Even More Buddha Bowls!

You already know I’ve been very enthusiastic about Buddha bowls lately, right? Exhibit A; Exhibit B. Well, here’s Exhibit C, just to give you more inspiration to concoct your own. The toppings are incredibly easy to make:

Beets: I steam them in the Instant Pot for eight minutes and then cut into bite-sized pieces.

Carrots and Brussels Sprouts: This time I halved the sprouts, cut the carrots into matchsticks, and rubbed both vegetables with a little bit of mojo de ajo that I had lying around from having made Mexican food earlier in the week. I then placed them on a silpat mat on a baking sheet and sent them into the oven, at 350 degrees, for about 25 minutes.

Zucchini in Tomato Sauce: I had a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce lying around from a nice ravioli dinner yesterday. I thinly sliced up two large zucchini and sauteed them in the sauce until tender.

Chickpeas: I could’ve gotten fancy with this and baked them with spices, but this time I simply spooned cooked chickpeas with some fresh ground black pepper.

In the center I have a few spoonfuls of kimchi.

And the whole thing sits atop a layer of quinoa cooked in vegetable broth.

Which is another illustration of the principle: if there’s an abundance of colorful, wholesome ingredients, you don’t have to be particularly fancy with the preparation of each topping – just place them nicely in the bowl and you’ll have a fabulous lunch.

Grilled Vegetable Casserole

The answer to the question “what do vegans eat on the 4th of July?” is obvious: grilled vegetables of all kinds! But what do vegans eat on the 5th of July?

We had a bunch of grilled vegetables from yesterday in the fridge, and today, with the help of some fresh tomato sauce and some herbs, they turned into a nice, filling casserole. Feel free to improvise with whatever you have in your fridge.

1/2 cup grilled corn kernels
1/2 cup grilled potato
1/2 cup grilled cauliflower
4 grilled mushrooms
2 large grilled onion slices
6 grilled Brussels sprouts
1/2 cup tomato sauce
oregano, marjoram, rosemary, garlic to taste

Cut up vegetables into small cubes, and in a baking dish, toss with tomato sauce. Sprinkle herbs. Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 mins or until the top begins to be golden.

Gazpacho

gazpacho

Tonight I’m having a nice friend over, so I took a few minutes in the morning to make gazpacho according to the New York Times recipe. I used eight large vine tomatoes, two Persian cucumbers, half a red onion, and one Poblano pepper, and drizzled in olive oil. This is one recipe in which the oil makes a big difference–it emulsifies everything into a heavenly orange-hued soup.

I’m also serving sauteed long green beans in garlic-ginger-soy sauce, a green salad, and easy portobello pizzettas.

Collard Wraps

Today we’re grilling vegetables in the yard! It’s always a fun thing, and our selection this time includes cauliflower, onions, mushrooms, potatoes, and brussels sprouts. On the side, we’ll be eating these guys: collard wraps stuffed with a lovely light salad.

Wrapping with a leaf is a skill, but you get better at it the more you do it, and collard leaves are excellent for this purpose because they are sturdy and, at the same time, pliable. You trim their stem and steam them lightly and they’re ready to go. It’s a nice, hand-held way to serve a salad, and might induce salad-phobic people to indulge.

Wraps
4 collard leaves

Salad
1 package kelp noodles
1/2 a regular cucumber or 1 Persian cucumber (preferred)
4-5 radishes
2 tbsp chopped green onions
big handful cilantro
1 small avocado or 1/2 big one

Dressing
juice from half a lemon
1 tbsp peanut butter
1 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp liquid smoke
chili powder to taste

First, mix all dressing ingredients and set aside to combine.

Then, place kelp noodles in bowl and cover with boiling water. Let stand for a few moments.

While the noodles are rehydrating, thinly slice all vegetables. Drain noodles and mix with vegetables. Pour dressing on top and gently mix to combine.

With a small, sharp knife, gently trim the stem off the collard leaves, without tearing the leaf itself. Place trimmed leaves in a steaming basket (or in your Instant Pot) and steam for a few minutes. Remove from heat source and rinse leaves gently with cold water.

