I’m in a phase of fussing over nutrition and what we eat.  I have decided that we don’t eat enough leafy greens.  It would actually be closer to the truth to say that we almost never eat leafy greens - this needs to change!  Those leafy greens are so full of good nutrients that there’s really no excuse to avoid them.  I even like them but tend to be lazy about washing and using the greens I buy.

I got started this morning by eating some lettuce wedges.  I had some iceberg lettuce in the fridge from the tacos we had earlier in the week (I know it’s mostly crunchy water but nothing is better on a taco!), and I discovered today that you can just chop it into big wedges, and hold the wedge like a wedge, and dip it into some salad dressing and eat by hand!  It’s not the best of the greens but it’s a start!  I bet this would be good in salsa too.  Or tzatziki if you’re a yogurt eater.

Next project: adding pureed kale to tomato sauces.  And adding a side salad to all my meals other than breakfast. Just some leafies on the side with a bit of dressing and maybe some chopped veggies. I like some fresh lemon and a bit of balsamic vinegar as a simple, fresh dressing over, say, baby spinach leaves.

Also: I just discovered liquid smoke.  It comes in a jar.  Mine is hickory flavoured.  You add it to stews or whatever to give it a smoky flavour (obviously) - and it’s actually pretty good!

I also just discovered Vegeta, which is a salt and dried veggie spice that is like Mrs Dash except Mrs Dash tastes gross and Vegeta is good (note - it contains MSG, in case you’re one of those people who gets freaky about MSG - you should know it’s in there).  I would throw Vegeta into a soup if it needed some more punch, or onto steamed veggies, or mixed in with baked potato flesh all mashed up in the skins, or in place of salt in home made fries, or maybe even on a salad?  I’m in love with Vegeta and am using it like a mad person.

I also went grocery shopping today, and will be making the following dishes over the next few days, all from Dreena Burton’s great cook book Eat, Drink & Be Vegan:

Chipotle and lime two-bean hummus (served with toasted whole wheat pitas and crunchy veggies for dipping)

Chickpea and wild rice soup (served with whole wheat buns, toasted and rubbed with raw garlic)

Cashew-ginger tofu, served with Teriyaki quinoa

And from Nava Atlas’ The Vegetarian Family Cookbook:

Navy bean soup with corn and red peppers

In all cases, I’ll be making simple salads of leafy greens to accompany.  Nummers!

This is a very simple pasta recipe that packs a ton of flavour.  Capers and kalamatas are both very bold, so this is not for the faint of heart.  But as I have said before, just because we’re vegans doesn’t mean we’re pussies!  Bring on the bold!

I would serve this pasta with a crisp, light salad and a good whole wheat bun.  The recipe makes between three and four adult servings, depending on how big your appetite is.  If you have buns and greens to accompany four is entirely reasonable.  Even more so if you have planned on some dessert, which again, in deference to the heaviness and boldness of this pasta, I would make a tossed fruit salad or perhaps something like frozen grapes.  Keep the accompaniments light is what I’m saying.

Enough preamble.  Let’s begin, shall we?

First: get a pot of water boiling for your pasta.  When it boils, add salt.  For the noodles themselves, I used 200g of whole wheat bowties, but any chunky pasta would be fine.

Start with one zucchini.  A small one.  I bought the Italian type from Safeway.  Remove the ends.  Cut in half lengthwise, then each half in half lengthwise (so you end up with quarters), and then cut into little chunks.  Or devise your own method of making little pieces, I’m not picky.

Next, mince two cloves of garlic.  We love garlic around here!

Now toss the zucchini and garlic into a deep pan.  At this point you need to decide if you want to sautee in oil or not.  If you do, use olive oil and a medium heat to get the zucc and garlic nice and cooked.  If you’re like me and prefer to avoid added oil, just use a little bit of water to get things moving (same temperature).  I tried salting the zucchini to help them release their water for the purposes of “sauteeing” without oil, but that was a mistake.  DO NOT ADD SALT.  The olives and capers will bring plenty of salt to the sauce!  None needs to be added! See the big black X over the salt shaker?  That means no salt.  If at the end you decide the sauce needs salt, you can add it then.

Once these guys are soft and sauteed, toss in tomato base.  You could either chop up four or five large, ripe tomatoes, or use a big can of diced tomatoes (which often taste better than whole), or use a mix like I did.  I had half a can available and I added two diced tomatoes.

Next we’ll spice it with a tablespoon of dried marjoram.  If you don’t have marjoram you could use oregano.

