Mini Pita Sliders

We had lovely guests over the weekend, and yesterday I made a Mexican brunch for them that included short-grain brown rice and Rancho Gordo pinto beans. This morning, as an airport sendoff, I used some of the leftover grains and beans to make them travel sandwiches, and there was enough to make a tasty breakfast for us, too. 

Serves four:

1 cup brown rice, cooked
1 cup pinto beans, cooked
1/2 white onion
1 tsp olive oil
4-5 drops liquid smoke
1 tsp coconut aminos
1 tsp nutritional yeast
2 whole-wheat pitas
2 tbsp tahini or vegenaise
vegetables and herbs according to taste (I used some of yesterday’s pico de gallo and cilantro)

Chop onion finely and brown in olive oil. As the onion is browning, in a mixing bowl, mash together brown rice and beans. Add onions to rice and bean mixture. Add liquid smoke, aminos, and nutritional yeast.

Make eight small balls out of the mixture and place in hot pan. Flatten the balls with wooden spoon. Brown 5 minutes, then flip and brown other side for 5 minutes.

Cut each pita into quarters. Coat insides with tahini. Place a burger in each quarter, then garnish with vegetables and herbs.

Bon Appetit!

Spring Stir-Fry

This simple and delicate dish combines many spring flavors and uses vegetables from our CSA and rosemary from our garden.

6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 tbsp grated ginger
1 tbsp safflower oil
3 green onion stalks, thinly sliced
1 pound green beans, with the ends trimmed
3 summer squashes, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
2 cups chickpeas, cooked
3 twigs rosemary
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp lemony pepper
2/3 cup white wine

Heat up safflower oil in a wok. Add garlic, ginger, and green onions, and simmer a bit. Then, add green beans, squashes, and chick peas, and stir fry for a few minutes. add herbs and wine, cover wok, and cook for 10-15 mins, or until wine is absorbed and beans are cooked but perky.

Spring Food Sharing!

Today, the Vernal Equinox, turned also to be the Grand Day of Spring Food Sharing, which was fantastic! It started with a trip to see friends in Berkeley who have recently had a baby. My standing thing to do for friends with kids is cooking up a storm and packaging the food in individual frozen servings, so they can quickly and easily defrost and eat it. Happily, I had a beautiful lentil stew from yesterday, which I brought the friends:

2 cups green lentils
3 large carrots
3 large tomatoes
1 fennel
3 celery stalks
1 package rainbow chard
5 garlic cloves
1/2 can tomatoes
1 tbsp cumin

Mix all ingredients in slow cooker, cover with boiling water, and set to cook on “low” for ten hours. Delish!

From there I headed on to Oakland for an Equinox ritual, which was springy and delightful. You can see our gorgeous altar in the photo. One of the activities was dyeing hardboiled eggs, which no longer appeals to me knowing what I know about the egg industry. But there was an alternative–sowing seeds and getting clippings of succulents–and we did a wonderful ritual for rain using reclaimed water, which I really appreciated. I need to start thinking about ways in which we can use reclaimed water and gray water here at Casa Corazones. Our garden consists of natives, which need a lot less water than exotics, and yet, if we are wiser about collecting shower water we can water them with that. The drought is a very serious source of concern, which means we may need to switch to growing things that require less water.

Our post-ritual feast included a lot of wonderful vegetable dishes. I summarily ignored the chicken and cheese and went for a green salad with edible flowers, two varieties of hummus, roasted asparagus, starfruit and strawberries and blackberries and blueberries, and my two contributions to the feast:

Fennel and Cucumber Salad

1 fennel
4 cucumbers
2 Meyer lemons
1 tsp olive oil
1 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp lemony pepper

Thinly slice fennel (bulb and leaves) and cucumbers. Combine in a bowl with juice from the lemons and the spices.

Broccolini and Blood Orange

20 broccolini stems (or two big broccoli heads)
1 blood orange

Cut broccolini or broccoli into florets and steam until bright green and cooked but still lively and crunchy. Peel and slice up orange into little bits. Combine with broccolini.

I really hope my friends, who were lovely company, enjoyed all the vegetables and may have been persuaded that a meal that consists mostly (or exclusively!) of plant foods is fantastic. This one certainly was!

For this evening, I’m plotting tofu and mushrooms in soy-orange glaze, served over quinoa.