Place a collard leaf on a cutting board, with the stem side toward you.. Place a few hefty spoonfuls of salad at the center of the leaf. Fold the stem side over the salad, away from you, and the opposite end toward you. Then, fold the sides as well. Flip the wrap with the seam side pointing down and give it a gentle squeeze. Proceed until all leaves and salad are used. Place on a tray, seam side down.

Vegan Pupusas

This blog’s subtitle refers to our neighborhood, Mission Terrace, in which you’ll find lots of wonderful Mexican and Salvadorean restaurants–and more than a few that serve food from both cuisines. If you have masa on hand, you can make both tortillas and their Mexican cousin, pupusas–a nice, fluffy pancake stuffed with nice filling. Our neighbors on Mission Street make theirs with dairy cheese, so I decided to try my hand at my own version and stuff mine with cashew cheese. I made two varieties: cheese and beans and cheese and loroco (a green bud sold at Mexican supermarkets and grocery stores.) Both came out delicious.

My technique is still pretty shoddy, but even the failures are tasty. For a real expert’s guide, I give you Lupita.

How to make the vegan fillings? I used my soft cashew cheese and mixed some with beans and some with loroco, in lieu of the fillings Lupita uses. Note that it’s easiest to maintain the consistency of the pupusa if the masa and the filling have roughly the same consistency. Buen Provecho!

More Buddha Bowls!

Here’s another variation on the Buddha Bowl theme! This one has, as its base, some leftover brown rice, stir-fried with spinach and mushroom. On top is a romanesco broccoli, accompanied by beets, sweet potato, cucumbers, radishes, two types of kimchi, and some sliced Sproutofu (a very easy way to eat tofu when you don’t have energy to marinate and bake anything.)

I really encourage you to experiment–really, all it takes is to use cooked, raw, and fermented vegetables, with a starch and a source of protein in a creative and colorful way.

Make Thine Own Tortillas!

I’m back from two weeks of travel, the first of which was spent in beautiful Mexico City. What a treat! Art everywhere, delightful and interesting people, lots to see, and lots to eat! It’s extremely easy to eat vegan in Mexico City. There are several vegan businesses: Gatorta, a vegan taco and torta stand at the corner of Puebla and Insurgentes, and Viko, a vegan taqueria-susheria in the Chapultepec underpass serving delicious soy horchata. I also had excellent vegan dishes with friends at Paramo on Avenida Yucatan – they made us ceviche from hearts of palm, tacos with roasted mushrooms, and a beautiful lentil salad.

But everywhere you go, even if the menu appears meat-heavy, just ask them for vegetables and they’ll prepare them for you. I had tacos with rajas (roasted poblano pepper strips), nopales (cooked cactus fruit) and champiniones (cooked mushrooms), with heaping bowls of frijoles de olla (cooked beans served in their fragrant pot liquor.) The cheese-and-cream-on-tacos thing is, thankfully, not a feature of authentic Mexican cuisine, at least where I went, so everything was vegan and delicious.

My main takeaway from all this is that homemade tortillas are way better than purchased ones. So, when I bought groceries this morning at Casa Lucaz I picked up a fresh bag of masa. I rolled a little ball, about an inch and a half in diameter, and placed it in my new cast iron tortilla press, between two layers of parchment paper. It turned out a perfect disc, and I then popped it on a hot cast-iron pan for about a minute on one side, then 30 seconds on the other. It came out perfect and terrific – fluffy, flexible, full of corn flavor – and was a great base for a tofu and greens taco.

Making my own tortillas is absolutely worthwhile from the flavor perspective and also quick and easy, so I’m never looking back – it’s all about the press and the pan from now on. I’m planning a nice Mexican mini-feast this evening using my new Talavera dishes – check out the pictures. In the blue dish: two pico-de-gallo salads (we like these!), some fresh spinach, guacamole, and tomatillo hot sauce. In the red dish: baked winter squash, Rancho Gordo beans, sauteed mushrooms with onion and a drop of whiskey, and sauteed kale in orange juice. Not all of these are traditional, of course–and you’ll note that the rajas and nopales are missing–but they will be so tasty with the fresh tortillas!

