Your Vegan Mom

A Couple Items of Business

As I continue to fine tune this site, I would like to draw your attention to a couple of features that I've recently added. If you scroll down on the bottom right, you'll find a little box to help you search both the content of this site and also all the sites on my blogroll as well as the sites on their blogrolls. Barbara Jo, I imagine you could find quinoa recipes to your heart's content here. The vegans, they'll eat the quinoa. Once you get a chance to use this new search widget, let me know what you think of it.

Also, there's a list of vegan-friendly restaurants in Los Angeles down there on the right as well. If you run the cursor over the name of the establishment you'll find some basic information: how I rate it, whether it's vegan or vegetarian or vegan-friendly, its address and phone number. If you click on the name you'll be redirected to either my mention of the restaurant on this site or if I have yet to write about it, then some other website where you'll get more information.

Now let's discuss my rating system. I had this huge rubric based on 6 different factors to help me give you an objective picture of local restaurants. But I have at least temporarily abandoned that systematic approach in the name of timeliness. I just wanted to get this list up there. So for now anyway, you get my incredibly subjective ratings. They mean something like this:

*****This place is outstanding in every way.
****I love this place.
***I like it.
**I don't like it.
*I really, really don't like it.

As you can imagine, you won't be seeing many 5s, and you really won't be seeing many 1s or 2s either. If it's someplace I REALLY don't like, I'll probably just leave it off the list. However, there are some vegetarian establishments that I don't feel I can ignore and get points just for being vegetarian, but just, unfortunately, aren't good. Orean in Pasadena comes to mind. Remember, I said this is incredibly subjective. Though I AM right, you're welcome to disagree. On the topic of Orean, apart from simply finding the food incredibly disappointing in the all-important deliciousness category, Hot Knives recently published an expose on the ingredients in their supposed vegan hot dogs. This is why you will see any restaurant that relies on pre-packaged fake meat products listed as vegetarian as opposed to vegan. It seems there is constantly an internet piece blowing the lid off some proclaimed vegan establishment whose fake chicken contains egg whites or whose soy cheese contains casein. (A quick side note on soy cheese: if it melts in that stringy kind of way, yes it is too good to be true, if it melts in that nacho cheese sauce kind of way, it's vegan...will somebody, please, come up with a fabulous cheese alternative? P.S. I haven't tried Sheese. Better than FYH? For now I'm sticking with Avocado when I want something rich in my sandwich, don't try it in mac n' cheese though.)

Back to the subject at hand, my opinion is based on the aforementioned deliciousness factor, the comfort of the establishment, the helpfulness of the staff, the vegan-friendliness, the affordability, and the uniqueness of the restaurant. Any questions?

Procrastinator's Grilled Tofu

Did you know that you don't have to drain your tofu for hours and marinate it overnight in order to get satisfying grilled tofu? Oh it's a fine technique and still probably the best way to really infuse your tofu with flavor, but if you haven't planned ahead, you can still get delicious grilled tofu on the dinner table with very little effort. You're gonna need -

a grill pan
a block of tofu (the firmer the better, but softer tofu will just take longer to cook)
about a cup of bbq sauce
basting brush or teaspoon if you don't have a brush
cooking spray

The idea here is that you're going to cook the tofu over low heat for a long time while you periodically baste it with sauce. In this way, the moisture will gradually dry up (replacing the draining-on-paper-towels-under-a-pot-weighted-down-with-a-bag-of-rice step). And the sauce will have time to soak in. I put the tofu on the grill first thing while I ready the remainder of the meal, in this case while I made mac n' cheese and salad. It can cook on medium-low for a good long time. Any time you walk past it, baste it again with the undiluted (You don't want to be adding water back to the tofu.) sauce. Flip it every once and a while so that it's cooking evenly and getting basted on both sides for maximum flavor absorption. I flip it after every couple of bastes and probably wind up flipping it about 4 times in all. When the texture of the tofu has gotten firmer, when it has nice grill marks and carmelizy saucy bits, it's done.

