Garlicky Alfredo sauce and Friday night nothingness

I'm insanely bored and restless feeling -- I'm stuck in my home state of Mississippi tonight, alone, listening to Fugazi, and for some reason not getting drunk. So this is as good of a time as any to share something I made last night with the masses (and by masses I mean the three people that will actually read this).

I'm visiting my grandfather -- a true Mississippi good ol' boy -- and decided that while I'm here running various errands, I will also use his thoroughly unsophisticated pallet to experiment. I take this as a challenge; if I can make this man, who thinks pork is its own food group, love something that I made then I've accomplished something. I've done this with chili, a dish I've pretty much mastered (I contend that I make the world's best vegetarian chili. No, your's is not better, nor is Isa Moskowitz's or Jesus Christ's -- mine is the best. Game. Set. Match.)

So, I had a recipe for vegan Alfredo sauce in my head that needed to get out. I made it, and it was a success. He said, he LOVED it. He was amazed that it had no meat or dairy at all in it, which is pretty much what I'm going for. The sacrifice is, of course, health. This is not a healthy dish, but holy Christ Jesus Hisself it's pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

Ingredients:

• One regular size can of coconut milk
• Several (4-5) tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• Half a cup (no more) of all purpose flour
• Several cloves of garlic, finely minced
• Fresh cracked black pepper
• Generic dried Italian seasoning mix
• A glass of water (or veggie broth)
• Salt
• Pasta of your choice (16 oz.)

(You will do this while simultaneously preparing your pasta.)

Start off by heating the oil in a pan or small pot on medium high heat with your garlic in there. When it starts to fry a little stir it around so it doesn't stick or burn. Then you want to add your flour to make a roux. Add it slowly, a little at a time. You don't want to add too much; ideally you want the same amount of flour and oil. You will stir it for a couple of minutes. You don't want to cook the roux too long because you want a light one for this dish. Also, be sure to keep stirring! A burned roux is not a good thing.

Add the can of coconut milk and stir it well. The roux will be stuck to the bottom, so make good and sure you get it all. While that heats up add a good bit of fresh cracked black pepper and your Italian seasoning. Stir it in and notice that the consistency of the sauce is like a gravy. (In fact, your sauce should look a lot like white sausage gravy.) You will add water or broth a little bit at a time, stirring it in until it's a proper consistency. Add salt to taste.

Pour is over your prepared pasta in a large pot or some other appropriate serving receptacle. This can feed three hungry people. It's good.

Tacos

It's been too long. Well I will try to do better. This blog doesn't have a huge following anyway, but that certainly won't change if I insist on going awol for months at a time.

For this you will need to make my seitan. (Other, inferior seitan might also work.) You need about 2 cups or so. I like them sliced into strips. It gives them a steak-like feel. If that freaks you out, well sorry, but some of us vegans miss meat and liked it. So deal.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of sliced seitan
• 1/2 medium onion, diced
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Shredded lettuce or greens
• 8 hard taco shells
• 2 tablespoons taco seasoning (you can sub chili powder in a pinch)
• A small glass of water
• Whatever extras you want (salsa, pico de gallo, guacamole, taco sauce, sour cream, whatever)

First, prepare your taco shells. Try to time it where they are warm when ready to eat.

Saute the diced onion on medium-high heat for a couple on minutes until it starts to get a little translucent. Add the seitan and cook for several minutes until good and hot, and starting to brown a little.

Add the taco seasoning and stir it in. It will be dry, which is where the water comes in. Pour a little in, and savor that cool hissing sound. You will add it until the bottom is good and watery. (Add a little at a time so you don't add too much.) You shouldn't be adding more than a few tablespoons. The goal is to make the tacos really good and tender, not to make fajita soup. If you do add a little much you can boil it out. Otherwise cover it for a couple of minutes.

It should be really tender and ready to put into your prepared taco shells. Add the shredded lettuce and whatever else you want.

This is a pretty simple and very good meal. It's easy to make -- the hardest part is the cleaning. But that's what women are for, right?

Louisiana style red beans and rice

Living (currently) as a southern boy transplanted to the midwest, one thing that I see constantly done wrong here is red beans and rice. Most people around here have no clue what real, Louisiana style red beans and rice is like. When I first moved to Saint Louis almost five years ago I was really stoked about all the vegetarian and vegan options there are for eating out. (Many of the local veggies here bitch, which I marvel at; Saint Louis is likely the most underrated vegan friendly city in the country -- and I've been to the supposed vegan meccas of Portland and San Francisco.) So imagine my horror when I order "red beans and rice"as a vegan selection on a local bar's menu and get basically whole kidney beans with a thin soupy broth served over rice.

First of all red beans and rice are NOT made with kidney beans. Understand that. True red beans and rice use the small red beans. Furthermore, the finished product is not simply whole beans in a broth, but creamy and thick, and not soupy at all.

