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Greetings, friendly readers.
As you may have noticed, I took a hiatus from posting due to a hellish and hectic spring finals period followed by a summer of European travels and then a cross-Boston move. I never intended for the gap in posts to grow so long, but what can I say? In the words of John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
While Europe was an amazing experience, both culinarily speaking and otherwise, it posed a number of challenges to plant-based eating (and yoga practice too, but that’s a whole different story). Let’s just say that I got quite adept at reading food labels in other languages. Now that I’m back in my own kitchen, regular posting should resume. But first, I thought I would share a few words about my Euro-cooking experiments.
While I was lucky enough to travel all over Europe over the course of the summer, I was largely stationed in Strasbourg, France, where I had an internship with the Council of Europe. Although the kitchen in my flat was workable, I felt a bit lost without some of my beloved kitchen tools and appliances. It only took one day of drinking Nescafe for me to invest in a French Press, but the lack of a food processor was another story entirely. I found myself buying packaged hummus for the first time in over a year — only to discover that the Euro-version of this vegan staple listed lait as its second ingredient. I’m not even sure that such a product could rightfully be called hummus. As Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romano so accurately put it in their excellent cookbook Veganomicon, “Hummus is to vegans what air is to the rest of humanity.”
Luckily, I landed a sweet and spirited roommate named Rita, a Portugese girl who shared my interest in cooking. Rita’s mother shipped her a hand-held blender, which is quite a handy device. It functions much like a blender or food processor, yet is considerably easier to clean (if my old yoga teacher Scot happens to read this, he will be thinking “I told you so”). Rita was generous enough to loan me the use of her blender to make my vegan French Toast batter. She also turned me on to the organic whole grain bread stand at the biweekly farmer’s market in our neighborhood. This thick, hearty bread made for fantastic French toast. When topped with maple syrup, shaved chocolate, shredded coconut, toasted almonds and fresh organic berries, it was really to die for. It even won Rita’s seal of approval: “If I could eat like this,” she said, “I could be a vegetarian, too.”
Unfortunately my apartment lacked measuring cups, so I can’t provide the measurements I used (and even if I did have measuring cups, they would have been in metric). The batter is similar to my perviously posted French Toast recipe, which goes to show how malleable such recipes are. But I found the addition of a banana into the batter yields a very tasty end result. The batter should be the consistency of a thick milkshake; add more soy milk to thin it out. You can make a big batch of this and keep in the fridge and have French Toast all week (you may need to add more soy milk to thin it out). Basically, blend or process the following together:
- banana
- firm tofu
- soy milk
- whole wheat flour
- raw sugar
- vanilla bean
Then heat a skillet with a bit of oil and, after submersing slices of the bread of your choice in the batter, fry the bread on each side until golden brown. The bread I was using in France was very dense and chunky, so I even stood the bread up on its side and heated the edges for a bit, just until browned. Then go all out and top with fruit, chocolate shavings, coconut, nuts, cinnamon, maple syrup — whatever strikes your fancy.
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So onto . . . cooking with orange juice?
Yep. In trying to improvise stir-frying in France, I started using orange juice, which provides a great tangy sweetness that really compliments cooked leafy greens like spinach, which I used in the pictured dish above. This is good knowledge to have because orange juice is easy to find, easy to keep on hand, and incredibly versatile. OJ also goes well with tomato based dishes — orange juice, tomatoes, and cinnamon make a fabulous combination, for examle. To use the OJ in your stir-fries, just start with a bit of oil and add your veggies in layers, incorporating the orange juice toward the end. I found that orange juice, coconut milk, and soy sauce make a fantastically creamy stir-fry trio (especially when cooked with fresh minced ginger).
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a recipe for buckwheat pancakes somewhere, and ever since the words “buckwheat pancakes” have been nagging at the back of my head. I’ve never been a huge pancake person, but something about the sound of “buckwheat” made them sound really hearty and wholesome, and also vaguely familiar, like a long-lost childhood breakfast. (The latter simply cannot be true; I almost never ate pancakes for breakfast as a kid, and if I did, they were surely compliments of Bisquick. Or Bob Evans.) Eventually, I found myself making a 9:45 p.m. buckwheat flour run to Whole Foods. However, I was dismayed to discover they didn’t have any. In mysterious determination to come home with SOMETHING buckwheat, I ended up buying a giant bag of kasha (toasted buckwheat groats) that I had absolutely no idea what to do with.
Once I finally did get my hands on some buckwheat flour (from Whole Foods — apparently they were out of it on trip #1), it took me several attempts to concoct a batter that would render presentable pancakes. However, the experimentation process did reveal that kasha actually makes a fine pancake topping, especially along with some fresh berries and maple syrup. Kasha kernels have a fun pyramid shape and impart a nutty, earthy flavor. Petar and I enjoyed a batch of these pancakes after a Sunday morning practice, and I’m pretty sure he’d also be willing to offer his full endorsement of kasha as a pancake topper. Plus, the name just “kasha” sounds kind of cool, like something that hippies would name their dog.
Some fun facts: buckwheat actually isn’t a cereal grain; it’s a fruit seed. Despite its misleading name, it doesn’t contain any wheat (making this recipe gluten-free, if you’re into that). It’s also an excellent source of fiber and antioxidants.