Dessert

And that summery salad left us plenty of room for a tarte tatin aux prunes for dessert.

Here are the sliced plums releasing their juices to hot butter and sugar. I could have watched this all day. Unfortunately I had other things to do.

This might not surprise you, what with those plums in that there pan all willy-nilly, but the final product was just not picture pretty. Pretty freakin' delicious? Yes, but not real photogenic.

So I'll leave you with one last pre-tart plum and a bbq reminder.

P.S. Paul would like to note that it wasn't really butter. It was Earth Balance. Also you should know, the recipe calls for 8 1/2 pounds of plums for a 10 inch tart. That's just got to be a mistake. I used 8 plums because that's what we had left. The recipe says to cut the plums in fourths. Sometimes you ought to actually listen to the recipe, this is one of those times. I cut them in eigths and I think that decision contributed to the unappealing visual quality. The plums really didn't hold up at all. They oozed into carmelized plum deliciousness which tastes good but doesn't look nice.

And the swooning has officially ended...

we used the last of our windfall from the Evans Family Farm.

We had a very, very light dinner so that we would have lots of room for dessert.

Summer Salad
1 large zucchini, roasted
2 ears corn, roasted
1 bell pepper, charred and skin removed
1 c. cooked pinquito beans
2 Tbsp. finely chopped basil
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 serrano chili, charred and skin removed
drizzle of flax seed oil
salt and pepper

So good. I put the corn under the broiler for three minutes. That is officially my new method of cooking corn. In my family there is passion in corn-cooking, it is the stuff of fierce loyalties, heated discussion, and mystical incantation. Don't shuck it. Soak it in seawater. Let it steam. Today, I feel lighter. I can leave all that advice behind, because I have discovered the one true best way to cook corn. Broil, three minutes. That's it. Oh, and also, start with really good corn. The sweet roasted flavor of the corn and zucchini worked so nicely with the lemon and basil. Here's a picture of the zucchini after it came out of the oven (I put it under the broiler on low for 6 minutes a side) before I chopped it up for the salad.

The H.P.E. Bounty

Tonight we used the cucumbers for a little salad to accompany yakiseitan and broiled eggplant.

Japanese Cucumber Salad
2 cucumbers
1/4 c. seasoned rice vinegar
1 tsp. toasted sesame oil
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. crushed red pepper
1 tsp. black sesame seeds

Peel, seed, and slice cucumber. Toss with the vinegar, oil, salt, and chili. Chill while you make dinner, about half an hour. Sprinkle with sesame seeds before serving.

Yakiseitan (obviously inspired by that recipe that I have vowed never to mention again, and of course by this L.A. Times Article.)
dry ingredients:
1 c. wheat gluten flour
2 Tbsp. nutritional yeast
2 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. powdered ginger

wet ingredients:
3/4 - 1 c. water
2 Tbsp. tahini
1 tsp. maple syrup
1 Tbsp. tamari

marinade:
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
1/4 c. mirin
1/4 c. sake

thread with:
green onions

Preheat oven to 350 and spray a 9x13 inch baking pan with cooking spray. Whisk together dry ingredients in a medium sized bowl. In a small bowl, whisk together wet ingredients, using just 3/4 c water, you can add more at the end if your dough is too dry. Cut wet into dry with a rubber spatula, and then use your hands to knead for about a minute. At this point the dough should be a wet cohesive mass. You can knead in a little more water now if the dough seems too dry. Spread the glob out onto the baking pan, patting and stretching to spread it out over most of the bottom of the pan. Bake for 25 minutes.

Remove from the oven and let cool for a minute before you transfer it to a cutting board. Tear the seitan up into bite size chunks and toss them into the marinade. The hot seitan will very quickly absorb the marinade, so once you have tossed all the pieces in the sake mixture you are ready to skewer. Thread bamboo skewers with alternating pieces of seitan and green onion. Grill over a hot flame, for about a minute on each side.

The seitan looks a little dry? It wasn't. The cucumber and eggplant look delicious? They were. Stay tuned to see what becomes of the rest of that beautiful bounty.