Your Vegan Mom

Chloe's Fettucine Alfredo

Freaking Felix, dudes.  So, I missed April, pretty much just that whole glorious strawberry and asparagus filled month - there was a back thing and then a sick thing - but now I feel fantastic.  I walked the kids to school this morning and planted corn and beans in the backyard.  (The man at the nursery says there isn't room in my 18 inch border for the third sister.  So, swiss chard and collards and some nasturtiums and zinnias are going to fill in.  What do you think, garden experts?  Ridiculous plan?)  So, I just now sat down with every intention of catching you up on the stack of recipes and cookbooks that are beginning to teeter... and here's Felix, singing, with 2 1/2-year-old, supposed-to-be-napping gusto, "wild west music...wild west music" at 1:45.  That's 45 minutes into nap time if you're keeping count.  That's 45 minutes into my time.  Now he's found some maracas to accompany...and he's using something as a drum.   

I'm not going to investigate.  I need to use this relative quiet.  Top of the list of books I want to discuss?  Chloe's Kitchen by youngin Chloe Coscarelli.  Have you read it?  Cooked from it?  I'm loving it.  Her fettucine alfredo has become an absolute staple in our house and actually in several other houses nearby.  (I'm a bit evangelical about good recipes.)  The sauce is so simple and decadent-tasting - I love having a jar in the fridge for super fast dinners or instant grown-up lunches.  

That's my lunch up there.  The sauce is smothering slithery fettucine and pan-seered broccoli and tempeh and slivers of garlic.  It's good.  I considered pouring a wine prop but stuck instead to my unphotographed pint of water for afternoon productivity's sake.  I'm not one to let a good wine prop go to waste.  

Paul and I also loved the spot-on Chinese restaurant-style vegetable moo shu.  The homemade Chinese pancakes elevated the dinner to date night cuisine.  The tempeh-based burgers are on the menu for dinner tonight, and then there are 15 pink sticky notes marking other recipes I've been meaning to try like the Artichoke Walnut Pesto Crostini and Jalapeno Cornbread Poppers with Whipped Maple Butter. 

The cookbook is full of of super accessible recipes.  They're easy, full of ingredients you've heard of, look like things you already eat, and have delicious results.  

I totally recommend it.

Fettucine Alfredo
Excerpted from the book Chloe's Kitchen: 125 Easy, Delicious Recipes for Making the Food You Love the Vegan Way by Chloe Coscarelli, published by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.  Copyright © 2012. 
Serves 4 - 6  

• 1 pound fettucine
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup raw cashews or blanched almonds*
• 2 cups water
• 2 teaspoons white miso paste, optional (Except I think this is totally not optional.)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Chopped fresh Italian parsley, for garnish

Bring a pot of heavily salted water to a boil.  Add fettucine and cook according to package directions.  Drain and return to pot.  

Meanwhile, heat oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat.  Add onions and let cook until soft.  Add garlic and let cook a few more minutes.  Remove from heat.

In a blender, combine onions and garlic, cashews, water, miso paste if desired (again, yes, add the miso), lemon juice, salt, and pepper.  Process on high until very smooth, about 2 minutes.

Toss hot pasta with sauce until noodles are evenly coated.  Adjust seasoning to taste.  If sauce gets too thick, add a little water, 1 tablespoon at a time.  Garnish with parsley and serve.  

*If you are not using a high-powered blender, such as a Vitamix, soak cashews or almonds overnight or boil for 10 minutes and drain.  This will soften them and ensure a silky smooth cream.  

Red Sauce

Nana called on Saturday.  From the kitchen I could hear Desmond's side of the conversation:

Not so good.

I have a harlot fever.

A harlot fever.

A harlot fever.

To cut to the chase, he's sick, with Scarlet Fever.  Did you know that people still got scarlet fever (and that my son's brain autofills for the word, harlot)?  Me neither.  So comfort foods (and not writing) have been at the top of our list this week.  There have been tons of action-packed smoothies and miso soup with tofu to slither right down a sore throat.  It turns out that scarlet fever is basically strep throat with a rash.  Who knew?  

