey. Better than Judie's

Ginger Tofu
From Vegetarian Cooking for everyone. Like coming home to an old friend, but better, because I love the bulk tofu so much.

Lettuce and Cucumbers
To put the protein on. I heart cucumbers.

Banana-Coconut-Cranberry Chutney and Roasted Peanuts
Cranberries cooked in a very small amount of fresh orange juice until they burst. Enough raisins to soak up the juice. Some toasted coconut, and as many fresh banana slices as I had the patience to provide. And Roasted Peanuts.

Quinoa and chickpeas with lemon and tahini
From 101cookbooks. Good, healthy, not amazing. Not much got eaten night of, but the leftovers seem to have just barely disappeared over the week.

Soupe de Chou-Fleur, Curcuma et Noisette
Actually, almonds, because noisettes coutent trop chers. And this was for the best. The soup turned out to be a waste of my time and the house's almonds. I thought that it was excellent, but I can only eat so much, and apparently no one in the house shares my love of cauliflowers and turmeric. Maybe a third of it made it all the way through the week. This was not helped by the fact that it was labeled simply "tree nuts" in the fridge, though. Once I relabeled it "Vegan Cauliflower Soup with North African Spices and Almonds," it did start going.

St. Pat's

Spinach, Garden Lettuce, and Apples with Lemon-Honey Dressing
This dressing was amazing. Unfortunately, I don't remember how I made it, except that it had lemon juice and honey in it.

Colcannon (vegan and not)
Burnt. My fault.

Soda Bread (non vegan, with raisins)
I think that my favorite soda bread would be a hybrid. Yes on both whole wheat and butter. Yes also to raisins. Light on the sugar. This was the white flour, high sugar, butter, and raisins version from the Bread Bible. If I had to go to one extreme, I'd pick this one. But a little more bran and a little less sweet would be perfect.

Vegan Irish Baby with Turnip and Beets in an Asian Glaze
The baby was chewy and delicious. The Asian glaze was also delicious, but a little out of place.

Beef and Guinness Stew
Tragic waste of cow. This is one of my favorite recipes, but in the rush of the cooking shift, the stew got cooked at too high a temperature, and the meat was horrible and chewy. Next time, don't plan a beef stew unless it can start early! (Note: Margit did exactly this a couple of weeks later, and the result was an amazing falling apart almost rendang-like beef and beer and carrot dish. With roasted cauliflower.)

Lentils with Mustard Dressing
Standard. Good. I'd be happy if we always had this in the fridge.

Guinness Cake (vegan and not)
Margit, ahead of time. The recipe did not scale well to the large pans, and the vegan version didn't hold together too well. But it all tasted great. Especially the crumbly vegan disaster.

More than I could chew

10 march 2009 (Purim)

After three weeks of assisting and excited about the holiday, I was a little over ambitious this week. In particular, this menu suggested three night-before tasks. Any one of them would have been manageable, but all together they added about four extra hours onto the shift, and ate up all of Monday evening.

Challah
Dairy Free from the Bread Bible, times four, with an extra egg or two (oops). I made the dough the evening before. It was very wet, and I was a little concerned that it would be difficult to form the next day, but the night spent in the fridge did wonders for it. Margit made four gorgeous braids, and they all got demolished.

Salad with Preserved Lemon Dressing
Either the preserved lemons weren't ready, or I should have been more careful about just using the peel, but the dressing was awful. I spent way too much time trying to save it. In the end, it was alright but not great, so I threw together a batch of the Krug family's dressing and served both on the side.

Sasouf (Bulgur and Chickpeas with Herbs and Lemon)
This was really nice. Easy to make, and the leftovers went quickly.

Butternut Squash Soup
Roasting the squash the night before made this soup really easy day-of. But processing all the squash myself the night before was an enormous pain. The soup was very simple and came out well. Onions softened in earth balance, pre-baked squash, and vegan broth simmered together for most of the shift. I pureed it with the immersion blender, and then added just a tiny bit of coconut milk and salt and pepper before serving it. This was a first attempt at copying Lauren's recipe. I think that hers had bay and rosemary.

Roast Lamb with Gravy
Alistair took care of this. I can't remember what my plan was for the lamb, but he didn't like it. I wasn't attached to it, so I let him take over.

Chicken, Olives, Onions, and Raisins in White Wine

Roast Eggplant Slices

Yogurt Sauce
My favorite. House yogurt, pomegranate molasses, tahini, and garlic. It was perfect, but no one seems to love this as much as I do. There was a ton left over. I used myself as an extra condiment with almost every meal for the next week.