Once the marjoram is in, turn up the heat to get the sauce at a boil.  Maintain the sauce at a gentle simmer with the lid on for about fifteen minutes.  During this time, get your pasta cooking.  Your goal is to have the pasta ready to eat at the same time as the sauce is finished simmering.  Based on a fifteen minute simmer, time as required.

While your zucc and garlic are cooking in the tomato sauce and the pasta is cooking, it’s time to prepare the olives.  I bought whole kalamatas.  Here they are, being depitted.  To easily remove the pit from an olive, smash them with the flat side of your knife (as you would a garlic clove before peeling) and then the pit is easy to pull out.

Once the pits are removed, roughly chop the olives.  You want about a cup altogether.  That took about twenty olives.  Next, measure out two tablespoons of capers, which you should give a quick rinse to (or not - I love the salty brine so I didn’t rinse mine, but I’m a rebel).

After the fifteen minute simmer, toss in the olive chunks and the capers.  If your timing is perfect, your pasta will be finished immediately after you add these guys.

Give it a stir and let the new additions get hot.  I have found that long cooking of olives tends to diffuse their flavour and make the sauce taste too homogenous.  Adding the olives at the end keeps their flavour sharp and distinct, so you have sauce which tastes of tomatoes and olives as a separate flavour.  The contrast is very pleasing, and this is why I add them at the end.  The capers are less prone to this flavour diffusion problem so you could probably add them any old time, but I like to keep things neat so they go with the olives.  The longer these ingredients cook in the sauce, the saltier it will taste too (or at least this is what I have noticed.  YMMV.)

At this point you can sample for saltiness and add pepper if you wish (I didn’t).  Here’s the sauce all ready to go:

So your sauce is ready, the pasta just finished cooking, and all that remains is to toss it all together.  Then lovingly spoon it into bowls, like so:

Delicious!  And dead easy!  The whole works can be done in twenty minutes, no problem.  Once you are familiar with the recipe it’s easy to whip up a simple green salad (and pull a bun out of a bag) while the sauce is simmering too, so you really can prepare a full meal in this time limit.  Guaranteed to impress with big flavours!

This morning I made some pancakes from one of my recipe books and they were just horrid.  Rubbery and thick and bland.  I only ate them to get at the syrup!  Husband liked them but he likes everything, so that doesn’t count.  So, there will be no recipe pictures today.  At least not of pancakes.  I’ll be making a kalamata olive and caper pasta later on which might make for some good photos… we’ll see how it goes.

Other than that, I’ve been busy with work and sickness.  Yesterday I spent most of the day barfing and groaning on the couch, too sick to read but happily not too sick to watch Inspector Morse.  I had a fevery day a couple days ago and apparently that was just the appetizer for yesterday’s full meal deal.  What a day!  Yeesh!

Today my plan is to recuperate further, and perhaps take a little drive with Husband in honour of the crisp, sunny weather.

I just burned the granola bars I was making.  At first I tried to choke them down, telling myself they were edible, but no, they’re awful.  I should have known they’d be inedible when I observed them smoking coming out of the oven.  It is a testament to my desire not to waste food that I even tried eating one.

Note to self: watch granola bars more closely next time.

This is not my recipe.  It is from one of the best cook books ever, Splendid Soups by James Peterson.  Splendid indeed!  You should rush out and buy this book if you like soup.  (It’s not vegetarian, in case you wondered.)  Anyway, this soup is so easy to make and the results are almost shockingly good.  Seriously.  I would not lie to you.  I took a lot of pictures but honestly, the whole works comes together in under forty minutes start to finish, and that includes time where you’re just twiddling your thumbs and watching TV while something simmers.  Not bad for a home made soup.

First, may I introduce the fennel, of which one bulb is required:

He has a slightly licoricey taste.  Here’s how you deal with him.  First chop off his leafy stems.  And cut him into quarters, cutting top to bottom.  Here he is, just before the final quartering cut:

Notice the wedge shaped parts of his stem there at the bottom.  That part isn’t nice to eat so we’re going to chop it off, as well as taking a shallow slice directly off the bottom.  This destems him.  The picture shows me making a very tricky and technically demanding angled slice to get the core/stem out:

Now he needs to be diced.  Don’t fuss too much with this.  The goal is to make little pieces that are soup-sized.  I cut each quarter into thirds, vertically, and then cut across these for the dice:

Now you toss all those pieces into your pot.  Next we will finely dice one medium sized white onion:

And that goes in the pot too.  Next add a bouquet garni - basically just a bundle of herbs tied together with twine that will simmer in the pot and be removed before serving.  You can use any herbs you like, though traditionally thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf are involved.  Marjoram is the herb recommended by the author, and I used marjoram, bay, thyme, sage, rosemary, and parsley.  Bundle them all up and tie it with some butcher’s twine, then toss it in the pot too.