Homemade Hummus

Just finished making hummus for the week ahead! It’s delicious and not too difficult. Here’s our home recipe:

3 cups dry chickpeas
boiling water
1/2 jar raw tahini
4 small lemons
for garnish: paprika, parsley, olive oil, pine nuts

Place chickpeas in pot or slow cooker (we prefer the latter, as it saves a lot of time if you start in the evening and make the hummus the next day.) Soak them in boiling water, about a couple of inches above the chickpeas, for a couple of hours. Then, turn on the heat or the slow cooker and cook until the chickpeas are tender. Remove the foam a couple of times and add more water if necessary.

Place chickpeas, water, and tahini in blender. Add juice from lemons and blend slowly until creamy. Garnish with olive oil, pine nuts, paprika and parsley, or save a handful of chickpeas to garnish. Serve warm or cool.

Roasted Chickpeas

This is one of the best snacks I’ve concocted recently, and with good quality canned chickpeas, so easy to make.

Ingredients:

1 can chickpeas
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sumak
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp red paprika

Heat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Layer a pan with foil. Mix all ingredients in a bowl, then arrange on foil in one layer. Bake for about 30 minutes, until chickpeas are crunchy.

Kelp Noodle Salad


The lentil sprouts have grown! They have little happy tails and a crunchy taste. Over the last couple of days I have eaten them in tortillas with tofu spread and in salads. Here’s one colorful possibility, made with slippery translucent kelp noodles.

Kelp Noodle Salad
1 package kelp noodles
4 romaine lettuce leaves
4 tbsp chopped green onions
1/3 cup chopped cilantro
1 cup lentil sprouts
juice from 1 lime
1/3 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp sesame oil

Open kelp noodle package. Place noodles in a colander and rinse in warm water. Place in bowl with lettuce, green onions, cilantro and sprouts. Mix lime juice, soy sauce and sesame oil; pour over salad and toss lightly.

Sprouting Lentils


I’ve posted here before about sprouting, and thought that some might appreciate a step-by-step guide of the process. This is a batch of lentil sprouts that I started yesterday night. I soaked them overnight, and this morning have rinsed them in fresh water and placed them in a colander over a pot. You can’t see any little tails yet, but the lentils are already very soft; the sprouting process has begun.

The Perfect Mejedderah

Hi all,
I’ve finally found the secret to a great mejedderah (a traditional Middle Eastern rice and beans dish), very similar to the one my grandma makes.
My grandma used to make this very often, and we’d be thrilled when we smelled it from outside their home. Her version had white rice, whereas mine has brown long grain rice, but other than that, it’s very much like hers.
Which is wonderful; because I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but my memories from home and childhood are very much memories of scent and taste. Shabbat lunches at my grandma’s were a delight; she is a wonderful cook, and though she hosts less than she used to, she still has a touch for everything edible and an amazing combination of creativity and order.
The other place I enjoy eating mejedderah is in a small restaurant in a gas station near my parents’ home. Theirs is very brown and delicious, but not like my grandma’s. I suspect their spice palette is different.
Anyway: I’ve been making mejedderah ever since I started living on my own, and something wasn’t quite right. Ever. And I just figured out what it was.
My onions weren’t caramelized enough.
I’m so glad I realized this, because now I’m eating a nice bowl of mejedderah as I work, and thinking of grandma. The technique for browning them properly is well-explained by my dear pal Barbara, right here, and I strongly recommend you make plenty, because they are so useful for quite a variety of foods. I combined them today in my split-personality-spring-soup, made with various sweet roots and spring fresh greens.

Mejedderah
2 large yellow onions
lots of olive oil
1 cup long grain brown rice
1 cup brown lentils
salt
pepper

Slice onions thinly and brown them in a heavy onion skillet, according to Barbara’s instructions.
Place about half the browned onion in a pot with the rice and the lentils. Over a high heat, swish around rice, lentils and onions, until everything is glossy and shiny and happy.
Then, add 3.5 cups of hot water. Wait for a boil, then lower the heat to a medium flame, add salt and pepper to taste, and cover the pot.
When all rice and lentils are ready, mix them with the remaining caramelized onions.
Yum.