I also recently discovered that my first born son's favorite meal is spaghetti with marinara sauce.  Totally dull, I know, but we'll cut him some slack because he's five and he's got the harlot fever.

Here's our current family recipe.  It's super simple and nicely balanced with a big ol' carrot adding a touch of nutritional variety as well as some mild sweetness to offset tart tomatoes.  It's a great basic sauce to smother ravioli or dip a calzone or stir into baked ziti or just put on top of some curly whole grain pasta to please the simple palate of a sick kid.  

Mushroom Stroganoff and Vegan Junk Food

 

Just in time for the resoluteness of New Year's resolutions to wear off, Los Angeles chef and caterer, Lane Gold swoops in with her adorable new cookbook, Vegan Junk Food.  It's jam-packed with corn dogs and cookies and nachos and all sorts of totally not good for you vegan fare.  The recipes that I tried were all rock solid, and quite a few of them are not even all that junky.  We loved the silky, rich mushroom stroganoff and it really would make a lovely date night dinner if you're looking for a last-minute recipe to woo your Valentine.

Simple Creamy Pasta

Did I tell you that on our first date, I invited Paul up to my apartment at three in the morning and made him dinner?  I was so young and naive, but fortunately so was he.

That night, almost 16(!) years ago, in my very first kitchen, I made pasta with bell peppers and tomatoes and fresh mozzarella.  (I didn't ditch the cheese until a couple years later.)

This pasta here is just the sort of dish that you could casually whip up at three in the morning with what you probably have on hand, all while sipping a glass of wine, shooing away your college roommate, and looking like a domestic goddess.

Incidentally, it is also a perfect lunch to prepare for two hungry children under the age of five because you need to go grocery shopping and you're out of bread and this will only take about 3 more minutes than pb&j anyway and you're still wearing your sweaty gym clothes from your visit to the Y fives hours previous.

But also, I was thinking we're all going to need some almost instant dinners in our arsenal as the days get shorter and the back-to-school schedules get more harried.  

This pasta is perfect for all those scenarios.  It's flexible.  I used spinach because it's what I had (and of course it cooks quickly) but you can use whatever vegetable odds and ends you have in the house.  Mushrooms or broccoli or kale would all be delicious.   

Almost Instant Semi-Fancy Pasta
makes: 3 grown-up servings 
takes: about 12 minutes

• 8 ounces whole wheat penne (or half a bag)
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 big handfuls of baby spinach
• pinch of salt
• 2 heaping tablespoons sliced sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil
• 1/3 cup vegan parmesan
• about 1/3 cup pasta water
• black pepper 

About 5 minutes before your pasta is done cooking, heat the olive oil and garlic in a big skillet over medium-low heat.  When the oil is hot and the garlic smells wonderful, add the spinach and a pinch of salt to the pan.  Toss it around with the oil and garlic until wilted.  Add the tomatoes with their oil.  It's probably time to scoop the pasta out of the water and into the pan with the vegetables - if you don't have a big slotted spoon called a spider, well you should probably get one - they're cheap and useful - but if you don't have one, drain your pasta, but reserve about a cup of the pasta water for the sauce.  Add the parmesan to the pan and stir it around to coat the pasta.  Drizzle in enough pasta water to give it a creamy consistency.  Stir.  Taste for salt.  

Serve (grown-up portions) with a few cracks of black pepper.

Notes on kid-friendliness: No, neither of my kids ate the sun-dried tomatoes, but the oil they're packed in gives this dish a nice flavor and the tomatoes are easily avoided and saved for me.  Felix ate around the spinach, sigh, but Desmond ate it.  If I had had more time I would have chopped it finely - that will sometimes work with the 2-year-old.  

Fake Meat (and Side Dish Spaghetti)

 

A couple months ago Desmond brought me an overturned frisbee/platter heaped with plastic farm animals.  "Here Mommy, soy chicken.  Soy piggy."

To my horror, he seems to have a pretty matter-of-fact, three-year-old understanding of what meat is.  He gets it.    

It makes me think of that story in Eating Animals*, where Jonathan Saffron Foer talks about that defining childhood moment when a teenage babysitter asked him, "You know that chicken is chicken, right?" 