Next we need to add 18 whole, peeled cloves of garlic.  Seriously!  When boiled without first being sauteed, garlic becomes very soft and mild.  The soup will taste of garlic but it won’t be overwhelming.  Trust me.  Go for it.  I used two whole cloves.

So now here is what your pot looks like:

It has a certain elegance, no?

Put the pot on the stove and add two litres of chicken stock, or in my case, faux chicken stock which involves no actual chickens.

Bring it to a boil and let it simmer for fifteen minutes covered.  While that’s happening, chop up about four very red and ripe tomatoes, about two cups worth.  I ended up with closer to three cups because I had a rogue tomato that needed chopping before it got too soft for any other use.  The recipe says to peel and deseed them, but I gotta tell you, that just seems like a waste to me.  You end up throwing out about a third of the volume of the tomato and I personally like the feel of the little seeds.  So I left everything in.  Which might also explain why I ended up with too much tomato:

And once the soup has simmered for fifteen minutes, you toss in the tomatoes and let it go for another ten minutes covered.

While that is cooking, strip some of the fuzzy bits off the fennel stalks and chop them up.  Try for a tablespoon or so.

And while you’re at it, chop up about a quarter cup of parsley, very fine.  I used flat leaf parsley which I prefer to the curly - the curly stuff feels yucky to me.  And reminds me of bad diners.

It’s also time to prepare the beans.  The recipe calls for properly cooking white beans from dry, but I can’t be bothered so I just use a can of precooked white kidney beans.  The recipe calls for just one cup, but I also hate to waste half a can of beans since they come packaged in more than a cup, so I just use them all.  When using canned beans, make sure to rinse them first.  They come out of the can in a sort of sludgy broth that I have never tasted but looks gross. Here are the beans next to the tomatoes.  Don’t worry about the continuity error.

Okay, so while you chopped fennel and parsley and rinsed beans, the tomatoes had their ten minutes to simmer in the soup.  Now fish out the bouquet garni, which has outlived its usefulness and needs to go in the trash. Shake off any clinging onions or other bits.

Now add the beans:

And the parsley and fennel fuzz:

And some salt and pepper to taste.  Stir.  Behold!

Behold also the mess on my stove.  Heh.  Okay, now you just let the beans heat through for maybe five minutes, and serve with crusty bread and perhaps a nice salad.  Hearty and delicious.  Seriously delicious.

Today I have a few things to do:

-Plan meals for the week and get groceries.

-Take the “Unexpected Christmas” Erroneous Triple Shipping of Chapters books back to the Chapters store downtown.

-Settle down to take a chunk out of my new book.

-Clean up the detritus from last night’s poker game.  Speaking of which, last night I baked some chocolate chip and walnut cookies for the gang and by the end of the evening there were only three left: an unqualified success for vegan baking!  There is little I find as satisfying as the disappearance into gullets of things I have cooked.  I’m generally a little trepidatious about serving vegan foods because I worry I won’t notice if they taste of soymilk or other strange veg foods that other people aren’t used to, but it seems I don’t have to worry about those cookies.  Excellent!

-Be a lazy slug.  Yesterday I endured my final day long class with Chi-Woman and I think I’ve earned it.  Later this week I have the final evening class with her, which is also my final class with her ever and my final non-supervision class ever.  YAY!  This calls for some slugging around, yes?  Yes!

Today I have already accomplished (warning: scatological content):

-THE MOST IMPRESSIVE BOWEL MOVEMENT EVER.  I think that after two years of vegetarianism I have at last achieved poo nirvana: the Perfect Poo.  Long, full, soft, with a gentle curve - it should be bronzed.  I’m so proud.

I occurs to me that talking about baking and pooping in the same post probably violates some etiquette conventions but I have to tell you, according to my blog stats, people come here for those two topics.  So in theory this should be my most popular post ever.

Which means if you don’t like baking and poo together, you are the one with the problem.

Here is my stock pot, in amongst the other pots.  Notice that he towers over my former Biggest Pot (top left corner), which now looks like a mewling pipsqueak in comparison.  Life’s tough, Dispaced Pot!  Welcome to being second best!