Roasted Red Peppers and Onions

Hamantaschen
I made the dough for this the night before as well, and let Margit actually form the cookies. We had poppy seed and jam fillings; no chocolate, as we ran out of time. I would definitely make these again.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2008/03/the_hamantaschen_project.html

Tuesday February 17th

Margit in charge, Kevin and I assisting

Fresh Garden Lettuce with Soy Milk Mustard Dressing
Roast Lamb with Apple/Prune Sauce, from epicurious, very good
Scandinavian Split Pea Soup
Vegan Soda Bread
Brussels Sprouts, shredded with butter and pecans
Pears Poached in White Wine

Best Meal Ever

Thanks to last weekend's wonderful Yosemite trip, I've been a little overwhelmed this week and haven't gotten around to posting Tuesday's dinner until now. And once again, I don't have time to flesh it out; V-day dinner starts in half an hour. However, it was really, really good, so I want to at least get the list down before I forget the dishes.

Roasted Salmon
With Asianish Glaze: Two parts mustard, One part soy sauce, a big glug of olive oil, and as much garlic as we had time to chop. Roasted at 500 for maybe 25 minutes? (Thank you Christie! That fish was maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in our kitchen!)

Lentilles au vin (encore, this time with champignons)
I carefully followed a recipe from Local Flavors by Deborah Madison, but the basic idea is this: get a lot of dried porcini mushrooms, maybe a cup and a half. Let them soak in boiling water for at least a half hour. While that is happening, saute some carrots and onions and celery and garlic in olive oil, then add some (four bottles of) wine. Simmer for a long time. Add the mushroom soaking liquid and some (maybe two cups) of soy sauce. Simmer some more, then strain, and mix with some (a gallon of) French lentils, and some chopped brown button mushrooms you've been roasting for the last half hour. This will be way to much food, so maybe next time cut by a quarter.

Carrot Salad (encore, this time with raisins and sesame seeds)
I don't always like raisins in my carrot salad, but I guess the house does. The leftovers didn't last half as long as last time.

Beet and Tomato Ragout with Goat Cheese Souffles
A favorite dinner party recipe from back when I was a grown up. It scaled remarkably well.

Chard and Beet Greens
Apparently emblematic of my cooking. Fortunately, pretty tasty.

Reheated Day Old Acme Bread
We had a lot of rolls this week, so I threw them in a metal bowl with a bit of water in the bottom and put them in a 500 degree oven for ten minutes. This worked ever better than I expected. We should do this every week that we have rolls, because I don't think we ever get through all the bread.

Vegan Chocolate Raspberry Cake
From the Veganomicon; very delicious. Someone asked "What kind of black magic makes this cake vegan?" The answer: Smucker's Strawberry Jam.

Indian Setsubun

Tuesday, February 3rd

Rescued Chickpeas
The chickpeas leftovers from Thursday were not getting eaten. I rescued them by substituting them, spinach and all, into a channa masala recipe. This would have worked well if I had been more careful with the spices; I accidentally poured in some cardamom at one point when I thought I was adding cumin. It was a bit much. The channa masala and spinach combo was great, though. Tasty (if you imagined away the extra cardamom) and really beautiful.

Rice With Onions
And cashews on the side. Should have had cranberries, but I forgot to put them out. This was also slightly overspiced, but would have been a great dish if I had been just a little more conservative. Next time: puree lots of garlic, ginger, and chilies in the food processor, fry briefly in a lot of olive oil, add the rice and water with just two or three cinnamon sticks and a tiny bit of turmeric and cumin, and mix in caramelized onions at the end. One gallon of short grain brown rice needs somewhere strictly between twenty two and thirty two cups of water.

Chicken Kebabs
From Julie Sahni's Savoring India, with dried cilantro instead of fresh, and three whole lemons in the marinade. Margit grilled these outside, and they were awesome. One whole box of frozen boneless skinless breasts was just about a perfect quantity.

Brussels Sprouts with Spicy Cornmeal
From the Veganomicon. Not as interesting as I expected it to be, but still very good. Rebecca did this one start to finish. This included trimming an enormous box of itty bitty sprouts.

Carrot Soup
Epicurious recipe. Okay, but not worth making again. Again, the spices were off. This time, they had been carefully measured, and then some fraction got charred and had to be replaced, but it wasn't clear how large a fraction had been lost... Also, important lesson: do not throw huge chunks of ginger into a giant pot soup that is going to be pureed with the immersion blender. This may well work in a tiny pot, but it will not work for the house. No matter how homogeneous you try to make the soup, you will fail, and you will miss some ginger chunks, and you will burn yourself. Chunks of veggies are okay.

Raita
Grated cucumber, dried peppermint, and Zeph's yogurt.