Vegan Cottage Cheese

Cottage cheese somehow tasted best in Israel. As kids, we all grew up eating it for breakfast, on a slice of simple bread or with an omelette, or for dinner with some vegetables on the side. To this day, few meals are as Israeli to me as some cottage cheese with a sliced tomato. Thanks to the one and only Noa Shalev and her amazing vegan cheese course (which you absolutely must take), we now have fresh cottage cheese at home, made from tofu and a few other ingredients! Preparation can be very simple or multi-step, depending on whether you rely on homemade yogurt and mayo or purchased ones, but since I always have a batch of homemade yogurt and had Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo in the fridge, it was a cinch. This works best with pink Himalayan salt and a touch of lemon juice.

Buddha Bowls

Are buddha bowls all the rage now or have they gone out of fashion? I have no idea, but I do see articles about them all over the place. The nice thing about them is that they constitute a varied, colorful, tasty lunch, made of ingredients that are easy to eat as they are or cook quickly and simply. Moreover, if you keep a bunch of toppings in the fridge, it’s easy to mix things up during the week and make variations on the theme.

In the photo you see our toppings from this afternoon: in the left plate, a simple tomato-basil salad, chopped cucumbers and radishes, sliced avocado, and two kinds of pickles–beets and root kimchi. In the right plate, simply baked potatoes and sweet potatoes (which I then cubed and stored in the fridge), zucchini slices and snap peas (which I lightly stir-fried on a dry pan with some garlic powder until the zucchini slices became pleasantly charred) and a bunch of chard that I chopped up and cooked up for five minutes with juice from one lemon.

Add to that some cooked quinoa and some tofu bacon or baked chickpeas and you’re in business. It occurs to me that this is an excellent hosting dish, too–just hand people bowls (maybe with the quinoa already layered at the bottom) and ask them to help themselves to whatever toppings they choose.

Shavuot

Check out our awesome Shavuot table! We just finished hosting our Shavuot party, which is apparently not a huge deal in the United States. I suspect there are two reasons: its lack of proximity to a heavily commercialized Christian holiday (this, after all, is how Hanukkah became such a big deal) and its strong ties to the land (it’s a harvest holiday.) In kibbutzim and moshavim there’s often a nice parade of first fruits of the year (including the babies born that year) and elsewhere in the country people celebrate with a dairy meal. Why dairy? Apparently, the word חלב״ chalav” (milk), in Jewish numerology, adds up to 40, and Moses was on Mount Sinai 40 days.

I took the challenge seriously and put together a holiday party for our friends featuring a whole array of vegan cheeses, which I learned how to make in Noa Shalev’s awesome vegan cheese course (you should take it, so cough up the 350 NIS and do it.) A lot of improvisation went into this – my cheese flavors are original inventions, save for the spirulina one, and my raw cashew cheesecakes are variations on the lemon-lavender cake I made a couple of weeks ago following Noa’s recipe. This time I made mango-basil cake and strawberry-thyme cake. All I did was replace the flavoring. I glanced at one of my new books, The Vegetarian Flavor Bible, to match fruit and herbs, but I find that I already have a pretty good gut feeling about combinations.

Anyway, from bottom to top: green salad with avocado, nectarines, and strawberries, dressed in quince vinegar from Nan at Vermont Quince; spiralized salad of cucumber, carrot, beet, and radish, dressed in a mix of good mustard and Nan’s quince salsa; cauliflower ceviche; “chevre” cheeseballs flavored with nigella, chimichurri, za’atar, zchug, and ras-el-hanout; leek-mushroom quiche with chickpea base; vegan lasagna with tofu ricotta: four hard cheeses, flavored with spirulina, turmeric-cumin, miso, and garlic-zchug; breads and crackers; and the aforementioned raw cakes.

A good time was had by all!