Ingredients:

• One pound (regular 16 oz. package) of small red beans
• 4 stalks celery, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, diced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 head of garlic (yes, a whole head), minced
• 4 decent sized sprigs rosemary, finely chopped
• 5 bayleaves
• 1/2 tablespoon red pepper flakes
• One regular (32 oz.) carton of vegetable broth
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Salt

The first thing you do is soak your beans overnight in plenty of water. The alternative to this is the quick soak method. The quick soak method is basically boiling the ever living shit out of dry beans for a few minutes, then taking them off the heat and letting them sit for an hour. It works, but I recommend an overnight soak, as the beans end up a better, more evenly cooked finished product.

After your beans are soaked the next step is to cook them. Throw out the soaking water and replace it with until the beans are well covered with water. Boil them for an hour with your bayleaves. After they are done drain them set them to the side.

Saute your onions, bell pepper, and celery on high heat until the onions start to caramelize. Turn your heat down to medium and add the garlic and the red pepper flakes. (If you think you are bad ass you can add a whole tablespoon, but any more than that and I think the heat starts to take away from the flavor of the red beans.) Stir this for a few minutes making sure it doesn't burn, then add half of your veggie broth.

Bring everything up to a vigorous boil and add half of your rosemary. Let it boil for a three or so minutes, then add your drained, cooked red beans (with the bayleaves) and the rest of your veggie broth. Bring it up to a boil then turn the heat down a little to medium-high. You want a good simmer going on here -- you don't want a full boil but you also don't want a light simmer either. These need to cook about an hour and a half. You need to be sure to stir regularly to make sure the beans don't stick to the bottom and burn. You will also need to add some water a couple of times (a cup or so at a time) as it cooks down. About 45 minutes or so into this process add the rest of the rosemary. Also, take a little taste and add salt accordingly.

Another thing that I like to do toward the end, but is optional, is to take a potato masher and mash the beans up a bit. This gets them a little creamier, which I like.

Serve over rice. Choose your own beans to rice ratio. You can add some hot sauce if you want. Also, this is one of those dishes that's better the next day, so don't eat it all up immediately.

Side dish: roasted cauliflower

I'm a true food nerd. Often times I have a recipe in my head that I just have to try out. These ideas for dished just pop into my head form time to time. A couple of months ago I had dinner with some friends who made a simple and delicious roasted cauliflower dish that was styled on Indian cuisine. They just took various spices and coated cauliflower florets with and roasted it. Cauliflower already has a pretty good natural taste to it in my opinion, and the spice combination did a decent job of complimenting this natural flavor.

Ever since then, and after tweaking and "perfecting"* my marinade, I've been thinking of how to take the great interaction that exists between chili powder and brown sugar and add it to other dishes. For some reasons combining those two ingredients seems to give rise to a new flavor that is better than the sum of their parts. So I decided that instead of using Indian spices I would experiment and alter my marinade to work as a spice mixture with which to roast cauliflower.

So here's what I did -- and it was good.

Ingredients:

• One head of cauliflower
• 1/2 cup of soy sauce
• 1/8 cup white vinegar
• 2.5 tablespoons of chili powder
• 3 tablespoons of brown sugar

Chop the head of cauliflower into florets and set it aside. Add all the other ingredients in a mixing bowl and stir well until well mixed. Add the florets a few at a time and stir into the spice mixture, making sure each piece is coated, after which you will add it to a roasting pan or casserole dish. Keep doing this until all the cauliflower is covered. Put it in preheated oven at 425F uncovered for 10 minutes. Then take it out and stir it, and put it back in for another 10 minutes.

That should do it. If you don't think there is enough of the spice mixture (some cauliflower heads are bigger than others) then add more of each ingredient. This dish goes really well with my meatloaf. I had it the other night.

Guacamole -- K.I.S.S.

I had a bit of a get-together yesterday. I'm not allowed to drink alone any more, so I have to invite people over when I want to get drunk. And while I was at it I figured I should set things on fire in my backyard have a barbecue. Anyway, this isn't another grilling post. I just got a request for the recipe for my guacamole, which by my own admission is pretty damn good. Avocados were on sale at Whole Paycheck for a buck each, so I grabbed seven and decided to make a nice big bowl. I'm going to keep this recipe smaller though.

The trick to making good guacamole is, in my opinion, keeping it pretty simple. You don't need to add a lot of ingredients. This goes along with my general opinion on cooking and food prep in general, which is that you want to use as few ingredients as possible when making anything. This is a constant topic of debate between me and my friend Anna, which is fine. She's a sweet girl and completely entitled to her wrong-ass opinion.

Ingredients:

• 2 avocados
• 1/2 medium red onion, diced
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 6 grape tomatoes, quartered
• 1 small lime wedge
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt

Mix this up however you see fit. If your avocados are not that ripe then you can put the lime juice and the tomatoes in first, as the acidity will break the avocados down a bit. Also, this is one of the things I like to just mix using my (usually washed) hands; you can squish it around pretty good and mix it fairly easily.

You can of course, as with pretty much anything else I put on this blog, adjust this as you see fit. If you have regular or roma or cherry tomatoes those will work. You can add a little cayenne pepper if you want a kick, or cilantro if you want to make it disgusting. (Sorry, I know this sounds insane to some people, but I do not like cilantro -- I think it tastes like soap.)