I'm not sure how I feel about him having this understanding so early.  It's an interesting side-effect of raising a vegan kid, that he's ironically not-sheltered from the reality of meat.  

He sometimes tests my reaction by adding animal products to his "recipes."  He will slowly list the ingredients in his cake, "sugar...flour... and... cow milk," as he coyly watches my reaction.  I respond, again, "Could you make mine with soy milk, please."  And so soy has become the magic vegan modifier.  When I decline the imaginary animal ingredient, he'll hastily add soy, as if duh, that's what he meant all along.  The word soy turns anything unpalatable into a mouth watering food stuff.  Soy spiders have become a popular ingredient in his cooking.  

And he nows claims that, "Soy chicken is my favorite," despite the fact that this is something that we rarely eat and were making a concerted effort to not even say, with the idea that that sort of terminology would be unnecessarily confusing for a kid that had no experience of chicken as a food.

But as Paul is fond of saying, "Parenthood is where your good intentions go to die."  (Desmond is watching TV while I write this.)  And so when the nice Gardein people offered to send us some of their new fake meat products, I said, heck yeah, my kid will totally eat that.  

 

 And he did, a bit.  I find that these sort of foods are more for the grown-ups with the nostalgic food cravings, than for the nice clean little palates of children.  But we were all fans of the crisp breaded chicken strips ("7 Grain Crispy Tenders" in Gardein parlance) that you bake in the oven.  The thin chick'n scallopini made great sandwiches.  The beefless tips were perfect in a quick beef with broccoli style stir fry one night, and I imagine would be super-satisfying in a hearty winter stew.  The buffalo wings were way too spicy for Desmond, and just not enticing enough for Paul and me.  On the other hand, the grown-ups hogged the marinara and daiya cheese stuffed cutlets to ourselves along with some side dish spaghetti after the kids went to bed.  Ah, tasty, oozy nostalgia.    

And in case you find yourself in possession of some of that fake chicken or just in need of one of those somewhat instant meals that you can pull together when you don't think you have any food in the house, have some -

Side Dish Spaghetti  

This is not the sort of dish that you follow a recipe for.  Let's just talk it through.  

You'll need:

•  spaghetti (This tip recommends a nickel-size serving for your average adult, a dime for a child and a quarter for a big eater.  That's if you're gripping the uncooked spaghetti in the ring formed by your thumb and index finger.  But with practice, you just know.)   
• olive oil or non-dairy butter (About a tablespoon per serving, but just swirl or scoop it in until it looks right.  You can add more or less to your own taste.  Because you're going to add moisture with the starchy pasta water you have wiggle room on how much oil you add.)
• minced garlic (About a clove per serving, more or less depending on how much you like garlic.)
• nutritional yeast (About 2 teaspoons per serving - this will add some body to the sauce as well as a bit of nutritional heft and that mild cheesy flavor.)
• pasta water (about 1/4 cup per serving, but add more if it seems dry.  Conversely, if it's too wet, either add a bit more nutritional yeast, or cook it off.)
• italian parsley (about 2 teaspoons minced per serving - if you don't have this on hand it's not the end of the world.  You can make do without, or maybe you have something else green you can replace it with?  A handful of shredded baby spinach would work.)

While your spaghetti boils, gently heat a swirl of olive oil or a pat or two of butter in a big skillet (or a small one if this is just for you).  Add your garlic and stir it around until it smells delicious.  Don't let it brown.  Use tongs or one of those big claw-like spaghetti spoons to fish the pasta out of the pot and into the garlicky oil. (If your pasta isn't just al dente at the moment that your garlic is fragrant, take the skillet off the stove and wait for the pasta to catch up.)  Scoop some pasta water onto the pasta.  (Add a little bit more than you want in the end because the pasta is still going to absorb a bit of water and some will cook off.)  Add some nutritional yeast and minced Italian parsley and stir it around.  Let the whole thing simmer for a minute until the pasta is toothsome-tender and the flavor bits are clinging to the pasta.  

 

*Did you read it?  I really don't like reading about sad animals, but I really do like good writing and Jonathan Saffron Foer, and I think this book is shockingly good.  He coaxes you in with warm writing and funny stories and then sneaks in all sorts of important information.  It's so well done.  What did you think?