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.