This batter will serve about two (maybe three if your pancake-flipping skills are well-honed and your appetites are small — neither of which apply to me).
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup buckwheat flour
- 1/2 cup spelt flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp sea salt
- 2 tablespoons palm sugar (can substitute any granulated sugar)
- 2 tablespoons COLD expeller pressed coconut oil (can substitute vegan margarine, e.g., Earth Balance)
- 1 cup soy milk (or other non-dairy milk)
- 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
- 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
- maple syrup for topping,
- Lots of fresh berries and kasha (if you know what’s good for you).
To make:
1. In a small bowl, whisk together the soy milk and the vinegar and allow to stand for about 10 minutes. The vinegar will curdle the soymilk, providing for that “buttermilk” effect associated with good pancakes.
2. Combine the flours, baking powder, sugar, cinnamon and salt.
3. Cut the COLD coconut oil (or vegan margarine) into small pieces, and then cut it into the dry ingredients until you have a sandy like texture. I actually do this in the food processor. I first pulse the flours for a few seconds, then I throw in the pieces of coconut oil. But this can easily be done by hand if you don’t have a food processor or are averse to cleaning one. (Note: as mentioned above, coconut oil, like dairy butter, is a saturated fat — which means it becomes solid when chilled).
4. Begin heating up a skillet — preferably cast iron — to a medium heat.
5. Combine the dry mix with the soy milk/cider combo, and then add in vanilla and applesauce. Assess the thickness of the batter — you will probably need to add water to thin the batter out. I ended up adding about 1/3 cup, but start slowly and always do a small tester pancake. If the pancakes is too thick and doesn’t cook all the way through, add more water.
6. LIGHTLY grease the skillet right before you are ready to start the pancakes. I choose to do this by wiping a little coconut oil on the warm skillet with a paper towel. I find that the edges of the pancakes turn out better if there isn’t a lot of oil or grease bubbling up around them. You can also use a non-stick spray.
7. Ladle out the batter onto the skillet and allow to cook until little bubbles start to form, usually less than two minutes. Then gently flip the pancakes and cook a minute or two on the other side.
8. Serve fresh and warm, with the toppings of choice.
So after I posted my “Breakfast of Champion” oatmeal yesterday, it occurred to me that I should really branch out in the breakfast department more often. And what better time to do this than a 3-day weekend? But, this sweet bread isn’t necessarily breakfast; it’s perhaps just as good (maybe better, nutritionally speaking) as a snack or dessert. It’s a bit cakey and sticky, making it perfect to enjoy as I did: still warm out of the oven, in a bowl of soy milk with additional blackberries (as pictured above). I used blackberries because I happened to have them on hand (Trader Joe’s was selling huge containers of them at a relatively low price for this time of year), but many other fruits could easily be substituted.
Also, note that this recipe is for a mini-loaf. I enjoy the mini-loaf format for three reasons (1) I am most often cooking for just me or one other person, (2) I feel guilty when I don’t eat leftovers, which I never seem to want to do, and (3) the mini-loaves are just so damn cute. However, a mini-loaf is about 1/3 the size of a regular loaf, so if you want the full monty, just make three times the dough and increase your baking time.
Ingredients:
- 1/3 cup of white whole wheat flour (no, this is not a typo, see notes below)
- 1/4 cup of evaporated palm sugar (can also use brown or white sugar, see notes below)
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 large very ripe banana, mashed
- 1 T plus 1 tsp canola oil
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 T chopped walnuts
- 1/4 heaping cup of chopped blackberries
- 1 T flaked coconut (optional: I have a theory that I was born to live in a tropical environment, a reality that manifests itself via a compulsion to put coconut products in EVERYTHING…)
To make:
- Preheat oven to 350 and lightly oil your adorable little mini-loaf pan.
- In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon.
- In a separate bowl, combine mashed banana, oil, and vanilla.
- Add the wet ingredients to the dry to form a rough, sticky dough. Then fold in the blackberries, walnuts, and coconut (if using).
- Put dough into loaf pan and cook for about 30 minutes, or until the bread passes the standard toothpick test.
Notes:
White whole wheat flour. Never heard of it? Don’t feel bad, neither had I until I stumbled across it in the baking section of my local grocery store. And I had to stare at it blankly or a minute or two: was this a trick? I think most of us health-conscious folks have become terrified of all-purpose white flour, the ubiquitous nutrient-deprived foundation of most baked goods today. Unfortunately, substituting traditional whole wheat flour often messes up the recipe in terms of consistency, taste and rising. Strange then, that white whole wheat flour seems to be the best-kept secret of the healthy baking world. While most traditional whole wheat flours are made from hard red spring wheat, white whole wheat flour is made from hard white winter wheat. It has an identical nutritional profile to traditional whole wheat flour — all the fiber and nutrients are present because all of the bran and germ remain — but offers a lighter color and sweeter taste. The Vermont-based flour company King Arthur makes both an organic and non-organic version.
Evaporated Palm Sugar. Also known as evaporated palm nectar, this whole foods sweetener is superior to traditional refined white sugar in that its glycemic index is only 35 (compared to white sugar’s GI of 68) and it actually contains some nutrients. It is derived from the blossoms of the coconut palm. I used the brand-spanking new organic version by Sweet Tree Sustainable Sweeteners, which is heralded as being the world’s most sustainable sweetener.
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