Independence Day Grill: The Alternative Burger

The Israel-dwellers among my gentle readers are probably still contemplating their bellies in pain and reflecting on the gorging fest they may have taken part in lately, otherwise known as “the Yom Ha’atzmaut Mangal“. We discussed this interesting anthropological phenomenon last year. And, without fail, the woods were thick with meaty smoke this year, too.

We were invited to a barbecue (=mangal) at the home of dear friends, and in lieu of vegetable skewers I decided to bring something else. A short search on google for vegan patties yielded all sorts of things, but none of the versions really captured the spirit of the holiday. Since this is Israel, I wanted the patties to have a bit of falafel aroma, which you can obtain using cumin and turmeric and paprika; also, the patties have a mix of lentils and chickpeas. I use oat bran to bond them together. They held nicely on the grill and were all eaten immediately (by us and by the meat eaters!). Not a morsel was left. Fortunately, my friend Ilan was around with his new camera and managed to take a picture before they disappeared.

Vegan Patties with a Hint of Falafel

3 cups green lentils
1/2 cup chickpeas
1/2-3/4 cup oat bran
5 garlic cloves
3 tbsps cumin
3 tbsps turmeric
1 tbsp paprika
big handful of parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Soak lentils and chickpeas in water; chickpeas take longer – a few hours – but lentils are happy after they’re soaked for twenty minutes or so. Then, strain and cook in a big pot of water until tender. Strain again, saving about 1/2 cup of the liquid.
Place lentils and chickpeas in food processor bowl. Add 1/4 cup oat bran and process. Add water if the thing refuses to puree, and oat bran gradually until the lentil paste can be shaped into small burgers that hold their shape. Add spices and parsley and garlic and keep processing. Taste to correct – since ingredients are cooked, it’ll give you a pretty good idea of what it’ll taste like eventually.

Place gently on grill (preferably on a tray, though these things don’t fall apart so easy), and eat with pita, tchina and vegetables.

Kidney Support Meal

How do you deal with exhaustion, nutrition-wise? We discussed this at home a few days ago, because we were both feeling tired from the holiday cooking/hosting/working/playing frenzy. We decided to resort to traditional Chinese nutrition principles, and eat a dish of azuki and mung beans with season greens.

As I explained somewhere else, Chinese medicine analyzes food according to its different properties (cold/warm, dry/moist, yin/yang, expansion/contraction). As with other conditions, exhaustion is a manifestation of an imbalance between the five elements – often, as a weakness in kidney energy. The kidneys, associated with the Chinese element of water, are not only responsible for reproductive functions and related to the bladder, but also govern our storage of life energy. When the kidneys are depleted, we have to build them.

Some types of beans are closely associated with the kidneys: remarkably, azuki or aduki beans and mung or mash beans. The fun thing about these small beans is their remarkable resemblance to each other in everything except color: mung beans are green, and azuki beans are deep rich burgundy, but both are small, egg-shaped, and have a little white spot.

There are many great ways to eat azuki and mung beans. This dish takes them down the spicy Middle Eastern route and mixes them with leafy greens. We ate this for dinner, and felt quite heavy later, so you may want to consider eating this for lunch.

Beans and Greens

1 cup azuki beans
1 cup mung beans
2 cups water or vegetable broth, or mix
1 tbsp olive oil
3 heaping tablespoons cumin
1 tbsp nutmeg
3 tablespoons good quality tomato paste
3 garlic cloves
1 large onion
2 dried small chilis
10 large leaves of red or white beet (in Israel, the easiest is manguld).

Place azukis and mungs in a bowl of water for a few hours. If you have no time, place them in boiling water for twenty minutes. Discard the water.

In a large wok, heat up some olive oil. Chop thinly garlic and onion and add to wok. As you fry up, add the cumin and nutmeg and mix. Make an incision in each of the chilis and add them, too. When everything is mixed and the room becomes fragrant, add the strained beans and fry for a few minutes. Then, add the water or broth and the tomato sauce, lower the heat and let cook for about 30 minutes.

Try eating the beans. Have they gone softer? If they are soft, chop up the greens and layer them on top of the beans; cover again. Cook until the beans are soft. You may have to add water as you go.

You’ll have to take my word that this comes out very pretty because of the contrast in color between the azuki and the mung. We have just a little leftover, but the camera has disappeared. I hope to find it by the next time we cook, which will probably be in the not-so-distant-future!