Setting shit on fire, portabellas, and the ultimate marinade

The weather is starting to get somewhat warm, so that means going outside and setting shit on fire -- a practice otherwise frowned upon in our society -- is perfectly acceptable under the auspices of "grilling." Now we all know that grilling is really just an excuse to satiate our barbaric pyromaniac tendencies. I don't care what those silly hippie ass raw foodists say; it's natural baby! The human race has been burning the ever living shit out anything and everything that's even halfway edible for thousands of years now, and I do mean anything and everything.

Yes, this is me. Yes, I was drunk. Yes, this is really fucking stupid.

Well since we are playing with fire, and doing so under the auspices of cooking, I figure we might as well want to do a halfway decent job while we're at it. There are several awesome things to cook on the grill. Hippie dogs are good; my favorite variety is the Yves'. Corn in the husk is great, though I suggest you soak them in water first (and add a little Tony Chachere's seasoning while eating). There are other obvious things like seitan, burgers, various veggies, etc. My favorite thing to grill though by far are portabella mushrooms.

I'm talking about those big boys they sell that look like small umbrellas. If you are gonna buy these then I suggest that you buy them in bulk. You can get really good deals at farmer's markets. You will be amazed how cheaply you can get some.

The great thing about portabellas is that they are great for marinating and grilling. They are very porous and taste amazing after being grilled. I developed a marinade especially for grilling portabellas that I'm pretty damn proud of, and can be used for all kinds of things, grilling or not. Anyway, here are the ingredients:

• One cup soy sauce
• One cup veggie broth
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 5 tablespoons brown sugar
• 3-4 tablespoons chili powder
• 3 tablespoons olive oil

Add this all together and that's it. I suggest you allow at least and hour to marinate the mushrooms in a plastic bag or whatever you want to use; I like to use large plastic bags as I can freeze and reused the marinade. This stuff also goes well with squash (marinated), seitan (brushed on while on the grill), and even brussel sprouts (though you need to marinate for a while), and will certainly work with lots of stuff I have not even thought of yet.

Good luck and enjoy this excuse to go outside and burn things!

"Meat"loaf, thoughts, excuses, and whatnot

I told myself when I created this blog that I would never let it go this long without an entry. And of course I did. Oh well. I've been dealing with a lot of family and other personal stuff lately. My redneck grandmother just passed away, and I have been doing what I can for my redneck family to give them all the white trash support they needed.

Anyway, I thought I should post a recipe for meatless meatloaf and give a few thoughts on making it. Faux meatloaf is something I have been trying to perfect for a while now. I could always manage to make it taste pretty good, but I could never really get the consistency right. It was always too crumbly, falling apart whenever I tried to cut it with my fork. I got a couple of more ideas to try out after having a really great fake meatloaf at a vegetarian restaurant here in Saint Louis. It tasted great, and didn't fall apart when eating it. I asked our server how it was made and he said with just a handful of ingredients.

I think the problem with my meatloaf before was that I was simply putting too many ingredients in it. I was basically trying to copy real meatloaf recipes, and they would add lots of stuff like ketchup or barbecue sauce, which would loosen the consistency, which was easily made up for by adding eggs. Egg substitute, in my experience, simply doesn't work all that well. So first I simply stopped adding anything to the mixture that would make the final product too loose.

The other end of the consistency issue is to find something better to bind it, and I think I found a pretty good solution to this. Instead of adding regular bread crumbs I used crumbs made from a bagel in a food processor. Bagels are sticky enough that the crumbs do an excellent job of holding the mixture together.

Finally, one thing i was doing with my "meat"loaf was simply making it too high. You don't want to loaf to be more than two inches thick. This makes it much easier to cut.

Okay here is a recipe that should make you a pretty good vegan meatloaf:

Ingredients:

• 16 oz of fake meat (I used Match, but Gimmie Lean, Boca Crumbles or even TVP should work fine)
• Half a medium onion, diced
• Several (4 or 5) cloves of garlic, minced
• Bagel crumbs from one bagel (made in a blender or food processor)
• One tablespoon (several sprigs) of finely clopped fresh rosemary
• Olive oil
• Liquid smoke
• Ketchup or barbecue sauce (for the glaze)

Process:

Saute the onions in a pan, adding the garlic after they start to caramelize. Set aside and mix together all the ingredients except for the ketchup for the glaze. Form into two elongated loaves, about six inches long, two inches wide, and one and a half or so high. Form a shallow channel down the middle going the length of each loaf. Add your glaze, spreading generously on the top and on the sides of the loaves.

Cover with foil and bake in a greased making dish or cast iron skillet at 425F for an hour. Take out and remove the foil and add more ketchup glaze, and put back in the oven for another 15 minutes and that's it.

I really like the flavor of rosemary in this dish. I'm a fan of rosemary anyway (it's probably my favorite herb), but it goes especially good in this dish. This "meat"loaf goes very well with salad, mashed potatoes, rice, or pretty much anything nice and starchy.