Yesterday the stock pot helped me produce a scandalous amount of spaghetti sauce.  It was so scandalously large that I ran out of tupperwares in which to freeze it, and had to go through some rather complicated manouvers with ziploc bags supporting one another in pots to fill.  But!  Out of all that effort (and it wasn’t really that much effort, spag is easy), I came away with about ten meals for two.  I freeze them in the right amount for Husband and I to use one package to make our dinner.  Well, usually that’s the case - last night I ran out of ziplocs too so there was probably enough spag for twelve dinners but I distributed the last four servings of sauce amongst the existing containers.

I also made some great corn chili last night, but I forgot to take a picture and we ate it.  But I tell you it was delicious.  The recipe called for cream, so I created a clever work around.  Oh I am so proud of this!  I too a block of very soft tofu and processed it in my blender until it was a liquid, about the consistency of warm yogurt.  This made a perfect substitution for cream because it adds body and protein and fat and all those things that make cream-additions so good, but of course there was no cream.  The only down side is that the tofu still had a touch of that beany taste that it has (this is what comes of being made from soybeans! Hmph!), but fortunately my chili was very bold and flavourful and completely took over the taste of the tofu.

Kiss my grits, inferior pots!

Things have been awfully intense around here lately, what with homelessness and my ongoing saga of nerve problems.  Can we take a break?  God knows I need one.

Today I went and got a wedding gift for some friends of ours who are recently married.  There’s not much point in keeping the gift secret because the couple can check out the status of their registry online at any time, so I’m going to go ahead and say (SPOILER) I got them some sets of their dishes.  Also, the Bay was having a sale on pots so I bough myself something I’ve wanted for my entire adult life: a proper stock pot.

It’s a beast.  It is so big that I could curl up and take a nap in it.  My other pots cower in fear from this stock pot.  In fact, I cower a little.  This pot means business.  And I currently have nowhere to store it so it lives on the stove, from which perch it stares me down.  What do you do with an aggressive pot?  Why, you make an enormous volume of spaghetti sauce in it, of course!

I’ll also be making a chickpea salad, lentil and cauliflower soup, corn and roasted red pepper stew, and a tomato, potato and pepper tagine.

I tame the pot!

Today is a blustery, beautiful day.  Outside it is blowing like heck, which is very unusual for Vancouver - a rare treat.  When I was out earlier I had to put on a jacket as a defense against the coolness of the wind - yet the sun is out, and warm, and my jacket made me too hot!  So off it came, and you know what comes next: I got cold.  Jacket back on.  Nothing was comfortable but who cares, it’s glorious out!

I went to the north shore for a while, and for the first time I saw crashing, curling waves on a city beach.  It was, as I keep saying, beautiful.  Lots of people were out enjoying the view with me.  I felt very peaceful and content, sitting with my hair whipping around me, watching the ocean curl and crash.

Now I’m home, drinking a diet pop and smelling my simmering black bean stew.  I’ve been reading an intense and challenging and eye opening book on psychotherapy - and feeling so excited about this work, and incredibly humbled as I read the transcripts of sessions performed by a master therapist.  It’s okay to be a novice, I tell myself, and settle in as though to watch a movie.  This is one of the key things that tells me this job is right for me: reading books on my topic is delicious, fascinating, the way I want to spend my free time.  I bring therapy books with me into the tub, which horrifies Husband, who treats books excellently and would never dream of reading one in the tub.  (I take the view that the physical book is but a vessel for the content, the information is the gold that it merely houses, and therefore there is no need to respect the actual pages.)

And that’s my day!  I hope yours is as satisfying.

Be amazed, gentle readers: I have concocted a vegan pho that tastes great!  This is the culmination of two years of experimentation, and I’m so pleased I could just pop.  Giving up pho was one of the tougher sacrifices to veganism, and it remains a chief temptation when I’m hungry and anywhere on the east side of the city.  For those not in the know, pho is Vietnamese beef noodle soup - it’s glorious and wonderful and I’d marry it if I didn’t already have Husband.  So how did I do it, when pho is all about the beef broth and I don’t eat cows?  The answer is simple.  To borrow a phrase from marketing, I have taken advantage of better living through chemistry.