Sweet Coconut Green Tea Black Bean Soup
Small nod to Setsubun. Green tea, coconut milk, agave syrup, black beans, dried fruit. Too sweet for me, but most of it was eaten.

Too much, too much...

Wednesday. 29 January

So, apparently, 20 lbs of pork loin is a lot. Like, twice as much as we needed.

Also, if a 3 lb roast takes 1 hour, 2 and a half hours at the same temperature is NOT a good estimate for 20 lbs. However, 2 hours at the normal temperature plus half an hour at "as hot as the oven will go" seems to work pretty well. If you're into charring.

Menu:

Orange and Honey Pork Loin Roast
Orange juice, Honey, Garlic, salt, pepper, pork, and heat. Lots of heat. 350 for two hours in a braising dish, and then 500 on a baking tray for a half hour. A better plan might have been to start with the high temperature and then turn it down. Or maybe 400ish covered for the whole time. The meat was actually cooked perfectly tonight, but the outside was black.

Chickpeas with Garlic and Spinach
Boring! I thought that I added a ton of garlic, but this seemed tasteless to me. Maybe it just needed salt. Or lemon juice. Next time, I would do this with fresh spinach, and pay a little more attention to the dish overall. It could have been good.

Veggie Paella
Onions, Red Peppers, Sweet Potatoes, Fennel, Green Beans, Artichoke Hearts, Rice, and Saffron. Good, not great. next time: cut the artichokes, add some mushrooms and more spices. I almost lost half of this. Must remember that one of the big woks has some thin spots and can get burny!

Bulgur with Vegetables and Paella Spices
A little overkill, perhaps. I was worried that the paella would not be enough. This was false.

Roast Cauliflower
Four trays full, five hundred degrees for just over an hour. Perfect. Thanks, Harold!

Sauteed Cauliflower Greens
Should have been chopped much smaller, and maybe mixed in with the chickpeas.

Tapioca Pudding
Excellent, even with the spinach spicing. Sarah B followed a recipe that she found on the internet, but cut the sugar by half. The only change I'd make next time would be to make more of it. Sarah started with 3 quarts of milk, and there wasn't quite enough.

Go, Sarah, Go!

Wednesday, January 28th

I came home today to find Sarah P and Benoit in the kitchen waiting for a head cook. At about 4:10, Benoit checked the sign up sheet and discovered that no one had taken the shift. So the two assistant cooks instantly rose to the task in front of them, rummaging around the kitchen, looking for protein sources and unclaimed veggies, but seemed like everything they picked out was reserved for my meal tomorrow.

It's hard enough cooking for the house when you're down a set of hands, but they were hit by surprise and without a plan (no defrosted meat! no soaking beans!), and additionally had my greedy kitchen whining to deal with (hands off those peppers!), so I stuck around for a little while to help them plan. Specifically, I started some Massaman curry, in the hopes that a rich coconut milk based Thai curry would stretch out the small bag of chicken that Benoit found, and make the whole meal seem more substantial. Sarah took on the head chef role and made some awesome lentils for the vegetarians, and quinoa, and stir fried some bok choy. The total quantity of food was a little low (you can only chop so much with 2/3 of a team), but overall I was quite impressed with her meal. Very well done, for such a last minute affair, and quite substantial as well.

The Massaman curry was a liberally modified recipe from somewhere on the internet. Equal parts coconut milk and veggie broth (two big cans each), lots of cumin and coriander, quite a bit of cinnamon and cardamom, a little nutmeg and cloves, and a tiny bit of tumeric for color. Soy sauce. Brown sugar. Most of the work went into making an impromptu curry paste: roughly chopped red onions, peeled and coarsely chopped ginger, peeled whole garlic, a few chopped chilies, and 3 quartered limes sauteed until the onions looked brownish, then thrown in the food processor and turned to mush. Perhaps not the most nuanced approach, but the whole limes were a solid co-opy replacement for both lemongrass and lime leaves.

I left Sarah with a big pot of curry and nothing in it. She and Benoit split the curry into two pots, chopped up a million sweet potatoes and a bunch of onions and threw them into both, then processed and fried a bag of chicken thighs and added them to one of the pots. They had roasted peanuts and dried coconut on the side, as well as a bottle of fish sauce. (The fish sauce really should have gone into the curry, at least the chicken one, but fish sauce is very controversial, so to the side it went). Green onions and cilantro would have been nice, but again: there's only so much you can do with two cooks. I don't even know if we had cilantro.

The lentils were tamarind lentils from the Veganomicon. I suggested them because I thought that the tamarind would go well with the curry. It's not clear if the pairing really worked, but the lentils themselves were super delicious. For all the complaints I hear about too many lentils, these didn't even last through dinner. Maybe it's just my lentils people don't like. Sarah's were a huge success.