I bought this at Safeway.  McCormick’s also makes faux chicken broth and a vegetable broth which I assume is real.  I’m not sure if you can read the tiny writing under “Beef” but what it says is: “style:” beef style.  But does it taste any good?  Well, as a former meat eater, I have to tell you that plain and naked as a clear broth, no.  It’s not quite right, if you know what I mean.  Beef style, not beef.  There is also a certain undeniable chemical taste that gets in the way of truly fooling yourself into thinking you’re drinking the aftereffects of boiling cow meat and bones.  Do recall I didn’t quit meat eating for aesthetic reasons!

So while this broth is great in places where broth itself is not the star (as a simmering liquid for veggies, or a boost to a chili, etc.), it really can’t cut it for pho.  Without a little help.  Let’s help it, shall we?

Begin with 10 cups of water and 5.5 cubes of the fake beef broth in a pot.  According to the good people at McCormick’s we should only have five cubes for that volume of water, but I find it just wasn’t quite enough.  Another half cube is perfect.

After consulting my little library of cook books, I decided to add also 1 generous tablespoon of tamari, and here’s the genius part: the stems of 10 or 12 mushrooms.  I used creminis.  Sounds simple but I tell you, the addition of these two ingredients goes miles towards hiding the unpleasant parts of the broth flavour while adding their own deliciousess.  They are also in keeping with traditional pho recipes.  And the mushroom caps?  They will take the place of the beef in the final soup.  No waste!

I already put the stems in the pot when I took this picture.  Hang on to those caps for now.

Get the pot to a good simmer and make sure the cubes are all dissolved.  They are bound with a little oil and in my opinion this helps with the simulation effect, since pho itself inevitably has some of the fat from the beef in it.  Now we have some things to add to the broth.  Here they are:

One onion, peeled and quartered.  You should use a white one, which I actually did, but since I only bought one I had to use a ringer for the after-the-fact picture.

2 or 3 whole cloves, crushed (use a heavy pot or measuring cup and squash the cloves against your cutting board)

A 2 inch piece of fresh ginger, sliced into 8 or 10 rings.  No need to peel.

2 teaspoons sugar

A 2 inch piece of cinnamon, broken up into pieces the same way you did the cloves

A scant teaspoon of anise seeds, also crushed

Now you just let it all simmer together for twenty or so minutes with the lid on.  So easy!  So pho-like!  So vegan!  There’s just one final addition to the broth: a teaspoon of peppercorns, crushed, added for only a minute at the end of the 20 minutes.  If you cook pepper for a long time it becomes bitter and that’s yucky, so always add pepper at the end of your cooking.  When the pepper is done, strain the broth through a seive and toss out the solid matter.  What you are left with is gloriously dark, rich pho broth that is beefy and tastes like fresh, not chemical:

Pretend my stove is clean.

At this point you’ll add the mushroom caps chopped up any way you like (I think slices look nice and they cook fast too) to the broth, which you can leave simmering gently while you prepare the noodles (though you must balance your desire for cooked mushrooms with your desire to protect the pepper from bittering.  It’s a judgment call.).  Use rice  noodles, which will have instructions on the package, and will be simple boil in water affairs.  And then all we have left is assembly.

In large bowls, put a generous helping of noodles (strained) into the bottom.  Pour broth over to cover the noodles.  Put bowls on table and enjoy the smells.  Provide the following as garnishes, which your appreciative family or guests will add according to their tastes:

Fresh basil

Bean sprouts

Green onion sliced on an angle

Sriracha sauce (called hot cock sauce in this house)

Hoisin sauce

Wedges of lime

Personally, I don’t like too much sweet in my savoury so I go light on the hoisin (though I go heavy on the hot sauce!).  But I won’t judge you if you’re like Husband and want everything to be sweet.  Make sure you provide enough of the veggies so people can really pile ‘em on - go nuts, it’s vegan.  Eat with a combination of chop sticks and a big spoon so you can get noodles and broth in every bite!

And what happened to our friend the beef style broth?  Through the alchemy of the additions during broth making, and the sauces you add at the table, it has been magically transformed into something that tastes fresh and homemade and beefy, but is entirely vegetable in nature.  Okay, vegetable and chemical.  We’re not perfect here.

Edit: It’s best if you only use 2 or 3 of the mushroom caps to finish the soup, otherwise the broth tastes too much like mushrooms, hiding the beefiness.

Edit 2: Husband would like me to tell you it’s called hot cock sauce because there is a rooster on it and it’s spicy, not because of anything indecent.  He would also like me to stop writing about my bowel movements, which I won’t, but I will (hereby) formally register his complaint.