Along with the lentils and curry, they made quinoa and bok choy. Either this quinoa was somehow different than our usual quinoa, or Sarah is a better quinoa washer than I am, but it seemed extra nutty and totally lacking in the usual quinoa hint o' bitterness. That did go extremely well with the curry. If I ever make Thai curry again for the house, I plan to forgo the usual brown rice. and make some quinoa. It was perfect.

And hopefully, I'll have three cooks, so that there will be time to chop more bok choy, because one wok full is definitely not enough!

First Tuesday

Tuesday, 1/20: Inauguration Theme (with Margit and Kevin again)

(Not the best meal ever, no particularly impressive dishes, and too much food overall, but the theme worked reasonably well.)

Spinach Salad with Massachusetts Crimson Berry Dressing
Box o'spinach. Dressing = cranberries, red onions, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and olive oil in the food processor. Toasted sesame seeds (unnecessary).

Windy City Chili, meat on the side
CBS claimed this as an Obama potluck recipe. Beans, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, veggie broth, parsley, oregano, turmeric, cumin, chili powder, salt, red wine vinegar. Meat = turkey and hot dogs, with the same seasoning.

Indonesian Fried Brown Rice with Peas and Tamarind Roasted Tofu
Both from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Served with scallions, cilantro, and chili roasted peanuts

Kansas Vegan Cornbread
Cook's Illustrated recipe with flaxseed. Good, but more work and not better than the maple/soy recipezaar standard.

Kenyan Collard Greens with Tomatoes
Collards, Onions, Salt, Pepper, Tomatoes, Veggie Broth, Lemon Juice

Hawaiian Banana Coconut Vegan Brownies
Modified Vegan with a Vengeance Pudding Brownies: never make these again! Nearly impossible to stop eating.

The Week of Unending Cooking

Sunday, 1-18 (with Margit and Allistair)

Coq et Lentilles Au Vin
Bacon cooked in oven ahead of shift, then red onions and mushrooms roasted in the fat (another pan done with olive oil for the vegetarians). Chicken sliced and sauteed with salt and pepper, lentils cooked in veggie broth, wine sauce - three bottles Charles Shaw, three small cans tomato paste, veggie broth, parsley, marjoram, and thyme- also made alone, then everything mixed together in two big baking dishes, covered, and left in oven to meld. Tasted kind of boring, so I cooked four heads of minced garlic in some olive oil and split it between the two dishes around 6:30. I added the actual bacon added to chicken dish right before serving.

White Beans with Sage
A year and a half in the co-op kitchen, and I still don't have the hang of beans. These seemed hard forever, and then suddenly totally fell apart, and ended up very sludgy. And yet delicious. I mixed in a ton of powdered sage, and a little lemon juice.

Carrot Salad
Grated carrots, A lot of lemon juice, a little honey, salt, pepper, and fresh parsley

Brown Rice with Dried Parsley and Frozen Corn
Almost as easy as plain rice, but so much tastier. And a lot more likely to get eaten as leftovers.

Green Beans with Caramelized Onions and Balsamic Vinegar
Green Beans tipped and tailed and steamed. Onions cut very small and cooked as long as we had time for. Vinegar added to onions pretty late, onions and green beans tossed together in hot wok right before serving.

Cranberry Birthday Brioche with Orange Flower Syrup
Margit's baby, and extremely well done. From Paris Sweets.

Monday, 1-19 (Margit in charge, Kevin Chan assisting)

Naked Spinach Salad with Last Night's Carrots
Yay using leftovers!

Amazing Stir Fry (Broccoli/Cauliflower/Carrots/Magic?)
from one of the Alice Waters books

Roasted Garlic and Pumpkin Soup
Yay using the pumpkin!

Vegan Sweet Potato Dumplings with Sage Butter and Bechamel
This is the only dish that I worked on, having stepped in to cover part of a blown shift. These were supposed to the gnocchi, also from the Alice Waters book, but a bunch of substitutions had been made resulting in a good tasting but extremely wet dough. So we went for dumplings, simmered in veggie broth and then baked in at 450 degrees until the end of the shift because even after boiling they were still falling apart. For something that kept seeming like it might just be a disaster, these were amazingly good. Actually, even if they hadn't seemed like they were going to be a disaster, I would have been impressed. I made a brown butter sage sauce to go on them, and because I was a little worried the brown butter would also be a disaster, I threw together a quick bechamel at the same time, following the recipe from the Minimalist vegetarian book. This is the first time I've made a cream sauce for the house that's come out well. I don't know what I did differently, or what I could have screwed up all the other times, because it seemed pretty easy tonight.

Apple Brown Betty